Daily Archives: 5 January 2026

An Activist Judge Gets It Wrong

Posted on by
Reply

DC District Senior Judge Amy Berman Jackson has ruled that

the Trump administration is legally required to secure funding for the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and that failing to do so would violate a prior court order barring the government from dismantling or shutting down the agency[.]

However.

Leave aside the fact that the question of the Trump administration funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the question of the Trump administration dismantling or shutting down the agency are distinctly separate questions.

The fact of interest here is Jackson’s mistaken ruling that Trump must fund the CFPB. He cannot. By the statute that created the CFPB, that agency is funded solely by the penalties it exacts via its enforcement actions (pay no attention to the conflict of interest behind the curtain) and from the Federal Reserve Bank, the latter which the CFPB draws from according to CFPB-determined needs (pay no attention to the doings behind this curtain, either).

The Trump administration has no control over and no capacity to produce CFPB funding. This is the sort of shenanigan in which activist judges engage, causing increased cost and delay in cleaning up prior messes.

A Useful Test

Posted on by
Reply

In their Wall Street Journal Tuesday op-ed, Michael O’Hanlon and Marta Wosinska, Brookings Institution Senior Fellows, pointed out that shotgunning moves (vis., universal tariffs on everything a target nation or group of nations exports to us and broadly barring exports to those same targets) as a means of altering the several links to the supply chains our economy needs to make the goods we need along with altering those links our economy wants to make the things we want. They then offered a three part test to better target those supply chain links that are most important and most time critical to us and our security.

  • First, a supply chain warrants special focus when its disruption would quickly threaten lives, core defense missions, or essential economic functions.
  • Second, when substitutes or workarounds can’t be instituted in time to mitigate the disruption.
  • Third, when surge capacity can’t be built on a reasonable timeline.

This approach, as they emphasize, acknowledges that developing resilience is costly and helps ensure that scarce capital goes to the most vital choke points. In fine, it targets links for better allocation of our non-tree-sprouting spending money

This is a good test, and it’s applicable in another way than purely domestically. It needs to be applied in reverse, also. What are the analogous critical choke points in our enemies’ supply chains? Applying the test to those would let us better target our enemies’ ability to wage and sustain war against us, our friends, and our allies.