Monthly Archives: November 2025

New Acquisition Strategy

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants one, and he’s on the right track. Critical to that will be his willingness and ability to fire the bureaucrats in DoD who stay in the way of the critical changes Hegseth wants, but that’s a separate story. What Hegseth wants is faster, more flexible acquisition processes that enable, rather than hinder, competition in acquisition and production and that foster rapid contract letting and fast production of the contracted for articles. In loose sum,

… Overregulation, diffused accountability, and insufficient competition [must be eliminated]. “Every process, every board, and every review must justify its existence,” the secretary said.
The Pentagon essentially wants to make faster and more flexible contracting authorities the default instead of the exception, and give more priority to the private economy to solve military problems.

One step along this evolution was this that the WSJ editors noted:

Welcome is concentrating more authority in a “portfolio acquisition executive,” who could oversee a suite of programs and make tradeoffs on cost and performance. The current system includes far too many layers of authority. “Program managers answer to dozens and dozens of folks” and “have to go get permission to move a dollar to a better priority,” a former US Navy secretary for acquisition told Congress this year.

Hegseth needs to be absolutely draconian in removing those extraneous layers and terminate the vast majority of the bureaucrats incumbent in them. Very few bureaucrats will warrant reassignment within DoD, and there are—or should be—very few open slots for reassigning into.

I add a couple of improvements to all of this. Hegseth wants to buy the 85% solution and iterate together over time to achieve the 100% solution, but as articulated, it’s insufficient, with too much room for weasel-wording added pricing costs by the contractor. Rather than simply jawboning against endless specs, requirements creep must be stopped cold. Changes to the specs often are warranted, but better is the enemy of good enough, preventing the good enough from being acquired at all, leaving us completely without. “Better” should be included in follow-on contracts—or new contracts—and only after “good enough” has been in operation for some years. That will determine whether that “better” really is and, if so, will provide justification for that “better” going to testing and production.

In parallel with cutting off requirements creep by the contractor, requirements creep by DoD personnel must be cut off, also. Those new and better requirements that come from Pentagon bureaucrats (and here I include the myriad flags and O-6s and O-5s looking for Efficiency Report material for the sake of their personal careers and/or for post-retirement employment with those contractors) must only be considered after the system they’re “improving” has been in the field, operationally employed for some years.

A second parallel is cutting off mission creep by DoD personnel. The system under consideration is being designed, built, and employed for a particular class (narrow or broad) of missions. If the mission changes, or a new mission is identified—and they will be—those needs can only be considered for the next upgrade to the existing system, or the changed/new mission’s needs will call for a new system.

And this: those systems will consist of a platform for carrying and delivering to the targets those bullets, bombs, missiles, drones, what-have-you that will do the destruction of the targets. Those platforms must be as generic as possible so as to be able to carry new and improved bullets, bombs, … with as little physical modification as possible, requiring only software upgrades (which means the platform’s computers must be capable handling the newer generations of software). The flip side of that must include the requirement that the upgraded/replacement bullets, bombs, … and software must be designed to fit onto the existing platform as much as possible. It’s certainly the case that a platform will wear out or the new and improved bullets, bombs, … and software will truly need a new platform, but those should be the greatly infrequent exception rather than the norm.

The Problem with Obamacare Subsidies

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Tony LoSasso, DePaul University Professor of Economics, and Kosali Simon, Indiana University Distinguished Professor of Economics, think the problem with Obamacare subsidies is their structure and not their size, and they want a shift to a Centrally Planned scheme akin to the government-approved form of competition that is the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, wherein Government decides (still) what is a suitable subsidy and peg[s it] to a lower-cost, benchmark plan. Under this, the coverage who selects a higher-cost plan must pay the cost increment himself. That this is all too similar to Obamacare and its Bronze plan subsidization, with consumers choosing pricier options paying the difference isn’t particularly relevant here.

LoSasso and Simon are missing the beam in one eye for the mote in the other. The problem with Obamacare subsidies isn’t their size, nor is it to whom they should be sent, as some on the right are starting to propose.

The problem with Obamacare subsidies is their existence. This broad government coverage scheme of Obamacare, advertised—still!—as the Affordable Care Act, is not, never has been, and never was intended to be affordable. The Act was intended from the outset to nationalize our nation’s health care coverage industry.

The only real solution, the only one with long-term durability, is to move our health care coverage industry back to its actual health insurance roots, and then to go a few steps further. Make insurance plans entirely salable across State boundaries. What began that century or more ago in a nascent health provision and health insurance process as wholly local and completely intrastate has long since grown to nation-wide production and market facilities, and that’s readily regulable under our Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Make health insurance policies available in one State available to prospective insurees in all States. That alone will let policy costs to the insuree (premiums, co-pays/out-of-pocket caps, deductibles) go down since the insurer will have only one set of rules with which to comply rather than 51 (the States plus the Feds).

In addition, it’s necessary to take the shackles off what insurers (not government coverage purveyors) are allowed to sell and what customers, insurees, are allowed to buy. These salable policies would range, under true, unfettered by Government, competition, from the full-up policies of pre-Obamacare that covered a broad range of ails and potential ails to policies that would cover only specific or closely related ails and potential ails to everything in between, including the sale and purchase of customer-selected bundles of policies covering specific closely related ails and potential ails.

A freely competitive market with far more limited government involvement is what will drive health insurance costs down and policy quality up. And that will have an important sequela: doctor availability, even for those on the bottom economic rungs, will go up.

All of that will take taxpayers out of the business of paying for coverages that don’t apply to them, especially including those taxpayers who otherwise would eschew health insurance altogether.

Two Short Steps

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The IRS has moved to cancel its “experimental” Direct File program. This is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s…exceedingly pleasurable fantasy…of the IRS online platform that lets filers prepare their taxes for free and submit them through the state.

Aside from the program’s cost ($138 per tax return, which is more than many tax software sellers charge) the editors of The Wall Street Journal noted,

The bigger problem with the program is its threat to the norm of taxpayer autonomy. The push to cut out the tax “middle man,” meaning private services, would have resulted in millions of filers letting the IRS make both the first and final determination of their tax liability and connect to their checking accounts.

Notice that: the IRS gets to connect to our private checking accounts. With Direct File, that’s a deeper connection than simply allowing the IRS to direct deposit a refund. With Direct File, the IRS has been able to extract the tax due from a tax payer’s bank account.

With the cancelation of Direct File, us tax payers, us average Americans, avoided a two-step sequence of events. The first step would have been making Direct File no longer a trial being tested in 24 of our nation’s States, but instead rolling it out nation-wide.

The second step would have been mandating Direct File for all of us.

It wouldn’t have stopped there, though. It wouldn’t be even a short step, more like a small shuffle, after that to alter Direct File to have employers “Direct File” all employees’ pay checks to the IRS instead of sending them to the employees. With that, the IRS would extract the taxes it deemed appropriate and remit to the putative employee the remainder—the amount the IRS would deem appropriate for each tax payer to have.

We dodged a terrible pas-de-deux—that dance for the two performers of tax payer and Government—for the time being, but the Progressive-Democratic Party will return to power eventually, and dangerously sooner than us average Americans want.

Regarding Illegal Aliens Applying for Asylum

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The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case involving the Trump administration’s limitation on illegal aliens’ ability to apply for asylum. The case, Noem v Al Otro Lado, centers on the meaning of “arrival in the United States” within the meaning of federal immigration law: does an alien “arrive” on meeting with immigration officers when the meeting occurs on the Mexican side with no actual entry into the US.

This should be an open-and-shut case. Here’s what 8 US Code § 1158 – Asylum, paragraph (a)(1) says on the matter:

Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 1225(b) of this title.

That’s clear. Present in the United States and brought to the United States means inside—being within the borders of—the United States. Nothing more, nothing less. In particular, this statute makes clear that “on the Mexican side” plainly is not inside the United States (to say nothing of the affront to Mexican sovereignty if “on the Mexican side” were taken to mean inside the US.

Section 1225(b) only specifies the process for granting or denying asylum, but this is what its paragraph (a)(1) says that’s relevant to Otro Lado:

An alien present in the United States who has not been admitted or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters) shall be deemed for purposes of this chapter an applicant for admission.

This is, in its essence, a repeat of the Asylum paragraph above. In the United States explicitly excludes being still on the Mexican side of the border. An alien, illegal or otherwise, must be on the US side of the border—within the US—before he can apply for asylum

Full stop.

The obvious alternative, though, should the Court rule wrongly on this, is to withdraw all US immigration officers from the Mexican side of the border.

It’s Really Pretty Straightforward

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The House Select Committee on China has laid out the breadth and complexity of the People’s Republic of China’s cornering of the rare earth production, refining, and manufacturing markets. The report allegedly

provides a roadmap on how the US can stop—or at least slow—the effort by its biggest global economic competitor to prevent the US from breaking into the market.

A road map? It’s really quite straightforward, if politically difficult.

The US has vast supplies of rare earths within our own borders. Canada, who would be better for us (and themselves) as a trading partner than as a State, has similarly vast supplies. We’ve just concluded a trade deal with Australia to export rare earth to us from its vast supplies. African nations have similarly vast supplies, although doing deals there would have more value in denying those earths to the PRC than in getting exports to us, vast as that value would be.

What’s needed, and this is the straightforward but politically difficult part—though the difficulty lies in timid politicians not those determined to do what’s best for our nation—is getting regulations, environmentistas, and climatistas out of the way of each of the mining, processing, and manufacturing phases of getting to the products of rare earths: primarily, but not exclusively, magnets and chips.

The report recommends a variety of market-manipulating measures, and those might be near-term effective, but the problems with government market interventions center on two things: the “government” part, and government interventions are open-ended; they don’t die. The best way for our government to manipulate our economy, our market, is to get out and stay out of the way.

And there’s be nothing at all that the PRC could do to stop us from doing any of that.