Tag Archives: regulation

Time to Be Draconian

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DoD is beginning a period of ostensibly serious performance review of the department’s several contractors.

Michael Duffey, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment:

We have completed initial reviews to assess company performance as part of this executive order and will now undergo an extended period of review in which we will make noncompliance determinations[.]
Following the upcoming decision period, we will be in touch with identified companies to begin remediation plans[.]

And this from Sean Parnell, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:

If progress doesn’t continue to be made, we will take enforcement actions. The Department of War will partner with those who perform—and hold accountable those who do not.

This has been a long time coming, assuming it’ll truly be a serious assessment with truly serious outcomes. If DoD is serious, then included high on that list of remediation plans should be cancelation of contracts. If the contractor has been noncomplying for some period of time, the cancelation and subsequent opportunity costs will be limited to the scofflaw business; there would be no loss to DoD from the contractor management team’s decision to fail to perform, and the losses to us taxpayers would be capped at what’s already been wasted on the scofflaws.

Remediation progress should be assessed on short time frames with closely spaced major milestones and a firm, nearby deadline for finally coming into full compliance. That compliance measure also should include concrete, measurable plans for staying in compliance and blocking drift away from requirements.

Shirking and throwing the contractor’s metaphorical shoes up on the desk, calling it job well done, and collecting us taxpayers’ money must be at an end. The only way to promote that is to be draconian in the department’s corrective actions. Pour encouragement des autres. Or, to fit today’s environment, il est bon de résilier un contrat avec un prestataire de temps en temps pour encourager les autres.

Bad Logic

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Arizona passed a law five years ago that essentially banned forceable DEI training. An ASU professor brought suit to clarify that the law also

gives public employees an “implied private right of action” to stop such coercion, which in his case was ASU training on how to “critique whiteness.”

A State district court agreed with the professor and ruled accordingly. An Arizona appellate court

“astonishingly” construed lawmakers’ silence on enforcement as confirmation that individuals cannot sue….

The euphemism quotes are from the professor’s lawyers in their reaction to the ruling and as they prepare to appeal to the State’s supreme court.

The lawyers—and any high school student who didn’t sleep through his logic class—are right to be astonished. The appellate court’s “argument” (my euphemism quotes this time) that saying nothing means cannot sue is textbook logic failure. The lawmakers’ silence means nothing other than that they said nothing. The appellate court’s claim otherwise is the court’s putting words into the lawmakers’ mouths the judges have no way of knowing belong there—unless the judges are claiming heretofore unheard of powers of mind reading.

No, and Yes

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NIH director Dr Jay Bhattacharya:

As far as the NIH, we’ve paused every single project that even is anywhere within the vicinity of something that could be gain of function, and the White House is working on a policy…(that) will make it so that it never happens again.
Nowhere in the United States Government will we invest in a project that poses a risk of catastrophic harm to the American people ever again[.]

No. We should continue, and perhaps accelerate, gain of function research across a variety of viruses, and not only those living in animals. We don’t necessarily need the research for our own biological weapons, and such research needs to be done within the most stringent safety protocols. The reasons we should do the research are two, primarily: one is that our enemies are conducting such research; the canonical example being the People’s Republic of China with its efforts that include its lab leak (from incompetent safety execution more than from proximate enmity) of the Wuhan Virus. We need our own gain of function research in order to be better positioned to counter deliberate spreads of successfully weaponized viruses. The need for this is demonstrated by PRC agents recently caught smuggling into our nation a variety of biologic weapons that would poison our nation’s food supply when released.

The other reason is the need to anticipate, understand, and produce effective responses when the inevitable event of another pandemic occurs and threatens national and global economies as well as national and global populations. A short list of examples of this includes the costly and deadly outbreaks of plague, smallpox, Spanish Flu, and the recent Wuhan Virus. All of these were far worse than they could have been had effective remedies been available or more quickly available due to ongoing gain of function research. That gain of function research technologies and methods didn’t exist for most of those cataclysms doesn’t alter the fact that such technologies and methods would have been beneficial then. We have the basics of such technologies and methods today.

I think I can tell you that the appetite for lockdowns in this administration is basically zero. So I don’t think we would have the same kind of approach. …
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We saw during COVID every single person’s life was affected in some, mostly for the worse. ” …I’ll tell you under my watch, I will never advocate and the NIH will not be advocating for lockdowns ever again.

Yes. The lockdowns not only harmed our economy and isolated adult Americans far too much, they severely damaged our children and not only by losing years of education that still have not been recovered. They also severely damaged our children’s social development, that damage came at ages where our children are their most vulnerable, and in far too many cases the damage will be life-long.

Maybe Europe Isn’t So Much our Friend

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Begin with so many of NATO’s European members welching on their financial and equipage commitments to NATO. This represents less a matter of their word being worthless, important as that is, but represents far more an utter betrayal of their fellow members. It’s these shirkers’ insistent reliance on their fellow members for protection even as they refuse to be capable of contributing to their fellows’ protection. That betrayal includes us. Europe’s nations might not be able to contribute much to our defense, but as many insist (for the most part correctly), allies are important to our national security.

But Europe’s essential lack of friendliness extends, now, to naked attempts to censor Americans’ speech within our own nation and anywhere else in the non-UK world. Europe intends to (try to) dictate to us what we are permitted to say.

The European Commission’s coercion of Big Tech to globally censor disfavored narratives goes much further than previously thought, according to a House Judiciary Committee interim staff report released Tuesday that tees up Wednesday’s hearing featuring an Irish comedian who was arrested in London for criticizing gender ideology while visiting the US.

And this, from a 2023 handbook by the EC-created EU Internet Forum:

tech companies were expected to moderate content from “populist rhetoric” and “anti-elite” sentiment to “political satire” and “meme subculture.”

Globally, too—which means within the US as the arrest of the Irish comedian demonstrates—not just inside Europe.

And this, giving concreteness to Europe’s enmity toward American businesses and their leadership teams and to us American citizens in general:

Paris police…raid[ed] X‘s local office Tuesday and summoning owner Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for “voluntary interviews” April 20.
The EC fined X €120 million, or 6% of its global revenue, in the first such DSA action in December, “in obvious retaliation for its protection of free speech around the globe,” the committee said Tuesday.

It’s possible to argue that President Donald Trump’s (R) tariffs are the wrong tool with which to deal with Europe, but it’s increasingly clear that he’s not wrong about the need. My suggestion to Musk and Yaccarino: don’t go to France for the interviews; conduct them, instead, via video over the Internet. There’s little reason to expect that these two, were they to go to France for the interviews, would be freely and easily able to leave after the interviews.

Universalized Choices of K-12 Schools

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Our public national education system—an inchoate agglomeration of local public school systems—is badly failing our children and through that badly failing our nation both in our economy and in our national security. Parochial schools, charter schools, voucher schools, homeschooling and pod-schooling (a pooling of homeschooler resources), which I’ll term choice schools—all of these do far better at educating our children than do those public schools, whether run by teacher unions or not. The ability to choose among those options is critical to our children’s education. The competition even produces improvements in the public schools. Hence, ESAs, Education Savings Accounts.

A limitation on ESAs is their funding. Formal funding for ESAs functionally caps their availability for students, with the result that vast numbers of students can’t get into one; the ESA program for their area has expended all of its funds before the enrollment lists got to them. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors propose a solution:

To create truly universal programs, states can remove enrollment caps and fund ESAs outside of annual appropriations…. They can boost scholarship amounts….

More money isn’t necessary. More money would help, even if it is government money, provided it’s allocated and spent wisely—but it would be government money.

More money could be made available for ESAs, if only indirectly, though, not by increasing spending but by allocating existing education dollars to the student rather than to the school district. In this way, when a parent moves his child out of the public school and into a choice school, the money would follow the student to that choice school, defraying the cost of attending that alternative school.

Other mechanisms for supporting school choice also are available. These include State governments removing such barriers to choice as caps on the number of charter or voucher schools allowed to exist in a jurisdiction, forcing homeschooling parents into teacher unions, limiting use of under-used or empty public school facilities by choice schools, onerous licensing and accreditation requirements for choice schools—even caps on the number of students allowed into an ESA program.