After Public-Safety Missteps in Palisades Fire, Residents Want Answers: A couple’s frustrated attempts to evacuate their Pacific Palisades neighborhood highlight fire-preparedness gaps in Los Angeles

By Jim Carlton, Marc Vartabedian and Brian Whitton of The WSJ. Excerpt:

"The morning of Jan. 7, the city’s fire department chose not to preliminarily position many of its firefighting resources, even in the face of dire warnings of a “life-threatening and destructive windstorm,” according to an internal resource-planning record reviewed by the Journal. While the fire department predeployed some teams, it didn’t station units in the Palisades, where another fire had broken out days earlier after New Year’s Eve fireworks, an internal incident report said.

Fire officials also declined to issue a “limited recall,” which would have kept roughly 1,000 firefighters on duty for an extra shift and could have enabled the department to staff all of its roughly 42 series-200 engines, which are key assets in fighting fires, according to the plans. The department staffed only a handful of those trucks that morning."

‘Why Nothing Works’ Review: Distrusting the Process

Beginning in the 1960s, progressives became ever more suspicious of big projects and their threats to individuals and local communities

By Judge Glock. He is director of research at the Manhattan Institute.

He reviewed the book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman.

Excerpt: 

"These progressives typically preferred to block projects not by criticizing their aims but by objecting to their procedures. There was always need for more public hearings, public notice, commission oversight, court appeals and, most importantly, detailed study. According to Mr. Dunkelman, by the mid-1970s the federal government and half the states required developers and bureaucrats to study how proposed building projects might affect their surroundings—water tables, wildlife, traffic, air quality, historic properties.

If a procedure had been skipped or a study deemed inadequate, lawsuits could send multibillion-dollar plans back to the drawing board. One of the activist left’s crowning achievements was the 1971 Supreme Court case Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe, which stopped the construction of a highway that would have run through Memphis, Tenn. Justice Thurgood Marshall ruled that the U.S. Transportation Department hadn’t followed an obscure legal provision requiring it to study whether there was a “feasible and prudent alternative” to taking a public park. Activists touted the case as a pre-eminent example of the people versus big power, yet the Memphis City Council had voted 4-1 for the road. A similar stalled road in San Antonio, Texas, had won 2 to 1 in a public-bond referendum. Whatever the wisdom of these urban highways, progressive activists themselves were blocking the will of the people. 

The end result of progressives’ efforts was that Hamiltonian projects became bogged down by pettifogging procedures. Mr. Dunkelman labels this tendency toward bureaucratic enervation “Jeffersonian”: Negotiations over regulations, environmental lawsuits, automated welfare payments—all are Jeffersonian since they hamstring bureaucratic discretion. According to this argument, the proposal to create what became the Public Authorities Control Board to oversee independent bureaucracies in New York is also an example of “Jeffersonian caution.” One would be hard-pressed to find examples further afield from Jefferson’s small-state vision. 

Mr. Dunkelman’s book provides a strong case for the pitfalls of excessive procedure. But like many so-called supply-side progressives—leftists who want to unburden government to accomplish their aims—he imagines that the root of our modern ills is “a failure of process.” If prospective Hamiltons could rip up the flowcharts, in this view, government could fulfill its destiny.

A more convincing case can be made that modern government’s problems come from the concrete demands progressives place on it. After all, they haven’t merely required studies; they’ve demanded union wages, affirmative-action rules, laws requiring domestic production in manufacturing, endangered-species protections, wetlands preservation, emissions regulations, and on and on. 

Mr. Dunkelman is happy to attack abstract procedures, but not the unions and other interest groups that have been the drivers of progressivism. Several times Mr. Dunkelman refers to two big projects he wants a re-empowered government to complete: high-speed rail and transmission lines for renewable power. But both are demands from narrow progressive interest groups, rather than popular projects stymied by procedural hurdles.

As for the cultural battle between Jefferson and Hamilton, there is little doubt who won. In recent years state Democratic parties have renamed their venerated Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinners. The party’s two most important founders are now painted as corrupt slaveholders. A Broadway musical has made Hamilton an unlikely hero. Big government has swept all before it, but still nothing works. Our troubles arise from more than a distrust of power."

A Total Subsidy That Needs DOGE

Why should U.S. taxpayers underwrite a foreign LNG project that competes with American exports?

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"France’s TotalEnergies’ Mozambique LNG export project is an example. Mozambique boasts large natural gas reserves off its coasts, but the East African country suffers from conflict and instability, which has spooked private investors. Total wants the U.S. and other governments to finance its $20 billion LNG project to reduce its risk.

The ExIm Bank approved a $4.7 billion loan for the project in 2020 on the rationale that China and Russia might otherwise finance the deal. But this justification strays from the agency’s stated mission."

"TotalEnergies seems to be leveraging its partnerships with Russia and China to argue that the U.S. should finance its Mozambique project to counter those U.S. adversaries in Africa. The Biden ExIm leaders invoked a similar rationale to approve a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for a solar and battery storage project in Angola, among other wasteful projects."

An Effective Treatment for Opioid Addiction Exists. Why Isn’t It Used More? (partly regulations)

A drug called buprenorphine may be the best tool doctors have to fight the fentanyl crisis. Why hasn’t it been more widely adopted?

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff. Excerpts:

"The missteps of the medical establishment didn’t stop with the first wave. The second wave of the opioid epidemic began when that establishment, realizing what it had unleashed, made medical-grade opioids much harder to obtain. Though this might have seemed like a reasonable and corrective step to take, the problem, some experts now argue, was that patients on opioids had developed a kind of disease: opioid-use disorder, more commonly referred to as opioid addiction. This would have been the opportune moment to deploy medicines, like buprenorphine, to set users on a path to recovery. Instead, the medical profession “abandoned millions of people,” Herring says. “We let millions of people just fall.” Physicians who might have wanted to prescribe buprenorphine faced significant hurdles, like training requirements and limits on the number of patients who could be treated."

"But even as awareness of buprenorphine has spread, the extent of its use is nowhere near what experts think is needed. “Every county should have at least one place where someone could walk in and that same day get buprenorphine regardless of their ability to pay for it,” Kolodny says. But a 2022 study found that only about half of the nation’s top-ranked hospitals said they provided buprenorphine in their emergency department. Hundreds of counties still lack any M.A.T. providers at all, according to a recent report from the inspector general’s office at the Department of Health and Human Services. And where those providers do exist, they often won’t accept Medicaid or Medicare patients. (Many providers won’t accept any insurance at all, Kolodny says.)"

"Experts also point to the onerous regulations that long governed the use of buprenorphine. It was approved to treat opioid addiction in 2000 — the earliest version available consisted of a tablet dissolved under the tongue — but limits on how many patients doctors could treat with the drug (no more than 30), coupled with training requirements before they could prescribe it to patients, caused many doctors to eschew it altogether. These regulations have been lifted piecemeal over the years. The X waiver, a certification that doctors needed before they could prescribe buprenorphine, was eliminated only in 2023. Yet even as the drug has become freer in a regulatory sense, and therefore easier to give to patients, the number of prescriptions written for buprenorphine has not meaningfully increased, according to C.D.C. data."

"As I asked around, however, it was easy to find people who disagreed with anything that resembled a mandate. Representative Paul Tonko of New York, though he lamented to me the slow adoption of buprenorphine, nonetheless suggested that a directive pushing hospitals and doctors to provide the opioid risked sparking a backlash. A much sounder approach, in his view, would be to remove the remaining barriers to the medicine’s full rollout. The D.E.A.’s monitoring of the drug has a chilling effect, he argued, making even pharmacies reluctant to stock too much of it, because they don’t want to attract the agency’s attention. To reduce this “fear factor,” Tonko recently was a sponsor of a bill that would temporarily exempt buprenorphine from the D.E.A.’s oversight."

Harmful minimum parking requirement regulations

See Donald Shoup, a Parking Guru Who Reshaped the Urban Landscape, Dies at 86: An economist at UCLA, Shoup said free parking carries a high cost, which is borne by everybody by Jon Mooallem of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Shoup took special aim at the harms of “off-street minimum parking requirement” regulations, whereby municipalities compel developers to include a precise, minimum number of spots dictated by their building’s specific use. Planners lay out these requirements in exhaustive and meticulous tables, but Shoup discovered they were merely “pseudoscience” without any rational or solid empirical basis. In a 1999 paper, “The Trouble with Minimum Parking Requirements,” Shoup scoffed at the notion that “[w]ithout training or research, urban planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for bingo parlors, junkyards, pet cemeteries, rifle ranges, slaughterhouses, and every other land use.” In fact, those he surveyed confessed they often just copied the requirements of surrounding communities.

Shoup compared the practice to bloodletting and treating wounds with lead—“a poison prescribed as a cure.” The consequences were corrosive: creating all that space for parking pushed buildings apart, decreasing density, making neighborhoods less hospitable and walkable. Plus, it was phenomenally expensive to build. (Estimates have put the cost of a single aboveground space at $20,000 or more—and much higher for underground spots.) The cost of that “free” parking rippled through a city, raising the costs of living in those buildings, renting those storefronts and shopping at those stores."

[Mandates for free parking] "stemmed from fear that people wouldn’t live or shop in an area that didn’t have enough parking. But Shoup demonstrated that fear was more of a superstition, based on a misapprehension about parking itself. “Most people think parking behaves like a liquid,” he wrote. “If the parking supply is squeezed in one place, cars will park somewhere else. But parking behaves more like a gas. The number of cars expands to fill the available space, and more parking leads to more cars.” (Mandates for free parking was in the print version)

When parking spots were free, people knocked themselves out trying to claim one—a phenomenon Shoup called “cruising for parking.” In one study, Shoup and his students made 248 car trips into Los Angeles’s Westwood Village and found they had to circle the block 2.5 times on average before finding a spot. Extrapolating out, this meant Angelenos were driving an extra 950,000 vehicle miles a year, within just that 15-block area, enough to make 36 trips around the earth. (Emulating his work, the nonprofit Transportation Alternatives asked every driver stopped at a red light in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn where they were going. Forty-five percent were simply looking for a place to park.)"

"Shoup’s policy prescriptions were straightforward: Get rid of minimum parking requirements; bring the price of on-street parking in line with demand, enough to maintain one or two empty spots on every block; and funnel the resulting revenue into upkeep and other public services for the immediate area, creating what Shoup called a “parking benefit district,” to bring residents and local businesses on board."

Why California’s Plan to Harden Homes against Wildfires Is Broken

By Kristian Fors of The Independent Institute.

"The horrific wildfires that devastated the Los Angeles area—and necessitated a $1 billion bailout of the FAIR Plan, California’s insurer of last resort—have many people asking why so few homeowners harden their homes against wildfires.

Home hardening is how homeowners reduce their wildfire risk by retrofitting their homes with fire-resistant materials and removing excess vegetation. A report by Guidewire analyzed data from over 90,000 California homes and found that home hardening consistently reduced wildfire risk, in terms of likelihood and damage severity.

The wildland-urban interface is where human development and nature collide, leading to greater wildfire risk. From 1985 to 2013, around 80% of the buildings destroyed by wildfires in California were located in this interface. The areas ravaged by the Los Angeles County wildfires—Altadena, Malibu and Pacific Palisades—are all part of this zone. Yet despite the risks involved with living in these areas, it appears that few homes there were fire-resistant. Meanwhile, fire-resistant architecture and defensible open space appear to have saved some of the homes that were not destroyed.

Why aren’t more homeowners taking steps to reduce their wildfire risk? The answer involves California’s broken property insurance market.

In 2022, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara mandated that insurers provide discounts to policyholders who implement specific wildfire mitigation efforts on their properties, including fire-resistant vents and Class-A fire-rated roofs. Discounts vary by insurer and are itemized in companies’ rate filings. State Farm policyholders, for example, who adopt all 12 mitigation steps and get certified by a nonprofit can receive premium discounts of about 10%.

According to a recent Politico report, however, experts conclude that the discounts are “too small to encourage wildfire mitigation.” The State Farm discount for fire-resistant windows for example, which can cost more than $700 per window, amounts to 0.1% or a $14 discount on a $13,800 annual insurance premium. Few policyholders will be moved by such small discounts to adopt expensive upgrades.

So why don’t insurers just offer larger discounts to improve outcomes? California’s broken insurance market disincentivizes insurers from doing so—because insurance rates are not actuarially sound.

To understand why that is, you need to understand the concept of “regulatory rate suppression”—which is the difference between market rates that allow insurers to cover expected costs and rates that are approved by regulators.

Research from the International Center for Law & Economics found that California is the worst in the nation for both home and auto insurance rate suppression. Even though California is an expensive and disaster-prone state, the average cost of homeowners insurance, $1,250 per year, is well below the national average of $1,915. While this sounds like a boon to consumers, in practice, insurance companies operating in California are overexposed to risk. They respond by charging homeowners who undertake fire-risk mitigation efforts more than they should to make up the difference. So-called “premium revenue” from armored homes is precious to insurers in California.

The discrepancy between what risky homes should pay compared to what they do pay is the result of Proposition 103 and the state’s regulatory system, which requires insurance companies to receive approval from the California insurance commissioner before changing rates on property and casualty insurance policies. Under this system, companies are limited by price controls and by the variables they are allowed to factor into insurance rates, such as previous prohibitions on using catastrophe models and pricing reinsurance costs into rates. The system is notoriously inefficient, taking months on average to reach a decision for rate filings and even longer if applications are moved to a rate hearing.

Even the FAIR Plan, California’s “insurer of last resort,” which had its reserves decimated by the Los Angeles area fires, has fallen victim to the state’s regulatory hurdles. According to Victoria Roach, president of the FAIR Plan, in 2021 the plan had a “rate need” of 70% but instead applied for a 48.8% rate increase; only a 15.7% increase was approved.

The insurance rates permitted in California do not reflect the level of risk that insurance companies are exposed to. If the system were permitted to function properly, without price controls, insurance companies would be able to consider the true value of mitigation efforts and offer steeper discounts to those who implement them. Moreover, under actuarially sound rates, homeowners in high-risk fire zones would bear the full financial brunt of the risk they are exposing insurers to, providing them with stronger incentives to make their homes more resistant to wildfires and to receive larger discounts.

The best way to encourage homeowners to harden their homes against wildfires is to create robust incentives to do so. Under the current system, discounts will continue to be minimal, and homeowners will lack sufficient incentives for crucial risk mitigation practices—perhaps until it is too late."

A Quick Cutter’s Guide to the US Department of Education

By Neal McCluskey.

"The Trump administration is looking for federal spending to cut, which seems pretty urgent given the nation’s nearly $37 trillion debt. The US Department of Education (US ED), which is neither constitutional, competent, nor effective, is home to numerous prime targets, including the Department itself.

US ED in Context

US ED spending constitutes a relatively small part of all education funding. In the 2021–22 school year (the latest with available data) all educational institutions in the United States spent $1.64 trillion, or $1.84 trillion in 2024 dollars. Appropriations for the US Department of Education in fiscal year 2024 were about $188.6 billion, or 10.3 percent of the total. Remove new Direct Loans for college students, which are supposed to be repaid, and the US ED budget was $97.0 billion, or just 5.3 percent of the total. Looking at the latest available (2020–21 school year) public elementary and secondary school revenues by source of funds, federal dollars account for slightly over 10.6 percent of the total.

US ED Spending by Type

Department funding, excluding student loans, comes in roughly four types:

• Formula grants
• Discretionary grants
• Direct funding
• Administrative funding

The table below shows the number of programs, the mean appropriation per program, and the total amount appropriated under each type. Note that “administrative” counts the number of administrative functions, not programs.

Formula grant programs are less numerous than discretionary but involve more money, largely because they include the primary funding under major laws, such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This includes $18.4 billion in grants to states through Title 1 of the ESEA and $14.2 billion in IDEA state grants. The biggest formula grant program is Pell Grants for college students, at $35.5 billion in FY 2024. The highly dubious 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which garnered $1.3 billion, is also a formula program.

Discretionary grant programs are typically much smaller than formula grants, have specific focuses, and would-be recipients apply for funding. These include Aid for Institutional Development programs geared to various minority-serving institutions of higher education, programs such as Upward Bound intended to help lower-income students get an academic leg up, several teacher-related programs, and the Javits Gifted and Talented program.

Direct funding goes to several recipients, including Howard and Gallaudet universities and the Institute for Education Sciences, which, among other things, oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Administrative costs cover the running of US ED, especially salaries for its roughly 4,200 employees.

What Should We Cut?

What should we be looking to cut? What follows are three possibilities, from ideal to better than nothing.

Everything

If all Department of Education functions ended, it would save taxpayers $97.0 billion. That’s about seven times the budget of the US Coast Guard.

All But What’s Constitutional

Constitutionally, the federal government has no authority to govern in education, and it certainly has none for a cabinet-level department. US ED must be eliminated, but a handful of functions it oversees have some constitutional warrant:

• Impact Aid: These programs compensate districts housing federal reservations, including military bases, for lost revenue resulting from Washington not paying property taxes. This can be justified under defense powers.
• Tribal education: The federal government has a long and fraught history with Native Americans, and through treaty power has a constitutionally legitimate role in assisting with education on reservations.
• Office for Civil Rights: The federal government has a constitutional responsibility to stop discrimination by state and local governments, though this should be moved to the Department of Justice.
• Gallaudet and Howard Universities: These are in the District of Columbia, over which the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction.
• Military: The Department administers an Outward Bound program intended to help veterans prepare for higher education.

In FY 2024, the federal government appropriated a combined $2.4 billion for these programs. Eliminating everything else would yield savings of around $94.6 billion, which is more than the fiscal year 2025 budget of the State of Michigan.

All But What’s Formula Driven

Presumably, programs that fund recipients by formula are more important than discretionary. Everyone is supposed to benefit from the former but not the latter. That means discretionary programs should be eliminated before the formula if one is prioritizing cuts.

As noted above, eliminating all discretionary programs would yield a savings of $5.3 billion. Add directly funded entities—essentially single-recipient discretionary programs—and the savings rise to $6.7 billion. Finally, assuming that the share of employees working on those programs is proportionate to the programs’ share of total funding, cuts would achieve an additional $204.8 million in administrative savings, bringing the total to around $6.9 billion. That is roughly the cost of a new Seawolf-class nuclear submarine.

Conclusion

Eliminating the US Department of Education and all that it does would produce major savings. But so would eliminating much of what it does short of full termination, especially if we keep only what is constitutional."