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May 15, 2025 | The American Prospect

Timi Iwayemi Alex Moss

Op-Ed Department of CommerceHoward LutnickIntellectual PropertyPatent and Trademark OfficePharmaRevolving Door

Trump Appointees Are Hijacking the Patent System

The PTAB’s inter partes review (IPR) process was designed to swiftly weed out low-quality patents—the kind that stifle competition, inflate consumer prices, and entrench monopolies. But since Trump and Lutnick’s arrival, a quiet bureaucratic coup at the USPTO has undermined this critical safeguard. Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart has moved to centralize power and gut accountability measures, opening the door to a flood of dubious patents.

April 28, 2025 | The Sling

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis

Op-Ed Economic MediaEconomic PolicyExecutive BranchTrade Policy

Trump Shatters the Assumptions of Neoclassical Economics

To the extent that we ever lived in a neoclassical world, the Trump administration is ensuring that we don’t any longer. We are long overdue for more nuanced economic discourse that doesn’t shy away from its own limitations, and that recognizes when it can and should (perhaps must) be complemented with other types of insights. As the illusion of perfect competition becomes ever more ethereal, the need for more sophisticated economic thinking and debate becomes ever more urgent.

April 23, 2025 | The American Prospect

Xaver Clarke

Op-Ed Congressional OversightElon MuskExecutive BranchGovernanceJudiciarySupreme CourtTrump 2.0

The GOP Is Destroying Justice to Embolden Trump’s Lawlessness

Since returning to office, Donald Trump has been repeatedly blocked by judges ruling against his most extreme actions: unconstitutional impoundments of congressionally appropriated funds, illegal purges of civil servants, and executive orders attacking law firms that don’t accede to his arbitrary and capricious demands.

March 26, 2025 | The American Prospect

Hannah Story Brown

Op-Ed Climate and EnvironmentGovernment CapacityMedia AccountabilityTrump 2.0

An Abundance of Credulity

In the months before the re-election of Donald Trump precipitated our rapid descent into authoritarianism, two books were being written about the idea that progressivism went astray in the 1960s and 1970s. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe a drift into a “politics of scarcity,” and in Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman calls it a “cultural aversion to power.” Both books ask a pertinent question: Why doesn’t the government do big, bold things, quickly, to address the pressing issues of our time? We have an abundance of viewpoints and veto points, they argue, but a shortage of affordable housing and transmission lines. Something’s got to give. The unstated question, of course, is who must give.

March 06, 2025 | The American Prospect

Toni Aguilar Rosenthal

Op-Ed Climate and Environment

The Clean Air Act is Under Attack 

In 1943, Los Angeles residents awoke to a city so thoroughly pervaded by eye-stinging smog that they thought the city had been the victim of a World War II-related chemical attack. It hadn’t. Rather, a boom in car infrastructure coupled with new and existing industrial pollution caused sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and other particulate matter to dominate the air in the city. At times it was nearly impossible to see more than a few blocks, or to breathe outside of one’s home.