June 16, 2025

Now, on to the news…

Introduced last month, the Infrastructure Expansion Act of 2025 would exempt federally funded construction projects from New York State’s costly Scaffold Law, which requires employers and property owners to prove that they’re not responsible for any “gravity-related” injuries that occur on work sites.

“Scaffold claims regularly lead to inflated settlements, even in extreme cases where a worker was intoxicated or disregarded safety rules,” Ken Girardin points out. “Those settlements, in turn, are passed on to other public and private projects in the form of higher insurance premiums.”

Indeed, the law has effectively pushed up housing construction costs and left businesses with fewer options for insurance coverage. Read more about why the new bill presents a long-overdue opportunity for reform.

In collaboration with the Sun Valley Policy Forum (SVPF), several luminaries from the Manhattan Institute will speak at this year’s SVPF Summer Institute, on July 1st and 2nd. This two-day conference retreat will be held in the premier mountain town of Sun Valley, Idaho. Reihan Salam (Manhattan Institute President), Jesse Arm (Manhattan Institute Executive Director of External Affairs & Chief of Staff), Heather Mac Donald (Thomas W. Smith Fellow and Contributing Editor of City Journal), and Senior Fellows Jason Riley and Abigail Shrier will be featured in the programming, along with other notable thought leaders. As a benefit to City Journal readers, Reserve ticket bundle registrations will be upgraded to the Bronze pass level, which includes access to a private cocktail party. For more information on the program, go here; to register with MI benefits, go here.

It’s no secret that the U.S. government collects massive amounts of data. From taxes to TSA to the MVA, federal, state, and local agencies store information about everyone living in the U.S. Yet, those agencies aren’t very good at sharing information with their peers.

Civil libertarians might cheer this news, but “relying on government incompetence isn’t a good way to protect civil rights,” writes Danny Crichton.

That’s why efforts to modernize the federal IT stack—including controversial contracts with Palantir—deserve more credit than criticism. Better data infrastructure could mean not only faster public services and stronger fraud detection but also more transparent institutions and smarter privacy protections.

The New York Times recently released a gender medicine podcast series called The Protocol. It’s worth listening to, Leor Sapir writes, as it includes interviews with some of the biggest names in the field. But overall, it’s a missed opportunity.

For instance, listeners might expect to hear interviews with Republican lawmakers who have written the laws that restrict the use of puberty blockers and surgeries as treatments for gender dysphoria in minors. But the podcast offers none of that. “Instead, it presents the Republican position as monolithic and almost exclusively through sound bites of Donald Trump—who likely knows close to nothing about this topic and in any case is a late-comer to the debate,” Sapir points out.

In a follow-up article, Sapir will examine the podcast’s substantive treatment of gender medicine. You can read the first part of his assessment, on the politics of the issue, here.

For both its proponents and detractors, America’s “administrative state” is powerful and important. To progressives, the term describes the impartial technical experts who use science to guide our nation’s policies. To the populist Right, it’s a term of opprobrium for a politically unaccountable “swamp.”

Both these views are wrong, according to Regulatory Reform from Nixon to Biden, a new book by John Graham, a former top official in the Office of Management and Budget. In fact, the president remains the key force in shaping regulatory policy, the book argues.

But just as “War is too important to be left to the generals,” as Georges Clemenceau once said, “major regulations are too important to be left to the president and his agency subordinates,” writes Marc Landy in his review of Graham’s book. Landy concludes that Graham’s most important recommendation—a new Congressional Office of Regulatory Analysis—could give legislators the tools they need to challenge executive overreach and restore the separation of powers.

“If you are a minority that undeservedly received a bonus for underachieving, the message is you don’t have to work harder to improve your performance.”

Photo credits: picture alliance / Contributor / picture alliance via Getty Images