The biggest news today should probably be about one of the Executive Orders from yesterday evening.
Trust me, it's big.
The President just authorized DOGE to start cutting regulations🧵
This order starts off huge.
Remember those recently-created DOGE Team Leads going into every agency? They're going to work with agency heads and the OMB to review all of the regulations across a number of huge categories.
The first category is those rules and regulations which violate the law of the land: unlawful and unconstitutional regulations, things that agencies enacted but which they shouldn't have been able to.
Now you might ask: Who decides what's lawful or unlawful, constitutional or unconstitutional, a good or a bad interpretation of statutes, prohibitions, and the law writ large?
Try to keep up, because the administration outlined this a few days ago:
The next category of regulations that DOGE will be purging is sizable.
DOGE was tasked with purging the federal government of socially significant regulations that Congress didn't roll out, and regulations that are costly for private entities without benefitting the public more.
This next category of regulations is where things get huge.
DOGE will be purging all regulations that impede innovation and infrastructure, make it harder to response to natural and manmade disasters, and just generally anything unnecessarily standing in the way of business.
Now obviously this is a major task, but don't worry: the next section says which regulations to focus on first.
It says to focus on regulations that are particularly important. This is totally logical: get rid of the big barriers to growth first, and then move down the list.
The next section might be my favorite part of this whole Order.
This section calls for an end to bureaucratic overreach.
It says that if a bureaucrat is doing more than they're required to, they need to stop it. This means fewer bureaucrats abusing their 'authority'.
Additionally, if agencies are currently engaged in overreach in the enforcement of rules and regulations, they're going to stop.
This can also apply to rules and regulations that the President does not want enforced in a given way based on his valid interpretation of said rule.
And finally, the Order says what to do with new regulations:
Run them by DOGE, and if they're a barrier to business or a burden on the public, they won't go into effect.
Every new regulation will be reviewed and every existing regulation will be reviewed too, and all barriers to growth that can be extirpated from the Federal Register will be extirpated from it.
This authority is expansive and unprecedented, and the admin was building to this.
And just to be sure, there's still more to come.
DOGE is enabling the digitization of records, the installation of modern systems and tools that will enable the U.S. to be governed in a modern, rapid, and flexible way.
That's its purpose, is making a 21st-century government.
And why?
Well obviously because regulations are burdensome, the spending has been too high, and so on, but this Order contains another clue.
One of Trump's goals is ending the secret fourth branch of government that persists between Presidencies and ensures Democrats are always in power.
It is an explicit goal of this Administration to end the "Administrative State."
In their Fact Sheet on this Executive Order, the Presidency stated that it is their goal to end the extreme burdens on the American people from this unconstitutional fourth branch of government, and to stop them from prying into American lives forevermore.
It is hard to overstate how huge this Order is.
There are hundreds of thousands of federal regulations, and a very large portion of them can be stripped back with executive authority alone.
And now, DOGE has been enabled to start that process, with all that entails.
That entails a lot, but I'll cut myself off here. And keep in mind, this is just the first month of this administration.
The state of Louisiana has managed to reduce its Hepatitis C death rate by nearly a sixth in just a few years through a clever public health program🧵
Louisiana's success has to do with the recent development of a miraculous change in how Hepatitis C (HCV) is treated.
Prior to 2013, HCV was primarily treated with drugs like interferon and ribavirin, but the drugs were not consistently effective at clearing the virus.
But then the FDA approved the first direct-acting antiviral (DAA), sofosbuvir, a liver-targeting NS5B protein inhibitor that, combined with another protein inhibitor (velpatasvir), is effective in treating 95-99% of HCV patients.
We finally have large-scale cross-sectional functional connectome scans for people aged young and old.
The finding that was most interesting to me in all this is that the brain's functional connectome seems to grow until about age 38, whereafter it starts shrinking.
Ignore the tails, because they're impacted by variance.
But speaking of, it seems that the global variance in the form of the connectome also grows until about age 28, whereafter it starts becoming less variable.
This is really interesting new data, and I'm happy to see it published.
Hopefully in a few decades, we'll have longitudinal data to see if what we see in the cross-section holds up within individuals, too!
Pirenne's thesis holds that Antiquity—the period when economic activity concentrated in the Mediterranean—ended because the rise of Islam destroyed the flow of trade across it.
The decline in trade that resulted from differences in faith had profound consequences for the economic geography of Europe.
Byzantine economic activity depended on trade, and it collapsed, whereas the Frankish economy, which was never trade-dependent, transformed.
The Byzantines' minting stalled and the Arabs' and Franks' increased (perhaps partly because they were cut off from one another!), providing each of their states with divergent trends in seignorage revenues and a widening gulf in the ability to fund the government.
At every age, the incidence of dementia is down. As a society, people are no longer suffering dementia nearly as often!
The world over, child mortality is way down. It's unusual for parents to experience the death of a child these days, where even a century ago, it was the global norm.
Each year, novel gene therapies are approved.
The number of gene therapies in the pipeline is also rapidly increasing. There is tons of progress to be made here, and the main issue is regulatory.
We have lots of low-hanging fruit in curing disease!