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 regulationsđź§µ
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.
Retatrutide is more effective at generating weight loss and other benefits for the people who take it, but there does seem to be a cardiac safety signal.
This could potentially be important *for people who have preexisting atrial fibrillation and CVD.*
Keep in mind, only one of these events became serious and the rest just passed: "Reported cardiac arrhythmias were mild to moderate in severity with the exception of one severe adverse event."
The reason for this signal seems to be a dose-dependent increase in heart rate.
Increasing heart rate could help to explain the added benefits of the drug for weight loss.
But I have doubts. Why? Because the heart rate increase was linearly dose-dependent, but weight loss tapped out at 8mg.
Gerrymandering is the death of centrism in America.
The more districts are uncompetitive, the less hope there is for moderate candidates, and the less value there is in moving to the center.
Gerrymandering means a more divisive and polarized America, with poorer governanceđź§µ
A recent paper in the American Economic Review made the value of competitive elections clear using data from America and France.
Looking at American elections, when candidates are in their primaries, they're more radical. When they compete with the other party, they moderate.
The same thing is observed in France, where the multi-round elections come with extensive moderation for some, slight moderation for others, and essentially no moderation for those who are already at the nation's center.
The World Health Organization frequently adopts irresponsible positions.
For example, they recommended against using non-sugar sweeteners (NSS)—zero-calorie stuff like aspartame.
Why?
Because of non-causal evidence. But all the causally-informative evidence said it was good!
On the one hand, you have causal evidence screaming about one direction of effects that are theoretically expected. Among this evidence, there's one bad sign, but it's marginally significant (p = 0.012) among a bajillion effects examined.
AND THEY GOT THE EFFECT SIZE WRONG.
See that highlighted 95% CI? It looks really precise, no?
If you go to the actual study, you'll see it's about switching from sugary to sugar-free hot cocoa, and the effect they report is actually 0.
Where did they get that estimate?! They don't say, but it went in their meta!
The White House just issued an executive order to end cashless bail.
Over the last decade or so, many jurisdictions have adopted a policy where criminal offenders can walk free without having to pay bail.
They then routinely go on to commit more crime. This targets thatđź§µ
Briefly, the way bail works in the U.S. is that the court allows a pretrial defendant—someone accused of a crime—to leave jail before their trial date if they can put up cash which they'll earn back if they appear for court.
This system works reasonably well for keeping jails reasonably uncrowded and ensuring that people show up for trial.
Critics allege that this system is unfair, however, because many defendants cannot make bail. They don't have the financial means, so they're kept in detention.