Striking from new Quinnipiac poll: *Voters prefer path to legalization over deportations for most undocs by 59-34. Among independents it's 61-33 *Majority says Trump on immigration is making America less safe Again, there's broad rejection of the whole project, not just ICE tactics (see below)

Deloitte is a $74B cancer on American government is an accurate diagnosis, but MAGA is constitutionally incapable of solving this problem. Government inefficiency, privatization, and grift *is* their political project.

Depressing: we published a more informative post on the same topic last week, by an author who isn't a Nazi, and all we got was this lousy t-shirt.

"As one dissenting staffer reportedly said in response to the Heritage Foundation’s call for a 'Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family': 'I don’t want to go back fifty years.'"

Just in time for the great grocery debate of 2026, Errol Schweizer is on the substack today arguing why public grocery stores are but one piece of a larger set of policies necessary to make the right to good and affordable food in NYC a reality. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Good work if you can get it 🫠

"After the passage of Trump’s 2025 tax law, the U.S. corporate marginal effective tax rate on investment in R&D became -47% overall and -146% if debt-financed. Yes, those are negative tax rates: every dollar Pharma spends on debt-financed research returns $1.46 in tax benefits to the companies."

The week in review: Edie Conekin-Tooze on hidden foster care as neoliberal family governance, an open letter from seventy-two UMN law faculty, and @lukef.bsky.social on the means-testing industrial complex. Plus, as always, the best of LPE from around the web 🧵👇

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that House Democrats will demand Trump pay the full taxes owed on his $10 billion settlement proceeds.

Last week I wrote that ICE (& immigration judges) are increasingly openly defying courts. lpeproject.org/blog/immigra... Now, a judge compiled 100 cases from ICE’s MN siege where ICE ignored court orders. Yet what are dems offering? Basically—laws that ask ICE to please follow the law.

The Binary Executive Theory: "The Constitutional Theory You Love, Now With Twice the Executive!"

I will simply never recover from reading this sentence: "Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people."

We have to stop talking about means-testing as inherently cost saving. lpeproject.org/blog/the-mea...

Absolutely terrific post by @lukefarrell.bsky.social . It’s shocking, wasteful, and pernicious how much our government relies on private contractors to perform the state function of administering public services. Great proposals here. lpeproject.org/blog/the-mea...

Corporations are extracting billions from America’s safety net and their payday is about to be supercharged by new rules. I lay out how programs like Medicaid have become vulnerable to corporate capture and what we need to build to stop it. @lpeblog.bsky.social lpeproject.org/blog/the-mea...

“hidden foster care, which is believed to have emerged in the 1980s, furthered the neoliberal-social-conservative project of dismantling the welfare state and reinstating the poor-law-style ideal of family responsibility” - excellent post from Edie Conekin-Tooze

However lawless you think the immigration agencies have become, it's worse than you think.

Coming soon to the editorial pages of The Washington Post: Why I I Didn’t Sign the Woke University of Minnesota Law Faculty Letter Against ICE

Today, we share an open letter from seventy-two University of Minnesota Law faculty addressing the federal government’s ongoing campaign of fear, intimidation, and violence against Minnesotans.

"projects that seek to subvert formal systems by moving funding into diversion programs face a perennial risk: co-option by a neoliberal-social-conservative project that is all too ready to replace well-funded, formal state processes with private responsibility by families and communities."

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him. White. Hot. Rage.

The week in review: @n-th-n.bsky.social on how immigration agencies are openly defying federal courts, and @ksabeelrahman.bsky.social and @jocelynsimonson.bsky.social on the Part IV problem in legal scholarship. Plus, as always, the best of LPE from around the web 👇🧵

If documents describing a conspiracy by a federal agency to violate the Constitution don’t result in collective action by Dems to (1) refuse to fund another cent of its operations and (2) dismantle the agency as quickly as circumstances allow, they’re even dumber than ICE apparently thinks they are

However lawless you think the immigration agencies have become, it's worse than you think.

It seems to me Congress should hold off on funding elaborate conspiracies to violate the Constitution.

This is great. We obviously live in a world (now, maybe always) where incremental policy proposals and doctrinal tweaks don't get at the core of what matters in law and legal disputes.

For years, @ksabeelrahman.bsky.social & I have been frustrated with what we call the Part IV Problem in legal scholarship, the expectation of neat & feasible prescriptions to end pieces. Our frustrations are heightened in this moment of authoritarianism, as we wrote today at @lpeblog.bsky.social:

As Rousseau said: "Scholars are born free, and everywhere they are proposing policy solutions."

However lawless you think the immigration agencies have become, it's worse than you think. Judges have ruled against ICE's new mandatory detention policy by a margin of 308-14. They have also held that a nationwide class is eligible for bond hearings. Yet ICE continues to enact the policy.

"agencies committed to lawlessness and bestowed with ever-expanding budgets simply cannot be meaningfully constrained by courts. Efforts to combat DHS’s harmful and illegal practices must go after the agencies’ budgets, shrinking and ultimately eliminating their headcounts and capacity."

Gonna tell my kids this is Marty Supreme.

This is what happened in our neighborhood yesterday. ICE snatched a human being off of our streets, roughed them up badly, and then pepper sprayed legal observers as they documented it all. This is a daily occurrence happening all throughout Minnesota right now.

This article is far too kind to the rubes who thought that Joe Lonsdale and Bari Weiss were "uncompromisingly committed to the fundamental values of open inquiry and free expression." The outcome is less a Greek Tragedy than it is learning one has not, in fact, purchased the Brooklyn Bridge.

Fun fact! We could be using the $75 billion allocated for ICE on literally anything else! Like essential services that help people exist! It’s almost as if these issues + our priorities have a lot of overlap! Also people definitely can’t afford things if they get shot in the face!

"Republicans’ goal was never regulatory decisions that maximized net benefits; it was less regulation, consistent with their broader political vision." A good day to revisit @epopppp.bsky.social's call to confront (and perhaps learn from) the conservative weaponization of Cost-Benefit Analysis.

In America you drop your kid off at school, get your brains blown out on the ride home, then the Vice President drops everything for a week to call you a terrorist, to slander your family, to protect the circumstances that led to your death so they can do it again. It is government by Alex Jones.

One reason I favor impeaching Noem is because it's a political process for a political problem. No, this will not stop ICE enforcement action but YES it would be an opportunity to educate the public about DHS & perhaps begin to lay a foundation for dismantling it.

You and your wife drop your 6-year-old off at school. You just moved here. You see ICE terrorizing your new neighbors. You film them, as is your legal right. Your wife complies with orders. She is then shot in the head. You still have to pick up your child later today. This could be you.

This is the only correct position, and the inevitable response from knee-jerk centrist reactionaries of "it won't work" is not a valid objection. Every member of Congress has a duty to say that what Noem has been doing is not acceptable.

Relevant

My selections cover tariffs as economic sabotage, lessons from the second red scare, the perversion of trust law, what CalRx teaches us about abundance, and the political economy of trans healthcare. This is America (woo).

ICYMI: We dropped our LPE Blog Wrapped yesterday. Check out the ten bangers that dominated the charts.

Today, our ten most read posts of 2025! What good is policy-adjacent scholarship? Does the 1st Amendment protect the economic infrastructure of speech? Can Trump grant Texas 40 Senators through executive order? Our brilliant authors answered these and other questions during this annus horribilis.

I'm happy to have contributed to two of the ten most-read posts on the @lpeblog.bsky.social in 2025 -- even as I wish I hadn't had to write them! lpeproject.org/blog/our-mos...

"Meanwhile, in the world’s largest entertainment industry, video game companies issue private instruments that 19th-century canal, railroad, and mining companies would envy."

Today, @raulcarrillo.bsky.social explains why existing legal frameworks are inadequate to address the emerging dystopian world of monetary fiefdoms—a world in which private infrastructure governs without the name of government.

I spent most of time this year producing my 14 part podcast “Democracy & Destiny.” That cut into my writing time. Well I resolve to write more in the future & I’m starting now. Here’s my piece on crypto money in politics. lpeproject.org/blog/the-res... #moneyinpolitics #crypto #campaignfinance 🤑🗳️⚖️✍🏾

Today, @profciara.bsky.social discusses a basic truth: the president’s personal wealth is now inextricably linked to the viability of cryptocurrency. This should worry you.

Today, Chastity Murphy offers an insider’s account of the failure to regulate stablecoins: a retrospective on what worked, what didn’t, and what’s at stake if we don’t reclaim public control over the future of money.

The week in review: @rohangrey.bsky.social and @amandaparsons.bsky.social on crypto, Sandeep Vaheesan on antitrust reform, @azohra.bsky.social and Madiha Tahir on why the U.S. wages war, and @quinnslobodian.com on the post-neoliberalism. Plus, more LPE news and notes in the 🧵👇