On July 9, 2012, President Obama signed the FDA Safety and Innovation Act, Pub. L. 112-144. Buried in Section 902 is a short statutory addition to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act — 21 U.S.C. § 356(b) — that created something called Breakthrough Therapy Designation, or BTD. The qualifying language runs 38 words. A […]
A subsidy is a rule with a price tag. When Congress writes the rule, it also writes who can collect. That sentence is the whole argument of this article. The rest is documents. The current U.S. statute book pays firms through tax credits, grants, loan guarantees, and price supports. Each program carries three parts that […]
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Regulatory forensics starts with a basic test: can you explain a rule to a stranger on a bus without reaching for a flowchart? If not, the rule may still be lawful, but it is probably not legible. Legibility is the quality that lets a small business owner, a policy analyst, or a graduate student trace […]
On September 12, 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission posted a cease-and-desist order against a mid-size broker-dealer. Supervisory failures tied to customer account transfers. The firm settled. Paid $1.2 million. Consented to the order without admitting or denying the findings. That phrase — “without admitting or denying” — runs through roughly 70 percent of SEC […]
Main entity: A trade barrier is any federal rule, tariff, quota, licensing requirement, or standard that raises the cost of moving a good or service across a border. Adjacent concepts include tariff-rate quotas, rules of origin, antidumping duties, countervailing duties, import licensing, and local-content requirements. For policy analysts, small business owners, and public policy graduate […]
Economic freedom indexes usually start with a tidy premise: lower taxes, lighter regulation, stable money, open trade—freer economy. Rank the countries, wave the scorecard, and suddenly policy analysts have a cudgel for whatever reform they already favored. But the premise skips a question that regulatory forensics keeps tripping over: free for whom? A rule that […]
Zoning laws are municipal ordinances that divide land into districts and prescribe what can be built, operated, or altered in each district. They sit at the intersection of property rights, land-use regulation, and local political economy. For policy analysts, small business owners, and public policy graduate students, zoning is a rare case where a local […]
People toss around “pro-business” and “pro-market” as if they mean the same thing. They don’t. The difference comes down to who gets the state’s help. A pro-business policy improves the position of specific firms or industries. A pro-market policy improves the position of competition itself. For anyone doing regulatory forensics, the distinction matters because the […]
Regulatory forensics is the practice of tracing a proposed rule from its preamble to its projected compliance costs and asking one uncomfortable question: who is this really for? It sits at the intersection of administrative law, public choice economics, and distributional analysis. For policy-curious professionals, reading a regulatory proposal is not about agreeing or disagreeing […]