Politics we can agree on: Small wins show the positive impact of government

I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown tired of the news feeling like a never-ending partisan shouting match. There hasn’t been a lot of coverage of good news that everyone can generally agree about.

I get it. The second Trump administration has moved aggressively to reshape agencies, eliminate programs, rewrite regulations and reconsider assumptions that have governed Washington for decades. Supporters see long-overdue disruption of an entrenched bureaucracy. Critics see the dismantling of institutions and safeguards that took generations to build. That’s newsworthy. But exhausting.

Keeping politics one step removed from science

A continuing resolution passed last week to keep the federal government operating through December 11. It contains a provision that will attract far less attention than the shutdown it prevented. For the duration of the resolution, Congress has blocked the Office of Management and Budget from implementing a proposed overhaul of federal grant rules that would substantially increase political control over grantmaking.

The OMB proposal would require greater involvement by senior political appointees in discretionary grants and would give agencies considerably broader authority to terminate awards when they determine that a project no longer serves the federal interest. OMB argues that elected administrations require flexibility to ensure that taxpayer money advances lawful government priorities. Critics see something much more dangerous: a mechanism through which scientific grants selected through expert review could ultimately become dependent upon political approval. The proposal drew nearly half a million public comments.

The continuing resolution does not resolve that debate. It simply prevents the proposed rule from taking effect while the CR remains in force. But that temporary brake is important. Republican Susan Collins and Democrat Patty Murray were among those supporting the restriction, and the final legislation preserves it.

There is a legitimate role for elected leaders in deciding national research priorities. Congress determines how much money agencies receive, administrations establish policy, and taxpayers deserve accountability for how their money is spent. But there is also considerable value in keeping the final judgment about whether one cancer study is more scientifically promising than another in the hands of people who understand cancer research. We have spent decades building peer-review systems precisely because scientific merit and political popularity are not the same thing.

For at least the next few months, that distinction survives. Let’s hope the fact it is directly called out in this continuing resolution signals that legislators intend to include similar terms in a full budget, should we ever get one approved.

Measuring whether the robocalls actually stop

The FCC announced another small but potentially consequential idea this week. It wants to create a public scorecard grading telephone providers on how effectively they protect their customers from illegal robocalls. The interesting part isn't the scorecard itself, but what the FCC proposes to measure.

Telecommunications regulation has traditionally focused heavily on compliance: Did the provider file the required paperwork? Did it implement the required technology? Does it offer the appropriate blocking tools? The FCC now wants to supplement those questions with a much simpler one: Did it work?

The proposed scorecard is expected to incorporate blocking statistics, consumer complaints, enforcement activity and other information to assess actual performance. The FCC is even considering how to measure the opposite problem, are legitimate calls mistakenly blocked by aggressive spam filters? It would then translate those results into something consumers can understand, potentially a numerical score, letter grade or risk rating.

There is something refreshingly straightforward about this approach. We have vastly more data available to us than when many regulatory structures were designed. That should increasingly allow the government to move beyond regulating processes and begin measuring outcomes. If one wireless carrier is dramatically better than another at preventing scams from reaching its customers, consumers should know that. The resulting competitive pressure might accomplish more than another hundred pages of telecommunications rules.

The freedom to fix what you own

In June, President Trump issued a memorandum with an unusually appealing title: Lowering the Cost of Living by Promoting the Freedom to Fix. The immediate issue is automotive. Federal emissions law can make modification of emissions-control equipment illegal, and the administration argues that the existing certification process for aftermarket parts has become an expensive bottleneck. The memorandum directs EPA to clarify consumers' ability to repair their own vehicles, encourage alternative certification pathways for compliant aftermarket parts and consider deprioritizing civil enforcement against people who make good-faith attempts to restore their vehicles to their original configuration.

I hope this kind of regulation eventually travels much farther than the garage. I have written before about the strange evolution of digital-rights protections. Laws intended to prevent piracy and protect intellectual property have sometimes been stretched into mechanisms for controlling perfectly ordinary things people do with products they have purchased. Manufacturers have used technological locks and intellectual-property arguments to discourage third-party printer cartridges, replacement parts and even compatible, but off-brand, coffee pods. Increasingly, we don't simply buy products. We buy physical objects containing software that can determine what we are permitted to do with them afterward.

That distinction will only become more important as software inhabits nearly everything we own. A tractor is a computer. A car is a computer. Increasingly, refrigerators, appliances, medical devices and industrial equipment are computers too. The public should retain the right to modify, tinker and improve the things we buy, and increasingly companies have found ways to make this illegal.

The Trump memorandum doesn't settle the broader right-to-repair debate. But it pushes in a direction I hope becomes a wedge: ownership of a physical product should carry a meaningful presumption that you are allowed to maintain, repair and modify it, provided you aren't creating some separate public harm. In the Data Economy, the right to own something may increasingly depend upon the right to access the software and data inside it.

Sometimes a label is enough

The Department of Health and Human Services offered another example of practical, consumer-protecting legislation last month when it proposed changing the way food manufacturers use the designation "Generally Recognized as Safe," or GRAS.

Under the existing system, a manufacturer can determine that an ingredient meets the GRAS standard without notifying the Food and Drug Administration. They can make that determination in a vacuum. HHS now proposes requiring manufacturers to notify FDA and provide supporting safety information when making those determinations. It would not mean that the FDA independently approves every ingredient before it enters the market. Doing that would require additional congressional authority, drive up costs and slow products to market. But the government would at least know what manufacturers have introduced into the food supply and the basis on which they determined it was safe.

I am a fan of labels. Labeling is one of the simplest forms of regulation because it often avoids the false choice between prohibiting something and doing nothing. We require food manufacturers to disclose ingredients without asking the government to decide what everyone should eat. Energy-efficiency labels let consumers compare appliances. Nutrition labels do not prevent me from eating a doughnut; they simply make it harder to pretend I don't know what's in it.

I've argued for similar thinking around artificial intelligence. We do not necessarily need the government deciding which AI-generated content people are permitted to create. But there is enormous value in knowing when something was generated by AI, which model produced it, or eventually understanding other characteristics of the systems increasingly making decisions around us.

Transparency preserves agency. Before we reach for prohibition, sometimes we should simply make sure everyone can see what is happening.

Is that really the price?

Speaking of seeing what’s happening, the Federal Trade Commission provided an almost perfect companion example last week. Companies increasingly possess enough information about us to estimate not simply what we want to buy, but potentially what each of us is willing to pay for it.

Browsing history, previous purchases, location and other behavioral information can make "personalized pricing" possible: two customers can encounter the same product but receive different prices based upon an algorithm's assessment of each person's willingness to pay. I’ve done experiments with my friends where we’ve searched for the same physical products on the same e-commerce site and gotten different prices. When I search for products in an incognito tab, I sometimes get different pricing than when I use my open browser. As best I can tell, personalized, or at least algorithmic pricing is happening already.

The FTC isn't proposing to prohibit the practice outright. Chairman Andrew Ferguson acknowledges that the agency doesn't have authority to ban personalized pricing in every circumstance. Instead, the FTC is considering whether companies that secretly use personal information to determine an individual's price may be engaging in deceptive practices under laws that already exist.

Disclosure changes the equation. There is nothing unusual about prices changing. Airlines have practiced dynamic pricing for decades. Hotels cost more during major events. Grocery stores run promotions. Supply and demand are foundational to markets. But there is an important difference between everyone seeing a higher price because demand is high and me seeing a higher price because an algorithm has concluded that I personally can afford it.

Perhaps companies should be allowed to do that. But if they do, I should know and that’s what the FTC is proposing. That is another small example of regulation catching up with the Data Economy without necessarily trying to stop it. Data creates new economic capabilities. Transparency can help preserve some balance of power for the person on the other side of the algorithm.

A promise worth watching

Finally, there is an idea related to a subject I've written about considerably in recent months: data centers. Earlier this year, seven of the country's largest AI and technology companies, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI, signed the Trump administration's Ratepayer Protection Pledge. In July, the administration expanded the initiative to include utilities, developers, governors and state policymakers.

The principle is compelling. Companies building enormous data centers should build, bring, or purchase the additional electricity they require and pay for the infrastructure necessary to deliver it, rather than shifting those costs onto existing residential and business customers. The pledge also calls for investment in local workforce development and coordination with grid operators.

This one belongs in the "good idea, now prove it" category. A pledge is not a regulatory structure. Electricity markets are extraordinarily complicated, costs move through utilities in indirect ways, and it will take years before we know whether households in data-center-heavy regions were actually protected from the infrastructure costs created by enormous new loads. There is a considerable difference between promising that ratepayers won't subsidize AI infrastructure and constructing utility tariffs, interconnection rules and regulatory mechanisms that ensure they don't.

But the underlying principle is right. I have argued previously that communities should not be asked to subsidize infrastructure whose economic benefits largely accrue somewhere else. If rural communities provide the land, water and electricity for the Data Economy, they should participate in its upside rather than simply absorb its externalities. The administration's pledge at least recognizes the problem. Now we get to measure whether it works.

Finding signal in the noise

There is a common thread through these otherwise unrelated examples. None of these examples represents a sweeping transformation of government. Some are only proposals. One is temporary. Another is a voluntary pledge whose effectiveness remains uncertain. Reasonable people can disagree about the details of every one of them.

But they share a useful instinct: preserve expertise where expertise matters; measure outcomes instead of paperwork; give people greater control over products they own; disclose information that affects their choices; and make powerful institutions more accountable for the costs they impose on everyone else.

Those aren't particularly Republican ideas or Democratic ones. They're mostly just principles of competent governance. Our current media and information environment isn't especially good at showing us this kind of thing. A new rule requiring disclosure of food additives cannot compete with the latest presidential controversy for online clicks. An FCC scorecard will never dominate social media. A few sentences buried in a continuing resolution protecting the independence of scientific grantmaking aren't going to lead the evening news.

Perhaps that is precisely why they are worth occasionally pointing out. There is plenty happening in Washington right now to be worried about, argue over and scrutinize aggressively. None of these examples requires ignoring any of it. Recognizing a good policy does not require endorsing the person who proposed it, any more than opposing a bad policy requires rejecting everything else that person believes.

That shouldn't be a radical idea. But these days, it might be one worth labeling.