What You Should Be Reading: January 2026

Welcome back to “What You Should Be Reading,” a monthly series in which the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) works like a snowplow—quite obviously not a Washington, D.C., snowplow—to push through the snow and provide some recent exemplary contributions to the corpus of policy wonkery.

January’s edition includes the perfidy of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), the ongoing damage inflicted by protectionism on Americans, and the case against an unconstitutional age verification proposal.

So, without further ado…

CTIA/NERA: “Quantifying the Opportunity of Reforming the Federal Communications Commission’s National Environmental Policy Act and National Historical Preservation Act Rules”

Repeating oneself is not always to be avoided, and TPA is fond of the following, which bears near constant reprise: NEPA delenda est. Like a boorish actor muffing a dual role in some ill-written off-off-Broadway clunker, NEPA manages to perform alternately as an utter incompetent and an outright offense against sensibilities of level-headed people. The law has proven incapable of achieving its desired end of environmental protection. “Our findings suggest that NEPA litigation at this level rarely changes environmental outcomes or protects environmental justice communities,” a 2024 report discovered. In the second, its burdens fall with the weight of a theater’s entire stock of sandbags on the entrepreneurs and businesses that must contend with its Kafkaesque compliance regime.

Federal permitting requirements function as an all-purpose stagnation device, weighing on new building projects economy-wide. The quantity of dollars sapped by regulatory compliance from particular industries is likewise remarkable. A new paper, published by National Economic Research Associates (NERA) at the behest of trade group CTIA, undertakes a sector-specific investigation, reviewing NEPA’s and the National Historical Preservation Act (NHPA)’s consequences for the wireless industry. The paper “finds that under the legacy regulatory NEPA and NHPA frameworks, mobile wireless providers would spend over $2.2 billion on regulatory compliance in the next decade alone. Additionally, complying with NEPA and NHPA regulations takes time, causing an estimated five-month delay in deploying new technologies and service upgrades.”

These are no small-dollar losses, particularly when viewed in the larger constellation of industries hamstrung by the federal permitting regime. Reform is overdue.

Read the full piece here.

The Kiel Institute: America’s Own Goal: Who Pays the Tariffs?

The Trump administration seems to think that tariffs are what Michael Scott might call a “win-win-win.” In the President’s mind, protectionism benefits American industry, increases federal revenue, and secures these goods at the cost of foreigners.

According to a recent review from the Kiel Institute, these suppositions are baseless. “Our research shows the opposite: American importers and consumers bear nearly all the cost” (emphasis removed). The paper reports that Americans—far from shunting off the price of tariffs to exporters—find themselves saddled with roughly 96 percent of the burden.

But the price of protectionism is sprawling, extending past immediate taxes on Americans. The  Kiel Institute writes: “American manufacturers that rely on imported inputs face higher costs. They must either absorb these costs (reducing profits and investment), pass them to customers (raising prices for downstream buyers), or scramble to find alternative sources (incurring adjustment costs and delays). None of these options is costless.”

China, the foremost antagonist in the White House’s trade drama, has not performed its role as the Trump administration expected. “Chinese exporters, despite facing significant new trade barriers, did not cut their dollar prices to maintain market share. Instead, the primary adjustment occurred through reduced trade volumes: fewer Chinese goods entered the United States, but those that did were not discounted.”

Read the full piece here.

Phoenix Center: “A Poor Case for Mandatory App Store Age Verification”

Saying “I told you so” fast loses its appeal in the world of politics and policy. The phrase becomes apposite almost exclusively when some legislator or bureaucrat has committed a thoroughly avoidable blunder, whose costs real people—taxpayers, consumers, businesses, etc.—must bear. In recent years, many free-market tech-policy analysts (including yours truly) have argued that age verification mandates, from the platform level to the app store level, violate the First Amendment. Many states have, nonetheless, persisted in advancing such legislation, and courts have vindicated the warnings of TPA and its compatriots.

The case that app store age verification circumvents the constitutional barricades that have halted myriad platform-level mandates cannot survive elementary scrutiny, writes the Phoenix Center’s Lawrence J. Spiwak. For one, a federal court enjoined the State of Texas’s app store law, the first app store bill challenged in court. Spiwak further dismantles the analytically myopic arguments of those who cite legal precedent to suggest that app store mandates could prove constitutional.

“Advocacy is not a substitute for argument; passion is not a replacement for rigor,” Spiwak writes. Despite their enthusiasm, age verification advocates have failed to convince courts of the constitutionality of their proposals.

Read the full piece here.

And furthermore, NEPA delenda est.

Note: TPA highlights research projects that contribute meaningfully to important public-policy discussions. TPA does not necessarily endorse the policy recommendations the featured authors make.