What You Should Be Reading: October 2025

Welcome back to “What You Should Be Reading,” a monthly series in which the Taxpayers Protection Alliance reminds its junior (and senior) staffers that, although many government employees are not working at present, the hardy, hardscrabble, rough-hewn, rugged, red-blooded, salt-of-the-earth yeomen of Washington, D.C.’s nonprofits must continue their toil come rain, shine, or shutdown—at the very least by reading the latest important works of public policy research.

October’s edition includes a legal challenge to app store age verification, the grey market for administrative law judges, and the effects of cell phone bans in schools.

So, without further ado…

Consumer & Communications Industry Association v. Paxton

During the course of the 2025 state legislative sessions, TPA staff (me included) flew from state capital to state capital warning legislatures of the dangers and constitutional violations of proposals to mandate age verification for app stores. Such proposals emerged in numerous states, and most failed to become law. A few states, however, failed to exercise prudence.

The Texas legislature in May enacted S.B. 2420, a bill requiring, inter alia, app stores to verify the ages of users and to obtain parental consent as a precondition to allowing underage users to download applications. This month, the Consumer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, alleging that S.B. 2420 violates the First Amendment as incorporated through the Fourteenth.

Advocates of app store age verification, defending the policy’s constitutionality, insist upon its content neutrality. This argument does nothing to save S.B. 2420 from the scrutiny of the First Amendment, however. CCIA writes:

The law is not tailored to its goal of shielding children from accessing speech that they do not have a First Amendment right to access. Instead, Texas has walled off virtually all mobile apps behind a series of verification and consent gates. Indeed, S.B. 2420 does nothing to exempt apps that facilitate core political or educational speech; creative or artistic expression; religious instruction and information; or the exchange of ideas, information, and culture. Texas has “burn[ed] the house to roast the pig.”

The trade group razes another ubiquitous argument of the age verifiers: that parental-consent provisions fortify parental prerogatives to manage the online lives of children. Noting the myriad means at the disposal of parents to do just that, CCIA argues: “The Act’s predominant effect is…to remove parental choice by imposing a one-size-fits-all, paternalistic restriction on the many millions of app store offerings (including books, movies, and games) and app store users, regardless of age and user preference.” In fact, “All major app stores provide more robust parental control offerings than S.B. 2420 requires, should parents decide that it is best for them to employ.”

This dilemma—what the government may do should parents decline to raise their children in a manner of which legislators approve—has come before the judiciary already, rising to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011). “While some of the legislation’s effect may indeed be in support of what some parents of the restricted children actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want,” Justice Scalia wrote. Although parents may direct their children’s lives, and although the legislators may assist them, Scalia reasoned that “it does not follow that the state has the power to prevent children from hearing or saying anything without their parents’ prior consent.”

Read the full complaint here.

Pacific Legal Foundation: How Interagency Borrowing of Administrative Law Judges Circumvents the Rule of Law

Most Americans are ignorant of the very existence of administrative law judges (ALJs), the bureaucrats-cum-jurists who, on a daily basis, deprive American citizens of life, liberty, and property with…well…something purporting to be due process of law. These officials serve various agencies, adjudicating disputes in the place of Article III courts. Removing judicial powers to the ersatz judges of the administrative state, in the understated words of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “may violate the separation of powers by placing adjudicatory authority over core private rights…within the authority of Article II agencies.”

In a new report for the Pacific Legal Foundation, Stone Washington illuminates what hitherto was, perhaps, the darkest corner of the ALJs’ shadowy domain. “Unbeknownst to many, however, is that certain federal agencies employ ALJs who were outsourced or borrowed from another agency,” he writes. “Some agencies employ ALJs who ‘double dip,’ adjudicating for two or more agencies at the same time.”

As Washington documents, the trading of bureaucrats raises important questions—questions which, because the process remains obscured by secrecy, remain unanswered in full. He argues:

First, borrowed ALJs occupy a legal gray area that may insulate them from proper accountability to the president and the heads of their originating agencies. An agency may attempt to protect its transitory ALJs from presidential removal if it relies on the ALJ’s time adjudicating for other agencies as justification. Neither the president nor the appointing agency head, nor the borrowing agency head, can properly control an ALJ if the ALJ temporarily works for a borrowing agency.

Second, certain agencies, such as the IRS, the STB, and NOAA, lack congressionally funded tribunals and any authority to adjudicate using other agencies’ officials. These agencies provide no paper trail for how borrowed ALJs are compensated or from which budgetary item they draw funding. Essentially, they finance borrowed judges in complete obscurity. This undermines Congress’s Article I authority to appropriate funds for specific, stated purposes in annual budgetary requests. This report did not discover any justification in these agencies’ budgets for how transitory ALJs are paid.

Third, the APA does not permit one agency to outsource its quasi-judicial power to another agency through interagency agreements.

Read the full piece here.

The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida

Lawmakers are casting about frantically for policies to do something, anything, about children and the digital world. Though not for insincerity or a lack of diligence, this search has lighted most often on ineffectual, impracticable, or unconstitutional proposals (for more, see above).

One proposal that is neither unconstitutional nor impracticable are cellphone bans in schools. The question to be answered is not whether children should have cell phones out of school but whether such in-school bans are effectual. The beginnings of an answer appear in a new paper from Umut Özek of the RAND Corporation and David N. Figlio of the University of Rochester. They examined the effects of phone bans in a Florida school district following the state’s law, enacted in 2023, which restricted students’ use of smart phones and requiring districts to enforce the policy. 

“[W]e find significant positive effects of the ban on student test scores, primarily in the second year,” the authors write. “Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect. These positive test score effects are larger for male students (an effect of 1.4 percentiles on the spring test in the second year) and for students in middle and high schools (1.3 percentiles).”

In the early days of enforcement, disciplinary incidents became more common, but such incidents “began to decline after an initial surge following the cellphone ban.”

Analysis purporting to prove that smartphones have caused American children to become lost in a mire of mental-health disorders fails to withstand scrutiny. “These trends have triggered public debates about the causal link between the rise in smartphone use among adolescents and the decline in their well-being, yet the rigorous evidence about this causal link is scant and mixed,” Özek and Figlio note.

Nonetheless, as the duo writes, smartphone use has become nearly ubiquitous among teens; one fifth of teens in the OECD report “that they use their smart phones for more than 6 hours every day.” More research must be done, but common sense dictates that phone-free schools, by promoting in-person socialization and banishing in-class distractions, are likely to benefit students.

Read the full piece here.

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.