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John Nothdurft and Donny Kendal present episode #90 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s podcast features work from the Center of the American Experiment, the Mercatus Center, and Empire Center.

John Nothdurft and Donny Kendal present episode #83 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s podcast features work from the Rand Corporation, the California Policy Center, and Reason.

John Nothdurft and Donny Kendal present episode #70 of the In The Tank Podcast. Donny and John review 2016 and make predictions about 2017.

With all the attending awfulness you expect. The laxness, the arrogance – the terrible performance. (See: ObamaCare, the Post Office, “green energy,” your Department of Motor Vehicles,….) And the willful denial of the fact that innumerable past failures – portend more of the exact same, should we be foolish enough to yet again try the exact same.

In 2015, Mississippi enacted the Equal Opportunity for Students with Special Needs Program, creating education savings accounts for parents of special-needs students. The ESA program allows these parents to use a percentage of the money allotted for their children at traditional public schools on education alternatives instead.

Congressional oversight of executive branch agencies is a key element of the checks and balances that prevent accumulation of too much power, as well as abuse of that power, in any one part of government. A review of two recent congressional oversight endeavors now being stymied by the Obama Administration underscores the often-overlooked importance of the oversight process. In both cases, lives are at stake.

No matter how many courts have rejected their pleadings, enemies of school choice appear committed to a 100-year-long judicial war in quest of some ultimate edict that will keep American students forever captive in government schools.

In this episode of the Heartland Institute’s weekly Budget & Tax News podcast, managing editor and research fellow Jesse Hathaway talks with Nelson J. Rockefeller Institute of Government director of fiscal studies Don Boyd about a new study examining how the assumptions and gimmicks public pension boards use to fund pensions are affected by investment risks, and how those risks affect taxpayers and government employees.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued its final methane rule on May 12. The 600-page rule is agenda-driven and backed by pseudoscience, emotions, and unicorn dust, and it’s important to note one specific change in the final rule amounts to a regulatory taking. The final rule imposes costly regulations on wells producing fewer than 15 barrels per day, effectively shutting down those businesses.

Austin voters have approved a ballot referendum to regulate peer-to-peer transportation network companies such as Lyft and Uber, forcing the companies to suspend service in a city otherwise known for its forward thinking and friendliness toward innovation.

Legislators have long attempted to reduce the negative health impacts of smoking through taxes, bans, and regulations. Some have tried to extend these same policies to electronic cigarettes or “e-cigarettes,” even though they contain no tobacco and are substantially less harmful than traditional cigarettes. This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled new regulations placing electronic cigarettes under an avalanche of new rules requiring that they be approved as a new type of tobacco product — effectively treating them like traditional cigarettes.

The first week in May is National Charter Schools Week, a time to celebrate the advancements made in the charter school movement over the past 25 years. Because of the nation’s hundreds of new and developing charter schools, thousands of parents and their children now have the opportunity to enroll in a school that better meets children’s specific education needs.

In a recent article published by Bloomberg View, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein discusses “an important but widely overlooked speech” made by Elizabeth Warren (D), in which the Massachusetts senator bemoans the influence of powerful industry groups on the regulatory process. To Warren, the problem is not overzealous administrative bodies, eager to impose unwanted, unnecessary new rules, but regulatory capture—the notion regulation is, in the words of economists Michael E. Levine and Jennifer L. Forrence, “simply an arena in which special interests contend for the right to use government power for narrow advantage.”