Scott Levy

Fmr. General Counsel for White House Off. of Pandemic Preparedness & Response Policy; fmr. Dep. Health Policy Dir. for Senate HELP; fmr Senate Finance staffer

[Matt Glassman @MattGlassman312]

Must read on the consequences of shifting annual DHS approps funding to reconciliation.

[Kevin McNellis @kevin_mcnellis]

Funding ICE through reconciliation is worse than it looks. Past reconciliation bills added to agencies' annual appropriations. The Senate bill fund ICE's operations through the end of Trump's term.

@ScottLevy47 and I explain why this is an congressional abdication /1

[Lawfare @lawfare]

The Department of Homeland Security has been shut down for over 2 months, but the Trump administration has largely continued immigration enforcement.

Scott Levy explains how Congress could constrain the president's unilateral ability to shift shutdown operations for political advantage.

[Peter Harrell @petereharrell]

I have a forthcoming piece on the US-Japan and US-Korea investment deals, which I will unpack in more detail when published. In the meantime, I wanted to share a couple of macro thoughts:

1. I see significant legal issues with the deals, including whether they comply with the Miscellaneous Receipts Act, which requires federal funds to be deposited in the Treasury (and which has been litigated in the past), and, to the extent that any deal investments are majority/substantially owned by the U.S. government, whether they comply with the Government Corporation Control Act. Scott Levy had a good essay on this last fall in Just Security. I can fairly readily envision circumstances in which private companies might find ways to raise these legal issues in U.S. courts even if the Executive Branch is less troubled by them and Congress continues to fail to advocate for itself as a co-equal branch of government.

2. I also think that, as with Trump's domestic equity deals (Intel, critical minerals companies, etc.) there are important governance issues--how will projects be selected; how will the government engage with the projects; what will the U.S. government's governance rights look like; etc. Addressing these governance issues is going to be important to the investment funds success over time and to maintaining enduring U.S. and Japanese/Korean support for the deals.

3. Setting aside the potential legal and governance issues, I think the deals have interesting potential upside for both the U.S. and its two closest East Asian allies. One of the industrial policy tools that the U.S. is going to need if it wants to scale up various kinds of comparatively low-margin but strategically important defense industrial base manufacturing is low-cost concessional capital. A year ago I would not have expected that capital to come from Korea and Japan, but here we are. I think it could be an interesting and useful tool.

4. I also think that the deals have the potential to strengthen the U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-ROK relationships over time. They are definitely somewhat controversial in both Tokyo and Seoul today. That said, the deals are explicitly designed to embed Japanese and Korean firms more deeply in critical sectors in the U.S. by encouraging the companies to invest here, and the deals also provide that Japanese/Korean suppliers will be prioritized as much as feasible. I can see scenarios where the deals more deeply entwine our economies, much as Reagan's 1980s autos trade agreements with Japan got Japanese car companies deeply embedded in the U.S. automotive manufacturing sector.

5. Longer term, I can see future U.S. administrations thinking about whether to expand these deals internationally. E.g., as part of a future re-negotiation, should the U.S. ask Japan/Korea to expend some of the money (realistically, only a fraction of the headline figures will be invested by the end of Trump's term) in third countries as part of a friend-shoring strategy.

[Sarah Despres @sarahdespres]

Is it time to start talking about adding the UDI to the claims form again? I am game. Who’s in? (And in case you need a refresher read the below).

https://t.co/S23WA8EIen

[Scott Levy @ScottLevy47]

The Trump administration is building a shadow budget — corporate, billionaire, and foreign money funding everything from a new White House ballroom to possibly even nuclear reactors. My new Just Security piece lays out fixes Congress should adopt now.

https://t.co/qUehbbMmJR

[Health Affairs @Health_Affairs]

In their new Forefront article, Scott Levy and @kevin_mcnellis argue that Congress should change its scorekeeping and PAYGO rules to allow the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to use accrual-based accounting when scoring health care policies with significant future effects. https://t.co/3EM16mHHsk