Andrew Langer
- Director, Center for Regulatory Freedom
- President, The Institute for Liberty
- Writer, Freelance
Regulatory Ronin, @SayNo2SocialMed Executive Director, Host, @TheLunchHourPod on @FederalNewswire, co-host @AJSaveTheWorld, sometime radio host.
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Articles by Andrew Langer
PARITY Act would end higher education’s 90/10 double standard
OPINION: For years, federal higher education policy has been fashioned around the fallacy that unelected bureaucrats in Washington are better suited to make decisions than students and their families. This mentality, which typifies liberals’ elitism, is hardly new. Leftists have long sought to consolidate control of higher education and protect conventional four-year universities, which often serve as purveyors of their woke agenda.
Big Insurance Refuses to Follow the Law
Signed into law in 2020, the “No Surprises Act” took patients out of the middle of payment disputes between payers and care providers, which was a big win for consumers. Families are on more solid ground now that they don’t have to worry that a medical emergency might lead to financial calamity.
Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government
The Securities and Exchange Commission wants to modernize how people receive important financial information. But its proposed Regulation E-Delivery confuses modernization with compulsion and would place the greatest burden on the investors least prepared to bear it. Today, investors generally receive documents required under federal securities laws on paper unless they affirmatively choose electronic delivery. The SEC proposes reversing that arrangement.
When the Association Speaks, Its Members Don’t Always Agree
There is a small but revealing moment in the debate over the proposed Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger, and it comes from a senator no one would accuse of carrying water for the railroads. Asked in July whether the deal would be good for agriculture, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley did something careful. He said he is a member of the Iowa Farm Bureau, and that the Iowa Farm Bureau thinks the merger would be bad for agriculture. Then he added that he did not want to say he had made up his mind.
What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Hamilton
The vice president rejects Milton Friedman’s free-market principles in favor of bigger government. The problem isn’t tax cuts Photo: LM Otero/Associated Press Vice President JD Vance recently told podcast host Michael Knowles that American conservatism has moved beyond Milton Friedman.
Op-Ed: No air conditioning, but Brussels wants to ban Zyn Original
The European Union has a perfect symbol for its governing philosophy: air conditioning for the elites, lectures and arbitrary restrictions for everyone else. During a brutal heat wave in Brussels, the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters reportedly shut down cooling on floors one through seven. The upper floors, where senior officials and commissioners work, kept their air conditioning. One staffer called it “feudalism.” Another called it a “disgrace.” They were both right.
The 5th Circuit’s app store mistake jeopardizes free speech online
OPINION: The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ recent decision allowing Texas’ App Store Accountability Act to take effect while litigation proceeds has focused attention on familiar debates: parental controls, online privacy and government oversight of digital platforms. Yet the most consequential issue may be one the court barely acknowledged: its apparent assumption that app stores are engaged primarily, if not exclusively, in commercial speech.
Competitive Trade: The Key to American Economic Dominance
Clayton Cardinalli For the better part of the last 18 months, policymakers in Washington have finally begun addressing one of the central truths of economic growth: America cannot outcompete the world if it remains impossibly expensive to build, manufacture, invest, and expand here at home. That realization helped drive a long-overdue push toward regulatory modernization and permitting reform.
The View’s Joy Behar Is Furious TrumpRX Is Lowering Drug Costs Nothing exposes partisan hypocrisy faster than affordable medicine with the wrong branding.
One day, historians may look back at The View and conclude the program functioned less as political commentary and more as accidental satire. That conclusion became even more plausible last week after co-host Joy Behar suggested Americans could effectively “die” because President Trump is attempting to lower prescription drug costs through the TrumpRX program. Yes — lower drug prices are apparently now dangerous. Yes — lower drug prices are apparently now dangerous.
Supreme Court holds that federal courts retain jurisdiction over post-award motions when claims were previously stayed under FAA Section 3
Introduction On May 14, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in Jules v. Andre Balazs Props., No. 25-83, 2026 WL 1336216 (U.S. May 14, 2026). The Court held that when a federal district court stays a lawsuit and refers the dispute to arbitration pursuant to Section 3 of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), that district court maintains the authority to later confirm or vacate the arbitration decision.
Main Street could get hosed if Swamp compromise on Stablecoin comes to fruition
Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks released their long-awaited compromise on stablecoin yield last week. The deal, embedded in Section 404 of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, bars stablecoin firms from paying yield that is “economically or functionally equivalent” to interest on a bank deposit. That sounds firm on paper. In practice, it is riddled with gaps large enough to drive a trillion-dollar industry through. This will have an enormous real-world impact.
Main Street Could Get Hosed If Swamp Compromise On Stablecoin Comes To Fruition Original
Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks released their long-awaited compromise on stablecoin yield last week. The deal, embedded in Section 404 of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, bars stablecoin firms from paying yield that is “economically or functionally equivalent” to interest on a bank deposit. That sounds firm on paper. In practice, it is riddled with gaps large enough to drive a trillion-dollar industry through. This will have an enormous real-world impact.
Reviewing CPAC's Regulatory Work 2025-April 2026
Over the course of 2025 and through April 2026, the CPAC Foundation's Center for Regulatory Freedom (CRF) maintained a sustained and disciplined presence in the federal regulatory process. While legislative debates often dominate public attention, the structure, cost, and real-world impact of public policy are ultimately determined through agency rulemaking, guidance, and information collection requirements.
Congress must demand hospital price transparency
OPINION: On April 1, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that his agency would be “requiring hospital executives to attest that their posted prices are accurate. If hospitals mislead patients or fail to disclose actual prices, we will hold them accountable.
The App Store Accountability Act Gets the Problem—and the Policy—Wrong
Washington’s latest attempt to “fix” the internet—the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA)—is a familiar story: a real concern, a politically appealing response, and a policy design that risks making the underlying problem worse. There is no dispute that parents should be able to push for better tools to manage how their children engage with digital platforms. Nor is there any question that the current ecosystem is imperfect.
ANDREW LANGER: Momentum is key for the Union Pacific - Norfolk Southern Merger
The proposed merger between Union Pacific (UP) and Norfolk Southern (NS) represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape American freight -- and good governance requires both scrutiny and momentum as the Surface Transportation Board (STB) completes its review. The purpose of the STB is to ensure that the merger satisfies the two-pronged test: that the transaction enhances competition and serves the public interest.
Restoring Competition, Not Undermining It, Is Key to Housing Affordability
Housing affordability is, at its core, a function of supply, competition, and the institutional frameworks that govern how markets operate. When supply is constrained, when competition is limited, or when regulatory and structural distortions inhibit efficient market functioning, prices rise and access declines. Any serious effort to improve affordability must begin from that premise.
America at 250: Rediscovering Exceptionalism in Rail and Space
When the United States marked the bicentennial in 1976, the celebration came at a moment of national unease, and yet, Americans celebrated.The bicentennial was a commemoration of the past and a reaffirmation of identity. Even if it was not explicitly framed as a declaration of American exceptionalism, that is what it was. It reminded a weary nation that its story will never stall in crisis, and that its capacity for renewal is exceptional.
MedPAC’s war on Medicare Advantage – and why Republicans shouldn’t fall for it
If there were ever a case study in how Washington’s permanent bureaucracy quietly steers policy regardless of who wins elections, it would be the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, better known as MedPAC, whose recommendations could be about to strike a new blow for affordability and health benefits for American seniors. On paper, MedPAC is an advisory body. It writes reports and crunches numbers.
ANDREW LANGER: MedPAC’s War On Medicare Advantage - And Why Republicans Shouldn’t Fall For It Original
If there were ever a case study in how Washington’s permanent bureaucracy quietly steers policy regardless of who wins elections, it would be the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, better known as MedPAC, whose recommendations could be about to strike a new blow for affordability and health benefits for American seniors. On paper, MedPAC is an advisory body. It writes reports and crunches numbers.
Regulation and Its Real Impact on Affordability: This Past Week at the Center for Regulatory Freedom
Last week, the Center for Regulatory Freedom (CRF) filed a wide range of regulatory comments across multiple federal agencies. At first glance, these proceedings may seem unrelated—covering everything from child care and car loans to energy reliability, health care staffing, telecommunications security, and paperwork reduction. But taken together, they tell a coherent story about the state of federal regulation—and why regulatory discipline matters more than ever.
COLUMN: Medicare, Medicaid program became a costly experiment
After 15 years of failure, the Affordable Care Act has fallen short of fulfilling its goals. However, one Obamacare program that has received insufficient attention in particular has quietly become one of the most wasteful, contradictory programs in American health care: the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. × Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings. kAmr||x :D 2 H@=7 :? D966A’D 4=@E9:?8] xE :D >2C<6E65 2D 2?
A Costly Experiment in Government-Controlled Healthcare – DC Journal - InsideSources
After 15 years of failure, Obamacare has fallen short of fulfilling its goals. However, one Obamacare program that has received insufficient attention in particular has quietly become one of the most wasteful, contradictory programs in American healthcare: the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). CMMI is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Pushing Back on Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Costly Overreach: CRF’s Regulatory Work Last Week
Last week, the Center for Regulatory Freedom (CRF) submitted a series of regulatory comment letters addressing proposals across defense, healthcare, energy, environmental regulation, communications, housing, and intellectual property. While the subject matter varied, a consistent theme ran through each filing: federal regulation must be grounded in reality, law, and cost-benefit discipline—not ideology, unchecked bureaucracy, or assumptions divorced from real-world consequences.
Credit Card Interest Rate Caps Aren’t Pragmatic Reform
AP Conservatives have long stood for a simple but powerful idea: prosperity is achieved through freedom, competition, and growth. That principle has powered America’s economic dynamism and provided hard-working families with the opportunity to live out the American Dream. It’s no coincidence that our economy has been and continues to be the envy of the world, while other countries stifle their own growth with heavy-handed regulations and misguided policies like price controls.
Americas deal boom signals real economic confidence
One of the clearest signals of economic confidence does not come from government forecasts or academic models. It comes from corporate boardrooms, where companies commit real capital, take real risk, and make long-term bets on the future. In 2025, global mergers and acquisitions activity surged,with a record 68 deals valued at $10 billion or more. In the United States,total deal value jumped more than 40 percentcompared to the same period in 2024.
Affordability and Regulatory Reform: The Week in the Center for Regulatory Freedom
Andrew Langer 22 minutes ago 5 min read One of the most persistent myths in Washington is that affordability problems can be solved by layering on more regulation, more paperwork, and more federal control. In reality, excessive regulation is often the very thing driving up costs—whether families are paying for housing, health care, energy, or everyday consumer goods. Last week, the Center for Regulatory Freedom (CRF) filed comments across a wide range of federal agencies.
America’s deal boom signals real economic confidence
One of the clearest signals of economic confidence does not come from government forecasts or academic models. It comes from corporate boardrooms, where companies commit real capital, take real risk, and make long-term bets on the future. In 2025, global mergers and acquisitions activity surged, with a record 68 deals valued at $10 billion or more. In the United States, total deal value jumped more than 40 percent compared to the same period in 2024.
Affordability, Security, and Regulatory Discipline: What CRF’s Latest Comments Tell Us About Governing at Scale
Last week, the Center for Regulatory Freedom (CRF) filed a series of formal comments across multiple federal agencies, addressing issues ranging from immigration adjudication and border integrity to energy preparedness, artificial intelligence governance, health care access, and housing finance paperwork.
GENIUS Act Loophole Threatens Main Street Economies
AP Congress took an important step this year to bring digital assets into the mainstream economy. By passing the GENIUS Act, lawmakers created for the first time a federal framework for payment stablecoins that recognizes their growing role in commerce and establishes regulatory clarity to promote innovation and economic growth.
Defending Consumers, Strengthening Innovation, and Restoring the Rule of Law: This Week at the Center for Regulatory Freedom
Last week, the Center for Regulatory Freedom (CRF) filed five major regulatory comments across four federal agencies, advancing core principles of competitive markets, due-process-based enforcement, national security integrity, and meaningful economic freedom. Each filing reflects our mission: pushing back against overreach, insisting on transparency, and ensuring that public policy solutions genuinely improve the lives of American workers and consumers — not just in theory, but in practice.
Don’t let Washington erode America’s values
Since its founding, the United States has championed personal liberty and the power of free markets. We chose private enterprise over central planning and competition over command, trusting that free people, acting in a free market, would drive progress. Our most dramatic leaps forward, from the rise of national railroads to the information age, came when the government set basic guardrails and then let innovators compete.
Democrats Want It Both Ways on Debt—and Working Americans Will Pay the Price
Democrats have spent the better part of two decades branding themselves as protectors of working Americans. But when you examine their actual policy choices rather than their press releases, a consistent pattern emerges: Their interventions routinely raise costs, distort markets, and ultimately hurt the very people they claim to champion. Their latest foray into student lending and consumer credit is a case study in that contradiction.
DOJ vs. CVS: The feds are not your pharmacy's CEO
The U.S. Department of Justice’s ongoing litigation accusing CVS of filing improper prescriptions is best understood as a vestige of a Biden-era judicial remedy system that reflexively sought to penalize for-profit entities rather than address underlying policy failures. The lawsuit alleges that CVS pharmacists filed improper prescriptions over ten years ago for opioids and other controlled substances.
This Week in the Center for Regulatory Freedom: MRAWA--Make Regulation Actually Work Again!
Andrew Langer 1 hour ago 3 min read This past week, the Center for Regulatory Freedom submitted comments to five federal agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Treasury Department (USDT), the United States Trade Representative Office (USTR), the Department of Transportation (DOT), and the Department of Education (ED).
CRF Comment Filings: Regulatory Course Corrections Continue
Andrew Langer 33 minutes ago 5 min read Last week was another busy week for the Center for Regulatory Freedom — both in terms of volume and in terms of the breadth of subject areas where we filed. It also stands as a useful snapshot of what this Center exists to do. We are not merely reacting to individual rulemakings — we are actively shaping the regulatory state in the direction of constitutional limits, scientific integrity, and economic rationality.
In Defense of Risk-Based Credit Scoring
AP When Bill Pulte took the reins at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), critics didn’t expect him to shake up the conversation around credit reporting. But that’s exactly what he’s done. And he’s right. In an era where “streamlining” often becomes shorthand for deregulation and cost-cutting at the expense of equity and stability, Pulte has chosen to preserve what works: the tri-merge credit reporting system.
America’s Future Depends on Chips Made at Home
The global balance of power in the decades ahead hinges on the technological decisions made today. This isn’t an arms race or a space race—it’s a data race. And at this moment, the United States is dangerously close to falling behind. Semiconductors, a truly American invention, are now the backbone, globally, of modern life—from household appliances to national defense systems.
A Victory for Free Speech and a Testament to the Power of Engagement: CPAC Secures Safeguards in FTC’s Omnicom-IPG Merger Decision
The mission of the CPAC Foundation's Center for Regulatory Freedom is to ensure that government agencies hear our voice—and, by extension, the voices of the millions of Americans we represent—when they make decisions that could reshape our economy, freedoms, and culture. This month, we saw the fruits of that engagement.
This Week In Regulatory Reform
This week, CPAC's Center for Regulatory Freedom (CRF) submitted formal comments across four federal rulemakings. In each case, we raised serious concerns about the ongoing importance of peeling back the regulatory excesses of the unelected bureaucracy in recent years: CRF challenged the Defense Health Agency’s policy of using “soft” credit checks and credit card data as identity verification for access to MHS GENESIS.
The US-Ukraine Security Guarantees: An Explanation
Executive Summary The August 15th U.S.–Russia summit in Anchorage marked a critical inflection point in the ongoing war in Ukraine. While no final ceasefire was announced, U.S. officials confirmed that President Putin agreed in principle to allow the United States and European allies to extend NATO-style security guarantees to Ukraine—guarantees that fall short of full NATO membership but mirror the mutual defense posture of Article 5.
Adults Are Back: Trump’s Alaska Summit with Putin Could Finally End the War in Ukraine
Today’s Trump-Putin summit in Alaska marks more than just a dramatic shift in tone — it signals the long-overdue return of strategic clarity to U.S. foreign policy. For over a decade, two successive administrations—Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s—have mishandled the threat of Russian aggression, enabling Vladimir Putin’s war machine to roll deeper into Ukraine.
Victory for Property Rights: How Conservatives Defeated a 700,000-Acre Federal Land Grab in Muleshoe, TX
In a landmark win for private property rights, local Texans, led by landowners, policy advocates, and Representative Jodey Arrington (TX-19), have stopped one of the most aggressive federal land expansion schemes in recent history. The Biden administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had planned to increase the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge footprint by over 700,000 acres—without congressional approval and without informing affected landowners.
The EPA: Making Driving Great Again!
The Center for Regulatory Freedom (CRF) at the CPAC Foundation applauds EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and his leadership in decisively revisiting—and rolling back—fuel economy mandates that have distorted automotive markets and sacrificed common sense in pursuit of one narrow metric: carbon dioxide emissions.
Harnessing AI To Reduce Paperwork Burdens: The $370 Billion Opportunity For Small Business
Everyone is talking AI these days - from regulatory professionals to the President himself. At the same time, we're discussing massive amounts of regulatory reform and how best to support small businesses in America. Following the election, CPAC's Center for Regulatory Freedom made a number of recommendations to the incoming Trump Administration-among them was the idea of harnessing AI to assist small businesses in regulatory compliance.
ANDREW LANGER: Waste, fraud, and abuse are hiding in plain sight at many American hospitals
For too long, hospitals have operated with near total impunity due to their extensive and dedicated lobbying efforts. This month, however, hospitals are facing more scrutiny than ever before.
The Historic Deregulatory Moment: Trump, CPAC, and the Massive Economic Opportunity Ahead
In an era where the size and scope of the federal government have ballooned largely through unchecked regulatory expansion, we are witnessing a historic reversal. Earlier this month, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), published a piece in Forbes that may have been missed in the clutter of headlines, but its implications are staggering. According to Crews, the Trump administration’s mid-year tally of new federal rules is at the lowest level ever recorded.
Transparency Over Mandates: Why the Beverage Industry’s New Initiative is a Win for Consumers and a Model for Public Health Policy
In the long-running debate over how we craft public health policy—especially when it comes to food and drink—there’s always been a tension between two fundamentally different approaches. On the one side are those who argue that only aggressive, top-down government intervention can protect people from making “bad” choices. They favor regulations that limit, mandate, tax, or outright ban certain products.
The FDA’s Talc Inquiry Is How Health Policy Should Work
6/27/2025|Updated: 6/27/2025 Commentary The Food and Drug Administration’s recently convened expert panel on talc may not generate headlines like a new vaccine or breakthrough cancer drug, but it deserves the full attention of every American who cares about science, transparency, and personal freedom.
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