Libertarian: Make the DOGE Cuts Permanent

“To make the DOGE spending cuts stick,” Sen. Rand Paul is encouraging “Vice President J.D. Vance to have the Trump administration draw up a rescission package” for Congress to pass, and so formally withdraw “spending Congress had previously authorized,” reports Reason’s Eric Boehm. As Paul points out: “If we want to have real savings,” then the Trump administration “is going to have to send this back to Congress, and Congress is going to have to approve of spending less money.” Boehm explains: “A rescission bill can pass the Senate with a simple majority, and Paul believes there would be enough support.” Plus, “a vote on a rescission bill would solve some of the legal and procedural questions about DOGE’s spending cuts.”

Defense beat: Europe Needs an Army

“Europe had better get its act together,” warns Bernard-Henri Lévy at The Free Press. “The American president, the secretary of defense and the secretary of state have told us that we cannot depend indefinitely on the United States.” This “historical moment” calls for “the formation of a new European Army, under independent European authority. Not NATO, dominated by the United States and its troops, but a European Army, under European command.” Hmm: “There is, at Europe’s borders, a battle-hardened army of 1.2 million active-duty personnel: the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As President Zelensky has already proposed, this could be the spearhead of this new European force.” The stakes are as huge: “We must unite or die. If we do not act, we will endure — in two, three, or five years — a new Russian assault, but this time in a Baltic country, Poland or elsewhere.”

Legal take: Crack Down on Pro-Terror Criminals

The First Amendment lets “left-wing radicals” chant “death to America” and “glory to the resistance” led by Iran, but it “doesn’t protect them from punishment for crimes: blocking roads, occupying campus spaces, vandalizing property,” etc., argues Tal Fortgang at The Wall Street Journal. President Trump must end the “inadequate” prosecution of these “civil terrorists” — and “federal law enforcement” already has the tools “to clamp down”: the RICO Act, the Antiterrorism Act, civil-rights laws and more. The prez can also order the FBI to seize organizations’ assets where there is probable cause. Congress, too, can take steps, but it won’t need to if Trump treats these civil terrorists “as threats to the rule of law and the West itself.”

From the right: Wall St. Woke Ain’t Broke Yet

“Woke is not yet broke on Wall Street,” sneers Paul Tice at the Washington Examiner, especially when it comes to “the net-zero agenda.” The “lower profile” adopted by some financial firms is mostly “a tactical retreat rather than a capitulation,” and “mainly to reduce their legal exposure, both to red state investigations into financial discrimination against oil, gas, and coal companies and possible antitrust charges.” Texas, which has led “the anti-ESG charge in recent years, should not be standing down at this point.” AG Ken Paxton should continue his bank investigations because the financial sector is “the linchpin of the fossil fuel defunding strategy of sustainability activists.”

Waste watch: End Universities’ ‘Research’ Grift

Team Trump’s move to prune funding by the National Institute of Health is the “correct one,” argues Dr. Stanley Goldfarb in USA Today. “Going forward, the NIH will pay a flat 15% of a research grant’s total funding on a university’s ‘indirect costs.’ These costs are supposed to cover overhead — such as how much a school spends on utilities, janitorial services, administration and so on.” That gave schools “a strong incentive to make their operations unnecessarily expensive, knowing they’ll generate higher indirect payments.” A typical NIH “grant pays a nearly 30% rate for indirect costs — about $9 billion of the NIH’s $35 billion in research grants in 2023. At Harvard and Yale, however, the rate approaches 70%.” This clampdown will let taxpayer dollars go directly toward research, not “administrative bloat and ideological adventures.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board