Tag: emergency powers

Trump’s National Guard Plan Edges the U.S. Closer to a Permanent Federal Police Force

The Pentagon is directing every state and U.S. territory to create “quick reaction forces” within their National Guards, which will be trained to respond to civil disturbances and emergencies, according to a recently leaked memo obtained by The Guardian. 

The memo instructs the National Guard Bureau to train these forces in riot control tactics, rapid deployment procedures, and the use of nonlethal weapons. The federalized forces will complement the National Guard Reaction Forces, which have existed for decades to provide emergency relief, reports The Washington Post. 

Most states and territories (excluding Washington, D.C.) will supply 500 National Guard members. These units are expected to fully mobilize within 24 hours of activation, with an initial contingent of roughly 200 troops that will be pulled from the guard’s unit that specializes in chemical and nuclear disaster response, ready by New Year’s Day. By April, the new quick reaction force will reach 23,500 soldiers strong, according to the Post. 

These new forces could signal the Trump administration’s readiness to expand federal control over local policing, with one anonymous Pentagon official telling the Post that the administration is “revising plans for the employment of [National Guard Reaction Forces] to guarantee their ability to assist federal, state and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances.”

Critics see the move as establishing a permanent, federally coordinated crowd-control infrastructure. Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine veteran and CEO of Vet Voice Foundation, told The Guardian that the memo represents “an attempt by the president to normalize a national, militarized police force.”

It’s unclear whether the new order—or any future deployments under it—would pass legal muster. Federal law generally prohibits the use of federal troops in civilian law enforcement, while the Insurrection Act allows exceptions only under narrow circumstances.

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The Government Shutdown Isn’t Stopping Trump From Amassing ‘Emergency’ Powers

Usually when we’re in the midst of a government shutdown, I’m in a good mood. Sure, recent shutdowns haven’t accomplished much in terms of shrinking the cost or scope of the federal government in the long run, but it’s nice to walk around feeling a little less governed than usual.

But even that small pleasure has turned sour. Yes, fiscal restraint matters. It matters to this magazine, which has made cutting spending the subject of a greater percentage of our cover stories than perhaps any other publication. And it matters to me personally; I’ve spent the last 25 years writing about the need to take debt and spending seriously. The size of the state is inversely proportional to personal liberty in ways that are too often overlooked.

But the intense acceleration of the quest to aggregate power in the White House is now unambiguously the more immediate threat to liberty. It’s visible every day on my commute to work, as National Guardsmen linger in my D.C. Metro stop. It’s visible in the September gathering of the nation’s top military officials for something between a pep rally and a company retreat. It’s visible everywhere Immigration and Customs Enforcement is staging raids and setting up warrantless checkpoints. It’s visible in the administration’s moves to take a stake in Intel and broker a TikTok sale. It’s visible from space. (As I write this, Blue Origin is completing its 36th New Shepard flight—a bright spot in a dark month.)

The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy wrote the bible on the imperial presidency, tracing how voters of all stripes invest outsized hopes in presidents and then act shocked when presidents behave like tyrants. The durable lesson: Don’t confer powers on your team’s guy that you wouldn’t trust in the other team’s hands.

But it’s hard to break the habit of agglomerating authority when your party is in charge. This problem is cross-partisan and is older than Donald Trump—or Joe Biden, or even Richard Nixon. After Watergate, the nation briefly remembered why limits are good. But it wasn’t long before the White House started soaking up power again, and by the 2000s a cadre of executive-power enthusiasts, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, started pushing hard to “restore” presidential prerogatives. The legal and scholarly scaffolding for today’s power grabs was assembled well before the last few months.

Meanwhile, the “national security” and “federal property protection” exceptions have become a tunnel wide enough to drive an armored personnel carrier through. In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security surged hundreds of federal officers into Portland, Oregon, with threadbare training for the job at hand; internal reviews later read like warnings from the future we’re now experiencing. Surveillance of protesters and mission creep were inevitable; they were the most predictable features of an overgrown executive. But despite that mess, the boots just keep hitting the ground. Portland is once more bracing for a federalized deployment—this time National Guard troops—with state and local officials fighting back on the grounds of both necessity and legality.

Immigration enforcement shows how this logic lands in daily life. The federal government claims sweeping authority within a 100-mile border zone that covers where nearly two-thirds of Americans live. That zone has long been a gray area for warrantless stops and checkpoints, ripe for masked agents far from any actual border to nick away at ordinary civil liberties. Powers granted today will be used more aggressively tomorrow. And powers used in that 100-mile border zone will soon be used elsewhere.

The emergency is now the default. Most of the knobs and levers a modern president uses to bully companies, police speech, or move bodies around aren’t new laws—they’re standby powers that switch on with a magic word: emergency. Congress littered the U.S. Code with these shortcuts; the Brennan Center for Justice has cataloged 137 statutory powers that spring to life the moment a president declares one. (Many never fully turn off.) As of mid-2025, there were roughly 50 simultaneous national emergencies still in force; they are renewed annually, spanning everything from sanctions to tariffs. That architecture lets the White House reach for trade controls, financial blockades, and tech blacklists without returning to Congress. If you like your powers separated, this is the opposite.

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On the Precipice of Authoritarian Rule

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the armed forces on more American cities during a rambling address to top military brass. He told the hundreds of generals and admirals gathered to hear him that some of them would be called upon to take a primary role at a time when his administration has launched occupations of American cities, deployed tens of thousands of troops across the United States, created a framework for targeting domestic enemies, cast his political rivals as subhuman, and asserted his right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists.

Trump used that bizarre speech to take aim at cities he claimed “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” He then added: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Trump has, of course, already deployed the armed forces inside the United States in an unprecedented fashion during the first year of his second term in office. As September began, a federal judge found that his decision to occupy Los Angeles with members of California’s National Guard — under so-called Title 10 or federalized status — against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom was illegal. But just weeks later, Trump followed up by ordering the military occupation of Portland, Oregon, over Governor Tina Kotek’s objections.

“I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. And he “authoriz[ed] Full Force, if necessary.”

When a different federal judge blocked him from deploying Oregon National Guardsmen to the city, he ordered in Guard members from California and Texas. That judge then promptly blocked his effort to circumvent her order, citing the lack of a legal basis for sending troops into Portland. In response, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act — an 1807 law that grants the president emergency powers to deploy troops on U.S. soil — to “get around” the court rulings blocking his military occupation efforts. “I think that’s all insurrection, really criminal insurrection,” he claimed, in confused remarks from the Oval Office.

Experts say that his increasing use of the armed forces within the United States represents an extraordinary violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That bedrock nineteenth-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement has long been seen as fundamental to America’s democratic tradition. However, the president’s deployments continue to nudge this country ever closer to becoming a genuine police state. They come amid a raft of other Trump administration authoritarian measures designed to undermine the Constitution and weaken democracy. Those include attacks on birthright citizenship and free speech, as well as the exercise of expansive unilateral powers like deporting people without due process and rolling back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers.

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Economic Freedom Begins Recovery From COVID-Era Government Meddling

The good news is that the first 20 years of the millennium saw overall increases in economic freedom around the world—with continuous improvement through the second decade. The bad news is that not just the United States but most of the world lost ground during the massive government interventions of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s unfortunate for individual liberty, but also for prosperity since the economic freedom of a country strongly correlates with higher incomes and lower poverty. The world appears to be recovering freedom and wealth, but it lost years of progress to government meddling.

The latest edition of the Economic Freedom of the World report, published by Canada’s Fraser Institute, the Cato Institute, “and more than 70 think tanks around the world” is out, and it finds the world digging itself out of a hole that started in 2020.

“Overall, the index shows that economic freedom has increased since 2000, but fell precipitously following the coronavirus pandemic, erasing nearly a decade of progress,” the authors note. “We take no position on the efficacy of the various public-health policies designed to deal with the coronavirus pandemic; they very well may have saved millions of lives, or they may have been completely ineffectual….Our concern is economic freedom, and on that margin, there is no question that government policies responding to the coronavirus pandemic have reduced economic freedom.”

While global economic freedom has started to improve again as the pandemic and its interventions fade into memory, the average across nations is back to where it was in 2012. Weighted for population, which accounts for large countries with statist governments including China, the world’s economic freedom is just a hair better than it was in 2013 and has yet to start recovery from the COVID-era dip.

The index shows North America experiencing the largest decline over the measured period, with Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and North Africa following. “The latter region’s decline is especially tragic given its low starting point,” comment the authors.

“In 2023—the latest year for which data are available—the 10 highest scoring nations were Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United States, Ireland, Australia and Taiwan (tied for 7th), Denmark, and the Netherlands.”

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White House Plans Emergency Orders To Keep Coal Plants Running As Power Bill Crisis Emerges

The Trump administration is urgently addressing the power bill crisis by continuing to use emergency authority to prevent coal-fired power plants from retiring, Bloomberg reports, citing sources. This comes after years of failed green energy policies pushed by climate grifters on the left collide with soaring power demand from AI data centers. The toxic combination has sparked a power crisis across Mid-Atlantic states – one that Energy Secretary Chris Wright says keeps him “up at night.” Even corporate media is now beginning to recognize the severity of the crisis as it now becomes a “major political issue” and liability for Democrats. 

The Energy Department has already issued emergency orders to keep two fossil fuel plants open (a Michigan coal plant owned by Consumers Energy and a Pennsylvania oil-gas generator owned by Constellation Energy), and plans will include other fossil fuel power generation plants in the weeks and months ahead. There are approximately 8.1 GW of coal power capacity, or about 5% of the U.S. fleet, slated for retirement this year, according to the latest EIA data. 

“I think this administration’s policy is going to be to stop the closure of coal plants,” Wright told the audience Wednesday during an event hosted by the New York Times. He said retiring coal-fired power plants “that are working today” would send power prices higher, and derail efforts to reindustrialize the U.S. economy. 

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New Texas Emergency Rules Ban Hemp Sales To People Under 21 In Line With Governor’s Executive Order

Texas officials have quickly adopted changes to the state’s hemp laws, consistent with the governor’s recent executive order, making it so people under the age of 21 will no longer be permitted to purchase consumable hemp products.

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) issued an emergency rule that took effect on Tuesday, stipulating that no businesses licensed under the agency may sell cannabis to those under 21. Doing so will now result in an automatic license or permit cancellation.

Failing to check IDs to ensure that a patron is of age will also carry the penalty of an automatic license cancellation.

“This emergency adoption is necessary to help prevent minors from accessing and using consumable hemp products (CHP) that will negatively impact the minors’ health, which in turn negatively impacts the general welfare and public safety,” TABC said in a notice.

And while it was just two weeks ago that Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed an executive order laying out new rules for the hemp market, the agency said that the rules are being adopted on an “emergency basis” and take effect immediately “because an imminent peril to the public health, safety, or welfare requires adoption on fewer than 30 days’ notice.”

“The harms associated with cannabis/THC use by minors are well documented,” it said.

State statute says emergency rules can only be effective for up to 180 days, and TACB said it ‘intends to propose these or similar rules under the normal rulemaking process and will consider any additional action necessary in the event unforeseen issues arise with the adopted sections. Future rulemaking may also provide additional guidance.”

While the rules are actively in effect, the agency noted that it will begin enforcement on October 1.

The Texas Cannabis Collective, which strongly resisted recent proposals in the legislature to ban hemp with any amount of THC, said the TABC action “follows Governor Abbott’s decisive steps earlier this year” when he vetoed a Senate bill to recriminalize consumable cannabinoid products.

Meanwhile, Texas officials have separately taken another step toward implementing a law to significantly expand the state’s medical marijuana program—proposing rules to to let physicians recommend new qualifying conditions for cannabis and to create standards for allowable inhalation devices in line with legislation enacted by lawmakers and the governor earlier this year.

Last month, the Department of Public Safety (DPS) also posted a set of additional rules in the Register to increase the number of licensed medical marijuana dispensaries in Texas under the recently enacted legislation.

DPS will ultimately be issuing 12 new licenses for dispensaries across the state. Currently there are only three. The additional licensees will go through a competitive process, with officials prioritizing Texas’s public health regions to optimize access.

The first round of licenses will be awarded to nine of 139 applicants who submitted their forms during an earlier application window in 2023. DPS will select those nine licensees on December 1. The 2023 applicants that didn’t receive a license, as well as any new prospective licensees, will have another shot at getting their license during a second round where awardees will be announced on April 1, 2026.

DPS has separately previewed future rulemaking to comply with the medical marijuana expansion law.

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Trump Has a Habit of Asserting Broad, Unreviewable Authority

In separate attacks this month, the U.S. military blew up two speedboats in the Caribbean Sea, killing 14 alleged drug smugglers. Although those men could have been intercepted and arrested, President Donald Trump said he decided summary execution was appropriate as a deterrent to drug trafficking.

To justify this unprecedented use of the U.S. military to kill criminal suspects, Trump invoked his “constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive” to protect “national security and foreign policy interests.” That assertion of sweeping presidential power fits an alarming pattern that is also apparent in Trump’s tariffs, his attempt to summarily deport suspected gang members as “alien enemies,” and his planned use of National Guard troops to fight crime in cities across the country.

Although Trump described the boat attacks as acts of “self-defense,” he did not claim the people whose deaths he ordered were engaged in literal attacks on the United States. His framing instead relied on the dubious proposition that drug smuggling is tantamount to violent aggression.

While that assumption is consistent with Trump’s often expressed desire to kill drug dealers, it is not consistent with the way drug laws are ordinarily enforced. In the absence of violent resistance, a police officer who decided to shoot a drug suspect dead rather than take him into custody would be guilty of murder.

That seems like an accurate description of the attacks that Trump ordered. Yet he maintains that his constitutional license to kill, which apparently extends to civilians he views as threats to U.S. “national security and foreign policy interests,” transforms murder into self-defense.

Trump has asserted similarly broad authority to impose stiff, ever-changing tariffs on goods imported from scores of countries. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected that audacious power grab, saying it was inconsistent with the 1977 statute on which Trump relied.

The Federal Circuit said the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which does not mention import taxes at all and had never before been used to impose them, does not give the president “unlimited authority” to “revise the tariff schedule” approved by Congress. The appeals court added that “the Government’s understanding of the scope of authority granted by IEEPA would render it an unconstitutional delegation.”

Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) against alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has also run into legal trouble. This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded that Trump had erroneously relied on a nonexistent “invasion or predatory incursion” to justify his use of that 1798 statute.

Trump argued that the courts had no business deciding whether he had complied with the law. “The president’s determination that the factual prerequisites of the AEA have been met is not subject to judicial review,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign told the 5th Circuit.

Trump took a similar position in the tariff case. As an opposing lawyer noted, it amounted to the claim that “the president can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, for as long as he wants, so long as he declares an emergency.”

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Covid mRNA Vaccines Are Unregulated Military Countermeasures

mRNA Vaccines DID NOT UNDERGO a legally regulated drug approval or manufacturing process

It is important to recognize that an EUA is not part of the development pathway; it is an entirely separate entity that is used only during emergency situations and is not part of the drug approval process. (2009 Institute of Medicine of the National Academies publication, p. 28)

All mRNA products on the market and in development today became available as a result of the declared Covid pandemic, through legal pathways intended for CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) emergencies – in other words, war or terror incidents involving weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

These WMD-related laws include Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and blanket legal indemnity granted through the PREP Act.

The manufacturing agreements for the Covid mRNA vaccines were military Other Transaction Agreements (OTA) signed by the Pentagon. This type of “other than contract” agreement is intended to supply the military with cutting-edge technology while bypassing pesky regulations and red tape. It is not intended for civilian use.

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FDA Revokes Emergency Authorization For COVID-19 Vaccines

The Department of Health and Human Services under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revoked emergency authorization for COVID-19 vaccines.

“The emergency use authorizations for Covid vaccines, once used to justify broad mandates on the general public during the Biden administration, are now rescinded,” Kennedy posted to X on Wednesday.

The news comes as the FDA, which is part of HHS, announced the approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for older adults and children as young as 5-years-old who have at least one condition that puts them at higher risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes, Pfizer said in a Wednesday statement.  

Regulators have issued similar approvals for COVID-19 jabs from Novavax and Moderna. 

HHS revoking emergency approval means that FDA clearance is no longer in place for some 240 million Americans, however “These vaccines are available for all patients who choose them after consulting with their doctors,” Kennedy sai. 

As the Epoch Times notes further, per federal law, the FDA approves products it determines are “safe, pure, and potent.” Emergency authorizations, in contrast, can only be offered under certain circumstances, such as during a public health emergency, and are for products that officials believe “may be effective” in treating or preventing a life-threatening disease or condition.

Updated Approvals

Dr. Marty Makary, the FDA’s commissioner, and Dr. Vinay Prasad, its top vaccine official at the time, signaled the change in May, when they said that the FDA would stop approving COVID-19 vaccines for many Americans absent clinical trial data.

“The FDA can only approve products if it concludes, based on scientific evidence, that the benefit-to-harm balance is favorable. And we simply need more data to have that confidence for younger individuals at low-risk of severe disease,” Prasad said at the time.

In the United States, regulators in recent years have been authorizing updated COVID-19 vaccines annually in a bid to counter waning effectiveness and better match circulating variants. The model is based on the historical approach to influenza vaccines.

Regulators in 2024 cleared updated shots from Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax without human data, citing animal tests and data from trials for previous versions.

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The Case of the Damning FDA Memos

On July 21, 2025, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) announced that it had secured the release of over 600,000 pages of Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) data used by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to authorize and approve Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine (BNT162b2), following a successful lawsuit, culminating in a late 2024 court ruling.

These documents, now publicly available on ICAN’s website, are part of a broader release of over 1.6 million pages, including data from the vaccine’s licensure in August 2021 and the earlier EUA in December 2020.

This report builds on my prior investigative work analyzing thousands of FDA documents released following the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) lawsuit, which focused on the biological product file submitted by Pfizer for the full approval of its COVID-19 vaccine in August 2021.

I was one of the initial researchers to uncover and analyse the damning data hidden within Pfizer’s Pregnancy & Lactation Cumulative Review, Interim-Narrative-Sensitive document (3000+ pages), and Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports document, among others.

Both ICAN and PHMPT’s lawsuits sought to make public the FDA’s data on the Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 shot, asserting that transparency is critical for public trust and independent analysis, given the global administration of billions of doses of this experimental gene-based product that was mandated in several countries.

My preliminary review of ICAN’s EUA data reveals several irregularities, outlined below with references to key documents and downloadable sources. This report focuses on four critical issues: manufacturing oversight gaps, missing Bell’s palsy data, clinical trial site deficiencies, and the exclusion of unconfirmed COVID-19 cases.

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