This Friday, Tom Church and Daniel Heil analyze the relative scale of federal spending on entitlement programs versus other federal budget items; David Fedor speaks with Bill Whalen about American energy strategy amid global market volatility; and Jonathan Roll argues that it’s not too late for the US and Israel to benefit from clarifying the objectives of their joint war against Iran’s revolutionary regime.
Federal Government Spending
One way to make sense of the huge numbers in the federal budget is to measure them against “Social Security and Medicare days”—that is, how many days of spending by these two huge programs would it take to cover any other program? In a new Plot Points analysis at Freedom Frequency, Policy Fellows Tom Church and Daniel Heil run these numbers. Defense outlays, for instance, would take 126 days of Social Security; Medicare spending would take just over four months. The proposed $200 billion Iran war supplement would add 27 more. At the other end of the scale, keeping Amtrak running would take a mere eight hours. In between are myriad government programs, some of which are mistakenly believed to be big drags on the budget. Foreign aid offers one example. Church and Heil argue that getting an accurate sense of the relative scale of different items in the nation’s budget is crucial if policymakers are to find ways to avoid insolvencies, higher taxes, or severe benefits cuts in years ahead. Read more here.
US Foreign Policy
A worldwide oil shock triggered by hostilities in the Middle East raises questions about the viability of America’s energy strategy and the ability of the United States and other developed nations to ride out the current storm. On a new episode of Matters of Policy & Politics, Policy Fellow David Fedor, a member of Hoover’s George P. Shultz Energy Policy Working Group, puts 2026’s oil drama in historical context and explains why Californians pay more at the pump than most Americans. Fedor also touches on a few other policy items that have Hoover’s attention: the state of US-India energy relations; a nuclear reactor approved for Wyoming; Indo-Pacific nations hamstrung by limited supplies of LNG; and Taiwan’s energy security. Fedor, who worked alongside the late Secretary Shultz for nearly a decade and a half, also touches on his mentor’s intellectual curiosity and how Shultz might parse these troubled times. Watch or listen here.
History and Strategy
“Defining war objectives is not only the conceptual bedrock of effective war planning and execution,” Research Fellow Jonathan Roll writes at RealClear Defense. “It is also part of the strategic equation itself.” Yet Roll notes that one of the challenges for US and Israeli leadership during the current war with Iran has been inconsistent messaging about the campaign’s ultimate objectives. Roll, acknowledging possible downsides of clarifying the war’s objectives, nevertheless maintains that providing such clarity could yield
“potentially substantial” benefits. “Even though the definition of war objectives now would be seen as belated,” Roll says, “the advantages of such an approach … largely outweigh the costs.” Roll concludes that “defining a clearly attainable endgame” remains “an essential part of achieving victory.” Read more here.
Viewed across five decades, the structure of global power has changed less than commonly assumed, Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin argues in this lecture from Hoover’s 2025 Summer Policy Boot Camp. Kotkin explains how maritime democracies continue to confront large, land-based authoritarian powers, while the United States retains a dominant share of global wealth, military capacity, innovation, and cultural influence. What has changed, Kotkin says, is scale: Global interconnection, dual-use technology, and the diffusion of economic success have made power harder to control and easier to exploit. The result is not decline, but a world destabilized by the unintended consequences of victory. Watch here.
Law and Policy
On March 4, the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions held a webinar—co-sponsored by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center—about the role of the judiciary today. Senior Fellows Michael McConnell, Eugene Volokh, and Tom Clark were joined by University of Chicago Law School professor Genevieve Lakier. Panelists covered how the federal courts are functioning—and perceived—amid today’s polarized political landscape. The conversation also explored questions such as: What is the judiciary’s role in safeguarding democracy? How can courts maintain legitimacy in a divided society? And how should we interpret recent high-profile court rulings in the broader context of American constitutionalism? Watch or listen here.
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