Today, Hoover reports on hosting election officials to discuss the 2024 voting cycle and ongoing challenges in American election administration; Eugene Volokh takes a look at the limited circumstances in which American citizens can lose their citizenship; and a profile of Hoover Veteran Fellowship Program alumnus John Moses sheds light on his work to assist Afghan refugees resettling in the US, as well as the value of the fellowship program to prospective participants.
Revitalizing American Institutions
On June 18 and 19, a cross section of election experts, practitioners, and policy observers gathered at the Hoover Institution to examine the current state of US elections and identify both achievements and shortcomings in the 2024 election cycle. On the whole, participants said the 2024 vote proceeded smoothly but that the future success of American elections is clouded by risks. These include the significant segment of the population that doubts elections’ reliability, reductions in funding and cybersecurity defenses, and a US election infrastructure that needs modernization to integrate emerging technologies. The gathering was part of a series dedicated to developing a long-term blueprint for sustaining and improving future American elections. It was organized by Distinguished Visiting Fellow Benjamin Ginsberg and Hoover’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, in concert with initiatives Pillars of the Community and the Election Official Legal Defense Network. Read more here.
In a post for the Volokh Conspiracy blog at the Reason site, Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh takes a look at the idea of revoking US citizenship from someone who has it. Generally, Volokh finds, “Once you have American citizenship, you have a constitutional entitlement to it.” However, he notes that “as with almost all things in law—and in life—there are some twists.” Those who gained citizenship through the naturalization process can lose it if they lied or committed fraud during that process. Moreover, “citizens can voluntarily surrender their citizenship, just as people can generally waive many of their legal rights.” Volokh reviews some of the actions that can trigger a voluntary loss of citizenship if performed “with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality,” such as swearing allegiance to a foreign power as an adult. But naturalization in another country doesn’t preclude dual citizenship, Volokh notes, which is allowed by American law. Read more here.
Hoover Veteran Fellowship Program
John Moses was a part of the initial cohort of the Hoover Veteran Fellowship Program (VFP) in 2021–22. He spoke to Hoover’s Chris Herhalt about what the experience meant to him, how it helped him set up an organization devoted to resettling Afghan refugees in his home state of Massachusetts, and how he’s working to keep Afghans out of harm’s way at home and abroad. Moses emphasizes how the VFP empowers “doers” and equips veterans with a powerful peer network extending across the nation. Moses shares how his Massachusetts Afghan Alliance organization supports Afghan asylum seekers by organizing community events and attending court hearings—work he recently discussed on BBC. “It costs us nothing, but it gives an invaluable amount of safety to people,” Moses says. To enlisted veterans considering the Veteran Fellowship Program, Moses suggests, “Sign up, come up with a plan, try to make it, and if you don’t, do it again next year, because it’s one of the best experiences I’ve ever had and it’s worth the effort.” US veterans are invited to apply to join the 2025–26 cohort of Hoover’s Veteran Fellowship Program here. Read more here.
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
Research Fellow Rebecca Lester joined the Marketplace Tech program from Minnesota Public Radio to discuss a tax law change in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act affecting research and development (R&D) expenditures. Back in 2017, when the first Trump tax cuts passed, they included a provision to change how firms were allowed to deduct R&D costs. Instead of deducting them all at once when a company made an investment, those deductions had to be spread out over five years starting in 2022, which made R&D more expensive, says Lester, who teaches accounting at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Lester recently coauthored a study showing the 2022 change led to reductions in R&D spending and employment that could have contributed to the slowdown in the tech industry starting in late 2022. But the provision has been reversed, which Lester says will benefit smaller, research-intensive tech companies. Listen here.
US Mental Health Care System
In a new coauthored paper, Hoover Fellow Valentin Bolotnyy studies the common nationwide practice of involuntarily hospitalizing those deemed a danger to themselves or others. Using data from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, the authors found that for “individuals whose cases are judgment calls, where some physicians would hospitalize but others would not,” involuntary commitment to a hospital “nearly doubles both the probability of dying by suicide or overdose and also nearly doubles the probability of being charged with a violent crime in the three months after evaluation.” The authors note that disruptions to housing and employment caused by hospitalization possibly account for the counterintuitive result. The authors conclude that, “on the margin, the system we study is not achieving the intended effects of the policy.” The paper was published as a Staff Report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Read more here.
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