Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz delivered a blunt warning about Medicare fraud in Los Angeles during a recent Fox News interview: “We believe that at least half of the hospices in the entire area around Los Angeles are fraudulent.” On May 13, CMS followed with a major enforcement action, suspending payments to roughly 800 hospices that billed federal taxpayers $1.4 billion last year. Those providers will no longer be paid while off

Washington debates often sound abstract until the results show up in family bank accounts. The final filing-season numbers now show that the Working Families Tax Cuts did exactly what supporters said they would do: return money to working families quickly, directly, and at a scale large enough to strengthen household budgets. According to final tax filing-season data highlighted by U.S. House Ways and Means Republicans, taxpayers received more than $310 billion in refunds thi

School choice keeps gaining ground because parents want options, students need opportunity, and political leaders in both parties are starting to recognize the demand. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has now signaled that New York intends to opt into the federal scholarship tax credit program, a major development for one of the nation’s largest and bluest states. According to the Commonwealth Foundation, Hochul has not yet formally submitted New York’s opt-in form to the IRS, but

Hospital spending is the biggest cost driver in American health care, and Washington keeps protecting the same hospital systems that drive costs higher. Patients need more competition, not more consolidation, facility fees, and payment rules that steer care into expensive hospital settings. New Congressional Budget Office projections show the problem clearly. From 2023 through 2034, fee-for-service Medicare hospital inpatient spending is projected to rise from $145 billion to

Senator Elizabeth Warren wants ordinary taxpayers pushed into an IRS-run tax prep system, but when her own taxes got complicated, she hired a CPA. That choice tells taxpayers plenty about why independent tax help still has value. Fox News reported that Warren did not use Direct File, the IRS-run tax filing system she spent years promoting, when it became available in Massachusetts. Her publicly released tax return showed that she used a private accountant instead. Fox also re

Large “nonprofit” hospital systems have spent years using tax preferences, payment rules, and market power to enrich themselves while patients and taxpayers carry the cost. Congress is finally taking a serious look at how that system works, and the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee is right to put hospital costs under the microscope. A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget shows how much money is on the table. The options include reforms that coul

SNAP enrollment is finally moving in the right direction. A new analysis from Jack Salmon at The Unseen and The Unsaid finds that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program fell by nearly 4.3 million people between January 2025 and January 2026, with roughly 3.5 million of that decline occurring after Congress passed and President Trump signed H.R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” This is good news for taxpayers and for the program itself because SNAP

It is wrong when one part of the business sector uses government power to enrich itself and mug its competitors. It is even worse when that effort is sold as a plan to protect ordinary people. The “Main Street Depositor Protection Act,” S. 4198, fits that pattern. The bill sounds like it protects small businesses, but it would expand government-backed deposit insurance, weaken market discipline, and let smaller banks shift the cost of their preferred subsidy onto larger compe

New York City’s budget mess is quickly becoming a warning to every small and family-owned business in the country. Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin are pressing Albany to cut the New York City Pass-Through Entity Tax credit from 100 percent to 75 percent. They are presenting the plan as a way to raise new revenue from high earners while the city faces a budget crisis. The political sales pitch is familiar, but the target is far broader than the slogan

The fastest way to make a credit card useless is to let Washington decide who deserves one. A new Committee to Unleash Prosperity analysis reinforces the warning CFE has already made: capping credit card interest rates would hurt the same consumers politicians claim to protect. Supporters may call it relief, but a government cap would push millions of Americans out of the credit market, shrink credit lines, weaken rewards programs, and leave families with fewer safe options w

Hospital giants went before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and showed why Washington’s health care affordability debate should start with the hospital industry. The system pays hospitals more, taxes many of them less, shields them from competition, and then asks patients and taxpayers to cover the bill. The hearing featured CEOs from some of the nation’s largest health systems, including major for-profit and tax-exempt hospital chains. Under questioning from Ways and

Health care fraud is not a paperwork problem. It is a taxpayer rip-off that drains money from patients who need care, providers who follow the rules, and workers who fund the system. At Paragon Health Institute’s National Press Club event, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz laid out the scale of the challenge facing federal health programs. Dr. Oz estimated health care fraud at about $100 billion per year and warned that fraud in Medicare,

The Labor Department just delivered a major win for 401(k) workers, retirees, and Main Street investors. Under the guidance, proxy advisory firms can be treated as fiduciaries under ERISA when they exercise control over shareholder voting rights or provide paid advice to retirement plans about how to vote. That means these firms cannot use other people’s retirement money to push ESG, DEI, or other political agendas. They must act for the financial benefit of workers and retir

Congress should stop treating the Highway Trust Fund like a slush fund. The fund was created to support roads and bridges, paid for largely by drivers through the gas tax. But new analysis from EPIC for America’s David Ditch shows that in fiscal year 2024, roughly $22.4 billion of Highway Trust Fund spending, or 30.1 percent of the total, was diverted away from the nation’s core highway system. Reform should be a top priority when Congress writes the next highway bill in 2026

The Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center should force a broader reckoning over how much power corporations gave one activist group to police the nonprofit world. The charges are allegations, and SPLC is entitled to defend itself in court. But the indictment raises a basic question that conservatives have been asking for years: why was SPLC treated as a trusted gatekeeper for charities, platforms, and public debate in the first place? DOJ Alleges

The 340B drug discount program was supposed to help low-income patients get cheaper prescription drugs. Instead, it has become a taxpayer-subsidized profit center for large nonprofit hospital networks that buy drugs at steep discounts, bill insurers and government programs at higher rates, and keep the spread. The Washington Post editorial board’s new op-ed calls the program what it has too often become: corporate welfare for hospitals. The Center for a Free Economy and more

The Center for a Free Economy has been highlighting how the Working Families Tax Cuts are delivering broad relief for workers, families, seniors, small businesses, and family-owned farms. Through a growing series of short videos tied to CFE blog posts, CFE has explained how the law lowers taxes on tips and overtime, strengthens the Child Tax Credit and standard deduction, expands education choice, improves Health Savings Accounts, provides auto loan relief for American-built

The 2008 housing collapse showed what happens when mortgage risk is ignored, understated, or pushed onto someone else. A new DC Journal op-ed by Ryan Ellis warns that Washington should not weaken one of the basic safeguards that helps lenders understand borrower risk before a mortgage is approved: tri-merge credit reporting. Tri-merge credit reporting requires lenders to review credit reports from all three national credit bureaus when underwriting a mortgage. That full view

A new Brookings Institution chart book by Jessica Riedl delivers a blunt warning for Washington: the federal budget problem is being driven by spending, not a lack of tax revenue. The charts show that even extremely aggressive tax hikes would fall far short of stabilizing the long-term budget, while higher tax rates on work, investment, and business would threaten growth and competitiveness. The Math Does Not Support a Tax-Hike-Only Strategy The most striking chart shows that

A new national poll released by the American Property Owners Alliance shows voters are ready for Congress to fix one of the most outdated parts of the tax code: the capital gains tax on home sales. The survey, conducted by OnMessage Public Strategies, found that 70% of voters oppose the current capital gains tax on home sales, including majorities across the political spectrum. The poll also found that 82% of Americans support adjusting the tax to account for inflation, with

Millions of Americans are paying taxes on gains they never chose to realize, and Congress has a clear opportunity to end this unfair treatment. The “Generating Retirement Ownership Through Long-Term Holding Act,” or “GROWTH Act,” H.R. 2089 and S. 1839, would fix one of the stranger features of the tax code by allowing mutual fund investors to defer taxes on reinvested capital gain distributions until they actually sell their shares. In a recent op-ed in The Hill , CFE Presid

Massachusetts taxpayers just received a costly reminder of why welfare reform cannot stop at writing bigger checks. According to Massachusetts Daily News , a new Fiscal Alliance Foundation study found that Massachusetts paid out more than $1 billion in improper SNAP payments between 2022 and 2024 while as many as 75% of able-bodied recipients were not working. That scale of waste should concern anyone who wants the safety net to work for the people who truly need it. Food sta

Social Security was created in 1935 as a hedge against “poverty-ridden old age.” That mission is hard to square with the system Washington runs now. A couple claiming the maximum benefit at age 70 can receive about $124,000 a year in Social Security, even as younger and generally poorer workers keep paying payroll taxes into a program projected to hit insolvency in 2032. That is not a focused safety net. It is a sign that Social Security has drifted far from its original purp

Affordability keeps getting worse in many states for a simple reason: government spending has grown far faster than taxpayers’ ability to support it. Vance Ginn recently pointed to a clear benchmark for fiscal discipline, and the numbers make the case. From 2016 to 2025, aggregate state spending excluding federal transfers rose 65.8%, while the sustainable benchmark of population growth plus inflation rose just 32.4%. That gap helps explain why so many states keep talking ab

The first filing season under the Working Families Tax Cuts is already showing what certainty and tax relief look like in practice. Families and businesses no longer have to guess whether key parts of the tax code will vanish after one more election cycle. The law made major tax relief permanent, and now millions of Americans are seeing the results in their returns, refunds, deductions, and long-term planning. According to new Treasury Department data , the first tax season u

Tax season is when tax policy stops being abstract. Small business owners see it in what they owe, what they can deduct, and how much they can reinvest in the future. That made the recent podcast featuring CFE President Ryan Ellis and Brian Reardon of the S-Corporation Association especially timely, as the two discussed how the Working Families Tax Cuts improved the tax code for small and family-owned businesses. The conversation focused on the parts of the law that do the m

Tax Day is one of the most dreaded days of the year. This year, it also came with a reminder of what Congress prevented. If the family and business tax relief enacted in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act had expired, American households would now be facing a broad and immediate tax increase. Instead, The Working Families Tax Cuts stopped what could have been one of the largest tax hikes in decades. What Congress Prevented Had that 2017 tax relief expired, taxpayers would have fa

Washington can project 3% real GDP growth for the next decade. That does not make it plausible. If the labor force is barely growing , the only way to hit that kind of sustained economic growth is to assume an extraordinary, long-running surge in productivity. That is not serious budgeting. It is wishcasting. The Trump budget leans on roughly 3% real GDP growth for years to come. But the economy does not grow by magic. Real growth comes from more workers, more output per work

Democrats still talk as if tax relief for working families mainly helps the rich. The facts point in the other direction. Data from the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and the latest IRS data summarized by Tax Foundation show that lower-income Americans receive larger percentage tax relief, while higher earners continue to pay the highest tax rates and the largest share of federal income taxes. That matters because the fairness debate around tax policy is often driven mo

California’s latest hospice crackdown is not an isolated scandal. It is another sign that Gavin Newsom’s California has become an epicenter of government waste, fraud, and corruption, with Medicaid standing at the center of the problem. Federal officials have now suspended 221 hospice and healthcare providers in Los Angeles over suspected fraud, and they say that number is likely to keep rising. That should not surprise anyone who has watched California pour more money into

Last night’s NCAA men’s basketball championship capped off a March Madness season full of busted brackets, missed bets, and office pools gone wrong. For most people who put money on the tournament, the final result meant a loss. But under the tax code, even people who break even over time can still owe tax on money they never actually earned. That is because the One Big Beautiful Bill Act limits gambling loss deductions to 90% of losses starting in 2025. A gambler who wins an

The Working Families Tax Cuts made a major pro-growth fix to the tax code by making it easier for businesses to deduct the cost of investment up front instead of dragging those deductions out over years. That matters most for small and family-owned businesses that need cash flow, certainty, and a tax code that rewards expansion instead of penalizing it. The law permanently restored full business expensing for investments purchased in 2025 and onward. It made small business e

A strong 2025 for small businesses is a reminder that when entrepreneurs get breathing room, they tend to use it well. A new “ Small Business Check Up Survey ” from the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council found that 71% of small business owners said their financial performance improved in 2025 compared to 2024, while 84% said performance met or exceeded expectations. That is a welcome sign for the economy, but it is also a policy lesson. Lower taxes and a more stable bu

The U.S. Postal Service is losing money because it is built for a market that is disappearing. As Chris Edwards argues in a recent Cato post, the USPS has lost money every year since 2007, mail volumes have kept falling, and the package business is no longer enough to make up the difference. Congress still acts as if the old postal model can be preserved. Paper mail is fading, private firms are winning more package business, and the case for privatization is getting harder to

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act fixed a major problem in the U.S. tax code. For years, America’s high corporate tax rate and flawed international rules pushed companies to move overseas on paper, taking profits, headquarters, and long-term investment with them. A new push to raise the corporate rate would risk reopening that wound. Stephen Moore and Committee to Unleash Prosperity recently highlighted what happened after tax reform. As Moore notes, corporate inversions effect

A recent Townhall op-ed by Stephen Moore argues that Republicans can win on healthcare affordability by taking on the interests that profit from a costly and opaque system. That argument deserves attention, especially when paired with fresh evidence showing just how much the biggest health insurers have been making while Washington kept the Obamacare subsidy machine running. The latest chart on insurer operating profits makes the point clearly. UnitedHealth, CVS/Aetna, Cigna

The Working Families Tax Cuts include one of the clearest pro-worker reforms in the law: no tax on tips. Eligible workers can deduct up to $25,000 in qualified tips earned starting in 2025, whether they take the standard deduction or itemize. For millions of Americans in restaurants, hospitality, transportation, and personal service jobs, that means more of their earnings stay in their own pockets. Federal estimates say about 6 million workers report tipped wages, and the ave

Social Security is running out of time. The Social Security trust fund is projected to be depleted in 2032, and Washington has already missed the chance to fix the problem gradually. That failure has consequences. Reform can no longer be delayed, and it can no longer be painless. The real question now is who should bear the burden. Taxpayers should not be forced to send even more money into a broken system. The fairest remaining option is to reduce benefits on a means-tested

Earlier this week, the Center for a Free Economy pointed to economist Mark Perry’s well-known “Chart of the Century” to make a simple point. The prices that have risen fastest in America are not random. They are concentrated in sectors where government plays the biggest role. That pattern is hard to miss. Hospital services, college tuition, child care, and medical care services have all risen far faster than overall inflation since 2000. By contrast, products and services wit

The latest IRS migration data shows that Americans are still moving to low-tax states and taking income, investment, and economic opportunity with them . From 2022 to 2023, Florida alone posted a net adjusted gross income gain of about $21 billion. At the same time, high-tax states such as California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey posted some of the largest losses. The pattern is hard to miss. People and money are flowing toward lower-tax, faster-growing s

This week, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee will mark up five narrow bills that would each, in their own way, make the tax code work better for taxpayers. The Center for a Free Economy is proud to endorse all five bills. They are: H.R. 2347, the "Survivor Justice Tax Prevention Act," sponsored by Congressman Lloyd Smucker (R-Penn.) This bill would make it clear that monies taxpayers receive as damages for sexual assault do not require invasive and re-traumatizing inq

Hospital prices have been out of control for years, and Congress is finally starting to ask why. At a U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health hearing last week on health care affordability, lawmakers focused on one of the biggest drivers of rising costs: large nonprofit hospital systems that enjoy major public subsidies while doing too little to justify them. That is a welcome shift. Washington often talks about health care costs in broad terms. But this proble

The Working Families Tax Cuts, enacted through H.R. 1, expanded education choice in the tax code by creating a new federal scholarship tax credit and broadening how families can use 529 savings. That is a meaningful shift in the right direction. Families need more than one path. Parents should be able to choose the school, tutoring, or support that fits their child instead of being boxed into a one-size-fits-all system. A New Federal Tax Credit for Education Freedom One of th

Washington’s priorities are badly out of balance. As Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in Senate Finance Committee testimony , the federal government allocates about $6 to seniors for every $1 it allocates to children under 18. That would be troubling enough on its own. It is worse because children are now the poorest cohort in America, while seniors as a group are no longer. Washington is allocating more to the politically pow

One of the biggest success stories of the Working Families Tax Cuts was permanent full business expensing for the business assets covered by the law. That reform strengthened investment by letting businesses deduct costs upfront instead of dragging those deductions out over years. Now the next step is clear. Policymakers should move toward full expensing for business structures too, including multifamily housing, factories, offices, warehouses, and other buildings that help t

Democrats rarely stop at taxing the rich. They start there. That is the real lesson from tax history. A tax is sold to the public as a narrow hit on a small group of wealthy households. Then the threshold comes down, the rates go up, inflation does the rest, and the burden spreads far beyond the original target. That pattern has played out before, and it is playing out again now. A New York Example Shows the Problem Bloomberg recently reported that Zohran Mamdani wants to sl

For too many Americans, buying a home has become more complicated, more expensive, and more frustrating than it needs to be. That is why President Trump’s March 13, 2026 executive order matters. Working with HUD Secretary Scott Turner, the administration took a step toward making the homebuying process simpler, faster, and more modern for creditworthy borrowers who are ready to purchase a home. The most useful way to understand this order is not as a final answer to the housi

The death tax remains one of the most destructive taxes in the federal code. It punishes families at the moment of loss and threatens the survival of family farms and small businesses that took decades to build. The “Working Families Tax Cuts” law delivers important relief by making the death tax exemption permanent and protecting families from a massive tax hike that would have taken effect if Congress had failed to act. Permanent Protection From the Death Tax Under the “Wor

The IRS is the nation’s tax collector. It should not also be the nation’s tax preparer. When the same agency that collects taxes also calculates what you owe, a clear conflict of interest arises. The incentives point in only one direction: higher tax bills and less trust in the fairness of the system. That is why proposals to expand the IRS “Direct File” system are misguided. Americans should not have to rely on the tax collector to prepare the very returns that determine how

President Trump’s sweeping tariff policy is now facing problems on two fronts: the courts and the economy. The Supreme Court of the United States recently ruled that key tariffs imposed under emergency authority were illegal , raising serious questions about the administration’s use of executive power to impose broad import taxes. At the same time, a federal trade court has ordered the government to begin refunding tariff payments to businesses , potentially returning billio