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We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The Treasury Department Is CreatedOn September 2, 1789, Congress passed the act establishing the Department of the Treasury—the third executive department created under the new Constitution, after Foreign Affairs and War, both of which we've marked on this show. A week or so later, President Washington would name Alexander Hamilton its first Secretary, and with that appointment, one of the most consequential careers in American governance began.The Treasury Department was, in a real sense, where the abstract new government became a functioning state. Hamilton inherited a country drowning in Revolutionary War debt, with no reliable revenue, no national bank, and shaky credit at home and abroad. Over the next few years, from that department, he engineered the financial architecture of the United States: the federal assumption of state debts, a system of customs duties and excise taxes to actually bring in revenue, the First Bank of the United States, and the establishment of public credit as a national asset. His conviction—captured in today's opening quote—was that a manageable national debt, properly serviced, would knit the country's creditors to its success and give the young republic financial standing in the world.The significance of September 2, 1789 is that the Treasury became, and remains, one of the most powerful institutions in American life. It runs the IRS, manages the public debt, enforces sanctions, and shapes economic policy in ways that touch every person in the country. The debates Hamilton started—about debt, about taxation, about how much the federal government should do with its fiscal power—are debates we are still having, quite literally, in every episode where we cover a tax question. And it's a fitting anniversary for today, because our final segment is a tax story—a reminder that the unglamorous machinery of how governments raise revenue, which Hamilton built, is where an enormous amount of real policy actually happens.A Utah judge has ruled that there is enough evidence to send Tyler Robinson to trial for the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk—and, critically, that prosecutors may seek the death penalty. We covered the prosecution's theory of this case back in July; now it has cleared its first major legal hurdle. At a preliminary hearing, Judge Tony Graf found the state had met the probable-cause standard on all seven counts, including aggravated murder, concluding that the evidence was “sufficient at this stage to support a reasonable belief that the defendant is the individual who shot and killed Charlie Kirk.” A word on that standard, because it matters: a preliminary hearing is a low bar. The state doesn't have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt—that's for the trial. It only has to show probable cause, a reasonable belief that a crime occurred and this defendant committed it. So this ruling isn't a verdict; it's a green light to proceed. The most consequential fight at the hearing was over whether this qualifies as aggravated murder, the charge that makes the death penalty available. Under Utah law, that generally requires an aggravating circumstance—and here prosecutors argued that Robinson, by allegedly firing a rifle from a rooftop toward Kirk near a crowd at Utah Valley University, knowingly created a great risk of death to people other than his target. The prosecutor called it “common sense” that shooting into a crowd endangers others; the defense contested it. The judge sided with the state, keeping capital punishment in play. The significance is that this now becomes a death-penalty trial in a case already saturated with political meaning, and everything—the evidence, the alleged motive, the aggravating circumstances—will now be tested under the far more demanding standard of a jury trial. Utah judge rules accused killer of Charlie Kirk will stand trial, face death penalty | ReutersNPR · CNNNow for something lighter, though still a real lesson in criminal procedure: Tiger Woods has reached a plea deal in his Florida impaired-driving case, and will lose his driver's license for five years. Woods was arrested in March after a rollover crash on Jupiter Island; no one was hurt. Under the plea agreement, prosecutors amended the charges—the first count down to reckless driving as a second offense, and the second to a careless-driving citation—and Woods agreed to the five-year license suspension plus a $1,500 fine, avoiding jail time. This is a textbook illustration of how plea bargaining actually works: the vast majority of criminal cases never go to trial, and instead resolve through negotiated pleas in which the defendant accepts responsibility for a reduced charge in exchange for a lighter, more certain outcome, and the state secures a conviction without the cost and risk of trial. Two details are worth flagging. First, “second offense”—Woods had a prior reckless-driving plea back in 2017, and repeat offenses generally carry stiffer consequences, which is part of why the license suspension is so long. Second, the judge was pointed about that suspension, saying it's “for the safety of the public” and that there are “no exceptions”—drive for any reason at all, the judge warned, and Woods goes straight to jail. The significance, beyond the celebrity, is a clean look at how the system handles impaired driving for someone who isn't a first-timer: not incarceration, but a charge reduction paired with a long, strictly-enforced license suspension aimed squarely at keeping him off the road. It's the everyday machinery of criminal justice, applied to an extraordinarily famous defendant. Woods gets 5-year license suspension in plea deal | ReutersABC News · CNNAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on a delightfully wonky problem with a real-world bite: the way Massachusetts taxes interstate trucks. My argument is that the state's rolling-stock tax is backward—it functions, weirdly, as a reverse carbon tax and a hidden tax on consumers—and that the fix isn't simply to exempt trucks, but to redesign the tax around where the trucks are actually used.Here's the problem. Massachusetts applies its sales and use tax to the full purchase price of an interstate truck, even if only a sliver of that truck's miles are logged in Massachusetts. Under state guidelines, a truck basically escapes the tax only if it spends six or fewer days in the state over a year—spend a week, and you can owe tax on the vehicle's entire price. Now layer on a perverse consequence: newer, cleaner trucks cost more money, so a tax based on purchase price falls hardest on the newest, most efficient, lowest-emission equipment. That gives carriers an obvious incentive to keep their clean new trucks out of Massachusetts and send in their older, dirtier ones. A state that says it cares about emissions has built a tax that literally rewards operating older, more polluting trucks within its borders. And because this is a tax on a business input, it doesn't stay with the trucking companies—it gets baked into freight costs and shows up in the price of groceries, medicine, and building materials, a phenomenon economists call tax pyramiding and the rest of us call higher prices.So what should Massachusetts do? There's a House bill to exempt qualifying interstate rolling stock, and I say that moves in the right direction—but the state shouldn't stop at a blanket exemption. The cleaner solution is apportionment: tax the Massachusetts share of the truck's use, based on in-state mileage, the same way states already apportion other business activity. Massachusetts taxes the Massachusetts piece, New York the New York piece, and so on. That six-day threshold is a lousy proxy—the seventh day a truck rolls through the state doesn't magically make the other 358 days of interstate driving Massachusetts activity. I also argue the state should make sure that upgrading to a cleaner fleet never increases a carrier's tax bill—give newer, higher-emissions-standard vehicles a credit or adjustment. And because no carrier should face a different tax regime every time it crosses a state line, I think the right long-term answer is a uniform, mileage-based model rule developed through something like the Multistate Tax Commission. The bumper-sticker version of my argument: removing this distortion is environmental policy, even though it looks like a tax break—because sometimes the cheapest, smartest thing a government can do is just stop taxing the very behavior it claims to want. Massachusetts Truck Taxes Need Revamp Beyond Adding an Exemption | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The National Park Service Is CreatedOn August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act, creating a new federal bureau inside the Department of the Interior to manage the country's national parks and monuments. Before this, the roughly 35 parks and monuments the government had accumulated were administered in a haphazard, piecemeal way—some by the Army, some by scattered Interior officials—with no unified mission and no consistent protection.The genius of the Organic Act is compressed into a single, oft-quoted sentence that has generated a century of law and litigation. It directed the new Park Service to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein” and to “leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” That phrasing contains a built-in tension that lawyers and the courts have wrestled with ever since: the Park Service is told both to provide for the public's enjoyment of the parks and to leave them unimpaired—two goals that can pull hard against each other when you're deciding whether to build a road, permit a concession, or limit the number of visitors. That “dual mandate” is the central puzzle of public-lands law.The significance of August 25, 1916 is that it enshrined in law a genuinely radical idea: that some places belong to the whole public, in perpetuity, held in trust by the government for people who haven't been born yet. Today the Park Service manages more than 400 sites across all fifty states and welcomes hundreds of millions of visitors a year. The writer Wallace Stegner, who gave us today's opening line, called the national parks “the best idea we ever had”—absolutely American, absolutely democratic. On a day whose news is heavy with contested executive power, it's a nice reminder that the law is also the instrument through which a society decides to preserve something for the common good.The Supreme Court has handed the Trump administration an interim victory on mail-in voting—but it's important to be precise about what the Court did and didn't do. In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the justices lifted an injunction that a Massachusetts federal judge imposed in June, which had blocked key parts of Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting in California and 22 other states that sued. That order aims to create a federal list of eligible voters and, controversially, to have the Postal Service deliver ballots only to people on that list. Here's the crucial nuance. This is a stay, not a ruling on the merits—the Court did not decide whether the president actually has the authority to reshape how states run their elections. It merely paused the lower court's block while the litigation continues. And it's partial: the Postal Service's role in the scheme remains blocked nationwide. Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, made the point sharply—she wrote that the decision doesn't suggest the executive branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to do this, it just postpones the day of reckoning. This is the shadow docket in action, a theme we keep returning to: the Court altering the rules for a national election months before that election, through an emergency order, without a full merits decision or a written explanation of its reasoning. The significance is that, for now, parts of Trump's order can take effect for the November midterms—a real-world consequence—even as the fundamental question of whether any of it is lawful remains formally undecided. The status quo the courts had maintained all summer just shifted, at least temporarily, and it shifted on the emergency docket.US Supreme Court lifts judicial hurdle to Trump's mail-in ballot curbs | Reuters Washington Post · NPRThe administration is preparing what would be the largest mass visa revocation in U.S. history: according to the Associated Press, the State Department plans to revoke the tourist and business visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are seeking asylum. The targets are holders of so-called B1 and B2 visas—the standard business and tourism visas—issued between 2016 and 2026, whose holders later sought asylum, with the action coordinated between the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. The legal logic is worth understanding. A visitor visa rests on a premise: that you intend to come temporarily and then go home. When someone on a tourist visa applies for asylum, the government's position is that they've revealed an intent inconsistent with that temporary-visitor status—so it's moving to strip the visitor visa. Importantly, officials say this wouldn't necessarily mean immediate deportation; most people with pending asylum cases would be recategorized, losing their visitor status but not instantly removed. Still, the scale is staggering and unprecedented, and it raises hard questions. Seeking asylum is a legal right, protected by statute and international obligation, and there's a real tension in penalizing people's immigration status precisely because they used the lawful asylum process. There are also due-process concerns lurking in any mass action that recategorizes 200,000 people, and a potential chilling effect on those weighing whether to come forward and claim protection. The significance is that this fits the aggressive immigration-enforcement pattern we've tracked all summer—but at a scale that's genuinely new, using visa revocation as a lever against the asylum system itself.US plans to revoke up to 200,000 tourism, business visas, AP reports | ReutersWTOP · Houston Public Media / NPRAnd a story close to home for everyone in this profession: Google has launched a version of its Gemini AI built specifically for lawyers. Google Cloud unveiled “Gemini Enterprise for Legal,” an agentic AI platform purpose-built for legal workflows—with specialized skills, connectors to legal research and document systems, and an ecosystem of partner tools. And its launch customers are not fringe experimenters; they're elite firms: Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, Weil, and Williams & Connolly. When firms of that caliber sign on as launch partners, it's a signal that AI in legal practice has moved from novelty to infrastructure. Here's the significance, and the tension. On one hand, this is the mainstreaming of AI in law—the same shift that, as we discussed a few weeks ago, is thinning out entry-level hiring at big firms as software absorbs the document review and first-draft work once done by junior associates. Google is now competing directly with the specialized legal-AI companies for that market, and its entry accelerates everything. On the other hand, this collides with a problem we've covered again and again: the fake, hallucinated citations, the AI-generated errors, even the litigant hiding prompt injections in his filings. A more powerful, more deeply integrated AI tool doesn't dissolve a lawyer's duties of competence, confidentiality, and candor—it raises the stakes on them. The significance is that the profession is being reshaped in real time. The tools are getting better and more embedded, the biggest firms are adopting them, and the hard questions—about verification, about who's accountable when the machine is wrong, about what happens to the training pipeline for young lawyers—are all arriving at once.Google expands Gemini AI platform for law firms, lawyers | ReutersArtificial Lawyer · Google CloudAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a big loss for Maryland—and a valuable lesson for every other state eyeing the digital economy for revenue. Maryland's first-in-the-nation digital advertising tax just took a potentially fatal blow, with the state tax court siding with Google, Apple, and Peacock in their challenges. My argument is that this doesn't prove you can't tax digital advertising—it proves Maryland went about it the wrong way, by designing a tax around the companies it wanted to pay rather than the activity it wanted to tax.Two design choices doomed it. First, Maryland taxed digital advertising while leaving comparable non-digital advertising—billboards, print, radio, television—completely alone. Second, the tax only kicks in for companies above a huge global revenue threshold, and the rate actually climbs, from 2.5% up to 10%, based on a company's worldwide revenue, not its Maryland activity. The court saw that for what it was: a structure that, in practice, hits big out-of-state tech companies while sparing basically every in-state business, which runs into both the dormant Commerce Clause and the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act. As I put it, using worldwide corporate revenue to set the rate on identical in-state transactions is just a backward way of making big companies pay more—two companies doing the exact same amount of business in Maryland can end up with wildly different bills.There's also a cautionary detail I love, because it says everything: Maryland passed this tax in 2021, but by 2025 the state comptroller had to hire an outside expert just to figure out what “digital advertising services” even means—introducing terms like “programmatic” and “visual” that weren't in the statute at all. If you need to hire an expert four years after enactment to ascertain what your own tax taxes, maybe the problem isn't that taxpayers are being difficult. And the fiscal stakes are real: the tax pulled in about $535 million earmarked for education, but now the challengers may be owed refunds with interest, right as Maryland stares down a multibillion-dollar budget gap. A tax that collects hundreds of millions for a few years and then has to hand it all back, with interest, is quantifiably worse than no tax at all. So my takeaway for states is that the durable path is the boring one—broad tax bases, treat economically similar transactions the same, scale liability to in-state activity. A neutral tax on all advertising would have reached less convenient targets too, including local businesses, and that's exactly the point: a tax principle that only applies when it lands on the politically preferred target isn't much of a principle.Maryland's Digital Ad Tax Defeat Is Teachable Moment for States | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: The Weimar ConstitutionOn August 11, 1919, President Friedrich Ebert signed the Weimar Constitution into force, creating the first parliamentary democracy in German history. It came into effect a few days later, ending the provisional government that had followed Germany's defeat in the First World War and the fall of the monarchy. On paper, it was a strikingly modern and liberal document—and its story is one of the most important cautionary tales in all of constitutional law.The Weimar Constitution rested on genuinely progressive foundations: popular sovereignty, a separation of powers, and an extensive bill of fundamental rights, including—remarkably for 1919—formal equality between men and women and the right to vote for both. It established a directly elected president, a parliament, the Reichstag, and a framework that looked, in many respects, like a model twentieth-century democracy. For a document drafted in the chaos of postwar Germany, it was an ambitious attempt to build a rights-respecting republic from the ground up.But the Weimar Constitution is remembered today largely for the flaw that helped destroy it: Article 48, which gave the president sweeping power to rule by emergency decree, suspending civil liberties when he deemed public order to be threatened. That emergency clause was invoked more and more frequently as the republic's politics fractured—and in 1933 it became the legal mechanism through which the Nazi regime dismantled democracy from the inside, using the constitution's own emergency powers to suspend rights and seize dictatorial control. Which brings us back to today's opening quote: the Weimar experience is the definitive real-world example of Justice Jackson's warning that an emergency power, once available, “lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” The significance of August 11, 1919 is that it stands as an enduring lesson that a constitution's protections are only as durable as the limits it places on emergency power—that a democracy can be subverted not in spite of its own laws, but through them.Luigi Mangione is due back in court for a pretrial hearing ahead of his murder trial, set to begin September 8, in the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel. Mangione, who is 28, has pleaded not guilty to murder, weapons, and forgery charges brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, and he has separately pleaded not guilty to federal stalking charges. At today's hearing before Justice Gregory Carro, the parties are expected to take up jury selection and the thorny question of public access to what is shaping up to be one of the most closely watched trials in years. Let's talk about the real legal challenges here, because this case is unusual on several fronts. First, Mangione faces parallel state and federal prosecutions arising from the same killing—something the Constitution permits under the “dual sovereignty” doctrine, even though it can feel like being tried twice. Second, the defense has signaled it may argue that Mangione lost control of his actions due to an extreme mental-health breakdown, and notably has not conceded that he was even the shooter, despite prosecutors citing surveillance video, DNA, ballistics, and a notebook. And third—the elephant in the courtroom—is that this case became a cultural flashpoint, with a wave of public anger at the health-insurance industry curdling, in some corners, into sympathy for the accused. That makes jury selection genuinely difficult: finding impartial jurors amid saturation coverage and strong public feeling is exactly the kind of problem that tests the machinery of a fair trial. The significance is that beyond the headlines, this is a serious test of whether the system can give a fair, dispassionate trial to a defendant the public has turned into a symbol—which is precisely when the guarantees of criminal procedure matter most. Luigi Mangione due in court ahead of insurance CEO murder trial | ReutersUPI · 6abcPresident Trump has said that whether to revive the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” is now up to his newly confirmed attorney general, Todd Blanche—a statement that lands like the punchline to a story we've been telling for weeks. Recall the sequence: Blanche rescinded the fund on the eve of his confirmation to win over Republican holdouts, but Trump then acknowledged that he himself never signed the rescission order, which left the door open. Now, with Blanche confirmed as attorney general by that razor-thin 50-49 vote, Trump is saying the future of the fund rests with Blanche. And that is exactly the scenario that critics warned about. Think back to what senators extracted as the price of confirmation: a promise to kill a fund that would have used taxpayer money to pay people, including January 6 defendants, who claimed to be victims of the prior Justice Department. But a promise made by the executive branch can be unmade by the executive branch, and here the president is openly signaling that his former personal lawyer, now running the Justice Department, could bring it back. The significance goes to the very heart of the concern that dogged Blanche's nomination: the independence of the attorney general. When the president publicly frames the revival of a controversial payout fund as a decision for “his” attorney general to make, it underscores the worry that the Justice Department's most consequential choices may run through the lens of the president's personal and political interests. The confirmation fight is over, but the question it raised is very much alive. Trump says future weaponization fund is up to Blanche | ReutersForbes · AxiosA federal appeals court has cleared thousands of lawsuits to proceed against the major social-media companies over claims they deliberately designed their platforms to addict young users. The San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit rejected the bid by Meta, Google's YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat to escape roughly 2,400 lawsuits consolidated in federal court, brought by states, municipalities, school districts, and individuals. The legal fight here is all about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—the 1996 law that shields online platforms from liability for content their users post. The companies argued that Section 230 also immunizes them from claims that they failed to warn about, or engineered, the addictive nature of their platforms. The court said no, and the distinction it drew is the crucial one: Section 230 protects a platform from being sued over what its users say, but it does not necessarily protect the platform's own product-design choices—the infinite scroll, the algorithmic feeds, the notification schedules engineered to maximize engagement. Claims aimed at that design, the court reasoned, are different from claims aimed at user content. If you've been listening, you know this is the federal counterpart to everything we've tracked at the state level—the New Mexico judgment, the Tennessee trial, the multistate penalty fight. The significance is that the industry's most powerful legal shield, Section 230, is being narrowed: plaintiffs are increasingly framing their cases around addictive design rather than harmful content, and courts are increasingly letting those cases through. That reframing may prove to be the key that unlocks the courthouse door for the whole wave of social-media harm litigation. US appeals court allows thousands of lawsuits against social media companies to proceed | ReutersNBC News · Al JazeeraAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a question hiding underneath the AI gold rush: who's actually paying for it? My starting point is a striking data point—Microsoft's current federal tax expense fell year over year from about $14.1 billion to just $2.5 billion, even as its revenue surged. And a big part of that drop comes from accelerated deductions in last year's massive 2025 tax law, which restored 100% bonus depreciation—letting companies write off the full cost of huge investments, like AI data centers, in the very first year.My core argument is that the tax law is financing the AI infrastructure boom, but it isn't creating it—and that distinction matters enormously before anyone declares the policy a success. The political narrative writes itself: capital spending soared after the tax cut, therefore the tax cut worked. But I think correlation is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there. Microsoft and its rivals aren't pouring tens of billions into AI infrastructure because Congress rediscovered depreciation. They're doing it because falling behind in AI could threaten their core businesses—it's become about as close to a strategic necessity as it gets. And here's the tell: Microsoft announced its roughly $80 billion AI data-center plan in a blog post in January 2025, a full six months before the tax law was even signed. The trajectory was public, budgeted, and well underway before the depreciation rules changed.So my point to Congress is: prove it. Before congratulating yourselves, you owe the public evidence that these tax benefits actually changed corporate behavior rather than just rewarding investments companies were already racing to make. And I want to push back on the idea that this is “just” a timing benefit and therefore basically free. Timing isn't free—letting a company keep its cash now in exchange for tax revenue later is like giving it an interest-free loan, and every dollar of accelerated depreciation is a dollar the Treasury can't use for something else this year. That's a real opportunity cost, felt in deficits or forgone public investment. My recommendation is concrete: Congress should require the Treasury and the Joint Committee on Taxation to regularly estimate how much of this investment is genuinely induced by the tax break, how much was simply pulled forward, and how much would have happened anyway. Because the public is quietly helping finance the AI revolution—and if Congress intends to make taxpayers silent investors in it, it should at least have the honesty to say so, and to show the math. Tax Law Is Funding the AI Infrastructure Boom, Not Creating It | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: The Acquittal of John Peter ZengerOn August 4, 1735, a New York jury acquitted printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel—a verdict that planted one of the earliest seeds of freedom of the press in America. Zenger published the New York Weekly Journal, which had spent a year printing scathing criticism of the colonial governor, William Cosby. For that, Zenger was jailed for nearly ten months and put on trial for libeling the governor.Here's what made the case so important. Under the English common law of the time, truth was no defense to a charge of seditious libel—in fact, the more true the criticism, the more “dangerous” it was thought to be, because it was more likely to undermine the government's authority. The judge instructed the jury accordingly: they were only to decide whether Zenger had published the words, and the court would decide whether they were libelous. But Zenger's brilliant lawyer, Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia, went over the judge's head and appealed directly to the jury, arguing that they had the power to weigh the truth of what Zenger printed—and that truthful criticism of government could not be a crime. The jury agreed, and acquitted.The Zenger verdict didn't immediately change the formal law—truth wouldn't be firmly established as a defense to libel for decades—but its influence was enormous. It established, in the American mind, two ideas that would prove foundational: that truth ought to be a defense to a charge of defaming the government, and that a jury of ordinary citizens could stand between the state and a critic it wanted to silence. Those principles run straight through the First Amendment and into modern press-freedom law, including New York Times v. Sullivan two centuries later. The significance of August 4, 1735 is that it's a origin point for the American conviction that the freedom to criticize those in power is not a privilege the government grants, but a liberty the people hold—an idea that, as today's stories show, is still very much contested.Todd Blanche's nomination to be attorney general has cleared its biggest obstacle: the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to advance him after he cut a deal with the Republican holdouts who had threatened to sink it. We've tracked this saga closely—the stalled vote, Senator Cornyn's refusal, and then Blanche's move over the weekend to formally rescind the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund.” The final piece came in a deal struck late Sunday with Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who had demanded written assurances about the settlement of Trump's lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns. With those assurances in hand, the committee's Republicans are now expected to line up behind him. It's worth noting the Democrats' objection, because it's a substantive legal point: they argue Blanche's rescission order doesn't actually prevent the administration from reviving the fund after he's confirmed, and they're calling for legislation to bar it permanently. In other words, an executive-branch promise can be undone by the same executive branch, which is exactly why they want a statute. The significance is that advice-and-consent worked as a real check—Blanche had to publicly dismantle a controversial initiative to win the votes—but it also exposed the limits of that check. A confirmation deal extracts a promise; it doesn't write a law. The nation's next top law-enforcement officer advances, having conceded the point, but with the durability of that concession still an open question.Blanche set to clear nomination hurdle after deal wins senators' vote | ReutersUS News (AP) · CNNA coalition of two dozen Democratic-led states has sued to block a new federal policy that would let immigration authorities get their hands on personal data about low-income families enrolled in a cash-assistance program. The policy would allow the Administration for Children and Families—which runs welfare programs—to share detailed personal information about benefit recipients with other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, and it's set to take effect August 11. The states' legal theory is twofold. First, they argue the policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act—the law that requires federal agencies to follow proper procedures and not act arbitrarily—by ignoring existing data-sharing restrictions and slapping new conditions on federal funding. Second, they invoke the Constitution. And a separate suit filed in Brooklyn by civil-rights and privacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, adds a Privacy Act claim—the federal statute that limits how the government can use and share the personal data it collects. Here's why this matters beyond the courtroom. Programs like this cash-assistance program serve some of the most vulnerable families in the country, and the fear that applying for help could funnel your information to immigration enforcement produces a powerful chilling effect—people forgo food and cash aid they're legally entitled to. It's the same dynamic behind the “public charge” fights, and fittingly, today marks the anniversary of the 1882 immigration law that first tied benefits to immigration status. The significance is a collision between the machinery of the welfare state and the machinery of immigration enforcement, with data privacy law as the battleground—and courts once again asked whether the administration followed the rules before repurposing sensitive government data.States sue over Trump policy of sharing benefits data with immigration authorities | ReutersDetroit News (AP) · UPIAnd a striking piece of accountability journalism: a Reuters investigation has found that judges in 75 separate cases have ruled that the Trump administration violated First Amendment rights—this despite the president campaigning as a free-speech champion who vowed to end what he called years of “government censorship.” The 75 rulings span the full range of First Amendment protections: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. According to the reporting, judges have repeatedly found that the administration chilled or suppressed the speech of citizens and groups who oppose its agenda—an unusually broad pattern of judicial pushback on constitutional grounds. A few caveats worth stating plainly, in fairness: many of these are trial-level rulings, some are preliminary, and the administration disputes them and is appealing in various cases, so not every one is a final word. But the sheer volume is the story. When dozens of federal judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, independently conclude that the same administration is infringing the First Amendment, that's a signal that's hard to wave away. The significance ties directly to today's Zenger anniversary. The whole American tradition of free expression rests on the idea that the government cannot punish or silence its critics—and this reporting suggests that principle is being tested, and defended by the courts, on an extraordinary scale. It's a reminder that the First Amendment is not self-enforcing; it lives or dies in the accumulation of individual rulings by judges willing to say no.Trump vowed to ‘bring free speech back.' Judges in 75 cases ruled that he has stifled it | ReutersCNN · Yahoo NewsAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on New York City's brand-new pied-à-terre tax—the city's first surcharge on high-value second homes—and my basic take is that it's good policy being undermined by a messy rollout. The trigger for the piece is a striking number: the city's initial roll flagged about 31,000 potentially liable properties, versus the roughly 10,000 officials had projected. That gap set off a backlash, and I wanted to separate the policy from the implementation.On the policy, I come down in favor. High-value second homes are actually a really sensible tax base, because they represent concentrated, largely immobile wealth. That's the key word—immobile. A wealthy person's labor income or investments can pick up and leave, but a condo can't reincorporate in Delaware or establish residency in West Palm Beach. It just sits there, and its value depends overwhelmingly on the city around it—the transit, the sanitation, the parks, the public safety, the cultural institutions. So a well-calibrated surcharge is really just asking people who hold significant, location-keyed wealth to return a share of the value the city itself creates and preserves. Across the OECD, the top wealth quintile holds roughly three-quarters of secondary-real-estate wealth, so this is a genuinely progressive base, and economists generally find recurring taxes on immovable property are among the least damaging to growth.Where I get critical is the data and the process. That 31,000-property list isn't a final bill—it's a preliminary screening pool, and many of those owners will be winnowed out. But the size of it exposes how hard it is for City Hall to tell a true second home from a rental, a family residence, or a property held in trust, using fragmented government records. Property records can identify an expensive apartment; they're much worse at revealing who's actually sleeping in it, and when. My core recommendation is transparency: every formal notice should include a plain-language reason code explaining exactly why a property was flagged and what records produced that conclusion, and the city should publish aggregate data on how many determinations are screened out, appealed, reversed, and upheld. The burden of the government's record gaps shouldn't fall on homeowners forced to rebut an unexplained conclusion. So my bottom line is that a second-home surcharge can be progressive, economically sound, and administratively workable—but only if the government is willing to show, clearly, whom it means to tax and how it got there. Make the first two years a genuinely transparent implementation period, and the policy earns its legitimacy before the real revenue arrives.New York City's Second-Home Tax Is Good Policy With a Data Issue | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Sonia Sotomayor Advances to the Supreme CourtOn July 28, 2009, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, sending her to the full Senate, which confirmed her the following week. With that confirmation she became the first Hispanic justice—and only the third woman—ever to serve on the Court.Her path to the bench was the stuff of American mythology, and it was central to her nomination. Born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, raised in a housing project, diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at seven and losing her father at nine, she went on to Princeton and Yale Law School, then worked as a Manhattan prosecutor before becoming a federal trial judge and later a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. As a district judge, she famously issued the injunction that ended the 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike. Her confirmation fight, though, turned heavily on a single phrase from an earlier speech—her remark that a “wise Latina” might, with the richness of her experiences, sometimes reach a better conclusion than someone without them. Critics called it bias; supporters called it an honest acknowledgment that lived experience shapes judgment.In the years since, Sotomayor has become one of the Court's most forceful liberal voices, known for pointed dissents on race, criminal justice, and—fittingly for today—the very “shadow docket” at the center of our lead story. She has been among the sharpest critics of the Court deciding major questions through emergency orders with little briefing and no argument. The significance of July 28, 2009 is both symbolic and substantive: symbolic, in that a woman from a Bronx housing project reached the pinnacle of the American legal system and expanded who Americans see reflected on their highest court; and substantive, in that she has spent her tenure insisting the Court explain itself and show its work—an insistence that lands with particular weight in a week when the justices are again being asked to make consequential law on the emergency docket.The Trump administration has escalated its fight over mail-in voting all the way to the Supreme Court, asking the justices on an emergency basis to let its executive order take effect nationwide. This is the direct sequel to yesterday's story: after the First Circuit refused on Saturday to lift the injunction blocking key parts of the March order, the Justice Department went straight to the high Court, asking it to put that injunction on hold while the litigation continues. The order directs federal agencies to build voter-eligibility lists and to restrict Postal Service delivery of ballots not tied to those lists; a coalition of 23 states and D.C. argues the President simply lacks authority to impose federal rules on elections that the Constitution assigns to states and to Congress. What's notable here is the vehicle. This is an emergency application—part of what critics call the “shadow docket,” where the Court decides consequential questions quickly, often with little briefing and no full argument. Regular listeners will remember the shadow docket as a recurring concern precisely because it lets the Court make major law in the shadows. The justices have told the states to respond by August 3, so a decision could come fast. The significance is that one of the most consequential election-administration questions in years—decided against the administration twice below—is now in the hands of a Supreme Court being asked to act on an emergency timeline, months before the midterms.Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow mail-in ballot restrictions | ReutersWashington Post · CNBCJohnson & Johnson has announced a $5.5 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming its talc products caused ovarian cancer—a deal that could finally close out more than a decade of litigation. The settlement would cover roughly 69,000 cases consolidated in New Jersey federal court plus related state cases, amounting to about 99.75% of the remaining talc claims. If you were with us last week, the timing is impossible to miss: just days ago, the federal magistrate judge overseeing those 69,000 cases cast serious doubt on whether the plaintiffs could even prove specific causation, ordering them to explain why their claims shouldn't be dismissed. Days later, J&J puts $5.5 billion on the table. That sequence is a lesson in how litigation leverage works—a favorable evidentiary signal can push a defendant toward a global resolution on its own terms, or embolden it, depending on the read. The mechanics matter: the deal needs acceptance by 95% of the ovarian-cancer claimants and approval from the judge overseeing the federal litigation. And notably, J&J isn't conceding anything—its litigation chief called the claims “meritless,” and the company still denies its talc caused cancer, though it pulled talc-based baby powder from U.S. and Canadian shelves back in 2020. The significance is that after years of trials, appeals, and two failed attempts to offload the liability through bankruptcy, J&J is choosing certainty and closure over continued combat—paying billions to make a decade of litigation risk go away, without ever admitting its product was dangerous.Johnson & Johnson announces $5.5 billion settlement of talc lawsuits | ReutersCBS News · Bloomberg LawA major trial has opened in Nashville, where the state of Tennessee is telling a jury that Meta knew its Instagram platform was harming teenagers and buried the evidence to protect its profits. In opening statements for what's expected to be a seven-week trial in state court, Tennessee's lawyers said Meta's own researchers repeatedly flagged that some teens were using the platform compulsively—linked to eating disorders, depression, and self-harm—yet the company declined to disable engagement features like autoplay, notifications, and infinite scroll, which the state says were designed to keep teens hooked and maximize the ads they saw. Meta's lawyer countered that the company has been transparent about the risks teens face and about the dangerous content it works to find and remove. The legal theory here should sound familiar—it echoes the playbook used against Big Tobacco: the argument that a company's own internal research proves it knew about the harm and chose profit anyway. That's powerful evidence if the jury believes it, which is likely why, according to reporting, there's already been a fight over whether Meta's lawyers tried to keep some of that internal research out. This connects to threads we've followed all month, from the multistate suit seeking enormous penalties to the individual bellwether cases. The significance is that these harm-to-teens claims are now being tested in front of an actual jury, and the outcome will shape how Meta and its peers value the risk—and how aggressively other states and plaintiffs press similar cases.Meta disregarded its own research on teen harm, Tennessee tells jury | ReutersAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I use a striking data point—the Miami metro area's cost of living has reportedly now surpassed greater New York City's—to make a case about how we misunderstand what it means to call a state “low tax.” My core argument is that focusing on a single, highly visible tax like the income tax gives you a badly incomplete picture of whether a place is actually affordable, and for whom.Here's the logic. Florida markets itself relentlessly on having no personal income tax, and rankings like the Tax Foundation's competitiveness index put Florida near the top and New York dead last largely on that basis. But I argue that conflates three very different claims: that Florida collects less through income taxes, that households there bear lower total costs, and that residents end up better off. Only the first is clearly true. The costs a state doesn't cover through an income tax don't vanish—they get shifted, recovered through other levies, or pushed into the private market. It's the same principle as a restaurant that offers “free” parking: the cost of that parking is just baked into the price of the food. When Florida forgoes an income tax, residents still pay—through sales and property taxes, fees, sky-high insurance premiums, and services they have to buy privately that other states provide publicly. And because the income tax is the most progressive major revenue source a state has, replacing it with all of that tends to shift the burden down the income ladder.The comparison I keep coming back to is the everyday cost that a public system absorbs in New York but a family pays out of pocket in Florida. New York guarantees every four-year-old a free, full-day pre-K seat; Florida's program funds about 540 instructional hours—roughly three hours a day—leaving working parents to cover the rest. New York's subsidized transit lets many households skip a car entirely. None of these private substitutes—an insurer, a toll road, a childcare provider—charges you less because you earn less, the way an income tax does. So here's the distributional punchline of my piece: Florida's model is a genuinely great deal if you make ten million dollars a year, because avoiding the income tax dwarfs everything else. But for the merely affluent professional making a few hundred thousand—and certainly for middle- and lower-income households—those insurance bills, tuition payments, and housing costs can quietly eat the whole “tax savings.” My bottom line is that any honest discussion of tax competitiveness has to start with comprehensive household-burden metrics across income levels, not a single headline rate—because “low tax” and “affordable” are not the same thing, and treating them as if they were lets officials sell breaks for the wealthy as broad affordability wins.Miami's Cost of Living Shows Income Tax's Limits as a Metric | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: The Senate Rejects Court-PackingOn July 22, 1937, the United States Senate rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan to reorganize—critics said “pack”—the Supreme Court, voting 70 to 20 to send the bill to a quiet death. It was a stinging defeat for a president at the height of his popularity, delivered by his own party, and it settled a constitutional question that still shapes how we think about the independence of the judiciary.The background was a collision between the New Deal and the Court. Through the mid-1930s, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court had struck down key pieces of Roosevelt's economic program as unconstitutional. Frustrated after his landslide 1936 reelection, FDR proposed legislation that would have let him appoint a new justice for every sitting justice over the age of seventy—which, not coincidentally, would have allowed him to add up to six new justices and swamp the opposition. He framed it as a matter of efficiency and helping overworked elderly judges, but nobody was fooled; it was a naked attempt to change the Court's decisions by changing its membership.The plan backfired, and the reasons are the lesson. Even senators who supported the New Deal recoiled at the precedent—if this president could enlarge the Court to get the rulings he wanted, so could the next one, and the Court's independence would become a fiction. Meanwhile, the Court itself defused the crisis: in the spring of 1937, Justice Owen Roberts began voting to uphold New Deal legislation, the famous “switch in time that saved nine,” which took some of the urgency out of FDR's demand. The significance of July 22, 1937 is that it established a durable, if unwritten, constitutional norm—that the size of the Supreme Court is essentially off-limits as a tool for a president to overpower rulings he dislikes. The number nine isn't in the Constitution, but the bipartisan rebuke of court-packing helped make it feel almost as if it were.An analysis of the closely watched lawsuit by Meta employees over AI-driven layoffs highlights a hard truth: even when workers suspect an algorithm decided their fate, proving it is enormously difficult. To recap, 26 current and former Meta employees sued, alleging the company's internal AI tools flagged them for termination because they have disabilities or took protected medical, parental, or family leave. Their theory is mechanically specific: because tools like the “Metamate” system scored employees partly on data such as keystroke activity, workers who were lawfully out on leave generated fewer data points and were disproportionately ranked as low-value. Meta cut roughly 8,000 people—about ten percent of its workforce—and says humans, not machines, made the decisions. Here's why these cases are so hard to win. Anti-discrimination law generally requires the worker to show the employer's decision was tainted by a protected characteristic, but the employee usually has almost no visibility into how the AI actually worked—the models, the training data, and the weighting are the company's closely held secrets. On top of that, many employees have signed arbitration agreements, funneling their claims out of open court and into a private process that's harder to see into and to appeal. The significance is that this appears to be the first case of its kind against a major U.S. company, and it exposes a growing gap: as employers hand more consequential decisions to opaque algorithms, the legal tools workers have to challenge those decisions—built for an era of human managers—may not be up to the job of proving what the machine did.Analysis: Meta employees' lawsuit shows that if AI fires you, proving it is the hard part | ReutersA split panel of the D.C. Circuit has struck down a long-standing National Labor Relations Board doctrine that protected unions after a business changes hands, ruling that it conflicts with federal labor law. The doctrine at issue is the “successor bar,” and it works like this: when a company is acquired and a new employer takes over, that employer generally cannot challenge or withdraw recognition from the existing union for a reasonable period—about six months—giving the union and workers a window of stability to bargain with their new boss. The court held that this Board-created rule isn't consistent with the National Labor Relations Act. What makes this ruling bigger than one labor doctrine is the tool the court used to get there. The decision applies the Supreme Court's 2024 Loper Bright ruling, which overturned the decades-old Chevron doctrine and ended the requirement that courts defer to a federal agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. Without that deference, the D.C. Circuit felt free to substitute its own reading of the labor law for the NLRB's. This is exactly the dynamic I wrote about in my Bloomberg column last week in the tax context—the death of Chevron doesn't erase statutory ambiguity, it just moves the power to resolve it from agencies to courts. The significance is that we're now watching that shift play out across the administrative state: settled agency doctrines, some decades old, are suddenly vulnerable to being reinterpreted by judges, and here the immediate losers are unions and the workers who counted on a bargaining foothold after a merger.US court says longstanding NLRB rule on post-merger union bargaining is invalid | ReutersA federal judge has temporarily blocked the administration from stripping work authorization from tens of thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants with Temporary Protected Status. U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton in Boston sided with a coalition of immigrant-rights groups and labor unions, halting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from moving ahead with a set of policies while he weighs a longer-term pause; he said he'll rule by August 5. Here's the stakes and the legal frame. A work permit—formally, an employment authorization document—is what lets many immigrants lawfully hold a job while their asylum case or protected status is pending. Yanking it doesn't just threaten deportation down the line; it immediately jeopardizes people's livelihoods and their employers' workforces. The contested policies were designed to implement immigration restrictions Congress enacted last year as part of the administration's signature tax-and-spending law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The plaintiffs argue USCIS is implementing those provisions in ways that exceed what the law allows and skip required procedures. A temporary block like this one preserves the status quo—keeping people employed—while the court decides whether the government followed the rules. The significance connects to a theme we keep returning to: courts serving as a check on how fast and how far the executive can move in reshaping immigration, insisting that even policies rooted in a real act of Congress still have to be implemented lawfully and with proper process.US judge blocks Trump administration from stripping immigrants of work permits | ReutersAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a self-inflicted mess in California: lawmakers scrambling to rework a business tax-credit cap that they apparently didn't realize would kneecap Hollywood film studios. My core argument is that California is directionally right to resist subsidy bidding wars, but wrong to rewrite the economics of credits it has already issued after companies have started relying on them.Here's what happened. Since 2024, California has capped the total tax reduction a business can take from all its credits at $5 million a year. That cap was set to expire after 2026—right as productions were going to start claiming credits under a newly expanded film incentive the state had just touted as a centerpiece of keeping film jobs in California. Instead, a bill called SB 122 extended the $5 million limit through 2029 and then converts it to the greater of $5 million or 70% of taxes owed. The part that really gets me is the admission underneath it: lawmakers passed a $351.7 billion budget without apparently understanding how this cap would interact with the film credit they'd just enlarged. As one assemblymember candidly put it, “I'm not sure who knew what about what.” It looks like the cap was really aimed at large research-and-development credit stockpiles, and film credits just got caught in the crossfire.My argument is that the distinction between prospective and retroactive matters enormously here. It's one thing for California to decide, going forward, that future subsidies will be smaller or conditioned—that's legitimate fiscal discipline, and I don't think Hollywood should get to dictate tax policy just by threatening to decamp to Georgia. But it's another thing entirely to change the timing and practical value of credits after studios have already committed workers, facilities, and financing in reliance on the old rules. When a state does that, it makes itself a less credible counterparty, and it quietly reduces the value of every future incentive it offers, because businesses will start discounting California's promises for legislative risk. So my prescription is targeted: protect the film credits already awarded under the prior rules, keep a real limit on the big accumulated R&D credits that were the actual target, and replace the blunt across-the-board cap with rules tailored to how these very different credits actually work. California doesn't have to choose between fiscal discipline and keeping its word—its tax policy can be skeptical, but its promises should still mean something.California's Business Tax Credit Cap Needs More Targeted Changes | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: The Sedition Act of 1798On July 14, 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act, the most notorious of the four laws known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to write, print, utter, or publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government of the United States, the Congress, or the President—with the intent to defame them or bring them into disrepute. In plain terms, it criminalized criticism of the government.The context was a Federalist administration, under President John Adams, gripped by fear of France and of domestic dissent, and eager to silence the opposition press aligned with Thomas Jefferson's Republicans. And that's exactly how it was used. Federal prosecutors went after Republican newspaper editors and even a sitting congressman, securing convictions for the crime of harsh political speech. Notably, the Act was written to expire in 1801—conveniently, the moment Adams's term would end—so that it could be wielded against his critics but would not outlive his own hold on power.The reaction was fierce and consequential. Jefferson and James Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions arguing the Act was unconstitutional, and the ensuing backlash helped sweep Jefferson into the presidency in 1800; once in office, he pardoned those convicted under it. The Sedition Act was never tested at the Supreme Court, but history rendered its verdict. More than a century and a half later, in New York Times v. Sullivan, the Court looked back and declared that the Act's assault on free expression had been repudiated “in the court of history,” using it as a touchstone for modern First Amendment law. The lesson of July 14, 1798 endures: laws that punish criticism of the government are almost always tools of the powerful against their critics—and a free press is most necessary precisely when the state would prefer it silent.Federal prosecutors have issued subpoenas seeking to compel four New York Times journalists to testify before a Manhattan grand jury, part of a leak investigation into the paper's reporting on security concerns surrounding President Trump's flight on the new Qatari-donated Air Force One. Federal agents delivered some of the subpoenas to the reporters' homes. Here's the legal terrain. There is no absolute federal reporter's privilege—the Supreme Court held decades ago that the First Amendment doesn't categorically shield journalists from grand jury subpoenas—but the Justice Department has long operated under internal guidelines that made going after reporters a last resort. Those guardrails matter here, because in 2025 Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded the Biden-era policy that had sharply limited subpoenas against journalists, restoring broader authority to pursue them. The Times says it will fight, and can ask a court to quash the subpoenas as overbroad, issued in bad faith, or violating the First Amendment. The significance is the pressure this puts on newsgathering: when the government can subpoena reporters to unmask their sources, sources stop talking, and the kind of national-security reporting at issue here gets harder to do. Press-freedom groups warn this administration has reached for subpoenas and search warrants against journalists—at the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal—more freely than its predecessors.Explainer: Can prosecutors compel New York Times journalists to testify in leak probe? | ReutersA federal judge has voided President Trump's roughly $1.78 billion settlement with the IRS, delivering a scathing rebuke and referring his lawyers for possible discipline. The backstory is unusual. Trump sued his own administration in January over the leak of his tax returns, and by late May had reached a deal with the IRS to create an “anti-weaponization” fund and to “forever bar” the government from any action related to his past tax returns—protection extending to his family and businesses. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams found the whole thing was a setup. The core legal defect is the absence of what courts call adverseness. Federal courts can only decide genuine “cases or controversies”—real disputes between opposing parties. Here, Judge Williams wrote, “there was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail,” because Trump was effectively suing himself, with his own Justice Department on the other side agreeing to lose. She found the case was brought for an improper purpose: to get a court's stamp of legitimacy on a settlement with no basis in law or fact. She sanctioned Trump's attorneys and referred one, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar, and suggested Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche should face discipline too. The significance is a court refusing to be used as a rubber stamp—insisting that its legitimacy can't be borrowed to bless a collusive deal dressed up as litigation.US judge voids Trump's settlement with IRS | ReutersA federal appeals court has revived more than 500 private lawsuits against Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, alleging that acetaminophen use during pregnancy caused autism and ADHD in children—and here it's worth being clear about the science before the law. There is no firm scientific evidence that Tylenol causes autism or ADHD. The most rigorous recent research, including a large Swedish sibling-comparison study of millions of children, found no causal link once you control for genetic and environmental factors shared within families; mainstream medical bodies continue to regard acetaminophen as one of the safer pain and fever options in pregnancy, and untreated high fevers carry their own real risks. So this ruling is not a finding that Tylenol is dangerous. What the Second Circuit actually decided was narrower and procedural: that the trial judge had wrongly excluded the plaintiffs' expert witnesses. Under the rules governing expert testimony, judges act as “gatekeepers,” admitting expert opinion only if it rests on reliable methodology. The district court had tossed the plaintiffs' experts as unreliable; the appeals court, per Judge Guido Calabresi, said their methods reflected approaches other scientists use and amounted to “acceptable interpretations of scientific evidence where scientists may, and in fact do, disagree.” Crucially, the court stressed it was not deciding whether Tylenol actually causes these conditions. The significance is about who weighs contested science—the ruling lets juries, not just judges, hear the dispute, which is a real win for the plaintiffs procedurally even though the underlying causation case remains, on the current evidence, weak.US appeals court revives private lawsuits linking Tylenol to autism, ADHD | ReutersAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on a counterintuitive idea: that big corporate taxpayers may come to miss the boring, predictable world of administrative tax law now that the Supreme Court has overruled Chevron deference. My argument, in short, is that a weaker IRS and Treasury is not the unalloyed win a lot of multinationals assume it is.Here's the setup. For forty years, under Chevron, courts deferred to a federal agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. With Chevron gone, courts no longer have to defer to Treasury's reading of the tax code just because the statute is vague and the agency has expertise. A lot of corporate taxpayers cheered that—less agency power sounds like more freedom. But my point is that killing Chevron did nothing to remove the underlying ambiguity in the tax code; it just moved the job of resolving that ambiguity to a different desk. And there are only two other desks it can land on, and I don't love either one for a company that wants predictability.The first desk belongs to the courts. If Treasury can't issue as many binding, prospective rules, then more of these questions get resolved through litigation—case by case, on particular records, often years after the transactions are done. Courts are built to handle controversies, not to administer a global corporate tax system. The Coca-Cola transfer-pricing fight is the stress test I point to: a company may win a great refund that way, but you can't organize a multinational's affairs around the hope that every ambiguous question turns into a bespoke judicial adventure. The second desk belongs to Congress, which is the more democratically satisfying answer—Congress writes the code and is politically accountable. But in practice Congress moves slowly and episodically, usually only when tax changes ride along on some bigger budget deal. By the time Congress fixes an international tax problem, the business model that created it has been reorganized twice and pivoted to something involving AI.So the core of my argument is that corporate taxpayers need to distinguish between a useful litigation win and a stable legal environment—those two things don't always travel together. A bad but clear rule can be modeled and planned around; an ambiguous rule, as I put it, isn't really a rule, it's a threat in the shape of a Treasury notice. My prescription is that Congress should make clearer, more deliberate delegations where technical administration is unavoidable—transfer pricing, international tax, anti-abuse rules—and that Treasury should do a post-Chevron audit of its own regulations to flag where the code is asking too much of administration and too little of legislation. Because the real choice here isn't between IRS power and taxpayer freedom. It's between prospective administration and retroactive improvisation—and multinationals may get their wish, see the IRS diminished, and then find themselves stuck with rules everyone knows are broken but no one can fix.Big Corporate Taxpayers Need More Clarity in a Post-Chevron World | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Sandra Day O'Connor Nominated to the Supreme CourtOn July 7, 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced that he was nominating Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court of the United States. If confirmed, she would become the first woman ever to serve on the Court in its then-191-year history. The Senate confirmed her later that summer by a vote of 99 to 0, and she took her seat in September 1981.O'Connor's path to the Court was, in its own way, a commentary on the barriers women faced in the legal profession. She had graduated near the top of her class at Stanford Law School in 1952—ahead of, among others, William Rehnquist, who would one day be her Chief Justice—and yet law firms in California would not hire her as a lawyer. One offered her a job as a legal secretary. She built her career instead in public service and in Arizona politics, eventually rising to become the majority leader of the Arizona state senate, the first woman in the country to hold such a post, before moving to the bench as a state judge. When Reagan, who had promised during his campaign to appoint a woman to the Court, chose her, he was reaching past the federal appellate judiciary—which had almost no women on it—into state government.On the Court, O'Connor became famous as a pragmatic, case-by-case decision-maker who resisted sweeping rules, and for roughly a quarter century she sat at the ideological center, casting decisive votes on abortion, affirmative action, campaign finance, religion, and the limits of federal power. Her approach frustrated those who wanted bright-line doctrines from either side, but it made her, for a generation, arguably the most powerful jurist in the country—the swing vote whose reasoning lower courts and litigants had to anticipate.Her nomination matters in legal history not only because it broke a barrier that had stood since 1789, but because of what came after it. Once one woman had sat on the Court and served with distinction, the question was no longer whether a woman could do the job but why it had taken so long. O'Connor herself was characteristically understated about the symbolism, insisting that she wanted to be judged on the quality of her arguments rather than her place in history. But the two are not really separable. The fact that a brilliant lawyer could be turned away from every firm that interviewed her, and then go on to become the deciding vote on the highest court in the land, is a reminder of how much talent the profession wasted for how long—and of how quickly a barrier that seems permanent can fall once someone is finally allowed through it.Meta has disclosed that four states are seeking as much as $1.4 trillion in penalties heading into an August trial over claims that the company deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young users. The figure—close to Meta's entire market value of around $1.5 trillion—came out in a court filing in which Meta argued the number is wildly excessive and, in its words, “has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement.”California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are among the states suing Meta, alleging that the company engineered features to keep teenagers compulsively engaged—infinite scroll, autoplay, manipulative notifications—while publicly downplaying the harm to young users' mental health. The case is set for trial in Oakland in August. The eye-popping penalty number comes from how state consumer-protection laws are structured: they typically set a fixed statutory fine per violation, and the states arrive at $1.4 trillion by multiplying that per-violation fine by an enormous number of alleged violations, one for roughly every affected young user, across years of conduct.Think about how that math works and why it produces such a staggering figure. If a law says you owe, say, a few thousand dollars per violation, that sounds modest—until the “violations” are counted in the tens or hundreds of millions because each affected teenager, each exposure, is its own violation. Statutes written to punish a corner store for mislabeling a product start to generate astronomical numbers when applied to a platform that touches nearly every teenager in a state. That's the tension at the heart of this filing: the states say they're simply applying the law as written, and Meta says applying it that way produces a number no legislature could possibly have intended.The significance here isn't really the trillion-dollar headline, which almost no one expects to be the actual outcome. It's what the fight over the number reveals. Penalty calculations like this are leverage—they shape settlement negotiations and signal how seriously a court might treat the underlying conduct. The case is one of the most important tests yet of whether decades-old consumer-protection statutes can be turned against the design choices of social media platforms, and whether “we built it to be addictive” can be treated as a deceptive or unfair business practice. However the penalty question resolves, the theory of liability is the thing to watch.Meta says US states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties in August youth safety trial | ReutersA coalition of twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general has come out against the Trump administration's plan to impose tariffs of up to 12.5% on 59 countries and the European Union, tariffs the administration justifies as a response to trade in goods made with forced labor. The attorneys general, led by California's Rob Bonta, call the levies unlawful and describe them as a pretext to resurrect tariff authority the Supreme Court has already rejected.Tariffs are taxes on imports, and the Constitution gives the power to levy taxes primarily to Congress. Presidents can impose tariffs, but only when Congress has delegated them that authority through a specific statute, and each of those statutes comes with its own conditions and limits. Earlier tariffs from this administration were struck down when courts found the President had stretched his delegated power past what the law allowed. Now the administration is invoking forced-labor concerns as the legal basis for a new round. The Democratic attorneys general argue that this is the same overreach in a new costume—that dressing tariffs up as a human-rights measure doesn't cure the underlying problem, which is that the President is claiming a taxing power Congress never handed him.Consider the practical reach of what's proposed. The attorneys general say these tariffs would hit roughly 99% of imports. A tariff, whatever its stated purpose, is ultimately paid by importers and passed along to consumers in higher prices. So the debate isn't only an abstract argument about the separation of powers—it's about who gets to decide to raise the cost of nearly everything Americans buy from abroad, and whether that decision belongs to one person in the executive branch or to Congress. The forced-labor rationale is genuinely important on its own terms; forced labor in global supply chains is a real and serious problem. But the attorneys general are making a structural point: even a good goal doesn't authorize a power the law doesn't grant.The significance is that this is another front in an ongoing constitutional struggle over how far presidential trade power extends. The attorneys general are signaling they will litigate, and the courts have already shown, in striking down the earlier tariffs, that they are willing to police the boundary. Watch for whether this dispute follows the same path to the Supreme Court, because the answer will shape not just this set of tariffs but how much unilateral economic power any president can claim by pointing to a sufficiently sympathetic justification.Democratic AGs oppose Trump plan to impose tariffs on forced labor concerns | ReutersThe U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has abandoned an unusual set of trademark applications it had filed to register the phrase “Board of Peace” on behalf of President Trump, walking away from the filings after sharp criticism from congressional Democrats and questions about whether the agency had any legal authority to file them in the first place. The government filed an express abandonment of the applications, ending what one member of Congress called an unlawful venture.A trademark protects a brand—a word or logo used to identify the source of goods or services in commerce. Normally, a person or company files their own application, or has their lawyer file it for them. What happened here is that the Director of the Patent and Trademark Office, the head of the very agency that examines and grants trademarks, filed applications to register “Board of Peace” on the President's behalf. And that raised an immediate legal problem: the Lanham Act, the federal trademark statute, generally forbids filing an application on behalf of another person unless you are that person's attorney—and the Director specifically was not acting as Trump's lawyer.Think about why that rule exists and why the arrangement looked so troubling. The agency that decides who gets a trademark is supposed to be a neutral referee. When the head of that agency personally files an application for the President, the referee has stepped onto the field to play for one team. Even setting aside the specific statutory bar, it collapses the distinction between the government official who grants rights and the private party who receives them. Critics questioned not just the legality but the transparency of the whole exercise—who authorized it, on what authority, and why the trademark office was branding a presidential initiative at all.The significance is less about the phrase “Board of Peace” and more about the guardrails around a powerful administrative agency. Trademark law has technical rules about who may file and on whose behalf, and those rules are part of what keeps the system credible. The abandonment—prompted by oversight from the House Judiciary Committee's Democrats—shows those guardrails still functioning: an irregular filing was flagged, its legal basis questioned, and the agency backed down before a court had to intervene. It's a small episode in the scheme of things, but a clean illustration of how ordinary statutory limits and legislative oversight can check an official who reaches beyond his role.US trademark office abandons ‘Board of Peace' branding rights applications | ReutersIn my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on the administration's threat to hit countries that have digital services taxes with 100% tariffs. My argument, in short, is that this is an ill-advised response—it isn't really a defense of the U.S. tax system at all, but an attempt to use consumer-funded trade pain to shield big tech from foreign tax bills.Let me set up the problem. A digital services tax, or DST, is a levy some foreign governments impose on the local digital revenue of companies like Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, or Netflix. These firms can earn enormous revenue from users in a country without ever having the kind of physical presence that the traditional international tax system was built to tax. Netflix can stream into a jurisdiction, pull revenue out of it, and never owe local tax. So foreign governments invented DSTs to capture some of that. The U.S. response, apparently, is to threaten tariffs on that country's completely unrelated goods until the tax goes away. The logic is that if Google has to pay France a modest tax on its digital revenue, someone in Cleveland might have to pay more for their champagne.I want to be fair to both sides here, because I actually think both have a point. DSTs genuinely deserve criticism—they're blunt instruments that tax gross revenue rather than profit, which means they can overtax low-margin business, and they're often designed with revenue thresholds conveniently set to catch every big U.S. tech firm while sparing domestic companies. So the U.S. complaint that these taxes are tailored to skim revenue from American firms is not baseless. But foreign governments also have a legitimate grievance: the old international tax rules really do struggle to tax digital businesses that earn a fortune from local users without setting foot in the country.Here's where I think the tariff response falls apart. A blanket 100% tariff doesn't fix any of a DST's design flaws. It doesn't determine where digital value is actually created, it doesn't allocate taxing rights, and it doesn't even fall on the foreign government. Tariffs are paid by importers, and most of that cost gets passed along to consumers. With last year's tariffs, as much as ninety percent of the economic burden landed on domestic firms and consumers. So think about how strange this is as tax policy: the companies facing the foreign tax are the largest and richest technology firms in the world, but the companies and consumers who'd actually feel the tariff are unrelated domestic players. No one is literally cutting Meta a reimbursement check, but the effect is the same—American consumers and importers become the leverage used to protect Silicon Valley from foreign tax exposure.And the bilateral approach has a nasty structural problem. The administration seems emboldened by the Canada episode—Canada moved to collect its DST, the U.S. threatened trade consequences, and Canada backed down. The apparent lesson the administration drew is that a big enough threat can make any foreign tax disappear. But if the U.S. treats tariff threats as a standing veto over other countries' tax policy, then every DST becomes a bilateral confrontation—France, Spain, Italy, the UK, one hostage negotiation after another—and it invites everyone else to adopt the same playbook the moment U.S. firms need something from them.So what I argue for instead is a binding, multilateral framework, and I lay out three pieces it would need. First, countries with DSTs agree to repeal them once a replacement is in place—the goal is to swap the ad hoc levies for something coherent, not stack a new rule on top of them. Second, market jurisdictions get, and help design, a predictable formula for their share of taxing rights over digital multinationals—something administrable and tied to a defensible theory of where digital profits are earned. And third, the U.S. keeps its powder dry: retaliation stays in reserve for countries that refuse the framework or discriminate against U.S. firms, applied with due process and proportionality, not as a one-size-fits-all tariff bazooka every time a foreign tax annoys Silicon Valley. Until we build that kind of system, the DST fight is just going to keep coming back.US Tariff Threat Is an Ill-Advised Digital Services Tax Reaction | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

As water scarcity intensifies across the Colorado River Basin, public attention has increasingly focused on data centers, AI, and the growing demand for resources in the Sun Belt. But are these technologies really driving the region's water challenges—or is the story more complicated?In this episode of Ten Across Conversations, host Duke Reiter speaks with water policy expert Sarah Porter about the realities behind water use in the American West. Porter explains why shortages on the Colorado River are rooted as much in decades of over-allocation and management decisions as in climate change, and why common assumptions about population growth, urban development, and industrial water consumption often miss the mark.The conversation explores the rise of data centers, the public concerns surrounding their water and energy demands, and the challenges communities face in balancing economic development with long-term resilience. Porter also offers a candid assessment of Arizona's water future, the difficult choices ahead, and why protecting groundwater, improving efficiency, and developing new water supplies will be critical for sustaining growth in an increasingly arid region.A thoughtful and timely discussion about water, technology, public perception, and the decisions that will shape the future of the Ten Across geography. Relevant Articles and Resources  The Kyl Center for Water Policy at the Morrison Institute Arizona Water Blueprint Report: From Copper Cattle and Cotton to Chips and Cloud Computing: Large Water Uses in Central Arizona. (Kyl Center for Water Policy. February 2026) Arizona Becomes Bellwether In Debate Over Data Centers' Growing Demand Of Power And Water. (International Business Times. June 18 2026) Arizona Data Center Tax Incentive Pause Signed by Governor Hobbs. (Bloomberg Tax. June 15 2026)Tensions Are Rising Among States That Rely on the Colorado River. (New York Times. June 15, 2026)Groundwater supplies in the Colorado River basin are falling fast. Is there a solution? (WBUR. June 15, 2026) What's more important, Arizona, building houses or water? (Rhett Larson for The Arizona Republic, May 2026) Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts Why 2026 Will Decide the Future of Water in the West, with Rhett Larson (June 4, 2026) The Hard Decisions Ahead for Lower Basin Colorado River States with guest Terry Goddard (December 5, 2025)Latest Deadpool Projections Inject New Urgency into Colorado River Negotiations with guests Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter (September 19, 2025)Understanding Groundwater Risks in the Southwest with Jay Famiglietti (June 6, 2025) Checking in on Tense Colorado River Negotiations with Anne Castle and John Fleck (April 10, 2025) Episode Credits  Host: Duke ReiterAudio Production: Louie DuranResearch and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler 

This Day in Legal History: The Burning of the GaspeeOn this day in 1772, a Royal Navy revenue schooner called HMS Gaspee, captained by a notably overzealous Lieutenant William Duddington, ran aground in shallow water in Narragansett Bay while chasing a Rhode Island packet boat called the Hannah. Within hours of the grounding, roughly sixty Providence merchants, sailors, and “Sons of Liberty” — led by John Brown, one of the wealthiest men in the colony — rowed out under cover of darkness in eight longboats, boarded the Gaspee, shot Duddington, and burned the ship to the waterline. The legal significance lies in what came next. The Crown convened a Royal Commission of Inquiry with authority to ship the perpetrators across the Atlantic for trial in England, bypassing colonial juries entirely, a procedural maneuver that the colonies read as a direct attack on the right to jury trial in the vicinage.The Virginia House of Burgesses responded in March 1773 by forming the first Committee of Correspondence, a sustained intercolonial communication network that became, two years later, the institutional skeleton of the Continental Congress. The Gaspee Affair never produced a single prosecution — the commission could not get the colonial governor or the Rhode Island courts to cooperate, and witness testimony evaporated — but it produced something more durable: the colonial conviction that the Crown's willingness to detour around local juries was itself a constitutional grievance worth organizing against. The right-to-jury-in-the-vicinage point that Madison wrote into the Sixth Amendment seventeen years later is, in a real sense, the Gaspee Affair's longest-lived legacy.The Supreme Court on Monday granted, vacated, and remanded the D.C. Circuit's decision in American Gas Association v. Department of Energy, sending the long-disputed Biden-era Department of Energy efficiency rule on non-condensing residential gas furnaces and commercial water heaters back to the D.C. Circuit “for further consideration in light of the position asserted by the Solicitor General.” That last phrase is the operative one. The new Solicitor General, on behalf of the second Trump administration's DOE, told the Court in late April that the prior administration's reading of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act was, in DOE's current view, wrong, and that the rule effectively bans non-condensing units that millions of homes and small commercial properties were built around. A confessed-error from a new administration doesn't automatically win a case, but the procedural vehicle — a grant-vacate-remand, or “GVR” — is the Court's standard way of saying “go look at this again with the new posture in mind” without resolving the merits itself.The trade-group plaintiffs, led by the American Gas Association and the American Public Gas Association, framed the rule from the start as a de facto product ban dressed up as efficiency standards. The environmental and consumer groups that intervened to defend the rule will get another bite at the apple on remand, but their position is harder when their own client agency has switched sides. Watch the D.C. Circuit's case calendar over the next few weeks for an expedited briefing schedule.Supreme Court Vacates Decision Outlawing Gas Stoves, Water Heaters | NewsBustersSCOTUSblog on Monday published a careful overview of an increasingly organized litigation campaign to ask the Supreme Court to overrule Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The campaign now includes Liberty Counsel, MassResistance, and the Southern Baptist Convention, which last year voted overwhelmingly to urge the Court to reverse the decision. The underlying ground for the push is partly the Court's reasoning in Dobbs four years ago, which gave conservative litigants a road map for unwinding substantive due process precedents, and partly the gradual erosion of public-opinion support for same-sex marriage in one slice of the polling, with Republican support falling from 55 percent in 2022 to 37 percent now. The legal headcount at the Court is, however, the part of the story that is not yet there.Only Justice Thomas has been a consistent vote to revisit Obergefell, having said so in his Dobbs concurrence. Justice Alito, despite being one of Obergefell's original dissenters, recently emphasized in a public speech that he is not suggesting the case should be overruled, citing stare decisis. Justice Gorsuch's dissent in 303 Creative seems to concede that Obergefell is good law and tries instead to carve out specific exceptions to it. None of which is a reason for litigants on the marriage-equality side to relax. The path Dobbs opened up is wider than any single justice's current voting pattern, and the campaign is plainly playing a long game.The next round of test cases on standing and ripeness will start to surface in the lower courts in the next term or two — that is when the campaign's seriousness becomes measurable.The campaign to overrule Obergefell | SCOTUSblogThe third and most constitutionally significant story of the day is one we've been watching: the litigation over President Trump's $400 million ballroom — built on the site of the demolished East Wing — is on track to land in front of the Supreme Court, SCOTUSblog reported Monday. The D.C. Circuit panel that heard the case for more than two hours in late April has not yet ruled, but the questioning made clear that a more substantial opinion is coming and that an appeal to the Court is the likely next stop regardless of which side wins. The legal question is unusually fundamental. The plaintiff, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, argues that the President has no “free-floating” power to construct major federal buildings without an appropriation from Congress, and that the Antideficiency Act and the Public Buildings Act both require the kind of statutory authorization the East Wing ballroom never received.The administration's response, delivered in a tone that several court-watchers described as unusually defiant, has essentially been that construction has “gone too far to be stopped” and that the courts have no role in second-guessing a presidential building decision once the steel is up. The structural separation-of-powers questions here — what does the Appropriations Clause actually constrain, and can a federal court enjoin a President from continuing to build something that is partially constructed — are large enough that the Supreme Court will almost certainly want to take the case if it reaches the high court. Construction, meanwhile, continues. The most likely Supreme Court resolution is a narrow opinion on standing or remedies, with the broader Appropriations Clause questions deferred for another day. We will see.White House ballroom battle may soon arrive at the Supreme Court | SCOTUSblogIn my Bloomberg Tax column this week, I argue that the SALT deduction cap's biggest problem is not that it is unconstitutional, but that it is badly designed. The latest failed challenge, Sims v. United States, involved two New Jersey taxpayers who claimed the cap violated the 10th Amendment, the 16th Amendment, and broader federalism principles. The federal district court rejected those arguments, finding that Congress has broad authority to tax income and decide which deductions are allowed, limited, or denied. My point is that opponents of the SALT cap should stop looking for constitutional defects that courts are unlikely to find and instead focus on forcing Congress to fix the policy it created.I explain that the cap has always been politically loaded: supporters see it as a needed limit on a deduction that benefits many high-income taxpayers in high-tax states, while critics see it as a targeted attack on those states. But unfair or politically motivated tax policy is not automatically unconstitutional. The real weakness, I argue, is the cap's uneven design, especially the pass-through entity tax workaround. Many business owners can effectively get around the cap when state taxes are paid at the entity level, while wage earners, sole proprietors, and many individual taxpayers remain stuck behind it.That creates a serious mismatch: two taxpayers can live in the same state, earn similar income, and face similar state tax burdens, but receive different federal treatment depending on whether one has the right business structure. I argue that this kind of selective relief may be a more promising target for a narrower administrative or legal challenge than another broad constitutional attack on Congress's taxing power. Congress partly recognized the problem when it raised the cap from $10,000 to $40,000, but I note that the fix is temporary, only lightly indexed, and still leaves major structural problems in place. The marriage penalty remains especially glaring because married couples filing jointly do not receive double the cap available to similarly situated unmarried taxpayers.I also criticize the phaseout design because it can create cliffs or marginal-rate spikes that reward tax gamesmanship rather than sound policy. A better fix, in my view, would make the higher cap permanent, index it meaningfully, eliminate the marriage penalty, smooth out the phaseout, and require Treasury to rationalize the treatment of pass-through entity taxes. The lesson from Sims is that courts may uphold the SALT cap, but that does not make it good tax policy. If the cap is unfair, incoherent, or selectively porous, Congress owns that problem.SALT Deduction Cap Falls Short in Design, Not Constitutionality This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Investors are getting a lot more information about an area that's been a mystery in the past: What goes into companies' tax bills. The US, the European Union, and Australia all have new or forthcoming requirements for companies to publicly disclose more details about the makeup of their tax payments—especially where they're paying. That can help investors compare companies and shed light on instances where multinationals might be locating their profits in lower-tax countries to cut their payments. The new requirements are already forcing companies like Meta Platforms Inc., Merck & Co. Inc., and Caterpillar Inc. to disclose that they're making big tax payments in countries like Ireland and Switzerland that have long had a reputation as “tax havens.” Meta paid Ireland $567 million in income taxes last year, according to its first-ever disclosures as part of new US accounting requirements. Still, the different regions' rules differ significantly—in some ways they complement each other, but gaps in information remain. On this week's Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax reporters Jorja Siemons and Michael Rapoport discuss the new sets of rules, how the new disclosures will play out, and how companies are responding to them and in some cases trying to get around them. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Artificial intelligence is putting accounting firm leaders on alert for workers well-versed in using and managing the new tools as the industry invests heavily in modernizing workflows. Firms should be staying attuned to the talent market and updating their salary structures accordingly to both attract early-career workers and retain staff looking to climb the ranks, according to Dominic Piscopo, founder of compensation data analytics firm Big 4 Transparency. They should also be having transparent conversations with their workers so compensation isn't a "black box." "Having transparency in those models and being willing to talk about it with people—not just have this very kind of cold process where a number is thrown out—can make all the difference, even if the number is exactly the same," Piscopo told Bloomberg Tax. Big Four accounting firms—EY, Deloitte, PwC, and KPMG—have started equipping staff with AI tools that promise increased efficiency and improved workflows. The new tech is prompting the industry at large to examine its workforce strategies and pricing models to stay competitive and attract talent. In this week's Talking Tax, Piscopo sat down with Bloomberg Tax reporter Jorja Siemons to discuss how firms and workers alike can navigate the current talent market. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Time is running out to file your taxes to the IRS as the April 15 deadline approaches. But for the IRS, the work is only just beginning and it's off to a rocky start. Elon Musk's Department Government Efficiency in 2025 pressured about a quarter of the IRS's workforce to leave, and the agency is on its seventh leader in the span of a little over a year. The agency also managed during one of the longest shutdowns in US history and a presidential-mandated hiring freeze. That meant the IRS had to change direction for the 2026 filing season. IRS workers from the human resources and technology divisions were told they'd be helping out process tax returns—an unusual move for the agency. Customer service workers at the start of the season weren't fully trained and critical tax season tech also wasn't ready. Bloomberg Tax's Erin Schilling and Erin Slowey spoke with David Schultz about the implications of the decisions of DOGE and what that means for taxpayers. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Lawmakers in both chambers of Congress are taking a closer look at a range of bipartisan IRS administration changes. House tax writers have advanced several pieces of legislation that would fix problems identified by taxpayer advocates and tax professionals. Some have become law. Senate Finance Committee lawmakers, meanwhile, recently introduced a large package that includes dozens of provisions that include digitizing more paper returns, providing more online information about refunds, and enhancing standards for tax return preparers. The interest in tax administration suggests there's a willingness among tax writers to try to take action—the key question is how. The two chambers' different approaches show an emerging disagreement over strategy. On this episode of Talking Tax, host David Schultz talks to Bloomberg Tax reporter Chris Cioffi about how a tax administration legislation has been taking shape, as well as the path forward in Congress. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

This Day in Legal History: NAACP v. AlabamaOn March 17, 1958, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a landmark decision in NAACP v. Alabama, a case that reshaped constitutional protections for civil rights organizations. The dispute arose when the state of Alabama sought to compel the NAACP to disclose its membership lists as part of a legal proceeding. At the time, the NAACP was deeply involved in challenging segregation laws across the South, making its members vulnerable to retaliation and harassment. Alabama argued that it had the authority to demand these records under its corporate registration laws. The NAACP refused, asserting that disclosure would violate its members' constitutional rights.The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, where the central question became whether forced disclosure infringed on the freedom of association. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice John Marshall Harlan II emphasized that privacy in group membership was essential to preserving lawful association. The Court held that Alabama's demand posed a substantial restraint on the ability of individuals to organize and advocate collectively. It recognized that exposure of members' identities could lead to economic reprisal, loss of employment, and even physical danger.Importantly, the Court grounded its reasoning in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, incorporating First Amendment protections against state action. This marked a significant step in expanding constitutional safeguards for civil liberties at the state level. The ruling made clear that states could not use indirect means to suppress lawful advocacy groups. It also strengthened the legal foundation for future civil rights litigation during a critical period in American history.The decision in NAACP v. Alabama remains a cornerstone of First Amendment jurisprudence. It continues to influence cases involving anonymity, privacy, and the right to organize without undue government interference.A federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the federal government's revised childhood vaccine schedule and paused related policy actions, finding the changes likely unlawful. The court concluded that the Department of Health and Human Services departed from longstanding, science-based procedures when issuing the new recommendations. Central to the ruling was the government's apparent sidestepping of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a key expert body that has historically guided vaccine policy.The judge rejected the argument that the health secretary has near-total discretion over vaccine decisions, emphasizing that such authority is still constrained by statutory and procedural requirements. He underscored that courts can review agency actions, particularly when they appear to ignore scientific standards or established processes. The opinion was especially critical of the administration's position that its vaccine guidance was not subject to judicial review, noting that the recommendations carry real legal and practical consequences.The revised schedule itself had scaled back universal recommendations for several vaccines, instead limiting them to certain groups or requiring consultation with a doctor. The court found that these changes could significantly affect liability protections for healthcare providers and insurance coverage obligations.The ruling also raised concerns about potential violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act after the abrupt dismissal and replacement of ACIP members, many of whom reportedly lacked relevant expertise. While the court did not cancel upcoming committee meetings, it halted the appointments of new members and froze future decisions tied to the disputed process.The decision represents a significant check on the administration's approach to public health policymaking, reinforcing that agencies must follow established legal frameworks and rely on qualified expertise. An appeal is expected, and related litigation is already pending in other courts.HHS' Childhood Vaccine Policy Changes Put On Ice - Law360US judge upends Kennedy's overhaul of childhood vaccine policies | ReutersA federal judge in Washington, D.C., is set to hear arguments over whether to halt construction of a $400 million ballroom project at the White House. The dispute centers on a lawsuit brought by preservationists, who argue that the project—built on the site of the demolished East Wing—was launched without proper legal authorization. They are seeking a preliminary injunction to stop construction while the case proceeds.The National Trust for Historic Preservation claims that neither the president nor the National Park Service has the authority to approve such a major structural change without explicit approval from Congress. The group argues that past practice shows Congress typically authorizes significant developments on federal land in Washington.The Trump administration, however, maintains that the project is lawful and does not require specific congressional approval. Government lawyers argue that the ballroom will improve infrastructure, enhance security, and help preserve the main White House building by shifting large events elsewhere. They also contend that the plaintiffs have not met the high legal standard required for an injunction.A federal judge previously denied an earlier request to stop construction, finding the initial legal arguments insufficient. The new hearing will consider revised claims focused more directly on presidential authority and statutory limits.At this stage, the case turns on whether the plaintiffs can show both a likelihood of success on the merits and that immediate harm justifies blocking the project before a final decision is reached.US judge to weigh new bid to halt Trump's $400 million ballroom project | ReutersYou may have heard about the SAVE America Act, and given the attention it's received, it's helpful to clearly lay out what the bill actually does.The SAVE America Act would make significant changes to federal voter registration and election procedures, primarily by requiring proof of U.S. citizenship. The bill amends the National Voter Registration Act to require applicants to present documentary evidence—such as a passport, birth certificate, or certain government-issued identification—before registering to vote in federal elections. It also requires that this proof generally be provided in person, even when registering by mail, though states may create alternative processes for applicants who cannot readily produce documentation.The legislation directs states to verify citizenship status during voter registration and to establish systems for identifying and removing non-citizens from voter rolls. It encourages the use of federal and state databases, including systems maintained by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration, to confirm eligibility. Federal agencies are required to respond quickly to state requests for citizenship verification and to share relevant data across agencies.The bill further mandates that voters present a qualifying photo ID when casting a ballot in federal elections. For in-person voting, the ID must be shown at the polling place, while absentee voters must submit copies of identification with their ballots. Acceptable IDs must generally include both a photograph and an indication of U.S. citizenship, though supplemental documentation may be used in some cases.The bill would effectively bring all the convenience and ease of a trip to the DMV to the ballot box.In addition, the legislation expands enforcement mechanisms. It creates potential criminal liability for election officials who knowingly register individuals without proof of citizenship and allows private lawsuits against officials who fail to enforce the requirements. It also requires states to take ongoing steps to ensure that only eligible citizens remain registered, including removing individuals identified as non-citizens.The bill includes provisions addressing discrepancies in documentation and requires election officials to document the basis for registering individuals who lack standard proof. It also preserves the use of provisional ballots, allowing individuals to vote while their eligibility is later verified. Overall, the measure shifts the federal framework toward stricter documentation, verification, and enforcement standards tied to voter eligibility in federal elections.What is in Trump's bill that requires proof of citizenship to vote? | ReutersText - H.R.7296 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): SAVE America ActThis week, my Bloomberg Tax column examines California's recent crackdown on luxury vehicles registered in Montana to avoid sales tax. The enforcement actions reveal a deeper flaw in California's system: it relies heavily on formal delivery paperwork rather than the actual use of the vehicle. Buyers have been able to exploit this by creating the appearance of out-of-state delivery through inexpensive documentation, even when the cars never leave California. Prosecutors allege that some schemes were remarkably simple, involving little more than fabricated shipping records.The current rule allows residents to avoid sales tax if a vehicle is delivered and kept out of state for 12 months, a policy originally designed for legitimate interstate purchases. However, it has unintentionally created a market for services that help buyers simulate compliance. Entity formation companies, transporters, and storage providers all play a role in generating paperwork that masks in-state use. This has made tax avoidance both accessible and predictable.California has responded with audits, criminal prosecutions, and surveillance tools like license plate readers, but these efforts address symptoms rather than the underlying design problem. A system built on easily manipulated documentation invites abuse. Instead, the column argues that California should adopt a “primary-use” rule, taxing vehicles based on where they are actually driven and stored.Other states already apply similar approaches to aircraft, using objective data like flight logs to determine tax liability. A comparable framework for cars could rely on existing data sources such as toll records, insurance information, and registration patterns. This would allow enforcement to focus on real-world usage rather than paper compliance.Clear thresholds and penalties could further deter avoidance by making enforcement more predictable. While some buyers might still structure legitimate out-of-state ownership, the system would no longer reward purely formalistic schemes. The broader point is that tax policy should reflect economic reality, not paperwork.California's Car Sales Tax Crackdown Calls for Primary-Use Rule This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

There are about five weeks left in tax filing season — the busiest time of year for the IRS and tax preparers. IRS CEO Frank Bisignano told lawmakers earlier this month the tax season has so far been a success, with quick refund turnaround times and a shrinking backlog. That is despite a tumultuous 2025 for the agency, when the IRS lost about a quarter of its workforce to resignation offers, began implementing the GOP's new tax-and-spending law, and managed the fallout of the longest government shutdown in US history. Tom O'Saben, director of tax content and government relations at the National Association of Tax Professionals, said tax preparers also aren't hearing a ton of complaints from clients either. On this episode of Talking Tax, O'Saben joined Bloomberg Tax reporter Erin Slowey to discuss how filing season is going, the impact of changes from the 2025 law, and what to do if you don't have the money to pay taxes by the deadline. "Don't put your head in the sand and say 'I know I am going to owe so I am just not going to file,'" O'Saben said. "That's a bad idea." Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Tax-filing season is well underway, and yet many states are still figuring out whether to conform to or decouple from provisions in last year's GOP-led tax overhaul, especially the deductions and other breaks for corporate taxpayers. The upshot is one of the more complicated filing periods in recent years. Corporate taxpayers are watching which states reject federal tax policy changes, such as those related to immediate expensing for research and development or property investments. Just in the past week, lawmakers in Republican-controlled states like Florida and Democrat-led states like Oregon moved ahead in decoupling from some of those corporate tax provisions to preserve billions of dollars in state revenue. Then there's the unique situation in Washington, DC, where a local law severing the city's tax code from more than a dozen provisions in the 2025 federal tax rewrite was met with Congress's formal disapproval. That set off a dispute between Capitol Hill and city leaders over whether the district's decoupling measure is in effect. (DC officials say it is.) Most of all, corporate taxpayers are looking for clarity from the states as they plan their filings, Scott Roberti, a managing director focusing on state and local tax in EY's national tax practice, says on this week's episode of Talking Tax. Roberti tells Bloomberg Tax editor Benjamin Freed that so far, at least 17 states have issued some sort of guidance on the conformity issue. Roberti hopes the remainder finish up soon in time for the end of filing season and quarter-end accounting. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

The Supreme Court's decision to nix a wide swath of the Trump administration's tariffs comes with some big tax and transfer pricing questions for tax executives as companies battle to collect refunds from the government. The court's 6-3 ruling sets up what would be a messy refund process, though the justices basically said nothing about it, leaving companies to take their claims to court. If the refunds come in, businesses will have to figure out how to apportion funds across subsidiaries —sometimes across borders — without breaking transfer pricing rules, which govern the pricing of affiliate transactions and ultimately determine where taxes are owed. The rules say related-party transfers must be priced as though they were done at arm's length, in the open marketplace. Companies that don't do it right risk a tax agency audit. On this episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax transfer pricing reporter Caleb Harshberger discusses the sticky tax and transfer pricing issues surrounding tariffs and the possibility of refunds. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

This Day in Legal History: Marbury v. MadisonOn February 24, 1803, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Marbury v. Madison, a case that permanently reshaped American constitutional law. The dispute arose after President John Adams appointed several “midnight judges” in the final hours of his administration. One of those appointees, William Marbury, never received his commission because it was not delivered before Thomas Jefferson took office. Jefferson instructed his Secretary of State, James Madison, not to deliver the commission, prompting Marbury to seek relief directly from the Supreme Court.Presiding over the case was Chief Justice John Marshall, whose involvement added a striking layer of irony. Before becoming Chief Justice, Marshall had served as Secretary of State under Adams and had been responsible for sealing the very commissions at issue. In other words, Marshall was now reviewing the legal consequences of actions taken by his former office. Rather than recuse himself, he authored the opinion that would define the Court's authority.Marshall concluded that Marbury had a legal right to his commission but held that the statute granting the Supreme Court power to issue writs of mandamus conflicted with Article III of the Constitution. Because the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, Marshall reasoned, any conflicting statute must be void. In declaring part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 unconstitutional, the Court asserted the power of judicial review for the first time.The decision simultaneously denied Marbury his remedy while expanding the Court's institutional authority. It avoided a direct political confrontation with Jefferson while firmly establishing the judiciary as a co-equal branch of government. What began as a minor political dispute over an undelivered commission became the foundation for the Supreme Court's power to strike down unconstitutional laws.A federal judge has permanently blocked the Justice Department from releasing a prosecutor's report concerning the classified documents case against President Donald Trump. The ruling was issued by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who concluded that making the report public would amount to a “manifest injustice” because the case never went to trial. She reasoned that publishing detailed allegations of criminal conduct without a jury verdict would undermine basic fairness principles.The case had been brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith and accused Trump of unlawfully retaining sensitive national defense materials at his Mar-a-Lago property and obstructing government efforts to recover them. Trump and his co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira, pleaded not guilty and described the prosecution as politically motivated. In 2024, Cannon dismissed the charges, finding that Smith had not been lawfully appointed.After Trump returned to office, the Justice Department supported efforts to keep the report confidential. Although special counsels are typically required to submit reports explaining their charging decisions, Cannon held that releasing this one would conflict with her earlier rulings, including her determination that Smith's appointment was invalid. She also cited concerns about exposing grand jury material.The decision prevents public disclosure of substantial details about one of the four criminal cases Trump faced after leaving office. It follows the Supreme Court's recent decision limiting Trump's tariff authority and marks another significant legal development in the ongoing disputes surrounding his post-presidency investigations.US judge permanently blocks release of report on Trump documents case | ReutersThe chief judges of two major federal appeals courts have announced plans to step back from active service later this year, creating new vacancies for President Donald Trump to fill. Debra Ann Livingston of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Jeffrey Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit both notified the president that they intend to take senior status. Livingston plans to assume senior status on July 1, while Sutton will do so on October 1.Their decisions come ahead of the November midterm elections, when control of the U.S. Senate could shift, potentially complicating confirmation of successors. Because judicial vacancies have been relatively scarce during Trump's second term, the openings present an opportunity to expand his appellate appointments. During his first term, Trump appointed 54 appellate judges, significantly influencing the judiciary's ideological direction.Both judges were originally appointed by President George W. Bush. Livingston, who has served on the Second Circuit since 2007 and became chief judge in 2020, has at times issued notable dissents, including in cases involving LGBTQ workplace protections and congressional subpoenas tied to Trump's business records. Sutton, on the Sixth Circuit since 2003 and chief judge since 2021, has been an influential conservative jurist. He authored a 2014 opinion upholding same-sex marriage bans that the Supreme Court later overturned in Obergefell v. Hodges.Senior status allows eligible judges to continue hearing cases on a reduced basis while enabling the president to nominate full-time replacements. Their departures will hand Trump two high-profile appellate vacancies at a time when few others are available.Two chief US appellate judges to leave active service, handing Trump vacancies | ReutersIn my weekly column for Bloomberg Tax, I examine the Trump administration's proposed 0.125% “land port maintenance tax” and question whether it is truly infrastructure policy or contingency planning after the Supreme Court curtailed its tariff authority. The proposal is framed as a parity measure to mirror the Harbor Maintenance Fee, but I argue the timing is hard to ignore. Just this week, the Court in Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs, reaffirming that Congress controls taxing power absent clear delegation. In my view, that ruling narrows executive trade authority and invites efforts to find alternative mechanisms embedded elsewhere in the customs code.I suggest the land port tax looks like one such alternative. Although labeled a “maintenance” fee, it would be imposed at the border and function economically like a tariff, with costs passed to US importers and consumers. Because most land-based trade flows through Canada and Mexico, I note that the charge would operate in practice as a North American supply chain tax. Calling it infrastructure policy does not change its price effects.I also argue that the Harbor Maintenance Fee analogy falls apart on inspection. Whatever its flaws, the HMF at least carries a user-fee logic tied to dredging and port upkeep. By contrast, the new proposal appears loosely connected to land-border infrastructure and bundled within a broader maritime industrial policy agenda. If shipbuilding is a national security priority, I contend Congress should fund it transparently through the Defense Department and regular appropriations. If the HMF distorts shipping routes, it should be reformed directly rather than replicated inland.Ultimately, I maintain that after Learning Resources, any border charge that operates like a tariff will face legal skepticism. If policymakers intend to subsidize maritime industry, they should say so clearly, define measurable goals, and subject the costs to democratic accountability. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Tax enforcement has entered a new age. The decades-old Justice Department Tax Division is now split between the broader civil and criminal divisions. Critics say the reorganization sends a signal that tax enforcement won't be a priority. While the reorganization may mean tax attorneys are pulled into different DOJ priorities, it also could mean more investigations will include tax charges, said Karen Kelly, who was the top official at the DOJ Tax Division before she joined Kostelanetz as a partner in August. DOJ tax attorneys are prioritizing immigration, fraud, and investigations into tax-exempt organizations that may have ties to "Antifa," Kelly said. The latter refers to an informal collection of people with left-leaning views that was a focus of a recent directive from Attorney General Pam Bondi. On this episode of Talking Tax, Kelly sits down with Bloomberg Tax reporter Erin Schilling to discuss DOJ's tax enforcement priorities, changing strategies, and how taxpayers should prepare. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Data centers have emerged as a major political target in state capitals as they proliferate across the country and elected officials hear complaints from their voters about the massive, energy-guzzling warehouses. That has put tax breaks for data centers—which can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars annually in some states—squarely in the legislative cross hairs. State lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced legislation to repeal sales tax exemptions or raise the bar to qualify for them. Support for rolling back incentives cuts across party lines, with Republicans and Democrats expressing opposition to subsidizing a rapidly growing industry. But the industry's boosters also cross party lines, and two Republican governors have vetoed attempts in previous years to repeal the tax breaks. On this episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax reporter Daniel Moore discusses how these tax exemptions work, why they've grown so much, and how they could change this year. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

This Day in Legal History: 25th AmendmentOn February 10, 1967, the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, formally addressing presidential succession and disability for the first time in constitutional text. The need for such clarity had become urgent after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and President Dwight D. Eisenhower's repeated illnesses during his terms. Prior to this amendment, there was no definitive constitutional mechanism for filling a vacancy in the vice presidency or for managing presidential incapacity. The 25th Amendment established four key sections, each designed to ensure governmental stability during times of crisis.Section 1 confirmed that if a president dies, resigns, or is removed, the vice president becomes president—not just acting president. Section 2 allowed for the appointment of a new vice president, with confirmation by both the House and Senate, in the event of a vacancy. This provision was put to use shortly after its ratification when Gerald Ford was appointed vice president in 1973 following Spiro Agnew's resignation. Section 3 allowed a president to voluntarily transfer power to the vice president by submitting a written declaration to Congress—used during temporary medical procedures like surgeries.Most controversial and significant is Section 4, which allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet (or another body designated by Congress) to declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” This provision has never been fully invoked but has been a topic of discussion during times of perceived presidential instability. It establishes a legal mechanism for removing a president against their will, albeit temporarily, with congressional oversight. The amendment reflects a post-World War II concern for continuity of leadership in a nuclear age. Its ratification marks a critical evolution in constitutional law, ensuring the executive branch remains functional even under extraordinary circumstances.A federal lawsuit filed in Texas alleges that an 18‑month‑old girl detained by U.S. immigration authorities was sent back into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody after being hospitalized for a life‑threatening respiratory illness and then denied the medications doctors prescribed.According to the filing, Amalia and her parents were held at the family detention center in Dilley, Texas after a routine immigration check‑in in December. The toddler became severely ill in January with extremely high fever and breathing problems, and a hospital diagnosed her with multiple serious infections including COVID‑19, pneumonia and RSV. After about 10 days in the hospital, she was discharged with a nebulizer, respiratory medication and nutritional supplements—but those were confiscated when she was returned to the detention facility.The lawsuit says her parents repeatedly tried to obtain prescribed treatment from detention staff but were forced to wait in long lines and often were denied, contributing to the child's health deterioration. Legal advocacy led to the family's release after the emergency court filing; attorneys contend the case reflects broader problems with medical care, conditions and protections for children and families in immigration custody.Toddler was returned to ICE custody and denied medication after hospitalization, lawsuit says | ReutersThe Trump administration is proposing a significant change to federal employment law that would restrict fired federal workers from appealing their terminations to the independent Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Under the plan, workers would instead have to appeal to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—a shift critics say would compromise impartiality, as the OPM director reports directly to the president.The MSPB, historically tasked with mediating disputes between federal employees and agencies, experienced a 266% spike in appeals cases during Trump's second term, likely due to a surge in federal job cuts. In 2025, the federal workforce shrank by 317,000 employees, though OPM claims most departures were voluntary through buyouts rather than firings—an assertion not independently verified.This latest proposal would further President Trump's second-term agenda to reduce the size of the federal workforce while also narrowing employees' legal options for challenging dismissals. Trump has also weakened job protection enforcement by removing officials from agencies that safeguard civil service rights. Critics argue the proposal consolidates power over personnel disputes within the executive branch, potentially eroding longstanding civil service protections.Trump seeks to limit legal options for fired federal workers | ReutersMy column for Bloomberg Tax this week is about tax holidays for data centers–or the folly in offering them. India's bold new play to become the backbone of global digital infrastructure isn't just about its headline-grabbing 20-year tax holiday for data centers. The real shift is happening in the fine print—a 15% safe harbor for transfer pricing that removes much of the risk multinationals face when operating across borders. If a company like Microsoft India applies a simple 15% markup on services sold to its U.S. parent, the Indian government agrees not to challenge the pricing. That's not just a tax break—it's operational certainty, and it makes India's offer much more attractive than anything U.S. states currently have on the table.In contrast, American states are still offering scattered subsidies—property tax breaks, zoning perks, utility discounts—without any unified vision or reliable regulatory structure. There's no equivalent to India's safe harbor. No clarity on transfer pricing. No coordination across state lines. The result is what I see as economic development policy by improv, where officials hand out incentives like they're bidding on a sports arena rather than negotiating infrastructure strategy.And what do U.S. taxpayers get in return? A burst of construction, a few permanent jobs, and a long-term commitment to expensive infrastructure upgrades for data centers that don't meaningfully plug into the local economy. Meanwhile, India is making an offer that fits squarely onto a multinational's balance sheet—pre-agreed pricing, national alignment, and a clear path to long-term cost savings.I don't think the solution is to try to beat India at its own game. But if states are going to offer incentives, they need to extract something real in return: energy infrastructure, broadband expansion, or compute resources that benefit the public. Otherwise, they're just footing the bill for someone else's global expansion. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Fifteenth Amendment RatifiedOn February 3, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, marking a pivotal moment in American legal history. The amendment prohibits federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Its ratification was the third and final of the Reconstruction Amendments, following the Thirteenth (abolishing slavery) and Fourteenth (guaranteeing equal protection and due process) Amendments.The Fifteenth Amendment was a direct response to the systemic disenfranchisement of Black Americans in the post-Civil War South. While it granted a legal foundation for Black men's suffrage, implementation faced immediate resistance. Southern states adopted literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and other discriminatory practices to circumvent the amendment and suppress Black political participation.Despite its passage, the amendment's guarantees would not be meaningfully enforced until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, nearly a century later. The legal battles stemming from the Fifteenth Amendment's promise have shaped much of the country's voting rights jurisprudence and continue to echo in current debates about voter ID laws, redistricting, and access to the ballot box.A U.S. federal judge is set to hear arguments on February 5 regarding Danish company Ørsted's request to lift the Trump administration's pause on its offshore Sunrise Wind project near Long Island, New York. Ørsted has asked for a preliminary injunction, warning that without a decision by February 6, it could lose access to a specialized vessel crucial for cable installation, putting the project's timeline, financial viability, and even survival at risk. The Interior Department halted five offshore wind projects in December, citing newly obtained, classified national security concerns, particularly radar interference. Ørsted's filing states the company has already committed over $7 billion to the Sunrise Wind project, which is about 45% complete and projected to power nearly 600,000 homes by October.Judge Royce Lamberth, who previously granted an injunction for Ørsted's Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island, will preside over the case. Four similar wind developments have already won legal relief allowing construction to continue during litigation. The ongoing delays reflect broader tensions between offshore wind expansion and the Trump administration's skepticism of the technology, as well as evolving security concerns.US judge to consider last project challenge to Trump offshore wind pause | ReutersThe U.S. Department of Justice has launched a civil rights investigation into the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. Pretti was killed during an enforcement operation that has since drawn national outrage and led the Trump administration to alter its tactics in Minnesota. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the FBI is conducting a preliminary review, with potential involvement from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, though he emphasized that the investigation is still in early stages.Video footage verified by Reuters shows Pretti being tackled by agents while holding a phone, and an officer retrieving a firearm from his body just before shots were fired. The Justice Department said a formal criminal civil rights probe would only proceed if the evidence supports it. Local officials have voiced distrust of the federal response and are conducting their own inquiry. Pretti is the second protester killed by federal agents in Minneapolis this month, and his family, represented by attorney Steve Schleicher, is demanding a transparent and impartial investigation. So far, no similar federal probe has been opened into the earlier shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer.US Justice Dept opens civil rights probe into Alex Pretti shooting, official says | ReutersIn this week's column for Bloomberg Tax, I argue that Volkswagen's decision to cancel plans for a new Audi plant in the U.S. highlights the limitations of using tariffs as a cornerstone of industrial policy. The assumption underpinning tariff-heavy strategies is that the U.S. market is irresistible enough to force global firms to onshore production, even as tariffs erode that market's size and appeal. Tariffs have come to function like sin taxes—meant to discourage consumption—but unlike cigarettes or soda, the goal with trade policy is not abstention, but investment and economic engagement. Instead, firms like VW are responding by pulling back, as higher costs reduce consumer demand and make U.S. market share too small to justify large-scale investment. The belief that global manufacturers can swiftly build U.S. capacity ignores the time, cost, and uncertainty involved, especially in capital-intensive sectors. VW's exit is rational: it doesn't make financial sense to break ground on a multibillion-dollar plant when the target market is shrinking and returns are questionable.Policymakers need to move beyond blunt tools and design trade incentives based on real market data, such as U.S. demand and potential return on investment. That means requiring ROI modeling before tariffs are imposed, and asking whether the targeted company has enough exposure to be moved by them. If the answer is no, we risk losing access to competitive products, jobs, and consumer choice—not gaining them. Trade policy should be surgical, not punitive, and should acknowledge that capital follows incentives, not threats.In a piece I wrote for Forbes late last week, and with apologies for a double dose of me today: I examined California's long-running flirtation with a mileage-based tax to replace its declining gas tax revenues—and how what began as a test program has quietly become a form of policymaking through delay. In 2014, the state authorized a pilot program to study a “road usage charge,” a per-mile fee designed to keep transportation funding solvent as gas consumption drops. That pilot wrapped up in 2017 and showed the system works: vehicles can be tracked, billing can be simulated, and the technical challenges are manageable. But nearly a decade later, no mileage tax has been implemented, and new legislation—AB 1421—would extend the advisory committee until 2035.The real issue now isn't feasibility but political avoidance. The state has drifted into a passive strategy where permanent pilots and advisory boards take the place of real decisions. This kind of inertia has a name: policy drift—when the law remains formally unchanged, but materially obsolete. California's ongoing study phase has become a way to defer a difficult conversation about revenue and equity in a post-gasoline economy. The technology exists, and other states have already tested it. What's missing is political will and public engagement.AB 1421 doesn't collect revenue or educate voters—it simply extends the status quo under the guise of preparation. From the outside, it looks like planning. In practice, it's a weather balloon designed to measure political tolerance, not policy readiness.California Mileage Tax—Pilot Programs And Permanent Policy Inertia This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Trump administration cuts to federal funding are trickling down to cities and states across the country—and a top public-sector accounting leader is taking note. Governmental Accounting Standards Board Chair Joel Black is leading his team in crafting public sector financial reporting rules at a time when local governments are assessing resource constraints following cuts to funding resulting from the 2025 GOP tax law. The board establishes financial reporting and accounting rules for state and local governments that follow generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. Municipal bond insurers, taxpayer groups, and research institutes are among those that use government financial reports to analyze fiscal health. The board's work during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic informs its efforts now during another period of strain for governments. "It really honed us in to be sure we're working on only those things that are significant improvements, only those things our stakeholders are really asking us to work on," Black said. Black's board is currently undertaking a project that aims to improve financial reporting rules for governments grappling with fears they won't be able to meet their financial obligations. In this week's Talking Tax, Black sat down with Bloomberg Tax reporter Jorja Siemons to discuss GASB's financial stress-related project and the resource challenges accounting teams are facing. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

A global minimum tax deal that exempts American companies from key provisions is a better outcome for European business than the alternative of US retaliatory taxes, the co-chair of the OECD's business committee said. The package agreed to this month by more than 145 countries at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development headed off a threat of steep US taxes on foreign companies if global concessions weren't made. In this episode of Talking Tax, Christian Kaeser, global head of tax at Siemens AG, told Bloomberg Tax reporter Ryan Hogg that some of his European counterparts regarded the deal as “lopsided” but welcomed new permanent safe harbors that were created with input from Business at OECD, known as BIAC. Kaeser is co-chair of BIAC's tax committee. “I'm pretty happy with the outcome,” he said. Competitive disparities created by the deal can be remedied by simplification of the EU's own rules, including scrapping of the bloc's controlled foreign companies anti-tax avoidance regime, he said. As for Pillar One, the other main part of a 2021 OECD-led tax agreement, Kaeser saw little hope. Further talks on the pillar, which would reallocate taxing rights to countries where big companies make their profits, have stalled for years. It “should be called Pillar Zed, zed for zombie,” he said. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

This Day in Legal History: Marbury v. MadisonOn January 20, 1803, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Marbury v. Madison, a case that began as a minor dispute over an undelivered judicial commission and ended by redefining American constitutional law. The story traces back to the final days of the Adams administration, when outgoing President John Adams rushed to appoint Federalist judges before Thomas Jefferson took office. John Marshall, then serving simultaneously as Secretary of State and incoming Chief Justice, sealed the commissions but failed to deliver several of them. One of the would-be judges, William Marbury, petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus to force Jefferson's Secretary of State, James Madison, to hand over the commission.The case placed Marshall in a precarious position, as he was being asked to rule on a problem he had helped create. Marshall first held that Marbury had a legal right to his commission and that the law ordinarily provided a remedy when such rights were violated. He then turned to the Judiciary Act of 1789, which appeared to grant the Supreme Court original jurisdiction to issue writs of mandamus. Marshall concluded that this provision conflicted with Article III of the Constitution, which strictly limits the Court's original jurisdiction. Rather than ordering Madison to act, Marshall declared that the statute itself was unconstitutional.By denying Marbury his commission while simultaneously asserting the power to strike down an act of Congress, Marshall executed a strategic legal maneuver that avoided a direct confrontation with the executive branch. The Court emerged stronger despite losing the immediate case. In explaining why the Constitution must prevail over conflicting statutes, Marshall articulated the principle of judicial review. That reasoning transformed the Supreme Court from a relatively weak institution into the ultimate interpreter of constitutional meaning.The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a challenge to a Hawaii law that restricts carrying handguns on private property open to the public without the owner's explicit permission. The case was brought by three licensed concealed-carry holders and a local gun rights group after Hawaii enacted the law in 2023. Under the statute, individuals must have clear verbal or written authorization, including posted signage, before bringing a handgun onto most business premises. A lower federal court initially blocked the law, but the Ninth Circuit later ruled that the measure likely complies with the Second Amendment.Hawaii has argued that the law appropriately balances gun rights with property owners' authority to control access to their premises. The challengers contend that the rule effectively prevents lawful gun owners from engaging in everyday activities such as shopping, dining, or buying gas. The challengers are supported by the Trump administration, which claims the law severely burdens the practical exercise of Second Amendment rights. The Supreme Court declined to review other portions of the law involving bans in sensitive places like beaches and bars.The dispute unfolds against the backdrop of the Court's recent expansion of gun rights, particularly its 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which recognized a right to carry handguns outside the home for self-defense. That decision also reshaped how courts evaluate gun regulations by focusing on historical analogues rather than modern policy goals.US Supreme Court to hear challenge to Hawaii handgun limits | ReutersA federal judge has allowed Dominion Energy to resume construction on its $11.2 billion offshore wind project off the coast of Virginia, marking another courtroom loss for President Donald Trump's efforts to curb offshore wind development. Judge Jamar Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that Dominion could restart work while it continues to challenge a stop-work order issued by the Interior Department. That order had halted several offshore wind projects based on newly cited, classified national security concerns related to radar interference.Walker found that the government's suspension was overly sweeping as applied to Dominion's project and emphasized that the cited security risks related to turbine operations, not ongoing construction. Earlier in the week, other offshore wind developers had secured similar rulings, allowing their projects to move forward despite the administration's objections. Dominion has already invested close to $9 billion in the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which is expected to supply electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes. The company said it would focus on safely resuming construction while continuing to pursue a long-term resolution with federal regulators.The decision underscores the legal and financial stakes for the offshore wind industry, as project delays can threaten multi-billion-dollar investments. At the same time, lawsuits challenging federal actions and the administration's opposition to offshore wind continue to create uncertainty for the sector. Several states, particularly along the East Coast, view offshore wind as critical to meeting growing energy demand and reducing emissions as electricity use increases.US judge allows Dominion offshore wind project to restart, another legal setback for Trump | ReutersFlorida has joined Texas in scaling back the American Bar Association's role in determining which law school graduates may sit for the state bar exam. In a 5–1 decision, the Supreme Court of Florida ruled that the ABA will no longer serve as the sole accrediting body for Florida bar eligibility, though graduates of ABA-accredited schools will remain eligible. The court said it plans to allow graduates of law schools approved by other federally recognized accrediting agencies to take the bar, even though no such agencies currently specialize in law school accreditation.The court framed its decision as an effort to expand access to affordable legal education while protecting academic freedom and nondiscrimination. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis praised the move, criticizing the ABA as overly partisan and arguing it should not control entry into the legal profession. The ABA responded that the ruling reaffirms state authority over licensing and said it would continue to promote the value of national accreditation standards.Florida's decision follows a similar move by the Supreme Court of Texas, which recently announced plans to develop its own criteria for approving non-ABA law schools. Other states, including Ohio and Tennessee, are also reviewing their accreditation rules. These developments come amid escalating conflict between the ABA and President Donald Trump's administration, which has taken steps to reduce the organization's influence across multiple areas, including judicial nominations and legal education.Within the ABA, the controversy has prompted internal reforms aimed at reinforcing the independence of its law school accreditation arm. One Florida justice dissented, warning that abandoning exclusive reliance on the ABA was an unnecessary and risky departure from a system that had functioned well for decades.Florida joins Texas in limiting ABA's law school oversight role | ReutersIn my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I argue that the Internal Revenue Service's partnership audit program has effectively been dismantled under the second Trump administration, with specialized auditors fired, pushed out, or leaving altogether. These weren't ordinary revenue agents but highly trained experts who understood the most complex partnership structures and could spot abuse hidden deep inside tiered entities. Once that kind of institutional knowledge walks out the door, it can't simply be rebuilt by restoring funding later. There is no meaningful private-sector substitute for this expertise, and when these specialists leave government, they often stop doing enforcement work entirely.I explain that this collapse isn't just a federal tax problem—it's a looming state budget issue. High-income states that rely heavily on progressive income taxes are especially vulnerable when wealthy taxpayers shift income through opaque pass-through structures. For decades, states have relied on federal audits and enforcement as a backstop, but that dependency has now become a serious liability. I suggest that states step into the vacuum by hiring former IRS partnership specialists and building dedicated partnership audit units within their own revenue departments.With relatively modest investment, states could recover revenue that would otherwise vanish into complex and lightly monitored structures. I also propose a multistate enforcement compact that would allow states to share audit resources, staff, and findings, creating a decentralized alternative to federal enforcement. The core message is that while federal capacity has been allowed to wither, the expertise still exists—and states may be the last institutions capable of preserving it.IRS Partnership Audit Brain Drain Is an Opportunity for States This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

PwC's new training program aims to give early-career recruits hands-on experience integrating artificial intelligence tools into everyday work. The Big Four accounting and advisory firm started piloting AI immersion sessions in October, with a full rollout to new US associates slated for July. The sessions are happening across PwC's tax, assurance, and advisory business. "We truly believe that the role of the new associate will be changing with AI and that their role will become somewhat elevated, and we need to make sure that we're really training them on those skills to work and think differently," said Margaret Burke, the firmwide talent acquisition and development leader for PwC US. Like its competitors, PwC has recently funneled resources into next generation autonomous tools aimed at handling routine tasks solo. The firm said in November it shed about 150 jobs across marketing, human resources, and other US support roles as part of a longer-term effort modernizing its back-office unit, including through using new AI tools. In this week's Talking Tax, Burke and PwC US Tax Leader Krishnan Chandrasekhar sat down with Bloomberg Tax reporter Jorja Siemons to discuss how the AI trainings have gone so far and what skills they hope new employees learn. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

A slew of big tax disputes and the worldwide upheaval brought on by the Trump administration's aggressive trade policy made for an exceptionally interesting year for transfer pricing professionals, and left them with lingering questions heading into 2026. President Donald Trump's April tariff announcements sent shock waves through the global economy and forced corporate tax heads—and C suites—to start figuring out what it all meant for their tax and transfer pricing positions, and whether they needed to make changes to fend off potential audits. At the same time, companies are seeing a growing number of audits and transfer pricing disputes—often with big dollar figures—as tax authorities around the world beef up their auditing and enforcement capabilities with staff, AI, and stronger reporting requirements. Auditing multinationals can bring them big tax rewards. That might be less true at the IRS, where the Trump administration has drastically reduced resources and staffing. On this episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax transfer pricing reporter Caleb Harshberger discusses what's been going on in the world of transfer pricing—which governs transactions within corporate groups—and what he's keeping an eye out for next year. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

This Day in Legal History: SCOTUS Intervenes in 2000 Presidential ElectionOn this day in legal history, December 9, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in the presidential election with a pivotal order in Bush v. Gore. The Court issued a 5-4 decision to halt the manual recount of ballots in Florida, which had been ordered by the Florida Supreme Court due to the razor-thin margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The justices cited potential violations of the Equal Protection Clause, expressing concern that differing standards across counties for evaluating ballots could lead to unequal treatment of voters.The per curiam order did not decide the case outright but signaled deep skepticism about the recount process, effectively pausing it while the Court considered broader constitutional questions. This stay was the first significant sign that the nation's highest court might ultimately decide the outcome of the 2000 election. Three days later, the Court would issue its final ruling, effectively awarding Florida's 25 electoral votes to Bush and securing his presidency.The December 9 order was controversial not only for its impact on the election but for its constitutional implications. Critics argued the Court had overstepped by interfering in a state-managed election process, while supporters claimed it was necessary to ensure legal consistency and fairness. The episode raised enduring questions about the judiciary's role in democratic governance and electoral integrity.The Court's use of the Equal Protection Clause in this context was novel and has rarely been invoked in similar cases since. The justices themselves noted that the ruling was limited to the specific circumstances of the 2000 election. Nevertheless, the decision left a lasting mark on American law and politics, serving as a stark example of how constitutional interpretation can intersect with high-stakes political conflict.The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a major challenge to federal campaign finance limits in a case involving Vice President JD Vance and two Republican political committees. The case targets restrictions on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates they support, with plaintiffs arguing that these limits violate the First Amendment's free speech protections. The legal challenge stems from a 2022 lawsuit filed while Vance was running for Senate in Ohio.At issue are “coordinated party expenditure limits” under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, which differentiates between independent spending (unlimited) and coordinated spending (restricted). The challengers argue that the current rules unconstitutionally restrict political speech by capping how much support a party can directly offer its candidates. In contrast, Roman Martinez, appointed by the Court to defend the law after the Trump-aligned FEC declined to do so, argues that without these limits, parties could act as loopholes for donors to evade individual contribution caps—raising corruption risks.A lower court upheld the law, citing a 2001 Supreme Court precedent, but the challengers now argue that subsequent changes in campaign finance law—especially since Citizens United—warrant a reassessment. Three Democratic campaign committees have joined the case to defend the law, represented by attorney Marc Elias. The outcome could significantly reshape the balance between campaign finance regulation and political speech, especially in high-stakes federal elections.US Supreme Court weighs challenge to campaign spending curbs in JD Vance case | ReutersMassachusetts is taking legal action to block Kalshi, a prediction-market platform, from allowing residents to bet on sports outcomes, arguing the company is operating as an unlicensed gambling business. Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell is seeking a preliminary injunction in state court to stop Kalshi's operations in Massachusetts, marking the first time a U.S. state has pursued a court order against the platform. At least nine other states have issued cease-and-desist letters to Kalshi, but none have yet gone this far.Kalshi offers users the ability to buy “event contracts” on the outcomes of various occurrences—including sporting events—through a platform regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The company maintains that its activities are legal under federal law, claiming its contracts are financial derivatives (swaps), not wagers, and thus fall outside the scope of state gambling laws.Massachusetts disagrees, alleging that Kalshi is effectively offering sports betting to users, including individuals as young as 18—below the state's legal betting age of 21. The case highlights a growing tension between federal financial regulation and state-level gambling laws. Kalshi's position has already faced judicial setbacks: federal judges in Nevada and Maryland have ruled that state gambling laws apply to Kalshi's operations, though those decisions are under appeal. Meanwhile, the company has pending legal challenges against other states, including New York and Connecticut.Massachusetts seeks to block Kalshi from operating sports-prediction market | ReutersThe U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against the Loudoun County School Board in Virginia, challenging its policy that allows transgender students to use locker rooms aligned with their gender identity. The DOJ claims the policy violates the constitutional rights of religious students who object to “gender ideology,” framing the case as a denial of equal protection rooted in religious freedom concerns. This lawsuit is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to roll back transgender-inclusive policies in schools, sports, and the military.The Loudoun County school board has maintained its gender policy despite federal pressure, citing prior court rulings supporting the rights of transgender students to use facilities aligned with their identity. Critics, including state officials, claim the school has retaliated against students and parents who objected to the policy, particularly in cases involving locker room complaints.The case represents a new front in an escalating legal and political campaign to police gender expression and access, using constitutional arguments around religion and sex-based rights to challenge trans inclusion in public spaces. This comes amid a broader moral panic over gender identity, echoing the structure and rhetoric of the 1980s satanic panic—but with even more tangible consequences, especially for already marginalized transgender youth. While the panic of that earlier era was rooted in fabricated threats, today's version is targeting real people, shaping policies that affect their education, safety, and public presence.US Justice Department sues Virginia school board over transgender use of locker rooms | ReutersIn my latest column for Bloomberg Tax, I argue that Texas' new sales tax sourcing rules expose the shaky logic behind decades of municipal incentives for fulfillment centers—and offer a timely reason to abandon the practice altogether. The recent revision to Rule 3.334 by the Texas Comptroller clarifies that a location must actively receive customer orders—not merely fulfill them—to count as a “place of business” for local tax purposes. That change has triggered a lawsuit from the City of Coppell and other Texas municipalities, who now stand to lose out on lucrative sales tax revenue tied to online commerce routed through local warehouses.But regardless of the lawsuit's outcome, I believe the real issue is the flawed economic development model these cities have been relying on. For years, under Chapter 380 agreements, municipalities handed out infrastructure upgrades and tax rebates to lure backend logistics operations with promises of rising sales tax revenue. Yet these facilities, often low-wage, temporary, and increasingly automated, were never a strong foundation for community growth. Their value was always tied to creative interpretations of tax code language—not meaningful employment or local investment.Now that the tax arbitrage game is falling apart, municipalities should see this as an opportunity to rethink their approach. I argue for redirecting public resources toward workforce development, technical training, and support for regionally rooted industries—investments that actually build capacity, not just capture transactional flows. If a city's financial health depends on how an e-commerce order is defined in the tax code, that's not economic development—it's dependence.Texas Sales Tax Sourcing Fight Is More Reason to Drop Incentives This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Anyone thinking about pushing the boundaries of tax law should remember that there's no federal statute of limitations on prosecuting fraud, even with weakened IRS enforcement, said Carolyn Schenck, who spent 20 years at the agency primarily combating tax evasion. "If people think that a current administration or a past administration might go soft on tax fraud, that's still an awfully big gamble," said Schenck, who's now at Caplin & Drysdale. "And I know that that's not one I personally would want to take." The IRS is coming off a tumultuous year with deep staffing cuts from the Trump administration's efforts to downsize the federal government and a parade of new commissioners. But increasing IRS staff and resources would be one of the best ways the government could combat fraud and collect more of the money it's owed, Schenck said. On this episode of Talking Tax, Schenck sat down with Bloomberg Tax reporter Erin Schilling to discuss what Trump administration workforce cuts mean for IRS enforcement and how the agency could improve its efforts to go after illegal tax shelters, even with a diminished staff. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ran on an expansive affordability agenda that would be paid for by higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. The democratic socialist's vision will be tough to realize, though, because any tax hikes would have to be approved by the New York State legislature and tax hike-averse Gov. Kathy Hochul (D). Local tax practitioners are emphasizing this political reality to worried clients who called and emailed in a hurry after Mandani won the Nov. 4 mayoral contest. “There's been kind of some demystifying as to how can or how will the mayor be able to make these ideas or proposals law," Jeremy Gove, a state and local tax counsel at Eversheds Sutherland, tells Bloomberg Tax editor Benjamin Freed on this week's episode of the Talking Tax podcast. "Explaining this to taxpayers is what we've been tackling over the past week or so.” Gove says that while higher taxes could compel some New York companies and wealthy individuals to decamp for lower-tax states, there's also a "wait and see" sentiment prevailing. Taxpayers might even welcome some proposals from Mamdani, such as hiring more auditors to clear out the Department of Finance's hefty case backlog, he says. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Grant Thornton's top audit leader is bullish on the practice's future after a 2024 deal that sold a significant stake in the accounting and advisory firm to private equity investors led by New Mountain Capital. The audit practice has benefited from a boost in dedicated resources and also bolstered its safeguards against conflicts of interest. Those improvements stem from an operating contract between Grant Thornton's legacy audit practice and its PE-backed business, said Ron Messenger, CEO of Grant Thornton's audit business. The firm's private equity deal ushered in a new two-part legal structure that created a corporate entity to provide its tax and advisory work while audit partners run the firm's legacy assurance business. Nearly half of the largest 30 firms have cut PE deals and they all rely on what the industry calls the “alternative practice structure.” Underpinning that new operating structure is a services agreement spelling out the relationship between the two entities from governance to resources. Those agreements can't be an afterthought, Messenger said. He spoke with Bloomberg Tax reporter Amanda Iacone about how Grant Thornton's services agreement came together, how regulators informed that document, and how it will influence the quality of the firm's auditing. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

A Trump administration push to reduce the frequency of corporate earnings reports risks hurting the accuracy of artificial intelligence-fueled models used by analysts, an accounting adviser said. Chief financial officers and other C-suite leaders would in turn need to address greater reputational risk if a plan to give public companies the option to file financial reports semiannually instead of quarterly advances, according to Steve Soter, vice president and industry principal at financial compliance platform Workiva. Companies prepare and submit quarterly reports, called Form 10-Qs, to the Securities and Exchange Commission's filing system in XBRL format, which makes the information more easily accessible and computer-readable, Soter said. Analysts' models consume this data to provide analysis and observations. Depriving investors and analysts' AI models of this information increases the risk of erroneous analysis and ensuing reputational damage, Soter said. On this episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax financial accounting reporter Jorja Siemons spoke with Soter about what steps C-suite leaders can take to mitigate data risks if the SEC reporting schedule shifts. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Despite the ongoing US government shutdown, many at the Treasury Department remain on the job working on guidance related to the July GOP tax law. Those at Treasury handling the international provisions used to be coworkers of Beth Bell, who became a principal at PwC's National Tax Service in Washington less than a month ago. On this week's episode of Talking Tax, Bell sat down with Bloomberg Tax senior reporter Chris Cioffi to discuss US efforts to secure agreements to allow the US tax system to coexist with the Pillar Two project, and what might prompt Republicans in Congress to reintroduce what came to be known as the "revenge tax" when the law was debated. Bell has deep experience with multilateral tax negotiations and worked as a staffer in both the House and Senate, playing a role in major tax legislation that passed in both the Biden and Trump administrations. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Ireland has presented a frugal budget for 2026 in the face of uncertainties caused by President Donald Trump's tariff and tax policies. The 15% global minimum tax on corporations and Trump's threats to impose large tariffs on pharmaceutical companies—most of which are US companies headquartered in Ireland—have increased pressure on the country to find ways to remain competitive. With foreign-owned multinationals in Ireland paying the majority of the country's corporation tax, the government is mulling incentives to encourage them to stay. In this episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax reporter Ryan Hogg discusses some options the government is considering, including an increase in the R&D tax credit. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

About three months have passed since Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the US, along with its Group of Seven allies, agreed to work on a system that would exempt American companies from parts of the global minimum tax. In that time, the US proposed a technical solution to separate its tax system from the global minimum tax. But other countries have raised concerns about what the US position means for their own tax sovereignty and whether their companies will be left at a competitive disadvantage compared to their American counterparts. In this episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax reporters Saim Saeed and Lauren Vella hash out these countries' frustrations and discuss the feasibility of coming to an agreement on a "side-by-side" system by Dec. 31, the deadline suggested by the Trump administration. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Gian Pazzia is the Chairman & Chief Strategy Officer at KBKG, where he oversees all strategic initiatives for one of the nation's leading specialty tax firms. With over 25 years of experience in the cost segregation industry, Gian is a recognized authority in his field and a former President of the American Society of Cost Segregation Professionals (ASCSP). During his tenure, he spearheaded the publication of the first technical standards for cost segregation reports and worked closely with the IRS on audit techniques, repair regulations, and landmark tax cases. As one of the first professionals in the U.S. to earn the Certified Cost Segregation Professional (CCSP) designation, Gian has provided expert testimony before the IRS and has been published in journals such as Accounting Today, AICPA's Tax Advisor, and Bloomberg Tax. Before joining KBKG, he worked at two of the Big Four accounting firms, helping to develop proprietary cost segregation software and advanced training programs. Today, Gian is a sought-after speaker who has educated thousands of CPAs and real estate professionals nationwide. In this episode, Gian and I dive into the world of cost segregation and its powerful role in boosting cash flow for real estate investors. We explore how accelerating depreciation can save investors significant money on taxes, why bonus depreciation is such a game-changer, and how even small property owners can benefit. Gian also shares insights into energy efficiency tax incentives, how technology and AI are making cost segregation more accessible, and why running real estate like a true business is the key to long-term wealth.   What You Will Learn: Who is Gian P. Pazzia, and how did he become one of the nation's leading experts in cost segregation? What exactly is cost segregation, and how can it accelerate depreciation to maximize investor cash flow? How has bonus depreciation reshaped the tax landscape for real estate owners? What practical examples show the impact of cost segregation on small and mid-size properties? How KBKG's software empowers everyday investors to take advantage of strategies once reserved for large institutional players. What energy efficiency tax incentives are available to multifamily investors and developers? Why treating real estate like a business—and leveraging the right tax strategies—is critical for building lasting wealth. Gian's story is proof that expertise, strategy, and innovation can transform the way investors approach real estate. Whether you're a new landlord with a duplex or a seasoned multifamily developer, this episode will give you practical tools to minimize taxes, maximize cash flow, and grow your portfolio more effectively.   Links & Resources: Email Address: gian.pazzia@kbkg.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KBKGTaxIncentives/ X: https://twitter.com/KBKG LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kbkg/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/KBKGinc Discount for listeners: Use code MASSIVE2025 at checkout for 10% off KBKG's residential cost segregation software.   Attention Investors and Agents Are you looking to grow your business? Need to connect with aggressive like-minded people like yourself? We have all the right tools, knowledge, and coaching to positively effect your bottom line. Visit: Join GIA Team | The Global Investor Agent Team to see what we can offer and to schedule your FREE consultation! Our NEW book is out…order yours NOW! Global Investor Agent: How Do You Thrive Not Just Survive in a Market Shift? Get your copy here: https://amzn.to/3SV0khX   HEY! You should be in class this coming Monday (MNL). It's Free and packed with actions you should take now! Here's the link to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sNMjT-5DTIakCFO2ronDCg  

Big job cuts and reductions in resources at the IRS are liable to prolong disputes over tax bills and force the agency to leave money on the table when cases are finally resolved. More than 170 attorneys have withdrawn from representing the IRS in cases in US Tax Court since Donald Trump became president in January, according to a Bloomberg Tax analysis. Many have quit the IRS altogether amid a major exodus of employees. Some Justice Department attorneys who represented the IRS in tax disputes in federal appeals courts have also left, moves that could impact some of the biggest, most prominent tax-related cases in the courts. The diminished resources suggest it'll take longer to resolve cases, former attorneys and former IRS and DOJ officials say. The IRS may also be pushed into considering settlements in some cases where perhaps it wouldn't otherwise. That would mean settling cases on less favorable terms for the agency, and potentially give taxpayers a leg up in dealing with the IRS. In this episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax senior reporter Michael Rapoport discusses the attorney departures and their implications, as well as attorneys' frustrations about their jobs and fears about the future that prompted some to leave the IRS. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Tax preparers consider themselves foot soldiers on the front lines of Americans' income tax preparations. They provide advice and file the returns, helping the government collect its revenue and make sure people are paying their fair share. They are also some of the first to warn taxpayers about scams. This group of preparers includes enrolled agents, who are the only federally licensed tax practitioners.  Enrolled agents now are assessing what the recent exodus of thousands of IRS workers and agency leadership means for filing season. They're also watching for guidance for how to implement new policies from the massive 2025 GOP tax law. Bloomberg Tax's Erin Slowey spoke with Jennifer MacMillan, president of the National Association of Enrolled Agents, about rules related to overtime and tips from that new tax law, the regulation of tax preparers, and what happens next at the IRS as its workforce has been slashed. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Congress is back in session with just a few weeks to reach an agreement before government funding runs out Sept. 30. For IRS watchers, the lack of agreement on how to fund the tax collection agency or whether to extend expiring tax breaks rank among the key issues lawmakers will grapple with over the coming months. In this week's episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax reporter Zach C. Cohen and Bloomberg Government reporter Maeve Sheehey preview the government funding fight and potential movement on budget reconciliation bills, and the impact on tax policy and administration. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Big Four accounting firms are racing to integrate next-generation AI technology across their service lines and develop a talent strategy to match the industry's new era. KPMG is focused on making sure it's balancing efficiency gains because of artificial intelligence with long-term workforce development, according to Sandy Torchia, vice chair of talent and culture at KPMG US. The firm has created new learning opportunities for workers to teach them how to use AI to enhance career growth, she said. Like its competitors, KPMG has rolled out new autonomous AI that can accomplish tasks with minimal human intervention. The industry's next generation is taking note. The vast majority of KPMG's US interns expect at least 20% of their work to be automated by AI by the time they start full-time positions, according to the firm's recent survey. Torchia, who is also head of people for KPMG's Americas region, recently stepped into a new role as global co-head of people for KPMG International. She spoke with Bloomberg Tax reporter Jorja Siemons about how KPMG is helping employees adapt to an AI-led future, as well as the state of hybrid work and the CPA pipeline. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

One of the most unwanted jobs in Washington is now up for grabs—again. President Donald Trump's IRS commissioner, Billy Long, exited as the head role last week and is expected to be nominated as the ambassador to Iceland. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will fill the job in the interim. The vacancy at the top of the IRS continues the turbulence the agency has experienced since the start of the Trump administration. Now, the question of who will be nominated next—if at all—remains. In this episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax reporter Erin Slowey discusses how the IRS got to this point and what it means for the future of the agency. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

It's been four months since the Trump administration announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs, and companies are still scrambling to make sense of what it means for their operations and tax planning. Rates keep changing, sometimes day to day, as countries struggle to make lasting trade deals with the US, while corporate tax and customs departments put their heads together to minimize the costs to their companies—without attracting a big audit. In this special Talking Tax podcast—the first of four on transfer pricing and tariffs—PwC principal Chris Desmond talks with Bloomberg Tax reporter Caleb Harshberger about the ways companies have been trying to adjust to the new reality. These include emergency meetings with top executives and heads of tax, trade, and other functions across the company, and deep dives into customs rules that many company executives hadn't felt the need to know well—until now. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Tax breaks for whale captains in Alaska and spaceport builders were among the lower-profile perks included in the GOP's $3.4 trillion tax-and-spending law enacted this month. The policies were necessary to gain votes of Republican holdouts, enabling the measure to pass in both the Senate and House in time for GOP lawmakers' self-imposed July 4 deadline. The law moved through Congress faster than many predicted, and some lawmakers are seeking changes to provisions in the law already generating criticism, such as a change to the deduction amount for wagering losses. The Republican majority's use of the reconciliation process, which allowed the measure to pass without any Democratic support, does not portend well for bipartisanship ahead. In this week's episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax reporter Chris Cioffi breaks down what Congress could tackle next on the tax front, including what could be in more reconciliation bills in the months and year ahead. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

This Day in Legal History: Sedition Act PassedOn this day in legal history, July 14, 1798, the United States Congress passed the Sedition Act, one of the most controversial laws in the nation's early political history. Part of the broader Alien and Sedition Acts, this law made it a crime to publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the federal government, Congress, or the President with the intent to defame or bring them into disrepute. Ostensibly aimed at quelling foreign influence and internal subversion during the quasi-war with France, the Act was also a clear weapon against domestic political opposition—particularly the Democratic-Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson.Federalist lawmakers, who dominated Congress and the presidency under John Adams, justified the law as necessary for national security. However, it was widely criticized as an assault on First Amendment rights and a means of silencing dissent. The law resulted in the prosecution of several Republican editors and even members of Congress, including Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont, who was sentenced to four months in jail.The Sedition Act provoked a fierce backlash and spurred Jefferson and James Madison to draft the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which introduced the doctrine of nullification—the idea that states could declare federal laws unconstitutional. Public outrage over the Act played a significant role in the Federalists' defeat in the election of 1800 and the subsequent repeal or expiration of most provisions of the Alien and Sedition Acts.The Sedition Act expired on March 3, 1801, the day before Jefferson assumed the presidency. Its legacy remains a cautionary tale about the tension between national security and civil liberties, and it is frequently cited in debates over the limits of free speech in times of political crisis.California tax authorities have flagged over 1,500 high-end vehicles sold by 500 dealerships as likely being registered through Montana LLCs in an attempt to avoid California sales tax and vehicle registration fees. These vehicles—worth more than $300 million collectively—are tied to a long-running strategy used by buyers of luxury assets like exotic cars, yachts, and RVs to exploit Montana's zero percent sales tax and minimal registration costs. Dealers and buyers now face possible penalties, audits, and investigations as California intensifies enforcement.The scheme works like this: a buyer sets up a Montana LLC, purchases and registers the vehicle under that entity, and keeps the car out-of-state on paper—even if it's garaged and driven daily in a state like California. That regulatory fiction is precisely what states are cracking down on. Bloomberg Tax recently highlighted the scale of the problem, noting that more than 600,000 vehicles are likely registered in Montana but used elsewhere, costing states billions annually in uncollected taxes.Montana LLCs have become a go-to workaround for the wealthy looking to sidestep their home-state tax obligations. While technically legal under Montana law, when the vehicle is used in another state without proper registration or tax payment, it becomes a form of tax evasion. States like Illinois and Utah are following California's lead, passing laws to “look through” LLCs and hold in-state beneficial owners accountable.This isn't just a niche tax dodge—it's a broader challenge to state tax enforcement. As wealthier individuals increasingly exploit differences between state tax codes, it's prompting legal reforms and inter-agency cooperation to close loopholes once thought too obscure or dispersed to address. California's latest enforcement push suggests these Montana LLC schemes are no longer flying under the radar—and that other states may soon follow with penalties and structural reforms of their own.California Finds 1,500 Vehicles Linked to Montana Tax SheltersNearly two-thirds of the U.S. Department of Justice's Federal Programs Branch—the unit charged with defending Trump administration policies in court—has resigned or announced plans to leave since Donald Trump's reelection. Out of roughly 110 attorneys, 69 have exited, according to a list reviewed by Reuters. The exodus includes nearly half the section's supervisors and is far greater than typical turnover seen in prior administrations. While the Trump administration maintains its legal actions are within constitutional bounds, current and former DOJ lawyers cite an overwhelming workload and ethical concerns as key drivers of the departures.Many career lawyers reportedly struggled to defend policies they saw as legally dubious or procedurally flawed, including efforts to revoke birthright citizenship and claw back federal funding from universities. Several feared they'd be pressured to make misleading or unethical arguments in court. In some cases, lawyers were expected to defend executive orders with minimal input from the agencies involved. A recent whistleblower complaint even alleged retaliation against a supervisor who refused to make unsupportable claims in immigration cases.Despite the mass departures, the Trump administration continues to rely heavily on the unit as it seeks to expand executive power following favorable Supreme Court rulings. The DOJ has reassigned attorneys from other divisions, brought in over a dozen political appointees, and exempted the unit from the federal hiring freeze to keep up with litigation demands. Critics argue the changes undermine DOJ independence, while supporters claim the administration is merely ensuring its policies get a fair defense in court.Two-thirds of the DOJ unit defending Trump policies in court have quit | ReutersAn $8 billion trial kicks off this week in Delaware where Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several current and former Facebook leaders are accused by shareholders of knowingly violating a 2012 FTC consent decree aimed at protecting user privacy. The lawsuit stems from the 2018 revelation that Cambridge Analytica accessed data from millions of Facebook users without their consent, ultimately leading to billions in fines and costs for Meta—including a $5 billion penalty from the FTC in 2019. Shareholders, including union pension funds like California's State Teachers' Retirement System, want Zuckerberg and others to reimburse the company, alleging they operated Facebook as a law-breaking enterprise.Defendants in the case include Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Reed Hastings. While Meta itself is not a defendant, the case focuses on the board's alleged failure to oversee privacy practices and enforce the 2012 agreement. The plaintiffs must prove what legal experts call the most difficult claim in corporate law: a total failure of oversight by directors. Delaware law gives leeway for poor business decisions—but not illegal ones, even if they're profitable.Zuckerberg is expected to testify, and plaintiffs argue he personally directed deceptive privacy practices and tried to offload stock ahead of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to avoid losses, allegedly netting $1 billion. Defendants deny wrongdoing, claiming the company took privacy seriously by investing in compliance and being deceived by Cambridge Analytica.Meta investors, Zuckerberg to square off at $8 billion trial over alleged privacy violations | Reuters This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Congress is reconsidering the accounting guardrails it put in place more than two decades ago to ensure investors can trust the revenues and asset values listed companies publish. Republican budget proposals would abolish the US audit regulator and reassign its work to the Securities and Exchange Commission. While lawmakers negotiate over what will end up in a final version of their tax and spending bill, the proposals have prompted debate over how best to regulate auditors and the role of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. A member of the board and two former executives turned whistleblowers of once-corporate titans Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. spoke with Bloomberg Tax reporter Amanda Iacone about whether the audit regulator should remain independent or whether it would benefit from being folded into the federal government. On this episode of Talking Tax, Sherron Watkins, a former Enron finance executive, and Cynthia Cooper, a former WorldCom chief audit executive, argue that Congress shouldn't scrap an agency that oversees auditors that act as investors' last line of defense. To Christina Ho, a current PCAOB member who has objected to the board's approach, moving auditor oversight to the SEC would counter what she sees as regulatory overreach and provide new opportunities to improve audit quality. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

The Republican-led Senate Finance Committee unveiled its portion of the mammoth tax-and-spending legislation that's quickly moving through Congress, and there's a lot to unpack. The Senate bill has dozens of differences from the House version. It makes several business breaks permanent, softens the excise tax on university endowments, and phases out more slowly cuts to clean energy credits, while smoothing edges on the so-called "revenge tax." But there are many similarities in the approaches the two bills take—both have tax breaks on income such as tips and overtime sought by President Donald Trump, and seek to extend much of the 2017 GOP tax law. Things are moving quickly as the Senate aims to pass its version out of its chamber before the July 4 break. In this week's episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax reporter Chris Cioffi speaks with host David Schultz on what's in the bill, what's left out, and where Congress goes from here. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Recent layoff announcements at Big Four accounting, tax, and consulting firms come as the industry faces economic uncertainty and a shrinking talent pool. The accounting profession is at a crossroads as a new class of students graduate. While recent data shows heightened interest in both undergraduate and master's degree programs, the industry faces possible disruptions like workforce reductions and emerging artificial intelligence tools. Deloitte LLP announced in April it would lay off government consulting employees as the Trump administration slashed federal contracts. The firm said in a statement the personnel actions were based on its public-sector clients' "evolving needs," among other factors. PwC LLP plans to cut roughly 1,500 jobs, many in its tax and assurance practices, the firm said last month, after two years of historically low levels of turnover. The firm plans to slow down its campus recruiting and will offer fewer internships for next year. But PwC announced this week it plans to reorganize its US advisory business, doubling the number of divisions from four to eight. The move "is being approached from a position of strength," according to a statement from PwC US advisory leader Tyson Cornell. Peter Demerjian is the director of the school of accountancy at Georgia State University. Namaan Mian is the chief operating officer at Management Consulted, a professional training and coaching organization. Demerjian and Mian spoke with Bloomberg Tax reporter Jorja Siemons about the recent layoffs, the industry's embrace of AI, and potential impacts on the industry's next generation. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

The “revenge” tax provision that's in the giant tax bill working its way through Congress has a lot of people worried. Known as Section 899, the provision would impose stiff, retaliatory tax rates on companies and people from countries that the US deems to be imposing "unfair" and "discriminatory" taxes against US companies. It was included in the version of the bill House Republicans narrowly passed last month, and now gets Senate attention. The aim of Section 899 is to push those countries into changing their policies, but many observers fear the move would lead to lower foreign investment in the US, costing American jobs and cutting into economic growth. That's not the only reason for concern. Financial markets are worried about the retaliatory tax's potential impact on the value of US assets. Some observers think Section 899 would damage the US's longstanding reputation as a stable, reliable place for global companies to do business and for global investors to put their money, On this episode of Talking Tax, Bloomberg Tax senior reporter Michael Rapoport explains the retaliatory-tax proposal and discusses its prospects for becoming law. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Eric Pierre is a second-generation CPA and former professional basketball player, Eric brings the same competitive edge to finance that he brought to the court. He graduated with a Master of Professional Accountancy from Stephen F. Austin State University and holds CPA licenses in both Texas and California.   While many CPAs stick to basic moves, Eric sees the entire board, anticipating challenges and opportunities far in advance. His strategic approach to wealth preservation has caught the attention of major media outlets, with Eric being quoted or mentioned in Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg Tax.   Eric's expertise allows him to navigate the complex world of finance with the precision of a seasoned pro. For those seeking to protect and grow their wealth, he offers more than just accounting services. Eric provides comprehensive strategies, always thinking several moves ahead to ensure his clients win in the high-stakes game of financial success.   What You Will Learn: Who is Eric Pierre? Why is effective tax management considered essential for business owners? What unique challenges do high net worth individuals face regarding taxes? What specific tax strategies are discussed, such as the "Augusta Rule" and vehicle depreciation? How can real estate investments impact tax liabilities and benefits for business owners? What qualifications must someone meet to be considered a qualified real estate professional for tax purposes? What common misconceptions about wealthy individuals and their tax issues are addressed in the conversation? What tax rule allowed the host to expense major capital expenditures like roofing through business entities? How does cost segregation and bonus depreciation work for property owners? What common misconceptions do people have about IRS audits and tax-related issues? What are some common mistakes or oversights consumers make regarding tax management? How can tools like QuickBooks assist business owners in tracking their expenses effectively? What is the significance of the Opportunity Zone legislation in tax planning? What are the main topics covered in Eric's book, "The Great Tax Escape"? What tax planning strategies should people consider as the year-end approaches to prepare for tax season? Eric shares how everyone can contact him. Additional Resources from Eric Pierre: Website: http://www.pierreaccounting.com/ Email: eric@pierreaccounting.com Phone: 619-997-2750 LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pierreaccounting Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pierreaccounting/ Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/pierreaccounting/ X: http://x.com/PierreCPA YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO1XWRM-KZpjtlrbHnrYGFg Attention Investors and Agents Are you looking to grow your business? Need to connect with aggressive like-minded people like yourself? We have all the right tools, knowledge, and coaching to positively effect your bottom line. Visit:http://globalinvestoragent.com/join-gia-team to see what we can offer and to schedule your FREE consultation! Our NEW book is out...order yours NOW! Global Investor Agent: How Do You Thrive Not Just Survive in a Market Shift? Get your copy here: https://amzn.to/3SV0khX HEY! You should be in class this coming Monday (MNL). It's Free and packed with actions you should take now! Here's the link to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sNMjT-5DTIakCFO2ronDCg