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For nearly a century, federal law barred the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission unless they could be shown to have committed "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The goal of this congressionally imposed restriction was to give agencies like the FTC some measure of independence from politics. But the ...

Emily Tvrdy has given birth four times. Now, as she prepares for her fifth, she knows what type of birth experience she wants—and what type she wants to avoid. Three of her four children were born in a hospital. The first she describes as traumatic, involving complications, pain, and a long separation from her infant son. Medical decisions wer ...

When COVID hit, the world was in a state of emergency, forcing Washington to cut all sorts of red tape. TSA waived its longstanding size limits on liquids to make room for hand sanitizer. Restaurants got the green light to sell beer and wine for delivery. Cities cleared the way for sidewalk dining that permit rules long had prohibited. Healthcar ...

When Amy Siple found out her husband was diagnosed with cancer, she put her whole life on hold. Amy had been a nurse for more than 30 years. She had lectured to students, spoken at TEDx events, and served as a tenured associate professor of nursing for 15 years. She held appointments and awards from the Kansas Advanced Practice Nurses Associatio ...

Floyd Johnson served in the U.S. Army from 1983 to 1985 and was honorably discharged after a training exercise in Germany turned deadly. Decades later, while incarcerated in Florida, he was diagnosed with PTSD. The VA rates disabilities on a scale from 0% to 100%, measuring how severely a condition impairs a veteran's ability to function in dail ...

Philip Serpe walked horses at the Meadowlands Sports Complex as a teenager without pay and spent his high school evenings volunteering at the track. He won his first Grade 1 race at 28, trained three Grade 1 horses, and built a reputation at some of the top tracks in the country. Now he is serving a two-year suspension from his successful thorou ...

When Jeffrey Hagen, a California-based architect, agreed to help a longtime client with a Las Vegas project, he did everything by the book. He drew up preliminary plans, submitted them to the city for a permit, and applied for reciprocity with the Nevada State Board of Architecture, truthfully disclosing that he was already working with a client an ...

Under Arizona law, when a government agency asserted something as fact, courts were required to accept it, as long as any evidence supported it—even a shred, even if the weight of the evidence pointed the other way. That standard, known as substantial evidence review, gave agencies something no ordinary litigant enjoys: the ability to lose on the ...

"Nonbinding." In government parlance, it means a document doesn't carry the force of law—that it's guidance, not a mandate. So why did an agency "guidance document" carry enough legal weight to prevent a family-owned Alaska business from moving its pipe storage operation to a larger lot—land bordered by a junk car dealer, a scrap metal deale ...