This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 27th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When a company admits to breaking the law and signs a deal with the feds, they pay a fine. They make anyone they misled or cheated

hold and they agree to cease the offending behavior. That's at least how it's supposed to work.

Cato's Will Yeatman says a new kind of agreement that offending

companies have been compelled to sign off on includes doing things for the

government that politicians would like but can't get Congress to agree. It's called leverage policy making.

Leverage policymaking was an unfortunate innovation in executive power during the

Obama administration.

What I mean by that term is that the government would use an individualized transaction.

So typically a settlement agreement or a licensing proceeding against a big corporation in order to achieve wider results than the underlying violation or the underlying subject matter before the

government and the corporation in question.

I think of it, but the analogy metaphor I use in my mind is that of a car jack where the individual transaction is the

jack itself and the government is leveraging it in order to support the weight of

the car and thereby achieve greater influence.

Okay, so the idea is that some company violates the federal law or some federal regulation

and in addition to agreeing to stop doing that or pay whatever duly authorized

fines there are they agree in addition to give money or support or air time to what?

They come in a number of varieties.

So what you explained one type,

an example will make this clear. So the Obama administration,

the president in his 2011 state of the union promised to put 1 million electric vehicles on the

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