In response to President Donald Trump's declaration of a 'national energy emergency,' the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently listed hundreds of energy and infrastructure projects that would be eligible for fast-track permitting. The projects, which include oil pipelines, natural gas power plants and mining projects, were already under review. But the possibility of accelerated permitting raised concerns that without effective oversight, the projects might be allowed to alter or destroy hundreds of acres of wetlands or risk contamination of drinking water sources. But based on my experience as an environmental law professor and former government lawyer, it's not clear that the claimed emergency conditions warrant fast-tracking major projects with minimal environmental review or public scrutiny. To be sure, swift action is often necessary in an actual emergency to prevent loss of life or property damage. A levee breach during a storm may require emergency repairs, including placing rocks, dirt or sand to contain flooding. An advancing inferno may call for hasty felling of trees to create firebreaks. Or a bridge collapse may necessitate prompt debris removal and reconstruction....

It's been a bad month for the stock market. But it's been a terrible month'in fact, a terrible year'for Tesla. Even after rebounding since Monday, perhaps with some help from Donald Trump's South Lawn salesmanship, Tesla's stock price is down almost 40 percent since January 1. Some of that drop is down to concrete issues with Tesla's core car business: Sales last year fell for the first time in more than a decade, and Wall Street analysts are now estimating that they will have fallen again in the most recent quarter. Tesla is facing fierce price competition in China, where its year-over-year sales fell by 49 percent in February, and steeply declining sales in Western Europe. Although the company has promised that it will be rolling out new, more affordable models later this year, details have been sparse at best. The most important driver of Tesla's share slump, however, can be summed up in two words: Elon Musk. Tesla has always been a 'story stock,' which is to say the sort of investment whose price depends less on a company's economic fundamentals and more on a story of what its future will be. Tesla's problem right now is that the hero, and narrator, of its story has gone AWOL....

On March 18, Meta will start releasing its version of Community Notes for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads users in the United States. The program copies a crowdsourced fact-checking system that Twitter unveiled in 2021 and that became the sole means of correcting misleading information after Elon Musk turned the platform into X. Meta executives say they're focused on getting Community Notes right in the U.S. before it rolls the feature out to other countries. It's a high-stakes region for testing a major new feature, given that the U.S. is Meta's most lucrative market, but Meta may be hesitant to roll out Community Notes in other regions such as the European Union, where the European Commission is currently investigating X over the effectiveness of its Community Notes feature. Zuckerberg first announced these changes in January as part of a broader effort to give oxygen to more perspectives on his platforms. Since 2016, Meta has relied on third-party fact-checkers to verify information on its platforms, but Neil Potts, Meta's VP of Public Policy, told reporters in a briefing on Wednesday that the systems were too biased, not scalable enough, and made too many mistakes....

Elon Musk's assertion of power over some of the government's largest and most sensitive data systems isn't merely a contravention of American statutory law, administrative norms, and individual privacy rights. It is an act of constitutional restructuring, and should be understood in those terms. Musk's team has accessed a Department of Treasury database that guides the disbursement of more than $5 trillion in federal funds. It is tussling with senior officials at the Internal Revenue Service over access to tax returns, among the most protected federal data, and at the Social Security Administration over access to data systems containing medical and bank records. A court has temporarily blocked Musk and his team from obtaining data about millions of Americans' student loans, but only for now. And just last week, Musk sought access to 'the most sensitive of all': a database reflecting ongoing wage and income information for most working Americans. The Constitution distributes power among the branches of government to prevent its concentration and maintain its balance. It organizes many different forms of power, but particularly significant are the powers that take the form of 'instruments,' to borrow James Madison's term for the government's material tools. Chief among them, the Constitution commits the 'power of the purse' to Congress. By contrast, only the president can wield the power of the sword as the commander in chief of the armed forces. Those two profound instruments, guided by different branches, can also counterbalance each other, as when Congress withholds funding for disfavored armed interventions....