Photo of Philip Wallach

Philip Wallach

Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

Philip A. Wallach is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Formerly he was a senior fellow of governance at the R Street Institute, where he researched America’s separation of powers with a focus on the relationship between Congress and the administrative state. He also follows a wide range of regulatory policy issues, including the efficacy of the Trump administration’s deregulatory efforts.

Philip joined R Street in January 2018. He was previously a fellow and then senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, where he authored To the Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (2015).

Philip received his bachelor’s with honors from Wesleyan University’s College of Social Studies, and his doctorate in politics from Princeton University.

He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and three daughters.

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The Day that Jolted Congress Back to Life

January 11, 2021
(This piece originally appeared in Inside Sources.) The mob that breached the United States Capitol yesterday did unforgivable violence to one of our nation’s most hallowed spaces. But its… Read More
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Options for increasing congressional capacity on complex regulatory matters

April 11, 2019
To:             The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress From:       Philip Wallach, R Street Institute Reform:   Options for Increasing Congressional Capacity on… Read More
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Make Congress (properly) political again

April 10, 2019
Chris DeMuth’s new essay powerfully and convincingly argues that well-functioning representative government is a necessary condition for national cohesion in our democratic age. DeMuth is not starry-eyed about legislatures, or… Read More
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Enough of our budget farce

March 26, 2019
he Trump administration’s new budget is fake news. That isn’t because it fails to live up to its grandiose title: “A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First.”… Read More
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Video: Can the other branches help restore Congress?

March 14, 2019
On February 6, 2019, the Federalist Society’s Article I Initiative and the Georgetown Student Chapter co-sponsored the first Legislative Branch Review Conference. The first panel asked “Can the Other… Read More
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No, getting rid of Congress is not a clever idea

February 20, 2019
Congressional majorities and President Donald Trump disagreed about how much money ought to be used to extend barriers running along our nation’s southern border. Their disagreement led to a partial… Read More
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President’s Day Read: The Star Wars theory of history

February 18, 2019
In the wake of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, bestselling popular historian and former Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek Jon Meacham undertook a series of essays which he soon turned… Read More
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The Fall of Jim Wright—and the House of Representatives

January 3, 2019
Those of us seeking to understand what has gone wrong with Congress are always on the lookout for characters who can be cast as villains in the institution’s history. Read More
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What the Democrats should do on trade

December 6, 2018
Reflecting on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 six months after its passage, Senator Reed Smoot (R-Utah)  declared: “The improvement since passage of the act has been… Read More
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Self-government in a republic of 325 million

November 27, 2018
In the 2016 and 2018 elections, both sides claimed that they represented the “real” American people. Candidates from both parties called for the people to rise up and take the… Read More