The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated quick policy change to protect public health and mitigate the effects of quarantine on the US economy. As policymakers work hard to ensure that hospitals are equipped with the right equipment and drugs to treat patients, many are also taking a hard look at how we manufacture these supplies.

The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) is guiding members of Congress who are working on legislation to incentivize pharmaceutical drug companies to bring Chinese manufacturing back to the US territory of Puerto Rico. This would not only decrease our country’s reliance on China for drugs, it would also spur job growth in Puerto Rico. As FREOPP President Avik Roy writes in National Review, there are 104 different COVID-19 treatments currently in preclinical or clinical studies. As therapies emerge from the clinical trials underway, American pharmaceutical companies are smart to reconsider where they manufacture these drugs.

Avik Roy and FREOPP have relaunched the American Wonk podcast, recently inviting Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) on to answer the following questions: Is Congress doing a good job of spending the $2 trillion in COVID-19 stimulus money? What’s next on the COVID-19 policy agenda? And how do we best address the economic dislocation that is affecting everyday Americans and vulnerable populations?

Jonathan Blanks, FREOPP’s new criminal justice scholar, calls on police to responsibly reduce the number of individuals in America’s jails by only taking people into custody when absolutely necessary. This will limit the number of people held in close quarters in jail, and help protect the health of the inmates and the officers and employees who work there.

FREOPP’s housing scholar Roger Valdez is documenting the unintended consequences of eviction bans in the time of COVID-19. While eviction bans may appear to help tenants, they actually create a huge income problem for housing providers, ultimately leading to higher rents for those who struggle to afford housing. Instead, local governments should ask banks to partner with residents and housing providers to bridge the gap until this crisis subsides.

And Robert Bryce, FREOPP’s new energy scholar, writes in the New York Post that a pandemic is the wrong time for New York City to shut down one of its top sources of energy, Indian Point nuclear plant, which provides about 25 percent of the electricity consumed in the city.