The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a component of the Department of Homeland Security, deploys a budget of $12.9 billion, an increase of 6.45 percent from fiscal year 2013. CBP has an internal affairs division to deal with misconduct, but according to an investigation by McClatchy news service, CBP’s internal affairs division “is…
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Abuse of Americans by the Internal Revenue Service is nothing new. As Gary Klott wrote in the New York Times in 1987, the federal agency was basing promotions on how much money its agents had seized. An IRS office in Los Angeles bore a sign reading “Seizure Fever – Catch it!” and those who…
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The 2014 election season is underway, where the growth of the national debt driven by irresponsible spending has made a surprise appearance in an ad attacking an incumbent politician. The Hill reports: Generation Opportunity, a nonprofit advocacy group with ties to billionaire donors Charles and David Koch that’s geared toward young adults, is attacking…
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As we have noted, California’s vaunted $68 billion “bullet train” is unpopular with taxpayers but a big hit with politicians, always eager for a new place to spend. So no surprise that the train to nowhere has already succeeded in bulking up government. Last year California’s High-Speed Rail Authority nearly tripled its staff to…
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It sometimes takes years to get a clear picture of historical events. Take 2009’s “stimulus” package, also known as the American Recovery and Restoration Act, which was supposed to revitalize the private sector of the U.S. economy at a time of crisis. Via Jim Pethokoukis, we find that the St. Louis branch of the…
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We recently noted that California governor Jerry Brown’s 2014-15 budget would result in the overstaffing of Caltrans design and construction departments by about 3,500 full-time employees at a cost of more than $500 million. This comes at a time when, as Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee observed, a declining workload is “not being…
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We’ve been following the story of the perverse incentives that the VA’s administrators had in creating the secret wait lists to ration and restrict needed medical care to American veterans. The latest salvo in fixing that problem was just fired in the U.S. House of Representatives, where a ban on further bonuses to the…
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The proposed budget for the federal Environmental Protection Agency for fiscal year 2015 is $7.89 billion. That should be plenty of money for the EPA to colonize more of American life. As Keith Matheny notes in the Lansing State Journal, the EPA is advancing new regulations that will make life more difficult for farmers….
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We have noted that California’s Parks Department protected its budget by hiding more than $50 million in a secret fund, at a time when it was shutting down parks and giving government employees lucrative vacation payouts. Now, in “California State Departments Play Shell Game,” Jon Ortiz and Jim Miller of the Sacramento Bee have…
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Count this among the dubious milestones of government achievement: Through the end of 2012, the Federal Register, the ever-growing compendium of the federal government’s regulations, now includes over one million instances of words — such as “shall,” “must,” and “required” — whose only reason for being is to restrict the economic activities in which Americans…
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