Last Friday, President Trump signed the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act into law, which promises to finally make it easier for the Department of Veterans Affairs senior leadership to remove supervisors and employees who have engaged in misconduct from their jobs, while also better protecting the employees who make misconduct at the VA…
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California has added Texas, Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota to its travel ban. State attorney general Xavier Becerra made the announcement accompanied by representatives from the ACLU and Equality California, which apparently fancy themselves part of government. California’s AB1887, enacted last year, purports to ban state employees from travelling to states perceived to discriminate…
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California’s vaunted bullet train has yet to carry a single passenger but it has managed to make the news. As it turns out, the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority offered a contract extension of $3 million on a noncompetitive basis. In other words, it was a no-bid sweetheart deal. That emerged in a new report…
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Illinois’ fiscal situation is getting worse. ZeroHedge summarizes the state’s rapidly deteriorating predicament: With just 10 days to go until Illinois enters its third year without a budget, resulting in the state’s imminent downgrade to junk status and potentially culminating in a default for the state whose unpaid bills now surpass $15 billion, Democratic…
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“Budget cuts threaten forests’ roads, hunting, fishing,” headlines the piece by McClatchy reporter Anshu Siripurapu. Trails “could get messier,” and maintenance on bridges, dams and recreation sites “could” become tougher. “That’s the potential fate of national forest projects, thanks to President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal 2018,” Siripurapu warns. The president seeks $100…
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As we noted, Jerry Brown has jacked up gasoline taxes and fees by $5.2 billion, and the governor slams those less than worshipful of this hike as “freeloaders.” Brown is a big booster of “subsidiarity,” which means that bureaucrats can use tax money designated for needy school children to boost the salaries of bureaucrats…
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What a difference a small change in personnel at the White House makes! Nearly two and a half years after becoming President, Barack Obama finally got around to signing an executive order to establish the “Campaign to Cut Government Waste“, which promised to impose new oversight and accountability aimed at reducing waste, fraud and…
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Over the last several weeks, we’ve been watching a very strange race to the bottom between two very fiscally-troubled states, Illinois and Connecticut, where the state government of each seems intent on becoming the first U.S. state to crash its credit rating all the way down to junk status. It looks like Illinois’ state…
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Joel Kotkin, a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, charts “California’s Descent to Socialism,” a new statist strain that “more resembles feudalism than social democracy” and being advanced by, “among others, hedge-fund-billionaire-turned-green-patriarch Tom Steyer.” He wants to double down on environmental and land-use regulation but as Kotkin observes, the state’s already severe land-use…
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As we noted, California’s Board of Equalization has managed to misallocate nearly $50 million in tax revenue. BOE members have been spending public funds to promote themselves, staging useless events, and dishing out raises to high-salaried staff without performance reviews. The shabbily constructed BOE headquarters in Sacramento remains a safety threat and bottomless money…
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