The new White House director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Mick Mulvaney, is looking for help to create a list of federal government agencies that can be either eliminated or have their budgets greatly reduced because they do things that have become unnecessary. Whether it’s because the agencies have obsolete missions…
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As a candidate, Donald Trump contended, “there’s tremendous waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government, an easily verified reality. As we noted, a recent internal study exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in Pentagon business operations, where the purchasing bureaucracy alone counted 207,000 full-time workers. The Environmental Protection Agency allowed “policy advisor” John…
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California government employees represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) will soon be getting “bonus checks” of $2,500. It remains unclear what this “bonus” is for, but it is not tied to any performance measure such as greater efficiency or accountability. The office of California’s state controller, which sends out the checks, had…
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Tomorrow, April 18, 2017, is Tax Day in the United States, the date by which all Americans who earned income in 2016 must either file their income tax returns and send a payment to the IRS or file for an extension to file their income tax returns for 2016 later this year. It’s no…
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During winter storms back in February, the emergency spillway of the Oroville dam failed, forcing the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people. Engineers had known for decades that the rock-and-soil spillway was unreliable but did nothing. California Rep. John Garamendi said the spillway “worked fine until it had to be used.” Governor Jerry Brown said,…
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Nearly one year ago, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico officially defaulted on its debts. In response to that default, and the looming threat even larger defaults the U.S. Congress passed an emergency debt relief bill to rescue the territorial government of Puerto Rico, which President Obama signed into law on June 30, 2016….
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The forced removal of Mr. David Dao from a United Airlines flight has touched off outrage around the world, justifiably so. The airline should have adjudicated the overbooking issue before the boarding process, and as UA CEO Oscar Munoz said, nobody should ever be treated that way. The video of the removal grabbed worldwide…
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“President Trump’s proposed budget is an out and out theft from the least of us to give to those with the most.” That is Bay Area Democrat Delaine Eastin in the April 5 San Jose Mercury News. The piece notes that Eastin is a candidate for governor and a former state education superintendent but…
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The Mercatus Center’s RegData project has created a database of federal regulations and used it in some pretty interesting ways to describe their cost to both American businesses and regular Americans. One of those ways involved estimating how much time it would take to read through the entire Code of Federal Regulations at the…
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Since the middle of 2016, the city of Dallas has been dealing with a Texas-sized problem for one of its public employee pension funds. Specifically, the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System was so at risk of becoming insolvent that the city’s retired firefighters and police officers were effectively conducting a run on the…
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