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Elected representatives of the people have been investigating unlawful surveillance of American citizens through the FISA court. When representatives posed questions to FBI boss Christopher Wray he told them, “I’m not prepared to discuss what happened in the court,” though he obviously knew the answer. Instead of answering questions, Wray offered boilerplate praise for the brave men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He left out the way foreign governments had gained influence by corrupting FBI agents.

The FBI’s Robert Hanssen, for example, gave thousands of pages of classified material, including U.S. nuclear secrets, to the KGB and its Russian successor agency the SVR. Hanssen pulled this off from 1979 to 2001 and caused enormous damage to the United States. FBI man Richard Miller, a counterintelligence man like Peter Strzok, also sold classified documents to Russian agents. FBI man Earl Pitts gave U.S. secrets to the Russians from 1987 until 1992. On the other hand, when Russia warned the FBI that the Tsarnaev brothers were dangerous, the FBI’s investigation found no links to terrorism and failed to prevent the Tsarnaev’s bomb attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013. So along with corruption comes incompetence.

The FBI boasts a budget of nearly $9 billion but contrary to what Wray appears to believe, the FBI is not a government unto itself. The FBI is a division of the United States government subject to oversight by the people’s elected representatives, who deserve answers to honest questions about political bias and government surveillance of U.S. citizens. If millennials are puzzled by the FBI’s current tangle, they should know that under longtime boss J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI took measures to “neutralize” civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. So it’s entirely appropriate that the current FBI headquarters is the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC.

The U.S. Congress has announced that it has resolved the differences between the House and Senate versions of a tax cut bill, where both houses will soon vote on the final version. The New York Times reports:

Party leaders in the House and Senate agreed in principle to bridge the yawning gaps between their competing versions of the $1.5 trillion tax bill, keeping Republicans on track for final votes next week with the aim of delivering a bill to President Trump’s desk by Christmas. The House and Senate versions of the tax bill started from the same core principles — sharply cutting taxes on businesses, while reducing rates and eliminating some breaks for individuals — but diverged on several crucial details.

In the end, more of the Senate bill appeared to be included in the final version, though lawmakers continued to make significant changes from the legislation that passed either the House or the Senate.

The changes included a slightly higher corporate tax rate of 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent in the legislation that passed both chambers, and a lower top individual tax rate of 37 percent for the wealthiest Americans, who currently pay 39.6 percent. But the bill will still scale back some popular tax breaks, including the state and local tax deduction and the deductibility of mortgage interest.

Since the tax cut would double the standard deduction for households, an overwhelming majority of middle class Americans will see their federal tax bill decline. The bill does however cap the mortgage interest deduction, which limits the amount of interest that amount that Americans who itemize their tax can claim on their tax returns, which can increase the tax bills of these households.

Because it lowers the amount of revenue that the U.S. government will collect, the house bill is likely to boost the overall debt of the U.S. government over what has been projected for the next 10 years. Several estimates based on the Senate version of the tax cut bill put the total amount of the increase for the national debt above what it would otherwise be under current law by the end of the next ten years anywhere from $0.516 to $1.39 trillion. Should it grow by the amount of the largest figure, the rate at which the national debt will increase as a result of the tax cut would be similar to the rate that elected politicians found acceptable for it to grow during President Obama’s second term in office.

With the tax deal now made, the big question now is whether the U.S. Congress will address its excessive spending problem, which may now be on tap for 2018. Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reports:

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday that congressional Republicans will aim next year to reduce spending on both federal health care and anti-poverty programs, citing the need to reduce America’s deficit.

“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Ryan said during an appearance on Ross Kaminsky’s talk radio show. “… Frankly, it’s the health care entitlements that are the big drivers of our debt, so we spend more time on the health care entitlements — because that’s really where the problem lies, fiscally speaking.”

That would be a welcome development, especially with the recent confirmation that an obscure section of a law that expanded health care entitlements back in 2003 opened to door to billions more in spending through a kind of pay-for-play system that uniquely benefited politicians and hospital administrators who jacked up their costs. Closing the government’s checkbook to stop funding those kind of corrupt crony relationships could go a long way to reducing the cost of health care entitlements for U.S. taxpayers without impacting the quality of health care.

As California politicians complain about the lack of affordable housing, a new state study claims the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), as a Los Angeles Times report put it, “doesn’t block development from actually happening.” A working family looking for affordable housing in California should have more than a reasonable doubt.

The claim that CEQA does not block housing is based on the survey’s finding that 1 percent of development projects required detailed analyses under the law and less than 1 percent were sued. But as a corrected version of the Times report notes “no housing developments were examined as part of the study.” The report also acknowledged a study from the Holland & Knight law firm finding that more than twice as many CEQA lawsuits were filed over housing as over public services and infrastructure projects (33 percent versus 14 percent) in almost all of Southern California, and that projects involving nearly 14,000 housing units combined were challenged by CEQA lawsuits from 2013-15. A CEQA lawsuit also “successfully stopped a 200-bed homeless shelter.”

On the other hand, as the Orange County Register noted, the legislature gladly waives CEQA regulation for big projects such as the new stadium for the Sacramento Kings basketball team. In a ploy known as “greenmail,” union bosses exploit CEQA to “compel the use of union labor and higher union wages, by businesses to prevent competitors from moving in and by local governments and NIMBYs to extract additional facilities or design features from developers.” The mere threat of a CEQA lawsuit is enough to kill a project, but the new state survey does not address that issue or how many projects were not launched at all because of the costs CEQA’s draconian regulation imposes.

The young working family looking for housing should understand that, contrary to official claims, CEQA blocks development, lowers the supply of housing, and drives up costs. That family should also expect little if any change without deep reform of CEQA. In similar style, recent legislation aimed at making housing more affordable will likely make it more scarce and expensive.

As fires rage in southern California, driving nearly 90,000 people from their homes, recurring governor Jerry Brown explains that that because of climate change such fires could be “the new normal” and “this could be something that happens every year or every few years.” As usual, the governor ignores a key back story.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, known as Cal Fire, bears primary responsibility for fire prevention and suppression on more than 31 million acres of private and public land, some one-third of the state. As Lawrence McQuillan notes, Cal Fire’s $2.2 billion budget has increased 45 percent since the 2014-15 fiscal year but “80 percent or more of its budget typically goes to fire suppression, not prevention.” Cal Fire’s fund to pay for removal of dead trees and vegetation and to provide fire-prevention education and planning, has decreased in recent years. This reflects perverse incentives because, “fire managers face strong incentives to emphasize suppression, where budgets are larger.” Cal Fire failed to spend $43 million raised by a special fire-prevention fee on 800,000 property owners, and state fees prevented local communities from raising money independently for fire prevention. Brush-clearing projects, including controlled burns and use of herbicides, have also drawn the wrath of regulatory zealots, who claim the prevention projects put plants and the environment at risk.

Governor Brown avoided such issues and his charge that such wildfires are “the new normal” recalls his response to safety issues on the new span of the Bay Bridge. “I mean, look, shit happens,” Brown said. Lately the governor has been gallivanting across Europe preaching that people need a “brain washing” over climate change. During Brown’s recently tour, the state Air Resources Board reported that the state’s cap-and-trade system reduced greenhouse gasses by 5 percent. Actually, the drop occurred because heavy rains allowed utilities to generate more hydroelectric power. Brown is fond of the cap-and-trade auction because one quarter of the revenues go to his vaunted bullet train project, a certified boondoggle with few if any environmental benefits. California taxpayers could be forgiven for believing that bad government is the new normal in the Golden State.

A brand new scandal has broken out at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where the fingerprints of the department’s bureaucrats are all over the latest evidence of misconduct. USA Today’s Donavan Slack broke the story:

Neurosurgeon John Henry Schneider racked up more than a dozen malpractice claims and settlements in two states, including cases alleging he made surgical mistakes that left patients maimed, paralyzed or dead.

He was accused of costing one patient bladder and bowel control after placing spinal screws incorrectly, he allegedly left another paralyzed from the waist down after placing a device improperly in his spinal canal. The state of Wyoming revoked his medical license after another surgical patient died.

Schneider then applied for a job earlier this year at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Iowa City, Iowa. He was forthright in his application about the license revocation and other malpractice troubles.

But the VA hired him anyway.

He started work in April at a hospital that serves 184,000 veterans in 50 counties in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri.

Some of his patients already have suffered complications. Schneider performed four brain surgeries in a span of four weeks on one 65-year-old veteran who died in August, according to interviews with Schneider and family members. He has performed three spine surgeries on a 77-year-old Army veteran since July — the last two to try and clean up a lumbar infection from the first, the patient said.

Schneider’s hiring is not an isolated case.

Slack goes on to document several other instances in which the VA’s bureaucrats knowingly overlooked the history of the medical professionals they hired, where evidence and findings of malpractice, license suspensions and other misconduct were either ignored or dismissed, where the consequences of those hiring decisions have negatively impacted the quality of treatment that America’s miltary veterans receive at the VA. The new scandal has already drawn bipartisan attention on Capitol Hill demanding an investigation.

Alas, the knowing hiring of individuals with shady track records is not an isolated to the bureaucrats at the VA. The scandal-plagued Internal Revenue Service has behaved similarly. Accounting Today‘s Michael Cohn reports:

The Internal Revenue Service rehired more than 200 employees with previous conduct and performance issues, according to a new government report.

The report, from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, found that 10 percent of the more than 2,000 former employees rehired by the IRS between January 2015 and March 2016 had been previously fired while under investigation for a substantiated conduct or performance issue.

Of the more than 200 rehired employees, 86 had been “separated” from the IRS while they under investigation for absences and leave, workplace disruption, or failure to follow instructions. Four had been terminated or resigned for willful failure to properly file their federal tax returns; while another four employees had been separated from their jobs while under investigation for unauthorized accesses to taxpayer information. On top of that, 27 former employees didn’t disclose a previous termination or conviction on their application, as required, but were nonetheless rehired by the IRS.

Both hiring scandals can be considered to be evidence of a culture of corrupt cronyism within the U.S. government, where its bureaucrats care first and foremost about putting their own interests before all others and to the exclusion of serving the interests of regular Americans. A third case of insider cronyism within a U.S. government agency can be found in recent news headlines involving the largely redundant Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where the quitting head of the bureau attempted to install his deputy as his replacement in defiance of federal laws governing the filling of permanent vacancies, where the deputy’s legal claim to the position was subsequently refused by a federal court.

To quote Ian Fleming from his James Bond novel Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” At what point will regular Americans receive both the answers and accountability they deserve from the bureaucrats in these agencies who claim to serve the public?

With the news being dominated by stories of an ethically-troubled Senator and an ethically-troubled Representative resigning from their positions of power in Washington D.C. today, many Americans might have missed that a scheduled showing of federal government shutdown theater has been postponed for at least another two weeks.

Mike DeBonis of the Washington Post reports:

Congress passed a short-term spending deal Thursday, sending to President Trump a bill to avert a partial government shutdown and setting up a heated budget fight later this month.

Trump has indicated that he will sign the deal, preventing a government stoppage that had been set to take effect at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.

The deal does not resolve numerous debates over domestic spending, immigration and funding for the military that brought the government to the brink of partial closure, leaving party leaders with a new Dec. 22 deadline to keep the government open.

The next showing of government shutdown theater will come just ahead of Christmas, where it will compete with local performances of The Nutcracker ballet for the attention of Americans, where even if the federal government does shut down at that time, it will hardly be noticed because of the holidays. And also because the nonessential part of the government that would shut down doesn’t do very much during this time of year.

But then, for many of the affected departments and agencies, the same thing can be said for most of the rest of the year too.

Besides Hollywood (Harvey Weinstein), Congress (Al Franken), and the media (Matt Lauer), to name only a few, it turns out that sexual abuse has been thriving in the California legislature. Capitol staffer Elise Flynn Gyore charged that assemblyman Raul Bocanegra groped her at a public event in 2009. Faced with this and other accusations, Bocanegra has now resigned his assembly seat.

On the senate side, Tony Mendoza fired three staffers after complaints about his behavior. Apparently, a full-time job with the Artesia Democrat required a woman to put in a brief session at Mendoza’s house in Sacramento. The senate duly stripped Mendoza of a committee chairmanship and appointments to two commissions. Senate boss Kevin de Leon now seeks to hire an independent legal firm to investigate sexual harassment. Legislators, staffers and taxpayers alike can be forgiven for believing that nothing will come of it.

As it turns out, De Leon was sharing a house with Mendoza when the alleged abuse took place and De Leon did nothing at the time. Only when the charges of abuse became public did de Leon vacate the premises. The senate boss is not on the panel he is appointing to select the law firm that will investigate sexual harassment. On the other hand, the senate boss was responsible for perhaps the worst public abuse of any legislator in California history.

Back in February, Leon’s chief of staff told senator Janet Nguyen to remain silent during a tribute to former state senator and New Left icon Tom Hayden, a champion of the Stalinist Vietnamese regime that drove many to flee. Nguyen, born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1976, spoke up anyway, first in Vietnamese then English. The Democrats cut off her microphone, told her to sit down and be quiet, and when Nguyen refused they had her carted off the senate floor. Senate bosses also cut off the feed from the California Channel, so viewers statewide would not hear an immigrant woman, born in a totalitarian state, speak the truth to power.

Kevin de Leon feigned outrage and said he would look into it, but nothing came of it and no senator was punished in any way. Californians should expect the same kind of show from the investigation of sexual harassment, whatever law firm de Leon’s panel selects for the job. Women might note that panel member Bill Monning played a major role in depriving Janet Nguyen of her right to free speech.

In housing, California has been in the throes of what Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, calls an “affordability crisis.” This year governor Jerry Brown signed a batch of bills designed to end the crisis and, as Assemblyman Richard Bloom put it, “make housing affordable again.” Those currently priced out of the market might recall past government efforts in the housing field.

Established in 1975, the California Housing Finance Agency (CalHFA), bills itself as the state’s “affordable housing lender,” with “financing and programs so more low to moderate income Californians have a place to call home.” Board members include state treasurer John Chiang and bosses from a number of housing authorities around the state. By all indications, nothing CalHFA has done for more than 40 years was able to prevent California’s current housing affordability crisis.

During the 1980s, California’s Department of Housing and Community Development launched the California Home Ownership Assistance Program with 345 loans at rates in the neighborhood of 12 percent. This deal included an “equity share” demand for homeowners “to pay as much as half of the amount a house has appreciated since its purchase.” Robert Frugoli bought a prefabricated house for $58,500 but decades later in 2015, when the value rose to $140,000, the DHC claimed that Frugoli, living on a disability payment of $1,800 a month, owed the state a $40,000 balloon payment. By any standard, that is predatory lending, and nothing the DHC has done since the 1980s has averted the current affordability crisis.

The bills Brown signed in September center on a new state tax on real estate transactions and another bond issue. As Dan Walters observed, the bills fail to address “underlying problems” such as California’s draconian environmental laws. So the bills merely “shift the day of reckoning to the next political generation,” when everybody will wonder why the bills “didn’t have the promised outcomes.” The other government housing schemes certainly didn’t, and there’s a back story here.

The prime mover of CalHFA, the state’s “affordable housing lender,” was Robert Klein a rising real estate tycoon. Klein was also the force behind the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the $3 billion state stem-cell institute that has produced none of the cures and therapies it promised California taxpayers in 2004, and now seeks another $5 billion

Over the years, MyGovCost has highlighted some of the more bizarre ways that U.S. taxpayer funds have been used to accomplish really questionable things, but we may have a new contender for what is perhaps the strangest way that the U.S. government’s bureaucrats have ever wasted money.

It may not surprise you to learn that the specific bureaucrats in question are employed by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), who decided that the best way that they could spend another $30,000 was to fund the staging of “Doggie Hamlet” at an outdoor field in New Hampshire. Senator James Lankford documented how Americans paid to put on this very weird performance in his 2017 edition of Federal Fumbles.

As evidenced in previous editions of Federal Fumbles, the American public’s love for William Shakespeare has sometimes translated into unusual and unnecessary federal expenditures. For instance, tens of thousands were spent to support a production of Silent Shakespeare in 2015.18 However, the strangeness of those fumbles pales in comparison to a $30,000 NEA grant to support a production of Doggie Hamlet.

Doggie Hamlet actually includes humans yelling or running toward very confused sheep and dogs. The production, which does not include any actual lines from Hamlet, is conducted outdoors in a 30-by-50-foot field in New Hampshire. The play is described as “a beautiful and dreamlike spectacle weaving instinct, mystery, and movement into an unusual performance event.”

Many people view art subjectively, and there are likely many who would enjoy watching this play. However, with $20 trillion in national debt, it is difficult to explain to taxpayers in Oklahoma or Montana—even the people who work with sheep daily—why $30,000 was spent for a few people to run around a field yelling at sheep. The NEA should refocus its efforts and its support on grants that advance the arts and our national interests.

At first, we couldn’t believe it, but there is a YouTube video of the world premiere of Doggie Hamlet in Hanover, New Hampshire on June 29, 2017.

https://youtu.be/1bHHjtxr3_g

We have an idea for a different performance art piece, where we would stage a truly beautiful and dreamlike spectacle by taking a $30,000 grant from the NEA and using it to demonstrate the mysterious beauty of not wasting taxpayer dollars by returning it, wholly unspent, to the U.S. Treasury.

Perhaps for the first time in living memory, if not ever, the outgoing Chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen expressed concern about the size of the U.S. national debt. CNBC‘s Jeff Cox has the story:

With Congress wrestling over a tax reform plan that critics say would explode the government budget deficit, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said she also is concerned over the surging level of public debt….

“I would simply say that I am very worried about the sustainability of the U.S. debt trajectory,” Yellen said. “Our current debt-to-GDP ratio of about 75 percent is not frightening but it’s also not low.”

“It’s the type of thing that should keep people awake at night,” she added.

The Fed has critics of its own, though, who say that the central bank helped balloon the debt through low interest rates kept in place since the financial crisis. The Fed kept its benchmark rate anchored near-zero for seven years, from December 2008 through December 2015. During that time, the national debt grew 77 percent.

In her comments, Yellen is only referring to the publicly-held portion of the U.S. national debt. In reality, the total public debt outstanding has grown to exceed 106% of the U.S. economy’s GDP while she has been at the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Also while she has been at the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Fed has dramatically increased its holdings of debt securities issued by the U.S. Treasury Department and other federal government agencies. The following chart shows by how much since June 14, 2004, which coincides with Janet Yellen holding leadership positions at the U.S. Federal Reserve.

During the Fed’s various Quantitative Easing (QE) operations, where the Fed sought to either boost the U.S. economy or to keep it from falling back into deep recession by loaning large sums of money to the U.S. government, the Fed would often dominate the buying at U.S. Treasury auctions, crowding out other lenders and forcing down interest rates.

Today, a little under $1 out of every $8 dollars that the U.S. government has borrowed in its $20.5 trillion debt is owed to the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Curiously, Yellen’s concern about the size of the national debt has suddenly come as the U.S. Congress is considering implementing tax cuts that would increase the rate at which the total public debt outstanding of the U.S. government is growing to be about the same as what it was during the last four years of President Obama’s tenure in office, which coincidentally overlaps portions of Yellen’s tenures as the Number Two and Number One person at the Fed.

Perhaps Yellen was concerned about the growth of the national debt during those four years. If only she had expressed them during that time, the national debt might not be quite the scary thing that now causes her night terrors.