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As we noted, California’s troubled Victims Compensation Board will reportedly provide $4 million for the victims of the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino. The backstory here is that these seriously injured government workers have become victims of government agencies.

“The problems started when San Bernardino County placed the terror victims into California’s Workers’ Comp System,” Matt Sawicki reported for Fox News last month. “Many survivors then had their claims repeatedly denied or modified.”

Terrorist Tashfeen Malik shot Valerie Weber twice, leaving her with a paralyzed arm and shattered pelvis. “I have to fight for treatments all doctors and surgeons say I need,” Weber told reporters. “Everyone was saying I need this, and yet my claim was sent to utilization review and being denied.”

This and other cases, such as Amanda Gaspard, shot multiple times, prompted an investigation. The county acknowledged the denials and called for “better communication” to claims administrators. San Bernardino County Board chairman, Robert A. Lovingood claimed “the county has worked hard and effectively to ensure safe, and complete care” for the injured employees and that has been “the county’s priority since that fateful day.” Based on their experience, San Bernardino injured victims don’t think so, and some have even petitioned President Trump for help.

San Bernardino is not the only case of government failing to provide terror victims with the medical treatment they need. In November, 2009, U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan, a psychiatrist, killed 13 and wounded more than 13 at Fort Hood, Texas. Nidal shot unarmed sergeant Alonzo Lunsford once in the head and six times in the body. The Army, following President Obama’s view that this was “workplace violence” and not terrorism, refused to cover an operation to remove a bullet. “Each one of us has gotten a raw deal somewhere down the line,” Lunsford told reporters.

Meanwhile, California’s Workers Comp system seemed to work well when Lt. John Pike, the cop who in 2011 pepper-sprayed students at UC Davis, claimed damage to his “psyche” and got a settlement of $38,055. On the other hand, when it comes to serious physical injuries the system does not work so well. The San Bernardino terrorist attack victims have learned that government’s proclaimed priorities can easily fail to match government performance.

Since President Trump released his “skinny” budget last week, there has been a lot of political posturing, if not outright hysteria in the media, from the advocates of the various government programs targeted for reduced levels of federal spending. And perhaps more remarkably, there have been widespread accusations of spending cuts where none have even been suggested. Legal Insurrection details a list of media organizations whose fact checking skills were apparently not put to use on a hyped story where all the facts about President Trump’s discretionary spending proposals are a matter of public record.

For example, New York Magazine has an article entitled, “White House Says Cutting Meals on Wheels is ‘Compassionate’,” Rolling Stone has one entitled “Meals on Wheels Seniors Respond to Trump: Cut Something Else,” the BBC writes that “Meals on Wheels cut back prompts backlash,” and Slate declares that “Trump’s budget director says Meals on Wheels sounds great but doesn’t work.”

The problem with these and the many other such headlines is that Trump is not cutting, and is certainly not eliminating, Meals on Wheels.

In an article headlined “Here’s the truth about Meals on Wheels in Trump’s budget“, USA Today‘s Gregory Korte reports on the origins of the story:

President Trump’s first budget proposal to Congress last week specifically identified steep cuts to hundreds of domestic programs, but Meals on Wheels wasn’t one of them.

The popular program — which mainly uses volunteer drivers to provide hot meals to older Americans across the country — doesn’t directly receive federal funding. As Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters Thursday, “Meals on Wheels is not a federal program.”

Nevertheless, Meals on Wheels quickly became the poster child for the impact of Trump’s budget cuts. Even before the budget’s release, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., tweeted that Trump had called for the “elimination” of Meals on Wheels, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus quickly dubbed it the “Starvation Budget.”

The involvement of partisan lawmakers brings an old saying about the rule of law to mind:

The Rule of Law:

1. If the facts are against you, argue the law.

2. If the law is against you, argue the facts.

3. If the facts and the law are against you, yell like hell.

The wide propagation of the phony Meals on Wheels budget cut story in the media suggests that Rule #3 is now in effect, where the loudest voices are demonstrating to their supporters just how far they’ll fight to prevent any imaginary budget cuts, no matter how imaginary they might be!

Bloomberg‘s Megan McArdle reflects on the politically inspired hysterical reaction to date and suggests the reason for why those who have become so angry and hysterical are now desperately yelling like hell.

The reaction to Trump’s budget has been, let us say, loud, with headlines blaring about cuts to poverty programs and social media going viral with angry denouncements of the White House budget chief who proclaimed that cutting meals on wheels was compassionate … to taxpayers. There have been some problems with these analyses, starting with the fact that the Meals on Wheels allegation was not, well, true. But broadly this is correct: the proposed budget does represent a fairly substantial transformation of government spending priorities.

Indeed. Just imagine how much more hysterical the reaction would be if any real net spending cuts for the discretionary portion of the U.S. government’s Fiscal Year 2018 budget had been proposed. The very earth below Washington, D.C., might have cracked open and the whole city sunk into the Potomac River from all the politically motivated and phony outrage.

Maybe next year.

President Trump wants to cut the budget of the federal Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent, from $8.2 billion to about $5.7 billion, a reduction of $2.6 billion and more than 3,000 positions. The proposed cuts have drawn attacks from politicians, the old-line establishment media, and regulatory zealots. For their part, taxpayers might keep a few realities in mind.

As an inspector general testified in 2013, the powerful EPA displays “an absence of even basic internal controls,” as confirmed by the case of EPA “policy advisor” John Beale. Beale claimed he also worked for the CIA, but nobody at the EPA bothered to check. That enabled Beale to take more than two years off, with full pay, claiming to be in London, India and Pakistan when he was actually kicking back at his vacation home. Beale pulled off his CIA ruse for nearly 20 years and also falsely claimed to have worked for Sen. John Tunney of California and served in Vietnam. Investigators found little evidence that the fraudster’s management produced anything of value, but the EPA eagerly ponied up retention bonuses. The EPA also continued to pay Beale for 19 months after his retirement dinner cruise. All told, the faker bilked taxpayers of nearly $1 million.

As we previously noted, the EPA has not exactly been forthcoming about what it does with the $6.3 billion it has collected from lawsuits and settlements since 1990. Taxpayers may also recall that in 2015 EPA contractors released three million gallons of contaminated wastewater into the Animas River. This unleashed 880,000 pounds of lead, arsenic and other toxic materials for dozens of miles through southwest Colorado and northern New Mexico. The EPA’s alleged vigilance also did nothing to prevent the Flint water crisis, but despite both disasters EPA boss Gina McCarthy kept her job.

Meanwhile, John Beale served 32 months in federal custody and last year gained release. He still collects his generous federal retirement, so in one sense the fake secret agent man got away it. Patrick Sullivan of the EPA inspector general’s office told reporters, “I’m quite confident that it would be almost impossible for someone like Beale to replicate his fraud.” Taxpayers have good reason to doubt it. On the other hand, taxpayers have plenty of evidence that the EPA deserves a cut of more than 31 percent.

Before he became president, Donald Trump perhaps made his biggest impression on Americans in his role on the reality TV game show The Apprentice. Today, with the release of the president’s so-called “skinny” budget, he looks to be in the starring role for a government-version of The Biggest Loser.

Reuters reports on President Trump’s initial position in the political negotiations over the future of the U.S. government’s spending.

President Donald Trump will ask the U.S. Congress for dramatic cuts to many federal programs as he seeks to bulk up defense spending, start building a wall on the border with Mexico and spend more money deporting illegal immigrants.

In a federal budget proposal with many losers, the Environmental Protection Agency and State Department stand out as targets for the biggest spending reductions. Funding would disappear altogether for 19 independent bodies that count on federal money for public broadcasting, the arts and regional issues from Alaska to Appalachia.

Trump’s budget outline is a bare-bones plan covering just “discretionary” spending for the 2018 fiscal year starting on Oct. 1. It is the first volley in what is expected to be an intense battle over spending in coming months in Congress, which holds the federal purse strings and seldom approves presidents’ budget plans.

Congress, controlled by Trump’s fellow Republicans, may reject some or many of his proposed cuts. Some of the proposed changes, which Democrats will broadly oppose, have been targeted for decades by conservative Republicans.

For a graphic on winners and losers in Trump’s budget, click here.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from President Trump’s skinny budget is that the proposed spending cuts would be balanced by increased spending elsewhere in the discretionary portion of the federal budget, with no change on the size of the annual budget deficit. As such, the purpose of the budget proposal is not to reduce federal spending so much as it is to change priorities for federal spending.

The Hill reports that the skinny budget has been declared to be “dead on arrival” by at least one Republican senator, two days before it was officially rolled out.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Tuesday that President Trump’s first budget was “dead on arrival” and wouldn’t make it through Congress.

“It’s not going to happen,” said Graham, according to NBC News. “It would be a disaster.”

Graham, a frequent Trump critic, expressed concerns with Trump’s proposed cuts to the State Department budget, especially the targeting of foreign aid.

In a separate report, Reuters indicates that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has a different view.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Thursday the State Department’s current spending was “not sustainable,” and he willingly accepted the “challenge” President Donald Trump had given in proposing to cut more than a quarter of his agency’s budget.

Trump’s budget proposal for the fiscal year beginning on Oct. 1 would cut 28 percent of the budget for U.S. diplomacy and foreign aid, according to documents provided by the White House. The combined budget for the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) would be $25.6 billion.

Speaking in Tokyo at the start of a trip to Asia focused on the threat from North Korea, Tillerson defended the cuts as a necessary correction to a “historically high” budget that had grown to address conflicts abroad in which the United States was engaged, as well as disaster aid.

“Clearly the level of spending that the State Department has been undertaking, particularly in this past year, is simply not sustainable,” he said. “As time goes by, there will be fewer military conflicts that the U.S. will be directly engaged in.”

The debate about the U.S. government’s budget is really about priorities. How should the U.S. government allocate its limited resources? Resources that have become more limited because of the earlier, wasteful choices made by politicians and their bureaucratic appointees, many of whom are no longer in office?

The argument over the State Department’s spending is just one small glimpse of what is really at stake for the American people, in what may just be the beginning of the first serious negotiations over the nation’s spending priorities in decades.

On Monday, March 6, 2017, a federal judge awarded $2.5 million to a military veteran who was denied timely medical care at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. The Arizona Republic‘s Jacques Billeaud reports on the results of the civil trial in federal court.

A judge on Monday awarded $2.5 million to a military veteran who said that his now-terminal cancer would have been curable had the Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix diagnosed it sooner.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Michelle Burns ruled a nurse practitioner who found abnormalities in Steven Harold Cooper’s prostate during an examination in late 2011 at the Carl T. Hayden VA Medical Center had breached the standard of care by failing to order more testing and refer him to a urologist.

Instead, Cooper learned 11 months later from a VA doctor that he had stage-IV prostate cancer. The day after receiving the diagnosis, Cooper sought treatment from a private doctor….

Phoenix was the epicenter of a scandal in which whistleblowers revealed that veterans on secret waiting lists faced scheduling delays of up to a year. An investigation by the VA’s Office of Inspector General into the wait-time scandal concluded that as many as 40 veterans died while awaiting care. The scandal led to the ouster of former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and a new law overhauling the agency and granting veterans easier access to treatment outside the VA.

For U.S. taxpayers, the most objectionable thing about the outcome in this case is that they are the ones who are being put on the hook for accountability in having to pay the $2.5 million judgment against the misconduct of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ employees. That is despite the fact that neither you, nor I, nor any individual outside of the VA contributed in any way to the situation that led to the court’s judgment against the VA.

At the same time, under the legal concept of sovereign immunity, the VA’s employees who are directly responsible for the situation will not bear any of the cost of the $2.5 million judgment.

But if they were, U.S. taxpayers could avoid being needlessly burdened with such large costs stemming from the misconduct of government employees if those employees were directly held accountable for their actions by directly bearing the financial consequences.

There are strong legal arguments against the claimed sovereign immunity of government bureaucrats, but until U.S. lawmakers reform the law to allow for the piercing of the government veil by the parties who have been injured by the bad actions undertaken by bureaucrats, in much the same way as applies in the corporate world, we will have the endure the negative outcomes of having bureaucrats be far too insulated from the consequences of their actions to have sufficient incentive to act in the best interests of U.S. taxpayers.

Californians pay the highest state personal income taxes in the nation, but if state Senators Cathleen Galgiani (D-Stockton) and Henry Stern (D-Canoga Park) have their way, teachers will be off the hook. Galgiani and Stern’s Senate Bill 807 would provide teachers with tax credits for college tuition, certification expenses and other costs. If they remain in the classroom for five years, they gain complete exemption from state income tax.

The bill is supposed to remedy a teacher shortage, but taxpayers should not be fooled.

The tax exemption amounts to a pay raise of four to six percent for the state’s teachers, whose average salary is $69,324, by some accounts $84,489, highest in the nation, and much higher than California’s $61,818 median household income. California teachers are not underpaid and not overworked. The school year is 180 days, in some districts 175 days, so teachers in effect work only half the year. The benefits are all gold-plated and firing a teacher is nearly impossible, whatever the gravity of the offense.

Teachers also received another bonus in the form of the Local Control Funding Formula. The billions for “at risk” students and English learners is being spent on salary increases, and Governor Jerry Brown is okay with it, in the name of “subsidiarity.” It’s his payoff to the teacher unions and educrats who helped extend the “temporary” tax hikes of 2012.

Like the governor, legislators who want to exempt teachers from state income tax remain unwilling to lower taxes across the board, for every taxpayer. A single worker earning $51,530 pays a rate of 9.3 percent. Many of the top earners, who pay the highest rate of 13.3 percent, are high-tech entrepreneurs who generate jobs and revenue. As Senator Stern sees it, however, “teachers are the original job creators” and thus more deserving of a tax break. Stern and Galgiani’s Teacher Recruitment and Retention Act of 2017 would be more accurately titled the Separate and Unequal Tax Exemption Act.

“Haven’t Crime Victims Paid Enough?” runs the headline on a color half-page newspaper ad from the California Victim Compensation Board. A terrified woman appears to be agreeing with the headline. The ad explains that “financial resources are available,” and “We cover: mental health treatment, medical expenses, funeral and burial, income loss, relocation expenses.” No word of any difficulties along the way.

As Lawrence McQuillan noted in 2003, the motto of CalVCB could be “thousands for lawyers and therapists, not a penny left for victims of crime.” The program “is bankrupt after spending its reserve fund of $96.7 million over the last four year.” CalVCB gave money to lawyers for “minimal services,” authorized mental health treatments at the highest benefit levels, and gave money to ineligible members of victims’ families. CalVCB “has become a pork barrel for government workers, therapists and lawyers.”

According to a 2008 report by California’s state auditor, from 2002-2005 compensation payments “decreased from $123.9 million to $61.6 million—a 50 percent decline.” At the same time, “the costs to support the program have increased. These costs make up a significant portion of the Restitution Fund disbursements—ranging from 26 percent to 42 percent annually.” In some cases, CalVCB staff took longer than 180 days to process applications and longer than 90 days to pay bills. The auditor found an “absence of controls that would prevent erroneous payments” and “no benchmarks, performance measures, or formal written procedures for workload management.”

As Richard Trainor of CalWatchdog noted in 2011, the $100 million CalVCB program sometimes took three years to discharge an approved claim. In some cases, “crime victims are left to twist in the wind on their own and provide their own legal, medical and rehabilitation services, at their own cost.” CalVCB administrative costs ran from 25-40 percent and the state bureaucracy remains lethargic.

A December 23, 2016 CalVCB press release hailing a $4 million grant for victims in San Bernardino came more than a year after the terrorist attack itself. No word about how much of the $4 million would actually go to legitimate victims and now much to government employees, therapists and lawyers. In similar style, the CalVCB newspaper ad omits key realities California’s crime victims and embattled taxpayers alike might want to know.

For the U.S. national debt, the date of March 16, 2017, marks the day when the statutory debt ceiling, which limits how much money the U.S. government can borrow, will go back into effect for the first time since it was suspended back on November 2, 2015, as part of former President Obama’s last budget deal with the U.S. Congress.

Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it will immediately begin employing “extraordinary measures” to ensure that the U.S. government’s total public debt outstanding stays below whatever level it will have reached at the end of the Ides of March. Reuters’ David Lawder reports on what that means:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Thursday called on Congress to raise the federal debt ceiling “at the first opportunity” and announced the first of several likely cash management measures aimed at staving off a U.S. default.

The Treasury said it would suspend sales of State and Local Government Series securities, known as “slugs,” effective noon EDT on March 15. A debt ceiling suspension expires at the end of that day….

Mnuchin said additional “extraordinary measures” to avoid default would likely be taken….

Analysts at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, estimated last week that a U.S. payments default could be staved off until October or November with Treasury’s cash conservation efforts.

In the past, such extraordinary measures have meant doing things like delaying scheduled contributions to pension plans for civilian government employees and the military, and authorizing the U.S. Treasury to issue I.O.U.s to the pensions’ trust funds. These funds were then reimbursed immediately after the debt ceiling was increased to allow more new federal borrowing.

These extraordinary measures follow on the heels of other measures that the U.S. Treasury Department began using several months ago, as it began more actively managing the rate of growth of the U.S. national debt in advance of the reimposition of the debt ceiling on March 16, 2017. Barron’s Teresa Rivas reported before the holidays last December:

With 2017 just around the corner, Congress has its work cut out for it, as it must approve an increase to the US government’s debt ceiling. If it doesn’t, that could translate into volatility for Treasuries, according to Invesco’s Justin Mandeville.

In his latest note, Mandeville writes that if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, the Treasury’s cash balance—regulated by law—would have to decrease “dramatically,” which would in turn curtail Treasury bill issuance.

The Treasury has already started trying to address this possibility, drawing down its cash balance to meet the law’s mandate if necessary, and recent T bill auctions have been scaled back. With little incentive to change this in the first quarter, he says investors should expect low auction sizes that put pressure on rates.

If Congress doesn’t act, then the Treasury can use “extraordinary measures” to avoid default, but that would only give it breathing space until mid-year.

March 16, 2017, is also significant because the White House has announced that it will issue a preview of President Trump’s first official budget proposal, to be released in full in mid-April. Called the “skinny budget,” here’s how Michelle Cottle of The Atlantic described it:

Within the next couple of weeks, things are going to get vastly less breezy, when the White House officially drops its 2018 “skinny budget” on Congress. This will give lawmakers their first real peek at Trump’s economic priorities––beyond his usual unicorns-for-all pledge to slash taxes while spending willy-nilly on things like infrastructure and immigration enforcement.

At that point, stuff starts getting real.

To clarify, what the White House is handing over is not a full budget proposal. It is a “skinny budget,” which sounds like some god-awful low-calorie sludge you’d order at Starbucks, but is in fact a general overview of the president’s spending priorities for the 2018 fiscal year. As Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney stressed at a press briefing Monday, the outline will not address entitlement programs such as Social Security or Medicare; it will not tackle tax reform; it won’t get into any specifics on infrastructure; and it won’t attempt any sort of revenue projections. It will merely provide “topline” numbers on discretionary spending that the various agencies will be expected to abide by.

Americans can therefore expect a lot of phony political posturing and bureaucratic howling to begin in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, March 16, 2017.

The elimination of taxes on feminine hygiene products is a global movement, but California governor Jerry Brown has been a staunch opponent of the tax cut. Last September he vetoed seven bills that would have cut taxes, and in his veto message he said “tax breaks are the same as new spending – they both cost the general fund money.” This year California Democrats have revised their proposals by cutting the so-called “tampon tax” and replacing it with a new tax on hard liquor. Assembly Bill 479 would increase taxes on liquor under 100 proof by $1.20 per gallon and on liquor over 100 proof by $2.40 per gallon. Beer and wine would be untouched and distributors would bear the tax increase. The measure needs a two-thirds vote to pass. For their part, taxpayers might want to veto Brown’s notion that tax breaks are the same as new spending.

In a tax break, a consumer gets to regain more of her own money. In new spending, the state spends the money it grabs from taxpayers. By the standard of government greed, all tax cuts must be “paid for” and the state must never suffer a reduction in revenue, like a worker who loses a job or has his wages cut. By this logic, if the state eliminated a useless agency such as the California Coastal Commission or the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, it would have to start a new useless agency to compensate. Meanwhile, if the state wants to save money, there are plenty of ways to do that.

For example, stop allowing California Highway Patrol bosses to retire and then boost their already gold-plated pensions by claiming a disability. Consider, for example, former CHP assistant chief Kyle Scarber, 53, who bags a pension of $125,000 a year. Scarber also faces criminal charges for aiding his son, accused of rape, to escape to Mexico. As this plays out, Scarber is demanding that CalPERS give him a more lucrative disability pension. It’s a safe bet that Scarber will get what he wants.

Many CHP bosses have boosted their pensions with dubious disability claims known as “chief’s disease.” To eliminate this waste and fraud would not be “the same as new spending.” Like eliminating the tampon tax, it is simply the right thing to do.

George Will has an interesting column about how the number of people employed by government at all levels has grown since 1960. Here are the leading paragraphs:

In 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected president, America’s population was 180 million and it had approximately 1.8 million federal bureaucrats (not counting uniformed military personnel and postal workers). Fifty-seven years later, with seven new Cabinet agencies, and myriad new sub-Cabinet agencies (e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency), and a slew of matters on the federal policy agenda that were virtually absent in 1960 (health care insurance, primary and secondary school quality, crime, drug abuse, campaign finance, gun control, occupational safety, etc.), and with a population of 324 million, there are only about 2 million federal bureaucrats.

So, since 1960, federal spending, adjusted for inflation, has quintupled and federal undertakings have multiplied like dandelions, but the federal civilian workforce has expanded only negligibly, to approximately what it was when Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952. Does this mean that “big government” is not really big? And that by doing much more with not many more employees it has accomplished prodigies of per-worker productivity? John J. DiIlulio Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania and the Brookings Institution, says: Hardly.

In his 2014 book “Bring Back the Bureaucrats,” he argued that because the public is, at least philosophically, against “big government,” government has prudently become stealthy about how it becomes ever bigger. In a Brookings paper, he demonstrates that government expands by indirection, using “administrative proxies” — state and local government, for-profit businesses, and nonprofit organizations. Since 1960, the number of state and local government employees has tripled to more than 18 million, a growth driven by federal money: Between the early 1960s and early 2010s, the inflation-adjusted value of federal grants for the states increased more than tenfold. For example, the EPA has fewer than 20,000 employees, but 90 percent of its programs are completely administered by thousands of state government employees, largely funded by Washington.

Although not directly employed by federal government entities, because these jobs are directly supported by funding provided by the U.S. government for the purpose of obtaining its objectives, they represent an effective extension of the federal payroll. As such, they are essentially “off-the-books” federal bureaucrats, which are funded through a combination of grants or contracts to non-profit organizations, as well as state and local governments.

Or as John DiIlulio describes them, they are “de facto Feds”, of which he estimates that there are 12 million people employed by state and local governments and nonprofit organizations for the purpose of administering federal government policies and programs, which are in addition to the 2.6 million civilian employees of the federal government and approximately 1.5 million uniformed military personnel.

• With one-third of its revenues flowing from government, if only one-fifth of the 11 million nonprofit sector employees owe their jobs to federal or intergovernmental grant, contract, or fee funding, that’s 2.2 million workers.

• As noted, the best for-profit contractor estimate is 7.5 million.

• And the conservative sub-national government employee estimate is three million.

• That’s 12.2 million in all, but let’s scale down to call it 12 million.

• 12 million plus our good-old two million actual federal bureaucrats equals 14 million.

• And how many were there back in 1960? The feds had some administrative proxies even then, maybe as many as two million, plus two million actual federal bureaucrats.

• So, let’s call it 14 million in all today versus four million back when Ike was saying farewell.

So, the real federal bureaucracy, defined as the total number of people (federal civilian workers, de facto feds in state or local government agencies, for-profit contractor employees, and nonprofit workers) paid to administer federal policies and programs, probably increased at least 3.5-fold during the same five-and-a-half decades that real federal spending increased five-fold and the number of pages in the Federal Register increased six-fold.

Big government is a lot bigger than most people think!