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Proposition 57, California’s 2016 Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act championed by governor Jerry Brown, expanded parole possibilities for nonviolent offenders and barred prosecutors from directly filing juvenile cases in adult court. This measure was supposed to reduce the prison population and save taxpayers money. Instead it burns up more taxpayer dollars and gives some of the worst violent offenders, including convicted murderers, a shot at early release.

Daniel Marsh was only 15 years old when he murdered Oliver Northup, 87, and his wife Claudia Maupin, 76, in their Davis home. Marsh tortured and eviscerated both victims and left a cell phone and drinking glass inside the bodies to confuse the police. He confessed to police in a lengthy interview, and his court-appointed lawyer failed to have that tossed. He then turned to an insanity defense, which the jury rejected, though his expert witness cost taxpayers $25,000.

Marsh carefully planned the murders—committing the crime at 15 was part of his calculation to avoid the maximum penalty. He was tried as an adult and in December 2014 and sentenced to 52 years to life, with the possibility of parole after 25 years, when he would only be in his early 40s.

In November 2016, voters passed Proposition 57. In February 2018, in a case involving Pablo Lara, a juvenile who had kidnapped and raped a seven-year-old girl, the California Supreme Court ruled that Proposition 57 applied retroactively. Later that month, the Third Court of Appeal reversed the judgement against Daniel Marsh, who would get a hearing to see if it was appropriate to try him in adult court. If not, he would be re-sentenced as a juvenile and face maximum punishment of incarceration until age 25. This is clearly a new trial at taxpayer expense, with no new evidence, all for a convicted murderer who has never shown the slightest remorse and clearly poses danger to the public.

“This is so wrong,” Claudia Maupin’s daughter Victoria Hurd recently told reporters. “It’s barreling back into our presence.”

Many similar cases are in the Proposition 57 pipeline. As the Lompoc Record headlined, “Prop. 57 could turn back time for minors charged with murder.”

Last week, while testifying before the U.S. Congress, the new head of the U.S. Federal Reserve Jerome Powell acknowledged that the U.S. government is not on a sustainable fiscal path.

CNBC has a video excerpt of Powell’s testimony on February 27, 2018, which came in response to questions asked by Representative Bruce Poliquin (R-ME), but here is the relevant portion of the transcript:

Poliquin: “Mr. Powell, do you take a different tack from the folks that were here, earlier, the last administration, do you think this is a problem?

Powell: “Do I think this is a?…”

Poliquin: “Yes. This 21 trillion dollars in debt.”

Powell: “Well, yeah, I think… I think that we’re not on a sustainable fiscal path and I think that we need to be on a sustainable fiscal path.”

That’s quite a refreshing change from the previous leadership of the U.S. Federal Reserve, who didn’t acknowledge that there was a problem with the growth of the U.S. national debt until their last months on the job.

Will the $20+ trillion national debt come to be used as a weapon against the U.S. in President Trump’s recently announced new trade war?

It’s a situation that has been threatened before, as we saw with Saudi Arabia during President Obama’s tenure in office, and it is something that we have seen other nations do before, where Russia worked over Ukraine as part of a wider saber-rattling exercise in recent years.

But this time, the U.S. is particularly vulnerable, because President Trump’s really ugly higher spending plans are coming at a time when the U.S. Federal Reserve is looking to stop being such an enabler of U.S. government borrowing, where the combination means that the U.S. government will have to look abroad to borrow the money to support President Trump’s deficit boosting fiscal plans. Richard Leong of Reuters reports:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to slap stiff tariffs on imported steel and aluminum has rattled financial markets and stirred fears that some trading partners might retaliate by dumping U.S. Treasuries.

Should China, Japan and other nations, which have recycled their trade dollars through their Treasuries holdings, suddenly decide to whittle them down, markets could be in for a rough ride.

Such a retaliatory move, in the wake of Trump’s first big protectionist action, comes at a time when foreign demand for U.S. debt is seen critical to offset an expected surge in federal borrowing needs, analysts and investors said on Friday.

In the case of China and Japan, the two nations together hold about 12.2% of the $20.2 trillion total public debt outstanding, which is nearly $1 out of every $8 that the U.S. government has borrowed in its history, which may give them some pretty strong leverage should they choose to use it. In terms of the $14.7 trillion publicly-held portion of the national debt, Japan and China hold nearly $1 out of every $6 that the U.S. government has borrowed, which is relevant because this is the portion of the national debt that will need to increase to support the U.S. government’s spending plans set by the Bipartisan Budget Act.

If that kind of retaliation happens, the likely effect will be to spike up the yields on U.S. Treasuries, which are the interest rates that the federal government pays to its creditors. And in fact, that is exactly what happened on March 2 as the markets responded to President Trump’s announcement of new tariffs on foreign-produced steel and aluminum imported into the U.S. CNBC reports:

U.S. government debt yields rose Friday after President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement sparked fear of a trade war and more robust inflation….

Fears of stronger inflation as a result of higher materials prices and foreign retaliation sent yields up across the board Friday. The United States is expected to set tariffs of 25 percent when it comes to steel and 10 percent for aluminum, which could emerge as soon as next week and put pressure on companies both domestically and internationally.

“Trade wars and tariffs are bearish for bonds because they raise inflation,” said Kathy Jones, chief fixed income strategist for the Schwab Center for Financial Research. “Particularly when we look at steel and aluminum, they’re a part of a lot of things we use: autos, beer cans — you name it.”

“If [the tariffs] go through — and they’re substantial — it’ll be passed along to the consumer,” she added. “Ultimately, tariffs tend to slow economic growth … People are looking at it and saying if we get some versions of this and retaliation, it’s just a lose-lose situation.”

Where the national debt is concerned, higher yields on U.S. Treasuries mean that an even larger portion of what the U.S. government spends each year will have to go to pay higher amounts of interest to the nation’s creditors, which means less money will be available to go to the things that Americans, including President Trump, would rather have the government doing.

When we consider the costs, President Trump’s idea of a “easy win” trade war doesn’t look much like a win for Americans – particularly where the ticking time bomb of the national debt is concerned.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, created by Proposition 71 in 2004, promised life-saving cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other diseases. The $3 billion state stem-cell agency also assured voters that royalties from these cures and therapies would generate more than $1 billion. As David Jensen of the California Stem Cell Report notes, no royalties have appeared until this month, when a check of $190,345.87 arrived. As one researcher observed, that “does not even cover the annual salary of CIRM’s part-time vice chairman,” and Jensen fails to provide the back story.

In 2009, CIRM board member Duane Roth offered to serve as vice chairman for no salary. CIRM opted to make Roth co-vice-chairman along with former state senator Art Torres, a lawyer, not a medical scientist. CIRM promptly tripled Torres’s salary from $75,000 to $225,000. So CIRM served as a lucrative landing spot for washed-up politicians.

Jensen claims CIRM was “an idea in the mind of researchers,” but it was actually the project of real estate tycoon Robert Klein, who made himself chairman, took a salary, and kept the agency off-limits to oversight. In 2013, the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, found that 91 percent of CIRM funding went to institutions with representatives on the CIRM board. So the agency was really about the redistribution of money.

Marcy Darnvosky of the Center for Genetics and Society told Jensen, “It’s hard not to ask whether this first royalty payment is anything other than theater, meant to assuage and allure voters now that CIRM is talking about another ballot measure for $5 billion more from the public purse.” Despite the meager results, Jensen clearly believes CIRM should get the money.

As Jeanne Loring of the Scripps Institute explains, “The infrastructure created by CIRM is the ground in which regenerative medicine will grow and blossom. The timing is difficult to predict, but the outcome is certain. California, thanks to CIRM, will be like Seattle was to Microsoft, like South San Francisco was to Genentech, like Cupertino was to Apple. We have sown the seeds, and now we need to nurture the growth of a new industry.”

From $3 billion in public funds this “new industry” returns $190,000 in 13 years. CIRM wants another $5 billion but Californians would be foolish to pony up another penny.

Where the practice of medicine is concerned, the field of chiropractic doesn’t have a strong reputation, which is attested by a Wikipedia article detailing a long list of scientific controversies and criticism of the field.

Never-the-less, despite ongoing questions of many of its practices and their effectiveness as medical treatments, a limited number of chiropractic services are covered by Medicare.

Which brings us to a whole different problem caused by a significant number of chiropractic practitioners, who appear to have unlocked the secret to extracting hundreds of millions of dollars annually from Medicare by providing chiropractic services to senior citizens that the program does not cover. Lois Norder of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains how they have been getting away with it:

Make off with millions by going small and flying under the government radar. That seems to be the takeaway in a new report by a government watchdog.

Every year, Medicare is shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars for massages, acupuncture and other ineligible or medically unnecessary services that are billed by chiropractors, says the report, by the inspector general of the federal health department.

Medicare patients are out millions, too, for coinsurance payments to chiropractors for medically unnecessary services, according to the report.

Yet despite years of warnings about the problem, the agency responsible for overseeing Medicare – the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — hasn’t made it a priority to identify and stop the waste, fraud and abuse, says the report.

One reason: Payments for individual chiropractic services are small, ranging from $29 to $54 dollars, the report says. But, the OIG notes, Medicare is paying more than $450 million a year for the services.

That strategy means that unscrupulous chiropractors are bombarding Medicare’s billing services with somewhere from 8.3 million to 15.5 million of these small dollar value bills per year.

There are really two problems at work here. First, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services doesn’t appear to have either the ability or the willingness to impose greater discipline on its reimbursement practices, where the high volume of small bills being submitted by chiropractors are being processed and paid despite being ineligible for reimbursement. Even at an annual total of $450 million, the waste represented just 0.08%, or less than one-tenth of one percent, of the Medicare program’s total amount of spending of over $597 billion in 2017. For the estimated 6,000 bureaucrats who work for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, that’s the equivalent of saving $75,000 out of the $99,500,000 of spending that each would be responsible for overseeing each year, assuming they equally divided that task among themselves.

The second problem is that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would appear to be dealing with some really unscrupulous chiropractors among its worst inappropriate billing cases, which is made clear in the following anecdote from Norder’s article:

The agency also tried educating chiropractors on Medicare billing requirements. But, the report says, chiropractors in at least one jurisdiction “were resistant to education and not willing to change their billing patterns.”

And thus, Medicare is being taken to the cleaners by unscrupulous chiropractors to the tune of $450 million a year in chiropractic services that it doesn’t cover, for cases that the U.S. Department of Justice’s Medicare Fraud Strike Force Teams apparently deem too small to pursue and prosecute.

As for solving the problem, perhaps greater federalism would be in order.

Since chiropractors are directly regulated and licensed by state governments, wouldn’t it make more sense to enlist state regulators to ensure that chiropractors are in compliance with both state and federal billing practices? Since they would have the power to pull the license of any chiropractor who might be “resistant to education” where establishing effective and honest billing practices are concerned, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services might get a lot more bang for its fraud-fighting buck if it were to follow that approach instead of continuing whatever it isn’t doing to stop the waste today.

For added effectiveness in eliminating waste beyond the $450 million what has been documented by its Inspector General annually for chiropractic services, it may also be desirable to transfer the administration of Medicare’s entire billing reimbursement program to the states. Remember, what is wasted just on chiropractic services that aren’t approved to be covered by Medicare is just a tiny fraction of the waste that is being generated across all of the medical services for which Medicare is paying the bills.

Or for that matter, we should perhaps consider transferring the administration of the entire Medicare program to the states, since it seems to have grown well beyond Washington D.C.’s ability to manage well enough to avoid wasting hundreds of millions, if not billions, in billing fraud each year.

California assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, a high-profile player with the #MeToo movement, is now facing allegations of sexual misconduct conduct. Two men charge that Garcia groped them, in one case after making an explicit sexual proposition. Another says he was fired after declining to play “spin the bottle” with Garcia. She has taken unpaid leave while investigators look into the charges. Over in the Senate, Tony Mendoza resigned from office as a vote to expel him was being prepared, so perhaps Mendoza and Garcia could commiserate with each other. For taxpayers, this is more than a matter of prurient interest.

As we noted, in the last three fiscal years, the state of California has paid out more than $25 million to settle sexual harassment claims against state agencies. The biggest payout was $1.7 million to Tyann Sorrell of UC Berkeley School of Law for sexual harassment at the hands of former dean Sujit Choudhry. The dean and his fellow abusers should have paid the settlements out of their own pockets and nothing is likely to change until state law makes legislators and government employees take responsibility for their own actions. Meanwhile, the anniversary of perhaps the worst case of abuse in state history recently passed without notice.

In late February, 2017, the senate held a memorial for New Left radical and former state senator Tom Hayden. Senator Janet Nguyen, a refugee from the Stalinist regime Hayden championed, attempted to speak out but senate Democrats demanded that she be silent, shut down her microphone, physically removed her from the Senate floor, and even cut off the video feed for the California Channel. Contrary to the sexual abuse cases, nobody suffered any penalty for smacking down Janet Nguyen. Longtime capitol observer Dan Walters was not surprised that governor Jerry Brown kept quiet about the case. As governor in 1975, Brown opposed the settlement of Vietnamese refugees in California and “he even tried to block refugee flights into Travis Air Force Base.”

In an all too predictable move, the board of the California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS) pension fund has begun taking steps to try to bail itself out before it is forced to acknowledge that it has little-to-no prospect of paying out the excessively generous pensions that politicians have promised to local government employees throughout the state.

In doing so, the board will force local governments throughout the state into one of three options: slash services to the residents of their communities to pay the pension benefits that politicians have guaranteed to the state’s public employees, hike local taxes through the roof to pay them, or go bankrupt as they might try to reduce their pension liabilities to levels they can sustainably afford.

Dan Walters of CALmatters describes how CalPERS board will impose those options on California’s school districts, cities and counties in a recent op-ed that appeared in the Fresno Bee:

The CalPERS board voted to change the period for recouping future investment losses from 30 years to 20 years.

The bottom line is that it will require the state government and thousands of local government agencies and school districts to ramp up their mandatory contributions to the huge trust fund.

Client agencies – cities, particularly – were already complaining that double-digit annual increases in CalPERS payments are driving some of them towards insolvency and the new policy, which will kick in next year, will raise those payments even more.

“What we are trying to avoid is a situation where we have a city that is already on the brink, and applying a 20-year amortization schedule would put them over the edge,” a representative of the League of California Cities, Dane Hutchings, told the CalPERS board before its vote.

Last summer, CalPERS board member and former state controller Steve Westly put numbers to the state’s growing government employee pension problem in his own op-ed at the Mercury News:

Jerry Brown has been a strong governor and a moderating force on budget issues. But when it comes to pensions, the new state budget projects that California has nearly $206 billion in “unfunded liabilities” for the state’s two public pension funds.

Over the last eight years, we added $100 billion in unfunded retirement liability for these funds. This is the elephant in the room of state finances, and it is time we got serious about it.

You probably haven’t heard much about the looming pension crisis because elected officials don’t like talking about it and it’s easy for them to kick the can down the road: they can make promises to public employees now that won’t come due until they’re out of office.

But the slow creep of pension costs is crowding out investments in other areas, including education, environmental stewardship, social services, and public transportation. In essence, the state is being forced to default on its social obligations to pay for its pension obligations. If you’re a progressive, fixing this problem may be the most important issue facing the state.

California’s state employees’ pension fund (CalPERS) manages close to $330 billion, making it the largest public pension fund in the nation. Unfortunately, it’s only funded at 65 percent of the amount needed for its commitments to retirees. And this is with the stock market at historic highs. If there is a downturn CalPERS could find itself with a much larger shortfall.

CalPERS’s public employee pensions have fallen to that 65%-funded level from 77%-funded just two years earlier when the red flags of its future insolvency risk began to be raised. Worse, that shortfall has grown even as the U.S. stock market has strongly rallied during that time, where the recent 10% correction the market has seen in the past month underscores the risk of lower investment returns.

The leading candidates running to replace California’s outgoing Governor Jerry Brown have largely avoided addressing the growing risk of CalPERS’ insolvency, although Governor Brown has suggested using the opportunity of an upcoming court case to force California’s state and local government employees to take a pension haircut. Bloomberg reports:

Mr. Brown in January said legal rulings may clear the way for making cuts to public pension benefits — specifically a case before the state’s Supreme Court in which lower courts ruled that reductions to pensions are permissible if the payments remain “reasonable” for workers. That would undermine a maxim called the California rule that holds that benefits can’t be rolled back.

“There is more flexibility than there is currently assumed by those who discuss the California rule,” Mr. Brown said at the time. In the next recession, the governor “will have the option of considering pension cutbacks for the first time,” he said.

Already, the state’s contribution to the public employees’ retirement system for the fiscal year beginning in July is double what it was in fiscal 2009. It’s worse for cities, where personnel expenses consume a greater share of budgets.

No matter what, somebody in California is going to bear the brunt in paying the cost of CalPERS’ looming risk of insolvency. The only question is whether it will be the residents of the state’s local communities or the bureaucrats who have benefited so much under the state’s current public employee retirement system?

Right now, the bureaucrats are getting their way. How long can Californians afford for the status quo to continue?

There is both bad news and worse news to report about the VA’s ongoing scandals of waste, fraud and abuse.

First, the bad news. The Department of Vetarans Affairs is now immersed in a new scandal, one that reaches all the way up to the top ranks of the federal agency. Gabby Morrongiello of the Washington Times reports on a misuse of taxpayer funds that allowed VA Secretary David Shulkin to go on a travel junket to Europe with his wife at taxpayer expense.

The Department of Veterans Affairs watchdog released a report Wednesday that said the head of the agency, Secretary David Shulkin, improperly accepted tickets to Wimbledon and used taxpayer funds to cover his wife’s airfare during a European trip last July.

According to the VA inspector general report, the 11-day trip cost taxpayers more than $122,000 and was subsequently misrepresented to ethics lawyers after Shulkin returned to the U.S.

Shulkin’s chief of staff, Viveca Wright Simpson, doctored an official email in order to secure taxpayer funding for the travel costs associated with his wife’s flight for the trip, which ended up totaling more than $4,000, the inspector general concluded.

Shulkin himself misrepresented how he obtained tickets to the Wimbledon tennis tournament in his conversations with ethics officials. Shulkin claimed he had received them as a gift from a close personal friend, when in fact, the woman who provided the tickets had only met the VA secretary three times.

“After a thorough investigation, OIG’s findings included the Chief of Staff’s alteration of a document and misrepresentations to ethics officials caused Secretary Shulkin’s wife to be approved as an ‘invitational traveler,’ which authorized VA to pay her travel costs [and] Secretary Shulkin improperly accepted a gift of Wimbledon tickets and related hospitality,” the report read.

The inspector general said the trip led to a “misuse of VA resources” and employees’ time since at least one staffer served “as a personal travel concierge to plan tourist activities” for Shulkin and his wife. The secretary, who was slated to attend a conference on veterans’ affairs in London and meet with Danish and British officials, was accompanied on the trip by three other top-level agency staffers and a six-member security detail.

Although centered around Shulkin, who had previously been appointed by President Obama to serve at the VA and who was promoted by President Trump to clean up the department, the new scandal really illustrates the extent to which corruption has become entrenched throughout the VA. Vivieca Wright Simpson, who has resigned within the last week, was previously implicated in efforts to cover up the VA’s wait list scandal, where VA officials had rationed health care to veterans by maintaining a secret wait list for veterans seeking treatment at the VA while making it appear they were meeting the department’s goals and allow them to collect performance bonuses. The Washington Examiner‘s Pete Kasperowicz has that aspect of the story:

A Department of Veterans Affairs official accused of altering an email to get a free trip to Europe for Secretary David Shulkin’s wife is the same official who tried to hide the VA waitlist scandal from Congress in 2014….

Wright Simpson is the same person who in 2014 tried to get VA employees to hide evidence of the VA wait-time scandal from members of Congress.

At the time, CNN reported that two lawmakers complained that their efforts to discover more about that scandal were stymied by Wright Simpson.

When Reps. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., and Mike Doyle, D-Pa., called the VA to ask about a glowing report from the Pittsburgh VA, they were told by an official that he was told not to tell lawmakers about the extent of the waitlist problem.

“Specifically, congressional sources say, Wolf said she was told not to do so by Gary Devansky of the Pittsburgh-based Veterans Integrated Service Network 4, on behalf of Vivieca Wright, the Veterans Health Administration’s Director of Network Support,” CNN reported.

Her involvement in the scandal that rocked the VA in 2014 didn’t hurt Wright Simpson’s career prospects. In 2017, the VA named her as the department’s interim chief of staff, and she has since taken on that role in an official capacity.

Noted VA whistleblower Scott Davis said Wright Simpson’s involvement shows the “corrosive culture” at the VA under the Obama administration has continued under Trump.

Indeed it does. For his part, David Shulkin is apparently seeking to restore his reputation after having it tarnished in the VA’s travel scandal. Military.com‘s Richard Sisk reports on the latest twist to come out of the VA’s travelgate scandal:

The Department of Veterans affairs became the department of intrigue Wednesday as Secretary Dr. David Shulkin claimed a White House mandate to purge those plotting against him at the agency.

In phone calls to several news outlets, Shulkin said he would be staying in the job despite the uproar over his travel expenses and now had administration approval to clean house of insiders at the VA who sought to take him down.

Shulkin told Politico he was the victim of “subversion” from within, and issued a warning that “Those who crossed the line in the past are going to have to be accountable for those decisions.”

Amen to that, although we would recognize that mandate would now be held by either Shulkin or his replacement should the travel scandal prove to claim his career in public service at the VA.

For now however, Shulkin would appear to be safe in his position, where his previous work to improve access to medical care to the nation’s veterans has bought him some time. Sisk continues reporting, which is where the worse news for the VA comes into play:

Shulkin’s apparent success in keeping the job came after several Veterans Service Organizations (VSOs) representing millions of vets backed his retention Tuesday.

The VSOs said they were disappointed by the findings of the IG’s report but saw Shulkin, the only holdover from the Obama administration in the Trump Cabinet, as a hedge against over reliance on the Veterans Choice Program, which allows vets to opt for private or community care.

The VSOs have consistently warned that the Trump administration’s push to expand Choice would eventually lead to the gutting of the VA’s health care system, the nation’s largest with 170 hospitals and more than 1,200 outpatient facilities serving nine million vets annually.

“While we were disappointed to learn of the recent issue with the Secretary’s travel, we believe that the current controversy surrounding the Secretary is part of a larger effort to remove him and install others who would take steps to privatize the services provided to our nation’s heroes,” Denise Rohan, national commander of the two-million member American Legion, said in a statement.

What the VSOs fail to recognize is that the government’s role in directly providing single-payer style health care to the nation’s veterans who were not allowed to seek care elsewhere is what allowed corruption to become institutionalized at all levels of the department in the first place, where the bureaucrats in the department could routinely put their own interests ahead of the veterans they claim to serve with impunity.

Breaking the unethical monopoly of the VA’s health care system for the nation’s veterans may be the only recourse that veterans and taxpayers have to break the chains of corruption at a government department whose bureaucrats are proving to be too intransigent to reform. The VSOs seeking to sustain the VA’s health care system as it is today had better hope that new accountability reforms become law and prove to be effective in cleaning house at the scandal plagued department.

Otherwise, it will be the veterans that they claim to serve who will continue to pay the price.

As we noted, California assemblyman Ian Calderon has proposed a bill that would make it illegal for restaurant staff to give customers a plastic straw unless they ask for one. Unrequested straws would draw a fine of $1,000 or even jail time. For all his zeal, the assemblyman seems to have ignored the tons of trash homeless “campers” leave in scenic areas such as the American River Parkway and in major cities such as San Francisco.

In a single week last March, the San Francisco Department of Public Works picked up 55,000 pounds of trash and close to 4,000 hypodermic needles. The plastic syringes pose health and safety hazards but that does not trouble legislators. In fact, the government spends money to distribute syringes. Such “needle exchanges” began during the AIDS epidemic and there are now some 200 across the USA, including 40 in California, with six in San Francisco County and five in Los Angeles, which hands out more than a million syringes per year. The federal government banned money for such programs in 1988, lifted the prohibition in 2009 and reinstated it in 2011. In 2016, the feds restored the funding as part of an omnibus spending package.

Government syringe handouts are intended to prevent disease but their promoters claim they save money as well. According to the Centers for Disease Control, a New York program in one year saved $1,300 to $3,000 “per client.” Likewise, “expanding access to clean syringes through an additional annual U.S. investment of $10 million” would result in 195 few HIV infections, “lifetime treatment cost savings of $75.8 million,” and “a return on investment of $7.58 for every $1 spent.” Taxpayers and economists alike might wonder about a windfall like that, but some realities remain clear.

Government spending is not “investment,” even if those in white lab coats say so. Whatever the public health benefits, the junkie “clients” discard the free syringes by the thousands. This poses health and safety risks, but unlike plastic straws, legislators do no seek to criminalize those who hand out the syringes.

After the recent mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, FBI special agent Robert Lasky, head of the bureau’s Miami division, said he “truly regrets” the pain caused by the FBI’s failure to act on a tip about the shooter. The FBI supposedly had no way to trace the tip, then FBI boss Christopher Wray said the message had not been passed on to the Miami field office as official protocol required. This was all couched in passive verbs, and the FBI boss did not name the person who failed to pass on the message, nor did he explain why that person might have failed to do so.

The FBI also had ample warning about Omar Mateen but did nothing. On June 12, 2016, Mateen killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub. Russian intelligence warned the FBI that Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev were dangerous. The FBI failed to follow up and on April 15, 2013, the Tsarnaevs planted bombs at the Boston Marathon that killed three people and wounded at least 264. In 2008 the FBI knew that U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan had been communicating with terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki about killing Americans. The FBI failed to interview Hasan or even consult his superiors. On November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood Texas, Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers, including private Francheska Velez, 21, who was pregnant, and wounded more than 30 others.

When senator Joseph Lieberman sought to make the Hasan-Awlaki emails public, the FBI blocked their release. During Hasan’s trial, reporters asked Robert Mueller, FBI boss from 2001-2013, if the bureau had dropped the ball by failing to act. Mueller responded that the agents “took appropriate steps,” and expressed no regrets.

Relatives of the Florida victims can be forgiven for thinking that Lasky and Wray’s regrets were more about the publicity of FBI failures than the violent deaths those failures had abetted. The default response of bureaucrats is always to defend the bureau. In the case of the FBI, bureaucratic indifference leads to deadly consequences.