MyGovCost News & Blog

One of the recurring themes we explore here at MyGovCost is that of government bureaucrats who behave badly.

Today, we’re featuring the story of Internal Revenue Service employee Gina Colombo, who works at the IRS’ Taxpayer Assistance Center in Phoenix, Arizona and who is also the sole owner of Uncle Joe’s Auto Sales in that city, who has admitted to defrauding numerous poor and non-English speaking customers at her used auto dealership business. Robert Anglen of the Arizona Republic reports:

The owner of a Phoenix used-car dealership who admitted defrauding dozens of desperate customers is a longtime employee of the Internal Revenue Service….

An investigation by The Arizona Republic found that Colombo has been employed by the IRS since 1998 — and she remained employed after state prosecutors shut down Uncle Joe’s and filed a consumer-fraud lawsuit against Colombo and her husband, Joseph Carrecia, in March….

IRS officials last week confirmed Colombo’s employment. They would not explain whether her admissions of fraud in the civil lawsuit preclude her from working for the agency….

They confirmed last week that Colombo works as a management and program assistant and earns a base annual salary between $34,662 and $45,057. Her name is listed in a lobby directory of the Taxpayer Assistance Center at 4041 N. Central Ave. in Phoenix.

Colombo appears to have worked for the IRS for a sustained period of time, as she cited the IRS as her sole employer in her 2010 Chapter 7 bankruptcy filings.

In addition to having a long track record of poor handling her own financial affairs, Colombo, who has been banned from operating any used car dealership in Arizona after admitting she “approved, endorsed, directed, ratified, controlled or otherwise participated in the acts and practices of Uncle Joe’s” that have been described as fraudulent by the Arizona Attorney General’s office, has been employed by the IRS to provide taxpayers with guidance to resolve their tax problems.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the IRS’ Taxpayers Assistance Centers have had a long history of being unable to provide useful help to a very large percentage of taxpayers seeking assistance, either giving wrong answers or no answers to as many as 43% of the questions they were asked by U.S. Treasury Department investigators.

Although the IRS declined to indicate whether Colombo’s admission of having commited acts of fraud in a civil setting would prevent her from being able to remain employed at the IRS, we should note that her admission would not be much of a barrier, as President Obama is seeking to exclude the consideration of criminal history from federal employment applications altogether, which would make it much easier for individuals with criminal convictions on their records to get jobs with the federal government. Stephanie Condon of CBS News reported back on November 2, 2015:

President Obama on Monday announced new steps he’s taking to make it easier for Americans with a criminal record to become productive members of society, including “banning the box” on federal job applications….

The president noted that around 70 million Americans have some sort of criminal record — that’s nearly one in five Americans, and nearly one in three Americans of working age.

“A lot of the time that record disqualifies you from being a full participant in society,” he said. “It means millions of Americans can’t even get their foot in the door… We’ve got to make sure Americans who paid their debt to society get a second chance.”

Since Gina Colombo’s admission of fraud is taking place as part of a civil settlement, it is highly unlikely that her admission of fraud will cause the IRS’ leadership to remove her from the federal government’s payroll. Instead, it is much more likely that she and her fellow IRS employees will continue to provide the same level and quality of service that regular Americans have long come to expect from the IRS’ Taxpayer Assistance Centers.

We have been following the story of the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which came in ten years late, a full $5 billion over budget, and with serious safety concerns. During hearings in Sacramento whistleblowers called for a “criminal investigation,” but California Attorney General Kamala Harris failed to follow up. But as Jon Riches notes in the Sacramento Bee, this does not mean that California’s AG has been inactive.

Riches works for the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, and in late 2015 the Institute “received a demand from Harris’ office to turn over a copy of private tax information that includes the names and addresses of our contributors. Although this information is protected from disclosure under both the First Amendment and federal tax law, refusing to comply with this demand would presumably result in our organization losing its ability to solicit new members in California.”

For Riches, Goldwater’s national litigation director, this mandate comes cloaked as a transparency measure but is actually “a concerted effort to stifle speech with which disclosure advocates disagree.” Riches recalls that in 1956 the AG of Alabama sought to force the NAACP to turn over its member list. The group refused and the U.S. Supreme ruled against Alabama, citing freedom of association and privacy.

Harris’ demand extends to 501(c)(3) groups, which are forbidden by law from engaging in electoral politics. As Riches notes, there are nearly one million of these organizations, including schools, public radio stations and soup kitchens. Ideologically, they span a broad range. Riches finds Harris’ information demands “no more persuasive than the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records without lawful authority.” He concludes that “every American has the right to support the causes we believe in without the fear of harassment and retaliation. Disclosure mandates undermine this basic freedom, dry up donations to charities and silence political speech.”

The Attorney General, meanwhile, faces no legal obstacle to investigate criminal misconduct on the Bay Bridge but has not done so, despite the lingering safety issues. As California congressman Mark DeSaulnier notes, “it’s frustrating that there’s never been anyone in the management of the bridge who has been held accountable.”

Throughout 2015, we’ve paid close attention to news stories highlighting the degree to which corruption has become institutionalized at the federal agency charged with providing lifetime medical care to the former members of the nation’s military services. The following links will get you up to speed with what can only be described as the complete collapse of ethics at the U.S. government’s largest civilian agency:

• The Unchanging Incentives of Bureaucrats
• Ghoulish Bureaucrats Behaving Badly
• More Ghoulish Bureaucrats Behaving Badly
• Surviving War, But Not the VA’s Rationing of Health Care
• VA Executives Plead the Fifth
• VA Executives Plead the Fifth, Reap Financial Rewards

The two most recent stories regarding the misconduct of two of the VA’s executives are particularly galling, because on December 28, 2015, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia announced that it would not prosecute either executive, despite a referral for criminal prosecution from the VA’s Inspector General. Stars and Stripes updates the story:

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors have decided not to press criminal charges against two former executives at the Department of Veterans Affairs who were accused of manipulating the agency’s hiring system for their own gain.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said Thursday it has declined a referral from the VA inspector general for criminal prosecution of Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves.

The inspector general said in a report this fall that Rubens and Graves forced lower-ranking regional managers to accept job transfers against their will. Rubens and Graves then stepped into the vacant positions themselves, keeping their pay while reducing their responsibilities.

Both Rubens and Graves had pled the fifth at Congressional hearings in order to avoid exposing themselves to criminal charges related to the misconduct reported by the VA’s Inspector General – a legal strategy that now appears to have paid off hansomely, as the U.S. Department of Justice has chosen to let them off scot-free.

And we mean “paid off handsomely” in more ways that one. Stars and Stripes also reports that the “demotions” they received in November 2015 have been rescinded:

Rubens and Graves were demoted in November, but their demotions were rescinded this month after a paperwork mix-up. The VA has said it will reissue the demotions after the problem is resolved.

Given the track record of their fellow executives at the Department of Veterans Affairs, it is not unreasonable to believe that the two executives will ever face any decline in their material well being as a result of their unethical actions.

Speaking of which, a good question to ask is how did the VA come to institutionalize corruption to such a degree? As it happens, we learned part of the answer to that question thanks to the investigative reporting of the Daily Caller‘s Luke Rosiak, who uncovered what led to the resignation of the VA’s previous Inspector General back in 2008:

Jon Wooditch, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ former top watchdog, resigned after being caught masturbating in the agency’s all-glass conference room in full view of people across the street, including school teachers at an education conference.

Wooditch, whose job as acting inspector general and deputy inspector general was to police waste and fraud cases at the notoriously troubled federal agency, resigned in 2008 after lying to investigators.

Those investigators confronted him with detailed instances of public masturbation in multiple states, according to a previously undisclosed report by the Department of the Interior inspector general and obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

It was during Wooditch’s tenure as deputy inspector general that the VA IG first uncovered — then all but ignored — dozens of clues of the widespread patient wait-list manipulation that contributed to the deaths of dozens of veterans.

Perhaps the best way to understand the degree of extreme corruption at the Department of Veterans Affairs is to recognize that it’s an example of the inevitable result that comes about whenever bureaucrats are free to put their own interests ahead of those of regular Americans.

And nowhere is that attitude more exemplified than by the statements of Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Sloan Gibson on December 9, 2015, as reported in the Washington Post:

A Veterans Affairs official on Wednesday defended the department’s decision to demote but not fire two senior executives who collected $400,000 in a relocation scheme, and pushed back sharply against lawmakers for pressing for punishment rather than accountability for the VA workforce.

“In my many years in the private sector, I’ve never encountered an organization where leadership was measured by how many people you fired,” Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson told the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

“You can’t fire your way to excellence.”

Given what we’ve learned of the state of personnel demotions at the VA, Gibson doesn’t seem particularly capable of enforcing demotions as a path to excellence either. In all his many years in the private sector, he also appears to have not learned that a change of leadership is one of the first definitive steps that you can take to stop the bleeding in a failing enterprise. Sadly, the VA under its current leadership is hemorrhaging blood in more ways than one.

For a lot of Americans, simply getting to or from work represents a significant expense. In fact, earlier this year, CNN‘s Kathryn Vasel totaled up the average annual expense that Americans pay just so that they can earn an income:

Workers spend 200 hours annually at a cost of nearly $2,600 on their daily commute, according to Citi’s ThankYou Premier Commuter Index released Wednesday.

That breaks down to about $10 a day being spent on getting to and from work.

People in Los Angeles face the highest daily roundtrip costs at $16, with New Yorkers coming in second at $14. Commuters in Chicago and San Francisco pay $11 a day, according to the survey.

But for many of the federal government’s bureaucrats in Washington D.C., their personal cost for commuting to and from their jobs is about to drop to zero, because the $1.1 trillion government spending bill signed by President Obama back on December 16, 2015 will effectively allow them to ride the city’s Metro light rail system for free, even at peak rush hour fares. Kathryn Watson of the Daily Caller Foundation reports:

The catch-all spending bill increases federal employee Metro benefits from up to $130 a month to as much as $255 a month. The hike more than covers maximum fares of $5.90 from any point on the system to any other point on the system during rush hour, both ways, over a 21-workday month.

Doing the math, the new $255 benefit per month for riding Washington D.C.’s light rail system to commute to and from their jobs would keep the federal government’s bureaucrats from otherwise having to pay up to $3,060 per year each out of their own pockets.

According to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), which operates Washington D.C.’s Metro light rail system, the Metro sees some 710,000 riders every weekday, of whom 35%, or 248,500, work for the federal government. At $3,060 per year each, the cost to U.S. taxpayers of fully subsidizing the commutes of these federal government employees would add up to $760,410,000 per year.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, some 132,674,000 Americans commute to and from their jobs, where in addition to paying $2,600 on average out of their own pockets just so they can get to and from where they need to be to earn an income, they’re each having to pay an additional $5.73 above and beyond that annual figure just so that federal workers can get to ride Washington D.C.’s light rail to and from their jobs for free.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention draws a budget of more than $11 billion for the purpose of, as the name implies, controlling and preventing diseases. The mammoth CDC, however, is always eager for mission creep. In the 1990s it spent $2.6 million to study “gun violence,” which is not, strictly speaking, a disease. A 1996 amendment by Rep. Jack Dickey barred the CDC from any research that could promote advocacy of tougher gun laws. Now some want to reverse course.

The President of the United States wanted $10 million for CDC gun efforts in the last two budget cycles. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told gun-control groups that eliminating the ban was a “priority” and she made it a part of recent budget negotiations. The ban stayed in but the effort to re-deploy the CDC in the cause of gun control is instructive for taxpayers. The gun-control advocates did not explain how anything the CDC did in the past could prevent mass shootings such as the massacre of 14 in San Bernardino. It did not emerge how eliminating the Dickey Amendment could prevent such killings in the future. It was all about expanding the mission of huge federal bureaucracy with a budget of more than $11 billion, and which has been surging in areas that have nothing to do with disease control.

Might a CDC push for more gun laws distract from the mission to prevent and control actual diseases? Might CDC advocacy make it even more difficult for law-abiding citizens to protect themselves? That also failed to emerge, along with the way gun control has been used to disarm and suppress “enemies of the state,” as Stephen Halbrook showed in Gun Control in the Third Reich. Meanwhile, taxpayers might note that when U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan, a psychiatrist, gunned down 13 at Ford Hood in 2009, the administration called it “workplace violence,” not “gun violence.”

We missed it before the Christmas holiday, but December 23 marked the annual celebration of Festivus, which if you’re fan of the old Seinfeld TV show or its reruns, you’ll recognize as the focal point of one of the show’s more memorable episodes.

As fans of the show know, one of the core activities of Festivus is the “Airing of Grievances”, and it was in that spirit that Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who in addition to currently being one of the many candidates running for President, also chairs the Federal Spending Oversight Committee. As part of his work for that committee, his office has produced a Festivus’ themed Waste Report for 2015, which collects some 33 really wasteful ways that the U.S. federal government spent over one billion dollars in 2015.

We thought it might be interesting to consider just the three most costly line items on the list, which account for over 70% of the $1 billion that Paul argues was wasted, starting with the costliest.

Insurance payments to farmers whose farms were established in areas that cannot reliably grow crops.

Insurance protects against the rare and unforeseen, not the regular and predictable.
You insure your car against accident, not oil change.

But, when the government is the insurer, this kind of obvious logic does not apply. Surprisingly (or maybe not), the Department of Agriculture (USDA)is paying out approximately $370 million annually in “prevented planting” crop insurance to farmers who cannot plant their crops in SEASONAL WETLANDS.

At issue is the intersection of the “prevented planting” crop insurance and prairie potholes. What are prairie potholes? They are basically ground depressions that fill with water in the rainy spring and dry out in the summer and fall, and are mostly located in the upper-Midwest. The “prevented planting” program is taxpayer subsidized crop insurance that compensates farmers when extreme weather prevents planting.

The problem is, some farmers claim prevented planting each year for the regular flooding of prairie potholes.

In fact, farmers in sixty-five counties, mostly in the Dakotas, have gotten payouts, 14 years in a row, and in another twenty-nine counties have gotten payments 13 of the last 14 years. In most cases, insurance payments were greater what direct crop subsidies would have been.

No private insurer would stand for this and would either not offer insurance or would control for this kind of abuse. To their credit, the USDA is not complacent in this abuse. Several attempts have been made to close the prairie pothole loophole. As recently as last year, USDA “clarified” rules to effectively prohibit claims four years in a row. But data suggests this new policy could be gamed. At the heart of the problem is that USDA simply does not have a definition of “Normal” weather.

So, if we know it is sure to happen, why are we insuring against it?

Why indeed? We can speculate that the program’s administrators were sleeping on the job, which perhaps explains the second most costly line item of waste captured in 2015’s airing of grievances.

Failed to prevent substantial Medicare overpayments for sleep studies.

You have probably heard of sleep apnea, the condition where a person momentarily stops breathing during sleep. In fact, Medicare alone spends almost $300 million a year on sleep studies to determine if patients have this condition. Unfortunately, it seems Medicare has a problem with overpaying for these important studies, costing taxpayers as much as $175 million a year.

In a recent report, the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services noted that one provider of sleep studies recently agreed to repay $15.3 million resulting from false claims.

The IG report delved into another sleep study provider from Orlando that was estimated to have been overpaid more than $1 million, or almost 60 percent of all payments they received.

Specifically, the IG found, that in a sample of 100 patients, 74 percent of items billed were not allowable under Medicare guidelines. In addition, nearly one-third of those payments were made without supporting documentation, such as a doctor’s referral. And, in one instance, Medicare paid for a procedure that was not even done.

Shockingly, roughly 60 percent of payments made to this particular provider were over 3-years old. Which means Medicare paid the bill for services without the required documentation and never followed up again.

This never would have been noticed if it were not for the Inspector General. If this is the trend, then the government could be improperly paying as much as $175 million a year just on sleep studies.

It’s one thing to not have adequate control over spending money the way it is supposed to be spent, but what in the world accounts for spending money that has been clearly allocated for a specific purpose and then okaying it to be spent on something entirely different? One might argue that situation indicates a complete breakdown of control over spending, and for the third most costly line item in the 2015 airing of wasteful government spending grievances, it’s something that’s hurts children.

Allowing School Lunch Program funds to be used for lawn sprinklers adnd other purposes.

According to the California Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes (CSOOO), over at least a six year period, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) diverted more than $158 million of federal School Lunch Program funding to other uses including buying lawn sprinklers and paying the salaries at the district’s television station.

One tactic used was to reduce lunch periods to as little as 20 minutes in some schools, so students (whose lunch was already paid for with federal funds) would be unable to receive food.

It’s probably not much of a surprise that the administrators of Los Angeles’ school district would put their own interests ahead of the children enrolled in the schools they run. What is a surprise is that during a time of increasingly severe drought in the state, which prompted California State Governor Jerry Brown to impose strict water conservation measures statewide after entering its fourth year, they chose to prioritize having green lawns over providing meals to the district’s poorest students.

It’s certainly not something that you’ll ever find discussed on the district’s television station, which aspires to compete with Los Angeles’ public television station in the near future.

Now that we’re well into the holiday season, where many of us will be going to parties, we thought we’d take a moment to consider how the politicians and bureaucrats who are employed by the federal government throw a party.

If you’re a long time reader of MyGovCost, you probably have already guessed that they do it at taxpayer expense! And thanks to the 2015 Wastebook, we have some prime examples of the kinds of parties that the federal government’s employees think is a good idea.

First, here’s how the Department of Homeland Security does it:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent almost $2 million to pay nearly 100 employees not to work and more than $1 million to lease unneeded spare vehicles. DHS also handed out $3 million to the owners of party buses, including one described as a “nightclub on wheels,” and luxury coaches to escort socialites and vacationers to the playground of the rich and famous.

What is it like to ride the DHS’ party bus? Here’s how the company the DHS contracted to provide the service describes it in their promotional literature:

“When it comes to premium comfort and convenience, there’s no better way to travel than Hampton Jitney’s Ambassador Service. With 30 amazingly comfortable 3-across seats, our Ambassador coach carries just half the passengers as our regular coaches,” the company boasts. “And, as the roomiest coach traveling to the East End, it offers the ultimate in comfort and convenience, such as extra-wide plush seats, extended legroom (it was designed for basketball players), spacious overhead and underneath storage compartments plus individual electric power outlets. In addition to rapid boarding, a courteous on-board attendant provides a wide variety of complimentary refreshments, snacks and reading material on every trip.”

“We have wine service,” points out a longtime Jitney employee. “And every so often, passengers get goodie bags with products that advertisers pay the Jitney to distribute like Tory Burch gift cards and Vera Bradley accessories.”

It turns out that many politicians and bureaucrats have an affinity, and really, more of an unhealthy fetish, for the glitterati, including those who don’t even make the D-list, as the following example from the National Institute of Health reveals:

A former cast member of MTV’s The Real World nabbed $5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to throw parties for hipsters.

Here’s how the squares at the NIH identified guests to invite to their hipster parties:

To identify the hipsters, government-paid researchers used photos of people in various modes of dress and style, asking young people to describe them. If a particular look screamed ‘hipster’ over and over, the researchers used that as a guide.”

Meanwhile, the people who receive paychecks from the U.S. Department of Agriculture might be described as being the furthest thing possible away from hipsters, which perhaps explains why their parties are so different:

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) picked up the tab to send a group to the Great American Beer Festival. It also sponsored the Ultimate Tailgate Party Package at a college football game and a sing-along show tunes brunch party.

Show tunes? What show tunes did they sing along to?

The sing-along brunch included music from the Little Mermaid, The Wizard of Oz, and Annie. Guests were also “treated to Broadway melodies from classic shows such as Carousel to modern hits like In the Heights.”

Dustin Ceithamer, who choreographed Mary Poppins, helped put the brunch performances together. “It is a party so we are going to be getting a little funky,” said Ceithamer.

On second thought, if they sang those sing-along show tunes ironically, they might be no different from the modern hipster.

Parties are, of course, a way that people join together to celebrate their communities, which might explain why the Department of Transportation throws block parties:

Residents of Kansas City were dancing in the streets this spring — despite having one of the worst pothole problems in the nation—at a block party paid for by the Department of Transportation (DOT).

Here’s what that party was like:

Inspired by a tradition that originated in Columbia called Ciclovia, a Spanish word meaning “cycleway,” the city hosted a street festival called “Cycle in the City.” An $86,000 federal transportation grant paid for “event management, advertising and planned activities,” which included dance classes, a climbing wall, yoga, a DJ, food stands, lawn games, biking, and skating.

Finally, for a story that didn’t make the news until after the 2015 Wastebook came out, for Christmas this year, President Obama has decreed that all employees of the federal government will receive a half day off work, with pay, so they can get an early on start on their Christmas parties!

President Obama on Friday granted federal employees a half-day off on Christmas Eve.

“All executive branch departments and agencies of the Federal Government shall be closed and their employees excused from duty for the last half of the scheduled workday on Thursday, December 24, 2015, the day before Christmas Day,…” Obama said in an executive order.

It is quite possible that President Obama is the only U.S. President to ever award the federal government’s employees with the benefits of paid holidays by executive order, freeing them from the burden of having to deliver the services that they are employed to provide to the regular Americans who might need to get something done the day before the U.S. government will be closed for an officially recognized holiday.

California’s $3 billion Stem Cell Research and Cures Act, Proposition 71, promised life-saving cures and therapies for a host of afflictions including heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In 2004 voters approved the measure, which created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. CIRM drew down the money and spent lavishly, but ten years later in 2014, “No California-financed cures or therapies have reached the clinic and none are likely to do so for years, if then,” wrote David Jensen of the California Stem Cell Report, who has been watching CIRM since 2005.

On December 17, 2015, Jensen authored a piece in the Sacramento Bee headlined “California stem cell agency adopts spending plan aimed at bringing cures to market.” So are the life-saving cures now available? “None, however, has emerged through the stem cell agency,” explains Jensen, who charts how CIRM wants to spend $620 million on clinical work and translational research, including $50 million for “educational programs” and another $50 million for “infrastructure.” CIRM plans a number of “translating” centers, at $15 million a pop, “to negotiate federal rules and regulations, and win ultimate approval of a therapy.” This might excite UC Davis, “which has received $127 million so far from CIRM. ” In practice this state agency has always functioned as the California Institute for the Redistribution of Money.

Real estate tycoon Robert Klein cleverly wrote Prop. 71 to install himself as the institute’s chairman, and the CIRM board once gave money to a for-profit company for which Klein had lobbied, even though the institute’s own scientific reviewers twice rejected the proposal. Klein protected CIRM from almost all legislative oversight by requiring a 70 percent supermajority of both houses to make any structural or policy changes. He awarded huge salaries to CIRM bosses and provided a soft landing spot for over-the-hill politicians.

Despite all the redistribution of money the institute remains a medical and scientific bust. A ballpark figure for the number of cures CIRM has produced is zero. For patients, taxpayers and legislators alike, that figure should double for the future funding this outfit deserves.

On Friday, December 18, 2015, President Obama signed into law the two massive spending and tax bills that the U.S. Congress passed earlier in the week. When he did, he dug the nation’s national debt hole over $1.2 trillion deeper over the next 10 years than it otherwise would have been, according to estimates by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).

Our chart below summarizes the major changes that will negatively affect the U.S. federal government’s fiscal situation over the next 10 years, from 2016 through 2025.

On the spending side, there are about $50 billion in spending increases for discretionary spending programs over the next 10 years, mostly supporting defense and transporation programs.

The biggest increase in spending however is the decision by U.S. politicians to artificially insulate Medicare beneficiaries from a major spike in their premiums for Part B health insurance coverage, where one in seven beneficaries would have seen their premiums increase by as much as 52% in 2016.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress continued its trend in recent years of making the “temporary” tax credits that are already part of the law permanent, rather than continuing what has become an ongoing charade where they are continually renewed whenever they are otherwise about to expire. The 2016 tax extender bill makes the current Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Credit, Opportunity education credit, and a number of corporate tax credits, such as those for Research and Development (or Experimentation) permanent.

Beyond those measures, the U.S. Congress also signed onto the “green” energy tax credits that are designed in part to keep “green” energy companies from otherwise going bankrupt.

Finally, the tax extender portion of the budget deal delays the implementation of taxes imposed by the Affordable Care Act, which is more popularly known as “ObamaCare”, for two years. In particular, the delay affects the implementation of the ACA’s “Cadillac” tax, which imposes taxes on health insurance coverage that the U.S. government defines as being too overly generous, and also the 2% excise tax on all medical devices that are sold in the United States.

The non-partisan Tax Foundation provides a good summary of the impact of these and other tax-related measures on expected future tax collections.

Curiously, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is really worked up on the tax extender portion of the 2016 budget deal, but has had very little to say about the increase in Medicare spending that is the single biggest line item in the budget deal weighing down the U.S. government with debt.

But at least there’s some good news out there for the folks at the CRFB. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office announced on Friday, December 11, 2015 that they found that repealing the Affordable Care Act would actually reduce the nation’s deficits by $474 billion over the next 10 years, in good part by reducing the kind of tax credit subsidies that the CFRB seems to find so objectionable.

The California Department of Transportation hired Alex Morales III as statewide coordinator for compliance with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). As Jim Miller notes in the Sacramento Bee, Mr. Morales III, who was paid a base salary of $74,912, has been arrested for allegedly accepting “at least $100,000 in bribes, including an SUV, in return for steering Americans with Disabilities Act compliance projects to specific recipients.” The 21-count criminal complaint against Morales III, 55, prompted a statement from Caltrans boss Malcolm Doherty: “We have a set of values that drive Caltrans and this behavior is not consistent with those values. If an employee goes outside of those values, they don’t have a place in this department.” Taxpayers might wonder if the “set of values” Doherty touts includes accountability.

Caltrans oversaw the construction of the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, $5 billion over budget, ten years late, and still plagued with safety issues. In January 2014 state senator Mark DeSaulnier held hearings on the bridge charging “a deliberate and willful attempt to obfuscate what is happening to the public.” Whistleblowers called for a criminal investigation but none took place. Caltrans bridge project manager Tony Anziano conveniently retired and DeSaulnier, now a congressmen complains, “it’s frustrating that there’s never been anyone in the management of the bridge who has been held accountable.” He’s right about that, and a cost overrun of $5 billion for a bridge of questionable safety is a more serious matter than the charges against Mr. Morales III. Caltrans claims it will terminate him, but reporters might want to keep an eye on that.

Taxpayers, meanwhile, might consider how measures such as the ADA function as make-work projects for bureaucrats. According to the Federal Department of Labor, four federal agencies enforce the ADA: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Department of Justice. The federal Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (ATBCB) is also involved and two agencies within the Department of Labor also enforce the ADA: the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, Programs (OFCCP) and the Civil Rights Center.