MyGovCost News & Blog

On Thursday, December 28, 2017, a Los Angeles publication mailed me a check via the United States Postal Service. I received the check on January 18, 2018, a full 21 days after it had been mailed, so the cost worked out to just pennies a day. On the other hand, in 21 days I could have walked there from northern California and picked up the check myself. On January 22, 2018, I asked a neatly uniformed USPS employee if there was any way to find out why my check took three weeks to arrive, and if I could find out who might be responsible for the delay. The USPS employee told me neither was possible. So this outfit is both slow and unaccountable, but that hardly covers the problems.

As we noted, last year the USPS reported losses of $2.7 billion and considered it a cause for celebration that the losses were less that the $5.6 billion from the previous year. Even so, 2017 was the eleventh straight year of losses, and during some of the worst years USPS bosses bagged big raises. Snail mail is dropping off since more people now pay bills electronically. The response of the USPS is to jack up the price of stamps and hit up taxpayers for more money. For its part, Congress has proved unable even to shut down Saturday delivery service.

President Donald Trump claims he doesn’t like losers, so he might team with Congress to end the USPS monopoly on first-class mail. In the digital age or at any time, that is the only way to end the USPS losing streak. Let private carriers compete and taxpayers will get the first-class service they deserve.

The latest episode of federal government shutdown theater turned out to be a total bust! Hardly anybody outside of Washington D.C. even noticed, and now, it’s all over—at least for a few more weeks. The Washington Post reports on the sudden demise of the 19th federal government shutdown since 1974’s Budget and Impoundment Control Act became the nation’s main law governing how the U.S. Congress approves spending.

From the outset, the government shutdown had been a test of wills. On Monday morning, the Democrats realized they had lost theirs.

At a caucus meeting in a room just off the Senate floor, a group of vulnerable Senate Democrats told their leader, Charles Schumer, N.Y., that the cost of their effort to protect young undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers” from deportation was rapidly escalating. It could imperil what was otherwise a promising outlook in November’s midterm election – and with it, the Democrats’ hopes of ending their exile from power.

With the shutdown heading into its third day, they were feeling the heat and finding it hard to control the messaging war. Voters in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were getting Republican robo-calls saying Democrats had “prioritized illegal immigrants over American citizens.”

So the Democrats decided to take a deal they had turned down only the night before—a less-than-airtight assurance by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., that “it would be my intention” to consider legislation that would address those immigrants in the coming weeks, but only if the government were reopened.

And so, what was promised to be a great battle of wills in the U.S. Congress came to a very sudden end, with a stunning political cave-in, where the only thing that the people who voted against approving an almost identical temporary extension in federal spending authority last Friday won in their successful effort to shut the federal government down for a long weekend was … another opportunity to shut the government down again in three weeks instead of four.

Only in Washington D.C.

Californians pay the highest income and sales taxes in the United States, and the government recently piled on a $5.2 billion tax on gasoline, diesel fuel and vehicle fees. Taxpayers recently got some clues about what the state will do with all that money. According to the state controller, the state is bulking up its payroll by more than $1 billion, doubling the rate of growth from the previous year. The state boosted the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation alone by 9 percent, an increase of $452 million, nearly half a billion dollars. The Department of Forestry and Fire Protection grabbed an additional $87 million, an increase of 13 percent. The state also increased by 56 percent the number of government employees paid more than $300,000 a year.

As we noted, the Service Employees International Union claims the California legislature is “our house” and the figures back up that boast. The state gave its biggest contract to SEIU local 1000, a total package of $234 million including bonuses of $2,500 for more than 95,000 workers. It remains unclear what, if anything, the SEIU members did to earn any bonus. So SEIU’s purchase of state politicians paid off big-time, but it was hardly the only windfall.

The state paid CalPERS investment boss Ted Eliopoulos $768,000 in 2016 and in 2017 the state boosted him to $867,000. That’s nearly a million dollars in pay alone, but the state can also make a government employee a millionaire, even when the employee is not working at all. According to Transparent California, Donald F. Colson, a principal engineer with the Department of Water Resources, who worked on the defective and unsafe Oroville Dam, retired in 1996 after 39.2 years of service, with a pension of $96,216.48. So in the past two decades, Mr. Colson has bagged more than $2 million courtesy of California taxpayers. They should understand that, in practice, “Golden State” means rule by government employees and for government employees.

Late on Friday, January 19, 2018, politicians in the U.S. Congress failed for the nineteenth time in the last 42 years to approve a resolution that would allow the U.S. government to continue borrowing money to support all of the spending that they’ve mandated. As a result, nonessential federal government employees have been directed to not report to work as of Saturday, January 20, 2018, although practically, the first day that most of these civilian employees would miss from work would be Monday, January 22, 2018.

According to the New York Times, about 40% of the U.S. government’s civilian workforce at its 14 departments are nonessential, including over 80% of the staff at the Departments of Labor, Interior and Commerce, and over 95% of the employees at the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In terms of spending, a much smaller percentage of the U.S. government is affected, which in 2018, will be less than the 17% of total spending that was impacted in 2013’s episode of federal government shutdown theater. Unlike in 2013, the nation’s parks, federal courts and even the Environmental Protection Agency will initially remain open, though with reduced operations.

That the latest federal government shutdown is little more than political theater is driven home by the media’s coverage, where Alex Berezow of the American Council on Science and Health can’t help but notice the hyped-up doomsday narrative.

One of the biggest problems of our hyperpartisan culture is that everything has been turned into a morbid game show.

Gone are the days when politicians and the media acted in the best interest of the American people. Instead, we have manufactured controversy and faux outrage over the most mundane of events. Instead of world news, we get 24/7 coverage of the President’s Twitter feed. And instead of serious analysis, we get programming that resembles some horrifying merger of Family Feud, Hunger Games, and Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Consider CNN’s coverage of the government shutdown. They are masters at combining the serious with the downright absurd: Their front page included a countdown clock and a gratuitous story about how your health will be affected. Supposedly, they are implying that when the clock runs out, we’re all going to die.

As is typical, the article is full of speculative fearmongering. CNN claims that the government shutdown could worsen the flu season, poison the food supply, block the discovery of life-saving drugs, put our veterans at risk, destroy the environment, and imperil our lives.

In other words, CNN apparently believes that the government shutdown is a life-or-death event for possibly millions of people. To underscore how serious they are, they have included a countdown clock to doomsday. The only thing missing from the front page is a dancing Pennywise gif.

Of course, CNN doesn’t actually believe any of that. They are manufacturing outrage and stoking fear to attract eyeballs. After all, the X-Files have returned, and CNN needs to compete for viewers.

For most Americans outside of the nonessential civilian federal government workforce, it will be difficult to tell the difference between a shut down federal government and a fully working federal government, which will make 2018’s episode of federal government shutdown theater an even bigger yawn than 2013’s episode. No wonder the Congress’ ratings are in the basement!

For years, bureaucrats at U.S. government agencies have been involved in unlawful schemes to pass off significant parts of their workload to contractors who are not bound by the restrictions of the U.S. Constitution.

That’s the gist of a startling claim made by Robert J. Hanrahan Jr., an employee of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who wrote an op-ed on the topic of the U.S. government’s off-the-books bureaucracy at RealClearPolicy.

The civil service’s growth is limited by the budgets enacted by Congress and executed by the president. But many federal agencies do an end run around hiring freezes by hiring contractors instead of federal employees to perform government work. The result? Bureaucracy expands rather than shrinks, congressional oversight is lost, ethical restrictions don’t apply, and government growth continues in defiance of known laws.

Federal law generally prohibits federal agencies from employing contractors to augment the federal workforce. The prohibition on hiring contractors for their specific skills to fill ongoing federal jobs has been law since the 1880s. Without specific authorization from Congress, hiring contractors in this manner is strictly speaking a felony. But many agencies do it nonetheless, as these laws are rarely, if ever enforced.

Through 2015, the U.S. government directly employs over 3.8 million Americans and U.S. residents as direct employees of the U.S. government, which includes the civilian employees of U.S. government agencies, active duty military personnel and people employed by the U.S. Postal Service. The Volcker Alliance, a nonpartisan organization that champions effective management in government activities, estimates that up to an additional 5.3 million people are doing work on behalf of the 3.8 million direct U.S. government employees as contractors or through grants issued by various government agencies. These 5.3 million people are, in effect, the off-the-books employees of the U.S. government’s bureaucracy who aren’t subject to the same laws or ethical constraints required of U.S. government employees.

That’s a situation that nobody voted to support in the U.S. Congress. If legislators turn their attention to adopting strong civil service reforms going forward, curtailing the ability of bureaucrats to offload their work to others outside of government as a means to get around their legal constraints would be a very good place to begin.

“A slew of delays and higher-than-expected costs are driving the anticipated price of high-speed rail construction in the central San Joaquin Valley by more than one-third, to about $10.6 billion,” writes Tim Sheehan in the Fresno Bee. “That’s a $2.8 billion jump from the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s estimate in 2016 of $7.8 billion for the 119-mile section of the route from Madera to Bakersfield.” High-Speed Rail board member Ernest Camacho told Sheehan “It’s horrifying when you look at the amount of money we’re going to have to reinvest to make this program work.” Taxpayers might note the use of “reinvest” for “spend,” but the “program” is already working for bureaucrats. As Sheehan reports, the same day they announced the $2.8 billion hike, High-Speed Rail hired Brian Kelley, secretary of the California State Transportation Agency, as the new CEO, at a salary of “nearly $385,000.” In truth, this “program” has been all about spending from the start.

As we noted, the bullet train doesn’t go anywhere but High-Speed Rail has established a Sacramento headquarters and three regional offices. So the Authority works well as a comfy sinecure for ruling-class retreads like board member Lynn Schenk, a former congresswoman and chief of staff for governor Gray Davis. High-Speed rail has also been handing out no-bid contracts, one for $3 million, part of a similar noncompetitive pattern in state government. The land the rail project needs remains in the hands of the rightful owners and the train will require the most elaborate tunneling project in U.S. history, certain to incur massive cost overruns. And of course, few commuters were panting for a 19th century form of transportation slower and more expensive than air travel. This is all about expanding government and spending taxpayers’ money.

On January 17, the High-Speed Rail newsroom had nothing about the $2.8 billion in additional costs and no estimate of the project’s total cost. The newsroom did have a press release explaining that the Authority “continues to move from the planning phase to full construction of the nation’s first high-speed rail system” and announcing new boss Brian Kelly. According to governor Jerry Brown, Brian “is uniquely qualified to move the nation’s first high-speed rail project forward.”

Last year, the Thomas fire in California’s central coast region made the national news night, after night, after night, as it became the biggest fire in state history. Combined with several other outsized wildfires, 2017 shattered state records for both wildfire-related losses and the sheer amount of money spent to suppress them.

What many Californians may not fully appreciate is that the state government was sitting on millions of dollars in recent years that, if used for its intended purpose of fire prevention, including clearing out flammable brush in rural areas, could have either avoided or reduced the extent of the damage caused during the state’s wildfires in 2017. Jim Miller of Tribune News Services broke the story in October 2015, long before the first embers of the Thomas fire were lit (via Governing):

Amid a drought that has created bone-dry conditions across much of California’s wildland area, a state fire prevention account has ended recent fiscal years with tens of millions of dollars unspent.

The money has been generated by a contentious, 4-year-old fee pushed through by Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative Democrats over the objections of Republicans and rural property owners. The state collected more than $300 million through June and spent about $260 million, including roughly $228 million on administration and statewide prevention activities, vegetation clearing, defensible space inspections and other programs.

About $22 million went to a state tax agency to cover collection costs.

But as fires burned hundreds of thousands of acres this year, the state ended the fiscal year in June with an estimated $43 million in fee money left over.

“We made a lot of people in the Legislature take a vote on this fee that they never really liked. But then to collect the money and just sit on it, and not deploy it in ways to help make those communities safer, is just silly,” said Paul Mason, vice president of policy and incentives at Pacific Forest Trust, a forest protection group.

More than 800,000 property owners pay the fee, most of them $117.33 a year for each habitable structure.

The money is intended to support fire prevention activities in the almost one-third of California where the state has the primary firefighting responsibility. Nearly three-quarters of the 31 million-acre area _ mostly privately owned watershed, rangeland and forested areas outside city limits _ presents a very high or high fire risk.

The state continued collecting its fire prevention fees through the end of its 2016-2017 fiscal year on June 30, 2017. On July 25, 2017, Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 398 for the primary purpose of extending the state’s controversial cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emissions regime, where a small provision within the bill suspended the requirement for California property owners to pay the state’s fire prevention fee until the year 2031.

Perhaps with the official end of California’s four year long drought earlier in 2017, California’s state politicians may have thought it would be safe to do away with the state’s fire prevention fees that they couldn’t do enough to spend.

But 2017 turned out to be the year that they needed to, where the state’s politicians have instead chosen to fall into the proverbial firefighting trap:

The “firefighting trap” is a term often used by business managers to describe a shortsighted cycle of problem-solving: dealing with “fires,” or problems, as they arise, but failing to address the underlying cause, thereby increasing the chance that the same problem will crop up in the future.

Researchers at MIT’s Engineering Systems Division have now looked at the original inspiration for this “quick-fix” management strategy: firefighting itself. They combined regional fire data, such as the number of fires and the amount of land burned per year, with interviews conducted with fire managers, policymakers, and academics to draw up a model illustrating the relationships that contribute to forest-fire management.

Much like in business, they found fire management can fall into the firefighting trap: Energy and resources are spent mostly on fire suppression — putting out fires in the moment — while less attention is devoted to fire prevention, such as clearing brush and building fire lanes during the off-season.

In particular, the team identified a factor that exacerbates the firefighting trap: instinctive, automatic reactions to particularly damaging fire seasons. They found that after severe fires, policymakers — driven by public pressure — funnel more funds into fire suppression for the next season. While this may put people temporarily at ease, this attention to fire suppression may undermine prevention efforts. The result, counterintuitively, is even worse fires the following season, due to the buildup of fire-prone materials such as dried tinder and dead trees.

Welcome to what Governor Jerry Brown is cynically calling California’s “new normal”.

As we noted, the new federal tax bill caps the amount state taxes filers can deduct on their federal return at $10,000. That displeases California’s senate boss Kevin de Leon, whose Protect California Taxpayers Act will allow Californians to pay their state income taxes as though they were a charitable donation, and therefore fully deductible. The money would go into a California Excellence Fund run by the treasurer’s office and then into the state budget. Assemblyman Kevin Kiley has a different plan.

“California should allow taxpayers to deduct their full federal tax liability on their state tax return – the state and local tax deduction (SALT) in reverse,” writes Kiley. He plans to introduce the “Prosperous Economy and Payer Protection through Equitable Rates Act,” which he claims will keep Californians from leaving the state and stabilize state finances. The Act might be of some help but its chances of passing range from slim to none. On the other hand, like de Leon’s scheme, the plan leaves a basic reality unchanged.

California deploys the highest rate of income tax of all 50 states, a full 13.3 percent, and the highest base sales tax at 7.5 percent. Nobody in state government considers whether these punitive rates might be too high, and that a plumber in Fresno should not have to pony up an extra 7.5 percent when he buys a new wrench. For California’s ruling class, high taxes, onerous regulation and ever-expanding government are always a good thing. Governor Jerry Brown evangelized relentlessly for the highest income tax, highest sales tax and the new $5.2 billion gas tax. That will penalize virtually every California worker, but Brown calls those who don’t like the tax hike “freeloaders.”

Assembly speaker Anthony Rendon is not pushing for tax relief but he is dealing with federal-state conflicts in a different way. At the outset of a recent trip to Mexico, Rendon said, “California resists isolation and is willing to step up and work with Mexico if the federal administration abdicates that responsibility.”

Like a kayak over a waterfall, the U.S. Congress is barreling toward another episode of government shutdown theater. Jordain Carney of The Hill explains:

Lawmakers are scrambling to avoid a government shutdown as they barrel toward another funding deadline without a clear path forward.

GOP leadership is remaining tightlipped about their plan, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) declining to outline their next steps before a Jan. 19 deadline.

They are expected to offer a short-term stopgap measure given the fast-approaching deadline and a failure to lockdown a deal on raising spending ceilings for defense and nondefense.

Since both major parties in Congress are looking to raise spending, the only real question is by how much will they do so. Republican leaders are looking to spend more on defense and infrastructure projects, while Democrat leaders are demanding equal spending increases for all non-defense programs, as if the two types of spending were not completely independent of one another.

The reason that there is a potential for a shutdown is because both parties are looking to get out from under the spending caps that were set as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. Tara Golshan of Vox describes how a law from seven years ago is constraining today’s legislators.

It all goes back to 2011, when an Obama-era impasse over the debt ceiling brought the American economy to near calamity. The ultimate result was the 2013 sequester, which set into law across-the-board budget cuts and established caps that would amount to $1.2 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years.

It’s important to remember that these sequester caps were never actually supposed to go into effect. They were designed to force a compromise. To win Republican votes to raise the debt ceiling, Obama agreed to push Congress to reduce the national debt, threatening cuts to domestic programs, which Democrats didn’t want, and to military spending, which Republicans didn’t want.

Since the sequester, there have been two bipartisan deals to raise the caps by billions of dollars. The first in 2013 was forged between Paul Ryan and Patty Murray; a second was agreed upon in 2015.

There’s no question that Trump wants Congress to do that again. His proposed defense budget busts the sequester cap by tens of billions. There’s just one problem: Congress needs 60 votes in the Senate.

Congress now has until January 19 — less than two weeks — to find a way to avoid a government shutdown and a sequester. Democrats don’t often find themselves in a position to leverage their agenda, but the sequester caps open a path to get protections for the undocumented immigrants previously covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and permanent funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Republicans really do need Democratic votes to raise the sequester caps and avoid a government shutdown, but so far, neither party seems ready to compromise.

And thus, we are a little over a week away from yet another episode of federal government shutdown theater, as the Democrats and Republicans play a game of legislative chicken in the meantime.

Last February 7 during heavy rains the Oroville Dam’s concrete spillway failed, launching fears of a complete dam failure, and forcing the evacuation of 188,000 people. As it turned out, government engineers knew for decades that the alternate earthen spillway was unreliable but failed to reinforce it with concrete. As Rep. John Garamendi famously put it, the dirt spillway “worked fine until it had to be used, in which case it didn’t work so well.” One of the government’s first moves was to dam up the flow of information on safety issues. The governor and state water bureaucrats blocked access to the dam’s design specifications, federal inspection reports, technical documents, and other crucial information.

Much of that has now emerged in Independent Forensic Team Report: Oroville Dam Spillway Incident, a 584-page report that chalks up the disaster to “a complex interaction of relatively common physical, human, organizational, and industry factors, starting with the design of the project and continuing until the incident.” On page 59, readers learn that the principal designer for both Oroville spillways “was hired directly from a university post-graduate program, with prior engineering employment experience limited to one or two summers.” And the designer had “no prior professional experience designing spillways” and “no instruction on spillway design” in college coursework. The forensic team “finds it striking that such an inexperienced engineer was given the responsibility of designing the spillways of what is still the tallest dam in the US.”

Taxpayers will find it striking that this massive, detailed report fails to name this non-engineer. Though obviously unqualified and incompetent, this person’s political connections were doubtless strong. Taxpayers could be forgiven for believing that’s why the incompetent grad student got the job and why the expert team keeps the identity a secret. Taxpayers should therefore regard the report as part of the ongoing cover-up.

Did the unqualified person perhaps design any other spillways, dams or bridges? Governor Jerry Brown should know because his father Edmund G. Brown was governor at the time of the Oroville dam’s construction. Under his son, the unsafe dam stands as monument to government incompetence, secrecy, and utter disregard for the safety of the people.