We have noted that California’s Parks Department protected its budget by hiding more than $50 million in a secret fund, at a time when it was shutting down parks and giving government employees lucrative vacation payouts. Now, in “California State Departments Play Shell Game,” Jon Ortiz and Jim Miller of the Sacramento Bee have…
Read More »
As we recently noted, the Veterans Administration has been cooking the books and falsifying information about wait times. According to CNN, at least 40 veterans died while awaiting treatment at the VA facility in Phoenix. President Obama says he’s angry over the situation but he has not fired VA boss Eric Shinseki. Now, as…
Read More »
The federal government maintains an $11.6 billion school lunch program feeding 31 million students daily. In 2010 First Lady Michelle Obama championed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which as this report notes “imposed a dizzying array of requirements on calories, portion sizes, even the color of fruits and vegetables to be served.” The rules,…
Read More »
As we have noted the federal Department of Defense wastes plenty of money and even spends on hardware that the military doesn’t need or want. Likewise, Obamacare has been incredibly wasteful but according to this report, taxpayers should also be looking at the State Department, which can’t seem to find how they spent $6…
Read More »
Contrary to Barack Obama’s promise, Obamacare deprived millions of Americans of the health plans they liked and wanted to keep. To get the health plan the federal government wants them to have, Obamacare steered these people to HealthCare.gov, a dysfunctional, insecure website also inscrutable to Spanish speakers because it was written in Spanglish. The…
Read More »
While monitoring federal debacles such as Obamacare and the stimulus package, taxpayers should not lose sight of local governments such as Los Angeles County, whose population of nearly 10 million exceeds that of many states, with a bureaucracy to match. Los Angeles County once maintained something called the Office of Public Safety, a police…
Read More »
2013 was a banner year for waste, fraud and abuse in government, with several strong contenders for the top ranking. Companies that got hundreds of millions of dollars under the federal stimulus package continued to go bankrupt, and the federal largesse failed to revive the economy. The Internal Revenue Service made life difficult for…
Read More »
As this column documents, the federal government is an engine of waste, fraud and abuse lately exemplified by Obamacare and the stimulus package. For their part, state governments are fond of boondoggles such as California’s so-called “bullet train.” But when calculating the cost of government, taxpayers would be wise to factor in local waste…
Read More »
Procurement scandals are common in the U.S. military and seldom the sort of thing anyone could make up. In the latest, as reported by the Washington Post, the U.S. Navy paid $1.6 million for firearm silencers valued at $8,000 – more than 200 times the manufacturing cost – and that most likely never should…
Read More »
Things are getting tougher for those who believe the federal government can trim spending. Consider the case of the Alaska-based Denali Commission, a 1998 project of Senator Ted Stevens aimed at helping rural Alaskans by building power plants and providing job training and health care. As the Washington Post noted, the Denali Commission, “became…
Read More »
 |
 |
 |