The federal Environmental Protection Agency wields enormous power but also displays, “an absence of even basic internal controls,” as an inspector general testified during October 1 hearings in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on the EPA’s “secret agent.” When he applied with the EPA in 1989, John Beale claimed he had worked…
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Its academic reputation may fall short of Berkeley, UCLA and Stanford, but the University of California at Davis boasts a fine department of viticulture and enology. UC Davis also teaches how abuse can generate waste. The UC system, now headed by former Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano, a politician and bureaucrat with no academic…
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Few would challenge the need for meaningful immigration reform in American, but taxpayers have good cause to wonder why the current immigration bill pending in Congress includes earmarks and pork barrel spending for special interest advocacy groups. In the style of Obamacare, many Senators and members of Congress may not have read the entire…
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Government waste occurs in schemes such as the federal stimulus, the GM bailout, Obamacare, and so forth. Government waste also occurs as a result of nepotism and sinecures, as in the case of Gil Cedillo Jr. In 2011 California’s Central Basin Municipal Water District hired Cedillo as a “business development manager,” a position the…
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It’s not clear how much economic development the federal Economic Development Administration, a division of the Commerce Department, actually produces. But the Commerce Department’s inspector general has some observations about the administration’s performance after a cyber attack that turned out to be bogus. “EDA’s persistent, mistaken beliefs resulted in an excessive response and ultimately…
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As recent testimony confirms, the Internal Revenue Service has been singling out groups for extra scrutiny and abuse based on their political views. At the same time, the IRS has been singling out people who are not even supposed to be in the United States for special convenience. For example, in 2011 the IRS…
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The federal government spends nearly $1 million a year on fees for bank accounts with a balance of zero. The Washington Post calls this “one of the oddest spending habits in Washington” and explains how it works. When federal agencies hand out grants they don’t just send out checks. Rather, they create “an account…
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There are two disparate views of our large and growing public debt. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, in a recent International Herald Tribune editorial “Cheating America’s Children” (March 30-31, 2013), considers those who have been worrying about our burgeoning public debt as “Chicken Littles.” Chicken Little, you may recall, is hit in the head by an acorn and subsequently runs about…
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“These people are collecting their hourly rates, flying out here to do whatever it is they do, eating peanuts and watching TV on the plane. When they get here, their usual hourly rate kicks in again. These guys are just rolling.” That may sound like a rant from some television tabloid but it’s actually…
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The California Department of Motor Vehicles is a massive bureaucracy whose legendary inefficiency is on the increase but which some pundits see as a model for government monopoly health care. Mariam Noujaim works for the DMV and is a member of the 2.1 million member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the more…
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