The federal government reported hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in improper payments last fiscal year and trillions over the last two decades.
According to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, the federal government reported $236 billion in improper payments in fiscal year 2023. The true number, though, is actually much higher, but federal reporting is often lacking.
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Not since Prohibition has the federal government sought to ban a product as popular as the internal combustion engine.
This week, the Environmental Protection Agency released its final emissions standards rule, requiring that 70% of new vehicle sales be pure battery-powered electric or hybrids by 2032.
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For the first time in my 94 years on earth, I fear for the future of our democracy. I see the federal government using its enormous powers with contempt for the governed instead of with the consent of the governed as our founders envisioned.
Fundamental change in America is occurring by executive order or the force of the government’s police powers instead of through the legislative process required by the Constitution. From this, I fear that free market capitalism may be replaced by big government socialism. I also fear the erosion of our rights and freedoms, including parental rights, freedom of speech and religion, and due process.
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Just when it seemed impossible for things to get tougher for small businesses, the federal government decided to make things worse.
Small businesses have had a tough run for the last few years. Record inflation, high interest rates, and workforce shortages have led to widespread pessimism among small businesses. The last thing they need is more government interference, but that is exactly what is happening.
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The college horror stories are endless. A mandatory Title IX training session at Harvard instructs students that “fatphobia” and “cis-heterosexism” perpetuate violence and that using the wrong pronouns constitutes abuse. Yet, hatred against Jews is tolerated at the school.
In California, community colleges teach that if someone claims they are not a racist, they are in denial and that colorblindness “perpetuates existing racial inequities and denies systematic racism.” A Michigan college held a “queer” abortion stories event earlier this year. The once-venerable University of Chicago is planning to host a “kink and consent” workshop for students, in which the practice of sex play with ropes will be taught.
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Michigan is very much in play for November.
Our new poll shows a dead heat, with Trump and Biden tied at 43% each and 14% undecided for this key swing state. With Trump leading comfortably right now in Georgia and North Carolina, a win in Michigan could well tip the entire election to the 45th president.
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Former President Donald Trump on Thursday expressed support for Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to secure the southern border amid perceived federal apathy toward the unprecedented surge in illegal border crossings.
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The invasion of illegal aliens on our southern border is getting worse by the day. Texas is at the forefront of this problem, comprising almost half of the nation’s border with Mexico. After years of failure by the Obama and Biden administrations, our state has finally decided to act to protect our citizens.
A new law was signed by the governor, making illegal immigration a state crime and empowering local and state law enforcement to carry out this new law. This should have happened years ago. The border crisis is not new. Inaction by the governor has continued to allow illegal aliens, including documented terrorists, into our state.
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The national debt continues to rise sharply to record levels during the ongoing debate in Congress over the next federal spending bill.
The federal government has already piled another $383 billion onto the debt so far into the 2024 fiscal year, which began on October 1.
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Idaho is asking the Supreme Court to intervene and allow the state to enforce its pro-life law despite the Biden Administration’s efforts to block it by allowing abortions in emergency rooms, according to court documents.
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act is meant to ensure that all patients who request emergency room treatment are examined, but Idaho argued in its court filing Monday that the law turns “protection for the uninsured into a federal super-statute on the issue of abortion, one that strips Idaho of its sovereign interest in protecting innocent human life and turns emergency rooms into a federal enclave where state standards of care do not apply.”
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In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” – beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser – “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
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Another game of shutdown chicken ended last weekend with the status quo and the ousting of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) says its time to end the senseless — and costly — practice of shutdown politics.
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The House passed a 45-day stopgap measure Saturday afternoon, according to multiple reports. The House has adjourned until Monday.
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The federal government handed over nearly $76 billion to colleges and universities from COVID-19 federal funding packages, despite the colleges and universities having billions of dollars in their endowment funds, according to data compiled by OpenTheBooks.
The Cares Act, The Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSSA) and The American Rescue Plan Act contained over $5 trillion in federal COVID-19 relief funds, of which nearly $76 billion was handed over to colleges and universities, according to data compiled by OpenTheBooks, a government transparency watchdog organization. Sixteen of the universities with the largest endowments received nearly $4 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds.
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The federal government is borrowing an average of $5.3 billion per day this fiscal year, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office estimated Tuesday. The new estimate come just days after a top international creditor downgraded the U.S. credit rating.
“The federal budget deficit was $1.6 trillion in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2023, the Congressional Budget Office estimates – more than twice the shortfall recorded during the same period last year,” CBO said. “Revenues were 10 percent lower and outlays were 10 percent higher from October through July than they were during the same period in fiscal year 2022.”
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Allegations that the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been politicized and weaponized against Republicans are in the news. It is commonly acknowledged that most federal employees lean left and vote Democratic, but this is usually said to make little difference. Prior to the 2022 election, a survey by Government Executive magazine said federal workers preferred Democrats 47 percent to 35 percent in House races, and 37 percent to 33 percent for the Senate.
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by Theo Wold James Landis is widely credited with crafting the theoretical architecture supporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radical reconstruction — and expansion — of the federal government. Landis shrewdly both established and legitimized the regulatory state, including Roosevelt’s creation of new federal administrative agencies, by offering the regulatory state…
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The federal government wasted over a half a trillion dollars in improper payments during the first two years of the Biden administration, a new analysis from a spending watchdog group found.
The analysis comes from Open The Books, which reports that 82 programs across 17 agencies made improper payments in fiscal year 2022 alone, averaging $20.5 billion per month, or $683 million per day.
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A Catholic college is raising money to end its affiliation with the federal government and become financially independent, arguing the government has become “hostile to faith,” according to its website.
Belmont Abbey College (BAC), located in North Carolina, is operating a campaign called “Made True” that aims to raise $55 million to cut ties with the federal government and restore its purpose as a faith-based institution, its website reads. The money will “create innovative new financial structures and stewardship programs” with the intent of graduating students without debt as well as create public policy and health science programs that align with the college’s mission.
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Retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn on Friday filed a suit against the federal government seeking damages over what he called Washington’s “wrongful and malicious” prosecution of him.
“As a direct and proximate result of Defendant’s actions, General Flynn suffered harm,” his attorneys wrote in a filing with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. “He was falsely branded as a traitor to his country, lost at least tens of millions of dollars of business opportunities and future lifetime earning potential, was maliciously prosecuted and spent substantial monies in his own defense.”
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Historically, the Federal Government had limited involvement in Public Education. That changed in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) into law.
ESEA doubled federal expenditures for K-12 education and gave the federal government much more input into education. That has been the debate ever since, central control of education versus state/local control.
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House Republicans think federal agencies have become a weapon against their own apolitical employees and the constitutional rights of Americans. House Democrats think House Republicans have become a weapon against the prerogatives of federal agencies.
The parties traded laundry lists of grievances stemming from agency and congressional investigations, from the Benghazi attack to the Russia collusion hoax, at the first hearing Thursday of the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
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Article III Project founder and President Mike Davis says he doubts House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan will hold Big Tech accountable for its abuse of power for colluding with the federal government.
“Jim Jordan has no intention of actually holding big tech accountable,” Davis said on the Wednesday edition of the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “He pretends like he is fighting against Big Tech, but behind the scenes he’s making these key decisions like opposing bipartisan reforms last Congress and appointing someone who is pro Big Tech.”
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Two recent proposals that the federal government are considering in the name of consumer safety have Uncle Sam coming after products millions of Americans use every day. While a potential gas stove ban has received several headlines in recent days, millions of Americans may not know that the government has also had a role in beginning the phasing out of a chemical that is a component in so many products that it will likely impact every American in the country.
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A hospital in Yuma, Arizona, is owed $20 million for medical services provided to illegal immigrants.
“We’ve calculated that over a six-month period, from December 2021 to May 2022, we had $20 million in charges that we’re unable to bill anyone for, for services we provided to migrants alone,” Dr. Robert Trenschel, president and CEO of Yuma Regional Medical Center, told The Daily Signal during a phone interview Wednesday.
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Americans listed the federal government as the top problem facing the country for the seventh year in a row, according to a new poll.
Of over 1,000 respondents, 19% mentioned the government as the top problem with the country, saying they are dissatisfied with “some aspect” of the government, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday. The government was ranked as more of a problem than inflation and the economy in general, with 16% dissatisfied with inflation and 12% dissatisfied with the economy in general.
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The House Republican Conference is currently working on legislation that may ban the use of TikTok by federal government employees, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
“We’re working on something right now,” said a Republican aide familiar with the matter. The proposal is said to be proceeding through the Judiciary Committee, which is set to be led by Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio in the next Congress when the GOP gains a majority.
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Interest on federal debt is set to skyrocket, potentially surpassing defense spending by as early as 2025, CNN reported Tuesday.
The federal government made $475 billion in net interest payments in the fiscal year 2022 — which ended in September — up from $352 in fiscal year 2021, according to the Treasury Department. The number exceeds the $406 billion spent on transportation and veterans’ benefits, and is on track to eclipse the roughly $750 billion spent on defense this year between 2025 to 2026, according to CNN, citing financial analytics firm Moody’s Analytics.
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Newly released polling data shows that a majority of Americans say the federal government has too much power.
Gallup released the poll Wednesday, which showed that 54% of Americans said the federal government is “too powerful.” The survey found 39% said the federal government has the right amount of power while only 6% said it has too little.
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The federal government has awarded a controversial nonprofit a $1 million grant for research to help prevent future viral pandemics, an award that comes after more than two years of suspicions that the nonprofit in question may have been bankrolling certain types of highly dangerous coronavirus experiments in the city where the COVID-19 pandemic began.
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If a politician from Florida decides to run for president in 2024, his (or her) home state will be short two votes in the Electoral College, and when the new session of the U.S. House of Representatives convenes in January 2023, Florida will be missing two congressional seats to which it is entitled.
Why? Because according to a post-2020 census survey, the U.S. Census Bureau significantly undercounted the population of Florida, as well as Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. At the same time, it overcounted the population of eight states, all but one of which is a blue state.
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The federal government is paying to bus illegal migrants from one border town to New York City, a Texas official told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The city government of El Paso, Texas, is busing illegal migrants to the Big Apple on the dime of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Deputy City Manager Mario D’Agostino told the DCNF Monday. The federal agency covers the travel costs of illegal migrants through a grant program.
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Do something.
This is a response—and perhaps a natural one—to a human tragedy or crisis. We saw this response in the wake of 9-11. We saw it during the Covid-19 pandemic. And we’re seeing it again following three mass shootings—in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa Oklahoma—that claimed the lives of more than 30 innocent people, including small children.
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The federal government has assembled a 21-agency working group to study and assess the environmental impacts of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
The “Interagency Working Group on Environmental Damage in Ukraine” — which was assembled by the Department of State and includes officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Department of Defense — has met weekly for about a month, Axios first reported Friday.
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Imagine a world where you were not taxed on how much you earned in a given year, but instead on how much your wealth appreciated.
To some this sounds like something straight out of John Lennon’s communist manifesto, also known as the song “Imagine.” Like the song, the music surrounding the words are enticing, but also like Lennon’s hit, the words themselves spell the death knell of freedom.
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President Biden’s latest executive order calls for extensive research on digital assets and may usher in a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC), eventually allowing individuals to maintain accounts with the Federal Reserve. Other central banks are already on the job. The People’s Bank of China began piloting a digital renminbi in April 2021. India’s Reserve Bank intends to launch a digital rupee as early as this year.
A CBDC may upgrade the physical cash the Federal Reserve already issues — but only if its designers appreciate the value of financial privacy.
Cash is a 7th century technology, with obvious drawbacks today. It pays no interest, is less secure than a bank deposit, and is difficult to insure against loss or theft. It is unwieldy for large transactions, and also requires those transacting to be at the same place at the same time — a big problem in an increasingly digital world.
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Multiple U.S. states, ultimately seeing little action from the federal government on the matter, have taken it upon themselves to roll out solutions for combatting the ongoing flow of deadly fentanyl into the United States.
As reported by ABC News, two major methods have emerged from the handful of states that are directly addressing this issue: One camp seeks to reduce the risks to drug-users while also imposing steeper penalties for dealing fentanyl, while the other approach involved calling for more federal intervention, with some of these states taking it upon themselves to guard the southern border and prevent the trafficking of fentanyl into the country from Mexico.
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The omicron variant may be nearing its peak in some states, but across the country it’s produced a dizzying array of conflicting signals on whether the nation should remain under a COVID national emergency or move on to an endemic “new normal.”
Comedian Bill Maher’s “I don’t want to live in your mask-paranoid world anymore” monologue went viral last week, just days after the Atlantic, the standard-bearer journal for the liberal intelligentsia, ran a story headlined: “COVID Parenting Has Passed the Point of Absurdity.” Accompanying the article was a black-and-white photo of a woman frozen in a more desperate and primal state of panic than the subject of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
Omicron, for most people without co-morbidities, produces much milder symptoms than do the coronavirus’s previous variants, but it’s far more infectious, racing through schools, shutting down classrooms and forcing parents to consult their district’s ever-shifting COVID “decision trees” on a seemingly daily basis.
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Over 100 conservative groups and leaders are calling on Education Secretary Miquel Cardona to resign over allegations that he collaborated with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to draft the infamous letter equating parents to domestic terrorists.
The Conservative Action Project (CAP), along with 120 conservative groups and leaders, released a letter Monday calling on Cardona to resign immediately, following reports that he worked with the NSBA and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to silence parents from speaking out about their concerns at America’s public schools, citing “threats” they posed to school boards.
School boards have been battlegrounds for culture wars over mask rules, COVID-19 vaccinations, schools reopening, Critical Race Theory (CRT), gender ideology and remote learning. The Monday letter also calls on Congress to further investigate the NSBA letter “to ensure any other Biden administration officials who were inappropriately involved are held accountable.”
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On New Year’s Eve of 2019, revelers gathered around the globe to ring in a new decade. Many jubilantly attended “Roaring Twenties” parties, adorned in elegant evening wear, cloche and Panama hats, and knickerbockers, harkening back to an exciting, culturally vibrant era of economic prosperity. But whatever veiled hopes partygoers had for a booming future soon met jarring realities: a once-in-a-century pandemic, global lockdowns, an economic recession, and widespread civil unrest stemming from an incident of police brutality. The Roaring 2020s were not to be, it seemed.
Take heart: Mark P. Mills, a physicist, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, faculty fellow at Northwestern University, and a partner in Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund, is out to rekindle our collectively dashed hopes. In his new book, The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s, Mills convincingly argues with verve, vitality, and – most importantly – evidence, that humanity is about to take a great step forward in the coming decade. And unlike the first Roaring Twenties, these won’t need to end with a Great Depression.
In the opening pages, Mills reminds us that the original Roaring Twenties didn’t start off so auspiciously, either. In fact, separated by a century, our situation seems eerily similar. The 1918 flu pandemic ran well into 1920, triggering a severe U.S. recession that lasted through summer 1921. Violent riots and political instability were also prevalent. Yet from this pit of public despair, Americans pulled themselves out. Propelled by remarkable advancements in mass production, medicine, electrification, communications via telephone and radio, movies, automobiles, and aviation, the United States saw its GDP rise by an astounding 43% between 1921 and 1929.
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