Taxpayers Supply $1 Billion Annually, and AmeriCorps Is Seven Years Without Clean Audit

Americorps People

Taxpayers provide it $1 billion annually, and for seven years running, AmeriCorps has failed to get a clean audit. A North Carolina congresswoman says that’s enough.

Identifying fraud risks, assessing inherent fraud risks, setting risk tolerance and consideration of existing controls were all cited in a scathing report of the Corporation for National and Community Service – aka AmeriCorps – from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

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Louisiana Governor Orders State to Start Tracking Cost of Illegal Immigration for Taxpayers

Jeff Landy

The newly-inaugurated Governor of Louisiana has ordered all of the state’s agencies to start actively tracking the costs of illegal immigration, so the taxpayers of the state can know how much they are spending on illegals due to Joe Biden’s open-borders policies.

As reported by Breitbart, Governor Jeff Landry (R-La.) signed an executive order on Tuesday mandating such tracking efforts by every statewide agency, in order to better understand how to cut such costs. Every agency head must report their data directly to Landry’s office.

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Federal Diversity Trainings Cost Taxpayers in 2023 Millions of Dollars

The Biden administration spent millions on diversity trainings for federal agencies, including some for the armed forces, in 2023.

Taxpayers were on the hook for the more than $16.3 million the federal government spent on diversity trainings taking place in 2023, according to a government spending database. Past government diversity trainings have instructed federal workers that asking an Asian colleague for help with a math problem could be racist, that men can become pregnant and that “social pain” can be the same as physical pain.

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Biden Clocks in Biggest Regulatory Burden in Recent Memory, Report Says

The Biden administration has outpaced other recent presidents in issuing significant regulations that place a financial burden on taxpayers, according to a report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Under President Joe Biden, the federal government completed 89 economically significant rules in 2022, defined as those with at least a $100 million economic impact, which is higher than any point in the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations when deregulation is accounted for, according to CEI’s “Ten Thousand Commandments Report.” Regulations as a whole resulted in $1.939 trillion in added costs for the average American in 2022, exceeding every form of tax except income tax, which it rivals at $2.263 trillion.

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Report: Border Crisis May Cost U.S. Taxpayers $451 Billion

The influx of migrants across the country’s southern border could cost taxpayers $451 billion, a report released Monday by the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee says.

The fourth report released by the committee says that the tab includes housing, education, property damage done by migrants, law enforcement and health care costs. 

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‘Too Favored to Fail:’ Taxpayers Bailout Biden’s Green Friends

While America struggles to buy groceries, President Joe Biden has a green slush fund worth billions of dollars, and he’s not afraid to use it.

Recent revelations uncovered that the CEO and lobbyists of Rivian, an electric vehicle manufacturer, held a quiet meeting at the White House with Biden’s Climate Czar, John Podesta. That’s right, the same John Podesta who served as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign before being pulled from the ranks of profitable green consulting to oversee distribution of $369 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).  Biden selected a political operative with green company ties to dole out the goodies from one of the largest slush funds in history. Now green CEOs who are hemorrhaging cash are beating a path to his White House office, presumedly with hat in hand.

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Government Estimates Unemployment Fraud During Pandemic Cost Up to $135 Billion

The U.S. government estimated unemployment fraud during the pandemic cost taxpayers up to $135 billion or about 11% to 15% of the total amount of unemployment insurance benefits paid during the pandemic.

That’s according to the latest report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which the U.S. Department of Labor disputes. 

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Commentary: Loan Forgiveness Hurts Taxpayers

A few weeks ago, I argued the Biden Administration would use the new SAVE plan to enact student loan forgiveness with or without the approval of the Supreme Court. Since then, the administration has announced details which highlight the SAVE plan offers even more generous forgiveness terms.

This talk about student loans has brought about a question for Ask an Economist this week. Garrett from Ohio says,“One of the most prominent arguments against student loan forgiveness is that the borrowers are forcing the greater population to pay off their debts for them.

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Taxpayers to Give Prisoners $130 Million Worth of College Aid

An expansion of federal student aid for the 2023-2024 academic year will cost taxpayers $130 million per year in grants to prisoners for higher education, according to The Associated Press.

The Biden administration’s expansion of the taxpayer-funded federal Pell Grant program, a program for low-income college students, will give 30,000 prisoners a total of $130 million in student financial aid for the upcoming academic year, according to the AP. The expansion is part of the Second Chance Pell Experiment from the Biden administration that is testing the benefits of providing Pell Grants to prisoners in order to reduce recidivism, according to a Department of Education (DOE) press release.

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Connecticut Seeks to Reduce Solid Waste Costs

Connecticut trucks hundreds of thousands of tons of solid waste to landfills in other states, which costs the state and taxpayers millions of dollars a year.

Gov. Ned Lamont has pitched a plan to reduce the amount of waste going to other states by increasing recycling and requiring manufacturers to reduce packaging materials, but the effort has faced pushback from the solid waste industry and some lawmakers. 

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Poll: 73 Percent of Taxpayers Say Government Doesn’t Use Their Taxes Wisely

Ahead of Tax Day on April 18, 73% of taxpayers said the government doesn’t use their taxes wisely, a new survey found. A separate report found that red states have the better taxpayer return on investment.

Wallethub’s “Taxpayer Survey” found that 28% of respondents said charities would better spend their money; 26% said local governments would best spend their money, followed by state government (22%), the federal government (16%) and religious groups (13%).

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Report: Connecticut Legal Aid Saved State Millions

Connecticut saved taxpayers millions of dollars through a pandemic-related program that provided legal representation to low-income tenants facing eviction, according to a new report.

The report on the state’s right-to-counsel program, prepared by the independent consulting firm Stout, found that by preventing evictions or helping tenants find new housing before they’re evicted likely saved Connecticut taxpayers between $5.8 and $6.3 million from the end of January to the end of November 2022. 

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Report: Transit Agencies May Turn to Taxpayers for More Money When COVID-19 Funds Dry Up

Transit agencies could turn to taxpayers for more money when federal COVID-19 money runs out.

With federal money dwindling, some mass transit agencies are preparing to seek more tax dollars at a time when fewer people are riding, according to a report from a credit rating agency.

Some workers never plan to return to the office, creating uncertainties for mass transit agencies and the taxpayers who fund them, especially those more dependent on riders for fare revenue. A new report from S&P Global Ratings said transit systems could seek additional tax dollars when federal COVID-19 money runs dry in 2025.

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IRS Accidentally Posts Personal Information of 120,000 Taxpayers

The IRS briefly made public the personal financial information of roughly 120,000 taxpayers, the agency announced on Friday.

Taxpayers’ Form 990-Ts were temporarily available to public viewing on the IRS website, but the agency has since removed them, according to the Wall Street Journal. Individuals file the form to disclose certain types of income within their retirement accounts.

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Taxpayers to Pay Billions After Biden ‘Forgives’ $10K to $20K in Student Loan Debt per Borrower

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday his administration would “forgive” $10,000 in federal student loan debt for those making less than $125,000 per year. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the plan could cost taxpayers more than $200 billion.

The total income cap is expected to be higher for married couples, likely around double the $125,000 mark, though that has not been confirmed.

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Commentary: Non-College-Educated Taxpayers May Soon Be Responsible for Billions in College Debt

Most Americans have been conditioned to accept some level of incompetence and inefficiency from government – but not to the extent that federal employees paid by our tax dollars simply admit that they are fundamentally incapable of doing their jobs. Yet shockingly, this is what we are now witnessing with the Department of Education’s failed and convoluted attempt to process claims for student loan cancellation. 

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Analysis: 10 Actions to Reduce Energy Prices That Won’t Cost Taxpayers $740 Billion

Rather than impose higher taxes and more restrictions on domestic production of oil and natural gas, as Senate Democrats voted to do by passing the Inflation Reduction Act, those in the industry proposed 10 actions policy makers can take right now to reduce costs. The industry says its solutions won’t cost taxpayers $740 billion, as the Inflation Reduction Act does, or increase the national debt or inflation, as 230 economists have warned the act will do.

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Analysis: Americans Will Pay for Biden’s Draining of Emergency Oil Reserves

President Joe Biden’s continuous sales of crude oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) could have severe consequences for taxpayers, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Biden administration announced plans last Tuesday for another wave of oil sales from the SPR, as well as a proposal to help restock the reserve, according to a White House press release. The Biden administration aims to strategically sell oil from the reserve to boost supplies and fight soaring gas prices, but the rapid draining of U.S. stockpiles could cause taxpayers to foot the bill when the department inevitably refills its reserves.

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IRS Destroyed 30 Million Tax Filing Documents, Lawmakers Demand Answers

Outside of IRS building

The Internal Revenue Service has been under fire for delays and millions of backlogged returns, but now lawmakers are raising the alarm after the federal agency “destroyed” millions of Americans’ tax documents.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig this week asking for answers about why these records were destroyed.

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Commentary: Stimulus Checks Are the Latest Immigration Scam

A great plague of our contemporary political landscape is that one bad policy begets even more bad policies. Such is the case with many of America’s existing immigration laws.

Federal law, for example, calls for specific enforcement protocols. But our elected representatives have decided that some of those protocols simply should be ignored. This mindset led to ideas like catching and then releasing illegal aliens into our communities, preventing local law enforcement from working with federal law enforcement, and “sanctuary” cities where those who have broken our laws can hide from accountability.

From this witches’ brew of bad ideas has come the latest product rollout, one suited for our time: stimulus checks for illegal aliens. Using the economic damage caused by COVID-19 as a pretext, anti-borders activists and their allied politicians have found a way to sustain those here illegally while creating further incentives for even more foreign nationals to move here.

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