On his final day in office, President Donald Trump rescinded his executive order blocking executive branch employees from immediately becoming lobbyists to the agencies where they worked in government. When President Trump signed the order back in the first week of his term, he promoted it as a tool to reduce corruption. By keeping...
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For those of us who pay attention to government spending, the week between Christmas and New Years is a busy time. It’s never pretty, because this is when a lot of wasteful spending is forced through by logrolling politicians. But that doesn’t mean we can’t laugh at them and their wasteful spending priorities. That’s...
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Next week, Joe Biden will be sworn in as the next President of the United States. With the Congress narrowly divided, his supporters don’t expect much of his policy agenda to gain traction. But he can follow the example of President Obama, who used his pen and phone to bypass the Congress and put...
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If you were to give out an award for Bureaucrat of the Year, how would you pick the winner? For example, 2020 had a lot of contenders. If you chose incompetence as the main criteria for picking a winner, you might choose the bureaucrats at the Centers for Disease Control. These are the highly...
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The latest example of how professional politicians generate costly waste on Capitol Hill just became official. Shortly after a number of COVID-19 relief measures passed earlier in 2020 as part of the CARES Act expired, President Trump signed a $2.3 trillion spending bill to extend them. The spending bill combines $900 billion of COVID-19...
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In 2004, Barack Obama was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate in Illinois. Speaking before a group of students at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Illinois, he voiced an inspirational quote: “We have an obligation and a responsibility to be investing in our students and our schools. We must make sure...
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California’s government-waste problem with unemployment fraud has just become a lot bigger. It’s not just celebrities and prison inmates who have been fraudulently cashing in on California’s pandemic unemployment assistance program. If it were, the total amount of taxpayer money lost to fraudulent unemployment claims in the state would total less than $1 billion....
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Scamming COVID unemployment benefits from California’s Employment Development Department (EDD) isn’t just for celebrity rappers any more. Serial killers, rapists, and child molesters can cash in too! Just before Thanksgiving, a law enforcement task force discovered that thousands of fraudulent COVID unemployment claims had been filed by residents of California’s state prisons. Worse, the...
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To borrow a line from the movie Taken, the U.S. government has a “particular set of skills.” It borrows trillions of dollars and it spends trillions of dollars. Unlike Liam Neeson’s character in Taken, Uncle Sam isn’t particularly good at either of these skills. After state and local governments shuttered businesses and mandated residents...
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Writing in Foreign Policy, economist Dambisa Moyo paints a nightmare scenario of what is waiting for the next U.S. President: