Animal testing by cosmetic companies is becoming a thing of the past in the United States, so it might shock you that the government is still forcing taxpayers to pay for cruel, ineffective, and expensive animal tests on cosmetics in government laboratories.
Last month, after two men were asked to leave a Philadelphia Starbucks on the grounds that they were loitering, the Starbucks Corporation announced that it would close more than 8,000 stores for a day in order to impose “unconscious bias training” on its employees. (Readers contemplating the wisdom…
Is there a hole in our justice system where corruption is allowed to fester? Yes.
That government shutdown, by the way, which stretched from midnight on the night of Friday, January 19, to sometime in the late afternoon of Monday, January 22, was more talked about than real. Some federal agencies took the day off, and here in Washington the traffic on Monday morning was easier…
Now that we have one full year of the Trump presidency in the history books, isn’t it time for Trump’s conservative critics to acknowledge his election was worth it?
The past week has seen widespread anti-government demonstrations in Iran, and the regime of the ayatollahs has responded with violent repression—including deadly force. Meanwhile there have been no demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, which is just as far from democracy. Why not?
In 1971, when Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the aim was to protect the animals from “capture, branding, harassment, or death.” The law hailed wild horses as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.”
With police intensifying their long-running corruption probes, Israel is awash with speculation that Benjamin Netanyahu’s days as prime minister may be numbered. Opponents—both within the Likud party and without—have been organizing. Sensing the danger, Netanyahu and his allies have fought back,…
The Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos, who in the 1970s won the Panama Canal back for his country, used to tell less successful Latin American leaders that the United States is like a monkey on a chain. You can play with the chain all you like—but if you play with the monkey, you’ll get badly hurt.…
With police intensifying their long-running corruption probes, Israel is awash with speculation that Benjamin Netanyahu’s days as prime minister may be numbered. Opponents—both within the Likud party and without—have been organizing. Sensing the danger, Netanyahu and his allies have fought back,…
The Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos, who in the 1970s won the Panama Canal back for his country, used to tell less successful Latin American leaders that the United States is like a monkey on a chain. You can play with the chain all you like—but if you play with the monkey, you’ll get badly hurt.…
Men's studies actually exists, but not for the reason you think. I was confused at first when I saw that a college actually had a men's studies department. The idea of "men's studies" is usually a trope used to bash the existence of "women's studies" and is (usually) not a serious proposal. Yet,…
The Washington Post outdid itself last week in the dog-bites-man department, trumpeting one of those yawn-inducing nonevents that have come to be hyped in the age of the Trump resistance. Here’s the ballyhooed breaking news item: A long-time EPA employee is retiring. Yes, that’s the story.…
The Washington Post outdid itself last week in the dog-bites-man department, trumpeting one of those yawn-inducing nonevents that have come to be hyped in the age of the Trump resistance. Here’s the ballyhooed breaking news item: A long-time EPA employee is retiring. Yes, that’s the story.…
We shall not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule, if we acknowledge that we were startled, in our callow youth, by a suggestion from a professor. The comment came from Adam Ulam, the distinguished scholar of Soviet foreign policy. In…
We shall not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule, if we acknowledge that we were startled, in our callow youth, by a suggestion from a professor. The comment came from Adam Ulam, the distinguished scholar of Soviet foreign policy. In…
Philip K. Howard writes in the American Interest of the signal and opportunity of the Trump Revolution:
In the depths of the Great Depression, two progressive congressmen added a little noticed amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act that over the next 80 plus years grew like an octopus with its tentacles touching every single American. At its inception, the Jones-Costigan Amendment was intended…
On a crisp fall day as the scent of burning firewood tickles one's nose, a flock of Canada geese flies through the dusk sky, the birds' trademark honks punctuating the breeze. This could be an encouraging image, because the best part about Canada geese is when they leave.
This week, the District of Columbia government proposed to deregulate the local taxi industry, which is facing challenges from ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft. Issued by the Department of For-Hire Vehicles (DFHV) through an emergency notice, the new rules permit cab drivers to institute…
There are times when it seems the entire objective of Washington and the political class is to shake down the rest of us for as much as can be had. Hillary Clinton would not be paid six figures for speaking if she were just an ordinary citizen on the lecture circuit. We've all heard her speak and…
Recent news that Wells Fargo employees had opened as many as two million unauthorized customer bank and credit card accounts since 2011 was shocking. The bank fired 5,300 workers and agreed to pay $185 million in fines to the Los Angeles City Attorney, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the…
The Washington Examiner editorial board has declared the legacy of Barack Obama to be a transformed America—one that trusts its government and institutions less than it did when he became president. Here's an excerpt from the magazine's editorial:
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.
In 2010, the New York Times dubbed her our "Quiet Savior from Harmful Medicines." That same year, FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg presented her with the eponymous Dr. Frances O. Kelsey Award for Excellence and Courage in Protecting Public Health. In 2000, she was inducted into the National…
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau just celebrated its fifth anniversary by releasing an outline for new debt collection rules that will encourage consumers to avoid paying their debts.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) pledged early this year that it was a new day in Washington, D.C. The transit agency pledged that the metro system would put safety and customer service first. D.C. commuters were largely skeptical that much would change besides rhetoric.…
The chief of Amtrak's police division, Polly Hanson, is under investigation for violating conflict of interest rules and committing fraud in hiring her boyfriend's firm for a government-funded counterterrorism contract. For a million-dollar contract on the railroad's RAILSAFE program, she chose ABS…
Poland's government has passed a law, upheld by its constitutional court, "that significantly limits the rights of people whose property in Warsaw was seized during or after World War II, and their descendants, to apply for restitution," according to the New York Times. The law sets up hurdles…
Donald Trump's speech on the economy Monday puts him in a strong position on the issue on which Hillary Clinton is weakest and politically vulnerable.
President Obama challenged "anti-government" types Wednesday to visit a nation with a poorly functioning government in order to appreciate how "useful" a well-run administration is to society.
At a time of historical distrust in the nation's capital, it should come as a bit of comic relief to a faithless public that we can't even believe in Fourth of July fireworks anymore.
To death and taxes add a new certainty: Starting next year we will watch the size of our government expand. We Americans, one-time disciples of the theory that that government is best which governs least, will have to choose in November between two paths to bigger government. The Democratic…
Technology has made the world run faster, increased productivity, and given us more stuff. Governments have organized themselves into massive institutions built to run more and more programs on behalf of citizens. And yet, for all this creation, our brave new world often seems cold,…
The federal technocracy, like the old B-horror-movie monster The Blob, grows by sucking all surrounding life into its amoeba-like digestive system. There are never enough bureaucratic controls or government programs to “incentivize” us—in the jargon—to behave in ways the technocrats think best.
Sometime in the next two years, if Obama administration bureaucrats get their way, public housing tenants who smoke in their own apartments will face sanctions, fines and perhaps even eviction. The proposed policy is deeply flawed. However, those who oppose it—as many conservatives will…
A tradition in the Senate required a newly elected member to wait a year or more before addressing his colleagues on the Senate floor. But that practice has been absent from the Senate for decades—until today.
It has long been good sport to make fun of the government. Ronald Reagan did it with a fine, almost deft touch. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” he would tell an audience, “are I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
The latest political happenings—the rise of Donald Trump, John Boehner’s surprise resignation as speaker of the House of Representatives, Hillary Clinton’s slide against the septuagenarian socialist Bernie Sanders—remind me of a verse from the old Rolling Stones song “Jigsaw Puzzle”:
How happy in their jobs are government workers? Well, the sovereign answer to that question would be: “Who cares?” They have steady work and, for most of them, it is all indoors with no heavy lifting. And they practically have to commit a felony to get fired.
Worry not about the tens of thousands of Syrians that Barack Obama plans to invite to take up residence here. Secretary of State Kerry assures us that the vetting process to screen out the bad guys will be thorough. Alas, Michael Steinbach, assistant director of counterterrorism of the F.B.I. told…
Recent polling by Gallup shows that
Something has gotten into Ted Cruz. The Republican senator is known as a conservative firebrand willing to take on his own party, but in a Thursday meeting with reporters in his Capitol Hill office, Cruz was sounding almost ecumenical. Maybe it was the presence of Pope Francis.
Traditional marriage is in big trouble in the United States. Between 1960 and 2011, the share of white adults 18 and older who were married declined by 25 percent, while the declines for Hispanic and black adults were 35 percent and 50 percent respectively.
In 1878, William Gladstone described the U.S. Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” Gladstone was right.
The American Action Forum (AAF) is out with a new report about the Obama administration's unsuccessful efforts to reduce regulations. The findings are jaw-dropping.
Last week, THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported on a $412,000 contract for 1,280 sleeping room nights at the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. However, at least two other hotels were booked for the visit, and a fourth hotel was also used, although no contract has yet been posted. The new…
“We have already cut defense … about 30 percent over the last 10 years, and we’re still at war. We’re actively involved on multiple continents in real combat operations. We should not be drastically reducing our troop levels.” That, as Bradford Richardson of The Hill reports, is the position taken…
In the midst of revelations about a massive data breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the agency awarded a $4.3 million two-month contract extension to Northrop Grumman for the OPM's Data Warehouse Program (DWP). According to the award documents, the follow-on contract includes…
The government doesn’t seem to have many good days, these days. If it isn’t a vast hacking of its employees’ personal information by, presumably, the Chinese, then it is the revelation that the people who are supposed to keep air travel safe, the crack agents of the TSA, missed some 95 percent of…
I'm not sure what the great political philosopher Leo Strauss would have thought of the Internet (he was a skeptic about progress, but also a skeptic about reaction). I personally think he would have appreciated aspects of it. Perhaps he would have even written an essay on "Persecution and the Art…
Speaking Tuesday at the 45th Annual Washington Conference of the Council of the Americas, Secretary of State John Kerry said that "countries are far more likely to advance economically and socially when citizens have faith in their governments and are able to rely on them for justice and equal…
The inspector general of the State Department confirmed today in Senate testimony that the State Department network at some point was hacked. He made the comments in response to a question from Georgia senator David Perdue.
The U.S. State Department is looking to design and facilitate a media ethics course for journalists in India, and has even proposed appropriating the name of Robin Thicke's 2013 hit "Blurred Lines" as a title for the course. The U.S. consulate general in Hyderabad, India is looking for a non-profit…
The system of federal and state "exchanges" or "marketplaces" that offer health insurance through the Affordable Care Act lean heavily on "navigators" to guide consumers in their choices. Organizations such as community health centers, legal aid societies, social service groups, church groups and…
Since Politico, a politics-focused website and newspaper, launched its subscription-based news service Politico Pro in 2011, government agencies have increasingly turned to the service to keep abreast of the latest developments in their spheres of policy. Government records show fiscal year 2011…
Senator Chuck Grassley has sent two letters to the State Department to ask about Huma Abedin's special government status when she was a government employee--and for information on Abedin's email use while working for the government. Abedin is a close aide to Hillary Clinton, and worked for the…
When President Obama attended the G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia last November, the entire delegation required over 5,000 room nights at five different hotels over the course of the summit, costing $2.1 million. Transporting all those people around Brisbane was not cheap: the State Department…
Busy week for Washington and the political class it succors. So busy that a headline screaming for the attention of our leaders came and went barely leaving a footprint.
We received this email from a 40-year veteran of the federal workforce, who raises serious questions about Hillary Clinton and her emails:
As the White House claims that it was caught off-guard by the Clinton email scandal, or that President Obama didn't realize that his emails to hdr22@clintonemail.com weren't landing on State Department servers, it would be good to remind them: you told us so.
As Justin Sink of Government Executive reports:
In spite of the Friday night passage of an eleventh hour, one-week stopgap spending bill to continue funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the department posted a lapse-of-funding notice and shut-down procedures on its website apparently intended if the last minute efforts failed.…
Lost in much of the reporting about CPAC is that almost all of the likely presidential candidates—really, all of them, with the exception of Rand Paul—seemed to place themselves at the Reaganite hawkish-internationalist end of the foreign policy spectrum. The much-heralded return of Republican…
On its much maligned Twitter feed, Think AgainTurn Away, the State Department is denouncing higher taxes -- and even asserting they're evidence a utopian society is a pipe dream.
Liberal commentator Juan Williams called the foreign donations to the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation "rank influence peddling" and "unethical" in remarks today on Fox News:
Vice President Biden spent about a day and a half in Belgium in early February to meet with various European leaders, but his entourage, security team and other delegation members required up to 209 rooms for up to three weeks surrounding the visit. While the estimated tab was $690,507, this cost…
In January, the State Department signed contracts for an estimated $1,690,000 million for hotels for President Obama's trip to India. Two of the contracts were for the New Delhi stay, and another two were for Agra, the location of the Taj Mahal. That latter leg of the trip was cancelled when…
Lisa Rein of the Washington Post writes that:
Scott Walker has proposed higher education budget reforms and many people in higher education are unhappy.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is working on a solution to a problem faced by a growing number of Americans as the population ages and relies more on prescription drugs: "What is this pill?" Much in the way a Google image search looks for similar images in Google's vast caches, the…
Vice President Joe Biden kicked off 2015 leading a presidential delegation to Brazil for the inauguration of Dilma Rousseff as president of that country. The vice president was only in the country on New Year's Day, for the inauguration and an hour-long meeting with Rousseff before returning to St.…
This Washington Post headline pretty much explains that government is our business—and business is very good:
Under President Obama, $7.5 trillion has been added to the national debt. The number is being highlighted by the Republican National Committee ahead of President Obama's State of the Union address, which will be delivered tonight from Washington.
With the announcement Monday of a five-year, $563 million contract award to Accenture, the Healthcare.gov contractor that rescued the Obamacare marketplace after 2013's disastrous launch, the total cost of the site will well exceed $2.2 billion. The new award is on top of the $1.7 billion in…
The Environmental Protection Agency has increasingly seen its mission as the regulation of … just about everything. And as its sense of mission expands the confidence of the people in its ability to do so fairly and effectively has declined. As Timothy Cama of The Hill reports:
Last week the White House released a first draft for what it ultimately intends to be a report card for the nation’s colleges. And there’s no way this effort will improve the lot of the typical college student.
When Congress headed home for the year last week without renewing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) many in the real estate, tourism, and insurance business predicted disaster. The Coalition to Insure Against Terrorism—a broad grouping representing everyone from real estate investors to…
With the price of oil plunging, the ruble crashing against other currencies, and its interest rates soaring, Russia has announced to the world that it:
When President Obama visited Brisbane, Australia in November for the G-20 summit, the large U.S. delegation required multiple hotels and thousands of "room nights" for the length of the stay, though the president himself spent only one night in his hotel. Initially, as first reported by THE WEEKLY…
In the last five years, the Department of Defense (DOD) has spent over $130 million to store unused satellites from eight different satellite programs, and plans to spend another $206 million on storage over the next five years. Storage costs for individual pieces of equipment range from $40,000 up…
Along with the primary goal of expanding the availability of health insurance, the Affordable Care Act aims to make the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) universal. This plan actually began with the 2009 stimulus (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), which included the Health…
President Obama stayed only one night in Australia for the G-20 summit, but the entire presidential delegation required over 4,000 rooms costing in excess of $1.7 million for the entire stay. Rooms at three different hotels were reserved for the U.S. delegation, and due to the large number of…
In Thursday’s lead editorial, the Wall Street Journal argues that congressional “Republicans can’t win by shutting down the government”; thus, they should not attempt to deny President Obama the funding he needs to carry out his unconstitutional executive amnesty for 5 million illegal immigrants. …
Less than four weeks before the launch of 2015 open enrollment for Obamacare, the government agency that runs Healthcare.gov suddenly realized the Marketplace site was heading for a repeat of last year's debacle. Documents show that on October 19, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services…
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently solicited quotes from contractors to recruit minors ages sixteen and seventeen to purchase "regulated tobacco products" on the Internet. The purchase attempts must be made from a facility located in Virginia and shipped to a P.O. Box provided by the…
New York senator Chuck Schumer will head to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to tell Democrats to "embrace government."
In a 2011 blog post titled "There's a New Sheriff in Town," the White House announced that Vice President Joe Biden was spearheading a new "effort to root out wasteful spending at every agency and department in the Federal Government" called the Campaign to Cut Waste. As if to emphasize the urgency…
The headline over this Government Executive article reads:
As reported in Government Executive, in a new study:
When President Obama finally offers his executive action on illegal immigration, the Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is going to get a bit busier.
President Obama labeled the U.S. government "the most important organization on earth" and said that he'd "squeeze every last little bit of opportunity" from his position as president of the United State over the next two years. Watch here:
The boss tells Politico what Washington can get done in President Obama's last two years in office:
The federal government is taking New York City to court. "Manhattan U.S. Attorney Files Healthcare Fraud Lawsuit Against Computer Sciences Corp. And The City Of New York For Orchestrating A Multimillion-Dollar Medicaid Billing Fraud Scheme," reads a headline from the Justice Department's press…
The Peter Drucker sallies about how government “can only do two things well: wage war and inflate the currency” is being severely tested. Today, we see this headline, over a piece by Jonathan Spicer of Reuters
The states of Illinois, New Jersey, and New York have all issued mandatory Ebola quarantine for certain travelers, and the White House doesn't like this one bit. According to the New York Times these states are being pressured to loosen their quarantine restrictions:
The American public has resisted the metric system for decades, but that has not discouraged the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from sinking $37,950 into two more episodes of a "motion-comic" video series called "The League of SI Superheroes." (SI stands…
The American public often rails about bureaucracy. It is not difficult to fathom why. Who amongst us has not fumed while standing in a long line at an understaffed post office? And how many of us have thrown up our hands in frustration at the complexity of income tax instructions and outsourced the…
A headline in the Wall Street Journal reads, “U.S. Deficit Shrinks to Level Last Seen in ’07.” The problem with this headline isn’t its accuracy (although it should say ’08 unless it’s speaking as a percentage of GDP). The problem is that readers are likely to come away with the false perception…
First time claims came in on the low side. Unexpectedly so. Which seems, paradoxically, predictable.
Yesterday’s presentation by the U.S. Treasury was a comical spectacle—at least for those of us with sardonic senses of humor. The good news? The deficit for FY2014 (which ended September 30) was 29 percent lower than the deficit was in FY2013. Increased corporate tax receipts drove much of the…
The headline on an item in Time reads:
Analysis of Congressional Budget Office projections by the Senate Budget Committee finds that Obamacare will increase the deficit by more than $100 billion over the next decade.
FBI director James Comey talked about Chinese hacking -- and how basically every American company has been targeted -- last night on 60 Minutes. Comey said that it's not the Chinese are so good, it's that they're "prolific." He likened their hacking style to a "drunk burglar."
Seems the CDC is afflicted with the government habit of treating information as something to hoard and withhold from the citizenry which can’t be trusted to understand or handle it. As Elise Viebeck of The Hill reports:
The U.S. economy added 248,000 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.9 percent. But the labor force participation rate continued to fall, average hourly earnings seem frozen, and over 13 percent of workers are either out of work, involuntarily working part time or too…
President Obama was counting strokes on the golf course at Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia last Saturday, but the day before a $91,318.76 contract was awarded to count something quite different at Fort Belvoir: bats. The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation will conduct the "Bat…
Eric Katz of Government Executive writes that Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., has:
These days, mentioning birth control and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the same sentence will likely draw some strong reactions. But a recent contractor inquiry by HHS for its National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland adds a new wrinkle. This time, the…
Matthew Continetti, writing for the Washington Free Beacon:
James Pethokoukis notes that according to a new study by the Tax Foundation, the United States:
The "busiest land port of entry in the Western Hemisphere" is getting an upgrade, and according to the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), about a half a million dollars worth of new artwork will be part of the package. The San Ysidro Land Port of Entry, the border crossing facility for the…
The federal government issued sixty contracts from 2009 to 2014 in efforts to build Healthcare.gov, the federal insurance marketplace. According to a report issued today by the inspector general (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the government had already paid out just…
The legislative fix has been passed and signed into law, along with a generous appropriation of new money. Also, a new top person has been named and confirmed. So time to move on from the VA and its woes. But before doing so, consider the magnitude of the problems and their duration. As Brad…
With the overwhelmingly bipartisan vote for the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014, Congress passed the most significant reforms to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in decades. And, right on cue, here come the grumblings from the second-guessers.
Thanks to the marvels of the digital epoch, citizens can now track the government’s spending of public money. On a website, of all things. Of course, while the technology may change and improve, the eternals still apply. So one is not especially astonished to learn, as Gregory Korte of USA…
There is a fairly robust debate about inflation going on these days. Is there too much? Not enough? Any at all? And just how much is too much? Can we hit the Goldilocks sweet spot?
Vice President Biden and his entourage visited Brazil in mid-June to attend the USA versus Ghana World Cup game, a trip that also included meetings with both the president and vice president of Brazil. Although the vice president spent only one night in Brazil before moving on to Colombia, the…
As anyone who has visited New York City knows, getting a taxicab in the city can prove very, very difficult. And finding a driver that speaks English, has working air conditioning, will let a visitor pay by credit card, and knows directions to major landmarks can be even harder. That’s why it’s…
Washington needs more money and if it doesn’t get it, your morning commute will become:
Another day, another national crisis. Yesterday it was immigration and another threat/promise to go it alone. Today, it is roads and bridges so, as Justin Sink at The Hill reports:
Now that Washington has acknowledged cultural malaise and a broad failure to provide timely access to health care at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Congress and the executive branch are competing frantically to show the public how hard they are working to fix that failure.
The white-hot issue of what to call the professional football team currently playing its home games in the vicinity of the nation’s capital just got hotter. Earlier this week, Senator Harry Reid said he wouldn’t accept comp tickets (truly a first for a sitting senator) to the team’s games so long…
One of the more intriguing aspects of the VA health care scandal is the way the paperwork was creatively done to make it appear that the system was operating as it was meant to. This took serious, sustained effort, as the AP reports:
As reported by Kellie Lunney at Government Executive, the:
Just a day after House Republicans introduced legislation to roll back some Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations on school meal programs, the USDA announced some flexibility would be granted to some schools for the coming school year when implementing the new policies:
The official White House schedule says President Obama was in the Philippines for less than 24 hours, but the estimated cost of the hotel and vehicle rentals in support of the trip topped $1.1 million. The hotel contract (Sofitel Luxury Hotel) provided for up to 3,600 room night plus various…
The featured speaker at a recent conference on “Excellence in Government,” was the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack.
An eye-opening report from KMOV about an Obamacare contractor using taxpayer dollars to pay their employees to spend all day doing nothing:
The government was spending too much money. And wasting a lot of it. The need to cut back was obvious and pressing. So Congress passed something called the “sequester,” that would force frugality upon the government and oblige Washington, Inc. to endure the kind of downsizing that had been…
The latest jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the staff of the U.S. embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Thursday as part of a seven-day trip through Africa. During his remarks, Kerry recognized the work of the foreign nationals employed by the embassy, and he singled out two nationals who recently…
After shelling out $677 million to build the federal health care website, the government will spend an additional $121 million in 2014 to repair it—$30 million more than previously estimated—the Washington Times reported last night. This comes just as the Obama administration is starting the hunt…
Americans have become increasingly more afraid of their own government, as Eric Katz writes in, appropriately, Government Executive. Seems that:
Four years after Obamacare became law, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is notifying Medicare providers and suppliers of new fingerprint-based background checks. Eventually, all individuals who hold a five percent or greater stake in a Medicare supplier or provider that is…
The Hill reports:
Employers’ requests for the limited number of H1-B visas that allow foreign skilled workers to work and live here has wildly exceeded the supply. After all, the visas allow employers to hire foreigners, rather than bid up wage rates to attract American citizens, or incur the cost of training…
In late March, President Obama took a week-long trip through Europe which included a stop of less than 24 hours in Brussels, Belgium for meetings with the European Union and NATO. The president stayed at The Hotel, a twenty-seven story hotel in the center of the city. The estimated cost for the…
As Charles S. Clark of Government Executive writes, three members of the House – Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts and Gerry Connolly of Virginia – have requested, by letter, something called a Government Accountability Office study. They are concerned that “The…
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released details of the latest contract with Terremark Federal Group covering "open market items" required for the ongoing operation of Healthcare.gov. The documents include an itemized list of computing and network services, fees, licenses and…
For the latest installment in the Department of Health and Human Services' Obamacare "My #GetCovered Story" series, HHS has borrowed a line from the traditional wedding vows: "In sickness and in health." In a blog post of that title, a "theater artist" from Chicago tells the story of how her own…
The Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee has put together this chart showing that payments on the interest of federal debt will "dwarf virtually every federal expense" in 2024:
Top Senate Banking Committee members released plans this week to wind down mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and replace them with a complicated apparatus disturbingly similar to Obamacare.
The federally subsidized railroad service Amtrak is offering up to 24 writers the chance to take a 2-5 day trip aboard a train for free. It's all part what is being called the "#AmtrakResidency program."
It's been almost a year since THE WEEKLY STANDARD quoted Philip Larkin’s great 1969 poem, “Homage to a Government." Yesterday the Obama administration released its 2015 defense budget, shrinking the Army to its lowest size since 1940 and reducing base defense spending to less than 3 percent of GDP.…
At first glance, a page on the Health and Human Services (HHS) website seems to be giving that agency's official advice on the "The Health Benefits of Nootropics," a classification of purportedly memory-enhancing drugs. The page is found on the website's subdomain of the Assistant Secretary for…
In the early days of the Obama administration, “smart power” was all the rage—and not just on the foreign policy scene. In April 2009, National Public Radio reported how one Allentown, Pennsylvania, mother was saving more than a hundred dollars each month on her electric bill. Tammy Yeakel’s power…
The website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was repeatedly hacked on Monday and Tuesday this week by an online drug retailer. A Tuesday Google search of the site, www.globalchange.gov, revealed dozens of pages hawking everything from Xanax to Levitra to Ambien. A partial list is…
At least three marketers of health-related or insurance products and services have taken advantage of the "data-set" feature at Healthcare.gov to give themselves a virtual presence on the federal government's Obamacare site. The ability to use a web address containing "healthcare.gov" may lend…
The federal government is closed, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Managment:
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that Accenture Federal Services would be taking over for CGI Federal as the main contractor for Healthcare.gov. CMS documents reveal that without the new estimated $91.1 million contract, the government could end up making…
Robert Laszewski—a prominent consultant to health insurance companies—recently wrote in a remarkably candid blog post that, while Obamacare is almost certain to cause insurance costs to skyrocket even higher than it already has, “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it.” How can this be? …
Government, we are told by those who evangelize for more of it, is the “things we choose to do together.” If so, then “we" don’t appear to be so happy with the job we have been collectively doing. As Rebecca Shabad at the Hill reports, a recent poll done by the Associated Press-NORC Center for…
An image of a state-run veterans’ cemetery posted to the aggregation website Reddit this week is causing a controversy. The image, originally posted by the page "U.S Army W.T.F! moments" on Facebook, captures a scene from Cheltenham Veterans Cemetery, run by the Maryland department of veterans…
President Obama is more perceptive about the shortcomings of government than we thought. “We have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly,” he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Wow!
Temperatures in the high 40s, with some rain. That’s the forecast for Buffalo on Sunday when the Bills and the Dolphins kick it off. Balmy, then. So much so that the team from Miami can’t, should they lose, use the weather for an alibi. Likewise, the fans who choose not to pay sit in the…
You would think the dearth of legislation coming off Capitol Hill might be a problem for K Street. But that would be outside-the-beltway thinking. There are other ways to skin a cat … or a taxpayer. And the lobbyists have found one. As Megan R. Wilson at The Hill writes, they are happily:
Tough times in the lobbying industry and the news is sure to be greeted with an outpouring of sympathy from across the land. As Kevin Bogardus and Megan R. Wilson of the Hill report:
Today is a snow day in Washington so even less will get done than on a day when the sun shines. And this year has been particularly unproductive, as Laura Litvan at Bloomberg writes:
Pessimists who believe that once a large piece of governmental malpractice is in place, it is there forever and immoveable, should to pay attention to this day and, perhaps, celebrate with a cocktail.
At the end of September, the federal government's fiscal year was drawing to a close, the threat of a shut down was increasing, and the State Department was shopping for art. Four contracts were awarded in the last two weeks of September, including $1,000,000 for a granite sculpture by Irish-born…
Sam Baker of the National Journal writes that:
The rallying cry among those who still believe in Obamacare, and that it will fundamentally transform health care in America, like to say of the program’s current problems, “It’s just a web site.” Implying that it can, like the transmission on your automobile, be fixed and you can then proceed to…
New research from the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee shows that over the last 5 years, the U.S. has spent about $3.7 trillion on welfare. Here's a chart, showing that spending versus transportation, education, and NASA spending:
Julian Hattem and Ben Goad of the Hill report that:
The government re-opened, and there was no default. No surprise. This was the 18th shutdown since 1976, when the current budget procedure was established. The five shutdowns under Jimmy Carter were mostly over major policy issues such as abortion (he was for it) and the construction of a…
The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with James C. Capretta on fallout from the government shutdown and the failure called Obamacare:
The captain of the ms Noordam has announced that due to the choppy seas we won't be able to put in, as planned, at Santorini—but that rather than having another day at sea, we're boldly heading off to dock at Iraklion, Crete.
The siege has been lifted. The 16-day ordeal is ended. Life, once again, is good. As Alexander Bolton and Pete Kasperowicz of The Hill report:
At sea aboard the ms Noordam, off the coast of Greece
A memo from the Office of Management and Budget director Sylvia M. Burwell on re-opening government:
President Obama signed the "deal" to re-open Congress and increase the debt limit, according to the White House. The press secretary sent this out late last night:
Even before the House vote on the so-called congressional deal to re-open the federal government and increase the debt limit, President Obama began to pivot to immigration:
Here's the so-called deal that Congress is expected to approve tonight:
THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Jeffrey H. Anderson on the congressional deal to reopen the government and raise the debt limit:
National Park Service director Jarvis said he discussed closing the open-air monuments and memorials with the White House, as well as the secretary of the Interior Department:
Just what you would expect. Shut down the government and right away, wild animals move in. They even infiltrate the White House grounds.
President Obama understands "the frustrations of the American people" more than anybody else. At least, that's what he told WABC in an interview:
In the White House garden, tomatoes are rotting on the vine and the weed growth is unchecked. Reuters is reporting that:
On board the ms Noordam, at port in Venice
That meeting of the big dogs, scheduled for 3:00 p.m. and designed to get to a solution of the shutdown/debt ceiling crisis?
Despite the government shutdown, Vice President Joe Biden is vacationing at Camp David this long weekend. He's joined at the Maryland retreat by his family, including his wife (Jill Biden), children, and grandchildren.
The findings of the newly released NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll are simply brutal for congressional Republicans. Not only are they getting the lion's share of the blame for the government shutdown, but President Obama's numbers have actually improved. Worse, Obamacare's numbers are improving,…
Headline from the Hill:
Just because the government is shut down (sort of), that does not mean that members of Congress are magically relieved of the need for money to finance the next campaign during which they will spend the money to persuade constituents to return them to Washington to continue in their good work.
A week before the government shutdown began, the State Department awarded a $130 million contract to design and build a new embassy compound in the city of NouakChott in the West African nation of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, which lies between Mali and the Atlantic Ocean. The contract went…
Since first writing about the conduct of the National Park Service yesterday, events have accelerated somewhat.
The fighting goes on in Afghanistan. As does the dying. United States troops have been in the country for 13 years and more than 2,000 of them have been killed there, four of them last Sunday. As Adam Ashton of the Tacoma News Tribune reports, the dead included:
An essential tactic in the shutdown is, it seems, to deprive people of things that they need or badly want. Make them pay. And when their suffering is no longer bearable, they will come back, chastened and grateful for the blessings government bestows upon them … something like that, anyway.
An essential tactic in the shutdown is, it seems, to deprive people of things that they need or badly want. Make them pay. And when their suffering is no longer bearable, they will come back, chastened and grateful for the blessings government bestows upon them … something like that, anyway.
Just a week before the government shutdown kicked in on October 1, the State Department awarded a five-year, maximum $5 million contract for custom handcrafted crystal stem and barware, according to a report in the Valley News, an online news site in Vermont (via Charlie Perkins). Valley News…
The government shutdown is frustrating. But it doesn’t mark the end of the Republican party, as some have suggested. Here are 8 reasons why.
Only "essential" employees of the federal government are still working during the shutdown. And at the Federal Election Commission that means practically no one is coming one.
A notice posted on the website of the Small Business Administration (SBA) warns furloughed employees that it is a "criminal offense" to use federal resources during the furlough period, including accessing government email accounts. Although the notice is directed to SBA employees, presumably the…
David Gelernter, on what Republicans should be saying during the shutdown:
Another open-air memorial in the Washington area is closed and barricaded off: the Iwo Jima Memorial, just across the bridge from D.C. in Rosslyn, Virginia. A source sends along this picture of the barricade set-up at the memorial, which is also called the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial:
The adverb "unexpectedly" gets a rest today. It has earned it.
Although the government shutdown continues, it appears President Barack Obama and the White House are not getting any closer to negotiating with Republicans. A quotation from an unnamed senior administration official in today's Wall Street Journal explains why.
The Air Force and Naval academies will play as scheduled this weekend. However, overseas military personnel accustomed to getting their football on Armed Forces Network will not be able to watch.
In an attempt to dramatize the effects of the federal government shutdown, Washington state Democrats may have revealed more about their state and about the state of the economy under President Obama than they intended. The Advance, official blog of the Washington state house Democrats, posted the…
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