Medicaid is losing billions to waste, fraud, and abuse, and the program is crushing state budgets The feds haven’t been able to fix it. Let the states try.
New USDA SNAP Rules and Work Requirements Come at the Perfect Time for Job Seekers
The December 2019 jobs report, released on January 10, 2020 confirms what everyone already knows; the economy is strong and the jobs market is robust. The U.S. added 145,000 new jobs in December, the unemployment rate persisted at a fifty-year low of 3.5 percent, and average earnings rose slightly, with the year over year gain at […]
New USDA Rule Will Help Reduce SNAP Abuse and Encourage Work
The program today has little meaningful oversight and is persistently susceptible to fraud.
USPS Ends Another Fiscal Year With Billion-Dollar Losses
There is no doubt that the USPS is facing a serious financial crisis.
Best Laid Plans: Another USPS IG Report, Another Failed Attempt to Save Money
As has been pointed out repeatedly in the past few years, United States Postal Service (USPS) management continues to struggle mightily to enact efficiencies or carve out savings from its operations. And this continues to be the case despite the dramatic drop in mail volume and USPS Postmaster General (PMG) Megan Brennan’s regular declarations and […]
Hope Ahead for VA/DOD Interoperability
In 1982, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DOD) were charged by Congress to share patient information for servicemembers transitioning from DOD into the VA health care system. This transition process has been anything but seamless, with medical records being attached to gurneys each time a patient was moved, and […]
The Multiemployer Pensions Crisis Needs Reform, Not a Bailout
A billion-dollar taxpayer bailout of failing multiemployer pensions is on the horizon. Ten years ago, subprime mortgages went from being a little-known form of lending to the precipitating factor in the international banking crisis that led to the Great Recession. Multiemployer pensions, which have been allowed to systematically underfund plans and make unrealistic assumptions on […]
Taxpayers’ Independence Day
The American people received an early Independence Day present on July 1 when President Trump signed into law H.R. 3151, the Taxpayer First Act of 2019.
House Appropriations Imposes Limits on JEDI Contract
The House Appropriations Committee released its report to accompany the Department of Defense (DOD) Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2020. Included in the report is language that would restrict the expenditure of funds for the DOD’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud procurement. The committee report prohibits funds from being “obligated or expended to migrate […]
USVI Should Avoid Repeating Municipal Broadband Failures
A U.S. Virgin Islands’ (USVI) public utility company is positioning itself to create a municipal broadband network that could come at the expense of hundreds of millions of duplicative taxpayer dollars under the guise of recovery from hurricanes Irma and Maria. The Virgin Islands Next Generation Network (viNGN) is a public corporation and the sister […]