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Waste of the Day: No Effort to Claw Back Improper Covid Grants

Topline: The Small Business Administration’s Shuttered Venue Operators grant program made $544 million of improper payments during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the SBA has not even tried to recover most of the funds, a new audit from the agency’s inspector general found.

Key facts: The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program gave $16.3 billion in grants to movie theaters, concert halls and other performance venues that had to close during the pandemic.

The SBA realized in 2024 that $544 million was paid to 579 businesses that may have been ineligible for the grants or did not fill out their paperwork properly. Federal law requires agencies to “promptly” send demand letters asking businesses to return the improper payments, but the SBA has only sent one demand letter.

SBA officials wrote a policy for sending demand letters in August 2023, but the policy had still not been approved as of November 2024. Some officials wanted the SBA’s Office of Hearing and Appeals to mediate disputes over improper payments, but the Office claims it does not have the authority to do so.

No demand letters can be mailed until the SBA figures out its policy. The longer it takes, “there is an increased risk that the government will not be able to collect improperly paid funds. The ability of an agency to collect delinquent debts generally decreases as debts get older,” according to the inspector general.

There were 220 grant recipients who voluntarily returned a total of $44 million without a demand letter.

The federal government lost $161.5 billion to improper payments in 2024.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com. 

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Bipartisan bill would require IRS to notify taxpayer if seeking private financial info

Taxpayers will have more control over how the Internal Revenue Service acquires their personal information if a newly-introduced bill becomes law.

The bipartisan Taxpayer Notification and Privacy Act, brought forward Thursday by Sens. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., would require the IRS to inform taxpayers of the exact tax information it plans to seek from third parties, such as employers or banks, at least 45 days before doing so.

During that time period, taxpayers would have the option to provide the IRS directly with their personal financial information (used to calculate whether a person owes taxes) rather than have third parties – such as their bank or employer – do so.

According to Warnock and Barrasso, the bill is meant to protect taxpayer privacy and reputation and increase IRS transparency.

“[T]axpayers shouldn’t have to worry about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) soliciting personal financial information behind their backs. They deserve to have the option to provide this sensitive information to the IRS directly,” Barrasso said.

“By providing that opportunity, our bipartisan bill will safeguard the reputation of taxpayers and small business owners across the country. It will also force the IRS to be as transparent as possible when it comes to the privacy of hardworking Americans,” he added.

Currently, if the IRS contacts third parties for tax information, it needs to notify the taxpayer that it is doing so, but it does not need to reveal which information it is seeking or from which entities. If passed, the bill would change that within 12 months of its being enacted.

The bill does include an exception, however. If the IRS determined that the information sought from a third party “is necessary notwithstanding whether the taxpayer could independently provide such information,” the IRS would not be subject to the extra reporting requirements stipulated by the bill.

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Dealer’s Talking Parrot Helps Police Nail Entire Drug Ring

A British drug ring was busted and its members jailed after police found the next best thing to a stool pigeon.

Mango, a pet parrot, became vital evidence through his vocabulary lessons after police arrested multiple members of a drug gang in Blackpool, according to ITV.

Fifteen people in all, including a man who ran a drug dealing operation from prison, were convicted in an investigation that got its big break when cell phones were discovered in the prison cell of Adam Garnett, the ringleader, according to a post from Lancashire police on their website.

From those phones, police were able to identify his contacts, which included Shannon Hilton, Garnett’s girlfriend. Videos found on her phone became important evidence that led to multiple convictions.

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School district must convince jury it can fire Christians for not using students’ transgender names

Two months before the Supreme Court dramatically expanded employers’ obligations to grant religious accommodations to employees, rejecting a throwaway line in a 1977 ruling that was widely used to deny accommodations, a Chicago-based federal appeals court ruled that calling students by their last names for the sake of religious conscience was a fireable offense.

Two years later, the same three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cleaned the egg off its face after reviewing former music teacher John Kluge’s second loss in district court in light of the High Court’s precedent for former postal worker Gerald Groff.

Indiana’s Brownsburg Community Schools Corp. will have to convince a jury that it yanked Kluge’s yearlong last-name accommodation and ordered him to either resign or address transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns, in violation of his Christian faith, because the district would have otherwise suffered “substantial increased costs.”

“Because material factual disputes exist, we reverse the district court’s grant of summary judgment to the school on Kluge’s accommodation claim and remand for further proceedings,” said the majority opinion by Judge Michael Brennan, joined by Judge Amy St. Eve, both nominated by President Trump.

They cited “insufficient evidence to conclude that calling students by their last names, without more, would inflict emotional harm on a reasonable person,” and that Brownsburg hadn’t shown Kluge’s practice resulted in emotional distress “under an objective standard.”

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Make Vaccine Injury Compensation Fair Again

We’ve known for years that the Covid-19 vaccines left many Americans seriously injured. Yet despite this common knowledge, the federal government’s surveillance to ensure vaccine safety has been substandard, to put it charitably. Worse, its performance in compensating those injured by the vaccine has been pathetic.

Now, Congress is finally paying attention to America’s vaccine woes.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., recently conducted a major hearing on general vaccine injuries, including childhood vaccines, taking sworn testimony on conditions from cardiovascular damage to neurodevelopmental disabilities. House investigators have also demonstrated the inadequacy of existing systems in tracking adverse events from the Covid-19 vaccines.

Such investigations have focused especially on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is jointly managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Under that system, doctors and patients are supposed to report Covid-19 vaccine injuries.

The sheer number of reported adverse events from the Covid-19 vaccine (over 1.8 million) dwarfs all previously reported vaccine injuries. But because it is a “passive” reporting system, largely based on patient self-reporting, VAERS is unable to show a causal relationship between a specific vaccine injection and a particular adverse reaction.

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‘Whitelash’: Professors say white students get angry, frustrated by ‘anti-racist education’

Two social work scholars argue that their “anti-racist education” efforts in the classroom faced “whitelash” from white students, who became emotionally distraught, pushed back by using “color-blind rhetoric,” or later wrote negative course reviews.

Quinn Hafen from the University of Wyoming and Marie Villescas from Colorado State University recently published an article in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research detailing their experience creating a “pedagogy of discomfort” to challenge white supremacy in the classroom.

The method was criticized by two scholars in interviews with The College Fix, who called the experiment somewhat abusive.

“[T]he more I reflect on that paper, the more I find it cruel to shame students based on immutable identities they hold, regardless of identity,” one observer said via email. “For the professors, it appeared that White and male students were their target.”

The College Fix reached out via email to both Hafen and Villescas regarding some of the concerns raised about their teaching methods. Hafen and Villescas did not reply.

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DC crime eclipses Latin American capitals as Trump weighs federalizing the district

President Donald Trump’s threat to federalize Washington, D.C., should it fail to effectively deal with violent crime, comes as the city’s crime statistics show the American capital is less safe than many of the major cities of Latin America.

Washington, D.C., recorded 187 homicides in 2024 in a population of roughly 702,000. That total represents a murder rate of 26.6 per 100,000. That figure marked a 32% drop from 2023’s 274, when the rate was roughly 41 per 100,000.

Data from the Heritage Foundation shows that in 2023, D.C. had a homicide rate of 40.9 homicides per 100,000 residents and ranked fourth worst in the nation, behind only New Orleans (53.8), St. Louis (53.7), and Detroit (40.9). 

“If D.C. were a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the United States,” the conservative think-tank added. 

By way of comparison, the 2023 rate for Mexico City stood at about 8 per 100,000. Bogota, Colombia boasted a rate of 14 per 100,000 in 2023. Quito, Ecuador boasted a rate of 45 per 100,000, just slightly higher than D.C. in that year.

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‘Absolute horror’: Researchers posing as 13-year-olds given advice on suicide by ChatGPT

A new report is highlighting the risks of teens accessing harmful information when using ChatGPT due to “ineffective” guardrails.

People know and use ChatGPT, the most popular generative AI platform, as a way to look up information quickly or even perform a task like writing a letter or summarizing text. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), through its research, reported that all accessible data could be dangerous—especially for young people.

What we found was the age controls, the safeguards against the generation of dangerous advice, are basically, completely ineffective,” CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed told KOMO News.

Ahmed said researchers posing as vulnerable teens, often detailing themselves as a 13-year-old weighing around 110 pounds, found that the chatbot gave detailed advice on sensitive topics. This included drug and alcohol use, how to mask an eating disorder, and suicide.

“Within two minutes, ChatGPT was advising that user on how to safely cut themselves. It was listing pills for generating a full suicide plan,” Ahmed said. “To our absolute horror, it even offered to [create] and then did generate suicide notes for those kids to send their parents.”

Dr. Tom Heston with the University of Washington School of Medicine published a study about the use of AI chatbots and mental health. Heston found that while useful, the technology can be dangerous for those with mental health problems, in part, because of the lack of emotional connection. Those same risks are there when this technology is used by young people, Heston said.

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UCLA library user borrowed rare Chinese manuscripts, returned fakes, DOJ says

A UCLA library user who allegedly took home rare Chinese manuscripts and returned fake ones in their place has been charged with stealing items worth $216,000, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Jeffery Ying used a number of aliases to get access to the classics works, some of them over 600 years old, the DOJ said.

Ying, 38, would check the works out and return days later with dummy manuscripts, and would frequently travel to China shortly thereafter, charging documents say.

“The library noticed that several rare Chinese manuscripts were missing, and an initial investigation revealed the books were last viewed by a visitor who identified himself as ‘Alan Fujimori,'” the DOJ said.

When detectives raided the Los Angeles area hotel where Ying was staying, they found blank manuscripts in the style of the books that had been checked out.

“Law enforcement also found pre-made labels known as asset tags associated with the same manuscripts that could be used to create ‘dummy’ books to return to the library in place of the original books,” the department alleged.

Libraries allow rare, one-of-a-kind works to be examined on-site, but they can’t be taken home like regular paperbacks.

Ying, from Fremont, in the San Francisco Bay Area, was also found to have a number of library cards in different names.

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Nancy Pelosi’s Recent Comments on ‘Trans Kids’ Show This is a Hill Democrats Are Willing to Die on 

Nancy Pelosi was recently speaking to a reporter who asked her a question about trans issues and she doubled down in support, mentioning that she supports ‘gender affirming care’ for ‘trans kids.’

Of course, gender affirming care is not caring, nor does it affirm gender, but who’s keeping track of the lies at this point?

The amazing thing about this is that the 2024 election showed that a majority of the country rejects all of this. Studies after the election found that one of Trump’s most effective ads was one that focused on Kamala Harris’ support for this issue and Trump’s rejection of it.

Parents across the country are sick of the very idea of men in the same locker rooms as their daughters and wives, yet here is Pelosi making it clear that Democrats are still not letting go of this.

From PJ Media:

On Thursday, Nancy Pelosi gave a troubling interview outside a VA hospital in San Francisco, where she appeared visibly disoriented and struggled to string together coherent thoughts while defending the practice of “transing” children.

When asked about her office’s response to interruptions in so-called “gender-affirming care” in California, Pelosi immediately stumbled. “Well, that is something that I’m working for at—at—at the national level,” she stammered. She then tried, and failed, to articulate her hope for continued access to these controversial procedures for gender-confused kids: “Are hoping that we can have gender-affirming care, uh, for—for our trans kids, and that’s… It—it’s, it’s a sad thing for us.” She never finished the thought.

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