Tag: taxes

Biden Administration Made $236 Billion in ‘Improper Payments’ Last Year: GAO Report

An estimated $236 billion in improper or incorrect payments was made under the Biden administration last year, with Medicare and Medicaid accounting for $100 billion of that total, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

“For fiscal year 2023, 14 agencies reported a total estimated $236 billion in improper payments across 71 programs,” said a March 26 GAO report. Improper payments refer to payments “that should not have been made or were made in the incorrect amount.” The $236 billion calculation does not include certain government programs that agencies determined were “susceptible to significant improper payments.”

As such, GAO believes the $236 billion estimate “potentially does not represent the full extent of improper payments.”

The group pointed out that improper payments suggest a “material deficiency or weakness in internal controls” at the agencies. “The federal government is unable to determine the full extent of its improper payments or to reasonably assure that appropriate actions are taken to reduce them.”

Medicare accounted for the largest percentage of government incorrect payments, totaling $51.1 billion.

This was followed by Medicaid at $50.3 billion, Federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance at $43.6 billion, Earned Income Tax Credit at $21.9 billion, and the Paycheck Protection Program Loan Forgiveness at $18.7 billion.

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Another Government Bureaucracy That Can’t Do Their Job: Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency

The 150 million dollar Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) was created to replace the scandal plagued Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).

More than 81,000 Americans remain missing from WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Gulf Wars/other conflicts.

Before quitting after less than a year on the job, the “new director” simply reassigned the previous JPAC Scientific Director to be in charge of “partnering with private groups”.  What this “partnering” turned out to be was the giving away of millions of taxpayer dollars in annual contracts to “non-profits to do DPAA’s primary job: recover remains of MIA’s.  With no apparent ethical oversight by DPAA, some of these same government contractors actively continue to solicit contributions claiming to be “non-profit” charities.  Huge multi-million dollar contracts are farmed out. This obvious unethical practice is just another example of the past arrogance and abuse by this same old group of poor leaders and managers who continue to remain in functional control of the “new” organization.

And, in “deja vu all over again” the Department of Defense appointed a former JPAC commander as the “new, new” director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.  This is the very same person who had steered the agency, known by its employees as “Dysfunction Junction”, into its final demise and lost his own job under a torrent of Congressional criticism.

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‘Everyone does it’: media pilfering from Air Force One prompts clampdown

A White House staffer recently met a reporter for a covert assignment by the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square.

But the House of Cards-esque rendezvous was not staged to hand over state secrets, or leak presidential gossip, or even to spread dirt on Joe Biden’s opponents. The item handed over – an embroidered pillowcase from Air Force One – was handed back, by the reporter involved.

So said Politico, reporting an attempt to clamp down on theft of branded items from the presidential plane.

The meeting by the Jackson statue, Politico said, came about after US air force crew members alerted the White House travel office that a west coast trip in early February ended with “several [items] missing from the press cabin”.

An email went out, described by one of no less than six anonymous sources as saying: “Hey, if you inadvertently wound up taking something off the plane by mistake, we can help facilitate a quiet return.”

The reporter who took the pillowcase had done so “probably not by accident”, Politico said. And so the meeting was arranged, the item “changed hands, and that was that”.

According to Politico, the White House press pack has long seen Air Force One as a source of souvenirs.

One unnamed current White House reporter said: “On my first flight, the person next to me was like, ‘You should take that glass.’ They were like, ‘Everyone does it.’”

Several unnamed sources, meanwhile, described to Politico a “former White House correspondent for a major newspaper” hosting a dinner party using “gold-rimmed Air Force One plates, evidently taken bit by bit over the course of some time”.

“Reporters recalled coming down the back stairs after returning to Joint Base Andrews in the evening with the sounds of clinking glassware or porcelain plates in their backpacks,” the site said.

Nor is such light-fingeredness a new phenomenon.

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Wuhan on the Rockies? Biosafety committee found dozens of accidents at NIH-funded lab in 3 years

Bats and hamsters and cats, and mice!

Fort Collins, Colorado, could have become the next Wuhan, China, with dozens of lab accidents just this decade involving outbreak-prone pathogens in animals including coronaviruses, Zika and tuberculosis, according to a group that fights taxpayer-funded animal testing.

The “incident reports” from Colorado State University’s Institutional Biosafety Committee minutes, obtained by Colorado Open Records Act request, detail 64 lab accidents from 2020 through 2023, the White Coat Waste Project said this week.

The National Institutes of Health chipped in more than $8 million in 2021 and 2023 to build a new CSU bat lab and import bats with Nipah virus and SARS-related coronaviruses via the EcoHealth Alliance, WCW discovered last fall, dubbing the campus “Wuhan West.”

The 2023 grant came months after the Agriculture Department found CSU committed animal cruelty by subjecting rabbits to temperatures above “the humane endpoint” and failed to report “a protocol for [26] rabbits that required the withholding of anesthetics and analgesics for scientific purposes.”

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Speaker Johnson Wants to Pass Bill Sending Billions in Arms to Ukraine and Israel

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) says he will work to pass a massive military aid bill for Ukraine and Israel once Congress returns to session next week, a move that could trigger a backlash from his party. House Democrats have vowed to shield the speaker from a GOP rebellion should he support the legislation.

Johnson has underscored the urgency of providing aid to Ukraine and Israel, declaring it a top priority upon the House’s return from Easter recess. “We’ll turn our attention to it and we won’t delay on that,” he told reporters last week.  

Sending billions more in aid to Ukraine is a volatile issue within the Republican Caucus. Johnson won his role as leader of the House, in part, because of his past votes opposing aid to Ukraine. However, since taking over as speaker, Johnson has repeatedly stated that he supports President Joe Biden’s $61 billion aid package for Kiev. 

The issue facing Johnson is how the aid to Ukraine is currently packaged. Initially, the GOP sought to include the funding in a bill that would also supply arms to Israel and Taiwan, as well as devote billions to border security. Last month, the Senate stripped the border funding and immigration reform from the legislation and passed a $95 billion foreign aid bill, including $61 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel. 

After passing the Senate over a month ago, Johnson has prevented the legislation from coming to a vote in the House. Some Republicans in the chamber say if Johnson brings the bill to the floor, they will vote to remove him as speaker. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he spoke with the speaker by phone on Thursday and pressed Johnson to pass the bill. “In this situation, quick passage of US aid to Ukraine by Congress is vital. We recognize that there are differing views in the House of Representatives on how to proceed, but the key is to keep the issue of aid to Ukraine as a unifying factor,” Zelensky wrote on X.

To overcome the threat from a small number of Republicans, Democrats in the House have hinted that they would support Johnson’s continued role as speaker if he brings the bill for a vote. “If the choice is between Ukraine aid and providing a vote to stop a motion to vacate, or no Ukraine aid, I think there’s a lot of Democrats who would be willing to assist in getting it done,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) told the Hill. 

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Taxpayers Will Soon Find Out if They’ll Have To Finance Fancy Stadiums for the Chiefs and the Royals

Professional sports team owners are at it again. This time, it’s the Kansas City Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals who want fans—along with their fellow taxpayers who may be indifferent toward sports—to help with their business expenditures. Early voting has already begun as Jackson County prepares to decide whether to partially fund the teams’ stadium plans or potentially lose the teams to another city.

The Chiefs proposed $800 million in renovations to the GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, of which the owners will only pay $300 million. The Royals, meanwhile, announced in February plans for a brand new stadium estimated to cost $2 billion, only half of which is expected to be paid by the Royals in private funds.

The vote, which will conclude April 2, either will have residents opt to get rid of an existing sales tax that pays a portion of stadium operation fees or replace it with a new one—totaling approximately $2 billion and scheduled for over the course of 40 years—in order to pay a portion of the price. Each team would receive $27 million of tax money annually.

So what will happen if voters reject it? “We’d have to look at all our options,” said Mark Donovan, the president of the Chiefs. “I think they’d have to include leaving Kansas City.” His appeal may very well sway voters, considering there is a long history of these threats working in the city.

The Royals echoed Donovan’s thought: “There’s lots of cities that would love to have these franchises,” said John Sherman, the majority owner of the Royals. And the Committee to Keep the Chiefs and Royals in Jackson County noted that “if the vote doesn’t pass, both teams will consider all options.”

But even though they insist these taxes are necessary, it’s difficult not to see their threats as a way to scare voters into coughing up taxpayer dollars so both teams can save private funds. Leaked documents indicate that taxpayers could end up paying up to $5.1 billion over four decades—far more than the teams’ estimate.

The sports giants are in fact so keen to save every penny that a $1 million request by Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. to pay for the elections, in order to avoid taking funds from the city’s emergency reserve, has so far gone ignored by the teams. The initiative “poses a significant dilemma,” said White, “given our commitment to safeguarding the county’s financial stability.”

It’s worth noting that the Hunt family, who owns the Chiefs and whose fortune stems from oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, is worth nearly $25 billion, according to Forbes. Putting aside the questionable ethics of weaponizing local sports enthusiasm to save private funds, there is no clear reason why the owners can’t pay for the renovations themselves.

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Is IRS using AI to infringe upon our financial privacy?

The House Judiciary Committee has opened an inquiry to whether the IRS is using artificial intelligence to invade Americans’ financial privacy after an agency employee was captured in an undercover tape suggesting there was a widespread surveillance operation underway that might not be constitutional.

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., sent a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding documents, and answers as to how the agency is currently employing artificial intelligence to comb through bank records to look for possible tax cheats.

The inquiry comes after the same panel has been exploring why the FBI was obtaining Americans’ bank records, including those of Jan. 6 suspects, without using search warrants or subpoenas.

Hageman told Just the News that lawmakers are increasingly concerned that federal law-enforcement agencies are no longer abiding by constitutional protections, including prohibitions against search and seizure without a warrant. 

The congressional inquiry was prompted by a September 2023 announcement that the IRS is using AI to “help IRS compliance teams better detect tax cheating, identify emerging compliance threats and improve case selection tools.”

The Treasury Department has since acknowledged it has “implemented an enhanced process using AI to mitigate check fraud in near real-time by strengthening and expediting processes to recover potentially fraudulent payments from financial institutions’ since late 2022.”

Jordan’s and Hageman’s letter said lawmakers have evidence and reason to believe that the IRS and Department of Justice (DOJ) are actively monitoring millions of Americans’ private transactions, bank accounts, and related financial information—without any legal process—using the AI-powered system.

“This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private financial records raises serious doubts about the IRS’s—and the federal government’s—respect for Americans’ fundamental civil liberties,” the letter said.

You can read the letter here: 2024-03-20 JDJ HH to IRS re AI surveillance.pdf

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U.S. History of Using ISIS

Back in 2015, the Guardian published a fascinating report titled Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq, which detailed how U.S. and British intelligence were supporting Islamic jihadist rebel groups in Syria with the objective of overthrowing the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The report included a link to a leaked 2012 Department of Defense document about U.S. support for these rebel groups in Syria, including ISIS. This report stuck with me, and I was a reminded of it a couple of years later when Assad was accused in April 2017 of using chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.Buy New $47.97 ($0.53 / Count)(as of 02:32 UTC – Details)

Notably, this chemical weapons attack just happened to occur the day after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson publicly announced that regime change in Syria was no longer official U.S. policy. In other words—we were told—the day after the U.S. announced it was getting off Assad’s case, he committed an atrocity (of zero military value) that would guarantee that the U.S. recommit itself to getting rid of him.

Though most of the legacy press endorsed the assertion that Assad’s forces were behind the attack, a few discerning reporters noted that it could have easily been carried about by one of the Islamic jihadist groups operating in the region to make the Trump administration rethink its abandonment of its regime change objective. Sure enough, a couple of days after the chemical attack, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that he was reconsidering his announcement the week before.

Now comes the news of a major terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall in Moscow that has left hundreds dead and injured. The U.S. government claims the attack was carried out by ISIS-K, which has reportedly taken responsibility for it. However, Kremlin officials have alleged that some of the gunmen were trying to escape into Ukraine, utilizing a ‘window’ of support from across the border.

Buy New $63.95 ($5.95 / Ounce)(as of 11:17 UTC – Details)The U.S. government just issued a statement condemning the terrorist attack in Moscow, but this reminds me of U.S. government doublespeak about ISIS back in the 2012-2017 period—that is, publicly condemning ISIS while secretly supporting it in Syria.

My concern now is that the attack on the Moscow theater was—like the Re’im music festival massacre in Israel last October—designed to provoke the absolute maximum violent response.

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NY Democrats Want To Sink Another $2.4 BILLION Into ‘Migrant Care’

New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed another $2.4 billion in spending on illegal immigrants in her latest budget proposal, in addition to the $1.9 billion the state spent on ‘migrant care’ in 2023.

Politico reports that Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams had previously agreed to allocate $1.1 billion for illegals that have made their way to New York City, but the costs have now doubled.

The report notes that “The money is expected to go toward National Guard deployment, short-term shelter services and relief centers at state-funded housing sites that include Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, Randall’s Island and Floyd Bennett Field.”

It continues, “The state will also continue to provide ‘humanitarian aid’ for New York City, which has seen an influx of more than 160,000 migrants in the last several years.”

The budget plan would also see up to five prisons closed.

The development comes as NYC hands out prepaid debit cards to illegals loaded with up to $1,400 per month in a pilot program that is costing city taxpayers $53 million.

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The Pentagon Ate Our Government

The biggest boost in spending from 2023 to 2024 went to the Pentagon. Of course! Even though the Pentagon has yet to pass an audit. Throw money at it as a reward!

Let’s do some basic math. Add the Pentagon budget, Homeland Security, Military Construction and the VA, and State/Foreign Ops and you get $1.118 trillion. (Basically, the State Department is a tiny branch of the Pentagon.) But even that figure is low, since some Energy spending goes to nuclear weapons, and I can’t imagine that spending on science doesn’t have military applications.

Let’s go with the $1.118 trillion figure as a rough estimate of military spending. Adding up all the numbers of money spent produces a total of $1.627 trillion. That means the percentage of money spent on the Pentagon and related military matters amounts to 68.7% of federal discretionary spending.

Yes, the Pentagon ate our government.

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