A newly released internal audit appears to indicate that the Government Accountability Office and President Barack Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development incorrectly argued that a specific organization wasn’t ACORN-affiliated. (more)
A report authored by Republican Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn entitled “Shooting the Messenger: Congress Targets the Taxpayers’ Watchdog” warns that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) faces further budget cuts at the same time Congress has increased its own budget from “$1.2 billion to nearly $2.3 billion” — its highest level in history. (more)
President Barack Obama flew to swing-state Pennsylvania on Tuesday to declare that Republican intransigence in Congress has prompted him to implement a reform of the Head Start program. (more)
The House Appropriations Committee is demanding the Government Accountability Office explain how its internal reforms will prevent mistakes like those in an error-ridden report on the for-profit college sector that stained the investigative agency’s reputation last year, forcing a reorganization of its undercover sting unit. (more)
It’s a congressional hearing that’s notable for what it’s not addressing. (more)
The Obama administration, which touts itself as the “most transparent” in American history, was dealt another blow on Tuesday with the release of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis of the Obamacare waiver decision-making process. (more)
Top GAO oversight official Rep. Darrell Issa of California continues to investigate the Government Accountability Office’s undercover sting unit, including interviewing the team that produced an error-ridden report on for-profit colleges, staining the agency’s normally unimpeachable reputation. (more)
Rep. John Kline, the GOP chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, says new details reported by The Daily Caller about the GAO’s error-ridden report on for-profit colleges are “deeply troubling” and put the report’s findings in question. (more)
A smoking gun document about an error-ridden GAO report puts the murder weapon in a top Democratic senator’s hands. (more)
I’m a big fan of giving the benefit of the doubt to issues I don’t agree with. My thinking is always that if there’s a ban, a loophole or a hurdle, it was placed there not to piss anybody off, but because of some honest, albeit sometimes wrong-headed, motivation to do the right thing. When I discover, however, that the driving force is malevolent, illegal, or just plain immoral, all bets are off. (more)
I just received a banking alert telling me that my account was overdrawn by $14.87. Since the overdraft fee of $35 has already been deducted, it’s kind of a day late and more than a few bucks short. As with many people facing a household budget deficit, I now need to figure out, line by line, where all my cash is going and what I can eliminate. Face it, it could be worse . . . I could be in the hole for, like $223 billion. Maybe I should just ask Bank of America to raise my bond rating? (more)
A just-released study from the Government Accountability Office uncovers massive duplication in federal government programs. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) estimates that the resulting waste costs taxpayers more than $100 billion a year. (more)
Republican Reps. Mike Turner of Ohio and Dan Burton of Indiana are asking House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, California Republican, to dig into the Obama administration’s decision to cut more than 20,000 private-sector workers’ pensions and eliminate their health and life insurance plans during the General Motors (GM) bailout in 2009. (more)
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is replacing the official behind an error-riddled report the agency released on for-profit colleges and is placing new constraints on the unit that produced the report. (more)
The federal government could save billions in taxpayer dollars annually by consolidating duplicative government programs, according to a new report. (more)
As members of Congress fight over what to cut in the current federal budget to avert a government shutdown, lawmakers are about to receive a blockbuster report that could provide a roadmap to potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in waste. The nonpartisan General Accounting Office (GAO) is poised to release a report Tuesday that one senator said “will make us all look like jackasses.” (more)
President Obama is laser-focused on economic growth. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last month, he advocated reviewing federal regulations to root out those “that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.” (more)
The White House and congressional Democrats are talking up a “green investment bank.” (more)
Over the last thirty years, most legislative and executive branch efforts at regulatory reform have focused on analyzing and improving new regulations, and agencies seldom look back to evaluate whether existing regulations are having their intended effects. Section 610 of the Regulatory Flexibility Act provides for periodic review of regulations for their impact on small businesses, but researchers have found that most agencies “comply with the letter of the law for only a small percentage of their rules, and they rarely take action beyond publishing a brief notice in the Federal Register.” (more)
It’s always fun to watch wingnuts become so blindly zealous in their argument that they start attacking their own side like some twisted political game of pin the tail on the donkey. This week, it’s the lunatic left fringe getting its panties all in a bunch over my recent speculation that Wall Street short-sellers are funding the Center for American Progress’s advertising blitz in order to drive down the stock of publicly traded for-profit colleges. These are the same short-sellers recently exposed by the Wall Street Journal for working closely with senior Obama administration officials to impose new government regulations that would hurt for-profit colleges and reap the short-sellers millions of dollars. (more)
