Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst unveiled a scathing report on the effects of telework on the federal government Thursday, citing multiple instances of abuse and failures stemming from the widespread use of the practice.
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Evictions are soaring, and Americans can’t pay the rent, potentially throwing hundreds of thousands of families out of their homes at a time when homeless shelters are jammed to the rafters with 10 million illegal immigrants.
It’s a useful reminder that the problem with our ruling elite isn’t just President Joe Biden’s dementia. They’ve made a very big bed we’re all going to be lying in.
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Not long after Jeremy Gober started running a sleep center, he quit treating patients for narcolepsy and sleep apnea and went full-time submitting bogus insurance claims. According to Gober’s 2022 indictment, he committed at least one especially sloppy error: One of his make-believe billings included a Medicare claim for treatment in March 2018 for a patient who’d died in December 2017. Before Gober was caught, Medicare and California’s healthcare system, Medi-Cal, ended up paying him a total of $587,000 for claims that turned out to be fiction.
The payments to Gober were part of $260 million the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spent from 2009 through 2019 to reimburse healthcare providers in 15 states and Puerto Rico for services to patients who were dead, according to the inspector general of the HHS, which administers Medicare and Medicaid — programs with combined expenditures of $1.7 trillion.
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A plethora of federal agencies have spent well over $200 million attempting to alleviate homelessness in Washington state over the past 17 years, only for the number of people living on the streets to keep rising.
Federal agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS), among others, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since 2007 on grants to third parties intended to mitigate homelessness in Washington, federal spending data shows. Despite the nine-figure sum of taxpayer dollars spent, the number of homeless people in Washington grew by about 20% between 2007 and 2023, according to a report produced by HUD.
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Blue states and the District of Columbia dominated the top spots for homeless residents per capita, according to a December report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
New York and Vermont came in second and third with an estimated 103,200, or 52.4 for every 10,000, and roughly 3,295, or 50.9 per 10,000, respectively, according to rates calculated by Axios from the report. Washington, D.C., had a higher rate of homelessness than all 50 states at 73.3 per 10,000 residents, or an estimated 4,922 people.
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With Christmas fast-approaching, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa put out a “naughty list” of government agencies that have high no-show rates of employees who have not returned to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic ended.
According to Ernst’s list, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Social Security Administration top the list with just 7 percent office occupancy rates.
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In the 2024 transportation and housing appropriations bill, House Republicans are once again poised defund a bid by the federal government to take over state and local zoning laws via a Department of Housing and Urban Development regulation to condition $3.3 billion of community development block grants on changes to those zoning laws.
Appearing in section 233, the new bill, to be voted on this week by the U.S. House, updates the language to reflect the most recent regulation in whack-a-mole fashion: “None of the funds made available by this 24 Act may be used to implement, administer, or enforce the proposed rule entitled ‘Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing’ published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Federal Register on February 9, 2023 (88 Fed. Reg. 8516), or to direct a grantee to undertake specific changes to existing zoning laws as a part of carrying out the interim final rule entitled ‘Restoring Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Definitions and Certifications’ published by such Department in the Federal Register on June 10, 2021 (86 Fed. Reg. 30779).”
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Arizona State Representative Matt Gress (R-Scottsdale) announced Wednesday that the Arizona Department of Housing will not enforce a provision in its contract with the City of Scottsdale that allows the city to pay for hotels for homeless people.
Scottsdale tried to utilize state funds to pay a hotel along Pima and Indian Bend Roads to house homeless persons from “the zone” in downtown Phoenix and foreign nationals who would have otherwise been kicked out under Title 42, which President Joe Biden allowed to expire in May.
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A new proposed regulation by President Joe Biden’s Department of Housing and Urban Development would once again attempt to meddle in state and local governments’ affairs by conditioning federal funding including Community Development Block Grants on changes to local zoning laws.
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Many states and the federal government are spending millions in taxpayer dollars on illegal aliens while veterans across the country still face a slew of issues like homelessness and long waits for primary care, a newly-released study found.
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A Tennessee woman who managed a government-funded apartment complex stole more than $22,000 from taxpayers, according to a state audit released Thursday. Pamela Byrd, the former office manager of the Brookwood Terrace Apartments in Wartburg, stole at least $22,036, Tennessee Comptrollers said. The Brookwood Terrace Apartments is a 24-unit complex and is part of the Douglas-Cherokee Economic Authority. The apartment complex houses people age 60 and over. A combination of state grants and money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development help fund it, according to the audit. The Tennessee Star called Byrd Thursday at her listed home telephone number. A woman picked up, but she said she wasn’t Byrd. “I’m not her, but what do you want with her?” the unidentified woman asked. The Star explained it wanted Byrd’s side of this story. The woman hung up. Comptrollers said they reviewed the apartments’ accounting records, bank statements and other documents put out between October 2012 and July of last year. They said there was a cash shortage of at least $22,036. Specifically, there was a shortage of $21,520 in rental payments plus $516 in security deposits. “For the period reviewed, DCEA officials were unable to account for…
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By Robert Romano On May 8, the National Fair Housing Alliance filed suit in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia against the Department of Housing and Urban Development for delaying the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation until 2020 or later. This regulation allowed HUD to force more than 1,200 cities and counties that took $3 billion of annual community development block grants to rezone neighborhoods along income and racial criteria. The lawsuit argues that HUD Secretary Ben Carson lacked authority to delay implementation of the rule when it was announced in Jan. 2018. There’s only one problem. Even if that were true, since the announced delay, Congress has acted via the recent omnibus spending bill, which preempts everything HUD was doing on this regulation, especially in implementing it. Under Division L, Title II of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, Section 234, it states, “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to direct a grantee to undertake specific changes to existing zoning laws as part of carrying out the final rule entitled ‘Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing’ … or the notice entitled ‘Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Assessment Tool’ …” Yet the regulation…
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