Less than a month after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, the agency that failed to protect him from harm may get a bigger budget.

On July 13, when Thomas Matthew Crooks shot and wounded Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Secret Service agents sprang into action, heroically shielding him from further harm and escorting him from the stage.

But subsequent reporting revealed that the incident was entirely preventable: Rally attendees alerted law enforcement to the presence of a suspicious person more than an hour before he started shooting, and they later saw him climbing on top of a building with a gun. "Trump was on stage for around 10 minutes between the moment Crooks was spotted on the roof with a gun and the moment he fired his first shot," the BBC reported.

After a particularly disastrous appearance before the House Oversight Committee, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned. Appearing before two Senate committees this week, acting Director Ronald Rowe Jr. testified that he was "ashamed" of the agency's failure.

Almost immediately after the shooting, a narrative emerged that the lapse owed to a lack of resources.

At a July 15 White House press briefing, a reporter asked Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of the Department of Homeland Security—which oversees the Secret Service—"Is the Secret Service stretched too thin?"

"The Secret Service in—in times like this calls upon other resources and capabilities to handle a—a campaign of this magnitude," Mayorkas replied. "And I do intend to speak with members of the Hill with respect to the resources that we need."

"Our agency needs to be adequately resourced in order to serve our current mission requirements and to anticipate future requirements," Cheatle noted in her opening testimony before the House Oversight Committee on July 22. "As of today, the Secret Service has just over 8,000 employees," she told Rep. Stephen Lynch (D–Mass.). "We are still striving toward a number of 9,500 employees, approximately, in order to be able to meet future and emerging needs."

In a letter to Rowe this week, Sens. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) and Katie Britt (R–Ala.)—respectively the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security—sought to understand the agency's financial needs as the subcommittee drafts an appropriations bill.

"Congress provided more than $190 million to the Secret Service in Fiscal Year 2024, specifically for protection requirements related to the 2024 presidential campaign, plus an additional $22 million above President Biden's budget request for protection-related travel costs," the senators wrote. "Despite this increase, in mid-June, prior to the attempted assassination, the Secret Service submitted a reprogramming notification to our subcommittee detailing its intent to shift $19 million to cover a shortfall for protection-related travel funding." This was in addition to the imminent addition of two vice presidential candidates and their families to the agency's protective purview, plus independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom President Joe Biden added to the list after the shooting.

"As a result, the Secret Service is assuming new protection costs related to the campaign at a time when it already appears to lack sufficient resources to fulfill its protective mission," the senators continue.

But it's not at all clear that a lack of resources was the issue: The agency's budget in real numbers grew 55 percent over the last decade, to $3.62 billion, and its work force grew 33 percent from 2002 to 2019.

It is possible the agency may be stretched thin in its duties: The Secret Service is tasked by law with protecting not only the president, vice president, and their immediate families, but also former presidents, vice presidents, and their spouses for life, and their children until age 16. They also protect visiting heads of state and "other distinguished foreign visitors to the United States and official representatives of the United States performing special missions abroad when the President directs that such protection be provided."

"The Secret Service currently protects 36 individuals on a daily basis, as well as world leaders who visit the United States," Cheatle told the House Oversight Committee.

But that's not the agency's only job: Agents are tasked with investigating a number of financial crimes like counterfeiting, money laundering, and identity theft, as well as ransomware attacks, botnets, and "online sexual exploitation and abuse by predators and other criminals, sometimes for financial gain."

It's possible that the Secret Service is doing too many jobs for the amount of resources it enjoys. Perhaps many of its financial and investigative tasks should be shifted to the U.S. Treasury Department, which is where the Secret Service originated before Congress added presidential protection to its plate in 1901. The numbers demonstrate that the agency's problem is not purely financial.

But it's also worth keeping in mind that government agencies, by their nature, do too much, too poorly, and for too much money. The Secret Service, for all the nobility of its mission, is no exception.

The post Secret Service May Get Even More Money After Failing To Protect Trump appeared first on Reason.com.

In California, Cajon Valley Union Superintendent David Miyashiro ran up nearly $400,000 in charges on his school district credit card between May 2022 and March 2024. Miyashiro spent thousands of dollars for professional conferences and memberships in education associations, while also spending $76,000 on hotels, $30,000 on airfare, $10,000 on rideshares, and $50,000 on food plus another $115,700 on catering; his average purchase during that period was $19,000. Miyashiro is one of the highest-paid superintendents in the state, receiving a $408,000 annual salary, an $800 monthly car allowance, and a $300 monthly stipend for business expenses.

The post Brickbat: Worth Every Penny appeared first on Reason.com.

You can add the Internal Revenue Service to the ranks of federal agencies conceding that raining taxpayer money on all and sundry to offset the negative effects of pandemic-era closures didn't go as well as intended. Not only was a program meant to offset the cost of paying workers during lockdowns and voluntary social-distancing prone to being gamed, but the "vast majority" of claims submitted to the program show evidence of being fraudulent.

The Tax Man Is Shocked To Discover Fraudsters

In the course of a detailed review of the Employee Retention Credit, "the IRS identified between 10% and 20% of claims fall into what the agency has determined to be the highest-risk group, which show clear signs of being erroneous claims for the pandemic-era credit," the IRS announced June 20. "In addition to this highest risk group, the IRS analysis also estimates between 60% and 70% of the claims show an unacceptable level of risk."

The Employee Retention Credit was offered to businesses that were shut down by government COVID-19 orders in 2020 or the first three quarters of 2021, experienced a required decline in gross receipts during that period, or qualified as a recovery startup business at the end of 2021. But it was clear early on that scammers were taking advantage of giveaways of taxpayer money, either to claim it for themselves or to pose as middlemen helping unwitting business owners file claims.

In March of 2023, the tax agency warned of "blatant attempts by promoters to con ineligible people to claim the credit." In September of that year, it stopped processing claims amidst growing evidence that vast numbers of applications were "improper," as the IRS delicately puts it. In March 2024, the agency announced that its Voluntary Disclosure Program had recovered $1 billion (since raised to over $2 billion) in improper payouts from participants who got to keep 20 percent of the take.

Ultimately, only "between 10% and 20% of the ERC claims show a low risk" for fraud, even by generous federal standards for throwing other people's money at problems largely of government creation.

"We will now use this information to deny billions of dollars in clearly improper claims and begin additional work to issue payments to help taxpayers without any red flags on their claims," commented IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel.

As of the end of May, the IRS "has initiated 450 criminal cases, with potentially fraudulent claims worth nearly $7 billion."

There's More Fraud Where That Came From

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to pandemic stimulus fraud.

In April, Attorney General Merrick Garland boasted that the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force (yes, it's widespread enough to rate its own task force) had "charged more than 3,500 defendants, seized or forfeited over $1.4 billion in stolen COVID-19 relief funds, and filed more than 400 civil lawsuits resulting in court judgements and settlements."

Strong work. But the various pandemic stimulus bills tallied up to trillions of dollars. And a lot more than a few billion ended up in the hands of grifters.

"The total amount of fraud across all UI [unemployment insurance] programs (including the new emergency programs) during the COVID-19 pandemic was likely between $100 billion and $135 billion—or 11% to 15% of the total UI benefits paid out during the pandemic," the Government Accountability Office warned last September.

Earlier, the Small Business Administration's Inspector General found more than $200 billion stolen from the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). "This means at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors," noted the report.

With between 70 percent and 90 percent of claims for the Employee Retention Credit identified as likely scams, either the IRS is a stand-out magnet for grifters or other agencies need to return to their own investigations with a somewhat more skeptical eye.

Stimulus Fueled Inflation as Well as Fraud

It's maddening enough that the federal government is handing out vast sums of money to con artists. But Americans are contending with a 2024 economy in which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' own inflation calculator finds that it takes $124.77 to purchase what $100 bought in 2019, before anybody heard of COVID-19. Federal stimulus programs are directly to blame for much of that inflationary slippage in the dollar's buying power.

"U.S. fiscal stimulus during the pandemic contributed to an increase in inflation of about 2.6 percentage points in the U.S.," three economists with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated last year. The reason, they said, was that governments "injected large amounts of money into the economy"—money created from thin air to artificially pump up the economy.

"Inflation comes when aggregate demand exceeds aggregate supply," agreed economist John Cochrane of the Hoover Institution and the Cato Institute in a March piece for the International Monetary Fund. "The source of demand is not hard to find: in response to the pandemic's dislocations, the US government sent about $5 trillion in checks to people and businesses, $3 trillion of it newly printed money, with no plans for repayment."

Officials justified the stimulus as a necessary evil to offset economic collapse from often-mandatory pandemic closures by keeping demand flowing with government checks. After conceding that stimulus fueled inflation, the St. Louis Federal Reserve economists argued that massive spending likely prevented "worse outcomes despite the price pressures that may have resulted from the spending."

But officials could have refrained from issuing closure orders so the economy could function without mandated disruptions. That would have made the creation of trillions of dollars from thin air and its distribution around the country entirely beside the point. Then, grifters wouldn't have opportunity to scam hundreds of billions of dollars out of federal agencies, including the IRS.

It's nice that the IRS, like other federal agencies, is catching up with the vast fraud it enabled. But it would be better if government officials weren't constantly addressing problems they created.

The post 'Vast Majority' of Pandemic Employee Retention Credit Claims Are Likely Scams, Says IRS appeared first on Reason.com.

In 2024, the federal budget deficit is estimated to reach nearly $2 trillion, according to new projections released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this week. In February, the agency predicted that the deficit would only be $1.58 trillion. However, spending increases have caused the projected deficit to increase by $400 billion, a staggering 27 percent hike. 

According to the CBO, 80 percent of the spike in the deficit can be blamed on four sources of government spending.

The largest source, responsible for $145 billion of the increase, is changes to the federal student loan program that have resulted in massive waves of federal student loan forgiveness and increased forgiveness going forward.

Second, the CBO's report details how the costs for "deposit insurance have increased by about $70 billion because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is not recovering payments it made when resolving bank failures in 2023 and 2024 as quickly as CBO previously anticipated."

Third, an additional $60 billion in cost increases came from additional legislation. And lastly, $50 billion in increased spending came from higher-than-expected Medicaid costs.

The long-term outlook for the budget deficit has increased too. In February, the CBO estimated that in 2034, the deficit would climb to $2.5 trillion. Its latest estimate now places that number as over $2.8 trillion.

"For the 2025–2034 period, CBO now projects that if current laws generally remained unchanged, the cumulative deficit would be $22.1 trillion. That amount is $2.1 trillion (or 10 percent) more than the $20.0 trillion the agency projected this past February," reads the CBO's report. "Measured in relation to the size of the economy, federal debt at the end of 2034 is now projected to equal 122 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); in February, debt at the end of that year was projected to equal 116 percent of GDP."

If the deficit continues to increase as the CBO predicts, the outcome could be disastrous. 

"As debt grows unabated, there is the risk of a sudden loss of confidence in bond markets, with investors demanding much higher interest rates that could trigger a debt doom loop and broader fiscal crisis," Cato Institute researchers Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett warned this week. "Congress and the Biden administration should cut spending now while the economy is growing and conditions are favorable for deficit reduction, alleviating pressure on interest rates and the federal debt to grow, and before a fiscal crisis forces their hands."

The post Federal Budget Deficit Forecast Jumps $400 Billion, Fueled by Student Debt Forgiveness appeared first on Reason.com.

In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman scrutinize President Joe Biden's executive order updating asylum restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border in response to illegal border crossings.

01:32—Biden's new asylum restrictions

21:38—The prosecution of political opponents: former President Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, and Steve Bannon

33:25—Weekly Listener Question

39:56—No one is reading The Washington Post

48:09—This week's cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

"Biden Announces Sweeping Asylum Restrictions at U.S.-Mexico Border" by Fiona Harrigan

"Biden's New Asylum Policy is Both Harmful and Illegal" by Ilya Somin

"Travel Ban, Redux" by Josh Blackman

"Immigration Fueled America's Stunning Cricket Upset Over Pakistan" by Eric Boehm

"Libertarian Candidate Chase Oliver Wants To Bring Back 'Ellis Island Style' Immigration Processing" by Fiona Harrigan

"Donald Trump and Hunter Biden Face the Illogical Consequences of an Arbitrary Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum

"Hunter Biden's Trial Highlights a Widely Flouted, Haphazardly Enforced, and Constitutionally Dubious Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum

"Hunter Biden's Multiplying Charges Exemplify a Profound Threat to Trial by Jury" by Jacob Sullum

"The Conviction Effect" by Liz Wolfe

"Laurence Tribe Bizarrely Claims Trump Won the 2016 Election by Falsifying Business Records in 2017" by Jacob Sullum

"A Jumble of Legal Theories Failed To Give Trump 'Fair Notice' of the New York Charges Against Him" by Jacob Sullum

"Does Donald Trump's Conviction in New York Make Us Banana Republicans?" by J.D. Tuccille

"The Myth of the Federal Private Nondelegation Doctrine, Part 1" by Sasha Volokh

"Federal Court Condemns Congress for Giving Unconstitutional Regulatory Powers to Amtrak" by Damon Root

"Make Amtrak Safer and Privatize It" by Ira Stoll

"Biden Threatens To Veto GOP Spending Bill That Would 'Cut' Amtrak Funding to Double Pre-Pandemic Levels" by Christian Britschgi

"This Company Is Running a High-Speed Train in Florida—Without Subsidies" by Natalie Dowzicky

"Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound" by Christian Britschgi

"With Ride or Die, the Bad Boys Movies Become Referendums on Masculinity" by Peter Suderman

"D.C. Water Spent Nearly $4,000 On Its Wendy the Water Drop Mascot" by Christian Britschgi

Upcoming Reason Events:

Reason Speakeasy: Corey DeAngelis on June 11 in New York City

Send your questions to [email protected]. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today's sponsor:

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Audio production by Justin Zuckerman and John Carter

Assistant production by Luke Allen and Hunt Beaty

Music: "Angeline" by The Brothers Steve

• Producer: Hunt Beaty
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The post Partisan Border Wars appeared first on Reason.com.

Government employees and their office desks are never, ever, ever getting back together.

Parody of Taylor Swift's "Fortnight" written by Remy; performed by Remy and Austin Bragg; music tracks, mastering, and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom.

LYRICS:

Temporarily sent away but
They forgot to come and get me
A barely-functioning bureaucrat
Nobody noticed my new aesthetic

COVID's still a thing
Though that won't keep me from mid-day Soul Cycle
Meeting with our agency?
Expect to see three blank screens and Michael

Cuz every fortnight I am in the office one day
It is so hard working every other Monday
I click "leave-on-doorstep" but the
GrubHub driver rings my doorbell
I want to kill him

All my mornings are Sundays stuck in an
Endless commissary
If you ever try reaching us
The effects are pulmonary

And my phone rings it's ruining my life (I'm sick and it's ruining my life)
We come in one day every fortnight (You come in one day every fortnight?)

Cuz every fortnight I am in the office one day
It is so hard working every other Monday
In my backyard I have uncooked burger patties on the table
I want to grill them

I tried calling ya, but you don't pick up
Another fortnight lost in America
I tried calling ya, but you don't pick up
Another fortnight lost in America

• Producer, actor: Austin Bragg
• Producer: Meredith Bragg
• Producer: John Carter
• :

The post Remy: Fortnight (Federal Employee Version) appeared first on Reason.com.

President Joe Biden says, "I know how to make government work!"

You'd think he'd know. He's worked in government for 51 years.

But the truth is, no one can make government work.

Biden hasn't.

Look at the chaos at the border, our military's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rising cost of living, our unsustainable record-high debt.

In my new video, economist Ed Stringham argues that no government can ever work well, because "even the best person can't implement change….The massive bureaucracy gets bigger and slower."

I learned that as a consumer reporter watching bureaucrats regulate business. Their rules usually made life worse for consumers.

Yet politicians want government to do more!

Remember the unveiling of Obamacare's website? Millions tried to sign up. The first day, only six got it to work.

Vice President Joe Biden made excuses: "Neither [Obama] and I are technology geeks."

Stringham points out, "If they can't design a basic simple website, how are they going to manage half the economy?"

While bureaucrats struggled with the Obamacare site, the private sector successfully created Uber and Lyft, platforms like iCloud, apps like Waze, smartwatches, etc.

The private sector creates things that work because it has to. If businesses don't serve customers well, they go out of business.

But government is a monopoly. It never goes out of business. With no competition, there's less pressure to improve.

Often good people join government. Some work as hard as workers in the private sector.

But not for long. Because the bureaucracy's incentives kill initiative.

If a government worker works hard, he might get a small raise. But he sits near others who earn the same pay and, thanks to archaic civil service rules, are unlikely to get fired even if they're late, lazy, or stupid.

Over time, that's demoralizing. Eventually government workers conclude, "Why try?"

In the private sector, workers must strive to make things better. If they don't, competitors will, and you might lose your job.

Governments never go out of business.

"Companies can only stay in business if they always keep their customer happy," Stringham points out. "Competition pushes us to be better. Government has no competition."

I push back.

"Politicians say, 'Voters can vote us out.'"

"With a free market," Stringham replies, "the consumer votes every single day with the dollar. Under politics, we have to wait four years."

It's another reason why, over time, government never works as well as the private sector.

Year after year, the Pentagon fails audits.

If a private company repeatedly does that, they get shut down. But government never gets shut down.

A Pentagon spokeswoman makes excuses: "We're working on improving our process. We certainly are learning each time."

They don't learn much. They still fail audits.

"It's like we're living in Groundhog Day," Stringham jokes.

When COVID-19 hit, politicians handed out almost $2 trillion in "rescue" funds. The Government Accountability Office says more than $100 billion were stolen.

"One woman bought a Bentley," laughs Stringham. "A father and son bought a luxury home."

At least Biden noticed the fraud. He announced, "We're going to make you pay back what you stole!

No. They will not. Biden's Fraud Enforcement Task Force has recovered only 1 percent of what was stolen.

Even without fraud, government makes money vanish. I've reported on my town's $2 million toilet in a park. When I confronted the parks commissioner, he said, "$2 million was a bargain! Today it would cost $3 million."

That's government work.

More recently, Biden proudly announced that government would create "500,000 [electric vehicle] charging stations."

After two years, they've built seven. Not 7,000. Just seven.

Over the same time, greedy, profit-seeking Amazon built 17,000.

"Privatize!" says Stringham. "Whenever we think something's important, question whether government should do it."

In Britain, government-owned Jaguar lost money year after year. Only when Britain sold the company to private investors did Jaguar start turning a profit selling cars people actually like.

When Sweden sold Absolut Vodka, the company increased its profits sixfold.

It's ridiculous for Biden to say, "I know how to make government work."

No one does.

Next week, this column takes on Donald Trump's promise: "We'll drain the Washington swamp!"

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post No One Can Make Government Work appeared first on Reason.com.

Voters in California went to the polls this week for a primary election that's the first step towards picking a permanent replacement for the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died nearly six months ago.

In Washington, meanwhile, Feinstein is still wielding influence from beyond the grave. Her name is attached to 256 different earmarks included in the budget bill working its way through Congress this week. Those pork projects will cost taxpayers about $1.1 billion if the bill passes in its current form, the Washington Examiner reported Tuesday.

And that only scratches the surface. The partial budget deal—which contains six of the 12 appropriations bills that make up the discretionary portion of the annual federal budget—is overflowing with earmarks to fund lawmakers' pet projects. All told, there are more than 6,000 earmarks in the bill, costing taxpayers more than $12.7 billion, according to Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), who has urged Republicans to vote against the package.

Many of the earmarks in the package seem like things that would be better funded by local or state taxpayers, who at least might stand to benefit from projects like new sewer systems, new runways and other upgrades for tiny rural airports, and a plethora of highway projects. Some are truly head-scratching, like Sen. Tammy Baldwin's (D–Wis.) $1.4 million earmark for a solar energy project in Wisconsin, one of the places in America least well suited for a solar farm.

Plenty of others make no sense for the public to be funding at all. Like a $3.5 million earmark secured by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D–Mich.) for The Parade Company, which runs Detroit's annual Thanksgiving Day parade. Or the $2.5 million earmark that will help build a new kayaking facility in Franklin, New Hampshire, curtsey of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D–N.H.), as well as $2.7 million line item to help build a bike park in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, a town with a population of less than 2,300 people.

For that amount of money, "you could buy EVERY resident a $1,200+ bike" Sen. Rick Scott (R–Fla.), who has become a vocal critic of the earmarks in the bill, posted on X (formerly Twitter). "There's no way they need this much of YOUR money for this."

The same could be said for several Republican-based earmarks too. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) has inserted at least eight earmarks into the bill, forcing federal taxpayers to put up more than $33 million for things most will never use, like a new trail at Coastal Carolina University and an ROTC facility at the University of South Carolina. Among the dozens of earmarks inserted by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska), perhaps the strangest is the $4 million grant for the "Alaska King Crab Enhancement Project."

Wait, you might be thinking, didn't Congress ban the use of earmarks when tea party-era Republicans controlled the government? Yep, they did. But like fiscal responsibility and concern about America's ballooning entitlement costs, those efforts to limit pork barrel spending are now distant memories. Democrats voted to reinstate earmarks in 2021, and Republicans soon followed suit.

To Congress' credit, earmarks are now handled more transparently than they used to be—which is why you can view the full list of earmarks included in the budget bills here.

Still, some things never change. Earmarks remain expensive, wasteful exercises in cronyism—and with the country $34 trillion in debt, Congress should not be putting taxpayers on the hook for frivolous handouts to politically connected friends.

The post The Budget Deal Is Overflowing With $12 Billion of Earmarks appeared first on Reason.com.