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President Trump Is Considering Scrapping a Government Agency

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President Donald Trump is expected to dissolve the Office of Personnel Management at some point during this summer, according to a report from the Washington Post.

What is the Office of Personnel Management?

The Office of Personnel Management works as sort of a massive human resources agency for the federal government. According to its website, “OPM directs human resources and employee management services, administers retirement benefits, manages healthcare and insurance programs, oversees merit-based and inclusive hiring into the civil service, and provides a secure employment process.”

In 2019, OPM had a self-declared total operating budget of $295,920,000.

Trump only recently appointed a new head to the agency, nominating Dale Cabaniss of Virginia on March 4.

What would happen?

The Washington Post reported that Trump plans to break up the agency into three sections, which would be absorbed by the Defense Department, the General Services Administration, and the Office of Management and Budget. Initially, all employees would be reassigned to one of these different sections, rather than being laid off. However, the total number of employees would be slowly reduced by not replacing those who retire or who leave due to other reasons. Currently, the agency employs 5,565 people.

The acting head of the agency, Margaret Weichert, called the move “a big, exemplary step,” according to the Washington Post. She said that the agency was “fundamentally not set up for success, structurally.”

Democrats like Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., spoke out strongly against this move, calling it executive overreach. However, as the Washington Post noted, both the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign had considered dissolving the agency.

But why?

This could be a move to help shrink the overall size of the federal government. While Trump has spoken repeatedly about cutting federal spending, including asking members of his own cabinet in October to cut 5 percent of their budgets, spending has ballooned under his leadership.

Federal government spending during the first six months of this fiscal year was 13.7 percent higher than it was during former President Barack Obama’s final year in office. The federal budget deficit, the amount the government spends beyond what it takes in, for the first six months of the year came to $693 billion, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. It is expected to pass $1 trillion in 2020.

The federal budget deficit differs from the national debt, which is made up of each yearly deficit combined with accruing interest. The budget deficit itself resets at the start of each fiscal year. The current national debt is in excess of $22 trillion. (For more from the author of “President Trump Is Considering Scrapping a Government Agency” please click HERE)

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DHS Employees Put $30,000 Worth of Starbucks on Government Credit Card

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Photo Credit: m01229 / Creative CommonsThe federal government has spent at least $20 billion in taxpayer money this year on items and services that it is permitted to keep secret from the public, according to an investigation by the News4 I-Team.

The purchases, known among federal employees as “micropurchases,” are made by some of the thousands of agency employees who are issued taxpayer-funded purchase cards. The purchases, in most cases, remain confidential and are not publicly disclosed by the agencies. A sampling of those purchases, obtained by the I-Team via the Freedom of Information Act, reveals at least one agency used those cards to buy $30,000 in Starbucks Coffee drinks and products in one year without having to disclose or detail the purchases to the public.

A series of other recent purchases, reviewed by internal government auditors, include wasteful and inappropriate purchases by government employees — including a gym membership and JC Penney clothing — that were not detected or stopped until after the purchase was completed.

The I-Team’s findings have been the subject of a Congressional hearing and created scrutiny from taxpayer watchdogs for the Department of Homeland Security, which made the Starbucks purchases and declines to publicly detail them.

A “micropurchase” is a purchase costing less than $3,000 in which a government-issued purchase card is swiped. The U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Defense, each made tens of millions of dollars of “micropurchases” in the past year, according to an I-Team review. But each agency said it does not make public an itemized list of its transactions, limiting the information to internal government reviewers and users of the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Eric ThayerReport: DHS employees put $30,000 worth of Starbucks on government credit card

By Colby Itkowitz.

Federal employees who are issued so-called purchase cards are permitted to spend up to $3,000 — known as “micropurchases” — and do not have to disclose those purchases publicly.

A House Oversight subcommittee held a congressional hearing earlier this month on misuses of the government credit card, asking why federal employees were swiping the card for seemingly personal things like hair cuts, gym memberships and movie tickets.

Scott MacFarlane, investigative reporter at NBC-4 Washington, discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests, that Department of Homeland Security employees put $30,000 of Starbucks on the cards in 2013. Agency employees spent about $12,000 at one Starbucks in Alameda, Calif., and several of those purchases were for just under the $3,000 “micropurchase” threshold, which means they can avoid scrutiny.

“I don’t know the agency’s needs or contingencies, but going to Starbucks seems like a really hard sell,” former Inspector General for the U.S. General Services Administration Brian Miller told MacFarlane in an interview.

Read more from this story HERE.

Good News: Tens of Thousands of Federal Workers Are Being Paid to Sit at Home

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Photo Credit: TownHallJust a friendly reminder about the state of our ‘not-a-cent-to-spare’ federal government, via the Washington Post:

Tens of thousands of federal workers are being kept on paid leave for at least a month — and often for longer stretches that can reach a year or more — while they wait to be punished for misbehavior or cleared and allowed to return to work, government records show. During a three-year period that ended last fall, more than 57,000 employees were sent home for a month or longer. The tab for these workers exceeded $775 million in salary alone. The extensive use of so-called administrative leave continues despite government personnel rules that limit paid leave for employees facing discipline to “rare circumstances” in which the employee is considered a threat. The long-standing rules were written in an effort to curb waste and deal quickly with workers accused of misconduct. And the comptroller general, the top federal official responsible for auditing government finances and practices, has repeatedly ruled that federal workers should not be sidelined for long periods for any reason.

Read more from this story HERE.

$500M Worth of US-Bought Planes Destroyed by Afghans, Sold as Scrap for 6 Cents a Pound

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsSixteen military transport planes bought by the United States government for the Afghan Air Force (AAF) at a cost of nearly $500 million were recently destroyed by the Afghan military and sold for scrap parts at around six cents per pound, prompting a government inquiry to determine why millions of taxpayer dollars were wasted on the ill-fated program.

The Department of Defense purchased for the AAF a total of 20 Italian-made G222 military transport planes at a cost of $486 million. However, the fleet was grounded in March 2013 “after sustained, serious performance, maintenance, and spare parts problems” were discovered, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

Read more from this story HERE.

BLM Employees Charged Taxpayers $799,000 for 'Gift Cards'

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Wildfire management employees at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) used government charge cards to by $799,000 worth of gift cards from vendors such as REI, American Express, FredMeyer and Visa, according to a report released Sept. 30 by the Interior Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

When investigators requested supporting documentation such as purchase orders, receipts, and authorizing signatures, BLM staff claimed that they were “missing,” according to the report.

The inspector general describes widespread misuse of government-issued charge cards at the agency, making the “purchase card program susceptible to fraud, waste, and abuse.”

In 2010, BLM conducted an agency-wide audit of the purchase card program. Auditors traced $70,000 of the undocumented purchases to the Idaho State Office, where one employee was found to have purchased personal items and gift cards totalling $41,276.33.

In May 2011, the investigation resulted in the suspension of BLM employee Maria Gilbert’s government credit card. On Sept. 13, 2013 Gilbert was charged with one count of theft of government funds between 2007 and 2011, to which she pleaded guilty.

Read more from this story HERE.

Retiring Senator Tom Coburn: Congress Lied To America About Spending

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerOklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn said Thursday that Congress lied to the American people about the amount of spending placed in the recent continuing resolution passed by Congress and signed by President Obama last week.

Coburn said that lawmakers from both parties, including Republican House Speaker John Boehner, lied about the amount of spending in the resolution because it far exceeds the amount promised in the two-year federal budget bill passed at the end of 2013.

Coburn, who is retiring when his term is up after the 2016 elections, cut loose in an interview with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham.

“The reason Americans have such poor view of Washington is because we’re dishonest with the American public in what we do,” Coburn told Ingraham. “In the continuing resolution […] we’re $47 billion above what we said we would be [in the Ryan-Murray bill].”

Read more from this story HERE.

Gov't Spends $700K On 'Vegetable Parenting Practices' Video Game

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Photo Credit: USDA

Photo Credit: USDA

By Eric Scheiner.

The Department of Health and Human Services has awarded $747,891 for the development of a video game to train “vegetable parenting practices”.

A grant for “Kiddio: Food Fight – Training Vegetable Parenting Practices” was given to Archimage, Inc. of Houston to help fund the project from May of 2013 through the end of August 2014.

“The genre of games that we research and develop are called ‘Serious Video Games’”, Archimage President Richard Buday tells CNSNews.com. “It’s a game to teach to mothers of pre-school age kids how to get their children to eat vegetables.”

According to Buday, a major focus is to help fight childhood obesity. “One of the problems is that parents may want the kids to eat better – fruits and veggies – but lack the understanding of how to do that.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP / Rodrigo Abd

Photo Credit: AP / Rodrigo Abd

Feds to Spend $2.5M for Juvenile Justice Reform — in Central America

By Melanie Hunter.

The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs has announced a $2.5 million grant for juvenile justice reform and pre-trial detention in Guatemala, El Salvador and Panama.

“Corrections systems in these countries suffer from acute overcrowding and inefficiencies which contribute to poor conditions and, at worst, active criminal recruiting and leadership of criminal activities from within prisons,” the grant announcement said.

The Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs’ (INL) “works throughout Central America to improve corrections administration and professionalism, and seeks to enhance this mission by engaging civil society to promote alternatives to incarceration for low-risk, non-violent offenders, particularly youth and pre-trial detainees.”

The INL’s mission is “to minimize the impact of international crime and illegal drugs on the United States, its citizens, and partner nations by providing effective foreign assistance and fostering global cooperation.”

Read more from this story HERE.

DEA Improperly Paid $854,460 for Passenger List

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Photo Credit: AP / Rob Carr

Photo Credit: AP / Rob Carr

The Drug Enforcement Administration paid an Amtrak employee hundreds of thousands of dollars over two decades to obtain confidential information it could have gotten for free, according to internal investigators at the railroad.

According to a report released Monday by Amtrak’s inspector general, the DEA paid an Amtrak secretary $854,460 to be an informant. The employee was not publicly identified except as a “secretary to a train and engine crew.”

Amtrak’s own police agency is already in a joint drug enforcement task force that includes the DEA. According to the inspector general, that task force can obtain Amtrak confidential passenger reservation information at no cost.

Read more from this story HERE.

Homeland Security Spends $450,000 on ‘State of the Art’ Gym Memberships

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Photo Credit: Vida Fitness Facebook

Photo Credit: Vida Fitness Facebook

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is spending more than $450,000 on gym memberships for TSA agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees who work desk jobs at a procurement office in Washington, D.C.

Last month, DHS bought gym memberships for ICE workers in its Office of Acquisition to boost their morale and “improve working conditions.”

“As part of the agency-wide Health and Wellness program, sponsored by Department of Homeland Security/Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has a requirement to provide ICE employees in Tech World Office at 801 I Street, NW Washington, DC, 20536 with access/membership to a fully comprehensive state-of-the-art health club facility,” the June solicitation said.

On July 7 the agency announced it had purchased 236 gym memberships to Vida Fitness, which describes itself as “more than just a gym,” offering an “Aura Spa, Bang Salon, Fuel Bar, Gear Shop, Endless Pools, luxurious locker rooms, and the rooftop Penthouse Pool and Lounge.”

The government will spend an estimated $400,000 for two-year memberships at the upscale Vida gym located in the Renaissance Hotel on 9th street.

Read more from this story HERE.

Transparency Troubles: Audit Finds $619B Gap in Federal Spending Site

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Photo Credit: USASpending.gov

Photo Credit: USASpending.gov

The Obama administration failed to properly account for how it spent nearly $619 billion, according to a watchdog audit of the main federal website meant to track where taxpayer money is going.

The report from the Government Accountability Office picked apart the website USASpending.gov, and the agencies feeding information to it.

The database of government spending and contracts was created out of a 2006 transparency law, but the GAO found it continues to have serious problems. The Department of Health and Human Services was the worst offender, during the 2012 period GAO examined.

“Although agencies generally reported information for contracts to USASpending.gov, they did not properly report information on assistance awards, totaling nearly $619 billion,” the GAO reported.

USA Today first reported on the GAO audit.

Read more from this story HERE.