RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 2 to March 8, 2025 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul D. Thacker recounts the fall and rise of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who paid a heavy price for bucking establishment science during the COVID pandemic – and now is poised for vindication as the Senate takes up his nomination to head the National Institutes of Health. -
Top leaders at the National Institutes of Health, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, were among his chief antagonists, dismissing him and his colleagues as “fringe epidemiologists.” -
Some of his Stanford colleagues leaked false and damaging information to reporters. The university’s head of medicine ordered him to stop speaking to the press. -
Acolytes of Fauci and Collins threw mud from a slew of publications including the Washington Post, The Nation, and the prestigious medical journal BMJ. -
In the years since, many of Bhattacharya’s scientific concerns about the efficacy of lockdowns and mask mandates have been corroborated. -
Fauci, meanwhile, accepted a pardon from President Biden, protecting him from COVID-related offenses dating back to 2014, the year he started funding research at a lab in Wuhan, China, that the CIA now believes probably started the pandemic.
In RealClearInvestigations, Bob Ivry and Jeremy Portnoy examine the Pentagon's years-long failure to pass an annual financial audit, and find widespread fiscal incompetence and noncompliance: -
The Defense Department will likely present Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency with its toughest test yet. Its $850 billion proposed budget for 2025 is gargantuan; its systems are outdated; and it has little incentive to correct its problems. -
Its dealings involve countless outside contractors, among them two of Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX. -
The situation is so tangled that when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed that the Pentagon would finally earn auditors’ approval, he said the earliest that could happen is 2028. And many are skeptical of even then. -
Researchers at OpenTheBooks found that accounting in 15 of the Pentagon’s 28 financial subcomponents wasn’t up to snuff. That’s 68% of the Pentagon budget. -
The Army lost control of its $20 billion of inventory in myriad ways, including a failure to even choose anyone to keep an eye on it. -
Procurement isn’t much better. This month, Lockheed Martin settled a $30 million lawsuit accusing it of ripping off the Pentagon for years on the F-35 fighter. -
Smaller contractors, too, have been slurping mightily at the taxpayer trough. TransDigm Group is accused of jacking up prices as much as 4,000%.
In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney reports that while Elon Musk initially promised to cut trillions from the federal budget – and cuts to the federal workforce have drawn attention – the real accomplishment of his Department of Government Efficiency so far has been to expose the federal government’s broken accounting systems. But they appear impervious to reform, Varney reports: -
The problem is not just following the money but finding it in the first place. And DOGE has succeeded on that front – up to a point. -
The federal government has become so big and so expensive that even experts have trouble navigating the morass of contracts, awards, grants, and loans in a labyrinth pitted with dead ends and rabbit holes. -
The complexity is a feature, not a bug, experts say. Quote: "Federal government spending is nebulous and almost designed to be that way because no one person benefits from it being straightforward.” -
Experts told RCI errors such as those made by DOGE are impossible to avoid when trying to get a handle on the surging ocean of federal government spending.
Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books Education Spending Up, Grades Down, RCI
$95 Million in EV Buses Never Delivered, RCI
Bank CEOs Earned Millions Before Bailout, RCI
Government-Subsidized Pizza, RCI
Millions in Improper Spending in Baltimore, RCI Trump 2.0 and the Beltway Guests are paying $1 million to dine with President Donald Trump at special events held at his Mar-a-Lago estate, while business leaders can secure a one-on-one meeting with the president at his Palm Beach estate for $5 million, this article reports: At a so-called candlelight dinner held as recently as this past Saturday, prospective Mar-a-Lago guests were asked to spend $1 million to reserve a seat, according to an invitation obtained by Wired. “You are invited to a candlelight dinner featuring special guest President Donald J. Trump,” the invitation reads, under a “MAGA INC.” header. MAGA Inc., or Make America Great Again Inc., is a super PAC that supported Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. “Additional details provided upon RSVP. RSVPs will be accommodated on a first come, first serve basis. Space is very limited. $1,000,000 per person.” This article reports that the $5 million one-on-one meetings have become a “hot ticket” in the business community. It’s not exactly clear where the money is going and what it will be used for, but one source with direct knowledge of the dinners told Wired “it’s all going to the library,” as in the presidential library that will ostensibly be built once Trump leaves office. Other Trump 2.0 and the Beltway Trump EPA Seeks Probe of Biden Green Grants, Washington Free Beacon
Trump AG Bondi Says She Was Misled on Epstein Documents, Hill
Trump Looks to Sell 443 Federal Properties, Bloomberg
U.S. Holding Secret Talks With Hamas, Jerusalem Post
Trump Drafts 'Pre-Decisional' Order to End Education Dept., Wall St Journal
Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts Hit Big Christian Charities, Washington Post
Hunter Biden Tells Court He Is Broke, PJ Media Other Noteworthy Articles and Series During the final months of the Biden administration, the National Institutes of Health awarded $28 million to a mysterious biomedical firm founded in 2022 whose chief financial officer was one of Joe Biden’s top COVID advisers. This article reports that the outfit, Vaccine Company, has left virtually no public footprint showing what it has done with the taxpayer funds, which the Biden administration doled out to a seemingly random post office box in Bethesda, Maryland: A Washington Free Beacon review of the taxpayer-funded company, which is supposed to use its $28 million HHS grant to develop vaccines to combat West Nile, dengue, and Zika viruses, indicates it has gone to great lengths to keep itself out of the public eye. The generically named firm has no website, and none of its top officers, including its chief financial officer, former Biden COVID adviser Sonya Bernstein, have disclosed their association to the company on their public résumés. Even the principal office of the taxpayer-funded business is a mystery, with Vaccine Company listing a different home base in each of its respective business registration filings in California, Maryland, and Massachusetts. As it pursued its nuclear weapons deal with Iran, the Obama administration “systematically derailed” an FBI probe into Iranian terrorists – with then-Secretary of State John Kerry “personally” interfering to block arrests to score a nuclear-weapons pact with Tehran, this article reports: Newly released unclassified FBI communications from 2015 and 2016 reveal how officials in then-President Barack Obama’s Justice and State departments stopped federal agents from enforcing US sanctions on Iran and set up “a shadow amnesty program that protected scores of additional Iranian criminals.” The covert effort included the abandonment of “dozens of Iran-related investigations” by the FBI and related cases by federal prosecutors “after recognizing the State Department and DOJ obstruction would thwart effective enforcement efforts,” whistleblowers’ disclosures say. This article reports that Kerry may have committed perjury: Kerry "personally told DOJ officials that they were to stand down on an arrest,” a disclosure stated, directly contradicting his sworn testimony to Congress in July 2015 that Iran was being “restrained” from implementing its missile programs. The amount Eurpean Union countries paid to Russia for fossil fuels surpassed the amount of aid they sent to Ukraine in 2024, this study reports. Despite a range of sanctions and the threat posed by dependence on Russian energy, in the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, EU imports of Russian fossil fuels have remained largely unchanged, totaling 21.9 billion Euros (EUR). This exceeds the EUR 18.7 billion they sent in aid to Ukraine in last year: Russia’s stronghold over new markets also solidified in the third year of the invasion. The three biggest buyers of Russian fossil fuels, China (EUR 78 bn), India (EUR 49 bn), and Turkey (EUR 34 bn) were responsible for 74% of Russia’s total revenues from fossil fuels in the third year of the invasion. The value of India and Turkey’s imports saw a year-on-year increase of 8% and 6% respectively. This study reports that Russia continues to use "shadow" vessels to reroute embargoed oil to non-sanctioning countries. Five hundred fifty-eight Russian ‘shadow’ tankers transported 61% of its total seaborne oil exports, valued at 83 billion euros. The fleet handled 78% of Russian seaborne crude oil shipments and 37% of refined oil products. In a separate article, the New York Times reports that while Russia’s war against Ukraine began as a race between the West and Moscow to pour conventional weapons, like shells and tanks, into the fight, it has increasingly become a video-game like contest fought between men and drones, which now account for about 70 percent of all casualties: The trenches that cut scars across hundreds of miles of the front are still essential for defense, but today most soldiers die or lose limbs to remote-controlled aircraft rigged with explosives, many of them lightly modified hobby models. Drone pilots, in the safety of bunkers or hidden positions in tree lines, attack with joysticks and video screens, often miles from the fighting. In response to the rise of artificial intelligence, schools are going back to basics, offering more classes in hands-on work with wood, metals and machinery, this article reports: School districts around the U.S. are spending tens of millions of dollars to expand and revamp high-school shop classes for the 21st century. They are betting on the future of manual skills overlooked in the digital age, offering vocational-education classes that school officials say give students a broader view of career prospects with or without college. … As white-collar hiring slows, more younger workers are finding blue-collar careers. The share of workers ages 20 to 24 in blue-collar jobs was 18% last May, two points higher than it was at the start of 2019, according to an analysis by payroll provider ADP. Enrollment in vocation-focused, two-year community colleges jumped 14% in fall 2024 compared with a year earlier. Enrollment at public four-year colleges rose 3% during that period. This article reports that roughly half of college graduates end up in jobs where degrees aren’t needed, according to a 2024 analysis of more than 10 million résumés by labor analytics firm Burning Glass Institute and the nonprofit Strada Education Foundation. |
