RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
July 14 to July 20, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Bob Ivry reports on untold amounts of fraud within the Department of Housing and Urban Development's two massive rental assistance programs – operations so impervious to reform that 10 years of hectoring the agency by HUD's internal watchdog have proven futile across administrations of both parties: The lack of accountability is a dark portent for any promise to tame the bureaucratic state, like the house-cleaning touted by proponents of a second Trump administration. The two rental assistance programs’ combined fiscal budget for 2025 is slated to be $49.5 billion and together they constitute 68% of HUD’s annual budget. The rental assistance cash flows through 3,700 local housing authorities and countless landlords supposedly on its way to putting a roof over some 3 million American households. But that circuitous complexity provides ample opportunity for multimillion-dollar mischief and is also a convenient scapegoat for HUD. So is its lag in upgrading technology systems that could make the accounting job easier. HUD, like other agencies, is required by law to estimate improper payments and post the results – but for 10 years it has flouted that law. That denies auditors a road map to track down crooked cash. HUD says the earliest it can start properly keeping tabs on the money is 2027, “dependent on funding.” HUD programs aren’t alone among federal agencies that illegally fail to estimate their improper payments. Also in the federal watchdog doghouse are the $111 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP; and TANF, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, a $31 billion program. In RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski reports that public education is having kind of a bad week – and it’s got four days: At least 2,100 schools in half the states have embraced the shorter week mostly as an incentive to hire and keep teachers. But even though unions, kids and many families cheer the move, it stymies learning in math and English when instructional time is reduced. The movement quietly gathered momentum over the years because, early on, early adopters were mainly in small rural districts in western states like Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Oregon. Total commute times were cut, but for districts, significant cost savings never materialized. That’s because salaries, the biggest expense in education, don’t change. What’s more, when schools extended class time to compensate, that pushed sports practices and events into the evenings, requiring expensive lights on ballfields and tennis courts. The push for a shorter week comes at a troubling time for public schools, first reeling from the pandemic, and lately, the end of pandemic funding. Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Boatloads of Cash for Marinas, RCI
Biden’s Staff Is Largest Since Nixon, RCI
Federal Deficit Projection Up 27%, RCI
Bike Café Over Bridge Repairs, RCI
Architect of the Capitol a Bungler, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Biden Circle Shrinks as Democrats Fear Election Wipeout, New York Times
COVID-Positive Biden Bares Unmasked Face to the World, Reason
Video: How Security Failed to Stop Trump Assassination Attempt, New York Times
Cops Told Secret Service Trump Shooter's Building Not Secure, Washington Post
House Probing Secret Service Even Before Trump Shooting, RealClearPolitics
Secret Service Boss Has Jill Biden to Thank for Her Job, New York Post
Gunman Called a Bullied, 20-Year-Old Loner, Wall St Journal
7 Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped J.D. Vance’s Worldview, Politico
J.D. Vance Left His Venmo Public. Here’s What It Shows, Wired
Washington Post Columnist's Wife Accused of Espionage, Daily Caller Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Millions of pregnant women have each spent thousands of dollars to put a piece of their newborn’s umbilical cord on ice with the promise that the precious stem cells in the cord blood could become a tailor-made cure if, one day, their child faces cancer, diabetes or even autism. But, this article reports, that is an expensive and often false promise: More than two million umbilical cord samples sit in a handful of suburban warehouses across the country. It’s a lucrative business, with companies charging several thousand dollars upfront plus hundreds more every year thereafter. The industry has grown rapidly, bolstered by investments from medical device companies, hospital partnerships and endorsements from celebrities like Drew Barrymore and Chrissy Teigen. But the leading banks have consistently misled customers and doctors about the technology’s promise, an investigation by The New York Times found. Doctors rarely use cord blood anymore, thanks to advances that have made it easier to transplant adult stem cells. And the few parents who try to withdraw cord blood samples often find that they are unusable – either because their volume is too low or they have been contaminated with microbes. The article reports that “just 19 stem-cell transplants using a child’s own cord blood have been reported since 2010 …. Yet private banks trumpet the cells’ lifesaving possibilities, and legions of their sales representatives peddle cord blood as if it were at the medical vanguard.” Defying predictions of a post-COVID resurgence, America’s birthrate has plummeted in the 2020s. Just 3.59 million babies were born in the United States in 2023 – which translates to 1.62 children per woman over a lifetime, far below the 2.1 needed to maintain the nation’s population without immigration. But, this article reports, birth rates are especially low in Democrat-run cities: Fertility rates have fallen much further in deep-blue metros like Boston, Minneapolis, and Seattle than in red-state metros like Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Nashville. Based on estimates derived from Census data, the average woman in the city of Seattle will have 0.96 kids over her lifetime if 2022 patterns continue, for example, while her Dallas counterpart will have 2.23 children. How come? Families with children are disproportionately migrating from pricey coastal metros to more affordable Sun Belt metros, partly for better, more affordable housing options. Those who remain in dense urban settings on the coasts, by contrast, often live in tiny “rabbit hutch” apartments or in densely packed neighborhoods, which leads them to have fewer babies than they had planned, as Lyman Stone has shown. This article reports that fertility declines and outmigration can spark a dangerous doom loop. “As populations collapse, cities have weaker incentives to construct housing and lack the tax base needed to fund basic services. Such forces sparked many Rust Belt cities’ downfalls." Real-estate insiders often divide owners of single-family rental homes into two groups. There are the big guys – a small number of cash-flush "Wall Street investors" who own hundreds or thousands of properties – and then a whole lot of little guys, or mom-and-pops, who own the vast majority of single-family rentals. This article reports that rise of sophisticated new tools and services is making it easier to turn mom-and-pop landlords into Wall Street sharks: The past few years have solidified single-family rental homes as genuine moneymaking enterprises, not just ho-hum nest eggs. It costs nothing for small-time landlords to cruise through Zillow and see what their neighbors are charging, which makes it easier to price their rentals more aggressively. Meanwhile, a whole ecosystem of startups has sprung up to meet the every need of mom-and-pop landlords, from basic stuff like tenant screening to the minutiae of air-filter delivery. … A steady stream of rental data and an onslaught of new property-management services have made amateur landlords savvier than ever. And that's to say nothing of the changing of the guard as baby boomers age out of their property-owning days, which leaves millennials and Gen Zers to take on the mantle. While noting that data on small landlords' behavior is “notoriously scarce,” this article reports that the smaller landlords are often the ones cranking up rents. “Chattanooga, Tennessee, for instance, has practically zero homes owned by institutional landlords but one of the country's highest rates of rent growth for single-family homes, with the typical asking rent for new leases up 10% in April from a year prior.” The lush forests that grace the Indonesian island of Halmahera are giving way to fiery smelters and multiple coal-fired power plants that burn nonstop – all in the name of green agenda. This article reports that increased demand from automakers who need nickel, which is essential for making electric vehicle batteries and larger batteries for clean electricity projects, is devouring forest land in Indonesia: Indonesia has the largest reserves of nickel in the world. Until recently, it mostly sold its nickel deposits – ore – raw. It didn’t have the processing plants to refine the metal. … The country has gone from having two nickel smelters to 27 over the last 10 years, with 22 more planned, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. Last year, the country was responsible for more than half the supply of nickel ore globally. This article reports that Indonesia’s nickel ore lies in shallow deposits, easily accessible when the rainforest is cut down. A recent report shows deforestation rose from an average of 33 square kilometers (about 13 square miles) around each smelter, to 63 square kilometers (about 24.5 square miles). If all 22 new plants are built, deforestation is likely to increase dramatically. AI-generated images have become so lifelike that law enforcement is having difficulty determining whether real children have been subjected to real harms for their production. This article reports that a single AI model can generate tens of thousands of new images in a short amount of time, and this content has begun to flood both the dark web and seep into the mainstream internet, overwhelming law enforcement’s capabilities to identify and rescue real-life victims: There are already tens of millions of reports made each year of real-life child sexual abuse material (CSAM) created and shared online each year, which safety groups and law enforcement struggle to investigate. “We’re just drowning in this stuff already,” said a Department of Justice prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “From a law enforcement perspective, crimes against children are one of the more resource-strapped areas, and there is going to be an explosion of content from AI.” This article reports that possessing depictions of child sexual abuse is illegal, but most states do not prohibit the possession of AI-generated sexually explicit material depicting minors. The act of creating the images in the first place is also not covered by existing laws. | 