RealClearInvestigations Articles

Topline: The U.S. unemployment rate was nearly 9% in 2011, but Washington was still spending taxpayer dollars to create jobs in other countries. The U.S. Agency for International Development sent $1.4 million to the island of Barbados for an "entrepreneurship initiative” run in partnership with Indiana University‘s Kelley School of Business. The money would be worth $2 million today.  That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and...

Topline: Taxpayers in Dauphin County, Penn., spent $670,000 on an empty parking lot this summer, but Amiracle4sure, the nonprofit in charge, does not seem concerned about the price. In an interview with PennLive, Executive Director Marsha Curry-Nixon credited the sale to “divine intervention” and said she “didn’t care” what the empty lot was actually worth. Key facts: The lot will be used to house a local homeless population that was forced out of a “tent city” due to highway construction. Amiracle4sure owns the 3.5-acre lot — which...

Topline: New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell has a history of taking expensive trips using public funds, but her latest voyage is shrouded in secrecy. FOX8 found in an open records request that Cantrell spent over $50,000 traveling to the French Riviera in June, and the city refuses to say whether taxpayers will foot the entire bill. Key facts: Cantrell, her security guard and two other city employees spent over $9,800 each on upgraded flights to the United Nations Ocean Rise & Coastal Summit in Nice, France, according to FOX8. The group flew first-class in and out of New Orleans and...

Topline: Baltimore County spent $125,513 installing crosswalks and traffic devices in the wrong locations, according to a recent inspector general report. Key facts: The errors came from the local Traffic Calming Unit, which was supposed to reduce traffic and enforce speed limits in residential areas by installing raised crosswalks with speed humps. The mistakes began after an employee at Victory Villa Elementary School asked the county to install a raised crosswalk in front of the school. The county promptly spent $20,606 to build one at the intersection of Compass Road and Cord Street...

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week October 26 to November 1   Featured Investigation: Why Is New York’s AG Targeting a Castle in West Virginia? Lawfare or feather-bedding? James Varney reports for RealClearInvestigations reports that question is at the heart of the ongoing legal dispute between New York Attorney General Letitia James and one of the right’s most controversial opponents of immigration, Peter Brimelow, who says the AG’s claims of financial impropriety centered on a West Virginia castle are really an effort to silence him. VDARE, established in...

Topline: President Donald Trump has taken significant steps to secure the border and curb illegal immigration, but now he is taking a victory lap with the use of public funds. The Department of Homeland Security has committed to spending $180 million on “advertising and media support” about the “national emergency at the southern border.” Axios reports that $51 million has already been paid for TV ads praising Trump for “putting America first.” The $51 million expense means Trump has spent more on political ads than any politician in the country this year,...

Topline: Imagine a world where government-funded scientists track your every move online, including your location and all of your text messages. It’s not a dystopian fiction, or at least it wasn’t in 2011. The National Science Foundation paid the University of Notre Dame $802,000 for a study that monitored the cell phone usage of 200 college student volunteers for two years. The money would be worth $1.1 million today. That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot...

Topline: The City of Baltimore gave $62,500 to a nonprofit that employs the mayor’s wife, according to tax filings reviewed by the Baltimore Sun. Six members of City Council have introduced a bill that would make similar payments illegal — which the mayor opposes. Key facts: The grant was paid in 2023 from the Baltimore Children and Youth Fund to the nonprofit Bmore Empowered, where Hana Scott is the director of operations. She is also Mayor Brandon Scott’s wife. The mayor’s office has a representative on the Youth Fund board who votes on which nonprofits receive...

Topline: Air traffic controllers across the country are working without pay during the government shutdown as flight delays cause huge issues for travelers. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will have no trouble with air travel thanks to two new jet planes bought for her and other department officials, including one for her private travel. The total bill for taxpayers is $172 million, the New York Times first reported. Key facts: The two jets are Gulfstream G700s, described by Business Insider as the “jet of choice for billionaires” and the “pinnacle of the luxury...

In southern India, a new enterprise called Peer Publicon Consultancy offers a full suite of services to scientific researchers. It will not only write a scholarly paper for a fee but also guarantee publishing the fraudulent work in a respected journal.    It is one of many “paper mills” that have emerged across Asia and Eastern Europe over the last two decades. Paper mills are having remarkable success peddling tens of thousands of bogus academic journal papers and authorships to university and medical researchers seeking to pad their resumes in highly competitive...

For more than 30 years, the author and public intellectual Peter Brimelow has argued for and published the writings of like-minded “immigration patriots” who support strong restrictions on immigration. Standing at the right edge of the policy debate, he has drawn the ire of pro-immigration advocates who ascribe racism to his positions. Left-wing groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League label him a “white nationalist.” They put him and VDARE, the nonprofit he established in 1999, on their well-publicized...

Topline: There were 40 students enrolled in Professor Kim Rich’s class at Pierce College in Los Angeles this spring, but only 16 of them were real people. The rest were “ghost students” — people using fake identities enrolled in online college courses to fraudulently obtain federal student aid. Across the state, 31% of all applications to community colleges were fraudulent and were blocked from admission last year, according to the California Community College Chancellor’s Office. The office claims only a tiny fraction of fake students got through and $13 million...

RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week October 19 to October 25 Featured Investigation:  No Fire This Time: A Reporter Finds the Changing Face of Protest in Portland  After President Trump claimed that Portland was "burning to the ground" and under siege by Antifa Nancy Rommelmann returned to her former home city for RealClearInvestigations to see whether a repeat of 2020’s violence was brewing. She found, instead, a complex story of how the never-dead past is vigorously exploited for political purposes.   Despite Trump's claims of chaos and his deployment...

Topline: Open the Books criticized the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office last year after the office spent hundreds of millions of dollars and still failed to meet the terms of three court orders that mandated an end to racial discrimination in its traffic patrols and internal affairs. It’s now clear why the spending failed. An Oct. 8 budget analysis by the independent monitor overseeing the sheriffs’ compliance 8 claims that $163 million of the money was spent not on ending racial bias, but on unrelated expenses like office renovations, a golf cart and horseback riding. Key...

“Portland is burning to the ground,” President Trump told a press pool in early October. This followed earlier assertions that the city was a “war zone,” “like WW II,” and “under siege from attack by Antifa” mobs. Having lived in Portland for 15 years and covered 2020’s violent protests extensively, I found the president’s claims simultaneously plausible and overwrought. Footage from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility south of downtown featured federal officers in what looked like hand-to-hand combat with...

The classroom subject of “civics” evokes antiquated images of Cold War-era conformity, but Andrew Hart describes a recent teacher workshop on civics with a schoolboy’s exuberance: “It was really refreshing. I was, like, wow.” The weeklong seminar at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia delved into the writings of Aristotle and Cicero, the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and civil rights titans W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.  “We spent the first full day just talking about...

Topline: Early settlers on the Oregon Trail were searching for a new home and economic opportunity, not hundreds of kinds of artisan cheeses. By 2011, the U.S. government was funding the latter with a $50,400 grant for the “Oregon Cheese Trail,” a tourist trap promotion for the state’s dairy farms and restaurants. The money would be worth $72,000 today. That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses.  Coburn, the...

Three years ago, RealClearInvestigations reported that the FBI was undercounting the number of armed civilians who had thwarted active shooters by a factor of three. Even though the FBI acknowledged the issue at the time, it never corrected the error involving the politically fraught issue. In the years since, the problem has only gotten worse. Since RCI’s 2022 article, the FBI has acknowledged just three additional incidents of armed good Samaritans stopping active shooters from 2022 to 2024, and none in the last two years. In contrast, the Crime Prevention Research...

Topline: The federal deficit was $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2025, according to preliminary estimates published by the Congressional Budget Office. That’s $8 billion less than FY 2024, but when discussing numbers that large, it’s almost unchanged. When the government spends more money than it collects, the national debt increases. It is now approaching $38 trillion, or over $110,000 per person in America. The deficit is the annual shortfall where the government spends more than it takes in, while the debt is the total, accumulated amount the government owes. Key facts: The...