RealClearInvestigations Articles

Topline: Physically attending college from behind bars is an impossible feat, but that did not stop the Internal Revenue Service from mistakenly giving 250 prisoners a tax credit to help cover undergraduate tuition in 2011. While many state and federal prisons offer credit-bearing courses, vocational certificates, and associate or bachelor's degrees, the inmates are still in prison and not paying tuition. The IRS error was representative of a much broader issue: 1.7 million people received the tax credit without submitting any proof that they were a student, costing the federal government...

Topline: The Department of Veterans Affairs made $1 billion in improper payments from 2018 to 2024 while reimbursing veterans for travel to doctors’ appointments, according to a review from the Government Accountability Office. Key facts: Veterans with federal health insurance and their caregivers get coverage for gas, meals, lodging, taxis and more for approved medical appointments through the Beneficiary Travel Program. But huge amounts of money have been paid for travel that was inexpensive or potentially never happened, according to the audit. The Beneficiary Travel Program made...

Topline: A Texas woman simultaneously held full-time jobs with the state government and the City of Austin without disclosing the conflict to either employer, the Austin city auditor announced in a new report. Key facts: Open the Books’ database shows Marie Joelle Dan worked at the Texas Department of Health and Human Services from at least 2017 until 2025. She earned a total of $546,732 — almost $70,000 in 2025. Dan also worked part-time for the Austin Parks and Recreation Department from 2021 to April 2023 and then full-time for Austin Public Health until November 2025. She made...

The battery recycler Ascend Elements was riding high in 2023, flush with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. The seed money provided to the Massachusetts company, which launched in 2017, was one of several large bets the Biden administration placed on the green future as it essentially created a venture capital arm at the Department of Energy and other agencies. In the movies, VCs almost always score big through their early investments in future behemoths (e.g., PayPal or Meta when it was Facebook). In real life, those jackpots are the exception, not the rule – many of...

Topline: Private insurance companies collected up to $462 million from the federal government in 2021 by falsely claiming their patients had suffered strokes and needed increased healthcare, according to an audit released by the Department of Health and Human Services this May. Key facts: The audit reviewed 554 Medicare Advantage plans that offer seniors government-subsidized health insurance as an alternative to traditional Medicare.  Almost 774,000 patients were listed as suffering a stroke in 2020, but for more than 240,000 of them, there was no record of a hospital visit for...

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week June 28 to July 4   RCI Podcasts & Videos On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, J. Peder Zane speaks with Duke Professor Adrian Bejan about his new book, “Diversity through Freedom” and the physics of politics. On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller speaks with Ben Weingarten about his RCI article reporting on the national security threat posed by the reliance of America's supply-chain on China. Featured Investigation: Alive and Kicking: News of Woke’s Death Is...

In only the last several years, corporate CEOs and conservative influencers have been killed in brazen attacks. Republican justices, presidents, and their staffs have been marked for threats, assaults, and even death. Small-cell terrorist organizations have executed sophisticated attacks on law enforcement. And much of it has been excused, even sometimes encouraged, by an intellectual ecosystem on the left that is, even now, incubating more political violence. In "Blood & Progress," from which this excerpt is drawn, the National Review’s Noah Rothman documents how and why left-wing...

Topline: A North Dakota woman was convicted last month of five counts of theft for stealing $131,000 in state grants meant for after-school programs. Key facts: Faith Dixon, 47, was one of the top recipients of $2 million that the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction awarded in October 2021 for its Out of School Time program to support children impacted by school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic.  Her nonprofit, Faith4Hope, instead sent the funds to her then-husband’s food stand, her brother’s music and production company and her sister-in-law’s dance...

Topline: Plenty of Americans recharge their energy by curling up with a good book or watching reruns on television. But, in case anyone was unaware, the National Institutes of Health spent taxpayer dollars in 2012 to discover that very fact. A federally-funded study concluded that those who had to show “self-control” or “regulate their emotions” during the work day were more likely to seek “greater immersion in a familiar fictional world the next day.” The project received an undisclosed portion of a $667,000 grant, or $973,000 in today’s...

Topline: Police officers on Long Island are being fired for wrongdoing at a date most convenient for them. Seven cops at the Suffolk County Police Department admitted to fireable offenses like drunk driving or revealing the identity of an undercover colleague. Instead of being terminated immediately, they signed settlements allowing them to remain employed until their total length of service reached 20 years — letting them collect a pension on their way out. Newsday reported that the seven cops collected $7 million in salary after the county already determined they should be fired....

Topline: The El Paso Independent School District bought $3.1 million worth of touchscreen blackboards and computer servers that were not needed, and left them in storage for over a year because there was no use for them, according to a recent internal audit. Key facts: Federal Title I funds for low-income schools helped the district buy 3,000 Mimio Interactive Flat Panels — large computer screens for teachers to write on while presenting to a class. More than a year later, 929 of the panels worth $2.3 million were still in storage. They had been meant only for core classroom teachers,...

Just a few years ago, wearing a sombrero on Halloween could get you banished from polite society for the social crime of “cultural appropriation.” Nutrition experts argued that preventing obesity was a form of racialized “fatphobia,” even as scientific names of songbirds were purged in a moral campaign presumably aimed at white supremacy. Meanwhile, a slew of studies and papers and articles argued that punctuality, excellence, and other forms...

What is human sexuality? In Western societies, the traditional understanding long shared by religious authority, textbook biology, and public opinion is being replaced by the emerging expertocracy of professors, bureaucrats, and lawyers. Consider a federal lawsuit involving a transgender individual who identifies as a woman, but has fully intact male genitalia. This individual was keen on visiting a women’s-only Korean spa in Washington state where naked girls and women receive full-body scrubs from female staff in communal saunas.  In his dissent in the Olympus Spa case, Judge...

Topline: When President Donald Trump claimed that the new White House ballroom would be funded entirely by private donors, it appears he already knew that would not happen.  The Washington Post reported that a project estimate prepared for the White House in early March showed the ballroom would require $300 million of taxpayer funding. Yet Trump publicly announced on March 31, “This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.” Key facts: The idea of spending public money on a ballroom is highly subjective. Trump argues it will boost security and is necessary...

There’s hardly a ruler in the world who would identify as fascist, but if you trust the mainstream media, you will assume fascism is on the march. Mentions of the term have skyrocketed ever since Donald Trump emerged from the land of chandeliers; fascist mentions on cable reached unprecedented levels in the run-up to the 2024 election. Now, almost anything Trump does – from cracking down on illegal immigration to proposing construction of a victory arch – is seen by the Washington Post and others as fascist. Tellingly, the term has not just been...

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week June 21 to June 27 RCI Podcasts & Videos On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, RCI Editor J. Peder Zane and RCI Senior Reporter James Varney speak with Dr. Kendall Conger who lost his job after challenging a 2021 statement issued by his employer – Duke Health – declaring racism a “public health crisis.” On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller speaks with one of the world's leading energy experts, Daniel Yergin, about how the global energy landscape is being transformed by...

Although Donald Trump’s defenders describe the Russia hoax and other efforts to frame the president as a "grand conspiracy," RealClearInvestigations has learned that the man now leading the probe of that scandal is pursuing multiple conspiracy prosecutions that are smaller and more manageable, according to several sources with direct knowledge of the probe.  Since taking over the Justice Department’s far-flung investigation in April, veteran prosecutor Joseph diGenova and his team quickly concluded that combining all of the alleged wrongdoing, which ranges from...

Topline: The military’s Foreign Comparative Testing program has partnered with other nations to create new body armor, rockets, ammunition and, in 2012, chipotle-flavored beef jerky. Pentagon officials spent $1.5 million meant “to improve the U.S. warfighter’s capabilities” on researching a “meat roll-up” for use as a “savory snack.” The money would be worth $2.2 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...

Topline: A tiny contractor’s disastrous time running an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in El Paso came to an end this March. Now, a Government Accountability Office report has uncovered millions of dollars in wasted money and other issues that jeopardized detainees’ safety. Key facts: Camp East Montana opened in August 2025 as the nation’s largest ICE facility, with the capacity to hold 5,000 immigrant detainees. The Army gave the small firm Acquisition Logistics a $1.3 billion contract to run the camp. Acquisition Logistics had no experience running...