RealClearInvestigations Articles

Topline: Congressional salaries and office space already cost taxpayers a bundle. Yet few realize that the speaker of the House gets to keep their office space, staff and budget for five years after retiring. Dennis Hastert, the Republican speaker from 1999 to 2006, received a $4 million budget after he left office, and used $1.9 million of it, according to ABC News — $2.8 million in 2025 dollars. Hastert’s office cost $441,000 in 2010 alone, according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a...

Topline: There’s no denying that the federal government needs to sell many of its buildings. It would cost $370 billion to repair all of them, while they were only 12% occupied on average last year. However, the government might have been better off keeping the Chet Holifield Federal Building on its 89-acre campus in Laguna Niguel, California. The “Ziggurat” building, modeled after an ancient Mesopotamian rectangular stepped tower, will sell for less than even low-end estimates, after the General Services Administration left it in disrepair and mismanaged its...

Topline: A bill that passed the Indiana state legislature on April 1 will make it harder for public employees to buy luxury cars with taxpayer money, but it’s too late to prevent the purchases already made by two top officials. Secretary of State Diego Morales is driving around a $90,000 GMC Yukon Denali, marketed as a car to "immerse yourself in luxury, " according to the IndyStar. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith is driving an $88,000 Chevy Tahoe High Country. Waste of the Day 4.15.25 Open the Books Key facts: Beckwith’s car is the most expensive model of the Chevy Tahoe, with...

While limiting strings-attached grants and curbing federal regulation, President Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education also take aim at a key tool bureaucrats use to oversee schools in all 50 states: civil rights investigations. Celine Almazan, advocate for the disabled:  Trump  administration changes have left clients "in limbo, or distraught, thinking there will be no accountability,” inclusionlaw.com Probes handled by the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against public schools, colleges and universities roughly doubled...

Topline: Local residents and environmental advocates have banded together to oppose California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed $20 billion water tunnel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, with various groups arguing the project will “make our town uninhabitable”   and have “terrible consequences” for wildlife.  Key facts: California officials have debated building a tunnel for decades. The current proposal will store rainwater to prepare for potential droughts caused by climate change, and is expected to provide $38 billion in benefits: an increased...

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the WeekApril 6 to April 12, 2025   Featured Investigation:Paying the Cost for Going After a Tax Cheat Named Hunter Biden In RealClearInvestigations, Nancy Rommelmann speaks with IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler in their first in-depth interviews about their years-long pursuit of Hunter Biden's tax cheating, a case that upended their lives and careers before their ultimate vindication: Ziegler, a self-identified Democrat, had no grudge against the former vice president’s son in 2018 when he came upon Hunter’s name...

Topline: If the federal government wants to keep Medicare and Social Security intact for the next 75 years, it will need an extra $78.2 trillion in cash that is not available under current law.  To say this is a Herculean task would be an understatement. The government has only $5.7 trillion in assets.  Key facts: The Treasury’s annual “Financial Report of the United States Government” warns every year that Medicare and Social Security are headed towards insolvency. Waste of the Day 4.11.25 Open the Books The latest report estimates that in the next 75...

Topline: The Spanish-American War ended in 1898, but it took over a century for Congress to completely stop charging a telephone tax created to fund it. The tax was finally eliminated in 2006, once the war was a distant memory.  Americans spent $128.6 billion in total paying the tax, according to the IRS and Congressional Research Service. It generated $5.9 billion in taxes in 2005, the most of any year. That’s one large phone bill: $9.8 billion in today’s money. Key facts: The telephone excise tax was created in 1898 as a way to cover the federal budget deficit created by...

By Nancy Rommelmann, RealClearInvestigationsApril 10, 2025 Joe Ziegler is not a beaten man – not for his antagonists’ lack of trying. Across his seven-year pursuit of Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes, Ziegler, a special agent in the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigative division, and his colleague Gary Shapley were shunned, threatened, and lied to. Ziegler was doxed. Shapley was told to accept a demotion or resign. Convinced the IRS and Department of Justice were stonewalling their efforts to bring charges against a sitting president’s son, the agents went...

Topline: Spending at the Department of Agriculture increased by 339% between 2000 and 2024, while staff numbers fell, OpenTheBooks found in its third and final review of federal agency spending trends. Key facts: USDA spent $75 billion in 2000 with a staff of 106,715. By 2024, its staff headcount had fallen to 92,072, but the agency spent $255 billion. Top salaries also increased recently at USDA. In 2023, the top paid official earned $252,840, the most ever for the agency at the time. In 2024, nine employees outearned that amount, with deputy administrator Cathy Glover taking home...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Like the other programs launched at universities around the country to revive the classical liberal arts and America’s founding principles, the University of North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership has faced fierce antagonism from entrenched faculty and administrators. Mostly, the opposition comes from academics on the left who typically demean the push for traditional civics education as a rightwing enterprise. J. Christopher Clemens: Quit as provost after months of acrimonious infighting. UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership But here...

Topline: The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, one of seven small agencies ordered to reduce its workforce in President Donald Trump’s March 15 executive order, had a payroll of $28.6 million in 2024, according to data obtained by OpenTheBooks.  Of the agency’s 200 employees, 164 earned between $100,000 and $204,000. All but 15 employees have now been placed on leave. The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak, who has done extensive reporting on FMCS, claims the agency exists only to “provide luxurious lifestyles for its employees,” including hiring friends and...

Topline: States and the federal government spent $4.3 billion on Medicaid for hundreds of thousands of patients who were already insured in other states, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal that used data from 2019 to 2021. Key facts: Private companies that insure Medicaid patients get paid each month for each person they cover. Patients should cancel their insurance if they move to another state and enroll in that state’s Medicaid program, often with a new insurer — but they often forget. State governments are responsible for checking their lists and removing...

Although The New York Times is known as the newspaper of record, many of its stories, vast swaths of printed history, are forever lost, existing, if at all, only in the minds of some particularly savvy readers. Before the internet, each day’s paper usually existed in archival form, preserved on microfilm or stored in one of the newspaper’s vast repositories, or both. [Shown, the first issue, from 1851, according to Wikpedia.] But not every article was saved. The Times publishes more than one edition every day. Before the digital age, later editions were updated to...

Mr. Trump’s tariffs aren’t really about tariffs. They are the opening gambit in a more ambitious plan to smash the world’s economic and geopolitical order and replace it with something intended to better serve American interests. This plan is often referred to as the Mar-a-Lago Accord. Apparently devised by Mr. Trump and two of his top economic advisers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Stephen Miran, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, it seeks to improve the United States’ global trading position by using tariffs and other...

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the WeekMarch 30 to April 5, 2025   Featured Investigation:Climate Change Driving California’s Golden Road to Decline California has long seen itself as model for the country and the world, but it has become tarnished because of progressive policies that have placed fighting climate change above delivering basic services and creating opportunity. In the first of two reported essays for RealClearInvestigations, Joel Kotkin reports: The state’s effort to achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2045 has meant massive subsidies for wind and...

California’s wide range of problems – including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market – show the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there is the will to change. Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California...

Topline: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent $20 million on several contracts and grants centered around diversity, equity and inclusion between 2021 and 2024, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The controversial ideology has been embedded in almost every facet of NASA’s $25 billion budget, OpenTheBooks found through a series of open records requests. Key facts: The largest DEI contract was $2.4 million paid to LMI Consulting to “incorporate and deeply engrain diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility in the culture and business.” NASA...

She is not afraid to challenge the US president and his administration – even if it gives her grief: Each uncomfortable exchange between Collins and the 27-year-old press secretary [Karoline Leavitt] will be seen as a win for the administration. “They think insulting people, demeaning them is the quickest way to discredit,” a former cabinet official during the first Trump administration told The Telegraph. Collins, however, insists it is simply her job “to ask questions and get answers”. “... [T]his has always been my mantra, kind of since round...