RealClearInvestigations Articles

Topline: For almost a decade, the federal government’s budget for Antarctic research included little money for actual scientific inquiry, and a boatload of cash for infrastructure and administrative overhead. An independent review found that from 2002 to 2011, less than 20% of the $300 million spent on the U.S. Antarctic Program funded the academic work central to the program’s mission. The rest paid for fuel, repairs to aging buildings and more, because — surprise, surprise — living in the South Pole is logistically difficult. That’s according to the...

Topline: Since 2019, school districts across 24 states and Puerto Rico have lost $225 million to fraud confirmed by the U.S. Department of Education inspector general’s semiannual report to Congress. No more than $67 million has been recovered. Key facts: Open the Books and the State Financial Officers Foundation documented 74 instances of confirmed school fraud, averaging over $3 million each. There are far more that have gone unprosecuted or undetected. Florida and Illinois schools each had the most instances of fraud with 11. Indiana lost the most money — $44 million —...

Topline: A city councilman in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, has still not paid more than $47,000 of utility bills he has owed since 1999. Another two councilmen have a combined $30,231 of unpaid bills dating back several months. The City Council voted to raise residents’ utility bills by 15% this March. Key facts: Former State Auditor Beth Wood previously discovered that Councilman Andre Knight had not paid $47,704 in bills for water, electricity and more. His utilities should have been disconnected, but two former city managers and the local finance director intervened beginning in...

Topline: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration cancelled development on a new rocket launcher after already spending $1.4 billion on the project. The half-finished launcher will be stripped down and used as spare parts for existing machinery. Key facts: The Mobile Space Launcher 2 was supposed to send astronauts to the Moon in early 2028 as part of the Artemis IV mission. The construction company Bechtel National began work in June 2019 and was expected to be done in March 2023 at a cost of $383 million. But NASA never created a reliable cost or schedule estimate, and Bechtel...

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week July 12 to July 18   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 Tablet writer and RCI contributor Lee Smith about conservative media in the Trump era with a special focus on X. On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller speaks with Varney about his recent RCI article that examines billions of taxpayer dollars invested in private companies. Varney’s investigation raises questions about oversight,...

Topline: The Utah state auditor found “wasteful and extravagant purchases” made with taxpayer-funded school vouchers during the 2024-25 school year, including trampolines, high-end gaming laptops and mountain bikes. Key facts: Auditors reviewed $17.1 million of the $67.7 million spent with school vouchers. More than half was spent on private school tuition, but there were high expenses for extracurricular activities, furniture, field trips and more. One family ordered a $6,150 Apple MacBook Pro from Amazon. Eight others bought laptops for more than $4,000. Six families bought...

Topline: In 2012, officials in Baldwin County, Alabama, used a $500,000 federal grant from the Department of Justice to install nearly 200 surveillance cameras in three county courthouses. The pricey security system was so powerful that it arguably violated federal privacy laws. Rather than risk a lawsuit, county officials shut off its audio recording capability entirely, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for technology that could never legally be turned on. That's according to the annual "Wastebook" report published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a...

If Johns Hopkins University wanted to signal its seriousness about creating an alternative to the left-leaning orthodoxy that permeates higher education, it couldn’t have done better than the recent hire of economist Peter Arcidiacono.  Arcidiacono, a devout Roman Catholic, faced campus protests and sleepless nights after publication of his empirical findings that affirmative action can be harmful to minority students who aren’t academically prepared. He was in the spotlight again for providing the evidence in the landmark 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard that...

Topline: Medicare paid an estimated $255.1 million in claims for hospice patients who either did not have a documented terminal illness or never signed a statement electing to receive hospice care, according to a recent audit by the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general. Key facts: The report focused on patients who were supposedly admitted to hospice in 2021 even though they had not visited a hospital in the preceding 18 months. Such an occurrence is unusual, but the payments had not been flagged by Medicare contractors for signs of potential fraud until...

Topline: As of June 2025, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was paying to store $2.9 million of rotten “super cereal” and $10 million of food that was going to expire in less than a year in a Djibouti warehouse, the agency’s inspector general found in a recent audit. Key facts: The U.S. planned to donate the super cereal to the United Nations’ World Food Programme. A mix of ingredients like corn, soybeans and dried skim milk, it’s used as an emergency source of nutrition for infants and small children. USAID contractors accepted a shipment of...

Topline: More than 571,000 current and retired federal employees owed $6.3 billion of unpaid federal taxes as of 2024, according to a new report from the Treasury’s inspector general. Key facts: There are 215,000 active employees with $2.1 billion of unpaid taxes. The rest of the tax dodgers are retired workers who receive a federal pension. The issue has steadily worsened since 2021, when 401,000 employees owed $4.8 billion. The inspector general said some enforcement measures were paused during the Covid-19 pandemic. Waste of the Day 7.13.26 Open the Books The U.S. Postal...

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week July 5 to July 11 RCI Podcasts & Videos On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, J. Peder Zane speaks with Noah Rothman of the National Review about his insightful new book “Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America.” On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller interviews John Murawski about his recent article in RealClearInvestigations reporting that the death of wokeness has been greatly exaggerated. Featured Investigation: When Uncle Sam Turns Venture Capitalist,...

Topline: Almost 100 retired workers on Long Island, NY, have been double-dipping on their taxpayer-funded health insurance — some for more than two decades. A June 16 audit from the Nassau County comptroller found $1.4 million in benefits paid to former employees’ spouses, who themselves were already receiving benefits from a different county. Key facts: State law and union contracts require Nassau County to cover former employees’ Medicare Part B premiums once they reach age 65. The standard premium is $203 per month and covers doctor’s visits and medical...

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...

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is the most violent and dangerous nation in the developed world. This dark view is frequently invoked by conservatives to demand stronger penalties for crimes and by progressives to argue for stronger gun laws.  At the same time, other nations point to crime as an Achilles heel of the American system. These include two peer nations with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world – Australia and Canada. In 2025, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that “the U.S. generally sees higher violent crime...

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...