RealClearInvestigations Articles

Topline: The Miami-Dade County school district’s attempt to get students to purchase cheap, healthy school lunches in 2012 needed just a bit more time in the oven. The district spent $612,808 to replace its cafeteria lines with cashless vending machines, reasoning that students’ love of touchscreens would get them to buy food they might otherwise ignore. “Students are very tech-savvy and love to text, punch in numbers and get things quickly,” one local official told TechNews Daily at the time, paying triple the cost of an average vending machine. Waste of the...

Topline: The former executive director of a federally-funded housing authority in North Carolina recently pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit theft of a federal program. She will serve two years in prison and pay $232,488 in restitution.  Prosecutors claimed Debbie Norris Woodell, 64, paid her husband’s company for work that was never completed and took kitchen appliances meant for low-income tenants. Key facts: Woodell had been working for the Dunn Housing Authority since 1989 and was promoted to executive director in 2014. The authority receives about $1 million per year from...

Topline: A former New York City school superintendent was working for Brooklyn schools as a consultant as of this June, a year after his new employer in New Jersey sued him for alleged fraud and mismanagement, according to an investigation by independent reporter Susan B. Edelman. Key facts: Thomas McBryde Jr. left his job as superintendent of Brooklyn’s District 19 — part of the larger NYC school district — in 2021, but his private McBryde Consulting Group was hired by the district in 2022. He became superintendent of Hackensack Public Schools in New Jersey in 2024. He was...

Topline: City employees in Cary, North Carolina spent $24.2 million on their purchasing cards in 2024 and 2025, filled with arguably some of the most bizarre purchases in the recent history of local governance.  State Auditor Dave Boliek found staff members spent thousands of dollars to film themselves dancing to ABBA songs, and $151,000 to write and promote a book that sold only a handful of copies. They also lost $7,481 from cancelling nonrefundable hotel rooms. Key facts: During a 2024 staff retreat to nearby Wilmington, employees planned an elaborate lip-syncing contest to the song...

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week July 19 to July 25   RCI Podcasts & Videos On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller speaks with Dr. Jonathan Lesser and Mitchell Rolling about their new National Center for Energy Analytics study, "Batteries and the Grid: The Hype, Hope, and Economic Reality." In a separate episode, Miller interviews RCI senior reporter James Varney about his article detailing how the federal government is increasingly acting like a venture capitalist by investing billions of taxpayer dollars in private companies. Featured...

Topline: The City of Oakland spent $2 million in 2024 to issue citations for illegal trash dumping, but offenders rarely bothered to respond. Just $16,000 of fines were collected, the city auditor found in a recent report. Key facts: Garbage pickup in Oakland can be expensive and cumbersome. Residents are required to subscribe to the county’s weekly pickup service for $40 or more per month. Bulky trash like appliances or mattresses require a pickup appointment made two weeks to a month in advance, and can cost nearly $700 for huge disposals. Many residents illegally ignore the...

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...

For much of its five-decade history, the Colorado Energy Office was a small department with a handful of employees who supported practical, cost-saving energy conservation measures. From 2010 to 2022, records show, the office received an average of $7 million per year from the U.S. Department of Energy.  All that changed after the Biden administration and Congress approved hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending to provide “a more equitable, low-carbon, and clean energy economy.” In fiscal year 2024, Colorado’s state energy office was slated to...

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,...