RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

A lobbyist for the College Board delivered a sharp warning to William Slater last month. She was not happy that the Tennessee Republican lawmaker had recently introduced a bill to allow the state’s public universities to accept the Classic Learning Test, an upstart competitor to the College Board’s famed SAT, as an admissions exam. Jeremy Tate, pioneer of the Classic Learning Test: “Absolutely the College Board is trying to undermine the CLT,” he says. Classic Learning Initiatives The lobbyist aimed to kill the bill.  “She let me know that the...

Topline: While the Department of Government Efficiency has taken aim at wasteful spending throughout the federal government, so far it has not set its sights on earmarks.  The previous ban on earmarks that lasted from 2011 to 2021 brought $141 billion in savings, according to new analysis from OpenTheBooks.com. It’s a crucial area of waste that cannot be ignored in the national conversation about deficit spending. Key facts: From 2000 to 2010, Congress spent an average of $20.4 billion per year on earmarks — local pet projects that lawmakers fund in their home districts using...

By Paul D. Thacker, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 4, 2025 Jay Bhattacharya was in pretty terrible shape five years ago. He was losing sleep and weight, not because of the COVID-19 virus but in response to the efforts of his colleagues at Stanford University and the larger medical community to shut down his research, which questioned much of the government’s response to the pandemic.  Jay Bhattacharya: Goes before the Senate this week. Hoover Institution Some of his Stanford colleagues leaked false and damaging information to reporters. The university’s head of...

By Bob Ivry and Jeremy Portnoy, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 3, 2025 To crack down on Pentagon spending, the Defense Department adopted a program in 2015 to track spending on lodging and entertainment. But so few officials used the Visa government travel charge card that nearly 4 million card transactions worth $1.2 billion couldn’t be reviewed in enough detail to check for misuse, abuse, and fraud, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General said last month.  Beetle Bailey: Goldbricker of the past -- and icon of Pentagon incompetence and...

As Elon Musk and his tech team urge their fellow Americans to become “domestic auditors” to help rein in federal spending, people have been encouraged to use the Treasury Department’s usaspending.gov website to identify and track government finance. Your go-to source? Guess again, say experts. usaspending.gov But usaspending.gov is wrong on the biggest picture, RealClearInvestigations found.  The total amount of spending across “all agencies,” as recorded at usaspending.gov, appears to be 50% higher than most experts interviewed...

The smoke from fire-ravaged Los Angeles has cleared, but a thick pall clouds the funding for fire recovery efforts. While insurance companies, landowners and taxpayers will surely foot most of the bill, it is likely that money solicited by Mayor Karen Bass through a campaign finance loophole will play a role. This wildfire is in the past, but a political firestorm arose soon after, over "behested payments." AP Questions regarding these funds, called behested payments, arose during fierce backlash over Bass’ decision earlier this month to appoint former L.A. Police Commissioner...

Although Hunter Biden got away with multiple crimes thanks to his father’s unprecedented pardon, he still faces punishment for his conduct before the District of Columbia Bar. Even presidential clemency cannot shield him from possible suspension of his law license. Hamilton "Phil" Fox, D.C. Bar Disciplinary Counsel: With Hunter's rap sheet wiped clean, probers have to "prove" crimes all over again. DC Bar/Facebook But former President Biden’s pardon has muddled – and delayed – the process of deciding Hunter’s professional fate, according to the D.C....

By John Murawski, RealClearInvestigstionsFebruary 19, 2025 In the plummy world of alumni relations, where distinguished graduates are awarded honorary degrees and major donors are fêted at the president’s mansion, it is virtually unheard of for former students to set up shop as a political counterweight to the university, challenging its modes of governance and day-to-day operations That was then: Silent Sam, standing. Yellowspacehopper/Wikipedia Alarmed by academia’s dominant ideological ethos of social justice activism – particularly the holy trinity of...

By Paul D. Thacker, RealClearInvestigationsFebruary 19, 2025 President Trump often trumpets American exceptionalism, but an executive order scheduled to take effect this week seeks to uproot a longstanding policy not found in much of the developed world: granting citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil. Under his order, the babies would, instead, inherit the immigration status of their parents.  The President's executive order. whitehouse.gov Attorneys general from 22 states have already sued in two federal district courts and won preliminary rulings...

Democrats have cast the Trump administration’s ouster of eight senior FBI leaders as a “purge” and act of “retribution” from a weaponized Justice Department, some likening it to President Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”  Jeffrey Veltri: Accused of retaliation. LinkedIn But former colleagues of the terminated “G-men” say this narrative is backward. FBI officials, past and present, have marshaled significant evidence via whistleblower complaints and testimony indicating that several terminated leaders...

Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, convened a panel of civil rights leaders last month to assail President Donald Trump’s executive order on “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.” The so-called anti-DEI order, Morial claimed, was an effort to “reverse the gains of the last seventy years.”  Marc Morial: His National Urban League has adopted the very types of discriminatory racial practices that were once condemned by early civil rights leaders seeking a truly colorblind society -- notably Dr. Martin...

By Vince Bielski, RealClearInvestigationsFebruary 5, 2025 After nasty clashes involving character assassinations and a mass resignation, a showdown is drawing closer in Chicago between the most powerful local teachers’ union in the country and the most financially distressed school district.  Stacy Davis Gates, teacher union president: There’s unrest inside the union over her militant leadership. Chicago Teachers Union The growing possibility of a teachers’ strike in a city with a long history of labor upheavals highlights the troubles rocking public schools...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsJanuary 30, 2025 Though even Donald Trump's harshest critics now concede he may not be the "Russian agent” they once speculated he was, the consensus among Washington’s elite remains that he's a beneficiary of Kremlin skullduggery.This persistent belief springs from a January 2017 U.S. intelligence document crafted by the Obama administration, which classified the sourcing behind it at the highest levels. Hillary Clinton, at the Trump inauguration last week, still blames her 2016 loss on Vladimir Putin. Pool Reuters Known...

Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to serve as President Trump’s director of national intelligence hinges on questions about the judgment and patriotism of the former congresswoman and Army veteran, doubts that are expected to take center stage at her Senate confirmation hearing Thursday. Echoing a charge first lodged by Hillary Clinton, Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Elizabeth Warren have spread innuendo that Gabbard is a “compromised” “Russian asset” who has been “in Putin’s pocket.” Former CIA Director John Brennan has speculated that Gabbard may...

By Ben Weingarten, RealClearInvestigationsJanuary 28, 2025 Flanked by some of the Big Tech executives whose companies had suppressed the views of his supporters throughout his predecessor’s term, President Trump on Jan. 20 declared the days of such speech policing over. President Trump's executive order. whitehouse.gov Hours later, the president put action behind his words, signing an executive order prohibiting the federal government from engaging in, facilitating, or funding “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American...

Update, Jan. 27, 2025: Trump Fires Many IGs By Bob Ivry, RealClearInvestigationsJanuary 23, 2025 COVID-19 emergency relief money, which began to flow soon after President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act in March 2020, united Americans from different walks of life, no matter their race, religion, or political affiliation, in the dogged pursuit of fraud. The federal government lost enormous amounts in COVID-19 economic relief begun hastily in the first Trump administration. AP To distribute financial help quickly as lockdowns spread, the Small Business Administration and the lenders...

President Biden’s pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci may protect the former National Institutes of Health official from immediate criminal prosecution, but some critics say he is not completely out of legal jeopardy and that public sentiment might still condemn the man who became known during the COVID-19 pandemic as “Mr. Science.” In the days before Biden offered the pardon to Fauci, along with other critics of Donald Trump, some experts who have followed Fauci’s career and handling of the pandemic, as well as members of the Trump transition team, reiterated their assertion...

The energy policy of the incoming Trump administration seems as concise as it is clear: Slash domestic energy costs under the mantra, popularized in 2008 by GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, of “Drill, baby, drill!” While a RealClearInvestigations canvass of energy experts suggests many of them foresee long-term benefits in that approach, it’s less clear to them that consumers will see immediate change. In other words, Trump may not deliver in 2025 on his campaign pledge to “cut energy prices in half within 12 months.” On the other hand, given...

The Biden administration is formally considering commuting the sentence of the convicted felon who stole and leaked incoming President Trump's tax records along with those of thousands of other taxpayers, in the biggest tax data heist in U.S. history. Littlejohn (top photo) leaked Trump's and Elon Musk's taxes ... Pool Getty Images North America ... and those of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos too. AP A search of the Justice Department's pardon database reveals Charles Edward Littlejohn -- who just began his five-year sentence in May -- has been assigned a clemency case...