Julia K Cole

Between 2002 and 2012, federal agencies spent more than half a trillion dollars ($688 billion) on payments that should never have been made.  Every year, according to their own record-keeping, the agencies that administer major federal programs are now paying out more than $100 billion improperly, and even though they're aware of the problem, they recover only a tiny fraction for taxpayers. This adds up to huge losses for the U.S. Treasury. In 2012 alone, the Office of Management and Budget gathered data on just 13 high-error programs in the federal government, and determined that they made a combined $101.3 billion in improper payments. To put that in perspective, that's almost $16 billion more than the highly controversial budget sequester wound up cutting from government spending in 2013. The government doesn't get a whole lot of that money back. In July, then-Controller of the Office of Management and Budget Daniel Werfel testified in a Senate hearing that ...

The call of the wild is being silenced nationwide by federal bureaucrats. We have less than 50 days left to change their minds.   Submit your comment now to keep gray wolves on the federal endangered species list. Wolves are one of the most iconic symbols of America’s wild places. Yet, for centuries they were ruthlessly hunted, trapped, and poisoned, bringing them to the brink of extinction in the lower-48 states. Wolves have made gains since being reintroduced in Yellowstone, but their position is tenuous to nonexistent in the vast majority of their former range, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the southern Rocky Mountains, and the Northeast. Despite this, last month the Obama Administration announced plans to strip wolves across nearly the entire continental U.S. of their federal protections. Will you lend gray wolves your voice so their recovery can continue? I have witnessed—and defeated in court—a number of flawed attempts to delist and hunt gra...