Free Republic

The pandemic divided Americans into two classes: those who could work from home and those who could not. Federal government employees were members of the privileged class. And they don’t want that to change. During the pandemic, over 90% of the EPA, USAID, the Department of Education and, ironically, the Department of Labor, were 'working' online. The utility of federal agencies could roughly be measured by whether their employees were mostly showing up to work, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, or were permanently out to lunch like the Department of Housing and Urban Development which did...

The number of container ships stuck at anchor off Los Angeles and Long Beach is down to around 20 per day, from 30 a few months ago. Does this mean the capacity crunch in the trans-Pacific market is finally easing? Absolutely not, warned Nerijus Poskus, vice president of global ocean at freight forwarder Flexport. “It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse,” he told American Shipper in an interview on Monday. “What I’m seeing is unprecedented. We are seeing a tsunami of freight,” he reported. “For the month of May, everything on the trans-Pacific is basically sold out. We had one...

It's the backlogs, stupid! Over the last several years, I've noted the following immigration backlogs that continue to plague our homeland security system: *The backlog of 600,000-plus fugitive deportee cases. *The backlog of 4 million immigration applications of all kinds. *The backlog of an estimated 100,000 FBI background checks for legal immigrant applicants. *The disappearance of 111,000 citizenship applications. The Washington Post reports today that those mounds of unprocessed paperwork continue to grow. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came here legally are waiting for FBI background checks that must be obtained before they can become naturalized: