Free Republic

President Trump's block-grant plan is a bold call to congressional Republicans to not squander their next opportunity to relieve U.S. education of bureaucracy like they did in his first two years of office. President Trump has become the first president to incorporate into his budget one of the few good federal education policy ideas: Sending Americans’ money back to their states to decide how to use it.Federal education programs have wasted trillions, enriching contractors and bureaucrats who lobby for open taps while arm-twisting Americans into trusting them with their dollars and children against all evidence that trust is deserved. Even...

A proposal to repeal Obamacare entitlements and replace them with grants to states would reduce premiums for individual coverage by as much as 32 percent, according to an analysis by the Center for Health and Economy.The Health Care Choices Proposal also would modestly reduce the deficit, increase the number of people with private health insurance, and cut Medicaid spending, according to Center for Health and Economy.The proposal, the product of national and state think tanks, policy analysts, and others in the conservative community, embarks on a new path to empower consumers and return authority to the states to provide people...

WASHINGTON, D.C.] – U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) today announced that communities and housing agencies throughout Illinois will receive a total of $26,128,915 in grant funding through three programs administered by Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to help develop urban communities in the area. “This funding will give local development agencies around Illinois the ability to expand and improve affordable housing and other critical services in their communities,” Durbin said. “These federal programs provide invaluable assistance to those in need.”    Community Development Block Grants The Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) program provides annual grants to states and local governments to...

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is streamlining the application process for state economic development funds and released a blueprint for regional councils that will compete for cash and tax breaks. Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday announced that he has redesigned the process for the state to distribute $1 billion in economic development money, enabling applicants to fill out just one form when seeking to tap funds from nine separate state agencies. The procedural streamlining is part of the governor's effort to get more bang for the state's economic development dollars by having regions compete for funding. The governor also released a “blueprint”...

In many ways, our health care system is broken. Even people satisfied with their own care are nervous about losing it, concerned about rising costs, and frustrated by the failure of government to bring about genuine reform. But the reason Congress has so far been unable to fix our health care problems is that Congress is too busy creating the problems in the first place. That’s why the current proposals emanating from the White House and congressional Democrats won’t work either. Those proposals would hand over the most personal, private undertaking of our lives — health care — to the...