Free Republic

Thirty million dollars would make anyone sit up and pay attention, especially when the words following include “the government” and “taxpayers.” But is $30 million each year what it costs to maintain the protection of a federally designated national forest? Surprisingly, no. This average annual loss of $30 million stems not from protecting the forest, but logging the forest, Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest in particular. That’s equivalent to over $100,000 per timber job in the area.When the current administration announced its intent to modify the protections of the “Roadless Rule” that restricts logging in over 9 million acres of...

I’m a federal criminal defense attorney. The range of prison time the government asked for Roger Stone shocked me as unduly high given the non-violent nature of the underlying crimes. By Caroline Court Roger Stone went to trial and lost. As a result, he’s likely going to be sentenced to some jail time. The question is, how much jail time is appropriate in his case?Federal sentencing has two components. The first is the statutory range (what’s provided for by the statute—e.g., five to 40 years). Here, two of the crimes for which Stone was convicted (obstructing a congressional investigation and...

Federal government is closing early because of threat of snow. It’s 43 degrees outside in the nation’s capitol now.

<p>A Middlesex County man is in police custody after several pipe bomb-like devices were found near the route of a Labor Day parade that the governor was set to attend Monday.</p> <p>Officials detained a man on Monday morning after they found “over half a dozen” devices on his large property near South Plainfield’s Labor Day Parade route, according to a senior law enforcement official with the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.</p>

Big government overreach knows no bounds. The latest example of federal regulation that will threaten thousands of jobs and livelihoods of hardworking Americas comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The NOAA says that Maine's lobster industry is to blame for the killing of right whales, an endangered species, and has enacted regulations set to take place this September which will harm the already struggling industry. Yet, the evidence says that the proposed regulation will in no way actually help the whales and will instead only burden lobstermen.As reported by the Portland Herald Press, NOAA "has ordered Maine to...

I think the time is coming for an idea that is so old that it is new again: cutting the Federal government in half. The idea is: cancel all Federal welfare-type programs, including all means-tested welfare programs (apparently there are over 150 of them), all healthcare-related programs including Medicare and Medicaid, all education-related, arts-related and housing-related programs, and anything else of this sort -- in short, most everything except for the military, national parks, and maybe some public works. Social Security could eventually be reformed to a system of private retirement accounts, known as a "provident fund" system and in...

The most effective way to deal with the national debt has always been the same, reducing the size of the gargantuan federal government In mid-February, our national debt reached $22 trillion, a new record for our country. Since President Trump took office in January of 2017, our debt has increased over $2 trillion. During the administration of President Obama, it increased from $10.6 trillion to $19.9 trillion. Thus, the national debt has more than doubled in 10 years and it is still increasing nearly $1 trillion per year. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the national debt for this fiscal...

Monday, Jan. 7 5:30 a.m. It’s the first full day I am furloughed, but I’m not sleeping in. My wife goes to a hot yoga class on Monday and she gets up at 5:30 a.m. to get there on time. I get up then, too, because she needs every light on. 6:43 a.m. The kids are awake and I’m getting them ready for school. I have to dress the 5-year-old in his school uniform; help the 7-year-old find his school pullover — “not sweatshirt!”; there’s a big difference — and keep the 3-year-old from destroying whatever she comes into contact...

Project Veritas just released its latest undercover video, "Unmasking the Deep State."  This first video focuses on a State Department employee who is both a poster child for the Deep State and a perfect example of why the federal bureaucracy needs serious reform.  Providentially, there is new legislation being considered in Congress that would do just that: the Merit Act (H.R. 559). The Merit Act would greatly streamline the process for firing employees who are poor performers, insubordinate, or otherwise engaged in misconduct.  Since the election of President Trump, the bureaucracy, including numerous holdovers from the Obama administration, has been engaged in...

President Trump recently announced plans to cancel an automatic pay increase for federal employees, a plan I strongly support.  This is part of his promise to drain the swamp, a message that resonated powerfully with the American people.  Americans are fed up with an out-of-touch federal government.  They want to see common-sense actions being taken to clean up the federal workforce.  In addition to canceling these unearned pay increases, President Trump is carrying out the will of the people by taking action.  This includes limiting federal employees’ use of their official time for non-work activities, cracking down on unfair union...

President Trump on Friday signed a series of executive orders making it easier to fire federal government workers and rolling back the prerogatives of unions that represent them. Andrew Bremberg, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said the president was “fulfilling his promise to promote more efficient government by reforming our Civil Service rules.” But the push also reflects conservatives’ long-running suspicion of the federal bureaucracy, one that the president’s advisers have been outspoken in channeling. Shortly after Mr. Trump took office, Stephen K. Bannon, then his chief strategist, called for “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”...

Government in the name of order, control, efficiency, organization, the greatest good for the greatest number, solidarity, social justice, and safety is instead ruling over a society that is increasingly disordered, crime-ridden, unjust, and disturbed to an extreme. A word that describes the direction of our acceleration through space and time is anarchy. The momentum toward anarchy began with the move toward federal government expansion. During Woodrow Wilson's presidency, we began to see the implementation of what is now called the administrative state. This was helped along by our participation in WWI, which created the need for more governmental controls....

Whether a government shutdown is on the horizon for the holiday season, a majority of federal employees who took an anonymous online survey from Federal News Radio said their federal agencies are ready if a shutdown does happen. Congress has until midnight on Friday, Dec. 22 to avoid a government shutdown. To do that, the House and Senate must pass either another stopgap continuing resolution or approve an omnibus spending plan, which came closer to reality on Tuesday, when President Donald Trump signed a bill authorizing more than $700 billion in defense spending for the rest of fiscal 2018. The...

After years of debate, a U.S. government board has voted to rename Utah’s Negro Bill Canyon, overruling a recommendation by Utah officials to keep the name. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names decided Thursday to rename it Grandstaff Canyon to get rid of an offensive name, The Salt Lake Tribune reports. The vote was 12-0, with one member declining to vote. The decision comes 16 years after the board voted to keep the name. The new name honors black rancher and prospector William Grandstaff, whose cattle grazed there in the 1870s. “His name was Grandstaff; it was not Negro Bill,”...

By Elizabeth Harrington Published September 08, 2017 Washington Free Beacon The National Science Foundation is spending over $130,000 on a study that asks four-year-olds about their "internal sense of gender identity." A grant for a two-year study was awarded to the University of Washington this summer. The project will interview 250 children aged four to six, and their parents, asking a series of questions about "gendered behavior."

What if the federal government captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text message and all the fiber-optic data generated by every person and entity in the United States 24/7/365? What if this mass surveillance was never authorized by any federal law? What if this mass surveillance has come about by the secret collusion of presidents and their spies in the National Security Agency and by the federal government's forcing the major telephone and computer service providers to cooperate with it? What if the service providers were coerced into giving the feds continuous physical access...

[snip]Subsidizing ballparks for billionaire owners and millionaire players, however, shouldn't be part of the equation. According to the Brookings Institution, the stadium loophole has cost federal taxpayers $3.2 billion for 36 professional sports facilities since 2000. Maybe bringing together two senators from vastly different states and from widely different ideologies — U.S. Sen. James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat — will help inspire a fractious Congress to work together on a bipartisan bill to cut federal subsidies for sports stadiums. The bill would end the federal tax giveaway for municipal bonds used...

<p>12:25 p.m.</p> <p>President Donald Trump has signed a new executive order taking aim at government regulations.</p> <p>The president says the order will direct each federal agency to establish a regulatory reform task force. The task forces will then recommend which regulations they can simplify or eliminate.</p>

President Trump responded publicly to the news of the forced resignation of his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, asserting on Tuesday that the “real story” is the number of “illegal leaks” from U.S. government officials. Trump made the claim in an early-morning tweet.

Many of the 2.7 million bureaucrats employed by the federal government oppose President Donald Trump’s policies and are actively attempting to sabotage his agenda. That sabotage comes in several forms, from secretly circulating emails among fellow ideologically committed members of the federal bureaucracy plotting strategy, to working behind the scenes with Democratic legislators to create out-of-the ordinary bureaucratic actions, to leaking confidential documents to the press.