Free Republic

Three judges appointed by former President Donald Trump handed down an astonishing decision on Wednesday, effectively holding that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency charged with protecting consumers from a wide range of predatory activity by lenders and other financial services, is unconstitutional and must be stripped of its authority. The decision by the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit relies on a novel reading of an obscure provision of the Constitution, and is entirely at odds with a Supreme Court decision that rejects the Fifth Circuit’s reading of that provision. This is not...

The White House is moving to dissolve the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and reorganize the agency’s responsibilities into three existing departments in order to “drive what is needed to support the mission in all of government.” “When we really look at the need for government overall, and we looked at the [OPM’s] design to support those needs, there was a fundamental structural misalignment between the challenges of today around our workforce and what OPM was conditioned to do,” Margaret Weichert, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget and acting OPM director, told The Daily Caller...

President Barack Obama wants to create a new government agency dedicated to keeping the nation’s food safe. The proposal in the president’s budget released Monday comes after outbreaks of illnesses linked to chicken, eggs, peanuts and cantaloupe in recent years. More than a dozen federal agencies oversee food safety, and consumer advocates have long called for bringing all those functions together in a single home. […] The budget proposes consolidating the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and all of FDA’s food safety oversight into one new agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. The new agency...

Investor's Business Daily reports that due to ObamaCare, Health and Human Services is on track to become "the first $1 trillion federal agency." This expansion of government leads to new hiring (e.g., 650 new employees to work in the Medicare/Medicaid Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight), and these new federal employees need desks and cubicles. Thus it's not surprising to read in the Montgomery County Gazette: The federal government proved the savior for commercial real estate in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., last year and 2011 is shaping up the same way. That was the good news...

Earnest question: When was the last time in modern history that an arm of the federal government took to boycotting a state? I can’t think of an example, but my political memory is lamentably short. And a follow-up: If it did happen before, did the man in charge at the time open his mouth to say something about it? I thought policy differences with state governments are to be settled at the ballot box or in court, as this one soon will be, and not with unilateral action that’ll hurt the blue-collar joes in Arizona whom Obama claims to care...

Speculators have filed applications to develop more than 1 million acres of desert in Southern California with solar, wind and geothermal power plants, setting up a classic clash over land use with environmentalists and off-road enthusiasts. They have submitted at least 130 proposals with the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees all of the territory, in recent years and especially since 2007. The interest is so hot that even if many of the projects fall through, the remaining ones would change the look of the arid landscape. California, particularly the southern half, is the epicenter of the nation's push for...

Wolves, wolf-hybrids suspected culprits in bloody predations... his herd of 700 sheep. But something had gotten there before him. Everywhere he looked, it seemed, there was a sheep that had been attacked and bloodied. "It was terrible," he said. "Some of them just had a chunk of flesh tore out, in some cases clear to the bone, the size of an orange. A few were bit in the neck." A few of the sheep could be doctored, but many of them died... of the 60 that were attacked, 21 died and 39 were injured. On top of that, the percentage...