Bureaucracy Times

All the news fit to be declassified.

Category: Bureaucracy in Focus

  • The Calming Area

    Somewhere in the Everglades, between July 2025 and January 2026, the federal government discovered a new use for the word “calming.” Staff at the Florida Soft-Sided Facility, the detention center better known by its unofficial and rather more honest nickname, “Alligator Alcatraz,” used it to describe an outdoor metal box measuring roughly eighteen square feet. Detainees were placed inside these enclosures 79 times over that six month span, for anywhere from six minutes to nearly two hours, with an average stay just short of one hour. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General visited on January 21, 2026, looked at the boxes, and concluded that whatever they were, they were not calming. It called the practice “unprecedented” among every detention facility it has ever inspected, and recommended that ICE stop using them immediately, for any reason, for any length of time. That recommendation, like the other nine in the report, was later closed administratively, not because anyone fixed anything, but because the facility stopped existing before anyone had to.

    A Rose by Any Other Name

    Bureaucracies are gifted at inventing language that makes the unbearable sound optional. Facility leadership told OIG investigators that these enclosures were “calming areas,” spaces detainees could request voluntarily when they needed a moment away from the crowd. It is a lovely piece of institutional poetry, evoking something between a meditation room and a quiet corner at a daycare. It also does not survive contact with the physical evidence. Inspectors observed locking mechanisms on the enclosures, the kind of hardware one does not generally install on a space people are free to leave whenever they like. Staff insisted time inside was closely monitored and that nobody was locked in. The report does not resolve this contradiction so much as let it sit there, both claims on the record, the locks photographed and cataloged regardless.

    The euphemism matters because it is doing real work. Call something a cage and you invite scrutiny; call it a calming area and you invite a shrug. The Florida Soft-Sided Facility’s paperwork consistently chose the shrug. The eighteen square feet of floor space is not, and neither are the dimensions behind that figure: roughly four feet three inches by four feet three inches, a footprint smaller than a standard walk-in closet, standing outdoors in South Florida, a state not known for gentle weather. One does not need to adjudicate every allegation about heat or sun exposure to notice that the structure itself was never going to be mistaken for a wellness amenity by anyone who had actually stood inside one.

    It is worth pausing on who gets to name a thing. The detainees inside these boxes did not choose the phrase “calming area.” Facility staff did, and facility staff are also the ones who logged the duration of each stay, who decided which incidents warranted the enclosure, and who described its purpose to inspectors after the fact. Every euphemism in this story was manufactured by the same party being asked to explain itself. That is not a conspiracy. It is simply how institutional language works when nobody outside the institution is in the room to object.

    The Twenty-Six Minutes

    OIG’s report distinguishes itself from the more sensational outside allegations that had already been circulating, that detainees were baked in these boxes under direct sun for punishment, denied food and water, left to the mosquitoes. The inspector general says plainly that it could neither confirm nor refute those claims, and that none of the detainees it interviewed reported experiencing them. This is the sort of finding that gets quoted by whichever side finds it convenient and ignored by the other. It deserves neither treatment. It is simply what a limited, one day inspection can and cannot establish.

    But buried in the same report is a single entry that does more work than any of the outside allegations combined: facility documentation showing a detainee held in one of these enclosures for 26 minutes after failing to comply with a lawful command. Twenty-six minutes is not a rounding error. It is a logged, documented, administratively recorded use of an eighteen square foot metal box as a disciplinary tool, written down by the facility’s own staff in the facility’s own paperwork. ICE told inspectors the enclosures served several purposes: discipline, crisis intervention, housing reassignment, conflict de-escalation. Set against a background of “calming areas” offered on request, discipline is not a small addition to that list. It is the whole list tipping over.

    What a Federal Watchdog Will and Will Not Say

    There is a particular value to a finding like “unprecedented among detention facilities OIG has inspected,” and it has nothing to do with adjectives. OIG inspects a great many ICE facilities, under multiple administrations, across a range of political climates in which the agency’s practices have been generous with euphemism and stingy with disclosure. When an independent oversight body with that breadth of comparison says it has never seen this before, that is not rhetorical flourish. That is a baseline being broken in real time, documented by the one entity in this story with no evident interest in making Alligator Alcatraz look better or worse than it was.

    And yet the practical consequence of that finding was almost nothing. The recommendation to discontinue the enclosures immediately arrived in a report published after the facility had already ceased operations in June 2026. ICE never had to comply, because there was nothing left to comply with. The recommendation was closed the way a case file is closed when the defendant dies before trial: administratively, finally, and without anyone having answered for the underlying conduct. The eighteen square foot boxes were never dismantled by order. They simply stopped being used because the facility around them stopped being used, a distinction that matters enormously to accountability and not at all to anyone who spent an hour inside one of them.

    What remains is a documentary record: photographs of locking mechanisms, a timestamp log running from six minutes fifty three seconds to one hour fifty nine minutes eighteen seconds, and one entry, 26 minutes long, that quietly answers the question the calming area euphemism was built to avoid. The federal government inspected its own creation, wrote down what it found, called it unprecedented, and then let the whole matter close itself. That is not oversight failing to notice a problem. That is oversight noticing a problem in exact, granular detail and discovering it had no lever left to pull.

    Source: DHS Office of Inspector General, Unannounced Inspection of ICE’s Florida Soft-Sided Facility (“Alligator Alcatraz”) in Ochopee, Florida, OIG-26-22, September 11, 2026.

    For more on federal oversight of immigration detention, see Whose Facility Is It Anyway — examining DHS’s claim that it bore no responsibility for Alligator Alcatraz despite $608.4 million in federal funding — and The Third Inspection: Krome Fails the Same Test Again, on how the Krome North detention center has now failed three consecutive OIG inspections with the same findings.

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  • Buy America, Trust America

    When Congress folded the Build America, Buy America Act into the 2021 infrastructure law, it built in something federal industrial policy rarely bothers with: an actual hard number.

    Under Section 70914(a) of the statute, the head of every covered federal agency must ensure that none of the funds for an infrastructure award are obligated unless all the iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials used in the project are produced in the United States.

    Waivers exist, and 2 CFR Part 184 spells out exactly three grounds for one: public interest, nonavailability, or a cost increase north of 25 percent. That last figure is not a vibe. It is a line item.

    The theory behind the law is straightforward enough. BABA was sold as industrial policy with a national security gloss, which is keep federal infrastructure dollars circulating through American steel mills and manufacturers rather than leaking out to the cheapest global bidder, on the logic that a country which cannot make its own rebar in a crisis has a problem bigger than procurement.

    Four HUD program offices administer money that counts as infrastructure spending under the statute, which means four separate offices inherited the same legal obligation to check their grantees’ receipts.

    You would think an agency handed a bright line would build a fence along it. According to HUD’s own Office of Inspector General, the Department spent more than four years administering this law across those four offices without a single agency wide plan to verify anyone was actually complying with it.

    HUD did not designate an official to own BABA implementation until April 16, 2026, and it did so only in the middle of the OIG’s own fieldwork on the subject. Nothing focuses an agency’s mind quite like watching an inspector general take notes.

    The Grantee’s Word Is Good Enough

    Of the four offices bound by BABA, the Office of Community Planning and Development got there first, applying the law to Community Development Block Grant projects starting in November 2022 and racking up nine approved waivers since. CPD is, by HUD’s own account, the most mature implementation in the building.

    Its enforcement mechanism is a checkbox.

    Grantees drawing funds through CPD’s Integrated Disbursement and Information System simply indicate whether BABA applies to their activity and self certify compliance. There is no independent verification layer sitting underneath that certification.

    BABA only gets a second look if a risk assessment happens to flag it, which means the government’s flagship domestic sourcing law rides on the same honor system CPD uses for everything else, applied to a statute that exists because Congress specifically did not trust the market to sort this out on its own.

    2 CFR § 200.322 already required a general domestic preference for federal financial assistance procurements before BABA arrived. BABA was supposed to be the version with teeth.

    Everyone Else Just Waited

    If CPD is the office that built a system and then quietly hollowed it out, the other three did not build anything at all. The Office of Public and Indian Housing spent years telling the OIG it was waiting on OMB for guidance on how to structure compliance oversight, an answer that stops sounding like patience and starts sounding like a strategy somewhere around year three of a law that took effect in 2021.

    The Office of Multifamily Housing Programs reported zero waiver requests and zero compliance issues, a data point HUD’s own management framed as evidence of a healthy program rather than what it also could be: a program that has never looked closely enough to find a problem.

    The Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes gets a pass by design rather than diligence, since its grants have simply never crossed the simplified acquisition threshold that triggers BABA in the first place. Three different offices, three different excuses for the same underlying fact: nobody was checking.

    Meanwhile OMB’s implementation guidance has been on the books since October 2023, and the Made in America Office exists specifically to standardize waiver review across agencies so that a law meant to apply uniformly does not turn into four unrelated fiefdoms. HUD’s fiefdoms did manage to coordinate on one thing: HUD’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer processes every waiver request that goes out the door, posting each proposed waiver for a public comment period before forwarding it to the Made in America Office for final review.

    That is a genuinely sound piece of process design. It also means HUD built a working pipeline for the rare case when a grantee admits it cannot comply, while leaving the far more common case, whether a grantee complied at all, to nobody in particular.

    The July 2027 Excuse

    The OIG’s fix is almost insultingly modest: designate one accountable official, and have each office write down an actual monitoring policy. HUD agreed to the first part immediately, once the person doing the agreeing had already been appointed mid audit. The second part is where the report gets its best line, buried in Appendix A.

    The Office of Multifamily Housing Programs, responding in writing, told the OIG it does not intend to call out BABA compliance separately from every other regulatory requirement grantees already certify to, arguing that a standalone BABA certification would be duplicative on top of the general certifications already required under 2 CFR § 200.322 and the noncompliance remedies already available under 2 CFR §§ 200.339 through 200.343.

    That is a coherent legal argument. It is also, functionally, an office explaining why it would prefer not to build the one thing the inspector general asked for, and it set a target completion date of July 2027 to write guidance it has apparently already decided will not say much.

    The Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes made a nearly identical case in Appendix B, while simultaneously agreeing to join a memorandum of understanding making some other office responsible for the coordination.

    None of this means BABA is a bad law, or even that HUD’s grantees are quietly larding their construction sites with foreign steel. Nobody in the report claims that, because nobody checked closely enough to claim anything.

    That is the actual finding here, dressed up in the government’s preferred euphemism of “limited program office monitoring.” A domestic sourcing law with a hard 25 percent ceiling and a specific enforcement office in OMB got implemented across a cabinet agency for the better part of half a decade on the strength of a checkbox, a waiting list, and a threshold nobody has crossed yet.

    The law had teeth. HUD just never got around to installing the jaw.

  • How the VA Turned a $34.5 Million Construction Plan Into a $100 Million Disaster in Arkansas

    The Veterans Health Administration’s capacity for self-inflicted institutional failure remains as reliably catastrophic as ever. A new Office of Inspector General report, released in September 2026, documents how five construction and maintenance projects at the Fayetteville VA Medical Center in Arkansas went from a collectively budgeted $34.5 million to approximately $100 million in actual or projected costs, with delays ranging from one year to more than seven years beyond their scheduled completion dates. As of January 2026, only one of the five projects had been finished. The others languished in various states of partial construction, abandonment, or perpetual redesign.

    The core allegation that prompted the OIG investigation, submitted via hotline complaint in March 2024, was straightforward: the facility was chronically unable to execute basic construction management tasks. Three of the four allegations were substantiated. The fourth, regarding contract terminations, wasn’t needed; the more damning finding was that the facility didn’t even fail to terminate contracts properly, because it managed not to terminate any construction-related contracts at all between 2019 and 2024, suggesting a different species of dysfunction entirely.

    The OIG report identifies the underlying cause with surgical precision: the engineers delegated as Contracting Officers’ Representatives (CORs) at Fayetteville didn’t do their jobs. They failed to provide architectural and engineering firms with complete VA design and physical security requirements. They handed construction contractors statements of work so vague that bidders peppered the facility with clarifying questions that went unanswered or received replies that prompted yet more questions. None of the three CORs interviewed for the investigation had taken formal training on developing statements of work, despite this being identified in VHA guidance as a primary responsibility. No formal design review process existed, despite the Federal Acquisition Regulation requiring CORs to maintain records of their design approvals. In lieu of institutional process, the facility’s engineering team conducted design reviews via email and spreadsheet, often without signatures, frequently without documentation of which engineer actually did the reviewing.

    This is not complexity masquerading as bureaucracy. This is bureaucracy pretending to be competence.

    The Geometry of Delay

    The mathematics of Fayetteville’s construction failures follows a peculiar pattern: small initial omissions compound into massive downstream costs and schedule disruptions. Consider the inpatient mental health building, the facility’s flagship project. Originally budgeted at $9.5 million with a planned October 2018 completion date, it remained under construction as of January 2026, more than seven years late, at an estimated final cost around $19 million. As the OIG investigation traced the project’s trajectory, the story of how a straightforward 21,056-square-foot psychiatric facility became a near-decade-long institutional migraine emerged from the contract record.

    The architectural and engineering design did not comply with VA physical security standards because the CORs writing the initial design contract omitted VA-specific requirements from the statement of work. This wasn’t a disagreement about standards or a calculated decision to incorporate standards later. The VA design requirements simply weren’t communicated. When construction bidders reviewed the design documents and began asking contractors’ reasonable questions about security specifications, lighting minimums, electrical connections, piping, stairwells, and elevator shafts, the facility’s response was essentially: we’ll figure it out. The COR’s responses were vague enough that contractors asked follow-up questions, some of which went unanswered. After the contract was awarded at $12.4 million, well above the $9.5 million budget, construction began. Then the contractors discovered the design didn’t meet VA standards. Automatic door operators required for patient accessibility throughout the building were absent. An over-the-door alarm system for suicide prevention in patient rooms was missing. The design lacked proper gaps between exterior masonry and walls, a deficiency that led to a legal dispute and cost the facility $1.8 million in contractor time spent resolving the noncompliance.

    In total, the mental health building accumulated 34 contract modifications, of which 16 related directly to design errors and omissions. Another project, the logistics area and sterile processing service renovation, began with a $2.7 million budget and 6,300 square feet of intended space. Architects eventually informed the facility that the selected location lacked sufficient square footage to meet the project’s design requirements. Rather than catching this during the planning phase, the discovery triggered a two-month work stoppage while the facility and its architectural firm argued about scope. When they agreed to expand the space, the project’s footprint ballooned to 13,500 square feet. By January 2024, the facility decided to split the project in two. The original $2.7 million project is now projected to cost $28.9 million total, with completion dates pushed five years into the future. The sterile processing component alone now carries a $24.8 million price tag.

    The laundry facility renovation followed a similar arc, though with more dramatic physical consequences. The original $1.9 million project eventually cost over $8 million. During construction, water damage was discovered in the building’s concrete floor; damaged concrete and rebar had to be removed and replaced before any other work could proceed. This discovery suggests contractors were bidding on a site assessment that had no apparent connection to what was actually in the ground. The statement of work didn’t adequately describe existing site conditions, so contractors bid on a phantom project, then discovered the real one halfway through construction.

    The Accounting of Incompetence

    The financial impact extends beyond the direct project costs. The facility spent over $1.1 million from its general operations funds on indirect expenses related to construction delays. When the inpatient mental health building delayed its opening, furniture purchased for the facility in 2020 needed warehousing. The facility paid a contractor $52,000 in December 2022 to store furniture for a building that still wasn’t ready for occupancy. Eventually, the facility moved the furniture to on-site storage to reduce costs further. Storage, surveillance, and laundry operations were temporarily outsourced or relocated due to construction delays, creating a cascading series of workarounds, each carrying its own budget impact.

    The three projects affected by cost-estimate variances all exceeded independent government cost estimates by more than 20 percent. The mental health building’s estimated construction cost was $8.2 million; the awarded contract was $12.4 million. The inpatient medical surgery unit’s estimated cost was $7.8 million; the awarded contract was $11.7 million. The logistics renovation estimate was $1.8 million; the awarded contract was $4.1 million. The OIG notes that while VA has no established criteria for acceptable variance between estimates and contract awards, significant deviations result in schedule delays while additional budget approvals are sought.

    There’s a damning detail embedded in the OIG’s analysis of independent government cost estimates. These estimates are supposed to be developed by CORs and based on prior project information, market research, anticipated direct and indirect costs, and design review. They’re meant to serve as a baseline against which to evaluate whether a contractor’s proposed price is reasonable. But the Fayetteville CORs were developing these estimates without having received training on how statements of work affect cost estimates, because training on developing statements of work simply wasn’t part of their onboarding. One might reasonably ask: if your staff doesn’t know how to write clear project specifications, how can they be expected to estimate what those (unclear) specifications should cost?

    The Institutional Abdication

    The most corrosive finding in the OIG report concerns what the VA system failed to catch before irreversible harm occurred. VISN 16, the regional oversight body, explicitly offered technical assistance through a construction management support contract designed to help facilities identify architectural and engineering design deficiencies. The Fayetteville medical center declined to use it. The facility’s chief of engineering service said the center couldn’t identify a “resource gap” that the contract would fill. Yet three of the projects reviewed by the OIG were either in the design phase or early construction phases at the time this assistance was available. The most charitable interpretation is that the facility’s leadership couldn’t recognize its own incompetence; less charitable interpretations are equally plausible.

    The OIG made four recommendations. The facility concurred with all of them. One recommendation has been closed based on documentation provided by the facility showing that design review procedures are now being tracked in the VA’s Support Service Center Capital Assets database. Recommendations 2, 3, and 4 remain open, pending evidence that the facility has actually implemented meaningful changes to how engineering staff are trained, how independent government cost estimates are developed, and how design reviews are documented and approved.

    Here’s what the OIG report demonstrates, in the accumulated weight of its findings: the VA possesses process frameworks, oversight structures, and technical guidance that should prevent exactly this kind of failure. The fact that none of these prevented failure isn’t an indictment of the systems themselves; it’s evidence of how thoroughly an institution can hollow out its own operational capacity. Training exists but isn’t taken. Technical assistance is offered but declined. Design standards are documented but not communicated. Contract requirements are supposed to be reviewed but are circulated via email and spreadsheet instead. The machinery of federal construction management is present. The people running it simply chose not to operate it.

    As of July 2025, the water storage facility project remained in limbo after three unsuccessful contract solicitations. The facility planned to resolicit the project in 2027, if funding was received in 2026. That’s the institutional pace at which the VA operates: catastrophic delay, followed by planning to attempt delay again, followed by a faint hope that future budget cycles might permit another try.

    The veterans served by this facility waited for facilities that should have been ready six years ago. They’re still waiting. The OIG report documents why, in exhausting bureaucratic detail. The question now is whether anyone at the Veterans Health Administration will actually read it. For broader context on VA institutional capacity, see The VA’s Staffing Crisis, As Reported by the VA, to Itself, on a Web Form — on how staffing shortage data is collected with no verification — and Cameras Rolling, Signs Missing, on a San Antonio psychiatric ward that waited six years for basic safety repairs.

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  • The Slush Fund That Ate Washington: How the RFC Invented the Modern Government Bailout

    A Loan Bigger Than Every Small Business in America Combined

    In 1949, while roughly a third of the country was still climbing out of Depression era wreckage, a federal agency handed a single automaker forty four million dollars, more money than it lent to every small business in America combined that year and the year before it. The automaker was Kaiser Frazer. The agency was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an outfit created seventeen years earlier with the explicit mission of saving ordinary banks and ordinary people from ruin.

    By the time it was finally put down in 1957, the RFC had disbursed more than fifty one billion dollars, according to its own final report to Congress, an amount so large that at its peak the RFC was arguably the biggest financial institution on earth, bigger than any bank, answerable to almost no one, and staffed by an administrator who could move Treasury sized sums without asking Congress for permission first.

    This is the story of how a Depression rescue vehicle became Washington’s favorite way to spend money without admitting it was spending money, and why Congress eventually got scared enough of its own creation to shut it down.

    From Bank Rescue to New Deal Piggy Bank

    The RFC was born on January 22, 1932, the brainchild of Federal Reserve governor Eugene Meyer and pushed through Congress by a Hoover administration desperate to stop a wave of bank failures. It was explicitly modeled on the War Finance Corporation, the WWI era agency that had proven Washington could stand up a fast moving lender when normal appropriations were too slow.

    GAO’s own contemporaneous correspondence on the RFC treated it as an executive agency of the federal government, entitled to borrow equipment and support from other federal bodies under the Economy Act, which tells you how thoroughly it was woven into the ordinary machinery of government even while operating with corporate flexibility (GAO B-27842).

    Under Hoover, the RFC was cautious to the point of uselessness. Under Roosevelt, it became something else entirely. Jesse Jones, the Texas banker Roosevelt installed to run it, turned the RFC into what amounted to the financial engine of the New Deal, funding public works, agricultural relief, and eventually the entire wartime industrial buildup through eight specialized subsidiaries.

    Its unusual quasi independent status meant Roosevelt could route enormous sums into favored projects with a degree of insulation from ordinary congressional appropriation fights, a feature that made it indispensable to the White House and increasingly uncomfortable for everyone else.

    The uncomfortable part showed up on schedule. Analysis from the Heritage Foundation on the RFC’s later years found that more than three quarters of its funds went out as large business loans of a hundred thousand dollars or more, typically at four percent interest, a rate at which the borrowing firms could not have raised private capital on anything close to comparable terms, meaning the RFC was routinely making high risk loans without charging anything resembling a risk premium (Heritage Foundation).

    Starting in 1948, congressional investigations turned up something worse than bad underwriting. Investigators found the RFC had extended loans to speculative ventures backed by sitting senators and administration officials, apparently in exchange for promises of continued funding for the agency itself, a scandal serious enough that the Senate Banking Committee forced a full reorganization in 1952 (EBSCO Research Starters).

    The Act Written to Rein In Its Own Creation

    Here is where the RFC stops being a New Deal history footnote and starts being the missing chapter of the story we have already been telling in this series. The Government Corporation Control Act of 1945, the law that still governs every federal corporation operating today, was not written in a vacuum. It was written by a Congress that had watched an entity like the RFC balloon into a nearly unaccountable financial power center and decided every future government corporation needed mandatory budgets, GAO audits, and explicit borrowing limits before it, too, got away from them.

    The RFC did not go quietly, and it did not go for the reasons you might expect. It survived the 1945 reforms, survived its own corruption scandal, and kept operating until the Eisenhower administration, ideologically committed to shrinking the government’s footprint in private markets, pushed through the RFC Liquidation Act of 1953 and wound the whole thing down by 1957, according to Britannica’s institutional history of the agency (Britannica). The RFC was not killed by a market failure.

    It was killed by a political decision that a government-owned bank had simply gotten too big and too politically entangled to keep operating as one.

    But the RFC did not disappear so much as metastasize. Among its many subsidiaries was an entity created specifically to guarantee mortgages during the housing crisis of the 1930s: the Federal National Mortgage Association, now known to every homeowner in America as Fannie Mae.

    The RFC is not a cautionary tale from a bygone era. It is the direct ancestor of the government-sponsored enterprise model that required its own trillion dollar rescue in 2008–a model built on the same instinct that built the RFC…keep the government’s fingerprints on the credit while keeping the balance sheet off the government’s books, until the balance sheet stops cooperating.

    The Blueprint Outlived the Agency

    The pattern here is worth sitting with, because it is the pattern this entire series keeps circling back to. An agency gets built for speed during a crisis. It proves useful enough that nobody wants to give up the flexibility once the crisis passes. It grows past the size anyone originally intended, starts making decisions that look less like emergency triage and more like industrial policy dressed up as commercial lending, and eventually either implodes into scandal or gets quietly absorbed into something else. Its institutional DNA lives on in whatever replaces it.

    The RFC’s most lasting legacy is not the $51 billion it lent out. It is the template it left behind, wherein a government corporation, built to look market-oriented and self-funding, can become the single most effective way for Washington to intervene in the economy at scale while limiting the amount transparency.

    Congress tried to fix that with the 1945 Act. It is worth asking, three quarters of a century and one Fannie Mae bailout later, whether that fix ever really took.

    Next in the series: Born in Bailout, Raised in Denial: The Fannie and Freddie Story Washington Still Can’t Finish — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the RFC’s most consequential children, and the government sponsored enterprise structure that let Washington keep pretending it wasn’t in the mortgage business until 2008 proved otherwise.

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  • So I Started Opening Websites: What the Federal Government Looked Like 25 Years After 9/11

    Most days, I approach the federal government with professional skepticism. It is, after all, more or less the business model around here.

    But September 11 occupies a different place. Personally.

    Twenty-five years after the attacks, I found myself wondering not whether Americans remember, and not whether federal employees care, but what our government looks like when it remembers.

    So I started opening websites.

    Not reports. Not press releases buried in archives. Not commemorative statements I could find by searching for the right words. I started with the front doors: the homepages the federal government was showing the world on the morning of September 11, 2026.

    This was not an attempt to grade agencies on patriotism, and it was never intended to become a list of bureaucratic winners and losers. A missing banner tells us almost nothing about the people working inside an agency. There are hard-working public servants, law-enforcement officers, veterans and others throughout these institutions for whom September 11 is considerably more personal than a communications decision on a website.

    Instead, I wanted to try something less conventional. I wanted to use the visible federal web as a kind of cultural instrument. Twenty-five years later, what place does September 11 occupy in the visible institutional consciousness of the federal government?

    Looking Through the Front Door

    Beginning early on September 11, I examined a broad cross-section of public-facing federal homepages. These website checks included agencies and institutions ranging from DHS and TSA to the State Department, Secret Service, CISA and Capitol Police.

    I looked at cabinet departments, military services, national-security and law-enforcement organizations, cultural institutions and other public-facing parts of the federal establishment. I recorded whether September 11 material was immediately prominent, present elsewhere on the homepage, incidental or not observed. I also paid attention to what the page emphasized instead.

    Then, at noon, I did it again.

    The second snapshot mattered because websites move. A communications shop may update a homepage after a morning ceremony. A carousel may rotate. A story can rise from the middle of a page to the top. So rather than pretend a 7 a.m. observation represented the entire day, I allowed one second look. At noon, the census closed.

    The methodology is admittedly imperfect. A homepage is not an agency. A communications office is not its workforce. A banner is not grief, and the absence of one is not indifference. This exercise measured visibility, not patriotism.

    But federal homepages are also finite public spaces. Institutions decide what occupies them. Taken individually, those decisions may mean very little. Viewed together, they offer a snapshot of institutional attention.

    What Was Visible

    The federal landscape on the morning of the 25th anniversary of 9/11 was not uniform.

    Some institutions placed September 11 unmistakably at the front door. The Department of Defense (now branded the Department of War) carried multiple remembrance features, including material marking 25 years since the attacks and content connected to the Pentagon Memorial.

    The National Guard led with a September 11 remembrance and featured Guard members recalling their experiences. The Air Force and Space Force displayed (almost identical) commemorative material in their homepage feature areas. The Department of Justice prominently presented a video from its 25th-anniversary memorial.

    Other acknowledgments required a little more looking. On the Army homepage during the morning check, September 11 material appeared farther down the page rather than dominating the opening view. By noon, that had changed, where a 25th-anniversary Army Museum story had moved into the first position under Top Stories, while a separate Patriot Day “Never Forget” feature was also present.

    Capitol Police offered another variation. Its September 11 item was there, but farther down in a social-media highlight rather than occupying the principal visual space.

    And then there were many homepages where no identifiable September 11 acknowledgment was visible during our observation. Among the pages we examined were the White House, FBI, ATF, Department of Veterans Affairs, National Archives, Library of Congress, U.S. Courts, Architect of the Capitol and several others.

    Manual inspection of some otherwise difficult-to-check sites likewise found no visible 9/11 material at the time of the snapshot, even after examining carousels or scrolling farther down the page.

    The noon pass did not produce a sweeping change. The Army’s elevation of its anniversary material was notable precisely because most of the landscape remained relatively stable. That gave us some confidence that the morning picture was not merely the consequence of arriving before federal web teams had finished their coffee.

    Silence on a Homepage Is Not Forgetting

    This is where the experiment became more interesting, and where a simple tally would have become misleading.

    The White House, for example, did not prominently display September 11 material on the homepage we observed, but it had published commemorative material earlier in the week.

    The Coast Guard’s principal homepage was overwhelmingly mission- and operations-oriented, yet Coast Guard editorial channels carried substantial 9/11 coverage and retrospectives.

    The Department of Veterans Affairs likewise had commemorative activity elsewhere even though its main homepage remained focused largely on benefits and services.

    Those examples matter.

    If the question were simply, “Did this agency remember September 11?” then searching the homepage would be a remarkably poor test. Federal institutions held ceremonies, published histories, posted on social media, remembered fallen colleagues and marked the anniversary in ways a homepage census cannot measure.

    But that was not quite the question.

    I was interested in prominence. That is, what did the federal government choose to put in front of a visitor arriving at its digital front doors on this particular morning?

    What Was in the Window Instead?

    Once I began looking at the project that way, absence became less interesting by itself. What occupied the space instead became equally important.

    Across the sites examined were current administration priorities, enforcement statistics, recruiting messages, agency services, operational news, leadership announcements and the ordinary business of government. America’s 250th celebration and related 250th-anniversary messaging also appeared repeatedly across the federal landscape.

    There is no scandal in any of that. Government still has to govern on September 11. Veterans still need benefits. Travelers still need information. Law-enforcement agencies still have cases. The country does not stop operating because the calendar reaches an anniversary.

    But homepages have finite attention. Every homepage is an exercise in selection.

    That made the recurring juxtaposition of America at 250 and September 11 at 25 particularly striking. One commemorates the continuity of the American experiment. The other remembers a morning when that experiment was attacked, and when, for a time, Americans responded with an extraordinary sense that whatever else divided us, we belonged to the same country.
    I remember a rapid and relatively moving rendition of “God Bless America” sung on the steps of Capitol Hill. Sure, it was presented by a large number of congressional leaders, for many of whom singing was not why they were elected. But is as tangible as the American flag being visible in every direction for months after the attack.

    It made me wonder, in today’s Washington, would we see the same thing? Or would politics trump our ability to unite in such a way?

    Twenty-Five Years Is a Long Time

    Perhaps that is the part of this exercise I found hardest to quantify.

    For those of us who remember September 11, twenty-five years can feel impossibly short. The images have not acquired the sepia tone of distant history. There are sounds, places and moments from that day that remain stubbornly contemporary.

    Institutionally, however, twenty-five years is enormous.

    Administrations have come and gone. Wars began and ended. Agencies were created and reorganized. People joined the federal workforce, served entire careers and retired. Young Americans born after the attacks are now old enough to serve inside institutions whose modern missions were shaped by an event they cannot personally remember.

    That may be the deeper question underneath this odd little experiment:

    What happens when lived memory becomes institutional memory?

    Every generation eventually confronts that transition. Pearl Harbor moved from living experience to inherited history. World wars passed from veterans’ memories into museums, textbooks and national ceremonies. September 11 is undergoing the same process in real time.

    Perhaps institutional memory does not simply disappear. Perhaps it changes location. It moves from the homepage to the archive, from the employee who was there to the employee who has heard the story, from an immediate national wound to an annual ceremony, from lived experience to history.

    A Litmus Test That Cannot Give a Laboratory Result

    I don’t want to pretend this exercise can tell us more than it can.

    There is no scientifically defensible percentage at which a nation has “remembered enough.” There is no proper number of homepage banners. And I would be suspicious of anyone claiming that a website carousel can measure the patriotism of the people behind it.

    Our census measured something narrower. It measured what a broad collection of federal institutions chose to show the public through their principal digital entrances during two snapshots on the morning of the 25th anniversary of September 11th.

    Some remembered loudly. Some remembered elsewhere. Some offered only a small acknowledgment. Some showed nothing we could identify on the homepage at all.

    Together, those choices produced something that no individual agency page could—a portrait.

    The Art of Noticing

    Bureaucracy Times spends most days examining what government gets wrong. Audits, procurement failures, unanswered FOIA requests, regulatory peculiarities and administrative absurdities provide no shortage of material. Rolling one’s eyes at the federal government is occasionally less an editorial position than an occupational requirement.

    But skepticism toward government and love of country are not contradictory ideas.

    I came to this exercise from two perspectives that do not always appear on these pages at the same time. I came as a citizen practicing the art of noticing, and as a retired soldier enduring the art of remembering.

    September 11 was not simply a day on which the United States was attacked. It was also one of those rare moments when the abstraction called “the United States” suddenly became tangible. For a brief period, the nation felt like a nation. The whole of government mobilized. Americans who disagreed about almost everything discovered something larger they still held in common.

    Twenty-five years later, the federal government still remembers.

    But it does not remember uniformly, and it does not always remember out loud.

    Maybe institutions aren’t so different from people in that respect.

    Memory changes before it disappears, but I will not forget.

  • The Pantry That Held a Federal Problem

    When federal investigators cracked open a humble kitchen cabinet in Kellyville, Oklahoma, they found exactly what the OIG’s proprietary data analytics had promised: a smorgasbord of narcotics meticulously arranged in false-bottom containers, each one designed to look like everyday household staples to the untrained eye.

    The powdered lemonade wasn’t lemonade. The sports drinks were a lie. Underneath, concealed in ingenious compartments, sat cocaine, MDMA, psilocybin mushrooms, and a colorful collection of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, including fraudulent Xanax, oxycodone, hydrocodone, and Percocet. It was, in its own way, a masterclass in domestic deception, right down to the organizational principle: everything in its place, everything legible to law enforcement, nothing what it appeared to be.

    This July, the suspect who organized this pharmaceutical pantry received a sentence of more than 17 years in federal prison. By then, the investigation that led to his conviction had already demonstrated something the Postal Inspection Service, the DEA, and the USPS Office of Inspector General would prefer remained institutional knowledge: the American postal system, for all its constitutional blessing and century-long tradition, remains a surprisingly efficient conduit for moving drugs across state lines, provided you know how to use it and how to hide what you’re moving.

    When Algorithms Light Up Like Christmas Trees

    The investigation began not with heroic detective work, but with the DEA Tulsa Office tracking a man suspected of participating in a nationwide fentanyl trafficking operation. The OIG special agents received the call in May 2025. They had an address. They had suspicion. They needed confirmation.

    What they got instead was overwhelming algorithmic vindication. The USPS Office of Inspector General maintains what it calls a proprietary analytical tool, developed by its Data Analytics team, designed to flag addresses receiving suspicious parcels. When OIG personnel ran this particular address through the system, according to the agency’s own account, “that address lit up like a Christmas tree.”

    The metaphor is instructive. Christmas trees are festive, innocent, beloved; the address, apparently, was not. What the analytics actually revealed was this: in just two months, the location had received numerous packages from Oklahoma, California, and Mississippi. The common thread was chemical, not emotional.

    The DEA and OIG coordinated. A search warrant was obtained. On the day agents intercepted one outbound package headed for the suspect, a K9 deputy with the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office performed the olfactory confirmation. Inside was a vacuum-sealed bag containing nearly a pound of pills that tested positive for methamphetamine.

    That was merely the opening act.

    Compartmentalization as a Lifestyle

    When Postal Inspection Service agents arrived at the property to execute a search warrant, they found a residential space that appeared, on initial inspection, entirely unremarkable. The kitchen was organized. The pantry was stocked. Everything suggested the domestic routine of someone who believed in order, in structure, in the virtues of proper food storage.

    But the Postal Inspection Service and OIG special agents were not looking for actual provisions. They were hunting for what the OIG later characterized, without apparent irony, as “a smorgasbord of illicit drugs.” What they discovered was a methodological approach to compartmentalization that would have pleased any organizational consultant. A place where false-bottom containers that maintained the appearance of legitimacy on top while concealing controlled substances beneath. It was, in effect, an entire kitchen devoted to the principle of misdirection.

    The haul was substantial. Cocaine. MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy or Molly. Psilocybin mushrooms, still classified as a Schedule I controlled substance, despite a growing scientific literature suggesting therapeutic applications. Counterfeit pharmaceuticals, each one a secondary fraud layered atop the primary narcotic crime. It’s not merely the distribution of oxycodone, but the distribution of counterfeit oxycodone, meaning consumers never even knew what they were ingesting. Counterfeit Xanax. Counterfeit Percocet.

    In the suspect’s vehicle, investigators found two semi-automatic handguns, $3,600 in concealed cash, three cellular telephones, and the supporting infrastructure of the retail drug trade. Things like digital scales, clear plastic baggies, and the mundane equipment of supply-chain management applied to substances that will destroy lives.

    Evidence suggested the suspect had ordered his inventory through unregulated online marketplaces, converted his residential property into a distribution hub, and conducted business across northeast Oklahoma. He was neither a major trafficker nor a minor street dealer. He was precisely the middle layer of the American drug supply chain, the network that makes narcotics available in communities where addiction has become, for all practical purposes, a chronic public health emergency with no visible ceiling.

    The Cooperative Takedown

    This case succeeded because it was built on institutional cooperation. The DEA pursued a nationwide investigation into fentanyl trafficking. The USPS OIG, equipped with its data analytics apparatus, cross-referenced suspicious addresses against the DEA’s intelligence. The Postal Inspection Service executed the warrants. The Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office provided K9 support. The U.S. Marshals Service accepted custody of the prisoner. Local prosecutors did the paperwork. Federal judges imposed the sentence.

    None of this was accidental. The USPS Inspector General, Tammy L. Hull, identified this partnership in remarks accompanying the case highlight.

    “We’re proud of the partnerships USPS OIG special agents have forged with the DEA, USPIS, and local and state law enforcement in Oklahoma and across the country. Joint investigations like these protect the American public by disrupting the criminal misuse of the U.S. Postal Service for drug trafficking.”

    The statement is, in every technical sense, accurate. The investigation succeeded. The suspect was convicted. The sentence was substantial. The American public was protected from one distributed, modestly-scaled narcotic operation across northeast Oklahoma.

    But the statement contains, perhaps necessarily, an institutional optimism worth examining. Every case that succeeds does so because someone chose to pursue it. Every criminal investigation requires the alignment of several independent bureaucracies, the availability of sufficient investigative resources, the cooperation of multiple jurisdictions, and a prosecutorial environment willing to proceed.

    The USPS OIG operates through voluntary cooperation with other agencies. These partnerships are real, demonstrable, documented. But they are also not comprehensive. They represent success, not saturation. For every address that lights up on the OIG’s proprietary analytics, how many others remain dark?

    The Postal System as Delivery Infrastructure

    The OIG’s public characterization of this case frames it as a vindication of joint investigative capacity. And in a technical sense, it is. But it also illustrates something more systemically concerning…the U.S. Postal Service remains, structurally, a convenient mechanism for the distribution of contraband.

    The postal system was designed for reliability, ubiquity, and trust. These same qualities make it attractive to anyone seeking to move substances across state lines while maintaining operational security.

    The suspect in this case was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison. The OIG has highlighted the case as evidence of joint investigative success. But the postal system still operates. Drugs still move through it. Other cases are still pending, and prior cases have already been tried, while future cases are being investigated right now by the very agencies that coordinated this takedown.

    The real question is whether identifying one pantry full of contraband represents progress in disrupting the systemic use of the postal system for drug trafficking, or merely the visible surface of a much larger problem.

    The OIG’s response, implied in its case highlight, is that institutional cooperation makes a difference. Perhaps it does. But the problem persists, and so do the pantries, and the compartments, and the false bottoms, and the small-scale distributors who convert residential spaces into supply hubs.

    For now, one address has been disrupted. One suspect has been incarcerated. One kitchen’s worth of contraband has been seized. The postal system, a government corporation, continues its deliveries.

    For more on USPS OIG oversight, see Nashville’s Postal Honor System Just Failed an Audit — on four OIG reports documenting self-reported compliance data that stopped matching reality at every layer of Nashville’s mail operation — and The Postal Service Passed Its Pay Audit. The Bill Just Got Postponed. — on how USPS executives legally defer salary cap overages into interest-bearing accounts while the agency posts a $9 billion annual loss.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • Paying for Nothing: How the VA Spent $11.2 Million on Services Never Delivered

    Paying for Nothing: How the VA Spent $11.2 Million on Services Never Delivered

    A Bureaucracy Times Analysis

    The Department of Veterans Affairs paid roughly $11.2 million for a Veterans Crisis Line backup center that never meaningfully answered a call. For nearly a year, taxpayer money went to a ghost operation that was supposed to catch overflow and emergencies for the nation’s 24/7 lifeline for veterans in suicidal crisis—but it never legally came online, never handled real traffic, and never delivered the backup protection the contract promised.

    The payments continued despite officials knowing—as early as November 2022—that the contractor couldn’t legally deliver the service. The backup call center sat understaffed, unable to meet security requirements, incapable of handling calls. Yet invoices kept coming. Checks kept clearing. Nobody stopped it until June 2023.

    This is not a case of good intentions gone wrong, or an unavoidable technical failure. It’s a story of institutional dysfunction, blurred accountability, and a bureaucratic apparatus so fractured that nobody felt personally responsible for stopping money from flowing to a ghost operation.

    The Setup: Why Backup Systems Matter

    The Veterans Crisis Line has answered over 5 million contacts since its 2007 launch. With a suicide rate among veterans nearly double the general population—35 deaths per 100,000 veterans according to VA’s own data—the service exists because it works. Trained responders recognize the specific trauma signatures of military experience. They know how to talk someone down from immediate harm.

    In 2022, the VCL added a new routing mechanism: the 988 hotline (national suicide prevention line) followed by the “press 1” option for veterans. This integration meant calls flowed through a contractor’s routing system before reaching VA responders. That contractor was also supposed to provide backup capacity—10 percent of call volume normally, but 100 percent in emergencies.

    Ten percent of normal traffic meant handling calls when the VCL’s main system went down for maintenance, during a cyberattack, or in the event of disaster. For a line that fielded 600 responders on average per month, this meant the contractor needed to maintain roughly 60 dedicated backup staff.

    On paper, the VA had it covered. A $32.5 million contract, awarded in April 2019, was supposed to last five years. The backup responder portion—$20.5 million of that total—went to a subcontractor brought in by the prime contractor. The service was supposed to be seamless, invisible unless needed, but absolutely reliable if crisis struck.

    It was none of those things.

    The Misaligned Checklist

    Start with the fundamental error: a security compliance failure buried in bureaucratic procedure.

    When the VA’s acquisition team put together the 2019 contract, they filled out a security checklist. This document, required by VA Handbook 6500.6, is supposed to identify what sensitive information the contractor will handle and what security protections are required. The 2019 checklist concluded: no Authority to Operate (ATO) needed. The contractor wouldn’t be storing sensitive veteran data, the team reasoned, so standard commercial security would suffice.

    This was wrong.

    The performance work statement—the contract’s actual requirements—mandated that the contractor transmit call documentation within 30 minutes of each call and provide call recordings to VA within 24 hours upon request. The contract explicitly stated: “call recordings will be kept according to VA policy; 100% recording and 100% retention.”

    Call recordings of veterans in crisis contain deeply sensitive information: suicidal ideation, trauma histories, medical conditions, personal identifying information. This is exactly the kind of data requiring Authority to Operate certification.

    The VA even had a reference point. When checking the previous 2017 contract—for nearly identical services—the 2019 acquisition team could have seen that ATO was required for the same work. But that discrepancy wasn’t caught. Nobody at VA compared the two. Nobody asked the information security officer why the exact same service changed from “requires ATO” to “doesn’t require ATO.”

    The information security officer would later tell OIG investigators that the understanding was the contractor wouldn’t store VA data. But the contract explicitly required it. When asked about the disconnect, neither the security officer nor the contracting officer could adequately explain the discrepancy.

    As the OIG report notes: “The information security officer and the COR who signed the 2019 checklist could not fully explain the discrepancy for the same service requiring an authority to operate for the 2017 contract but not requiring one for the 2019 contract.”

    This is how $11.2 million starts getting wasted: through a failure in the most basic institutional check—comparing your contract to the last contract for the same work.

    The Subcontractor Switch

    For three years, the system limped forward under the original subcontractor. Then, in April 2022, that subcontractor announced it was getting out of the business. Termination was set for July 15, 2022—the day before the VA was implementing “988 press 1” hotline routing through this same contractor.

    Within a week, VA leadership scrambled to create an internal backup system. But it would take months to get operational, and even longer to fully functional. So they needed the contractor—with his new subcontractor—to maintain backup capacity in the interim.

    The new subcontractor came on July 15, 2022, with an aggressive staffing plan provided to VA’s Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR):

    • 50 staff by October 2022 (2.5 months in)
    • 92 fully staffed responders by November 2022 (3.5 months in)

    The COR rated this plan “acceptable” and signed off on it.

    By August 2022, just weeks into the new subcontract, the new subcontractor revealed its technology plan: it wanted to use a cloud-based system for document sharing.

    This triggered an information security review. And that’s when VA’s sloppiness caught up with them.

    By the end of August 2022, the information security officer told the COR and VCL officials: if the contractor was processing, storing, or transmitting VA data using cloud services, it would need FedRAMP certification and an Authority to Operate. The proposed system didn’t have it.

    September 2022: The COR confirmed the contractor couldn’t use the proposed system because it lacked FedRAMP compliance.

    October 2022: The VCL’s deputy director of technology circulated an issue brief. It would take 12 to 18 months for the contractor to achieve compliance.

    Twelve to eighteen months. Let that sink in. VA officials had just learned they’d contracted for a year-and-a-half of security remediation—during which the contractor couldn’t legally handle veteran calls—and didn’t immediately stop the bleeding.

    The Meeting Where Everyone Knew

    November 2, 2022. This is the date that matters most.

    VCL officials, the COR, the contracting officer, and the acquisition services division chief all sat down to discuss the unfolding disaster. The meeting notes are blunt:

    “Contractor could not provide backup responder services without an Authority to Operate.”

    “It would be at least one to two years before services would be provided.”

    The acquisition services division chief—essentially the boss of the contracting operation—suggested options. The contract could be modified (which would require renegotiating price). A 60-day stop-work order could be issued to buy time to figure this out. Or the whole service could be terminated.

    The contracting officer’s response: “The contractor must be given a chance to become compliant and had to be paid.”

    This is the pivot point where negligence becomes something more deliberate. Everyone in that room understood:

    1. The service wasn’t being provided
    2. The contractor wasn’t compliant with federal security law
    3. The contractor couldn’t become compliant for at least a year
    4. Yet the contractor had to keep getting paid

    The meeting notes even included a section explicitly labeled “paying for services not received”—the COR later told OIG investigators that VCL leaders had expressed concerns about this issue to the contracting officer.

    Eight days later, on November 10, the parties met again. Same conclusion: the contractor would need 9 to 18 months for compliance. Still, the contracting officer didn’t issue a stop-work order. Didn’t renegotiate. Didn’t terminate.

    Why? The contracting officer told OIG investigators he was waiting for VCL officials’ direction.

    The VCL deputy executive director told OIG investigators VCL needed the backup system while building their internal option.

    So who made the decision? Nobody. That’s the answer. It fell into a bureaucratic void.

    The Invoice Trap

    Meanwhile, invoices were flowing in. Every month, the contractor—or its subcontractor—submitted payment requests for call responder backup services. The COR, whose job was to verify that services were actually delivered before authorizing payment, kept approving them.

    The data tells the real story.

    Call routing logs show: zero calls transferred to the backup center from mid-July 2022 through June 2023. Two calls in August 2022 that probably weren’t even answered based on call duration. Then nothing. Complete silence. A year of radio silence, during which VA paid $11.2 million for staffing that didn’t exist and calls that were never handled.

    Yet in March 2023—nine months into this black hole—the VCL management analyst emailed the VCL executive director asking to exercise the next contract option year for the backup center. Same day, the executive director approved it. The COR issued an evaluation saying the contractor’s performance was “satisfactory.” The contracting officer issued the modification to continue the contract.

    This is the trap: federal contracting law doesn’t punish you for overpaying for nothing. A firm-fixed-price contract means the contractor bears financial risk—but it also means the contractor gets paid regardless, as long as they keep billing. And unless someone explicitly stops payment, the machine keeps grinding.

    The COR later explained to OIG investigators that he approved invoices based on the contracting officer’s advice that payments were justified because the contractor was “making progress during the implementation phase and working toward an approval.” Translation: he approved payment for work not done because someone else told him it was okay.

    But VA’s acquisition manual explicitly states: “the COR should not recommend invoice payment solely on the recommendation of another government employee.”

    It happened anyway. Month after month, January through May 2023, invoices were approved based on one official deferring to another official’s judgment, with nobody actually verifying the work was done.

    The irony is caustic: the COR’s job was to protect the government’s interests. Instead, he abdicated that responsibility to someone else.

    Why Nobody Stopped It

    Three factors created this mess:

    First: Unclear authority and responsibility. The contracting officer believed VCL leadership needed to decide about the backup services. VCL leadership believed they needed contracting guidance. Nobody wanted to own the decision, so nobody made it. For seven months, the system defaulted to “keep paying.”

    Second: Weak documentation and communication. When a VCL official apparently told the contractor not to take calls (without official authorization), the contracting officer found out later and was confused about who said it and when. At a critical moment, nobody had written proof of the problem, so the contracting officer could demand written direction before acting. But this created a catch-22: VCL couldn’t be expected to formalize a problem the contracting officer wasn’t formally acknowledging.

    Third: The acquisition manual’s weak enforcement. The regulation says CORs shouldn’t rely on other officials’ advice. But there’s no secondary review, no checkpoint, no audit until months later. A COR can violate the manual by just deferring to the contracting officer, and nobody catches it until an OIG audit.

    The acquisition services division chief told OIG investigators that “there was no evidence in the contract file that indicated the contractor did not provide call answering services” and that “VCL officials did not provide a formal written notification stating that services were not being provided.”

    This is the heart of bureaucratic dysfunction. Nobody takes action without formal documentation. But the system that’s supposed to generate that documentation is the same system that’s failing. It’s circular: you can’t stop payment without formal notice, but nobody issues formal notice because nobody owns the decision.

    The Termination and Settlement

    Finally, in May 2023—a year after the disaster began—the VCL deputy executive director notified the COR: terminate the backup responder services. The COR relayed this to the contracting officer. The contracting officer issued the termination in June.

    Total damage: $11.2 million in payments for undelivered services. Plus $677,575 in settlement costs to unwind the contract.

    The OIG excluded the settlement costs from its “questioned costs” calculation—the official figure for waste. So the number that gets reported to Congress, the number that matters for oversight, is $11.2 million.

    But the real number is $11.9 million.

    Systemic Red Flags

    The OIG’s recommendations are measured but pointed:

    1. Have the Office of General Counsel determine whether to recoup the $11.2 million under the Contract Disputes Act.
    2. Implement policies to ensure information security requirements are accurately determined before contract award.

    VA’s response was equally measured. They concurred with #1 and said they’d check with General Counsel by year-end 2026. On #2, they concurred “in principle” and said they’d already addressed the issue with the acquisition team. No systemic breakdown, they implied. Just an isolated error.

    But the OIG identified two structural failures:

    Control environment failure: “VA officials did not take timely action to prevent paying for services not received.”

    Monitoring failure: “VA officials did not take timely action to modify the contract or terminate the call responder backup services.”

    These aren’t compliance errors. These are institutional willingness to let money flow to a failed program.

    The Missing Annual Assessment

    Buried in the report is another missed opportunity. VA Handbook 6500.6 requires contractors handling sensitive information to conduct annual security self-assessments. The 2019 contract included this requirement.

    The OIG found no evidence this assessment was ever conducted. The information security officer hadn’t seen it and thought it was no longer required.

    This should have been the circuit-breaker. The first annual assessment after the July 2022 subcontractor change would have immediately identified that an Authority to Operate was needed. The assessment would have forced the acquisition team to confront the noncompliance in real time, in formal documentation.

    Instead, the assessment was skipped. Another checkpoint failed. Another opportunity to catch the problem before $11.2 million was committed.

    The Veterans Crisis Line Context

    What makes this particularly damaging is that this happened to the Veterans Crisis Line—the service literally designed to prevent veteran suicide. The OIG estimated veteran suicide rate at 35 deaths per 100,000 veterans, nearly double the general population rate.

    The VCL answered over 5 million contacts since inception. It works. It saves lives. That’s why backup capacity matters. It’s not a theoretical nice-to-have; it’s insurance against the system that saves lives failing at a moment when someone’s in acute crisis.

    And $11.2 million—the amount wasted on a non-functional backup—represents federal resources that should have been flowing to actual crisis services, training, prevention, follow-up care.

    Waste at this scale, in a program this critical, isn’t just a budgeting problem. It’s a failure of stewardship toward the people the VA is supposed to serve.

    The Reorganization Unknown

    As of June 2026, the VA was still in the middle of a reorganization that consolidated contracting specialists under the Office of Acquisition, Logistics, and Construction. The OIG report notes: “The effects of these changes on the issues identified in this report are not yet known.”

    This is the unsaid part of the story. If restructuring doesn’t actually fix these problems, if acquisition staff just get moved around without changing procedures or accountability, then the next $11.2 million waste is probably already in the pipeline.

    The question isn’t whether the VA has policies that should work. They do. VA Handbook 6500.6, VA Directive 6500, the Federal Acquisition Regulation—these documents contain the requirements to prevent exactly this scenario.

    The question is whether the VA has the institutional discipline to enforce them.

    Open Questions for Further Investigation

    • Will General Counsel actually pursue recoupment? The OIG’s recommendation was for Office of General Counsel to determine if VA should recover the funds. VA said they’d report by December 31, 2026. Has that happened? What did they conclude?
    • Is this common? How many other VA contracts have similar compliance gaps? The OIG report treats this as an isolated incident, but the conditions that created it—weak security checklist review, missing annual assessments, unclear authority—are systemic.

    Conclusion: The Cost of Deferred Decisions

    This wasn’t a case of fraud or deliberate theft. Nobody was running a scam. The contractor presumably believed it could eventually become compliant. VA officials presumably believed paying during the compliance period was reasonable, especially if they thought the money might ultimately be clawed back under the Contract Disputes Act.

    But that reasoning collapses once you have a conference room full of people explicitly discussing “paying for services not received” and still choosing to let invoices through. The VA had tools to stop it. The contracting officer could have issued a stop-work order. The COR could have refused to approve invoices. VCL leadership could have formally declared the contractor noncompliant. Any of these actions would have prevented most of the $11.2 million in waste.

    None happened. Instead, each official deferred the decision to someone else. The contracting officer waited for VCL guidance. The COR approved invoices based on the contracting officer’s advice. VCL waited for the contracting officer to act. This is how $11.2 million disappears in a federal bureaucracy: not through malice, but through diffused responsibility. When everyone’s supposed to be in charge, nobody is.

    The open question now is whether that responsibility will ever be reassembled. VA has told the OIG it will decide by December 31, 2026 whether to seek recoupment of the $11.2 million. That decision point is more than an accounting exercise. It is a live test of whether the department is willing to say, in writing and with consequences, that paying for nothing is unacceptable even when the system has already moved on.

    Meanwhile, the underlying tradeoff doesn’t change. Veterans’ resources remain finite. Every million dollars wasted on a defunct contractor backup is a million dollars not available for crisis responder training, community outreach, or the mental health services that support long-term veteran wellbeing. It also reflects a broader pattern of VA institutional dysfunction documented in our coverage: a staffing crisis the VA counts with an unverified web form, construction projects that tripled in cost while no one operated the oversight machinery, and a psychiatric ward where safety hazards went unresolved for six years. The Veterans Crisis Line will keep taking calls, and the VA’s internal backup will keep running, but the opportunity cost of this failure is already baked into future budgets.

    The VA’s response to the OIG—concurring in principle while framing this as an isolated error—leans heavily on the hope that this is a one-off. The facts of the case suggest something else: a system that chose inaction when action was required, and that only fully acknowledged the problem once the money was gone and the audit was underway.

    That leaves a larger, unresolved question hanging over the Veterans Crisis Line case: is this common? If the same weak controls, missing assessments, and blurred lines of authority exist elsewhere in VA contracting, then this episode is not an anomaly but a preview. Whether General Counsel pursues recoupment will tell us something. Whether the institution prevents the next version of this from happening at all will tell us everything.

    Sources and Documentation

    Fediverse Reactions

  • The Leviathan’s Paperwork Problem: How the VA Quietly Shortchanged Veterans and Called It Due Process

    Closed Means Nothing If the Work Was Never Done

    Here is the sentence that should be carved above the entrance to every regional VA office in America: the claim status “closed” is defined as “the claim is complete with no further action possible.” That is the government’s own definition, straight from VBA Manual 21-4.

    Now consider that the Office of Inspector General just spent thirteen months proving that VBA staff closed thousands of these supposedly complete, no-further-action-possible claims while the actual required action, the one affecting a veteran’s monthly paycheck, had never happened at all.

    Somewhere a bureaucrat defined “closed” and somewhere else an entirely different bureaucrat closed a case that was, by any honest reading, wide open. This is the kind of contradiction that would get you fired from a lemonade stand. At the VA, it just gets you a “concur” stamp and a target completion date sometime next year.

    A Third of Cases, A Thousand Ways to Fail a Veteran

    The report in question, released last week and quietly filed under a review number nobody will remember, examines how the Veterans Benefits Administration handles “adverse actions,” the bureaucratic euphemism for cutting a disabled veteran’s monthly check. Under 38 C.F.R. Section 3.103, before VA can reduce or terminate a veteran’s disability compensation, it has to notify them, give them sixty five days to respond with evidence, and offer a hearing.

    This is not some newfangled progressive innovation. It is basic due process, the kind of thing that has been settled law in this country since well before most of the claims processors involved were born.

    The OIG sampled 229 cases out of an estimated pool of 27,100 and found errors in roughly a third of them, projecting that about 9,300 cases involved at least one mistake (see the report’s Appendix C for the full statistical gymnastics, margin of error and all). Break down the error types and you get a portrait of an agency that treats due process as optional homework.

    About 4,000 cases involved insufficient notice to the veteran, meaning VA moved to cut a check before telling the person whose money it was. Nearly 2,900 involved uncorrected “codesheets,” the internal ledgers that track a veteran’s disability history, left inaccurate after the fact. Another 2,900 had botched effective dates, sometimes off by a month in either direction (see Example 2 in the report, where a claims processor miscounted sixty days and cost a veteran an extra month of benefits they were never entitled to, an overpayment of roughly $300 that will eventually have to be clawed back from someone who did nothing wrong).

    Then there is Example 3, which deserves its own museum exhibit. A veteran’s lung cancer rating was proposed for reduction from 100 percent to 30 percent. The due process letter went out. The veteran did not respond. So far, bureaucratically unremarkable. Then a different claims processor, working an entirely separate benefit for the same veteran, canceled the “end product” tracking the reduction, which under VA’s own system definitions automatically closed the case as complete.

    The reduction that was supposed to happen never did. VA overpaid the veteran about $43,000 over sixteen months, at a running rate of $2,700 a month, and nobody noticed until the OIG went looking. This is not fraud. Nobody here is a villain twirling a mustache. It is simply a records system so brittle that one employee’s unrelated paperwork can silently erase another employee’s entire adjudication, and an agency with no automated way to notice when that happens.

    If this sounds familiar, it should. Federal courts have spent decades wrestling with agencies that treat procedural notice requirements as a formality to be checked off rather than a substantive right to be honored. The Supreme Court’s own due process jurisprudence in the benefits context traces back to Mathews v. Eldridge, which set the very balancing test the VA is nominally supposed to be applying here. And this is far from the VA’s first rodeo with the OIG on exactly this theme.

    Earlier reviews have flagged similar breakdowns in how VBA tracks pending claims through its “end product” workload system, a structure originally built to measure employee productivity rather than to safeguard veterans’ rights, which may explain why it is so good at counting closed cases and so bad at noticing which ones should not have been closed.

    They Knew in 2024. They Made a Video.

    What makes this report more than a dry compliance exercise is the timeline buried in its own pages. In March 2024, over two years before this report’s publication, a senior quality reviewer at VBA’s Compensation Service flagged on an internal call that an “alarming number” of adverse action claims were being closed without final decisions. The recommended fix was to remind new staff to finish their paperwork.

    Nobody followed up.

    The OIG then found the exact same problem persisting through September 2025, in nine of twenty sampled cases, a 45 percent failure rate that is arguably worse than the original estimate. This is bureaucracy’s favorite trick: identify the problem, hold a call about the problem, and mistake the call for the fix.

    Meanwhile, VBA officials proudly told the OIG team about a new training initiative called “Minute Videos,” rolled out in December 2025 with more planned for March 2026. The OIG actually watched them. The December batch had nothing to do with adverse actions. The March batch addressed the topic but, in the OIG’s own words, did not address the deficiencies identified in this review or the actions recommended to mitigate them.

    Somewhere in a windowless conference room, someone approved a training video series that fails to train anyone on the thing it needed to train them on, and that someone almost certainly got a positive performance review for shipping content on schedule.

    VA’s own fix for the letter generating problem, meanwhile, has a “tentative delivery timeline” stretching from a 2023 start date to early 2027, a four year odyssey to standardize a form letter.

    For context, the Government Accountability Office has spent years documenting how federal agencies routinely blow through their own modernization timelines, sometimes by a decade or more, for systems far more complex than a rating decision letter.

    The Bare Minimum, Arriving Four Years Late

    The dollar figures here, at least $16.9 million in improper payments and nearly $1 million a month in ongoing overpayments and underpayments, are almost beside the point, though Congress will fixate on them because dollar figures are legible in a way that human suffering is not.

    The real story is that a veteran who lost a leg or a lung in service to this country can have their monthly check quietly reduced, restored, reduced again, or simply left in bureaucratic limbo because two different employees in two different systems never talked to each other, and no software exists to flag the contradiction.

    VA concurred with every finding. VA agreed to every recommendation. VA has, as of this writing, resolved 184 of the 191 specific errors the OIG identified, which sounds impressive until you remember those 191 are drawn from a sample that represents thousands more the agency has not yet found.

    The recommendations themselves (standardized letters, an extra layer of signoff, an automated tracking report) are not radical. They are the bare minimum any competent organization would have built a decade ago. That the largest disability benefits system in the country is only now getting around to it, under OIG pressure, with completion dates stretching into 2027, tells you less about incompetence than about priorities.

    Building a system that reliably protects a veteran’s paycheck has simply never been urgent enough. It took an audit to make it urgent for exactly as long as this news cycle lasts.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • Meet the Fourth Branch: Why Your Government Moonlights as a Business (and Mostly Loses)

    A Business That Wasn’t Allowed to Act Like One

    Somewhere in a filing cabinet in 1945, Congress wrote a law with a genuinely funny premise: certain federal agencies would no longer behave like federal agencies. They would sign contracts, hold property, and pay their own bills, just like a business, because Congress had decided the government needed businesses it could own outright without admitting that’s what it was doing.

    Eighty years later, the flagship product of that experiment, the United States Postal Service, has lost money in nearly every fiscal year since 2007, and its cumulative net losses over that period have run to roughly $118 billion, according to GAO’s most recent Postal Service Primer. USPS has been sitting on the Government Accountability Office’s High Risk List, the federal government’s own list of things it privately admits are broken, since 2009. It has been there so long it could apply for tenure.

    This is the joke Congress never quite got around to finishing: build a business that isn’t allowed to act like one, staff it with people who can’t be fired like private employees, price its product below what private carriers charge, and then act baffled, decade after decade, when the balance sheet reads like a hostage note.

    The Law Behind the Contradiction

    The legal machinery behind all this is the Government Corporation Control Act of 1945, now living a quiet life as 31 U.S.C. Chapter 91. It splits federal corporations into two flavors: wholly owned entities like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Export Import Bank, and mixed ownership entities like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. All of them share one theoretical mandate: generate your own revenue, cover your own costs, and stay off the taxpayer’s tab as much as possible.

    Some of them actually do this. The FDIC funds itself by charging member banks insurance premiums calibrated to risk, which is a business model roughly as old as insurance itself, and it generally runs in the black. TVA sells electricity and, whatever else you think of a federally chartered utility running seven states’ worth of dams, it mostly pays its own way.

    USPS is where the model goes to die, and not for the reasons its critics usually assume. It is not that USPS is bad at commerce. Operating revenue actually rose to $80.5 billion in fiscal year 2025, up 1.2 percent from the prior year, driven partly by its Ground Advantage shipping product actually competing for package business. The problem is that Congress built USPS to run like a business and then, in the same breath, ordered it to behave like a public utility with no off switch. Federal law requires delivery to every address in the country six days a week regardless of profitability, and the Postal Regulatory Commission caps how much USPS can raise prices in response. GAO’s December 2025 report on USPS notes that unfunded liabilities and debt now sit at 206 percent of annual revenue, compared with 82 percent back in 2007. USPS itself has told GAO it could run out of cash as early as fiscal year 2026 if it makes its full required pension payments, a sentence that should alarm anyone who has ever mailed a check.

    Not an Aberration — a Design Feature

    Here is the part that should bother you more than the debt number: USPS is not an aberration inside this system. It is the system working almost exactly as designed, just under conditions the designers never priced in.

    The government corporation model was born out of urgency, not ideology. During World War I, Washington needed to mobilize shipbuilding and war financing faster than a normal federal bureaucracy could move, so Congress chartered entities like the Emergency Fleet Corporation that could hire and contract without civil service delays. The New Deal supercharged the idea. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation alone funneled billions into propping up banks and railroads, operating with a degree of financial autonomy that eventually made Congress nervous enough to write the 1945 Act specifically to rein these entities back in.

    That history matters because it explains why the USSR comparison, while tempting, lands in the wrong place. Soviet state enterprises were just extensions of a central plan, handed production targets by people who didn’t have to care if anyone actually wanted the thing at the other end. American government corporations are weirder. On paper, they’re told to hustle for their own money and act like everyone else in the marketplace. In practice, they live and die on what Congress lets them do, what Congress lets them borrow, and how generous Congress feels after the crash. This is not five-year-plan territory. It’s stranger than that: a business shoved into a market and then told, in the fine print, that it isn’t allowed to make the choices an ordinary business would have to make to stay alive there.

    You can watch the same tension in the 2008 conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, technically government sponsored enterprises rather than government corporations, but built on the identical fantasy that a market-facing entity can carry an implicit public backstop without anyone ever having to write a check for it, until suddenly someone does.

    The Asterisk in the Promise

    The quiet danger in all of this is not that the government owns pieces of the economy. Plenty of stable democracies run public rail, postal, or utility operators without collapsing into command economies. The danger is the specific American habit of pretending these entities are self-sufficient businesses right up until the moment the bill comes due, at which point Congress rediscovers that USPS’s unfunded liabilities are, in fact, everyone’s problem.

    That accounting fiction has a cost, and it is not abstract. USPS retirees depend on pension funds whose solvency is now genuinely in question. Rural communities depend on a delivery mandate that the agency’s own revenue cannot support at current rates. And taxpayers who were told for eighty years that these corporations don’t touch their money are one legislative rescue away from finding out that promise had an asterisk the whole time.

    This series is going to keep pulling that thread. Next up: the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the New Deal’s favorite off-balance-sheet slush fund, and what it can teach us about every government bailout that came after it.

  • The Agency the President Is Trying to Kill and Congress Keeps Funding

    Congress Funds a Shutdown Target: Inside the Constitutional Cage Fight Over USAGM

    In the Biden era, a routine budget request rarely makes news. In the Trump era, even the footnotes get weaponized. So when the U.S. Agency for Global Media quietly sent Congress its fiscal 2026 budget justification asking for $153 million, it did not read like a plea for survival. It read like a suicide note. The stated purpose of the request, spelled out in the agency’s own document, was to support the orderly shutdown of USAGM operations.

    That is not how Congress read it.

    Lawmakers responded with a bipartisan spending bill that appropriated about $643 million for USAGM broadcasting, plus $10 million for capital and financial improvement projects, in an appropriations package President Trump signed on February 3, 2026.

    The resulting $490 million gap between what the executive branch requested and what Congress enacted is a math problem and a constitutional one. Between those two numbers sits an agency that has been hollowed out, partially restored by court order, told its acting chief was serving unlawfully, evicted from its new headquarters lease, shuffled into a NASA building, and kept on issuing press releases. USAGM is not a zombie agency. It is a live constitutional dispute with a masthead.

    To understand why this particular fight escalated so quickly, it helps to remember what exactly the administration has been trying to switch off.

    A Counter-Communist Broadcasting Agency

    The U.S. Agency for Global Media oversees the sprawling portfolio of U.S. government funded international broadcasting. That portfolio includes Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.

    Voice of America itself dates to 1942, when the United States started broadcasting into Axis territory during World War II. During the Cold War, VOA grew into a staple of American soft power, beaming news and analysis to audiences behind the Iron Curtain that could not depend on state controlled outlets for independent reporting.

    Congress eventually codified what VOA should and should not be. The 1976 VOA Charter committed the broadcaster to accurate, objective, comprehensive news coverage, including news that reflected negatively on the United States. It sought to build an editorial firewall between journalism and propaganda, and Congress wrote that firewall into statute. USAGM’s current oversight structure is more recent.

    The Broadcasting Board of Governors Reform Act of 2018 created a single agency head and a clearer chain of command. Instead of a part time board, Congress opted for a CEO model that could, in theory, act faster and manage a complex mix of federal entities and private nonprofit grantees.

    Before the current conflict, USAGM’s annual appropriation typically fell in the $700 million to $800 million range, funding broadcasting in more than 40 languages to audiences that numbered in the hundreds of millions. That is the institution that became a target in March 2025 when the Trump administration moved from grumbling about bias to trying to dismantle the agency that runs it.

    Ideological Bias? You Don’t Say…

    The administration’s case against USAGM has always had two distinct strands. The first is ideological. The White House and allied commentators have portrayed VOA in particular as a taxpayer funded megaphone for liberal bias. In 2025, administration press outreach labeled VOA “radical propaganda,” a phrase that quickly migrated into conservative media coverage.

    Right leaning outlets compiled exhibits. Training materials were held up as evidence of an ideologically slanted newsroom culture. Coverage decisions were cataloged as proof of a left leaning bias and what critics saw as softness toward adversaries such as Iran.

    In June 2025, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene launched an investigation into what they called longstanding security and management failures at USAGM, folding editorial grievance into a broader narrative of mismanagement.

    The second strand is structural. On March 14, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14238 directing that USAGM be eliminated “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” as part of a broader campaign to shrink the federal bureaucracy. The order did not parse which parts of the agency exist solely by regulation and could arguably be dismantled unilaterally and which parts are hard wired into statute. It simply instructed the bureaucracy to start turning out the lights.

    That gap between a sweeping order and specific legal constraints would make the order less a blueprint and more a litigation generator. The administration’s distilled position, carried into its fiscal 2026 budget: USAGM is biased, wasteful, and redundant. The $153 million shutdown request was the ledger entry for that theory.

    What followed was not an orderly wind down. It was a collision between the executive branch’s appetite for speed, Congress’s preference for continuity, and a federal judge with a well-stocked supply of injunctions.

    The Judicial Branch Enters The Ring

    In March 2025, after Executive Order 14238, USAGM moved to sideline most of its workforce. The agency placed about 85 percent of its federal staff on administrative leave or terminated them, a sweep that reached across USAGM headquarters, Voice of America, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. The remaining active staff shrank to roughly 250 employees out of the pre order workforce. Contractors were told to stop work.

    Federal funding to the grantee networks, including Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was cut off. The grantees sued. So did VOA journalists. So did the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents many of the federal staff.

    One judge, Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, became the central referee. In April 2025 he issued a preliminary injunction blocking the shutdown of VOA and ordering that staff be returned to work and programming restored. His orders did not resolve every disputed legal theory, but they did halt the most aggressive moves.

    Then, in March 2026, Lamberth issued a separate decision that reached the heart of the administration’s personnel strategy. He ruled that Kari Lake, whom the administration had installed as acting CEO of USAGM, had been serving in violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and the Appointments Clause. That ruling did not simply tell the administration to find another executive, it invalidated all official actions Lake had taken as acting CEO, declaring that they would have no force or effect.

    By the time those decisions landed, the workforce picture had changed again. Court ordered reinstatements drove the federal headcount back up to about 813 employees as of May 2026. That figure remains about 52 percent below the agency’s staffing level in 2012, but it is far from the skeletal force of roughly 250 employees that remained during the height of the dismantlement push.

    On paper, the agency exists. On the appropriations line, it is funded. In practice, much of its recent activity has consisted of compliance with court orders undoing its own actions.

    You Get Funding! And You Get Funding! Everyone Gets Funding!

    Congress, for its part, did something both simple and provocative. It kept paying the bills. The bipartisan appropriations legislation that became law on February 3, 2026 granted roughly $643 million for USAGM broadcasting, more than four times the administration’s shutdown focused request, along with $10 million tagged for capital and financial improvement projects.

    Lawmakers signaled that the funding levels and directives enjoyed veto proof support. Faced with that math and with a much larger spending package on the line, the administration signed. USAGM responded in careful bureaucratic prose, saying it was assessing how best to carry out its mission within the authorities and resources provided by Congress. Translation for those not fluent in agency statement language: the money is real, the legal fights are real, and no one agrees who is actually in charge.

    The daily texture of that standoff looks less like a cinematic showdown and more like a slow motion institutional car crash.

    In September 2024, before the executive order, USAGM signed a lease for new headquarters space at 1875 Pennsylvania Avenue, a move that would have taken the agency out of the aging Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building and into a modern consolidated office.

    In March 2025, as part of a broader effort to shrink the federal office footprint, the administration canceled that lease. Instead of cutting a ribbon on prime real estate a short walk from the White House, USAGM relocated into space in a NASA building, a fitting location for an agency whose legal status now seems to depend on orbital mechanics.

    Throughout the personnel cuts and courtroom arguments, the agency’s public facing communication kept chugging along. USAGM’s account on X continued to post content, including statements that aligned with Trump administration messaging on Iran and generic holiday greetings, even as grantees sued over funding cuts and staff were marched on and off administrative leave.

    In January 2026, USAGM issued a sharply worded press release attacking Radio Free Asia over equipment sales and staff reductions. It was an unusual sight: a federal agency publicly denouncing one of its own grantees while both sides remained active in ongoing litigation. The press shop did not go dark. Neither did the grievances.

    Behind the theater sits a cleaner but more consequential question. How far can a President go in dismantling a congressionally created agency without new legislation.

    The Age of EO Torpedos

    The USAGM fight is not fundamentally about whether individual VOA segments are too harsh on Trump or too soft on Iran. It is about whether an executive order, a set of personnel moves, and a lowball budget request can achieve the functional elimination of an agency that Congress has never voted to abolish.

    USAGM’s enabling statute remains on the books. The VOA Charter’s protections for editorial independence remain statutory. Congress has continued to appropriate money. The administration’s legal theory, expressed in the phrase to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, has met courts that interpret applicable law to include the very statutes that created and fund the agency.

    So far, judges have blocked the most aggressive shutdown efforts and voided the actions of the administration’s chosen acting CEO. The White House has not reversed course. Congress has not restructured the agency. The result is a kind of cold conflict governed by injunction and continuing resolution.

    Why One Embattled Broadcasting Agency Matters

    The USAGM saga offers a hard case test of an increasingly common temptation: if a President does not like an agency’s mission, can he accomplish by attrition and administrative order what he cannot get Congress to enact?

    In USAGM’s case, the answer so far is that a determined executive can inflict heavy operational damage but not achieve complete erasure without running into statutory walls. Staffing remains far below prior levels. Grantee networks have already cut parts of their operations. Programming has been interrupted. A year of mass administrative leave bled institutional memory that no court order can magically restore.

    That damage exists regardless of whether one embraces or despises the agency’s mission. It is the predictable outcome when a constitutional fight plays out inside a living institution with employees, foreign audiences, and a statutory mandate that still sits on the books.

    Congress has chosen to keep funding USAGM. The White House has chosen to keep trying to shrink it. The courts have chosen to keep supervising the crossfire.

    Somewhere in that NASA building, the agency that broadcasts American news abroad is learning, in real time, how much of its own survival depends on the very separation of powers it was created to explain.