Bureaucracy Times

All the news fit to be declassified.

Category: Congressional & Legislative

  • FTC Questions Who Really Controls College Accreditation

    The Federal Trade Commission has waded into the normally sleepy world of higher-education accreditation with a fairly provocative question: What happens when the institutions being regulated have substantial influence over the organizations doing the regulating?

    It turns out that question leads somewhere interesting.

    The FTC this week endorsed a Department of Education proposal intended to make it easier for new higher-education accreditors to enter the market and for colleges to change accreditors. The Commission argues that the existing system can restrict competition, increase costs and protect incumbent institutions from new educational models.

    That matters because accreditation is considerably more consequential than the word makes it sound.

    The Education Department describes accreditors as gatekeepers to more than $100 billion in federal student aid every year. Colleges generally need accreditation from a federally recognized organization for their students to participate in Title IV federal aid programs.

    The people guarding that gate, however, frequently come from the institutions standing behind it.

    The FTC’s 21-of-27 Example

    In its comments supporting the proposed rule, the FTC pointed to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

    According to the Commission, 21 of Middle States’ 27 commissioners are administrators or faculty members at colleges and universities.

    That could sound like an unusually cozy arrangement until you start looking at the other accreditors.

    Bureaucracy Times did.

    The result suggests Middle States is less an exception than an illustration of how American accreditation was designed.

    The New England Commission of Higher Education openly describes itself as a “peer-based” membership association. Its commission consists of faculty and administrators from affiliated institutions alongside public representatives.

    Then there is the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, better known as SACSCOC.

    Its organizational structure makes the relationship particularly easy to see.

    The SACSCOC College Delegate Assembly includes one voting representative from every accredited institution. That representative is the institution’s chief executive officer or designee.

    Those representatives elect the organization’s 77-member Board of Trustees.

    The board, in turn, takes final action on the accreditation status of applicant, candidate and member institutions.

    According to SACSCOC’s own organizational materials, the trustees are primarily administrators and faculty members from member institutions, although 11 seats are reserved for public members.

    In other words, colleges send representatives to an assembly that elects the board of the organization responsible for deciding whether colleges remain accredited.

    Nobody appears to be hiding this arrangement. It is the arrangement.

    Peer Review or Competitive Barrier?

    There is a perfectly legitimate reason for structuring accreditation this way.

    American higher-education accreditation has historically been built around peer review. The theory is straightforward: professors, administrators and university presidents presumably know more about evaluating universities than a federal bureaucracy does.

    Accreditors also include public representatives and impose conflict-of-interest requirements intended to prevent commissioners from simply protecting their own institutions.

    But the FTC is now asking a different question.

    What happens when peer review also becomes market regulation?

    Accreditation standards can determine what facilities a college needs, what qualifications faculty must possess, what programs institutions can offer and, ultimately, whether students attending those institutions can receive federal financial aid.

    The FTC argues that incumbent institutions therefore can have an economic interest in accreditation requirements that make it more difficult or expensive for competitors to enter the market.

    The Education Department has reached a similar conclusion. Its August proposed rule says a small group of accreditors has dominated higher education for decades and proposes simplifying federal recognition of new accrediting organizations while making it easier for institutions to switch accreditors.

    The public comment period closed September 21.

    We’ve Seen This Movie Before

    The FTC also points to the American Bar Association as a cautionary example.

    That comparison comes with some history.

    The Justice Department sued the ABA in 1995 over its law-school accreditation practices, alleging that legal educators had used the accreditation process in ways that restricted competition. The case ended in a consent decree requiring changes to ABA practices.

    More than three decades later, the ABA’s accreditation authority is again being challenged.

    Texas has ended its reliance on ABA accreditation for determining which law-school graduates can sit for its bar examination. Florida has also moved to expand accreditation options, while federal competition officials have encouraged efforts to reduce states’ exclusive reliance on the ABA.

    That history gives the FTC’s current intervention considerably more weight.

    This isn’t merely a philosophical debate over who should evaluate colleges.

    It is an antitrust question about who gets to enter the education market and who gets to establish the price of admission.

    A Very Expensive Gate

    None of this establishes that commissioners are improperly favoring their own institutions, and institutional participation in accreditation governance is not evidence of misconduct.

    But the structure creates an unusual accountability loop.

    Colleges are evaluated by accrediting organizations substantially governed by people drawn from colleges. Those organizations establish standards colleges must satisfy. Accreditation then helps determine whether those colleges’ students can tap into more than $100 billion in annual federal student aid.

    The FTC is essentially asking whether a century-old peer-review system has also become a mechanism for incumbents to influence the rules confronting potential competitors.

    That is a considerably different question from whether accreditation is necessary.

    And after looking at who actually sits around the accreditation table, it is a question worth asking.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • Eighteen Billion Dollars, and Nobody Assigned to Watch It

    The Elementary and Secondary Education Act asks the Department of Education to do a great many things for the nation’s schoolchildren. Monitor how the money is spent is not, technically, one of them. Not with any specificity, anyway. Congress wrote a provision meant to improve oversight of ESEA funds that never actually orders the Department to monitor anyone, sets no required method, and specifies no frequency.

    It is the legislative equivalent of telling a teenager to “keep the house clean” and then being surprised, four years later, when the sink is a biohazard.

    The Government Accountability Office spent from November 2024 to September 2026 looking into how the Department watches over roughly twenty-seven billion dollars a year in K12 funding, ostensibly to examine chronic absenteeism policy. What it found along the way is a much bigger story than absent children.

    In 2026, the Department of Education suspended its most comprehensive monitoring strategy for ESEA programs entirely. Thirty two of fifty one states have not undergone consolidated monitoring since the Department fully implemented the strategy in 2019. Officials could not tell GAO when monitoring might resume, or what would replace it, or really much of anything, other than a promise that a 2027 monitoring plan is coming “in early fall 2026.”

    The Word That Isn’t in the Statute

    Consolidated monitoring was the Department’s flagship tool for checking whether states receiving ESEA money, the great majority of it flowing through Title I, were actually complying with fiscal and programmatic requirements. It is a broad, single streamlined review of key ESEA programs, the kind of audit that catches the boring, unglamorous compliance failures before they become the interesting, headline generating kind.

    GAO’s report is careful to note that the statute intended to strengthen this oversight does not “explicitly direct Education to monitor grantees,” nor does it set “specific requirements regarding the method or frequency of monitoring and oversight activities.” Officials told GAO, more or less accurately, that they have broad discretion in how they carry out oversight responsibilities and that nothing legally compels them to do it any particular way.

    This is the sort of statutory gap that exists in dozens of federal programs and rarely matters, because agencies tend to keep doing the thing they were doing regardless of whether a statute makes them do so. It matters here because the Department stopped anyway, and did so with no announced replacement, no interim safeguard, and no explanation beyond “developing plans for future monitoring activities.”

    Discretion is a wonderful thing to have written into law, right up until an agency uses it to simply not act.

    Title I, Part A alone accounted for over eighteen billion dollars of the roughly twenty seven billion in ESEA formula funding in fiscal year 2025, about two thirds of the total. GAO’s own prior work, cited in this report, has already flagged the decentralized structure of state administered programs like Title I as a fraud vulnerability.

    Suspending the primary mechanism for catching fiscal noncompliance in a decentralized, state administered, multibillion dollar program is not a small administrative housekeeping decision. It is the removal of the one instrument that was checking whether the money went where Congress said it should.

    Half the States, Half the Time, and Two Findings That Stuck

    Even before the 2026 suspension, the Department’s coverage was thinner than the “comprehensive” branding suggests. Of the thirty six states that chose to include chronic absenteeism as an indicator in their statewide accountability systems, only fourteen, under forty percent, had been monitored for compliance with the relevant indicator and support and improvement plan requirements since 2019.

    Two of those fourteen, Maryland and New Mexico, actually turned up violations. Maryland could not demonstrate that any of its school quality indicators, including chronic absenteeism, meaningfully differentiated performance among schools, and New Mexico was not ensuring its support and improvement plans were informed by the chronic absenteeism indicator at all, as required.

    Maryland has since fixed its paperwork. New Mexico, as of this report, has not.

    Separately, on the more universal chronic absenteeism reporting requirements that apply to every state regardless of accountability system choice, the Department monitored twenty six of fifty one states between 2019 and 2025, and found missing required data in seven of them (Idaho, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Texas, Vermont, and Washington).

    When GAO independently reviewed the 2025 report cards of those same seven states, meaning after the Department’s corrective actions were supposed to have taken effect, it still could not find required chronic absenteeism data on one state’s report card and could not find state level subgroup data on another. The corrective action, in other words, did not fully correct.

    None of this is presented by GAO as scandalous in itself. Monitoring programs find problems; that is the point of monitoring programs. What is scandalous, or at least deeply irresponsible, is stopping the monitoring right as the backlog of unresolved findings was still being worked through, and doing so for a reason no more specific than institutional reorganization.

    Congress Gets to Own This One Too

    GAO’s response to all this is characteristically restrained. It is making three recommendations to the Department, resume comprehensive monitoring, fix a data reliability problem in how chronic absenteeism rates are calculated, and issue guidance for shared time schools.

    One “matter for congressional consideration” is asking lawmakers to consider “clearly articulating ESEA monitoring requirements” so that the next Department that finds itself with unlimited discretion and limited enthusiasm cannot simply decline to use it.

    The Department’s own written response, reproduced in the report, disagreed with the recommendation to resume monitoring, insisting it never stopped overseeing states at all and that consolidated monitoring is only “one aspect” of its work, citing more than one hundred other monitoring and oversight activities carried out since 2019.

    GAO’s rebuttal, delivered with the flat patience of an auditor who has heard this argument before, notes that the alternative activities described are “limited in scope” and “substantively different than systematically assessing compliance with ESEA requirements more broadly.”

    Translated out of GAO diplomacy, that reads as yes, you did some things; no, they were not the thing that was suspended; and no, a promised 2027 plan does not retroactively cover the eighteen months in between.

    Congress wrote itself an escape hatch on oversight language decades ago, confident, presumably, that no administration would ever actually walk through it. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Child Care and Development Block Grant program both contain explicit, mandatory monitoring requirements, proof that Congress knows perfectly well how to write a statute that does not leave this to agency discretion.

    ESEA does not have that language, and now it has a live demonstration of exactly what that omission costs. Eighteen billion dollars, and for the moment, nobody assigned to watch it.

    Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, K-12 Education: Actions to Improve Oversight of Key Federal Programs and Address High Chronic Absenteeism (GAO-26-107920, September 2026). Related: A Chronic Absenteeism Rate of 125 Percent Is Still an Official Federal Statistic and The Department Started Fixing Its Data, Then Fired the People Fixing It.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • Three Minutes of House, 38 Seconds of Senate, and a Record Full of Paperwork

    The House gathered at 4:30 p.m. on Monday and adjourned at 4:33. The Senate opened at 4:00:02 and closed at 4:00:40. There were no recorded votes, no quorum calls and no committee meetings, according to the October 5 Congressional Record. The paper trail kept moving anyway.

    The one rule worth a look

    The House received 20 executive communications, EC-4822 through EC-4841. Sixteen were Coast Guard safety zone, special local regulation and drawbridge notices, and three were FAA airworthiness directives for Bell, Airbus and Boeing aircraft. That leaves one that is not routine. EC-4822 transmits a Department of Agriculture interim rule on Highly Erodible Land and Wetland Conservation (Docket NRCS-2026-0067, RIN 0578-AA73), received September 23 and referred to the Committee on Agriculture. The Record carries only the title, so we have not reviewed the rule text. Interim rules take effect before the final word on them, which is why they deserve a second look.

    Twenty-one Senate bills wait at the desk

    A Senate message asked for House concurrence in 21 bills, and the Digest shows each one held at the desk. Several carry real weight. S. 3315 would have the Department of Health and Human Services and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency coordinate on health sector cybersecurity. S. 4009 would impose sanctions over forced organ harvesting involving China. S. 4395 reauthorizes the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, S. 4668 sets name, image and likeness protections for student athletes, S. 4974 amends the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act on food safety, and S. 5249 would align licensing of uranium enrichment facilities with other fuel cycle facilities under the Atomic Energy Act. With both chambers in pro forma, none of them can move before a real session.

    New bills and a clock that is running

    Members introduced 30 House bills, H.R. 10721 through H.R. 10750, and 11 resolutions. Two stand out. H.R. 10732 from Rep. Davis of North Carolina would bar candidates for federal office from trading in contracts on the outcome of their own elections. H.R. 10736 from Rep. Finstad would prohibit computer or printer acquisitions involving entities owned or controlled by China. Separately, the Veterans’ Affairs Committee reported H.R. 2283, a pilot grant program for outpatient mental health facilities serving veterans, with an amendment (Rept. 119-839).

    The Clerk also reported that H.R. 5345 went to the President on September 29. The bill would create a single point of contact at the Social Security Administration for victims of identity theft. By our count of the constitutional ten days, Sundays excepted, the window runs to about October 10.

    The Speaker’s appointments were quiet but consequential. Robert Shireman and Dominique Baker, both recommended by the Minority Leader, will serve six year terms on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. The Senate named Adam Klein of Texas to the FISA Reform Commission.

    The Record, recycled

    The Extensions of Remarks ran to dozens of tributes, and a few read like reruns. One cites a Miami Heat rebounding total as of November 21, 2012. Another celebrates the 100th anniversary of a Miami church whose founding it dates to 1912, which would make this year’s number 114. The official record of the House is only as current as the text members choose to insert.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • A Missile Shield for All Americans, Subject to Classification

    The Scorekeeper Was the Last to Know

    The Congressional Budget Office put a price on a national missile defense system on May 12. A system matching the January 2025 Iron Dome for America executive order, CBO found, would cost about $1.2 trillion to develop, deploy and operate for twenty years, a figure laid out in its report and repeated in testimony to the Senate on September 29.

    Anyone who has met the federal government can guess what happened next. Nothing. David Mosher, who directs CBO’s National Security Division, told the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee at the hearing that the Golden Dome program office gave the agency its first briefing on September 25, four months after the estimate appeared, according to the Center Square.

    CBO told the same outlet it had received no information from the program office before publishing. Guetlein told the same hearing that the program remains on track to deliver an initial operational capability by the summer of 2028 — a statement confirmed in the hearing record — a timeline he has stated publicly since December 2025, according to Federal News Network and National Defense Magazine, and confirmed at the April 2026 subcommittee hearing.

    In the interval, Gen. Michael Guetlein, who runs the program, wrote a Washington Post opinion piece dated September 24 calling estimates approaching $1.2 trillion sensational and accusing their authors of imagining a hypothetical system built on legacy technology and outdated cost models. His office, he added, had briefed congressional committees dozens of times. CBO, as it happens, is not a congressional committee.

    There is a name for faulting a forecast’s assumptions while the real ones stay classified, and it is not peer review.

    Senator Deb Fischer‘s office, for its part, said she is glad the two sides can now work toward a more accurate estimate. One hopes to hear such sentiments in month one rather than month five.

    Two Numbers, Two Universes

    The Pentagon’s number is $185 billion, which a program office official described as covering the objective architecture through 2035. CBO’s is $1.2 trillion over twenty years. The same official told the Center Square the office would need more time to say what the $185 billion does and does not include, a remarkable thing to say about a figure one has been defending in public.

    CBO’s testimony offers two readings of the gap. Either the real architecture is far narrower than the executive order describes, or the money is parked in other accounts, such as the services’ missile procurement lines. Or both.

    The engine of the gap is the space layer. CBO prices the space-based interceptors at $743 billion, about 60 percent of the total, for 7,800 satellites sized to engage a raid of ten intercontinental ballistic missiles launched nearly at once. Atmospheric drag at those altitudes limits each satellite to roughly five years, so CBO says about 30,000 would be needed over twenty years to keep 7,800 aloft.

    Strip the layer out and the bill falls to $448 billion, though CBO notes the result would no longer match an executive order that asks for space-based interceptors by name.

    Here is an inference, and it should be labeled as one. It rests on CBO’s cost table and on the Pentagon’s own inability, so far, to define the scope of its figure.

    A $185 billion program through 2035 cannot contain a $743 billion constellation, so either the Pentagon’s space layer is far smaller than CBO’s or the cost is booked somewhere other than the Golden Dome fund. The reasoning is arithmetic, with one caveat: CBO spreads replacement purchases across twenty years, so the two numbers are not strictly comparable, and CBO itself says a direct comparison is difficult without more detail from the Department of Defense.

    Cleveland, Sioux Falls, and the Word Everyone

    The Pentagon’s position, relayed by an official who would not be named, is that the system protects all Americans, including those in Guam, Alaska and Hawaii. The official would not say which areas it defends, or whether it relies on U.S. Northern Command‘s defended asset list, citing operational security. Nor did the official address testimony at the hearing that not every American can be protected.

    That testimony came from David Trachtenberg, a former deputy under secretary of defense for policy, who told Senator Angus King he was not saying every citizen can be protected and expected the system to be deployed in phases. King had already observed that the name Golden Dome implies national coverage, and he asked the obvious follow-up.

    He put it to the panel this way, “Is it going to protect Cleveland but not Sioux Falls?” Choices were coming, King said, and they had to be made public.

    CBO’s notional design offers a hint of the geometry. Its 35 regional sectors each cover roughly 1/37 of the country, which CBO says would protect most of the U.S. population, and the agency says plainly that the system “would not be an impenetrable shield” and could be overwhelmed by a full-scale attack from Russia or China.

    CBO told the Center Square it did not estimate what share of the population or land area would be covered. Most is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and the remainder presumably lives somewhere.

    The case for secrecy is not frivolous. Fischer’s office says the specifics are classified, and Tom Karako of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has argued that defended asset lists and similar operational details should remain closely held. But it is one thing to keep a radar’s performance secret and another to keep secret which American towns sit under the umbrella.

    The first protects the system. The second protects the program from the question.

    A Dome With No Budget Under It

    All of this assumes the thing gets paid for. Congress gave Golden Dome about $25 billion in the 2025 reconciliation law, and Guetlein said in August that roughly 90 percent had been obligated, according to Air and Space Forces Magazine.

    For fiscal 2027 the Pentagon asked for about $17 billion inside a proposed $350 billion reconciliation package and a mere $400 million in the ordinary base budget. The same report finds little political will for another reconciliation bill.

    The new fiscal year opened October 1 under a continuing resolution, and because Golden Dome has no fiscal 2026 appropriation, a stopgap has no baseline to hold it level against. Guetlein warned in August that without funding in fiscal 2027, “there is no Golden Dome because there is no funding.”

    Senators of both parties noticed. Mike Rounds said reconciliation should not have been necessary to get the program started. King called it very bothersome that the Pentagon and the White House went around the normal appropriations process for one of the most expensive initiatives of the government.

    Fischer pointed out that the layered architecture traces to her own committee’s language in the fiscal 2024 defense authorization, which means the program’s parentage is not in dispute even if its price is. Karako told the panel that Golden Dome and the broader munitions effort will stand or fall on 2027 funding.

    So the ledger reads as follows: A shield for everyone, with a list of protected places nobody will read aloud, priced at either $185 billion or $1.2 trillion depending on whom one asks and what one counts, funded by a reconciliation bill that has not passed and a continuing resolution that cannot carry it.

    CBO is careful to note that engaging a missile is not the same as defeating it. Someone at the Pentagon might extend the same care to distinguishing a program from a slogan.

  • A Grandmother Who Is Not a Tribal Member Can Cost You Your Water Line

    There is a category of person, according to the federal government, whose existence complicates plumbing. That person is a spouse, a grandparent, or another relative living in a tribal community who happens not to be an enrolled tribal member.

    Under Indian Health Service policy, a home occupied by such a person can be legally invisible to the agency whose entire mission, per the Indian Sanitation Facilities Act, is to build water and wastewater infrastructure for Indian homes, communities, and lands.

    The Government Accountability Office documented this in a new report on tribal water infrastructure, and the arrangement is exactly as absurd as it sounds when you say it out loud (Government Accountability Office, GAO-26-107178).

    The Household IHS Cannot See

    IHS interprets its own statutory authority narrowly. A home is eligible for funding if it belongs to a tribal member or the tribe itself. A home is not eligible if it belongs to, say, a non-member spouse or a non-member grandparent, even though tribal members and their children live there every day.

    GAO heard repeatedly from tribal and tribal health consortium officials that these mixed and multigenerational households are common, not rare, in tribal communities.

    One tribal water utility official put it about as plainly as an interview subject can put anything to a federal auditor, saying that every single water infrastructure project their tribe had sought or received IHS funding for included at least one ineligible home where tribal members actually lived.

    Every single one.

    Add to that the leasing wrinkle. A tribal member renting a home from their own tribe, or from another tribal member, can also fall outside IHS’s eligible category if fewer than five years remain on the lease at the time engineers are designing the project.

    That means a teacher living in tribally owned housing, or a tribal member on a short-term lease from a relative, can be sitting inside a project area that IHS is actively funding while remaining, on paper, someone IHS is not funding.

    IHS itself does not even track how often this happens; the agency does not collect data on the number of tribal members living in homes its own rules classify as ineligible.

    It knows the loophole exists. It has simply never counted through it.

    Eighty Hours for Eight Thousand Dollars

    Here is where the definitional problem stops being abstract and starts costing real staff time. When a home falls outside IHS eligibility, somebody still has to pay for the water hookup, and that somebody is usually the tribe, scrambling for outside money while an IHS field engineer walks them through it.

    GAO’s example is almost too clean to be real. Officials from one IHS area office reported spending more than 80 hours helping a single tribe apply for and manage an outside grant worth $8,000.

    After the tribe received the money, the same officials spent additional hours helping it report on how the grant was spent, on top of the original 80. An agency employee’s time is not free. The officials themselves told GAO that once outside funds are transferred to IHS, managing and overseeing them imposes a significant expense on the agency, expense that dwarfs, in staff hours, the size of the grant it produced.

    Run the arithmetic and it gets worse before it gets better. Eighty-plus hours of a federal engineer’s time, spent to unlock $8,000 for a home the agency’s own charter arguably should have covered in the first place, is not an isolated inefficiency. It is what happens, systematically, every time IHS’s definition excludes a home that a tribal member actually lives in.

    Multiply that by however many mixed households and short leases exist across Indian Country, a number IHS admits it does not track, and you get a hidden administrative tax charged entirely in engineer hours, paid for the privilege of routing around a definition the agency wrote for itself.

    A Fix That Fits on One Page

    GAO’s response to this is not a demand for a wholesale rewrite of federal Indian law. It is a request that Congress define, in the statute itself, exactly what “Indian homes, communities, and lands” means, so IHS stops having to guess at the boundaries of its own mandate case by case.

    Absent that, GAO recommends IHS update its own policy to reflect any new statutory definition once one exists, in consultation with tribes.

    This is not a controversial ask. It is closer to basic housekeeping, the kind of clarifying language that should have existed since the Indian Sanitation Facilities Act was written, rather than something an outside audit has to surface decades later as a formal recommendation.

    What makes the current arrangement particularly galling is that IHS is not accused of malice here, or even of especially poor judgment. The agency is applying a plausible reading of an old statute that never anticipated, or never bothered to specify, how it should treat a reservation home where a grandmother happens to hold a state, rather than tribal, enrollment card.

    The absence of a definition did the damage. Everything downstream (the excluded homes, the outside grant hunts, the 80 hours for $8,000) follows directly from Congress never having bothered to spell out a term that shows up in the law’s own name.

    Who Actually Pays For the Gap

    The people who pay for this gap are not, in the end, IHS engineers, whose hours are at least salaried and accounted for somewhere in a federal budget. The people who pay are tribal families living in homes that fall on the wrong side of a definition nobody wrote down clearly, families who may wait longer for a water connection because their household includes a relative who checked the wrong box on a tribal enrollment form decades ago, or none at all.

    GAO’s report does not put a number on how many households currently sit in this limbo, because, again, nobody is counting. That absence of a number is itself the finding. An agency whose entire job is connecting homes to water cannot say how many homes its own eligibility rule disconnects.

    Congress created this problem by leaving three words undefined in the 1959 Indian Sanitation Facilities Act and letting an agency’s legal interpretation harden around the gap for six and a half decades.

    Fixing it requires nothing more dramatic than actually finishing the sentence.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • A Public Hearing Got Stayed for a Year While Nobody Could Agree Who Was Allowed to Ask the Question

    In October 2022, the President asked two federal agencies a fairly simple question. Should marijuana still sit in Schedule I, the category reserved for heroin and LSD, alongside a legal finding that it has no currently accepted medical use in the United States. Four years later, the honest answer is that nobody in the federal government has fully answered it, and the paper trail explaining why, laid out in detail in a new GAO report on drug scheduling, reads less like science than like a jurisdictional turf fight that occasionally paused for actual medicine.

    HHS Answers a Question DEA Did Not Think It Was Allowed to Ask

    By August 2023, HHS had its answer. Applying a new two part test it had adopted that same year for judging whether a drug has a currently accepted medical use, HHS concluded marijuana met the standard and recommended DEA move it to Schedule III. The trouble was that DEA had spent decades applying a stricter, older five part test for the same question, one that generally required something close to FDA approval.

    HHS’s new test did not require that. It asked instead whether there was widespread current medical use recognized by licensed practitioners operating in state authorized programs, plus some credible scientific support for at least one such use, a bar dozens of state medical marijuana programs could plausibly clear even without a single FDA approved cannabis product.

    This is not a scientific disagreement so much as a disagreement over who gets to decide what counts as a medical use in the first place. DEA’s traditional test, in place since 1992, effectively let the agency treat state legalization as legally irrelevant, since it generally required something close to FDA approval before any substance without one could be called medically accepted. HHS’s new test, adopted in 2023, built state level medical practice directly into the federal legal standard instead.

    Whichever test wins determines the schedule, and the schedule determines the criminal exposure. GAO’s report is careful to note that FDA officials insist the two tests coexist rather than replace one another, that FDA approval remains, in their words, the most straightforward path to establishing accepted medical use. Straightforward is doing a great deal of work in that sentence for a process that has just taken four years and counting to sort out a single substance.

    The Justice Department Settles a Fight Between Two Other Agencies

    In April 2024, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel weighed in and sided with HHS. DEA’s traditional approach to currently accepted medical use, the opinion found, was an impermissibly narrow reading of the Controlled Substances Act. Satisfying HHS’s new two part test was sufficient on its own, the opinion held, regardless of FDA approval or DEA’s own five part framework.

    The opinion also concluded DEA could satisfy the country’s obligations under the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs by placing marijuana in Schedule III while layering additional restrictions on top through its own regulatory authority, closing off DEA’s other plausible argument for keeping marijuana more tightly controlled.

    DEA published a notice of proposed rulemaking the following month to reschedule marijuana to Schedule III, then a notice of hearing that August. In January 2025, the presiding administrative law judge stayed the entire hearing pending an interlocutory appeal to the DEA Administrator, meaning the agency that had just lost the legal argument at the Justice Department got to pause the hearing on its own initiative while it sorted out internal procedural objections.

    The rulemaking sat that way for nearly a year.

    An Executive Order Breaks the Stall, Then Splits the Difference

    In December 2025, the President issued an executive order directing the Attorney General to take all necessary steps to finish the rulemaking. Four months later, the Acting Attorney General moved, but not by finishing what DEA had proposed in 2024. Instead, in April 2026, the Acting Attorney General issued a final rule immediately placing FDA approved marijuana products and marijuana used under a state medical license into Schedule III, using the narrower authority to reschedule drugs for treaty compliance rather than the broader rulemaking DEA had been sitting on for two years.

    In the same order, the Acting Attorney General withdrew the stalled 2024 hearing notice and issued a fresh one covering the original, wider question of rescheduling all marijuana, with the actual hearing to run from late June through mid July of this year.

    So as of this writing, a portion of marijuana has been in Schedule III since April, reached through the narrowest available legal doorway, while the broader question that started this entire four year process, whether marijuana generally belongs in Schedule III, sat through a new round of hearings that only just concluded.

    Two federal agencies agreed on the underlying science within a year of being asked. It then took a Justice Department opinion, a stayed hearing, a change in test, an executive order, and a second hearing notice to produce a result that only partially answers the question the President posed in 2022, using an authority nobody had originally proposed using for the purpose.

    What the Timeline Actually Measures

    None of the four years this took were spent gathering new pharmacological data. HHS finished its scientific evaluation within roughly a year of being asked, well inside the range GAO’s broader report found typical for far more obscure substances. Every subsequent delay was procedural, a fight over which test applies, which agency’s reading of the statute controls, whether a hearing already scheduled could be paused by the same agency contesting the outcome, and eventually whether the President’s own order was enough to force a decision at all.

    The Controlled Substances Act was written to sort chemicals by their pharmacology. What this timeline actually documents is how much of that sorting, at least for the one substance most Americans have an opinion about, ends up decided by agencies arguing over their own jurisdiction rather than by anything found in a laboratory.

    Sources: U.S. Government Accountability Office, Drug Scheduling: DEA and FDA Should Strengthen Policies and Procedures for Scheduling Controlled Substances (GAO-26-108623, September 2026); DEA Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Rescheduling of Marijuana (Federal Register, May 21, 2024); DOJ Office of Legal Counsel opinion on HHS marijuana scheduling recommendation (August 2024). Related: The Word That Decides Every Drug Sentence in America Was Never Actually Defined and The Two Year Emergency Order That Needed Seven Years and an Act of Congress to End.

  • The $21 Billion Contract That Was Worth $74 Million

    Somewhere in the Department of Veterans Affairs, a dashboard once displayed a number so large it should have triggered an alarm rather than a press release. A single contract action, the VA told Congress in May 2025, had a value north of $21 billion.

    The actual figure, according to the VA Office of Inspector General, was just over $74 million. That is not a rounding error. That is a factor of roughly 284, the kind of gap you get when nobody checks the math before it goes to the Hill.

    The OIG’s new review of “contracts terminated for convenience” was requested by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Angus King, who wanted to know what happened when the Department of Government Efficiency, VA senior advisers, and the General Services Administration went hunting through VA’s contract portfolio in early 2025.

    The answer, once you strip away the chest-thumping, is that VA terminated 435 contracts worth about $1.1 billion, out of 2,210 contract actions the OIG reviewed. Everything else on the lists VA sent to Congress was either reinstated, never terminated at all, or simply wrong.

    Efficiency, Measured in Wheelchair Ramps

    The most instructive failure here is not the math. It is what got swept into the “terminated” pile in the first place. VA’s July 2025 submission to Congress claimed 1,667 contracts had been terminated or were being terminated. The OIG found the real number was 366, and 17 of those were later reinstated.

    The other roughly 1,300 actions on that list had nothing to do with termination; they were supply contracts that had simply run their course, including orders for prosthetics, surgical implants, and wheelchair ramps, plus more than 150 healthcare contract actions such as nursing home service orders.

    A Category Management Support Office official told the OIG that DOGE representatives “wanted to claim credit for any contracts that ended,” whether or not the government actually ended them. That is a remarkable sentence to find in a federal audit. It means the savings narrative being fed to Congress was padded with equipment orders for amputee veterans that had simply finished delivering, filed under the same banner as genuine cost-cutting.

    The distinction between “we canceled this” and “this was already over” apparently did not matter much to whoever was compiling the list.

    The Eleven-Hour Review

    To be fair to VA’s rank-and-file contracting staff, the OIG’s account of how this played out reads less like malice and more like triage under fire.

    From February through June 2025, OALC and VA senior advisers issued at least 47 orders demanding that contracting officials justify, terminate, pause, or reinstate contracts, on top of a running stream of follow-up emails from GSA and DOGE representatives. On February 21, 2025, officials were handed 1,049 contract actions to review, get approved by deputy under secretaries, and report back on, all within less than 11 hours.

    Some offices did not finish in time. The CMSO director told the OIG that VA senior advisers and DOGE representatives ordered the terminations to proceed regardless. VA had built a questionnaire asking whether each contract provided direct veteran care, required specialized skills VA could not hire for, or was merely administrative support like scheduling; the tool existed, the deadlines simply did not leave room to use it properly.

    Officials, VHA staff among them, told the OIG that instructions arrived from OALC, VA senior advisers, and DOGE representatives simultaneously, on inconsistently formatted lists that sometimes duplicated the same contract action twice. VA did not build a database to track the churn until April 2025, months after the worst of the chaos had already passed.

    Nobody Spoke Federal Acquisition

    The OIG’s explanation for the inflated dollar figures is almost charming in its bluntness. The officials assembling the lists sent to Congress “were unfamiliar with contracting and acquisition terminology.” VA had built a tracking dashboard to monitor the terminations, and that dashboard miscalculated contract values, apparently without anyone downstream noticing that a single contract does not typically run twenty times the annual budget of a mid-sized federal agency.

    This is the recurring shape of the DOGE-era efficiency push across the government; fast, politically driven demands for numbers, staffed by people with strong opinions about waste and thin knowledge of how contracts actually work, producing figures that collapse the moment an inspector general opens the file.

    VA’s own contracting officers, notably, come out of this review relatively well; the OIG found they generally complied with Federal Acquisition Regulation requirements even while being ordered around by people who did not know what a settlement cost was.

    Of the 267 terminated contracts that reached a settlement agreement, 150 cost the government nothing at all, and the remaining 117 cost about $10.6 million combined, a figure that would have looked almost quaint next to the phantom $21 billion the dashboard once reported.

    The Cleanup, Eventually

    VA has since sent Congress a corrected list, submitted April 13, 2026, after the OIG briefed OALC officials in January. The OIG did not audit that list’s accuracy. It also declined to make any recommendations, since VA’s own procurement leadership simply concurred with the draft report and offered no comment, the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug.

    What remains is a case study in how “government efficiency” gets manufactured for public consumption. Real terminations, genuinely worth $1.1 billion, buried under a much larger pile of expired supply orders and inflated dashboards, sent to Congress by people who could not tell a completed prosthetics contract from a canceled one.

    The veterans who needed those wheelchair ramps got them either way. The number on the press release did not.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • The Number That Stopped Moving in 1985

    In 1985, a gallon of gas cost about $1.09, the Berlin Wall was still standing, and the Indian Health Service decided that $10,000 was a reasonable amount of money to connect a tribal school or ceremonial ground to a water system. Forty years later, gas costs three times as much, the Wall is a tourist attraction, and the Indian Health Service still thinks $10,000 is a reasonable amount of money to connect a tribal school or ceremonial ground to a water system.

    This is not an oversight in the sense of a memo nobody read. Per a new report from the Government Accountability Office, IHS senior officials told auditors they had never adjusted the figure because they did not believe it was constraining anyone (Government Accountability Office, GAO-26-107178). Constrain is an interesting verb choice for a policy that has been used exactly twice in two years.

    A Cap With Nothing Under It

    IHS runs a special project fund that can, in theory, pay up to $10,000 to connect an existing tribal community building, a Head Start school, a gathering place, a ceremonial ground, to a water line already being built for a nearby project. It sounds like a sensible bit of flexibility, the kind of accommodation an agency writes into its own rules so tribal communities do not have to run a separate federal gauntlet just to get a spigot into a building that already has walls and a roof.

    In practice, GAO found that of roughly 800 tribal water projects IHS funded in fiscal years 2023 and 2024, exactly two used special project funds for existing community buildings. Two. Not two percent. Two projects, full stop, out of eight hundred.

    Tribal officials and staff from a tribal health consortium told GAO exactly why the number is so small, and it is not because the buildings do not need water. It is because $10,000 does not buy water infrastructure anymore; it barely buys the truck that delivers the materials to build it.

    Tribal health consortium officials said the cap does not come close to covering even basic connection costs, citing the price of materials and the price of hauling those materials to remote tribal land as the primary obstacles. Faced with a fund that cannot fund anything, tribes do the rational thing and skip it, going hat in hand to EPA or USDA instead, agencies with broader statutory mandates that let them pay for the same buildings IHS’s own rule was theoretically designed to help.

    The special project fund exists on paper as a convenience. In practice it functions as a formality tribes have learned to route around.

    Math From the Reagan Administration

    Here is the part where the story becomes less about neglect and more about arithmetic nobody bothered to do. GAO ran the inflation numbers, and $10,000 in 1985 dollars is worth about $30,000 in fiscal year 2025 dollars, triple the amount IHS is still authorized to spend.

    That is not a rounding error produced by decades of general price creep; it is the kind of gap that appears when an agency simply stops looking at a number it wrote down once and filed away. IHS itself, to its credit, did not try to defend the figure once GAO put the inflation math in front of them. Agency officials acknowledged that construction costs have risen since 1985 and said the limit could warrant reevaluation in light of current labor and materials costs.

    That is a remarkably mild way to describe a policy that has effectively been auto-denying itself for four decades. Nobody at IHS appears to have decided, at any point between the second Reagan administration and now, that $10,000 no longer covered what $10,000 used to cover.

    The number simply sat there, technically still on the books, functionally inert, while every input it was meant to pay for, labor, pipe, transport, concrete, kept climbing. A ceiling that never moves is not neutral. It is a ceiling that gets lower every year, measured against the thing it is supposed to buy.

    The Workaround Tax

    The consequence of a dead-letter fund is not that the work stops; the consequence is that the work gets more expensive to arrange, just not on IHS’s books. When a community building cannot get water through the special project fund, tribes and IHS staff go looking for outside money, usually from EPA or USDA, and that search comes with its own overhead. GAO documents this pattern repeatedly across the broader report; pursuing outside funding to cover costs IHS itself will not cover tends to multiply administrative time for everyone involved, IHS engineers included, because now two or three agencies’ worth of paperwork has to be reconciled instead of one.

    A $10,000 cap that functioned properly would resolve a small, incidental cost in house. A $10,000 cap that has not functioned properly since roughly 1990 instead generates a shadow bureaucracy of grant hunting, all to connect a building that, in many cases, sits a few hundred feet from a water main that is already being installed.

    GAO’s recommendation here is almost apologetically modest. It does not ask Congress to rewrite the Indian Sanitation Facilities Act or reorganize IHS’s funding authority. It asks the Director of the Division of Sanitation Facilities Construction to evaluate whether $10,000 is still appropriate, in light of inflation and increases in labor and materials costs, and adjust it accordingly.

    This is, functionally, a request that the agency check a number against the last four decades of economic reality, a task that requires no legislation, no new appropriation, and no interagency task force. It requires someone to open a spreadsheet.

    What Stagnation Actually Costs

    It would be easy to read this as a minor line item in an 86 page report about a much larger set of problems, IHS’s narrow eligibility rules, USDA’s underwriting demands, EPA’s application backlogs. But the frozen $10,000 cap is worth isolating because it is the cleanest example in the whole document of a specific kind of federal failure, not malice, not even obvious negligence, but a number that was correct once and was never revisited, sitting quietly inside an agency’s own internal rules for so long that revisiting it now counts as a recommendation rather than routine maintenance.

    Somewhere in a tribal community right now, a Head Start school or a ceremonial ground is going without a water connection it could plausibly have gotten already, not because the money does not exist in the federal system, but because the specific pot of money set aside for exactly this purpose has been mathematically useless since roughly the first Bush administration, and nobody thought to check.

    That is not a scandal in the traditional sense. Nobody profited. Nobody hid anything. It is simply what happens when the machinery of government runs on numbers that were never designed to update themselves, and the humans responsible for updating them assumed, without checking, that the machinery was fine.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • The Two Year Emergency Order That Needed Seven Years and an Act of Congress to End

    In February 2018, the DEA declared an emergency. Fentanyl related substances, a class of chemicals built by tweaking fentanyl’s molecular structure just enough to dodge existing schedules, were flooding the illicit drug supply, and DEA used its statutory power to temporarily place the entire class into Schedule I. Temporary scheduling orders under the Controlled Substances Act are built to last two years, occasionally three if a permanent scheduling case is pending. This one lasted more than seven, according to a new GAO report on federal drug scheduling, because the process built to handle individual substances had no idea what to do with a class that might contain twenty four million of them.

    The math is not a typo. FDA officials told GAO that depending on which chemical variations you count as valid modifications, the fentanyl related substance class could encompass close to twenty four million distinct chemicals. The Controlled Substances Act requires an individualized scientific and medical evaluation for each substance before it can be permanently scheduled through the normal administrative process. Evaluating twenty four million compounds one at a time, within any statutory deadline that has ever existed, was never going to happen.

    An Emergency Order Standing In for a Law

    DEA formally asked HHS to begin evaluating fentanyl related substances in April 2019, more than a year after the temporary order took effect. HHS did not start sending evaluations back until July 2020. By then the original two year clock was already running out, and Congress had to step in repeatedly just to keep the temporary order from lapsing entirely, extending it in pieces until a hard deadline of September 30, 2025. For most of a decade, in other words, the legal basis for federal fentanyl prosecutions rested not on a permanent, individually justified schedule placement, but on a standing emergency declaration that kept getting renewed because nobody had a better option.

    GAO’s report treats this almost gently, as a case study in “how legislative scheduling can address certain challenges with administrative scheduling.” That framing undersells what actually happened. The administrative process is the one Congress designed to require scientific rigor, an eight factor analysis of abuse potential, medical use, and public health risk, substance by substance. When that process could not scale, the answer was not to fix the process. It was to let an emergency order function as de facto permanent law for seven years, then have Congress skip the individualized evaluation requirement entirely.

    Congress Legislates Around Its Own Statute

    In July 2025, Congress passed the HALT Fentanyl Act, permanently placing all fentanyl related substances into Schedule I as a class, with mandatory minimum sentences including ten years for trafficking one hundred grams or more of any fentanyl analog. Legislative scheduling does not require a scientific and medical evaluation of any kind. Congress can schedule a substance by simple statute regardless of whether it independently meets the Controlled Substances Act‘s own criteria, and in this case it scheduled millions of substances that had never been individually evaluated, because the agency process that was supposed to evaluate them had spent seven years failing to keep pace with the chemistry.

    GAO’s own prior work flagged what this means in practice. Research organizations interviewed for a 2021 GAO report on the same subject warned that class wide scheduling without individualized review risks convicting people over substances that later analysis might show have little or no actual abuse potential. Criminal justice stakeholders went further, warning that sweeping penalties onto an undefined and expanding chemical class could produce lengthy federal sentences for trace amounts and deepen existing racial disparities in sentencing, concerns that did not stop the legislation and do not appear to have been resolved by it. The HALT Act’s fix for a broken administrative process was not to make that process work. It was to make the process legally irrelevant for this entire category of drugs.

    Congress did carve out one narrow accommodation while it was at it. The Act eased registration requirements for research institutions studying fentanyl analogs, allowing multi site studies under a single license instead of the old substance by substance paperwork. That provision quietly concedes the same point the rest of the law ignores, that these chemicals are different enough from one another to require individual study when the purpose is understanding them, but not different enough to require individual review when the purpose is prosecuting someone for possessing them. The bar for scientific caution turned out to depend entirely on which side of the courtroom was asking.

    What Happens Now That the Science Stopped Mattering

    Since the HALT Act passed, FDA told GAO it has not received a single new request to evaluate a fentanyl related substance for the purpose of scheduling, because there is nothing left to schedule; Congress already did it, permanently, for the whole class, present and future. FDA officials said they may still occasionally review a specific substance, mostly to authorize research into it rather than to inform any scheduling decision, since the scheduling decision has already been made regardless of what the research finds. As of this spring, FDA had evaluated forty six fentanyl related substances at DEA’s request under this narrower, research only track.

    That is the actual shape of where this ended up. A federal drug law that was supposed to run on individualized scientific findings now runs, for an entire and still expanding class of substances, on a blanket legislative designation passed because the science could not keep pace with the chemistry and nobody wanted to say so out loud for seven years. The emergency order worked exactly as designed, as a stopgap. The failure was in treating the stopgap as an acceptable substitute for the law it was supposed to hold a place for, for longer than most federal sentences run.

    Nobody in this story made an obviously wrong call at any single step. DEA was right to act fast in 2018 against a genuine public health emergency. HHS was not unreasonable to take time evaluating chemistry nobody fully understood yet. Congress was arguably right that waiting for twenty four million individual evaluations was never a serious option. The failure is structural rather than personal, which is exactly why GAO’s report treats it as a footnote to a larger story about missing paperwork rather than the headline it probably deserves on its own. A statute built around individualized scientific findings quietly stopped requiring any, for the drug category currently killing more Americans than any other, and it took seven years and an act of Congress for anyone to say so plainly.

    Sources: U.S. Government Accountability Office, Drug Scheduling: DEA and HHS Face Challenges in the Administrative Process (GAO-26-108623, September 2026); GAO-21-494, Fentanyl Analogues: Agencies Addressing Scheduling Challenges But Face Broader Issues (2021); HALT Fentanyl Act, Public Law 119-26 (signed July 16, 2025).

    Fediverse Reactions

  • The Timesheet That Refused to Change, Four Audits Running

    There is a particular flavor of institutional rot that does not announce itself with a stolen Ferrari or an embezzled yacht. It announces itself with paperwork so lazy it becomes its own confession. In a new Justice Department Inspector General audit of $105 million in federal victim assistance grants flowing through the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, auditors found a subrecipient director whose activity reports were identical, pay period after pay period, for years. Not similar. Identical. The kind of identical that suggests a human being decided, once, what percentage of their time belonged to which grant, then stopped thinking about it entirely, apparently confident nobody downstream would ever check the math against reality.

    Somebody did check. Michigan DHHS itself flagged the pattern, first in a monitoring review dating back to fiscal year 2021. And flagged it again. And again, through fiscal year 2025, by which point the department’s own report on the matter had degraded into a bureaucratic shrug; a note that “future repayment may be requested” should the identical timesheets continue to appear identical. Four years is a long time to keep discovering the same fire and responding by writing a memo about how, next time, there might be consequences.

    A Culture of Encouragement

    This is not an isolated lapse dressed up as a pattern; it is the pattern. The Office of Justice Programs grants at issue, three Victims of Crime Act formula awards covering fiscal years 2022 through 2024, fund a genuinely vital state apparatus. Michigan’s Division of Victim Services channels the money to more than 200 community organizations providing crisis intervention, forensic exam reimbursement, shelter, and legal advocacy to survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse. Nobody is disputing that the underlying work matters. What the audit disputes is whether anyone in Lansing was prepared to make subrecipients actually fix what monitoring reviews kept turning up.

    Auditors pulled a sample of 14 subrecipients’ monitoring histories across the five year review cycle and found that 9 of them had repeat or substantially similar findings. In one case, financial audits conducted in fiscal years 2022 and 2024 turned up eleven repeat findings at the same organization, including unsupported expenses and improperly calculated indirect costs; the same deficiencies persisted across the two year gap despite the subrecipient having been formally required to update its processes. The audit’s own language captures the department’s operating philosophy with more precision than any editorial gloss could manage; Michigan DHHS “identified concerns but did not explicitly require subrecipients to take corrective action, rather encouraged subrecipients to resolve the issues before their next monitoring review.” Encouraged. As though four year old fraud indicators were a matter of gentle persuasion rather than federal compliance.

    Michigan DHHS officials offered auditors a reasonable sounding excuse; some review periods overlapped, leaving subrecipients insufficient time to correct issues before the next check arrived. It is a plausible administrative headache. It does not explain why, when a director’s timesheets never once varied across years of reviews, “encouragement” remained the department’s entire enforcement toolkit. Nor does it explain the parallel finding that of 22 subrecipient contract reviews auditors examined, 19 turned up errors in the performance data those subrecipients reported to the federal Performance Measurement Tool system; wrong categories, service logs that did not match the numbers claimed. Michigan DHHS caught these errors and, per the audit, did not require subrecipients to correct them or revise how they tracked the data going forward. The department has since told auditors it now asks for amended reports when it spots discrepancies, an improvement whose arrival four audit cycles late says something on its own.

    The Cash That Sat Around Too Long

    While the timesheet saga is the report’s most vivid moment, it shares billing with a second failure that deserves its own brief entry in the ledger of institutional forgetfulness. Federal rules require grant recipients to keep drawdown requests to the minimum needed for reimbursements due within ten days; essentially, do not sit on federal cash. Michigan DHHS transferred roughly $3.2 million in expenditures between two overlapping VOCA grants and, in the shuffle, ended up drawing down funds it had effectively already drawn once, leaving $900,000 in excess federal cash sitting in state coffers for over a month, discovered only because the auditors went looking.

    The department returned the money, eventually, and explained that it had not known about the ten day repayment requirement, this despite a nearly identical episode having already surfaced in a prior review by the OJP’s own Chief Financial Officer’s office. A department managing over a hundred million dollars in federal victim services money discovering, for a second time, that it does not know how quickly federal cash must move is not an anecdote so much as a diagnostic.

    Money That Michigan Says Belongs to Michigan

    The audit also questioned $238,982 in administrative expenditures, the bulk of it $169,659 in pension and retirement contributions charged to the VOCA grant for employees whose eligibility for those specific benefits could not be verified. Michigan disagreed, at length, citing state law that spreads certain unfunded pension liabilities across the entire state payroll regardless of individual eligibility, and declined to concede the point even in its formal response to the draft report. The Office of Justice Programs sided with its own auditors; federal cost allocation rules require charges to match the actual pattern of benefits received by the employees whose salaries hit the grant, not a statewide average. It is, in miniature, a preview of the same institutional posture visible everywhere else in this report; acknowledge the smaller, cheaper findings gracefully, agree to return the money nobody will fight for, and hold the line only where holding it costs the most.

    What Comes Next

    Justice Department auditors issued eight recommendations. The Office of Justice Programs agreed to all of them without qualification. Michigan DHHS agreed with four, contested the pension cost finding across three separate recommendations, and simply declined to state a position on a fifth, even while agreeing to write the check. Every recommendation in this report is now formally “resolved” in the federal accountability sense of the word, meaning paperwork exists committing someone to eventually do something; Michigan has given itself until September 2027, more than a year from now, to finalize procedures ensuring subrecipients actually correct their deficiencies in a timely way.

    That deadline sits uncomfortably close to another number in this report; the four years auditors spent watching one subrecipient’s timesheets stay exactly the same while nothing happened. Bureaucracy has a rhythm all its own, and in Lansing it appears to run on a five year monitoring cycle that resets itself before consequences ever quite arrive.

    Sources: DOJ Office of the Inspector General, Audit of the Office of Justice Programs Victim Assistance Grants Awarded to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, Report 26-099 (September 2026)

    Fediverse Reactions