Category: Federal Agencies & Oversight

• The Federal Budget Works Until 2056, Provided Social Security Keeps Paying Benefits After Its Trust Fund Runs Dry

  The Congressional Budget Office has published its latest look at the federal government’s finances over the next three decades.

  The numbers do not improve with scrutiny.

  Under CBO’s February 2026 long-term projections, federal debt held by the public rises from roughly 101 percent of gross domestic product in 2026 to 120 percent in 2036. By 2056, it reaches 175 percent of GDP.

  That is an extraordinary number. Yet buried inside the spreadsheets supporting the projection is another problem that arrives much sooner.

  Social Security’s largest trust fund runs out of reserves in 2032.

  The combined Social Security trust funds follow in 2033.

  And CBO’s long-term federal budget projection generally assumes scheduled Social Security benefits continue to be paid anyway.

  That does not make the projection wrong. It does, however, make understanding what CBO is actually projecting rather important.

  CBO describes its long-term budget outlook as an illustration of what federal finances and the economy would look like over the next 30 years if current laws generally remained unchanged. It is a baseline, not a prophecy.

  The distinction becomes particularly important when Social Security enters the spreadsheet.

  The Revenue Line Barely Moves

  CBO published a separate workbook containing its 2026 long-term Social Security projections as a supplement to its broader Long-Term Budget Outlook data.

  Reading the two together provides a clearer picture than either does alone.

  One of the most striking findings is what does not happen.

  Social Security tax revenues do not collapse.

  In 2026, CBO projects Social Security tax revenues equal to approximately 4.51 percent of GDP.

  By 2030, the figure is approximately 4.53 percent.

  In 2036 it remains about 4.52 percent.

  Even in 2056, Social Security tax revenues are projected at roughly 4.46 percent of GDP.

  The revenue line is remarkably stable.

  The spending line is not.

  Scheduled Social Security outlays equal approximately 5.26 percent of GDP in 2026.

  They rise to about 5.61 percent in 2030.

  By 2036, that figure reaches 5.91 percent.

  By 2056, scheduled outlays remain around 5.79 percent of GDP.

  That produces a persistent structural gap between dedicated Social Security tax revenues and scheduled benefits.

  In 2026, that difference amounts to approximately 0.75 percent of GDP.

  By 2030 it exceeds 1 percent.

  In 2036, it reaches approximately 1.38 percent.

  The basic problem is therefore not disappearing revenue. It is a system whose scheduled expenditures increasingly exceed the dedicated tax revenues supporting them.

  The demographic explanation is not particularly mysterious. In CBO’s 2026 demographic outlook, the agency projects that the population will continue aging while growth slows substantially. Beginning in 2030, CBO expects deaths to exceed births annually. The number and age distribution of Americans directly affect both the workforce paying Social Security taxes and the population receiving retirement benefits.

  The economy, meanwhile, continues growing.

  CBO’s Social Security tables project nominal GDP increasing from roughly $32.3 trillion in 2026 to approximately $96.5 trillion in 2056.

  Taxable payroll rises from about $11.3 trillion to $32.6 trillion.

  This is not a projection built around economic collapse.

  The economy becomes much larger.

  The financing gap survives anyway.

  Then the Reserves Disappear

  The trust fund numbers make the timeline considerably less abstract.

  CBO projects the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund ratio at 1.53 in 2026. It falls to 1.07 in 2028, 0.60 in 2030, 0.36 in 2031 and 0.12 in 2032.

  Then the number disappears.

  CBO projects that the OASI trust fund will be exhausted during fiscal year 2032. When the Disability Insurance trust fund is included, combined Social Security reserves are projected to be exhausted in 2033.

  Those findings are also laid out in CBO’s March 2026 testimony to the Senate Budget Committee on Social Security’s finances.

  Trust fund exhaustion does not mean Social Security suddenly has no money.

  Payroll taxes and other Social Security revenues continue arriving after the reserves disappear. The problem is that those revenues would not be sufficient to pay all scheduled benefits.

  CBO’s supplemental spreadsheet shows just how large that difference could become.

  If benefits after trust fund depletion were limited to amounts payable from available Social Security revenues, combined OASDI benefits would be approximately 23 percent below scheduled benefits in 2034.

  The reduction reaches roughly 24 percent during several subsequent years.

  The situation is even sharper when OASI is examined independently. CBO’s tables show payable benefits approximately 26 percent below scheduled benefits in 2033, 28 percent below in 2034 and 2035, and 29 percent below in 2036 and 2037.

  Those are not predictions that Congress will cut Social Security benefits by those amounts.

  They illustrate what the financing mechanism can support if scheduled benefits are compared with revenues available after reserve depletion. CBO’s Social Security testimony specifically describes this as a payable-benefits scenario and emphasizes the uncertainty surrounding long-term projections.

  And that distinction leads directly into one of the stranger features of the federal government’s long-term budget projections.

  Two Futures Inside the Same Spreadsheet

  For purposes of its federal budget baseline, CBO generally assumes that Social Security will continue paying scheduled benefits.

  Its Social Security analysis simultaneously calculates what benefits would look like if payments were instead limited by available program revenues after trust fund exhaustion.

  Both calculations are useful.

  They are also very different futures.

  In one, scheduled benefits continue after the reserves financing the existing gap have disappeared.

  In the other, payable benefits fall substantially below scheduled benefits.

  Congress does not have to accept either outcome untouched. Lawmakers could change taxes, alter benefits, transfer money, restructure portions of the program, adopt some combination of those approaches, or pursue other legislative changes.

  CBO is not predicting what Congress will do.

  It is displaying the arithmetic of what happens under specified assumptions.

  That distinction becomes increasingly important because Social Security is only one part of the government’s larger fiscal problem.

  Interest Eventually Costs More Than Social Security

  According to CBO’s 2026 Budget and Economic Outlook, federal debt held by the public reaches approximately 120 percent of GDP in 2036.

  The annual federal deficit reaches roughly $3.1 trillion that year, equal to about 6.7 percent of GDP.

  Then the interest bill becomes a problem of its own.

  By 2056, CBO projects net federal interest spending equal to approximately 6.9 percent of GDP.

  Social Security spending is projected at roughly 6 percent.

  Put differently, under CBO’s long-term baseline, the federal government eventually spends a larger share of the entire national economy servicing its debt than it spends on Social Security.

  Interest does not provide retirement benefits, build roads, purchase aircraft, inspect food, or prosecute crimes.

  It services previous borrowing.

  And as debt accumulates, interest becomes another source of deficits, which can require additional borrowing, which produces additional interest.

  By 2056, debt held by the public reaches 175 percent of GDP.

  Yet the most consequential decisions may arrive more than two decades before that endpoint.

  The Fiscal Collision Arrives Earlier Than 2056

  The timelines from CBO’s two workbooks can be placed beside each other.

  Social Security already spends more than its dedicated tax revenues in 2026.

  The OASI trust fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in 2032.

  Combined Social Security trust fund reserves are projected to be exhausted in 2033.

  By 2034, payable combined benefits would be roughly 23 percent below scheduled benefits if payments were limited by available Social Security financing.

  By 2036, federal debt reaches approximately 120 percent of GDP while the annual deficit reaches 6.7 percent.

  Then the debt and interest burden continue climbing for another 20 years.

  The Social Security financing decision does not wait for the broader debt problem to arrive.

  It gets there first.

  That makes the headline number of 175 percent debt-to-GDP somewhat deceptive as a measure of when the problem becomes important.

  Washington does not have 30 years before it encounters the arithmetic.

  According to CBO’s own projections, one of the largest federal programs reaches its financing crossroads within roughly seven years.

  And Then Reality Changed Five Days Before Publication

  There is one final wrinkle in CBO’s 30-year outlook that demonstrates just how carefully these projections should be interpreted.

  CBO released its long-term outlook data on February 25, 2026.

  The agency included an unusual but important qualification.

  Its projections did not incorporate the budgetary or economic effects of the Supreme Court’s February 20 ruling concerning tariffs.

  Five days.

  CBO produced a federal fiscal projection extending three decades into the future while acknowledging that a major event occurring five days before publication had already changed part of the landscape underlying the baseline.

  That is not a criticism of CBO. Producing long-term economic projections requires freezing assumptions at some point. Otherwise, the spreadsheet would never leave the building.

  It is, however, an excellent demonstration of what a baseline actually represents.

  And we no longer have to speculate about whether the omitted tariff developments were financially meaningful.

  In an August update to its tariff projections, CBO estimated that trade-policy changes through July 31 would increase cumulative federal deficits during fiscal years 2027 through 2036 by approximately $900 billion compared with the agency’s February baseline.

  About $700 billion of that difference comes from larger primary deficits. Another $200 billion comes from additional debt-service costs.

  CBO said the increase was largely driven by the removal of tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act following the Supreme Court decision. The administration subsequently imposed other tariffs, but CBO projected that those would generate less revenue than the tariffs removed after the ruling.

  That $900 billion should not simply be pasted onto CBO’s 2056 debt number. Tariff policy affects revenue, prices, trade, economic activity and debt-service costs, and the policies themselves have changed repeatedly.

  But the episode provides a useful reminder.

  Thirty years is a very long time in federal budgeting.

  Apparently, five days can be enough.

  The Spreadsheet Is Not the Future

  None of CBO’s projections establish that federal debt will equal exactly 175 percent of GDP in 2056.

  CBO itself warns that its baseline projections are subject to considerable uncertainty and that future legislation, administrative actions, judicial decisions and economic developments could produce markedly different results.

  They do not establish that Congress will allow scheduled Social Security benefits to exceed dedicated financing indefinitely.

  Nor do they establish that lawmakers will permit payable benefits to fall roughly one-quarter below scheduled amounts after trust fund depletion.

  Those are policy questions that remain unresolved.

  What CBO’s spreadsheets do establish is the scale of the arithmetic confronting whoever eventually has to resolve them.

  Social Security’s dedicated revenue remains relatively stable while scheduled expenditures exceed it. Trust fund reserves absorb the difference for a while. Those reserves eventually disappear.

  At roughly the same time, the broader federal government is running persistent deficits, accumulating more debt and devoting an increasingly large share of national economic output simply to paying interest.

  CBO can project that process all the way to 2056.

  Congress does not have the luxury of waiting that long to decide what happens next.

  Sources: CBO, The 2026 Long-Term Budget Outlook (February 2026); CBO, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036; CBO, The Demographic Outlook: 2026 to 2056; CBO, Social Security’s Finances: March 2026 Senate Budget Committee testimony; CBO, August 2026 update on tariff revenue effects.

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  2026.09.24

• DOJ Warns About Ubiquitous Surveillance. We’d Tell You What Table 2 Says, But It’s Redacted

  The Justice Department has a ubiquitous technical surveillance problem.

  It does not have a department-wide definition for that problem. Until recently, it had no coordinated strategy for managing it. No individual or office had explicit responsibility for coordinating the response. And when auditors went looking for employee training specifically addressing the threat, they found none.

  Then there is Table 2.

  We would tell you what Table 2 says, but the Justice Department has blacked out essentially the entire thing.

  That would ordinarily be little more than an irritating footnote in the world of federal records. In this particular report, however, the black boxes inadvertently provide a rather good demonstration of exactly what the Inspector General is warning about.

  Bureaucracy Times received the report the decidedly unglamorous way investigative journalism occasionally happens. We entered an email address on a government website and subscribed to updates from the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General.

  No classified records request. No FOIA lawsuit. No source slipping an envelope under the door.

  We asked the government to send us its newsletter.

  And the government sent us a report containing a table it apparently could not show us.

  The digital trail everyone leaves behind

  The September 2026 report, Audit of the Department of Justice’s Efforts to Mitigate the Effects of Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance, examines what DOJ calls UTS.

  The concept is remarkably broad.

  According to the OIG, ordinary use of technology and online services creates digital trails and discoverable connections. UTS involves capturing and analyzing that information to connect people with things, events or locations. The FBI divides the threat into five vectors: visual and physical surveillance, electronic signals, financial information, travel information and online activity.

  A cellphone can reveal location information. Financial transactions contain identifiers. Hotel stays and airline reservations create records. Browsing and social-media activity generate advertising data.

  Individually, those records may appear mundane.

  Combined, they can tell a story.

  Sometimes a deadly one.

  The OIG’s previous 2025 audit of the FBI documented a drug-cartel investigation in which the cartel hired a hacker who exploited mobile phones and other electronic devices to obtain call and geolocation information. According to the Inspector General, that information was used to intimidate and, in some cases, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.

  In another organized-crime investigation, call logs on an employee’s cellphone exposed communications with a known FBI-issued phone. The FBI lost the source.

  These aren’t hypothetical privacy concerns dreamed up for the annual cybersecurity PowerPoint.

  People can die.

  Investigations can be compromised.

  Sources can disappear.

  And the OIG concluded that the problem extends well beyond the FBI.

  DOJ had a threat without a strategy

  Following its FBI audit, the Inspector General expanded its examination to the rest of the Justice Department.

  What it found was not reassuring.

  The auditors concluded that, outside the FBI, DOJ had not taken sufficient steps to manage the UTS threat. The deficiencies, according to the OIG, increased risks to Department employees, investigations, operations, sources and witnesses.

  DOJ didn’t even have a common department-wide definition of ubiquitous technical surveillance.

  The OIG found no individual or office explicitly responsible for coordinating DOJ’s response. There was no policy or guidance establishing how components should coordinate on UTS. And there was no single mechanism ensuring that information about emerging threats and mitigation practices moved throughout the Department.

  Of 16 DOJ components and units interviewed outside the FBI, the auditors found that only the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Defensive Counterintelligence Unit had developed its own definition of UTS.

  The DEA defined it as the widespread and continuous collection of data through technologies, often involving ordinary devices and activities, that can be connected back to an individual.

  The FBI, meanwhile, was considerably further along.

  Following the earlier OIG audit, the bureau designated UTS a “Tier 1 Enterprise Risk,” conducted an FBI-wide assessment, began developing a mitigation plan and training program, and continued working on an enterprise-wide UTS strategy.

  The rest of DOJ was playing catch-up.

  Forty-six courses. Zero dedicated to UTS.

  Perhaps the cleanest measurement of that gap appears in the Department’s training records.

  DOJ identified 46 training courses offered during fiscal years 2024 and 2025 that it believed might be related to ubiquitous technical surveillance.

  The Inspector General checked.

  None was UTS-specific.

  Some courses touched subjects related to the threat, but according to the auditors, none actually described the UTS threat, explained how it might be exploited to DOJ’s advantage or taught personnel how to protect the Department from it.

  Only seven of the 46 courses were mandatory.

  Participation in the remaining voluntary courses among non-FBI DOJ personnel was less than 1 percent.

  The mandatory offerings included general DOJ information-technology training, DEA’s Foreign Travel Briefing, ATF’s Counterintelligence Awareness and Security Training, and U.S. Marshals Service courses covering operations security.

  The OIG concluded that DOJ had neither baseline UTS awareness training for its workforce nor specialized UTS training for employees working in particularly sensitive areas such as surveillance, source handling and counterintelligence.

  There is a substantial difference between not recognizing a theoretical risk and failing to organize around a threat that has already materialized.

  DOJ was dealing with the latter.

  Immigration judges were already being targeted

  During the current audit, DOJ told investigators about UTS-related incidents involving immigration judges overseeing cases handled by the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

  Individuals had gathered publicly available but sensitive information about judges from disparate sources and published it in ways that could be used for intimidation or other purposes.

  The response required coordination among DOJ security personnel, the U.S. Marshals Service and, sometimes, the FBI.

  EOIR also employed a privacy and data-removal service to try to remove judges’ personal information from the internet.

  That episode is particularly important because it demonstrates the defining characteristic of UTS.

  The information does not necessarily have to begin as secret.

  The danger comes from aggregation.

  Take pieces of information that are individually public or innocuous, connect them, and something considerably more sensitive can emerge.

  Which brings us back to Table 2.

  About that table

  On page three of the publicly released report sits a table.

  Its title is redacted.

  Its column headings are redacted.

  Its row labels are redacted.

  Its substantive entries are redacted.

  Even the source printed beneath the table is redacted.

  What remains visible is essentially its skeleton: four principal rows, two columns and a collection of bullet points hidden beneath black rectangles.

  The OIG explains on the cover of the report that the complete version contains information the Justice Management Division considered law-enforcement sensitive and that those portions were removed to produce the public version.

  There is nothing inherently scandalous about that.

  Law-enforcement agencies possess information that shouldn’t be publicly released, and Inspector General reports routinely undergo redaction for legitimate reasons.

  But the placement of this particular table was irresistible.

  Immediately before Table 2, the OIG explains that it interviewed personnel from 12 non-law-enforcement components and subcomponents and four law-enforcement components, encompassing another 32 subcomponents. The auditors found a general lack of awareness and understanding of UTS across DOJ, although law-enforcement components were generally more aware of the threat than their non-law-enforcement counterparts.

  Then comes the blacked-out table.

  Immediately afterward, the report concludes that DOJ had taken no enterprise-level action to coordinate its components or actively manage department-wide vulnerabilities.

  Naturally, we wanted to know what was underneath all that black ink.

  So we tried to reconstruct it.

  We failed

  There are important distinctions here.

  Bureaucracy Times did not attempt to remove the PDF’s redactions, exploit hidden document layers, recover deleted text or otherwise circumvent the government’s decision to withhold the material.

  Instead, we tried something considerably less exciting.

  We searched publicly available government records.

  The theory was simple and, appropriately enough, almost identical to the threat described in the report itself: perhaps information appearing separately in other public DOJ, FBI, DEA or OIG records could be combined to independently establish what Table 2 contained.

  We got surprisingly far.

  The public report identifies the organizations auditors interviewed, including ATF, the Bureau of Prisons, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service, National Security Division, Criminal Division, Executive Office for United States Attorneys, Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, Civil Division and EOIR, among others. The FBI was excluded from this particular audit because the OIG had already examined it separately.

  We could establish that DEA’s Defensive Counterintelligence Unit had developed a UTS definition.

  We could establish that EOIR had experienced the immigration-judge incidents.

  We could establish that the Marshals Service participated in responses to those incidents.

  We could establish that DEA, ATF and USMS offered training touching areas relevant to UTS.

  What we could not establish was which organizations corresponded to the four visible rows of Table 2 or precisely what its individual bullet points said.

  There were plausible candidates.

  Plausible isn’t proof.

  So we stopped.

  The black boxes remain black.

  Which rather proves the point

  There is something wonderfully circular about the exercise.

  DOJ’s Inspector General published a report explaining that seemingly ordinary pieces of information can be collected from disparate sources, connected together and used to reveal relationships that aren’t obvious when each piece is viewed independently.

  DOJ then redacted information from that report because it was considered law-enforcement sensitive.

  We received the redacted report because we had subscribed to a public government email list.

  Then we attempted to combine other publicly available government records to determine whether the missing information could independently be reconstructed.

  And we discovered that the public record gets you surprisingly far.

  Just not far enough to responsibly fill in Table 2.

  That may be the most appropriate ending imaginable for an Inspector General report about how much information can be reconstructed from seemingly ordinary pieces of data.

  DOJ agrees changes are needed

  The Justice Department isn’t contesting the Inspector General’s central findings.

  The Justice Management Division’s Security and Emergency Planning Staff concurred with all three recommendations.

  DOJ says it will develop a coordinated UTS strategy and governance framework, establish a structured process for identifying and monitoring risks, maintain a UTS risk portfolio and implement tiered training.

  The Inspector General lists the recommendations as “resolved.”

  That does not mean they’re finished.

  The first recommendation will remain open until the OIG receives evidence that DOJ has actually established the coordinated strategy and assigned responsibility for managing its UTS risk portfolio. The second requires evidence that risks have been identified and mitigation plans developed.

  The third will not close until DOJ demonstrates that it has created and implemented mandatory basic UTS awareness training across the Department, along with advanced training for employees occupying higher-risk positions.

  That gives the Inspector General something concrete to measure later.

  It gives us something to watch, too.

  And if the Department eventually publishes a follow-up explaining how everything turned out, Bureaucracy Times is already subscribed to the newsletter.

  We’ll check Table 2 first.

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  2026.09.23

• IRS Warns About Fake ‘Tribal Tax Credits.’ The Public Record Already Names the Promoters.

  The IRS says the credits do not exist and warns taxpayers about unnamed “promoters.” Congressional investigators and SEC filings have been considerably less shy.

  The Internal Revenue Service has a warning for taxpayers: Someone is selling fake “Tribal Tax Credits.”

  The agency’s September 18 alert says promoters are marketing nonexistent federal tax credits under names including “Tribal Tax Credits,” “Native American Tax Credits” and “Sovereign Tribal Tax Credits.” The IRS says no such federal credits exist and warns that taxpayers who claim them could face penalties, interest and even criminal consequences. IRS warning.

  There is just one conspicuous omission from the IRS warning.

  Names.

  The IRS repeatedly refers to “promoters” without identifying the companies or individuals involved.

  Fortunately, other parts of the federal government have been less mysterious.

  In April 2025, Senate Finance Committee investigators publicly identified White River Energy Corp., Nepsis Inc., Nepsis Tax Advisors LLP, Quartermaster Tax, E3 Family Office, Lifetime Advisors and Lifetime Navigators in connection with the promotion or distribution of purported tribal tax credits.

  The committee said the IRS had already confirmed to its investigators that the credits did not exist. Senate Finance Committee.

  That makes the IRS’s decision to issue an anonymous scam warning more than a little curious.

  The Numbers Are Not Small

  White River’s own filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission provide a window into just how ambitious the operation became.

  In December 2023, White River told investors that it had received another $5 billion in federal income tax credits supposedly issued to a Native American tribe. The company claimed the credits had been placed under White River’s name and taxpayer identification number at the U.S. Treasury. SEC filing.

  By February 2024, White River reported an agreement contemplating the acquisition of another $13 billion in purported credits in exchange for $3 million in cash and 10 million restricted shares of White River stock. The company said it had already paid a $1.25 million deposit. SEC filing.

  Then came the sales operation.

  In April 2024, White River announced plans to sell $5 billion of purported credits in three tranches. The first $2.5 billion would sell for 50 cents on the dollar. Another $1.5 billion would go for 55 cents. The final billion would cost 60 cents on the dollar.

  White River also said it possessed a legal opinion from an unidentified law firm supporting the validity of the credits. The company deemed the opinion a “trade secret” and said it would disclose it only to certain prospective purchasers and representatives who signed nondisclosure agreements. SEC filing.

  The IRS now says references to unverifiable legal opinions and demands for nondisclosure agreements are themselves warning signs of the scheme. IRS warning.

  The People Behind the Sales

  White River’s SEC filings also identify executives who stood to benefit directly from selling the credits.

  In April 2024, the company’s board increased annual base salaries for CEO Randy May and CFO Jay Puchir to $1 million each. Both executives also became eligible for royalties equal to 1 percent of gross proceeds from tax-credit sales. SEC filing.

  Six months later, White River doubled those royalties to 2 percent each. Directors James Cahill, Danny Hames and Greg Landis were each granted royalties equal to 0.33 percent of gross proceeds from future sales. SEC filing.

  The distribution network extended beyond White River.

  Senate Finance investigators said a whistleblower identified Lifetime founder Jon LaCasse and his daughter, Payton LaCasse, as personally pitching the credits. Investigators also independently confirmed that Lifetime’s website hosted Nepsis promotional materials concerning the credits. Senate Finance Committee.

  The Senate investigation later obtained a recording of a call between Puchir and more than 100 investors. According to the committee, White River could not provide investors with a definitive government document or government contact capable of authenticating the credits. Senate Finance Committee.

  By January 2026, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden said White River was under a DOJ criminal tax investigation involving its sales of the purported credits. The committee also accused the company of failing to disclose that investigation in required SEC reports. Those are congressional allegations; a criminal investigation itself is not a finding of guilt. Senate Finance Committee.

  So Why Doesn’t the IRS Name Them?

  That brings us back to September 2026.

  The IRS warns taxpayers that promoters may claim secret government agreements exist. It warns about credits sold at steep discounts. It warns about unverifiable legal opinions. It warns about nondisclosure agreements. And it warns that previously accepted tax returns do not prove the credits were legitimate.

  The agency even provides instructions for reporting abusive promoters.

  What it doesn’t provide is the identity of any promoter.

  That might be understandable if federal investigators were still trying to determine who was selling these products. But the public record tells a different story.

  Congress publicly identified companies connected to the promotion of the credits in April 2025. SEC filings identify White River executives and directors who received compensation tied to their sale. Congressional investigators identified individual sales activity. And by January 2026, a Senate committee was publicly discussing a Justice Department criminal investigation.

  Yet when the IRS issued its nationwide scam warning eight months later, the people it warned Americans about became simply “promoters.”

  There may be a legal, investigative or procedural reason the IRS declined to identify them. The agency’s alert does not explain one.

  The IRS has now told taxpayers what to look for.

  The public record tells them where some of those warning signs have already appeared.

  Bureaucracy Times will continue examining that record.

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  2026.09.23

• The Postal Service Knew. It Filed a Meeting Agenda Instead.

  The United States Postal Service lost $9 billion in fiscal year 2025. Somewhere between $3.6 billion and $5 billion of the surrounding rot, spread across counterfeit shipping labels, counterfeit stamps, and a payment system nobody bothered to fraud-test before launch, was not a mystery to the agency while it happened.

  It was, by the Postal Service’s own admission, something people inside the building had flagged, discussed, and in at least one case warned about in writing more than a year before anyone shut anything down. This is not a story about an agency that failed to notice a problem. It is a story about an agency that noticed, formed a working group, and kept mailing.

  A Timeline That Reads Like a Confession

  Start with the number that should embarrass everyone involved. From March 2024 through February 2026, the Postal Service’s own Office of Inspector General says counterfeit package labels drained $3.1 billion in unrecoverable revenue, with another $520 million projected through 2028. Ninety seven percent of counterfeit labels identified in that window made it all the way to delivery.

  The detection system built to stop them, the Counterfeit Postage Intercept Process, caught the labels it was designed to catch in 2023 and then sat still while counterfeiters moved on, the institutional equivalent of reinforcing the door after the windows had been open for a year.

  The Enterprise Payment Account fraud embedded in that mess has its own paper trail, and it is the most damning document in the pile. Corporate Treasury warned Postal Service stakeholders about the vulnerability in January 2025. The agency did not officially identify the fraud until May 2025.

  The Inspector General discovered it independently that August, during unrelated site visits, which is its own small humiliation; the watchdog found the fire before the fire department did. The agency did not shut down the roughly 2,800 fraudulent accounts responsible until January 2026, a full year after Treasury’s first warning, by which point December alone had bled $125 million in a single month, 14 percent of that month’s entire label revenue.

  The Inspector General’s own words on the agency’s response were blunt: “the measures have not been timely or robust enough to counter this fraud scheme.” OIG’s audit traced the root cause to something administratively poetic. Treasury, the office responsible for catching fraud, had no consultation rights and no decision authority over the very payment system fraud was flowing through. The system was never tested for fraud prevention before it went live.

  A Machine That Cannot See What It Was Built to See

  If the label fraud is a story about warnings ignored, the companion audit on counterfeit stamps is a story about equipment deliberately blinded. The Postal Service’s primary stamp authenticator, the Advanced Facer Canceller System 200, can run in a mode that catches nearly everything or a mode that catches almost nothing, and management chose the second one to save processing time.

  When the Inspector General ran its own controlled test, feeding the machine counterfeit stamps in its low-revenue protection setting, the machine caught none of them. Zero. Management’s defense amounted to a cost argument, and a fair one on its own terms, except that nobody then bothered to implement any interim check, such as basic sample testing, to find out how much fake postage was sailing through in the meantime. That gap alone, OIG estimates, put $337 million at risk in a single fiscal year.

  The stamp fraud also has an online dimension that makes the agency look almost quaint. A contractor hired to scan the internet found 8,895 instances of counterfeit stamps being marketed or sold in under two months. The Postal Service takes over 30 days to disable an online threat once found; the contractor’s industry benchmark is eight.

  The Inspector General points out, not unkindly, that the agency already uses the Lanham Act aggressively to sue people selling unlicensed eagle-logo T-shirts and baseball caps, and applies it far less often to people selling fake postage using the same logo. Priorities, evidently, are a choice.

  Ninety Seven Cases, Nine Convictions, One Percent Recovered

  Here the story stops being about detection and becomes about consequence, or the near total absence of it. Between 2020 and 2025, the Postal Inspection Service presented 44 counterfeit label cases to the Department of Justice for prosecution.

  Nine were accepted. All nine won convictions, a perfect record on the cases federal prosecutors bothered to take, which only sharpens the question of why 35 others were turned away and why the agency still cannot say. The Inspector General recommended a simple fix, a structured data field to track why DOJ accepts or declines a case, so patterns could inform future referrals.

  The Postal Service disagreed, arguing the information “is not provided” by DOJ in the first place, an answer that concedes the problem while declining to solve it.

  Of the $57 million in losses the Inspection Service actually identified through investigation over that same five year window, it recovered $572,250. About one percent. The delay between a search warrant and a seizure warrant runs four to five months, plenty of time for a suspect whose bank has already tipped him off to walk the money elsewhere.

  The agency had two untapped options available to it. One was the Revenue Deficiency Process, an administrative billing mechanism. The other was simply referring cases to state prosecutors. It has used neither with any consistency. When OIG recommended exploring both, management disagreed with that too, and pointed to a prior report about stamps as though it had already answered a different question.

  The Working Group That Was Not a Program

  None of this happened for lack of meetings. The Postal Service assembled a “Fraud Analytics and Mitigation” team, held regular cross-functional sessions, and produced slide decks. What it did not produce, across two years and two separate audits, was a signed program charter, a clear line of decision authority, or meeting minutes documenting what was decided and why.

  Management’s own response to the recommendation that it fix this was that formal governance amounted to unnecessary overhead given how fast fraud moves, an argument that would carry more weight from an agency that had, in fact, moved fast.

  The Postal Service agreed with eight of the eleven recommendations in the label audit and rejected three, all in the section on prosecution. It agreed to all four recommendations in the stamps audit and all five in the payment account alert, mostly after the money was already gone.

  Every implementation date attached to a real fix lands sometime between April 2026 and August 2027. The Inspector General will keep filing reports. The agency will keep filing agendas.

  The $3.62 billion did not wait for either.

  Sources: Efforts to Mitigate Counterfeit Postage (USPS OIG, Report 25-072-R26, September 10, 2026); Counterfeit Stamps (USPS OIG, Report 25-121-R26, June 16, 2026); Management Alert: Enterprise Payment Account Fraud (USPS OIG, Report 25-072-2-R26, February 10, 2026)

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  9 reposts

  2026.09.23

• The Dots Say What Warsh Would Not

  A Chairman Who Declines to Own His Forecast

  At his press conference on September 16, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh offered the public a tidy piece of humility. The central bank, he said, “cannot affect any individual price,” whether at the gas pump or the grocery checkout, but it could work to keep any change in relative prices from broadening out, from producing “second and third order effects on the economy.”

  It is a reasonable description of monetary policy’s actual reach. It is also, conveniently, a description with no falsification clause attached. If prices broaden out anyway, the Committee can say the hike softened what would otherwise have been worse. If they do not, the Committee takes the credit. Either outcome confirms the theory, which should always make you suspicious of the theory.

  There is a second detail worth sitting with, buried in the fine print of the Summary of Economic Projections released the same afternoon. Of the 19 seats on the Committee, only 18 participants submitted a projection for 2028 and 2029, and Warsh himself is understood to have again declined to submit his own dot for the federal funds rate, a habit he established at his very first meeting as chair back in June.

  A central banker who will tell reporters, at length, what the Committee is trying to accomplish, while declining to put his own number on paper for where rates should go, has found a genuinely elegant way to be accountable for the rhetoric and insulated from the record.

  What the Dots Actually Say

  The rhetoric was calm. The dots were not. In June, the median FOMC participant projected the federal funds rate would end 2026 at 3.8 percent, consistent with the one quarter point hike that had already been substantially priced in. By September, with that hike delivered and the range sitting at 3.75 to 4 percent, the median projection for year end had moved up again, to 4.1 percent.

  Read plainly: the Committee did not simply catch up to where it said it was headed. It moved the target further away, in the same direction, in the same meeting where it congratulated itself for a “timelier return” to 2 percent inflation.

  The inflation numbers explain why. Median PCE inflation for 2026 came in at 3.7 percent, versus 2.0 percent, the Committee’s own longstanding target, a gap that would embarrass most institutions into using the word “elevated” more than once in a press release. Core PCE, which strips out food and energy on the theory that doing so reveals the underlying trend, sat at 3.4 percent.

  Seventeen of eighteen participants said the risks to inflation were weighted to the upside. Seventeen of eighteen said their uncertainty about inflation was higher than normal. This is not a committee that is confident inflation is cooling. This is a committee that voted to raise rates while telling you, through its own survey data, that it expects to be wrong in the direction of more inflation, not less.

  The One Number That Actually Moved in the Fed’s Favor

  Credit where it is due. The unemployment rate projection improved, from a June median of 4.3 percent to 4.1 percent in September, and GDP growth ticked up slightly as well. That is the justification buried inside the jargon of “economic activity is expanding at a solid pace.” A labor market that is not cracking gives the Committee room to lean against inflation without immediately worrying about a recession it is causing. It is a coherent policy position.

  It is just not the position that got spoken aloud at the podium, where Warsh’s framing stayed centered on prices rather than on the fact that a resilient labor market is precisely what buys the Fed room to keep hiking.

  Reading the Distribution Instead of the Median

  The median number flatters the Committee with an appearance of consensus that the underlying distribution does not support. Figure 2 in the SEP shows twelve participants clustered around a year end midpoint near 4.125 percent, but four sit higher, near 4.375, meaning four members of the Committee think two more quarter point hikes belong on the table before December, not one.

  Two participants sit lower, at 3.875, essentially arguing the September hike should not have happened at all. That is not a unanimous outlook dressed up as a single dot. That is a room with real disagreement about how much further to go, compressed into a median that makes the disagreement disappear.

  An institution that wants credit for transparency does not get to publish the distribution and then let the chair speak only in the language of the median. The dots, read honestly, say the Fed expects to keep hiking into a labor market it currently likes and against an inflation number it currently distrusts. Warsh, at the microphone, said something calmer and vaguer, and declined to attach his own name to either number.

  The public got the speech. The institution kept the paper trail to itself.

  Primary sources: Federal Reserve, September 2026 Summary of Economic Projections; Federal Reserve, September 16, 2026 FOMC statement.

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  17 reposts

  2026.09.23

• The Ten-Year Plan That Forgot to Have an End Date

  In March 2021, the United States Postal Service unveiled Delivering for America, a ten-year plan promising, in essence, that a 246-year-old delivery monopoly could be reengineered into something resembling a modern logistics company, if only it was allowed to consolidate a few hundred facilities, reroute the mail through fewer hubs, and quietly stretch the definition of “on time.”

  Five years and roughly $40 billion in projected investment later, the Postal Service’s own Office of Inspector General has produced a report that reads less like a progress update and more like a diagnosis delivered with the studied gentleness reserved for patients who are not going to like the prognosis.

  The topline finding, stated with bureaucratic understatement, is this: the Postal Service has cut costs, reorganized its network, and reduced transportation and processing expenses by roughly $2.75 billion combined. Its annual net loss has not moved. It stood at $9.18 billion in FY 2020 and sits at $8.98 billion in FY 2025, a rounding error’s worth of improvement bought with five years of institutional upheaval.

  Meanwhile the controllable loss, the metric management prefers because it excludes the pension obligations Congress has never fixed, grew to $2.75 billion. The organization has, in other words, gotten leaner and no less broke.

  Rural America Gets the Extra Day

  The plan’s central mechanism, the Regional Transportation Optimization initiative, works by no longer whisking mail from small post offices into the processing stream the same day it is collected. Instead, mail from offices more than fifty miles from a processing facility waits, gaining the Postal Service a cheaper truck schedule and gaining the customer an extra day of transit that did not exist before.

  When fully deployed, RTO will touch 72 percent of ZIP codes in the contiguous United States, and its distribution is not evenly shared: 86 percent of rural populations are affected against 45 percent of urban ones. Five entire states (Louisiana, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming) will be RTO in full.

  The OIG’s examples do the rhetorical work no press release ever will. First-Class Mail crossing Vermont, a state 157 miles long, now takes four days instead of two. A letter from Pierre to Rapid City, South Dakota, 172 miles apart, went from a three-day standard to five.

  The report also traces a piece of mail from Providence, Rhode Island, to Akron, Ohio, a route that now detours through Massachusetts and Indianapolis before it can reach Ohio, the postal equivalent of routing a phone call through three area codes to save money on the switchboard. None of this is malfunction. It is the plan working as designed, which is precisely the problem the OIG is pointing at.

  The Postal Service says it expected 95 percent on-time delivery under the redesigned network. Performance improved briefly after the changes began, then declined again across every mail class in FY 2024 and stayed down through FY 2025, ticking upward only in the first half of FY 2026.

  RTO ZIP codes trail non-RTO ZIP codes by roughly eight percentage points on First-Class Mail, a gap that widened even after management padded the delivery standards in 2025 to make the numbers look better on paper. When the target keeps moving to meet the outcome, the outcome stops meaning very much.

  A Ten-Year Plan Without a Program Manager

  Here the report shifts from documenting outcomes to documenting something closer to institutional negligence. Delivering for America was sold to Congress, employees, and the public as a structured ten-year plan with $40 billion in investment and $22 billion to $31 billion in projected savings.

  In FY 2024, quietly and without much public notice, the Postal Service updated the plan and removed the savings targets and budget goals entirely. Management now describes DFA as a “strategic direction” rather than a plan with numbers attached, which is a remarkably convenient thing to decide once the original numbers stop being achievable.

  There is no centralized program office tracking the transformation as a whole, no overarching timeline, and no mechanism to report how much of the ten-year plan has actually been completed.

  The OIG had to calculate that figure itself: as of March 2026, fourteen of sixty planned regional processing centers were operating, along with seventy-three of a planned one hundred ninety local processing centers and a hundred fifty-four of four hundred planned sorting and delivery centers. Less than half of the network redesign is finished, five years into a ten-year plan, and nobody at USPS headquarters can currently tell you, in dollars, what finishing the rest will cost.

  Management has acknowledged total costs may exceed the original $40 billion estimate. By how much, it will not say, because it no longer tracks the number.

  The report is even less forgiving on modeling. USPS built its network redesign, including the Atlanta and Richmond processing centers, on volume projections that ignored trailer counts, loading times, and dock space, resulting in mail trucks idling for up to thirteen hours waiting to unload.

  Separately, USPS signed an air cargo contract with volume minimums it then discovered it could not meet with packages alone, forcing it to divert First-Class Mail back onto planes, directly undoing the surface-transport strategy the rest of the plan depends on. An organization that cannot model its own truck bays is now being asked to manage a ten-year, $40 billion transformation on the honor system.

  Standardization: The Part of the Plan Nobody Finished

  The most damning finding is also the driest. The entire premise of the redesigned network was that new regional processing centers would be functionally interchangeable, standardized boxes that could be measured, compared, and managed from a national dashboard.

  Instead, the OIG found that the Atlanta and Indianapolis centers, both purpose-built at a combined cost exceeding $700 million, perform entirely different functions. Atlanta consolidates local mail collection, cancellation, and express mail processing in one building. Indianapolis spreads the same functions across three separate facilities. Table 6 of the report lists fourteen regional centers using five different sorting machine types with no consistent pattern for what gets done where.

  The Postal Service built a national network and ended up with fourteen local ones, which is precisely the fragmented, custom-solution architecture Delivering for America was supposed to replace.

  Layered on top of that is a persistent scanning problem, flagged across five separate OIG audits, in which manual, error-prone scanning at modernized facilities undermines the very tracking visibility the new network was supposed to deliver. The OIG recommends automation. Management’s response, that full standardization is “impractical” given legacy infrastructure, is the kind of sentence that would have sounded more convincing before the agency spent five years and $40 billion trying to do exactly that.

  The Verdict, Such As It Is

  To its credit, the Postal Service agreed with all five OIG recommendations, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of nodding solemnly at a doctor while reaching for a cigarette on the way out.

  It will build a five-year program schedule by mid-2027.

  It will standardize efficiency measurement by 2027.

  It will look into automated scanning by 2027.

  All of it is achievable, none of it is new, and all of it should have existed before the agency spent a decade’s worth of political capital and public patience rerouting the mail through more hubs than the routes require.

  Delivering for America has, by its own auditor’s account, delivered cost savings without delivering solvency, and standardization without delivering standards. The plan has five years left to prove it was worth the wait.

  Rural Vermont, waiting an extra two days for a letter to cross a state you can drive in three hours, is not optimistic.

  Source: USPS Office of Inspector General, Delivering for America: Five-Year Assessment (Report 26-042-R26, September 2026).

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  6 reposts

  2026.09.23

• Washington Helped Build Google’s Ad-Tech Empire. Now It’s Trying to Pry It Open.

  The Justice Department is celebrating a federal court order designed to loosen Google’s grip on online advertising technology.

  There is just one awkward historical detail.

  The federal government reviewed and cleared some of the acquisitions that helped Google build that grip in the first place.

  On Sept. 16, the Justice Department announced what it called “substantial relief” in its antitrust case against Google. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ordered Google to make important portions of its advertising technology work more readily with competing systems, allow publishers greater access to their own data, prohibit certain preferential bidding practices and submit to six years of outside monitoring.

  It is the latest development in a case that produced a major government victory in April 2025, when U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema found that Google had unlawfully maintained monopolies in publisher ad servers and open-web display ad exchanges.

  But getting from a collection of advertising businesses to an unlawful monopoly took years.

  And Washington was watching for much of the trip.

  The Government Approved the Building Blocks

  In 2007, Google agreed to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

  DoubleClick was no minor addition. Its technology included a publisher ad server that would eventually become Google’s DFP and technology that developed into Google’s AdX advertising exchange. Those products later became central to the Justice Department’s monopolization case.

  The Federal Trade Commission investigated the DoubleClick acquisition for eight months.

  Then it let the deal proceed.

  The vote was 4-1.

  At the time, the FTC concluded that the transaction was unlikely to substantially lessen competition. Regulators even considered the possibility that Google might combine or bundle DoubleClick’s products with its other advertising businesses.

  The commission concluded that DoubleClick lacked the market power necessary to make such a strategy a significant competitive threat.

  That prediction has not aged particularly gracefully.

  Nearly two decades later, a federal court found that Google unlawfully tied its publisher ad server, DFP, to its AdX exchange as part of conduct that helped maintain its monopoly power.

  There is an important distinction. The court did not rule that Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick itself was illegal. The government’s eventual case concerned what Google subsequently did with the market position it had assembled.

  Still, Washington had examined one of the central building blocks before Google put it into the building.

  Then Came More Pieces

  Google acquired Invite Media in 2010 for approximately $81 million.

  Invite Media provided technology on the advertiser side of the market and ultimately became part of Google’s advertiser-buying infrastructure. The Justice Department’s 2023 complaint would later identify the acquisition as another step in Google’s expansion across the advertising technology stack.

  The transaction apparently fell below the threshold requiring federal premerger notification, meaning regulators did not conduct the same kind of review that DoubleClick received.

  Then came AdMeld.

  Google agreed to purchase the publisher advertising technology company in 2011 for roughly $400 million.

  This time, the Justice Department investigated.

  The Antitrust Division gathered information from Google, AdMeld and other participants in the advertising industry. It ultimately closed the investigation without challenging the acquisition, concluding that the deal was unlikely to substantially reduce competition.

  One of the government’s assumptions was that publishers could use multiple advertising platforms and shift their business among them.

  Years later, the Justice Department revisited that conclusion.

  Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki described the government’s earlier reasoning in a 2023 speech and delivered an unusually concise bureaucratic postmortem.

  “We were wrong.”

  Google’s growing scale, DOJ subsequently argued, combined with exclusionary practices to undermine precisely the competitive alternatives regulators had expected would remain available.

  Washington Comes Back With a Crowbar

  By 2023, the Justice Department was telling a very different story about the advertising market.

  Its antitrust complaint specifically traced Google’s expansion through DoubleClick, Invite Media and AdMeld, arguing that Google had established control across critical portions of the technology used to buy and sell open-web advertising.

  Two years later, Judge Brinkema found Google liable for unlawfully maintaining monopolies in publisher ad servers and ad exchanges.

  The government then sought something much more dramatic: structural relief that included forcing Google to divest its AdX exchange.

  The court declined to go that far.

  Instead, Google received what might best be described as federally mandated interoperability.

  Under the final judgment, Google must create and support integrations connecting AdX and DFP with Prebid, an open-source advertising technology widely used by publishers. AdX must also be capable of submitting real-time bids into competing publisher ad servers.

  Publishers must be allowed to access and export their data from Google’s systems, making it easier to migrate to competitors.

  Google’s advertiser tools are prohibited from bidding preferentially into Google’s own advertising products simply because Google owns them.

  And a monitor and technical committee will oversee Google’s compliance for six years.

  The government helped open the door.

  Now it is installing a monitor to make sure Google leaves it open for everyone else.

  A Monopoly on Fixing Monopolies

  There is a tempting joke here about the federal government objecting to monopolies while maintaining something of a monopoly on deciding what constitutes one.

  Legally, however, the distinction matters.

  Federal antitrust law does not prohibit a company simply because it becomes enormously successful or even obtains monopoly power. The Sherman Act targets acquiring or maintaining that power through unlawful exclusionary conduct.

  Nor did the court retroactively declare Google’s major acquisitions illegal.

  The more interesting story is institutional.

  Federal regulators examined Google’s $3.1 billion DoubleClick acquisition and approved it. DOJ examined the roughly $400 million AdMeld acquisition and approved that too. Invite Media slipped beneath the federal premerger-review threshold.

  Those three acquisitions subsequently appeared in the Justice Department’s own reconstruction of how Google built its position across the advertising technology stack.

  The FTC made predictions about the competitive consequences of DoubleClick.

  DOJ made predictions about AdMeld.

  The market developed.

  Google developed with it.

  Eventually, DOJ acknowledged that at least one of those predictions had been wrong.

  Now, almost two decades after the DoubleClick acquisition, the federal government has won a court order requiring Google to connect the resulting advertising infrastructure to competitors, share information with customers and operate under years of technical supervision.

  The Justice Department calls that restoring competition.

  It may also be something considerably more familiar in Washington.

  Fixing yesterday’s regulatory assumptions with tomorrow’s regulatory oversight.

  <strong>Sources:</strong> <a href=”https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-again-wins-substantial-relief-against-google&#8221; target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Department of Justice, September 16, 2026 press release on Google ad tech remedies</a>; <a href=”https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-google-llc-2023&#8243; target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>U.S. and Plaintiff States v. Google LLC, DOJ Antitrust Division case page</a>; <a href=”https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/virginia/vaedce/1%3A2023cv00108/533508/1410&#8243; target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, April 17, 2025 liability opinion</a>; <a href=”https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/1566706/dl&#8221; target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>DOJ complaint, January 24, 2023 (PDF)</a>; <a href=”https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2007/12/federal-trade-commission-closes-googledoubleclick-investigation&#8221; target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>FTC press release closing the Google/DoubleClick investigation, December 20, 2007</a>.

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  10 reposts

  2026.09.22

• DOE Wants Industry to Mine Its Cold War Leftovers. First, It May Want to Check the Math.

  The Department of Energy is looking for companies interested in turning leftovers from America’s nuclear weapons complex into useful commodities.

  There is aluminum and copper from uranium enrichment plants. Lead shielding from a former nuclear rocket facility. Lithium hydride, radioactive cesium and contaminated platinum at Oak Ridge. And in Utah, there are millions of tons of uranium mill tailings that may still contain recoverable vanadium and other critical minerals.

  Before anyone starts digging, however, DOE may want to check the calculator.

  In an Expression of Interest released by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, the department says approximately 8,000 tons of aluminum are available at its Paducah cleanup site in Kentucky.

  DOE helpfully converts that figure to 56 million pounds.

  It isn’t.

  Eight thousand tons is 16 million pounds, meaning DOE’s own critical-minerals inventory appears to overstate the aluminum weight by 40 million pounds.

  Fortunately, the underlying 8,000-ton estimate appears consistently enough elsewhere in the document to make the problem look considerably more like arithmetic than the sudden appearance of 20,000 additional tons of Cold War aluminum.

  And there is plenty of material without the extra zeroes.

  DOE announced the initiative Sept. 18, seeking information from private industry about recovering surplus materials at five Environmental Management cleanup sites: Paducah, Kentucky; Portsmouth, Ohio; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the Nevada National Security Site; and the Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project in Utah.

  At Paducah alone, DOE identifies about 8,000 tons of aluminum and 2,000 tons of copper, plus smaller quantities of tungsten, silver, platinum and selenium.

  That is roughly 20 million pounds of aluminum and copper before anyone reaches the more exotic items on the list.

  Much of it is a legacy of the enormous gaseous diffusion equipment once used to enrich uranium. DOE says the aluminum and copper are primarily contaminated with uranium on their surfaces, potentially allowing them to be decontaminated and recovered.

  Portsmouth presents a similar opportunity, including about 1,100 tons of copper from electrical equipment, 280 pounds of fluorine and a decidedly less industrial 3.1 grams of platinum.

  Oak Ridge gets stranger.

  DOE lists approximately 10,000 pounds of lithium hydride contained in shielding assemblies, about 1,000 grams of platinum and 1.39 pounds of cesium-137 chloride contained in sealed radioactive sources.

  Recovering the cesium, unsurprisingly, would require shielding, remote handling and specialized processing. The platinum comes with its own complication: contamination from cobalt, cesium and strontium.

  In other words, this is not a government garage sale.

  Sixteen Million Tons Already Buried

  The most intriguing possibility may be sitting in an engineered disposal cell about 30 miles north of Moab, Utah.

  DOE has spent years moving uranium mill tailings from the former Atlas mill beside the Colorado River to Crescent Junction. The material originated from uranium and vanadium ores processed between 1956 and 1984.

  Approximately 16.2 million tons of material covered by DOE’s analysis have already been placed in the disposal cell.

  Now the department wants to know whether some of what it buried might still be useful.

  Historical sampling found vanadium in the tailings, particularly in fine-grained material. DOE also identifies aluminum, antimony, beryllium, bismuth, cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, nickel, tungsten, zinc and other potentially useful minerals.

  There is an important caveat.

  DOE says there has been no site-specific metallurgical testing establishing that those minerals can actually be recovered economically. The material is heterogeneous, radioactive and already inside a regulated disposal facility. DOE specifically warns against using historical samples to calculate a whole-cell mineral resource.

  The tailings averaged about 477 picocuries per gram of radium-226 in 2012-2025 loadout measurements.

  Mining yesterday’s radioactive waste, apparently, comes with paperwork.

  Recycle It or Bury It

  Nevada offers perhaps the simplest illustration of what DOE is trying to accomplish.

  At the Nevada National Security Site, DOE has surplus lead shielding from the former Engine Maintenance, Assembly and Disassembly facility, part of the Cold War-era nuclear rocket program.

  The inventory includes 402 standardized lead bricks already characterized as non-radiological, along with additional bricks and lead shot expected as dismantlement proceeds.

  DOE has a deadline.

  The lead must be dispositioned before May 1, 2027. If no user is found, DOE says it will be disposed of at the Nevada site.

  That turns the exercise into more than a hunt for valuable metals. Every pound successfully reused can potentially represent material DOE does not have to process, transport, store or dispose of as waste.

  There is historical precedent for that calculation. Federal reviews of DOE cleanup activities have long examined whether recovering metals from former nuclear facilities could offset disposal costs and produce commodity value.

  But DOE has not provided a current estimate of how much taxpayers could save through this particular initiative.

  That may be because DOE does not yet know.

  The current solicitation is only an Expression of Interest. DOE is not offering companies funding, and interested firms would be responsible for the equipment and expertise necessary to extract, process or relocate the material. DOE is essentially asking industry to tell the government what can realistically be recovered and what anyone might actually want.

  Companies have until Nov. 2 to respond, following a virtual Industry Day scheduled for Sept. 30.

  For an agency responsible for cleaning up the remnants of decades of nuclear weapons production, the experiment represents an unusual reversal.

  For years, the question has been how much it will cost to get rid of the material.

  DOE is now asking whether someone might want to buy, recover or reuse it instead.

  Just remember that the 8,000 tons of aluminum still weighs 16 million pounds.

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  9 reposts

  2026.09.22

• Four Minutes of Congress and a Rule That Asks Examiners to Look Away

  The House convened Monday at 10:30 a.m. and adjourned at 10:34 a.m. Nobody voted, nobody debated, and the Senate stayed home. The real news arrived, as it does in pro forma weeks, stapled to the back of the Congressional Record as executive communications nobody reads aloud.

  The most consequential is EC-4755, the FDIC’s transmittal of a major final rule, issued jointly with the OCC, that defines “unsafe or unsound practice” in regulation for the first time. Beginning November 2, a practice qualifies only if it departs from generally accepted standards of prudent operation and is likely to materially harm a bank’s finances or pose a material risk of loss to the Deposit Insurance Fund. A Matter Requiring Attention, the examiner’s formal warning shot, now demands a reasonable expectation of material financial harm or an actual violation of banking law. Everything beneath that line becomes a “supervisory observation,” which a bank may ignore for as many exam cycles as it likes; examiners are forbidden to escalate it on that ground alone.

  The agencies assure readers the new standard would have caught Silicon Valley Bank. The same document forecasts that the OCC will issue fewer MRAs and that banks will save more than $100 million a year as a result. The agencies declined to put a number on “likely” or “material,” which leaves the whole edifice resting on examiner judgment, the very thing the rule was written to restrain. They then printed the wrong OCC docket number and ran a correction Tuesday.

  Also Buried in the Back Pages

  Fewer visits. EC-4756 reports a joint interim final rule doubling the asset ceiling for the 18-month exam cycle to $6 billion, as the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act directs. When Congress created the extended cycle in 1991, the ceiling was $100 million. Comments close October 14, after the rule has already taken effect.

  Douglas retires. EC-4766 covers an MSPB final rule ending mandatory use of the twelve Douglas factors, drawn from a 1981 case against the Veterans Administration, in reviewing penalties for federal employee misconduct. The Board will instead weigh the totality of the circumstances in appeals filed on or after October 5. It carries an OPM docket number because it began as a joint proposal with OPM, one that drew roughly 676 comments in 32 days.

  Museums. Rep. Stansbury’s H.R. 10527 would shield the Smithsonian’s independence from executive interference. It is the second such bill in a week, following H.R. 10475, and the American Alliance of Museums has endorsed it. Both sit in House Administration.

  Whose office is it. Rep. Griffith inserted a clarification on H.R. 10204, passed September 14, describing the Copyright Office as performing “legislative and executive functions.” The bill strips the Librarian of Congress’s authority over the Register and makes the Register a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate. Congress is handing an office to the President while insisting it still belongs to Congress.

  Acting, again. DHS sent four notifications under the Vacancies Act (EC-4765). The Record discloses that they exist and nothing more, which is how acting appointments prefer it.

  Contempt, certified. The Speaker certified Leon Black’s subpoena defiance to the U.S. Attorney for D.C. under H.Res. 1543, after the Oversight Committee voted 41 to 0 and the House agreed without a recorded vote. Whether anyone prosecutes is now the Justice Department’s call.

  In four minutes, Congress did nothing. In the fine print, the government agreed to look less often, less closely, and with fewer rules for how it punishes the people doing the looking.

  2026.09.22

• Congress Just Voted to Create a DOJ Fraud Division. DOJ Already Created It.

  The House overwhelmingly approved a new National Fraud Enforcement Division. The Justice Department has already assembled roughly 500 attorneys and staff, shifted authorities from existing components and asked for another $30 million to expand it.

  WASHINGTON — On September 16, the House of Representatives voted 352-72 to pass legislation establishing a National Fraud Enforcement Division within the Department of Justice.

  According to the official House Clerk roll call, H.R. 9576 passed with 352 yeas, 72 nays and nine members not voting.

  It sounds straightforward enough.

  There is a great deal of fraud. Congress wants a Justice Department division dedicated to fighting it. Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly agreed. Every Republican who cast a vote supported the legislation, as did 139 Democrats and the House’s lone independent.

  There is just one peculiar wrinkle.

  The National Fraud Enforcement Division already exists.

  The Justice Department created it months ago, began transferring personnel and prosecutorial authority into it, established its organizational structure, put it to work and announced plans for substantial expansion.

  Congress, in other words, has voted overwhelmingly to create an organization the executive branch has already created.

  Welcome to federal organizational management.

  A 352-72 Vote That Wasn’t Quite Bipartisan Uniformity

  H.R. 9576, the National Fraud Enforcement Division Act of 2026, was introduced July 2 by Reps. Brad Finstad of Minnesota and Derek Schmidt of Kansas.

  The bill is remarkably brief for legislation establishing an organization of this scale.

  It creates the National Fraud Enforcement Division under the Attorney General and places it under an Assistant Attorney General appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

  That official would lead DOJ efforts to investigate and prosecute fraud affecting the federal government, federally funded programs and American citizens. The division would coordinate multi-district and multi-agency investigations, assist U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, develop national fraud enforcement priorities and recommend legislative and regulatory changes.

  The final House vote was lopsided.

  Republicans voted 212-0 in favor. Democrats divided 139-72, with three not voting. The House’s lone independent also supported the bill, according to the House Clerk’s voting record.

  The opposition therefore came entirely from Democrats, although roughly two-thirds of Democrats casting votes supported passage.

  The result is notable because the rule governing consideration of H.R. 9576 and several other measures had passed only 214-211 the previous day, largely along party lines.

  Whatever disagreements surrounded the legislative package, H.R. 9576 itself attracted broad support.

  That may have something to do with the size of the problem.

  There Really Is an Enormous Fraud Problem

  The federal government’s fraud problem is not particularly controversial.

  The Government Accountability Office estimates that direct annual fraud losses to the federal government range from $233 billion to $521 billion, based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022.

  Federal fraud enforcement, however, was hardly nonexistent before someone thought of creating a National Fraud Enforcement Division.

  The Justice Department’s Criminal Division already maintained a Fraud Section. Within it were specialized operations dealing with health care fraud and market, government and consumer fraud.

  U.S. Attorneys’ Offices prosecute fraud throughout the country. The FBI investigates it. Federal inspectors general investigate fraud involving their agencies and programs. DOJ’s Civil Division maintains its own Fraud Section for civil matters including health care, defense contracting, procurement, grant, customs and disaster-relief fraud.

  The old Criminal Division Fraud Section was hardly idle, either.

  According to DOJ’s 2025 Fraud Section Year in Review, the section charged 265 defendants during the year, with more than $16 billion in aggregate intended fraud losses. DOJ’s 2025 national health-care fraud takedown alone involved charges against 324 defendants in alleged schemes involving more than $14.6 billion in intended losses.

  So what exactly has Washington created?

  The answer turns out to be more interesting than simply another office.

  DOJ Started Rearranging the Furniture First

  Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche formally created the National Fraud Enforcement Division in April.

  His April 7 memorandum establishing the division directed DOJ to consolidate and realign existing resources into the new organization, arguing that doing so would reduce duplication, establish clearer lines of responsibility and centralize expertise.

  The department then began moving additional personnel and authority.

  By August, DOJ had formally rewritten its organizational regulations to give the Fraud Division jurisdiction over criminal fraud, criminal tax proceedings, trade and customs fraud, fraud involving federal money, health-plan fraud, health care fraud and certain related controlled-substance cases.

  The department’s August 18 Federal Register rule explicitly amended Criminal Division authority to accommodate responsibilities assigned to the new Fraud Division.

  One jurisdiction has had an especially busy trip around the organizational chart.

  Criminal tax enforcement moved from the Tax Division to the Criminal Division during a December 2025 reorganization.

  Eight months later, DOJ moved it again.

  The new destination was the National Fraud Enforcement Division, whose regulations now assign it “all criminal proceedings arising under the internal revenue laws.”

  Tax Division to Criminal Division to Fraud Division in less than a year.

  Somewhere in Washington, an organizational chart is probably asking for mileage reimbursement.

  This Is Bigger Than a Renamed Fraud Section

  It would be equally misleading, however, to dismiss the new division as nothing more than bureaucratic rebranding.

  DOJ has built something considerably larger.

  The department’s official organizational chart places an Assistant Attorney General at the top of the National Fraud Enforcement Division, supported by a Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General and five Deputy Assistant Attorneys General.

  DOJ’s August enforcement priorities memorandum describes specialized litigating and support operations covering health care fraud, tax enforcement, public trust and financial integrity, trade and commerce enforcement, national enforcement, corporate enforcement, asset recovery, appellate work, investigations, data science and litigation support.

  The department has taken existing fraud authorities and personnel and built around them centralized analytical, investigative, and technological capabilities.

  The same DOJ memorandum makes the scale unusually clear.

  The department said it was reorganizing “substantial resources” from other DOJ components into the new division and expected the organization to reach approximately 500 attorneys and staff by August 24.

  And 500 apparently isn’t the destination.

  It is the starting point.

  DOJ said the division would continue growing rapidly during the following two years.

  The department has also launched a National Fraud Detection Center, described as a prosecutor-led, multi-agency operation designed to combine law-enforcement and analytical capabilities to identify fraud across federal programs.

  Then Comes the Money

  H.R. 9576 itself does not contain an appropriation for building the division.

  The Justice Department’s budget documents fill in that blank.

  DOJ’s FY2027 congressional budget submission contains a separate budget account for the National Fraud Enforcement Division.

  The department’s detailed budget justification requests $30 million for the division in FY2027.

  More significantly, DOJ is requesting 140 new positions, including 100 attorneys. Because of hiring timing, the department estimates those positions would account for 70 full-time equivalents during the fiscal year.

  But that 140-position request is separate from the workforce already being assembled.

  DOJ has described much of that initial workforce as coming from reorganizing “substantial resources” from existing Justice Department components. The 140 requested positions represent an additional personnel increase sought through the FY2027 budget.

  That distinction matters.

  DOJ first consolidated hundreds of existing personnel and functions. It then sought additional money and employees to grow the resulting organization.

  Only after that machinery was moving did the House vote to establish the division in statute.

  Not Every Fraud Prosecutor Is Moving In

  There are limits to the consolidation.

  DOJ’s Civil Division still maintains its own Fraud Section, which investigates and litigates major civil fraud cases involving federal programs, health care, defense contracting, procurement, grants and other government expenditures.

  The Civil Division has continued operating that machinery even while the new criminal Fraud Division has been taking shape. In May, for example, DOJ announced new procedures for accelerating False Claims Act cases involving benefits fraud.

  U.S. Attorneys’ Offices also remain responsible for prosecuting cases within their districts.

  The National Fraud Enforcement Division therefore does not place every federal fraud investigator and prosecutor beneath one organizational roof.

  What it does is centralize a substantial portion of criminal fraud enforcement at a much higher organizational level within DOJ.

  The former Criminal Division Fraud Section existed inside another DOJ division.

  The National Fraud Enforcement Division sits separately under its own Assistant Attorney General.

  That is not merely a name change.

  It is a significant redistribution of authority.

  Congress Arrives at the Construction Site

  There is an unusual constitutional and bureaucratic sequence underlying all of this.

  The executive branch announced the concept.

  DOJ administratively created the division.

  Existing personnel and functions were transferred into it.

  DOJ changed its regulations to accommodate the new organizational structure.

  The division began operating.

  The department requested additional money and personnel to expand it.

  Then the House passed legislation establishing it.

  The Federal Register rule provides an especially interesting footnote to that chronology. DOJ characterized the reorganization as involving agency management, personnel and organization. The department concluded that the action therefore did not constitute a “rule” for purposes of the Congressional Review Act and was not subject to that law’s reporting requirement.

  H.R. 9576 would therefore do something important, but different from what the phrase “establish a National Fraud Enforcement Division” might initially suggest.

  It would give statutory footing to an executive-branch reorganization already underway.

  That could matter well beyond semantics. An organization created administratively can generally be reorganized administratively. Putting the division into federal law would give Congress a direct role in establishing its continued existence and leadership structure.

  Whether the Senate will agree remains to be seen.

  But the House has spoken rather decisively.

  The federal government has an enormous fraud problem. DOJ believes consolidating prosecutors, investigators, analysts and data capabilities into a national division will improve its ability to attack that problem. A substantial bipartisan majority of the House has now endorsed putting that structure into law.

  The interesting question is not whether Washington should combat fraud.

  It already was.

  The question is whether moving existing fraud fighters into a new centralized division, adding personnel and building another Assistant Attorney General-led bureaucracy will make the government better at finding fraud.

  The National Fraud Enforcement Division may eventually answer that question.

  It just didn’t wait for Congress before getting started.

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  7 reposts

  2026.09.22