Bureaucracy Times

All the news fit to be declassified.

Category: Public Safety & Social Policy

  • 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).

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  • The $1.4 Billion HUD Couldn’t Be Bothered to Count

    For nine consecutive years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has known, by its own admission, that its largest rental subsidy program is “susceptible to significant improper payments.” For nine consecutive years, it has declined to say by how much. Not because the number is unknowable. Because in 2017 HUD fired the contractor whose job it was to know, and simply never got around to hiring a replacement.

    That is the opening fact of HUD OIG Report 2026-FO-0006, and it is worth sitting with before the number arrives, because the number is the least interesting part. Any auditor can find a bad statistic. What OIG actually documented is an agency that spent nearly a decade in willful, well-funded ignorance of its own $38.4 billion program, then disputed the homework once someone else finally did it.

    An Agency That Outsourced Its Own Curiosity

    The Public and Indian Housing Tenant-Based Rental Assistance program, known more casually as Section 8 or the Housing Choice Voucher program, is the federal government’s largest direct rental subsidy. It moved $38.4 billion in fiscal 2025, 43 percent of HUD’s entire budget, through roughly 2,200 local Public Housing Agencies that calculate each household’s subsidy using a formula built from income, deductions, rent reasonableness, and utility allowances. It is, by design, decentralized, manual, and dense with judgment calls, which is precisely why the Payment Integrity Information Act requires HUD to estimate how often the formula gets applied wrong.

    HUD used to pay a contractor to run that estimate every year. It discontinued the contract in 2017 and has not produced a figure since, citing “decentralized payment processes, dated and disparate systems” and a familiar chorus of complexity. OIG did not accept complexity as an excuse; it built the estimate HUD wouldn’t. Auditors pulled a stratified sample of 300 payments from the 2.3 million monthly housing assistance payments on the books in March 2025 and checked each one against the underlying documentation.

    Seventy-four were wrong. That is 25 percent, one in four, extrapolated to a projected $1.43 billion a year in improper payments, a number OIG discounted downward for statistical caution before publishing it, meaning the real figure is probably higher, not lower.

    Where the Money Actually Leaks

    The errors sort into a fairly mundane taxonomy, which is itself the point; nothing here required fraud, only inattention. Income miscalculations accounted for the largest share (PHAs entering figures that didn’t match pay stubs, relying on stale documentation, or simply skipping verification against HUD’s own income-matching system). Utility allowance errors came next, PHAs applying the wrong schedule or the wrong unit size to a calculation most of them still do by hand. Then there is a category OIG calls “program compliance,” meaning the PHA skipped a required step entirely, no annual reexamination, no rent reasonableness analysis, no verified immigration status, and got the whole payment marked improper as a result, not because the dollar amount was necessarily wrong but because nobody could prove it wasn’t.

    That distinction matters more than it sounds. OIG also logged 13 “technically improper” payments, cases where the PHA broke a rule but the dollar amount happened to land correctly anyway, pure luck rather than diligence. The audit treats those as a warning sign rather than a reprieve; the same shortcuts that produced a correct number this month are exactly the shortcuts that will produce a wrong one next month.

    Then there is HOTMA, the Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act, signed in 2016 with instructions to raise the medical and disability expense deduction threshold and the elderly and disabled household allowance. Ten years later, HUD’s own system still runs the old, lower thresholds, because the software meant to replace HUD’s aging PIC system, itself a replacement project HUD started in 2021, still has no launch date. A statute a decade old, unenforced, because the agency’s internal IT timeline has quietly outlived the urgency that produced the law in the first place.

    The Monitoring That Wasn’t

    If the errors were merely common, that would be one story. What makes it worse is how little anyone at HUD was watching for them. The agency ran 19 targeted “Calculation of HAP, Adjusted Income, and Rent” reviews in fiscal 2023 and has run zero since. In fiscal 2025, HUD completed 14 total Compliance Monitoring Reviews, covering nine separate program areas, for a portfolio of 2,200 housing agencies and 2.3 million households. That is not oversight so much as its rumor.

    PHAs, for their part, were not shy about explaining why, once OIG actually asked. Understaffed offices process tens of thousands of annual reexaminations with no time to verify small, fluctuating income sources like child support or unemployment benefits. HUD’s own income-verification tool, the Enterprise Income Verification system, updates quarterly and simply doesn’t capture pensions, TANF, or state benefit income at all, meaning the tool HUD requires PHAs to use cannot see a meaningful share of the income it’s supposed to catch. Guidebooks on calculating rent and running reexaminations haven’t been updated since 2019 and 2020 respectively, years before several of the rule changes they’re supposed to explain.

    The Part Where HUD Argues With the Math

    Faced with all this, the Office of Public and Indian Housing did what agencies under audit reliably do, agreed with the spirit and quibbled with the specifics. PIH accepted the recommendation to work on simplifying HAP calculations and to develop better monitoring. It rejected the recommendation to embed a mandatory documentation checklist into its own system, for the reasonable-sounding but conveniently timed reason that its legacy IT platform can’t support it. And it declined to concur with the $1.43 billion figure itself, saying it was still waiting on additional information from OIG.

    OIG’s rebuttal, printed in the report without much editorializing needed, lays out a timeline; final results shared with PIH in March 2026, three follow-up meetings in April to walk through methodology sample by sample, and no further request for information from PIH until July, three months after the walkthroughs concluded. The agency that spent nine years unable to produce its own improper payment estimate spent another four months sitting on someone else’s before deciding it needed more homework.

    PIH’s written response includes one more line worth quoting in spirit if not verbatim, namely that the risk of error is “largely outside of PIH’s direct control,” a structural feature of a complex, decentralized statute rather than a management failure. That may even be half true. It is also the sentence every agency reaches for once the number gets big enough to need one, and it is a strange thing to say about a program HUD chose, for nine years running, not to measure at all.

    Source: HUD Office of Inspector General, Report 2026-FO-0006, “HUD’s Public and Indian Housing Tenant-Based Rental Assistance Program Had Significant Improper Payments,” September 17, 2026.

  • 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)

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  • The Word That Decides Every Drug Sentence in America Was Never Actually Defined

    Every criminal penalty attached to a controlled substance in the United States, whether it is a marijuana possession charge or a fentanyl trafficking case, traces back to a single phrase in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. “Potential for abuse.” It is the first of eight factors the Food and Drug Administration is required to weigh when deciding whether a drug belongs in Schedule I with heroin or Schedule V with cough syrup. According to a new GAO report released this week, FDA has never written down what the phrase means.

    Not “hasn’t gotten around to it lately.” Never. Fifty six years into the statute, the agency responsible for the single most consequential judgment in American drug law, the one that decides whether you face a misdemeanor or a mandatory minimum, is operating on what its own officials describe to GAO as “professional judgment.” There is no criteria document. There is no process memo. There is a phrase in a 1970 statute and a room full of scientists doing their best.

    The Machine That Has No Manual

    To be fair to FDA, the underlying machine is genuinely intricate, and GAO’s report lays it out in more detail than anyone outside the agencies has probably ever gotten. When DEA wants to schedule, reschedule, or deschedule a substance, it is required to request a scientific and medical evaluation from HHS, which farms the actual work out to FDA’s Controlled Substance Staff. FDA runs what the statute calls an eight factor analysis, weighs the evidence, and sends a recommendation back. Under a 2024 Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel opinion, that recommendation is legally binding on DEA right up until DEA opens formal rulemaking, at which point DEA still owes it “significant deference.” In practice this produces a strange kind of choreography. GAO reviewed 208 substances DEA acted on between 2020 and 2025, found that DEA was required to request and consider an HHS evaluation for 95 of them, and confirmed DEA did so every single time, aligning with HHS’s recommendation on all 84 substances where a final decision had been published by the study’s cutoff.

    So the system, mechanically, works. Two agencies coordinate, mostly agree, and rarely fight. What GAO actually found alarming was not the disagreement rate. It was that neither agency has bothered to write down how any of this is supposed to happen. DEA has no policy assigning roles or responsibilities within its Diversion Control Division for any of the four scheduling pathways it runs. When GAO asked why, DEA’s answer amounted to a shrug dressed up as confidence, that the statute is already clear and the staff are qualified scientists with advanced degrees who do not need a manual. FDA’s defense was gentler but structurally identical, that each evaluation is so individualized a written policy might not fit, so staff learn the eight factor analysis through what the agency calls “person to person training.” Meaning if the two or three people who currently know how it is done retire in the same fiscal year, so does the institutional memory.

    A Definition Nobody Bothered to Write

    FDA officials told GAO directly that the absence of a written definition of “potential for abuse,” including what counts as a “high” potential for abuse, creates real problems when a substance does not cleanly resemble anything already scheduled. They cited xylazine, the veterinary sedative now showing up as a street drug additive, as a case where the lack of a legal or policy definition left staff improvising. This is not a hypothetical gap. It is the actual criterion federal law uses to sort substances into schedules that carry radically different criminal exposure, and the agency charged with applying it admits, on the record, that it is filling the void with judgment calls rather than standards.

    GAO’s other finding compounds this. FDA also maintains a memorandum of understanding with the National Institute on Drug Abuse describing how the two consult on scheduling science. That MOU is over forty years old and refers to FDA offices that no longer exist. Nobody had gotten around to updating it either, until GAO asked. Both agencies confirmed to GAO that the document is out of date and needs revising, which is its own small monument to how long a stale piece of paper can sit in a federal filing system before anyone with the authority to fix it notices.

    None of this is abstract. The report notes that DEA’s own request for an HHS evaluation of xylazine sat with FDA for three years before a recommendation came back, and DEA still had not finished its own review as of this spring. In the meantime the substance keeps showing up mixed into street fentanyl, and DEA has told GAO it now wants Congress to just legislate a schedule for xylazine directly, because the existing statute cannot cleanly cover the ranch hands and slaughterhouse workers who have a legitimate reason to be near the stuff. When the agency responsible for classifying a substance decides the classifying process itself does not fit the substance, the honest response is not to route around it quietly. It is to ask why the process is built the way it is in the first place, which is precisely the question GAO’s report keeps circling without ever quite being allowed to ask it directly, because GAO’s job is to audit process, not to interrogate the statute Congress wrote.

    Two Recommendations and a Very Small Concession

    GAO’s fix is almost aggressively modest. It asked DEA to write down its roles, responsibilities, and procedures for the four ways it schedules substances. It asked FDA to write down how staff should conduct the eight factor analysis and, specifically, how to define potential for abuse, including relative to other substances. It asked FDA and NIH to update their four decade old MOU and add a clause requiring someone to look at it again periodically. That is the entire ask. Not new authority, not a change to the statute, not even a change to who decides what. Just a request that the agencies write down what they are already doing, so the next generation of staff does not have to reinvent the standard from scratch every time someone retires.

    Justice and HHS both agreed to all three recommendations, which is the part of this story that should trouble anyone paying attention rather than reassure them. HHS’s written response promises FDA will draft a new policy describing how to conduct the evaluations that determine, among other things, whether someone’s fentanyl analog carries a Schedule I sentence or no sentence at all. That policy does not exist yet. It has never existed. The system that puts people in federal prison for decades has been running, by the agencies’ own account, on trained judgment and institutional memory rather than a rule anyone could read, challenge, or hold an official accountable to. GAO did not find that DEA and FDA were reaching wrong answers. It found something quieter and, in its way, more damning: nobody can say, on paper, why the right answers were right, or whether the next official asked the same question will reach the same one.

    Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, Drug Scheduling: DEA and FDA Should Strengthen Policies and Procedures for Scheduling Controlled Substances (GAO-26-108623, September 2026).

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  • New Mexico’s $74 Million Rural Health Announcement Is the First Piece of a Much Bigger Experiment

    The Trump administration announced $74 million Sunday to expand rural healthcare across New Mexico. That number is real, but it is also roughly one-third of the story. The full first-year award to New Mexico under the new federal Rural Health Transformation Program is approximately $211.5 million. And in Year One, a significant portion of that money is not going toward new doctors, new clinics, or new hospital beds. It is going toward building the regional architecture that will eventually decide where those things should go.

    What the $74 Million Actually Buys

    The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that the $74 million will fund six Regional Hub Organizations under Healthy Horizons, one component of New Mexico’s broader rural health strategy. The hubs are charged with identifying local needs, establishing priorities, and developing plans for expanding specialty, maternal, behavioral, and chronic-disease care. Year One, in other words, is substantially a planning operation — which may be exactly what New Mexico needs.

    New Mexico’s own Legislative Finance Committee has already raised that question in a different context. A committee analysis found that lawmakers had appropriated $226 million to the state’s Rural Health Care Delivery Fund between 2023 and the 2025 special session, and that by October 2025 slightly more than a quarter of it had been spent. Legislative analysts found no overarching plan guiding those investments and questioned whether grant decisions were adequately tied to demonstrated community need. Healthy Horizons is, at least structurally, an attempt to build that plan before spending the rest of the money.

    The Funding Stack

    The Rural Health Transformation Program was created by the 2025 federal budget reconciliation law, Public Law 119-21, with $50 billion appropriated over five fiscal years — $10 billion annually from FY2026 through FY2030. Half of each year’s funding is split equally among states with approved applications; the remainder is distributed based on rural population, healthcare infrastructure, state policy, and program design. All 50 states received awards. New Mexico’s first-year share is $211.5 million, of which $74 million covers the Healthy Horizons hub phase. The program’s full five-year budget for New Mexico, per CMS’s published application abstract, is approximately $393.3 million — covering workforce recruitment, telehealth, remote patient monitoring, health-data infrastructure, and chronic-disease management alongside the specialty and maternal care components.

    The Larger Context

    The same law that created the Rural Health Transformation Program also made substantial changes to Medicaid financing. New Mexico officials and members of its congressional delegation have warned those provisions could place additional financial pressure on providers serving Medicaid patients. The rural health money and the Medicaid changes are separate components of the same legislation — the $74 million is not replacement funding for reduced Medicaid flows — but the juxtaposition is unavoidable. Washington is restructuring one major source of rural healthcare revenue while simultaneously running a $50 billion experiment to transform how rural healthcare is delivered. CMS has a dedicated Office of Rural Health Transformation to administer the program through 2031 and has emphasized both state flexibility and accountability for results.

    New Mexico has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on rural health in recent years, and its own legislative analysts subsequently found the investments lacked strategic direction. Six regional hubs are now being stood up with federal money to produce exactly that direction. Whether they do — and whether the infrastructure being built in Year One translates into measurable outcomes by Year Five — is the question the announcement doesn’t answer. It just starts the clock.

    Sources: CMS, Rural Health Transformation Program — New Mexico Application Abstract; New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, FY2027 Budget Recommendations.

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  • The FAA Cannot Define Who Keeps You Alive Up There

    The Federal Aviation Administration employs 44,979 people. Somewhere among them are the workers who ensure your flight does not end as a smoking hole in a field, and somewhere else, apparently, is a filing cabinet where the FAA keeps its definition of who those workers actually are. A new report from the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General, published September 16, opens with a premise that should alarm anyone who has ever boarded a commercial aircraft. The agency responsible for the safest airspace in the world cannot agree, internally, on what “safety critical” means.

    This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the finding of an audit mandated by Section 429 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, which directed the OIG to check whether FAA had built the workforce plans Congress requires and whether those plans actually captured the people the agency depends on to keep planes in the sky and out of each other’s flight paths. The answer, delivered with the dry precision OIG reports specialize in, is that FAA does the legal minimum and calls it a system.

    A Word That Means Four Different Things

    FAA’s Office of Human Resource Management maintains four separate classifications for its workforce, Safety Critical, Mission Critical, Public Safety, and Mission Support. Each carries its own definition, and each was built for a different bureaucratic purpose. Safety Critical and Mission Critical exist to determine who gets furloughed. Public Safety and Mission Support, introduced in 2025, exist to determine who gets exempted from the Deferred Resignation Program, the buyout scheme that thinned federal payrolls that year. Meanwhile, the Aviation Safety Workforce Plans covering fiscal years 2020 through 2024 used an entirely different three-tier scheme (Safety Critical, Safety Technical, Operational Support), which was swapped out for the Public Safety and Mission Support categories in fiscal year 2025, then swapped back to the original three tiers in fiscal year 2026.

    Read that again. In three consecutive fiscal years, FAA changed the taxonomy it uses to describe its own safety workforce three times, and at least one of those changes was explicitly tied to determining who was eligible for a voluntary resignation incentive rather than to any operational or safety rationale. An FAA official told OIG investigators that a common definition “would be welcomed,” which is bureaucratese for an admission that after decades running the National Airspace System, nobody has bothered to write one down in a way that survives contact with the next personnel action.

    The Quarter of the Workforce Nobody Is Watching

    The practical consequence of this definitional fog is a coverage gap that would be comic if the stakes were lower. FAA is legally required to publish two annual workforce plans, one for air traffic controllers and one for the aviation safety inspectors and engineers in the Office of Aviation Safety. Combined, those plans account for 19,862 employees, 44 percent of the agency’s total workforce.

    Left out entirely: 10,808 employees, roughly a quarter of everyone FAA itself classifies as Mission Critical or Public Safety, appear in no workforce plan whatsoever. That population includes Airport Safety Inspectors, who hold the identical occupational classification as the Office of Aviation Safety inspectors who are covered, and who spend their days checking runway lighting, markings, and emergency equipment. It includes first-line and operational air traffic managers, the people who supervise the controllers the agency does track. It includes engineers scattered across the Air Traffic Organization and the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, the latter a growth industry the report itself flags as expanding. FAA’s justification, relayed to OIG officials without apparent irony, is that the agency “only completes workforce plans that are mandated by law.” Not the ones that would be useful. The ones that are mandatory.

    The Data Nobody Asked For, Which Is Exactly the Data You’d Want

    Even the two plans FAA does publish are thinner than they look. Neither the Air Traffic Controller Plan nor the Aviation Safety Workforce Plan includes information on gaps in senior positions, meaning nobody outside the agency can tell how long a critical supervisory slot sits empty before it gets filled, or how long the average vacancy period runs for the most consequential jobs in the building. Neither plan addresses employee competencies or skills gaps, despite both including sections on training initiatives, an odd omission for documents ostensibly meant to answer the question of whether the workforce is actually prepared to do the job. Neither includes information on workforce development or cooperative training programs, and the Air Traffic Organization, which houses the controller workforce, does not run any workforce development or cooperative training programs of its own to omit.

    FAA is separately unable to explain how it manages conflicts of interest when its safety inspectors rotate through training with the aerospace companies those same inspectors are supposed to be regulating, a gap Section 429 specifically required the agency to account for. The Office of Aviation Safety pointed OIG toward its general ethics order and annual training requirements, which address personal conduct broadly but say nothing about the specific arrangement of an inspector cycling through industry-sponsored instruction and back onto that industry’s oversight file.

    The Minimum Viable Compliance

    FAA’s official response to all this, dated September 2 and signed by a deputy director in the agency’s own Office of Audit and Evaluation, concurs with all four of OIG’s recommendations. It also states, without evident self-awareness, that the agency has “successfully completed” every workforce plan the law requires. Both statements are true, and that is precisely the problem the report identifies. Compliance with a statute that nobody bothered to make comprehensive is not the same thing as knowing who your safety-critical workforce is, and FAA has spent five years proving it can do the former while declining to do the latter.

    The agency’s remedy, per its own comments, involves mapping occupational series to statutory responsibilities, drafting guidance for a standardized three-category workforce segmentation, and building a succession planning program, all of it promised for completion by September 30, 2027. That is a full fiscal year and a full congressional term of runway before the agency that runs the world’s busiest airspace commits to knowing, on paper, who is actually keeping it safe. Until then, the 10,808 people currently invisible to their own employer’s planning documents will keep doing the work anyway. The paperwork will simply keep pretending they don’t.

    Sources: DOT OIG, FAA’s Aviation Safety Workforce Planning (September 16, 2026); FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, H.R. 3935.

  • Washington’s Poverty Ledger: Millions Lifted, Billions Paid Improperly

    The federal government is remarkably good at keeping millions of people above the poverty line, and considerably less tidy when asked to account for every dollar it spends doing it.

    Those two facts are not contradictory.

    New data released by the U.S. Census Bureau show that Social Security alone kept an estimated 28.8 million people from falling below the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2025. Refundable tax credits kept another 6.1 million above the line. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP, accounted for 3.1 million. Supplemental Security Income accounted for 2.2 million, while housing subsidies accounted for another 2.1 million.

    That is the good side of the ledger.

    On the other side sits a federal payment system that reported an estimated $186 billion in improper payments during fiscal year 2025, including tens of billions associated with some of the same enormous programs intended to improve Americans’ economic security.

    It would be tempting to choose one number and tell a simple story.

    The numbers refuse to cooperate.

    Two Ways to Measure Poverty

    The Census Bureau reported Monday that the official U.S. poverty rate fell from 10.7% in 2024 to 10.2% in 2025, leaving about 34.5 million people below the official poverty threshold.

    But Census maintains another measurement called the Supplemental Poverty Measure, or SPM.

    Unlike the traditional measure, the SPM attempts to account for considerably more of the economic machinery surrounding a household. Government benefits such as SNAP, housing subsidies and refundable tax credits count as resources. Taxes, work expenses and medical expenses reduce those resources.

    Under that broader calculation, the poverty rate was 13.1% in 2025 and did not change significantly from 2024.

    The distinction allows Census to perform an unusually revealing exercise: remove individual benefits or expenses from the calculation and see how many people cross the poverty line.

    It amounts to something resembling an antipoverty ledger.

    And Social Security owns the largest entry.

    Without Social Security benefits, Census estimates another 28.8 million people would have been in SPM poverty in 2025.

    Refundable tax credits reduced the number by 6.1 million. Within that category, the Earned Income Tax Credit accounted for about 4 million. SNAP reduced it by 3.1 million, SSI by 2.2 million and housing subsidies by 2.1 million.

    Other noncash benefits—including energy assistance, WIC and school lunch—collectively kept about 1.5 million people above the threshold. Other cash benefits accounted for another 1 million.

    These estimates overlap and cannot simply be added together. A household can receive more than one benefit, and Census specifically warns that the individual components are not mutually exclusive.

    Still, the direction is unmistakable.

    Federal assistance changes measured poverty substantially.

    Then the Bills Arrive

    Census’s ledger also runs in reverse.

    Medical out-of-pocket expenses pushed approximately 7.7 million people into SPM poverty in 2025. Payroll taxes, or FICA, added roughly 4.5 million. Work expenses added about 4 million, and federal income taxes pushed another 1.4 million below the threshold.

    The medical number is particularly striking because it increased from approximately 7.5 million in 2024.

    At the same time, several government benefits became somewhat less consequential in the poverty calculation.

    Refundable tax credits kept 6.8 million people out of poverty in 2024, compared with 6.1 million in 2025. SNAP’s effect declined from 3.6 million to 3.1 million. SSI declined from 2.5 million to 2.2 million.

    Social Security, meanwhile, barely moved: 28.7 million in 2024 and 28.8 million in 2025. Housing subsidies remained at approximately 2.1 million.

    So while the topline SPM poverty rate barely changed, some of the machinery underneath it did.

    That is one advantage of looking below the headline number.

    Another is discovering what happens to all the money.

    $186 Billion in Improper Payments

    Federal agencies reported approximately $186 billion in improper payments during fiscal year 2025, according to the Government Accountability Office.

    About $153 billion—roughly 82%—were overpayments.

    The total was $24 billion higher than the previous fiscal year. GAO says the $186 billion does not represent the entire universe of improper federal payments because some programs susceptible to significant errors were not included in the total.

    Several programs connected to the poverty ledger appear prominently in those numbers.

    Medicaid reported an estimated $37.39 billion in improper payments, representing a 6.12% error rate.

    The Earned Income Tax Credit reported approximately $21.1 billion in improper payments and an estimated error rate of 32.7%.

    SNAP’s fiscal 2025 payment-error rate was 10.62%, representing approximately $10.1 billion in improper payments.

    SSI’s latest available payment-integrity estimate, covering fiscal 2024, found approximately $7.33 billion in improper payments from $63.29 billion in outlays.

    Those are enormous numbers.

    They are not, however, enormous fraud numbers.

    Improper Does Not Mean Stolen

    An improper payment can involve fraud. It can also involve an innocent eligibility mistake, the wrong payment amount, missing paperwork, an underpayment or even a payment made to the correct person for the correct amount through a process that failed to satisfy federal requirements.

    Medicaid provides an almost absurdly useful example.

    Of the program’s $37.39 billion in estimated fiscal 2025 improper payments, CMS says 77.17% resulted from insufficient documentation, which the agency says is generally not indicative of fraud or abuse.

    That does not make the problem imaginary.

    It means the government could not demonstrate that those payments satisfied all applicable requirements.

    The distinction becomes even stranger in the Affordable Care Act premium-tax-credit program. CMS reported that approximately 43% of that program’s improper payments involved situations in which the government paid the right recipient the right amount—but violated a statutory or regulatory requirement while doing it.

    Financially correct.

    Procedurally improper.

    There may be no phrase more suited to the federal government.

    Actual fraud nevertheless exists, and treating every payment error as innocent would be just as misleading as calling every error theft.

    The Holes in the Fence

    SNAP provides a good illustration of the difference between a known improper payment and a potential control weakness.

    USDA reported $10.1 billion in SNAP payment errors for fiscal 2025. The agency says its payment-error rate measures whether states correctly determine household eligibility and benefit amounts and includes both overpayments and underpayments.

    A separate USDA program-integrity review found something different.

    Reviewing eligibility information from 29 state agencies, USDA identified records involving dummy or missing Social Security numbers, duplicate participation within states, interstate duplication and deceased individuals appearing as active participants.

    The agency estimated that dummy Social Security numbers and intrastate duplication alone represented more than $1.5 billion in annual financial exposure.

    “Exposure” is not the same as confirmed loss, and neither is synonymous with fraud.

    But it identifies holes in the fence.

    The distinction matters because a prosecution can tell taxpayers how much one fraudster stole. A control weakness raises the more consequential question of how many fraudsters the government might not have identified.

    And What About Noncitizens?

    Immigration status creates another place where the numbers require more care than the political shorthand normally permits.

    Some noncitizens are legally eligible for particular federal benefits. Others are not. Mixed-status households may contain an ineligible adult and eligible U.S.-citizen children.

    A benefit received by such a household therefore cannot automatically be described as money improperly paid to a noncitizen.

    Social Security Administration records provide an unusually clear example.

    In December 2025, 7,392,201 people received federally administered SSI payments.

    Of them, 7,082,134 were citizens and 310,067 were noncitizens—about 4.2% of recipients.

    Noncitizen recipients received a lower average monthly payment: $596.77 compared with $719.70 for citizens. Nearly 252,000 of the noncitizen recipients were 65 or older.

    Those figures establish that noncitizens receive a measurable share of SSI benefits.

    They do not establish that those payments were illegal.

    That requires a separate eligibility determination.

    And fraud cases involving noncitizens using false identities or otherwise defeating eligibility controls should likewise be categorized as fraud—not used to characterize every lawful noncitizen beneficiary.

    The distinction may be less satisfying than a sweeping conclusion, but accounting generally is.

    The Government Knows Some Things Better Than Others

    The federal government can estimate with remarkable specificity how individual programs affect poverty.

    Census can tell us that Social Security moved 28.8 million people across its Supplemental Poverty Measure threshold.

    It can estimate that SNAP moved 3.1 million.

    It can tell us that medical expenses pushed 7.7 million the other direction.

    Elsewhere in Washington, however, the accounting becomes considerably fuzzier.

    GAO says federal agencies identified $186 billion in improper payments during fiscal 2025—and also says that total does not capture the full government-wide universe.

    Treasury estimates that nearly one-third of EITC payments were improper. USDA reports a SNAP error rate above 10%. CMS reports tens of billions in Medicaid errors while explaining that most resulted from inadequate documentation rather than apparent fraud.

    And the Social Security Administration can tell us exactly how many SSI recipients are noncitizens, while that fact alone tells us almost nothing about whether their benefits were properly or improperly paid.

    The deeper one digs into the ledger, the harder it becomes to reduce it to “government programs work” or “government programs waste money.”

    Both propositions are too simple.

    What Taxpayers Are Buying

    Census’s new statistics establish something important.

    The American safety net has a measurable effect.

    Remove Social Security, SNAP, refundable tax credits, SSI, housing subsidies and other assistance from household resources and millions more people fall below the Supplemental Poverty Measure.

    That is not an ideological claim. It is what the government’s own statistical model measures.

    The government’s other records establish something equally important.

    Programs distributing hundreds of billions of dollars make mistakes. Agencies send money in incorrect amounts, fail to maintain required documentation, pay people who are not eligible, underpay people who are eligible and sometimes get defrauded.

    The scale is large enough that even small error rates produce numbers measured in billions.

    In fiscal 2025, the government estimated $186 billion in improper payments across 64 programs. GAO says federal improper-payment estimates since fiscal 2003 total roughly $3 trillion.

    Those numbers do not erase the 28.8 million people Social Security kept above the SPM threshold.

    And those 28.8 million people do not erase the payment errors.

    The more useful accountability question is what lies between them:

    How much poverty is the federal government preventing, how much does it spend doing so, how much money leaves the system improperly, how much of that represents actual fraud—and how confidently can Washington tell taxpayers the difference?

    Census has provided a surprisingly good answer to the first question.

    The federal government’s own auditors suggest there is considerably more work to do on the rest.

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  • The Third Inspection: Krome Fails the Same Test Again, and Nobody Is Held Back a Grade

    Some institutions learn from their mistakes. Others simply learn to write better memos about them. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General has now inspected the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami three times since 2023, and each time the findings read like a photocopy of the last, just with the dates changed and a few new appendices explaining why nothing much has improved. The latest report, OIG-26-29, documents an unannounced inspection conducted May 28 to 29, 2025, and covers overcrowding, food safety, use of force, medical neglect, and a facility that appears to be inventing new places to warehouse people faster than it can process the ones it already has. Notably, the report was not released until September 11, 2026, nearly sixteen months after the inspection itself, a delay the OIG attributes to three separate government shutdowns that ate up 123 days of the fiscal year. Apparently the government can furlough its watchdogs even while it keeps running the kennel.

    Building 9 and the Art of Improvisational Incarceration

    The headline number is simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: on the first day of the inspection, Krome held 1,102 detainees against a maximum capacity of 882, a full 25 percent over. Six of fourteen intake hold rooms were over their posted limits, one by 56 percent, and inspectors found detainees standing or lying on the floor because there was nowhere else to put them. Krome had also converted two visitation rooms into overflow intake space, which is one way to solve a capacity problem, provided you don’t mind that it violates the standard meant to prevent exactly that.

    More striking is the twelve-hour rule. Detention standards cap how long someone can be held in an intake hold room before being processed and moved, precisely because hold rooms are not designed for extended stays. OIG inspectors found intake processing sheets, taped to the outside of hold rooms on May 28, dated May 26. An intake officer confirmed the obvious: people were being held well past the limit, in some cases for days, with a single opportunity to shower or brush their teeth regardless of how long they stayed. Krome’s explanation involved medical screening bottlenecks (no full-time X-ray technician, evidently a luxury) and general staffing shortfalls, which is a candid enough admission that the problem is structural rather than incidental.

    Then there is Building 9, a tent-like structure erected after the prior inspection cycle to serve as overflow housing during the intake crunch. Inspectors found detainees classified at different risk levels (low, medium-low, and high, denoted by wristband color) commingled inside it, which is precisely the scenario the classification system exists to prevent. Some classification forms were incomplete or missing supervisory sign-off entirely. Krome’s given reason, again, was volume: too many people coming and going for staff to finish the paperwork. It is worth noting that a companion report released the same day, OIG-26-22, found even more severe conditions at Florida’s now-shuttered “Alligator Alcatraz” facility, including detainees held in four-by-four-foot outdoor metal enclosures. Whatever is driving Florida’s detention system to improvise structures and shortcuts, it is not confined to one address. See The Calming Area and Whose Facility Is It Anyway for our full coverage of the Alligator Alcatraz inspection.

    Chicken, Grievances, and Fifteen Vacancies

    If the housing findings suggest a facility straining under volume, the food service findings suggest one that has simply stopped paying attention. Inspectors observed raw chicken thawing in three large vats, one with water running continuously over the sides and onto the floor, the other two with chicken submerged, uncovered, and out of its original packaging, sitting in standing water with no temperature control whatsoever. Two freezer gauges read 20 degrees Fahrenheit over the required maximum. A pallet of food marked “Keep Frozen” sat outside in direct sunlight for more than two hours while ambient temperatures ran between 82 and 90 degrees. None of this requires an advanced food safety credential to recognize as a problem; it requires someone walking through the kitchen occasionally.

    The medical findings follow a similar shape: real improvement in one narrow area, framed by neglect everywhere else. Sick call wait times dropped from five to seven days down to two or three, thanks to a new sign-up system, which OIG credits fairly. But medical grievances were not being logged or filed, a problem the OIG first flagged back in its 2023 inspection and which persists unchanged. There has been no Continuous Quality Improvement program since the position responsible for running one went unstaffed in April 2024. And the facility’s medical staff had fifteen vacancies at the time of inspection, including a Health Services Administrator position empty since February 2025 (its Assistant has been serving in an “acting” capacity ever since), one dental assistant for the entire detainee population, and eight recently departed nurses. A facility can build all the temporary tents it wants; it cannot conjure medical staff from an org chart with strikethroughs on it.

    Use of force fares no better on inspection. Of a five-incident sample drawn from 44 reported incidents over six months, two were flatly non-compliant: pepper spray deployed against a detainee described in Krome’s own after-action review as “offering no resistance,” with no follow-up medical evaluation and incomplete documentation of who was even involved; and a choke hold used during a cell search under circumstances that did not remotely meet the threshold requiring deadly force. Both incidents, notably, were caught and described honestly by Krome’s own internal review process, which raises an uncomfortable question the OIG report does not quite ask directly: if the facility’s own paperwork identifies the violation, why does the violation keep recurring?

    Grading Its Own Homework

    Appendix B of the report is where the real theater happens. ICE concurred with all nine recommendations, as agencies reliably do, and the OIG’s own scorekeeping tells the real story. Three recommendations (hold room capacity, classification commingling, and SMU recreation equipment) were closed based on evidence ICE supplied, largely photographs and inspection checklists. Six remain open, including the food safety and use-of-force recommendations, because ICE’s paperwork showed intentions and new procedures but not yet the sustained compliance the OIG wants to see documented over time. To its credit, the OIG is not simply rubber-stamping ICE’s self-assessment; it is explicitly withholding closure on the more serious findings pending better proof. That is more scrutiny than many oversight relationships manage. It is also, worth remembering, the third time this particular dance has been performed at this particular address, following near-identical findings in 2023 and again in OIG-24-21 in April 2024, both of which also ended in “concur” and a list of process fixes.

    None of this happens in a vacuum, either. Staff-detainee communication showed nearly a quarter of requests to ICE going unanswered past the three-day window, and 17 percent of facility responses marked “complete” contained no actual response at all, a bureaucratic sleight of hand that deserves its own category of dishonesty. Special Management Unit detainees, meanwhile, got an empty fenced lot with no recreational equipment while the general population played basketball and volleyball nearby, a distinction that says a good deal about what “special management” actually means in practice.

    Krome did get credit where it was due (the law library, legal materials, and attorney visitation rooms were all found compliant, an improvement from the prior cycle) so it is not as though the facility fails every category. But a facility that can fix its law library and still cannot keep chicken below room temperature, log a medical grievance, or finish a classification form on time is not suffering from a resource problem so much as a priorities problem. The paperwork trail from 2023 through 2026 tells a consistent story: identify the failure, promise the fix, provide a photograph of a checklist, and wait for the next unannounced visit to do it all again.

  • Five Billion Dollars for the Bureau of Prisons, and a Watchdog on a Diet

    Every so often Congress does something almost touching in its honesty. Buried in the reconciliation act it passed last July, the same 800-plus page monument to legislative multitasking that reshaped Medicaid, tax brackets, and the national debt ceiling in a single afternoon, lawmakers also found room to hand the Federal Bureau of Prisons five billion dollars. They then, in the very next breath, ordered their own watchdog to make sure the Bureau did not blow it.

    That watchdog, the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General, announced in April that it was standing up a new oversight effort to track how BOP spends the money. Its first product is a public dashboard, the kind of thing that looks reassuring right up until you notice how much of the actual accounting still has to be taken on faith. The rest of the story lives in the fine print: a Senate committee report that reads less like appropriations boilerplate and more like a parent handing a teenager the car keys along with a very specific list of rules about curfew.

    The Fine Print of a Windfall

    Section 100056 of Public Law 119-21 is admirably specific for a document buried in a bill mostly concerned with tax brackets and Medicaid work requirements. It appropriates five billion dollars to BOP, available through fiscal year 2029, and it splits the money with the precision of a divorce settlement: not less than three billion for hiring and training new employees, not more than two billion for maintenance and repairs. Congress, in other words, built its own priorities into the statute rather than trusting the Bureau to sort it out.

    That specificity is not decoration. It is a tacit admission of where BOP has been failing for years. The correctional officer shortage has been a fixture of oversight reporting since before the pandemic, and the Senate Appropriations Committee’s own report accompanying the bill spends paragraphs on “augmentation,” the practice of pulling teachers, psychologists, and other non-custodial staff into cellblocks to cover shifts. The Committee has been complaining about this since 2017. Nine years is a long time to keep writing the same sentence into a report and expecting a different result.

    The maintenance side is no less telling. BOP’s own facilities director told a Senate Judiciary hearing in 2024 that the repair backlog had grown to roughly three billion dollars, a figure driven by roofs that, in her memorable phrasing, keep crumbling. Two billion dollars against a three billion dollar backlog is progress, arguably, though it is also an admission that the hole is deeper than the shovel.

    A Base Budget That Refuses to Move

    Here is the detail that ought to embarrass everyone involved. While Congress was carving out five billion dollars in emergency supplemental funding, it also passed BOP’s ordinary fiscal year 2026 budget in that same Senate report, and that budget did not move an inch. Salaries and Expenses: $8,392,588,000, identical to the year before. Buildings and Facilities: $179,762,000, also identical. The entire burst of new money for staffing and repairs is arriving through a one time, off cycle appropriation that expires in 2029, while the underlying, permanent budget line for facility maintenance remains smaller than a single semiconductor plant’s monthly grocery bill.

    This is not how a healthy institution gets funded. It is how you patch a hole in the hull without ever addressing why the ship keeps taking on water. When the five billion dollars runs out, whatever the Bureau has built or hired will need to be sustained on a base budget that, as of this writing, Congress has shown no interest in growing. The supplemental is not a fix. It is a loan against a problem nobody has committed to solving permanently.

    The Watchdog Gets a List of Chores, Not a Raise

    The Committee did not simply hand BOP the money and walk away, to its credit. Section 100056 comes with an explicit oversight mandate: BOP must deliver a spend plan to the Inspector General and the relevant committees within 120 days of enactment, broken out by fiscal year, and the OIG must then assess whether the money is going where it is supposed to, flag risks, and report back, in one document or several, as it sees fit. That deadline landed around the first of November. Whether BOP hit it is, as of this writing, an open question, and one worth a formal records request rather than a press release.

    What makes the arrangement almost darkly comic is the OIG’s own budget. The same report that ordered this new layer of scrutiny also notes that the Inspector General’s office has fielded more than 27,000 complaints about BOP misconduct over the past three years, that roughly 57 percent of all OIG investigations already concern the Bureau, and that the office’s total appropriation for the coming year is a flat $139,000,000, not one dollar more than last year. Congress has, in effect, assigned its watchdog a second job and declined to adjust the salary. The gap between what oversight is tasked to do and what it is resourced to accomplish runs through federal oversight broadly — see The Inspectors General Say They Returned $17 for Every $1 Spent, our examination of what the federal IG community’s headline return-on-investment figure actually measures. If the review is thin, if it takes longer than anyone would like, the reason will not be a mystery.

    A Track Record That Argues for Skepticism

    None of this occurs in a vacuum, and BOP has not exactly earned the benefit of the doubt. A GAO report from last year found the Bureau had implemented only 33 of 87 recommendations from restrictive housing reviews conducted back in 2014 and 2016, a full decade of foot dragging on its own watchdog’s advice. A separate GAO report, issued just weeks before this piece went to press, is already circling the same five billion dollar appropriation, which suggests the Government Accountability Office does not share the confidence implied by a shiny new dashboard either.

    Meanwhile, the infrastructure money is not flowing into an oversight vacuum so much as a politically charged one. BOP’s own fiscal year 2027 budget documents request another $152,000,000 to plan the reactivation of USP Alcatraz as a working prison, a proposal that generates headlines far more easily than it generates cell capacity, while simultaneously rescinding $400,000,000 in prior year construction balances, most of it from the long contested Letcher County, Kentucky project. Money is being pulled from one embattled site and pushed toward a defunct national landmark, all while the base maintenance budget sits frozen and the emergency supplemental is supposed to cover the difference.

    The Inspector General’s dashboard is a start. It is not, on its own, an answer to the question Congress ought to be asking itself: why does an agency with a documented decade of ignored recommendations, a stagnant base budget, and a watchdog running on last year’s allowance keep getting bailed out with emergency cash instead of a permanent fix. Five billion dollars buys a great deal of goodwill. It does not, on the evidence so far, buy a plan.

    See also Forty Reports, Zero Referrals — on a six-month OIG period that produced 40 investigative reports on theft and fraud at federal grantees and zero criminal referrals to DOJ — and The Auditors Said Fine. The Administration Said Gone. Congress Said Neither. — on the Legal Services Corporation’s clean FY2025 audit conducted while the White House was trying to eliminate the agency.

    This is the first in an ongoing series tracking BOP’s implementation of Public Law 119-21. A records request regarding the Bureau’s spend plan submission is pending; a follow up will run when it is resolved.

  • Congress Wants AM Radio Back in Your Car. It Isn’t About the Music

    In an age when a car dashboard can stream Spotify, display satellite imagery, make phone calls, provide turn-by-turn directions and occasionally demand a software update before breakfast, Congress has decided there is one piece of technology American motorists still need.

    AM radio.

    The House of Representatives passed the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025, H.R. 979, by voice vote on September 15. The legislation would require automakers to provide access to AM broadcast stations in new passenger vehicles sold in the United States without charging consumers an additional fee.

    At first glance, the legislation has the unmistakable appearance of Congress riding to the rescue of a technology that predates commercial television.

    The reason for the bill is considerably more practical.

    The EV Problem

    Automakers have increasingly removed AM receivers from some electric vehicles. Electric motors, high-voltage systems and other components can generate electromagnetic interference that degrades AM reception.

    Rather than engineer around the interference, some manufacturers simply stopped providing AM reception in certain models.

    Congress noticed.

    The Congressional Budget Office says the legislation would primarily affect electric vehicle manufacturers that have already removed AM equipment or announced plans to do so. CBO estimates that roughly 2 million to 2.5 million vehicles per year would require updated radio equipment under the legislation.

    The agency does not expect compliance to break the automotive industry’s piggy bank. CBO estimates the mandate would cost manufacturers several million dollars annually, primarily for software updates and modifications to radio components. [Congressional Budget Office, March 16, 2026]

    The automobile industry has nevertheless objected to the mandate. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation has argued that Congress is requiring manufacturers to preserve a particular technology rather than focusing on the broader capability of delivering emergency information to motorists.

    That distinction gets to the heart of the debate.

    AM Radio Is Part of the Emergency System

    Congress is not preserving AM because lawmakers are worried Americans might lose access to talk radio, baseball games or the peculiar experience of driving through three states while listening to the same distant station after sunset.

    The primary argument is emergency communications.

    Broadcast radio remains part of the federal Emergency Alert System and the broader Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. The FCC identifies analog AM and FM stations among Emergency Alert System participants, and says FEMA’s national emergency message is distributed through a network that includes highly resilient AM broadcast stations and satellite services. [Federal Communications Commission, FCC 25-50]

    That matters for reasons that extend beyond disasters knocking modern communications systems offline.

    Some Places Start With the Backup System

    Emergency communications discussions often begin with a familiar scenario. A hurricane, wildfire, earthquake or widespread power failure damages cellular and internet infrastructure, leaving residents searching for another way to receive information.

    But there is another category of American community where the problem exists before the emergency begins.

    Large rural and remote areas still have uneven access to cellular voice and broadband service. The FCC continues to collect and map mobile coverage by technology, speed and even whether the user is stationary outdoors or traveling inside a vehicle. The existence of those federal coverage datasets reflects a simple reality. Modern wireless service is extensive, but it is not universal. [Federal Communications Commission, Broadband Data Collection]

    AM broadcasting has historically filled some of those geographic gaps. The FCC itself has described AM stations as frequently providing the only radio service available to listeners in certain circumstances, particularly people living in or traveling through rural areas. The Commission has also called AM a crucial service to rural communities and noted its role in providing information during emergencies and natural disasters. [Federal Communications Commission, FCC 07-218]

    That creates an important distinction in the debate over removing AM receivers from automobiles.

    In one community, AM may become useful because the cellular network failed.

    In another, AM may already be the communications system with the greatest practical reach.

    A smartphone can contain extraordinary communications technology and still display “No Service” when the nearest functioning network is beyond reach. Internet-based emergency systems face the same geographic limitation when connectivity is unavailable. FM radio generally operates over shorter practical distances than lower-frequency AM broadcasting.

    For emergency planners, this means the value of AM cannot necessarily be measured by asking how many Americans listen to it during an ordinary morning commute. The smaller population living or traveling beyond reliable cellular, broadband or FM coverage may be precisely the population for whom an AM receiver remains most valuable.

    And disasters can make the distinction worse. FEMA maintains communications-impact data showing cell-tower outages during major incidents using information collected through the FCC’s Disaster Information Reporting System. During Hurricane Helene, for example, the FCC separately tracked outages affecting wireless infrastructure and broadcast stations across the affected states. [Federal Emergency Management Agency, TEMPO Communications Impacts]

    The argument for AM, then, is not simply that it survives when newer technology fails. In some parts of the country, newer technology may never have provided equivalent coverage in the first place.

    Congress Built an Expiration Date Into the Mandate

    The legislation does something else that makes it more interesting than a simple technology-preservation bill.

    The requirement expires.

    H.R. 979 directs the Department of Transportation to issue the AM-access rule within one year of enactment. The rule would sunset eight years after the legislation becomes law.

    Congress also wants someone to determine whether AM is actually as important to emergency communications as its defenders maintain.

    The bill directs the Government Accountability Office to examine the role AM broadcasts received in passenger vehicles play in disseminating emergency alerts through IPAWS. GAO would have one year to report its findings.

    DOT would also be required to report to Congress at least every five years on the effects of the regulation.

    CBO estimates that implementing the federal portions of the legislation, including work by DOT and GAO, would cost approximately $1 million between 2026 and 2031. [Congressional Budget Office, March 16, 2026]

    The structure effectively creates a temporary preservation order while the government studies the technology it is preserving.

    Keep the radios. Study whether they are still necessary. Revisit the question later.

    There are worse approaches to infrastructure policy.

    Old Does Not Necessarily Mean Obsolete

    The automobile industry’s objection deserves consideration.

    If emergency warnings can reliably reach motorists through cellular networks, satellite systems, FM broadcasting and newer digital technologies, permanently requiring one specific communications technology could eventually become difficult to justify.

    Congress appears to have left room for that possibility through the sunset provision and GAO study.

    But the legislation also raises a broader question about the country’s increasingly interconnected infrastructure.

    Technological progress usually rewards efficiency, speed and capability. Emergency preparedness sometimes rewards something different.

    Redundancy.

    A communications system does not necessarily have to be sophisticated to remain useful. Sometimes its value comes from the fact that it operates differently from everything surrounding it.

    AM broadcasting is approaching its second century as a mass communications technology. It is noisy. It is susceptible to interference. Its audio quality will not inspire anyone shopping for premium speakers.

    Yet Congress is now considering whether that stubborn old signal may still deserve a place inside one of the most technologically sophisticated machines most Americans own.

    The House has made its decision for now.

    The Senate gets the next turn of the dial.

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