Bureaucracy Times

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.
Fediverse reactions
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.
Federal Register Watch: September 22, 2026
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation used a board meeting called on less than the customary seven days’ notice, with no stated reason for skipping that window, to advance two rules reshaping bank mergers and interstate branching while quietly retiring an internal policy on how examiners talk to the banks they supervise.
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation: The FDIC board met with less than seven days’ advance notice, short of the window the Government in the Sunshine Act normally requires so the public has some warning before a federal board acts, and today’s notice offers no explanation for the shortened timeline. At that meeting the board advanced two proposed rules, Merger Transactions and State Bank Parity, and separately voted to rescind the board’s prior statement on how examiners communicate supervisory findings to banks. Nothing in the record explains why the meeting needed to happen on short notice, which is the kind of procedural shortcut worth flagging even when the underlying policy changes turn out to be defensible on their own terms. (Sunshine Act notice)
- FDIC, Merger Transactions: The proposal would let smaller bank mergers gain “deemed approval” automatically if the agency doesn’t act within a set window, and it narrows the FDIC’s own discretion to pull an application out of expedited review for closer scrutiny. That trades case-by-case judgment for a clock: an applicant that clears the deadline gets its merger approved by default rather than through an affirmative agency decision, which is a real loosening of how much scrutiny bank consolidation receives. (Federal Register)
- Securities and Exchange Commission: The SEC granted temporary, conditional exemptive relief letting certain blockchain-based trading venues handle tokenized versions of ordinary, exchange-listed stocks without registering as a stock exchange, and letting their liquidity providers skip dealer registration too. Exemptive relief lets the agency test a new market structure, tokenized trading of real company shares, without a full rulemaking first, and the SEC is asking for public comment on the approach at the same time it’s already letting it operate. (Federal Register)
- The White House: Two companion executive orders on outdoor recreation, signed September 17 and published today, direct federal agencies to act on tight deadlines. Restoring American Saltwater Angling and Recreation creates a new interagency task force on shark and seal predation of fish stocks and gives agencies 30 to 60 days to identify and suspend, revise, or rescind rules deemed to “overly burden” anglers and boaters. Reinvigorating America’s Hunting Heritage directs agencies to open hunting on additional federal land, including at two national monuments, unless a specific local reason justifies keeping it closed, and gives Interior a year to expand Sunday hunting. Executive orders take effect the moment they’re signed, so both have already been federal policy for five days; today’s Federal Register entry is the public paper trail catching up, not the trigger, and the deregulatory deadlines set in motion are worth watching for when they come due.
- Federal Communications Commission: The FCC opened a comment period on radiofrequency exposure limits that a federal appeals court ordered it to reconsider back in 2021, in Environmental Health Trust v. FCC, meaning the agency is answering a court mandate roughly five years after the fact. The delay is the story: the court found the FCC hadn’t adequately explained why its existing RF exposure safety limits remain adequate, and only now is the agency formally reopening that question to public input. (Federal Register)
This edition reviewed all 102 documents published in today’s Federal Register issue across 38 agencies. Excluded as routine: information-collection and Paperwork Reduction Act renewal notices (filed today by, among others, HUD, NRC, EPA, HHS, DOJ/ATF, OMB, and FCC), advisory-committee and fishery-council meeting notices, routine antidumping and countervailing-duty administrative reviews from the International Trade Administration, FAA airworthiness directives, Coast Guard safety zones, routine SEC self-regulatory-organization fee and rule filings from Cboe, Nasdaq PHLX, and the NYSE, and ten State Department arms-sales notifications that, on inspection, turned out to be a single coordinated helicopter and precision-munitions package to Bahrain rather than anything unusual.
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.
Fediverse reactions
The Fed Finally Hikes, and Conveniently Skips the Month Before Voters Do

The Reversal Nobody at the Podium Wanted to Name

On September 16, 2026, the Federal Open Market Committee did something it had not done since 2023. It raised interest rates. The vote was 12 to 0, a quarter point, lifting the target range to 3.75 to 4 percent.

You would not know from the statement itself that this was a reversal of years of cutting. The Committee’s prose, as always, arrived sanded down to the texture of a hospital waiting room…

“Economic activity is expanding at a solid pace.”

“Productivity growth is strong.”

“Job gains have kept pace with the workforce.”

Four sentences later, almost as an afterthought: “Inflation remains elevated.” Today’s action, the statement assured us, “will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2 percent goal.”

Timelier than what, exactly, the statement does not say. Timelier than the last several years of the Committee insisting inflation was transitory, then persistent, then manageable, then, apparently, in need of an actual hike to fix.

If you have whiplash, you are reading the sentence correctly. The institution that spent 2024 and 2025 cutting rates on the theory that inflation was heading obediently toward target has just told you, in the driest possible language, that the theory did not hold.

“Geopolitical Developments” Is Doing an Enormous Amount of Work

The statement attributes elevated uncertainty, in part, to “geopolitical developments.” This is a phrase built for a press release, not a diagnosis.

Chair Kevin Warsh, at the podium, came slightly closer to naming the mechanism, telling reporters that the Fed “cannot affect any individual price” on items like oil or groceries but would work to ensure that any change in relative prices “don’t broaden out, don’t have second and third order effects on the economy.”

That is a serviceable description of what a central bank actually does. It is also, notably, not a description of any specific tool the Fed is using to accomplish it. Raising the federal funds rate a quarter point does not touch the price of oil, does not touch the price of eggs, and does nothing to whichever geopolitical development is allegedly driving both.

What it does is tighten financial conditions broadly and hope the broadening effect Warsh described never shows up. That is a bet, not a mechanism, and the statement’s studious refusal to name the underlying driver means the public is being asked to trust the bet without being told its odds.

A Skip Calendared Suspiciously Close to an Election

Here is where the institutional story gets more interesting than the monetary one. Most FOMC participants pencil in a total of two hikes this year in their updated projections, and the Committee is expected to skip its October meeting, a decision one asset manager tied explicitly, in reporting following the announcement, to the meeting’s proximity to the midterm elections.

The Federal Reserve has spent decades building a reputation, however imperfect, on the idea that its calendar answers to data, not to ballots. A skipped meeting is not itself a scandal. But when the skip is reported in the same breath as the midterms, and nobody at the Fed rushes to correct the record, the silence tells you something.

Either the independence is real and the timing is coincidental, in which case the Fed has an obligation to say so plainly; or the timing is not coincidental, in which case the public deserves to know that too.

What the Institution Owes the Public It Did Not Deliver

None of this means the rate decision was wrong on the merits. A quarter point hike after a multiyear cutting cycle, with inflation still running hot, is a defensible call, and 12 to 0 votes do not happen by accident. But defensible policy and adequate disclosure are two different things, and the September statement gave the public one while withholding the other.

The Fed will tell you, correctly, that a terse statement is a feature, not a bug, designed to avoid spooking markets with unnecessary color. Fair enough. But if the data justified a reversal this stark, the institution owes the public more than four sentences of boilerplate.

And if the October skip really is unrelated to the midterms, the burden is on the Fed to say so, not on financial reporters to speculate in its absence.

The Committee reconvenes, by the current schedule, well after voters have had their say. Whether that is coincidence or caution dressed up as one, the Fed has not told us, and until it does, the question is not going away.

Primary sources: Federal Reserve, September 16, 2026 FOMC statement.
Fediverse reactions
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.
Fediverse reactions
Nashville’s Postal Honor System Just Failed an Audit

The Postal Service Office of Inspector General does not typically announce itself. It shows up before the carriers do, counts what it finds, and compares that count to what management already told headquarters. In Nashville, over three days in July, that comparison broke down almost everywhere it was tried.

Four reports released September 17 (covering the Church Street Station, the Hendersonville Main Post Office, the Lebanon Main Post Office, and the Nashville Processing and Distribution Center that feeds all three) describe an operation running on self-certification, in a district where almost nobody was checking whether the certifications matched the floor.

The Paperwork and the Reality

Start with the number every field manager is supposed to report daily, undelivered mail sitting in the building after carriers leave for the street. The Postal Service has a system for this, the Delivery Condition Visualization tool, and a policy requiring managers to log it accurately before day’s end.

At Church Street, auditors found 5,158 delayed pieces stacked at carrier cases, on the workroom floor, and in the throwback case on a single July morning. Management had reported none of it.

At Hendersonville, auditors counted 7,276 delayed pieces; management’s own DCV entry captured 48 percent of that total.

At Lebanon, the smaller rural unit, the shortfall was proportionally similar, 164 pieces found against 40 reported, a 24 percent capture rate isolated to one route overwhelmed by a botched reassignment.

Three units, three different failure stories (an untrained acting supervisor at Church Street, an absentee postmaster at Hendersonville, a carrier case too small for its own route at Lebanon), and one identical result: the number that travels up to district, area, and headquarters bears little relationship to the number sitting in the building.

The OIG’s own language is almost bureaucratic understatement here; inaccurate DCV reporting, it notes, “can result in improper actions taken to address issues.” That’s one way to put it. Another is that the agency has been managing its mail backlog using data it privately admits, in three separate audits, it cannot trust.

Nobody’s Holding the Keys

Arrow keys open street collection boxes and apartment mail panels, and the Postal Service treats them, on paper, as tightly controlled accountable property. In practice, Nashville treated them like spare change.

Church Street had one key missing and nineteen more in active use that had never made it into the national RADAR inventory system. Hendersonville had two keys missing and one more found on-site despite being logged as lost. Lebanon had one missing and thirteen unlogged keys sitting in a vault behind a lockbox whose own key, per the report, was kept somewhere that had “not always” secured it.

The detail that unifies all three units is not the sloppiness, which is almost expected at this point, but what happened after. Postal Service policy requires any missing or lost arrow key to be reported immediately to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. None of the three stations did it.

The Lebanon postmaster told auditors she knew the reporting requirement and skipped it anyway, on the theory that the keys were probably just in transit between facilities. That is not an oversight; it’s a judgment call to not escalate a security gap that, per the OIG’s own boilerplate repeated in all three reports, “can result in undelivered mail” and “increased risk of mail theft.”

Three units, three postmasters, and not one referral to the agency’s own law enforcement arm.

The Scan That Isn’t a Scan

Every tracked package’s status, the “Delivered,” the “No Access,” the “Held at Post Office,” exists because a carrier or clerk scanned it. Customers, insurers, and USPS’s own performance metrics all treat that scan as ground truth. Nashville treated it as a formality.

At Church Street, 21 of 30 sampled packages, seventy percent, had scans that didn’t match what actually happened to them, including thirteen marked “Delivered” that plainly weren’t.

At Hendersonville the rate was worse, 23 of 30, with some “No Access” scans logged more than four miles from the delivery address.

At Lebanon, all six sampled packages had integrity problems, with hold notices posted on parcels that had no accompanying hold authorization form.

Scale that same failure up to the Nashville P&DC, the plant that processes and dispatches for all three stations, and it stops looking like a delivery-unit habit and starts looking like a systemic one. Load scan compliance there sat below both the FY25 and FY26 goals, with a documented downward trend management admitted it wasn’t monitoring.

And when auditors went looking for the handheld scanners themselves, twenty of seventy Surface Visibility units and one of twenty-three PVS units hadn’t been used since mid-April and simply couldn’t be located, a shortfall the OIG valued at $12,075 in questioned costs. An inspector watched a driver try to walk out of the transportation office with a scanner without signing for it.

Nobody stopped him until the OIG did.

Why Nobody Caught It

Every one of these findings traces back to the same structural cause, stated by the people responsible for catching it. The Hendersonville postmaster was on extended leave for two weeks before and during the audit, leaving three recently promoted, undertrained supervisors to run the unit’s closeout, route adjustments, and package handling with no meaningful oversight; staff described her, when she was present, as unapproachable.

At Church Street, an acting PM supervisor closed out the unit alone because the redline process, the checklist meant to catch exactly this kind of gap, was never taught to him. At the P&DC, logistics management runs with a single supervisor per shift, splitting attention between dock activity, driver availability, and scanner distribution until, inevitably, something goes unwatched.

None of this reads as concealment so much as capacity collapse. That is, the checks exist on paper, the people meant to run them are stretched across too many duties to run them consistently, and the gap only closes when an outside auditor counts what’s actually there.

USPS agreed with every finding across all four reports, which is the expected and mostly empty gesture at this stage. The recommendations tied to the P&DC report carry implementation dates running out to May 2027, nearly two years after the conditions that triggered them. The three delivery unit reports, meanwhile, are interim.

A capping report covering all three stations and the district as a whole is still pending, and based on how long the equivalent report took after a similar 2023 audit in Memphis, Nashville shouldn’t expect it before winter.

Until then, the operative fact is simple. An agency that runs on self-reported compliance data, unaudited inventory logs, and scans nobody double-checks is only as accurate as its most honest, best-trained, least overworked field supervisor.

In Nashville this summer, that bar turned out to be considerably lower than the number the Postal Service had been reporting to itself.

For more USPS OIG coverage, see The Pantry That Held a Federal Problem — on a joint OIG-DEA investigation that dismantled a drug distribution network running through the postal system — and The Postal Service Passed Its Pay Audit. The Bill Just Got Postponed. — on how the same OIG found full compliance with executive salary caps while $1.1 million in deferred compensation quietly accrues interest on a $9 billion annual loss.

Sources: Church Street Station, Nashville, TN: Delivery Operations (26-110-1-R26) | Hendersonville Main Post Office, Hendersonville, TN: Delivery Operations (26-110-2-R26) | Lebanon Main Post Office, Lebanon, TN: Delivery Operations (26-110-3-R26) | Efficiency of Operations at the Nashville Processing and Distribution Center, Nashville, TN (26-109-R26)
The Actuary’s Gift: How a $316 Billion SSI Expansion Got Pre-Scored While the Inspector General Was Still Counting the Last Round of Overpayments

The Social Security Administration’s Office of the Chief Actuary keeps a very particular kind of stationery: dry, unfailingly polite, and capable of detonating a fiscal grenade. On September 15, 2026, Chief Actuary Karen P. Glenn sent one of these letters to Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, scoring a Supplemental Security Income overhaul that would cost the federal government an additional $316 billion over the next decade.

It arrived, as these things do, with a straight face and a clean conscience — and an awkward footnote: the same week the letter went out, the SSA’s own inspector general was still trying to explain why the agency cannot stop overpaying people whose bank accounts it never bothered to check twice.

An Actuary’s Gift, Itemized

The letter to Pelosi scores a seven-provision proposal drafted by Dr. Wendell Primus of the Brookings Institution, and it is, structurally, a marvel of quiet generosity.

Provision A raises the SSI federal benefit rate by $70 for individuals and $105 for couples.

Provision B triples the general income exclusion.

Provision C triples the earned income exclusion.

Provision D excludes 40 percent of Social Security benefits from the SSI income calculation entirely.

Provision E quintuples the countable resource limit, from $2,000 to $10,000 for individuals, while sheltering up to $50,000 in retirement savings from counting against eligibility at all.

Provision F eliminates the consideration of in kind support (food, shelter, a couch to sleep on) as income.

Provision G has the IRS hand SSA a list of people who might qualify but haven’t applied.

Total combined cost through 2034: $316 billion, layered on top of a baseline SSI program the actuaries already project will cost $722 billion over that same window. The single largest line item is not the benefit increase everyone will read about in the press release; it is Provision G, the outreach provision, at $135 billion, more than the benefit hike and the resource limit changes combined.

Glenn is admirably honest about the uncertainty here, noting flatly that “the actual effect that this provision would have on participation is uncertain.” One might call that the actuarial equivalent of a shrug, delivered at a cost of $135 billion.

A Proposal With a Long, Familiar Résumé

None of this is new, and that is precisely the point worth dwelling on. Provision D, the 40 percent Social Security exclusion, is lifted nearly verbatim from a 2024 Brookings paper by Primus and coauthors. Primus, notably, already has a different SSA-scored proposal circulating through Congress; a broader solvency package he sent to then Minority Whip Steny Hoyer produced its own actuarial letter in January 2025, one dealing with the OASDI trust funds rather than SSI alone.

Provision E, the resource limit increase, is essentially the text of the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, and the broader package overlaps substantially with the SSI Restoration Act, reintroduced this past March by Rep. Adelita Grijalva, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, and Rep. James Moylan, with 30 cosponsors.

What is missing from the Pelosi letter is a bill number. This is not legislation being scored, rather an idea being pre-scored, run through the actuary’s office by a private economist working through a member’s office, presumably so that whoever eventually introduces the combined package can wave around a $316 billion figure with an official SSA letterhead attached to it.

It is a perfectly normal way to legislate in Washington, and it is also, if you squint, a way of credentialing an idea through an agency whose job is arithmetic, not politics, so that the arithmetic can later be cited as though it settled the politics.

The Resource Limit and the Inconvenient Auditor

Here is where the story gets uncomfortable for everyone involved. The SSA’s own Office of the Inspector General published its Fiscal Year 2024 compliance audit under the Payment Integrity Information Act in May 2025, and it found that SSA failed two of the ten reporting requirements, both in the SSI program specifically.

The SSI improper payment rate climbed from 9.41 percent (roughly $5.3 billion) in 2019 to 10.62 percent (roughly $6.5 billion) in 2023, moving in exactly the wrong direction despite years of corrective action plans that read, in retrospect, like a to do list nobody finished.

The leading cause, according to the OIG, is unreported resources sitting in financial accounts above the current limit, and the agency’s own data shows that 89 percent of those overpayments occurred because a recipient’s circumstances changed after their initial approval, in the gap between reviews where nobody was looking.

The OIG estimates $2 billion in overpayments could have been prevented in 2023 alone had SSA simply run its existing verification tool more often. It has not implemented that recommendation. A separate OIG audit released the same month documents the mechanism in detail: 63 unresolved SSI earnings alerts sat for an average of 733 days, long enough for the agency’s own finality rules to erase $664 million in overpayments from collectability entirely.

Into this specific, well documented gap, Provision E proposes to quintuple the resource limit and exempt up to $75,000 in retirement accounts for couples from ever being counted.

But it is worth noticing that Congress is being asked to widen precisely the category of asset that its own watchdog just identified as the single largest driver of a persistent, unresolved overpayment problem, at the same moment SSA is finally rolling out zero dollar tolerance verification for the old, much smaller limits.

A Program on Autopilot, Redirected

The 2025 SSI Annual Report, which supplies the baseline assumptions for Glenn’s letter, tells a story of a program quietly shrinking relative to everything around it. SSI expenditures were 0.22 percent of GDP in 2024 and are projected to fall to 0.17 percent by 2049, a decline attributed to a shrinking pool of eligible citizens and benefits growing slower than average incomes. Recipient numbers actually dropped slightly between January 2024 and January 2025, from 7.30 million to 7.26 million.

Against that backdrop, the Primus proposal does not merely add to the program; it reverses its trajectory. The letter’s own table shows $104 billion in new costs against a $339 billion baseline for 2025 through 2029, a roughly 30 percent acceleration over five years, applied to a program the actuaries themselves describe as coasting toward relative irrelevance.

That may well be defensible policy. Poverty among elderly and disabled Americans is a real and measurable thing, and $688 a month, the current average SSI payment, buys considerably less than it did when the resource limits were last touched in 1989. But it is not the same claim as “modest technical fix,” which is how proposals like this tend to be marketed once the actuarial letter gets attached to a press release.

Somewhere between the Brookings paper, the Grijalva bill, and Karen Glenn’s very polite letter, the size of the ask got lost in translation, and it is the sort of thing a $316 billion program deserves to have said about it plainly, in public, before anyone votes on it.

SSA Chief Actuary Letter to Speaker Emerita Pelosi (September 15, 2026)Download
Federal Register Watch: September 21, 2026
The Securities and Exchange Commission today proposed rescinding Rule 14a-8, the federal rule that has long let shareholders force a company-wide vote on social, environmental and governance proposals at annual meetings, making it the most significant document to clear the Federal Register today.
- Securities and Exchange Commission — The SEC proposed rescinding Rule 14a-8 entirely, which would end the federal requirement that companies put qualifying shareholder proposals on the ballot and instead leave those questions to state corporate law and each company’s own governance documents. It paired that proposal with a companion rule, Proxy Solicitation Modernization, which would drop the requirement that companies deliver annual reports before a shareholder vote and shorten how long brokers must search for a company’s beneficial owners; together the two proposals would remove federal minimums that have applied uniformly across all public companies and hand that oversight to fifty different state codes instead, which is why the pairing carries more weight than either proposal would alone. Comments on the proxy modernization piece are due November 20, giving investors, companies and state regulators roughly two months to weigh in before either rule could be finalized. Read the notice.
- Executive Office of the President — President Trump signed Executive Order 14428, revoking a 2009 Chesapeake Bay directive outright and instructing the secretaries of War, Interior, Agriculture and Commerce, along with the Homeland Security secretary and the EPA administrator, to prioritize funding for measurable, science-based nutrient-reduction projects over broader bay-restoration spending. The order also directs EPA to work with the bay’s watershed jurisdictions to identify and encourage repeal of local stormwater fees, which the administration frames as unjustified “rain taxes” on residents; giving the Department of War a formal seat alongside the conventional environmental agencies in a regional water-quality program is the kind of institutional detail worth watching for what it signals about how funding and authority get redistributed going forward. Because the order revokes the prior directive rather than amending it, the previous oversight structure ends immediately rather than phasing out. Read the order.
- Homeland Security Department — DHS published a new Finding of Mass Influx of Aliens, extending for another 180 days an authorization that began as a 60-day emergency measure in January 2025 and has now been renewed three times without ever lapsing back into ordinary immigration procedure. The prior extension expired September 17 and this one was not published until September 21, leaving a four-day gap during which the underlying finding technically was not in effect, worth asking why an authorization meant to be temporary keeps getting renewed after the fact rather than allowed to run its course or replaced with a different legal mechanism. The finding relies on 8 U.S.C. 1103(a), the provision that lets DHS request state and local law-enforcement assistance during a mass-migration event, which is a substantial authority to keep active on a rolling basis rather than through ordinary appropriations or legislation. Read the notice.
- Executive Office of the President — A presidential memorandum on Restoring Reciprocity in Government Procurement directs the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Trade Representative and federal agency heads to identify and remove Canadian-origin products from federal purchasing wherever the law allows, citing Canadian “Buy Canadian” policies and provincial barriers that the administration says lock out U.S. companies while Canadian firms keep access to more than $280 billion a year in federal contracts. The memo sets no implementation deadline, which matters because an open-ended instruction to “take all steps permitted by applicable law” gives agencies wide discretion over both timing and scope with no public checkpoint to measure compliance against. The Trade Representative must monitor Canada’s treatment of U.S. goods and report back on whether the restrictions should ease, though the memo does not say when that report is due. Read the memorandum.
- Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board — The Board disclosed that after the Justice Department and FBI submitted 22 additional requests to postpone releasing records tied to five civil-rights cold cases, it approved only three of them. The notice exists because the 2018 law that created the Board requires it to publish these determinations within 14 days, a transparency requirement that makes it possible to see, in a single document, how often federal law enforcement asks to keep decades-old civil-rights records sealed and how often an independent board pushes back. Denying the large majority of the postponement requests is itself notable, since it suggests the Board found most of DOJ and the FBI’s stated justifications for continued secrecy unpersuasive. Read the notice.
- Commodity Futures Trading Commission — The CFTC reopened the comment period on a proposal to exempt its CFTC-59 Insider Risk Program Records System from key Privacy Act protections, but for only ten additional days after the original comment window had already been closed since June. A Privacy Act exemption of this kind determines whether employees or contractors named in an internal insider-threat database can find out what the CFTC has recorded about them or challenge inaccurate entries, so the scope of the exemption carries real stakes for the people it covers even though the filing itself is procedural. A ten-day reopening arriving more than three months after the original window closed gives the public comparatively little additional time to respond relative to the length of the delay that preceded it. Read the notice.
Editorial note: This edition was compiled after screening all 76 documents published in the Federal Register on September 21, 2026. Excluded as routine: information-collection and OMB/PRA notices, antidumping and countervailing-duty determinations, SEC self-regulatory-organization rule filings, Coast Guard safety zones, DEA individual-practitioner decision-and-order notices, routine advisory-committee meeting notices, and routine FERC filings and funding announcements that did not otherwise trip an institutional or anomaly signal.
GSA Has a $17 Billion Building Maintenance Problem. Now It’s Inspecting Buildings Less Often.

The federal government has a building maintenance problem measured in billions of dollars, fewer people managing those buildings than it did two years ago, and a new policy allowing as much as five years to pass between the physical assessments it uses to estimate what many of those buildings need.

That combination sits at the center of a new audit by GSA’s Office of Inspector General, which found that the agency’s Public Buildings Service was already understating repair and maintenance liabilities in some of its building assessments. This is Part 2 of our coverage; Part 1 covers how hundreds of those assessments were completed and approved by the same employee, defeating the agency’s own quality-control requirement.

The September audit examined 196 buildings and found that 79 surveys underreported repair and alteration costs by a combined $73.2 million.

The OIG did not extrapolate that figure across GSA’s entire portfolio, and neither should anyone else. The audit does not establish that every federal building assessment is understated by the same percentage.

What it does establish is more consequential for the future: the system GSA relies upon to understand the condition and repair costs of its buildings was capable of missing known liabilities before the agency substantially lengthened the time between required physical assessments.

And the government already has quite a maintenance bill.

A $17 Billion Backlog

GSA’s Public Buildings Service serves as the federal government’s civilian landlord, providing workspace for hundreds of thousands of federal employees across a portfolio that requires continuous attention — roofs, elevators, boilers, chillers, electrical systems, fire protection equipment. The backlog has been growing for years.

The Government Accountability Office reported in 2025 that deferred maintenance and repair across Defense Department and civilian federal properties had more than doubled, rising from approximately $171 billion in fiscal year 2017 to $370 billion in fiscal year 2024.

GSA’s portion exceeded $17 billion by March 2025, and GAO warned that allowing the trend to continue could cause federal assets to deteriorate further and require premature replacement — potentially costing substantially more than performing maintenance when originally scheduled.

The problem was serious enough that GAO added the condition of federal buildings as a new concern within federal real property’s longstanding designation on its High-Risk List.

GSA was therefore already trying to manage an aging portfolio carrying billions of dollars in deferred work when its workforce shrank dramatically.

PBS Lost 45 Percent of Its Workforce

Between September 2024 and November 2025, the Public Buildings Service went from 5,683 employees to 3,126 — a reduction of approximately 45 percent.

GAO later found that PBS had not conducted strategic workforce planning before making those reductions.

The consequences were not purely theoretical: officials from federal agencies served by PBS told GAO about concerns regarding the organization’s capacity, including project delays associated with having fewer employees available to perform essential real-estate work.

PBS officials subsequently began trying to determine where workforce and skills gaps existed, even as the schedule for assessing federal buildings changed.

Two Years Became Five

GSA uses its Building Assessment Tool, or BAT, to estimate the cost of correcting major deficiencies in buildings for which PBS has maintenance responsibilities.

A BAT survey is not simply an accounting exercise.

It is a 40-section assessment based on a physical inspection of an individual building. The information produced through that process feeds GSA’s financial reporting, long-term capital planning and decisions about which repairs receive priority.

Previously, PBS required those surveys every two years; beginning in fiscal year 2025, GSA moved to a five-year assessment cycle.

The agency’s FY2025 financial reporting attributed the change to resource constraints and alignment with the minimum assessment frequency established by the Federal Real Property Council.

GSA is not violating the federal minimum by inspecting buildings every five years. It has moved from its previous, more frequent schedule to the minimum interval permitted under the applicable government-wide standard.

Nor does a building’s maintenance estimate simply sit untouched until someone returns with a clipboard five years later.

GSA updates BAT estimates annually to account for changes in labor and material costs and other circumstances. Better project-specific information can also be incorporated when it becomes available.

Those procedures can help keep the estimated price of known repairs current.

But updating the estimated cost of a problem isn’t the same thing as discovering a new problem.

A spreadsheet can tell GSA that the roof repair it identified three years ago is more expensive today.

The spreadsheet cannot look at the roof.

That distinction is precisely why the timing of the new OIG audit matters.

The Inspector General Found Missing Repairs

The GSA OIG concluded that PBS was not consistently following its own procedures for ensuring that BAT estimates were complete and accurate.

Auditors found 79 surveys among their 196-building sample that underreported repair and alteration liabilities by approximately $73.2 million.

The problem was not always that GSA lacked the information; in some cases, relevant records existed elsewhere within the agency, but surveyors and approvers did not consistently review them when preparing assessments.

That means the agency could possess records showing that work was needed while the building assessment used to calculate maintenance liabilities failed to incorporate it.

The OIG concluded that the deficiencies limited assurance that PBS was consistently using and reporting complete, accurate and reliable information about the repair and maintenance needs of its portfolio.

Because PBS underwent significant staffing reductions and a major reorganization in 2025, the OIG noted, BAT surveys are now required every five years instead of every two, explicitly connecting that problem to the longer inspection schedule.

The longer interval, auditors warned, increases the risk that GSA will be working with outdated maintenance-liability information.

In other words, the five-year cycle isn’t the reason auditors found $73 million missing from the sampled surveys.

But discovering that the system can miss liabilities makes the additional three years between required physical assessments considerably more important.

Avoiding a Future Television Career

There is, admittedly, an entertaining way to contemplate the eventual destination of buildings whose maintenance problems are allowed to accumulate.

Fans of Mysteries of the Abandoned know the formula.

Somebody builds an impressive structure. Somebody stops taking care of it. Nature begins submitting its own change orders. Eventually, a television crew arrives to explain why there are trees growing through what used to be the conference room.

A federal building does not become Discovery Channel material merely because GSA inspects it every five years.

But the joke works because deterioration isn’t particularly interested in the government’s inspection calendar.

Roofs leak. Pipes corrode. Boilers age. Concrete cracks. Electrical equipment becomes obsolete. Water intrusion produces new problems while existing problems become more expensive.

And the federal government is already carrying a maintenance backlog large enough that preventing deterioration ought to be considerably cheaper than documenting the ruins afterward.

The Minimum Standard Meets a Maximum-Sized Problem

There is nothing inherently improper about a five-year assessment cycle — it meets the federal minimum. That may actually be the more important point.

GSA did not move to a five-year cycle while managing a pristine portfolio with abundant staff and a maintenance system demonstrating exceptional accuracy.

It made the change amid resource constraints, a major reorganization, a 45-percent reduction in PBS staffing and a deferred-maintenance backlog exceeding $17 billion.

The federal government’s broader maintenance backlog, meanwhile, has more than doubled since 2017.

Now the GSA inspector general has demonstrated that the information system helping the agency understand those liabilities can omit repair costs already documented elsewhere inside the government.

The OIG has recommended tighter controls over how BAT surveys incorporate maintenance information and stronger quality-control procedures. PBS agreed with the recommendations.

Those changes may improve the accuracy of the information GSA collects, but they do not change the arithmetic of time. Under the old schedule, a required physical assessment returned every two years. Under the new one, it may not return for five.

For a government already trying to decide which of billions of dollars in building repairs it can afford to make, three additional years is a long time for something to start leaking.