Bureaucracy Times

All the news fit to be declassified.

  • Two Minutes of House, 33 Seconds of Senate, and 27 Legislative Requests From the Department of War

    Congress did almost nothing on the floor Tuesday, but the paper kept moving. The House met at 4 p.m. and adjourned at 4:02. The Senate held a pro forma session from 1:31:12 to 1:31:45 p.m. There were no votes, no quorum calls, and no committee meetings. Both chambers return Friday, October 9, for another pro forma round.

    The real action was in the executive communications. The Department of War’s Legislative Affairs office sent nine letters, EC-4842 through EC-4850, transmitting 27 legislative proposals it wants enacted this session. Twenty-one went to Armed Services, three to Foreign Affairs, and one each to Oversight, Natural Resources, and Judiciary. The Record prints only counts and referrals, not the proposals themselves. What a defense department wants from Natural Resources and Judiciary is worth chasing.

    Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Bost filed two reports. H.R. 6698 would make the Board of Veterans’ Appeals identify the factors behind untimely disposition and remand of appeals in its annual report. H.R. 7260 would require an annual report on the National Cemetery Administration. Both are reporting mandates, not new spending.

    Among 17 bills introduced, a few stand out.

    • H.R. 10764, from Rep. Moore, would require certain procedures for compromise settlements or awards involving executive branch officials. It went to Judiciary.
    • H.R. 10766, from Rep. Self, would add Golden Dome assets to the Defense Department’s Critical Asset List.
    • H.R. 10752, from Rep. Carter of Louisiana, would create an artificial intelligence task force inside CISA.
    • H.R. 10765, from Rep. Raskin, would direct the Smithsonian to build a permanent exhibition on government propaganda, corruption, and authoritarianism during the Trump presidencies.

    The Smithsonian thread continued in the Extensions of Remarks. Rep. Mfume honored Secretary Lonnie Bunch as he prepares to conclude his service, and he argued that the administration has pushed to reshape how federal institutions present American history. That is his characterization, not a finding. It follows the independence fight we covered with Rep. Stansbury’s H.R. 10527.

    One more thing about the Record itself. Several tributes read as if they were pulled from earlier years. Rep. Wilson’s tribute to Timothy Belcher asks colleagues “from the 117th Congress” to join her. Her Tragil Wade-Johnson tribute talks about reaching 2,500 girls “in 2023 alone.” Her Nancy Dawkins tribute celebrates a 100th birthday for a woman born in 1923. It is October 2026, and in the Record it is always a little bit 2023 somewhere.

    Sources

  • Federal Register Watch: October 7, 2026

    Wednesday’s Federal Register, Volume 91, Number 193, ran 148 numbered pages, and the headline rules were mostly absent. What the issue offered instead was a cluster of privacy notices in which three federal agencies described, in their own words, new or enlarged piles of personal data. The Treasury Department is assembling a file on student borrowers, the Justice Department is building a firearms rights database and asking to keep it largely closed to the people in it, and the Drug Enforcement Administration is widening who counts as a subject of its aviation records. The Labor Department, meanwhile, abandoned a rulemaking it spent fifteen months not finishing.

    Treasury Takes the Student Loan File

    The most consequential item is easy to miss because it carries a dull name. Treasury’s notice of a new system of records, Department of the Treasury .033, covers Federal Student Aid portfolio research, analysis, oversight, reporting and compliance records. Under an interagency agreement, the Education Department will hand Treasury data, including personally identifiable information, on recipients of federal student grants and loans under Title IV of the Higher Education Act. The notice names three Education sources, the National Student Loan Data System, the Default Management Collection System and the Enterprise Data Management and Analytics Platform Services, and it concedes that some of the data may come from education records protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. The Office of the Fiscal Assistant Secretary and the Office of Economic Policy will run it.

    The categories of records are broad. Treasury lists loan origination, disbursement, repayment, default, collection, discharge and consolidation data, plus application and eligibility information such as dependency, income and household details. The people covered include borrowers, co-signers, endorsers, parents and spouses, along with anyone who files an inquiry or complaint. Treasury says it will use the material for research, modeling, forecasting, audit coordination and responses to oversight bodies, and it promises role based access controls, audit logging and periodic access reviews. Education remains the custodian of the underlying program records, but Treasury wants its own single system anyway, because the records serve one Treasury mission under one governance framework.

    One purpose deserves a second look. The tenth listed purpose is to support program transition, implementation, reporting and closeout activities tied to the transfer, ownership, administration, oversight or management of the portfolio. What follows is an inference and not a statement in the notice. The wording suggests Treasury expects some part of the student aid portfolio to change hands or change managers, and it is building the paper trail before the move. The reasoning rests only on that purpose line and on the notice’s repeated references to Treasury’s ownership and administration responsibilities, and the notice never says a transfer is planned. Comments are due November 6 under docket TREAS-DO-2026-0628. The notice lists no Privacy Act exemptions for the system, which makes it a useful contrast with the next item.

    A Second Chance With the Blinds Drawn

    The Office of the Pardon Attorney published two companion documents. One is a notice of a new system of records, the Firearms Rights Restoration Electronic Records Database. The other is a proposed rule exempting that database from parts of the Privacy Act. The database will receive, track and adjudicate applications under 18 U.S.C. 925(c), which lets people barred from possessing firearms ask the Attorney General for relief. The notice explains that since 1992 Congress has restricted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from spending its appropriated funds on those investigations, which left the program unusable, and that the Attorney General withdrew ATF’s delegation in March 2025 after reviewing the matter under Executive Order 14206. A final rule on the application process followed in August 2026.

    The records will live on the FBI’s Electronic Departmental Order service inside the Next Generation Identification system, and the database will interface with the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Justice proposes to claim exemptions under subsections (j)(2) and (k)(2) of the Privacy Act, the law enforcement provisions, from several requirements, including the rights to request access to and amendment of one’s own records. The stated reasons are that notice, access and amendment would reveal the nature and scope of the adjudication, chill candid communication among officials advising the Attorney General, and expose people who gave information under a promise of confidentiality. Those are real interests. They are also bought with the applicant’s own access and correction rights, which is what the exemption does by its terms. Comments on both documents are due November 6.

    Down the page, the DEA republished and retitled its aviation records system as the DEA Aviation Division Reporting System, last published in full in 2000. The old notice covered pilots. The revision adds DEA employees and contractors, vendors, detainees, inmates, non-DEA law enforcement personnel and other federal employees and contractors, and it updates the record categories, purposes and routine uses. Comments are due November 5. The addition of detainees and inmates suggests the system now tracks passengers as well as crews, an inference drawn only from the expanded list of covered individuals.

    Labor Declines to Move Its Furniture

    The Wage and Hour Division withdrew a proposed rule it published on July 2, 2025, which would have removed from the Code of Federal Regulations the Fair Labor Standards Act interpretive parts that were never issued or amended through notice and comment. The idea was to demote those parts to subregulatory guidance posted elsewhere. The comment period ran 30 days. The Department received six substantive comments, two in favor and four opposed, and it denied 10 requests for more time. Fifteen months later, Administrator Andrew B. Rogers signed the withdrawal, which took effect October 6.

    The stated reason is that further action no longer aligns with the Department’s needs, priorities and objectives, a sentence that could justify almost any abandoned project. The notice adds that commenters raised concerns about the effect on specific industries and that the Department will keep looking for ways to modernize its interpretive guidance. For employers and workers who rely on those parts, the practical result is that the guidance stays exactly where it was.

    The Rest of the Docket

    The Federal Reserve extended the comment period on its Regulation O proposal by 30 days, to November 4, after commenters asked for more time. The August 4 proposal would update the rule on loans by member banks to their insiders, index outdated dollar thresholds, and address how the rule applies to banks that lend to companies presumed to be controlled by large asset managers through passive investment funds. The Copyright Office opened a notice of inquiry on music streaming fraud at the request of Representative Scott Fitzgerald of the House Judiciary Committee, with comments due November 23 and replies December 21. The notice puts domestic streaming revenue for sound recordings at about $9.5 billion.

    The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative confirmed that the two 2018 Section 301 actions on China did not terminate on their four year anniversaries, because domestic industry representatives asked that they continue, and the statutory review goes on. The Department of Energy withdrew the appendix B test procedure for commercial warm air furnaces in a final rule, finding an uncertain gain in representativeness that did not outweigh the burden. The IRS asked for comments, due December 7, on its information collection for Trump Account elections. The Office of Special Counsel published a notice naming the members of its Senior Executive Service Performance Board, and sanctions actions from the Office of Foreign Assets Control filled 17 pages. The only presidential document was Proclamation 11071, designating National Manufacturing Day.

  • HUD Arrested 491 Fugitives in Subsidized Housing. Its Own Audits Show How They Got There.

    The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general spent much of 2026 helping federal agents hunt fugitives living in federally assisted housing.

    By the time the nationwide effort was tallied, 491 people had been arrested.

    But the arrests raise a question considerably larger than the operation itself: How did so many wanted people wind up inside the federal housing-assistance system, and how did investigators find them after they were there?

    HUD’s Office of Inspector General announced Oct. 5 that its nationwide “Operation Clean House” had resulted in 491 arrests through a series of enforcement operations conducted with the U.S. Marshals Service and state and local law-enforcement agencies.

    The arrests included people wanted for offenses ranging from drug trafficking, weapons crimes and aggravated assault to rape, murder and child sex offenses. Authorities also seized 10 firearms.

    The national announcement, however, is only the final chapter of an enforcement campaign that unfolded city by city throughout 2026.

    And viewed alongside a series of HUD OIG audits released during the same period, Operation Clean House exposes an uncomfortable contrast inside the federal housing system: investigators proved remarkably capable of finding wanted fugitives after they were associated with federally assisted housing while auditors were simultaneously finding serious weaknesses in the systems intended to determine who should be receiving assistance in the first place.

    Building Operation Clean House

    Operation Clean House was not a single nationwide raid.

    Instead, HUD OIG worked with the U.S. Marshals Service and other agencies in a succession of local operations targeting fugitives connected to federally assisted housing.

    An early operation in Columbus, Ohio, targeted people with active felony warrants who were residing in government-subsidized housing. HUD OIG later reported that operations in Columbus and Minneapolis together resulted in 55 arrests of people residing in HUD-assisted housing.

    In Memphis, another operation resulted in 24 arrests. HUD OIG said the majority of those arrested were current HUD program participants who were taken into custody inside HUD housing.

    Kansas City followed with 40 arrests during a five-day operation targeting violent or repeat offenders associated with HUD-assisted properties or leaseholders.

    Philadelphia produced another 41 arrests of fugitives residing in federally subsidized properties.

    Then came Cleveland.

    During a two-week operation in September, authorities arrested 75 people. According to the U.S. Marshals Service, 68 were fugitives identified as using HUD housing. Seven additional people with outstanding felony warrants were encountered during the operation.

    That distinction matters.

    HUD OIG’s nationwide figure of 491 represents arrests resulting from Operation Clean House. It should not automatically be interpreted as 491 HUD beneficiaries who were illegally receiving housing assistance.

    The government’s own descriptions show that the population swept up by the operation was more complicated.

    But Cleveland also provides one of the clearest clues about what was happening behind the scenes.

    According to the Marshals Service, investigators worked with HUD OIG to “develop information about wanted fugitives living in HUD housing” before conducting the operation.

    Exactly how they developed that information remains unclear.

    The Other Half of the Story

    Six days before announcing the 491 arrests, HUD OIG released three audits examining tenant eligibility and related controls at major housing authorities in Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles.

    Together, HUD OIG said the audits identified more than $4.3 million in improper payments associated with deficiencies involving criminal-background screening, immigration verification and other eligibility controls. The finding extends a pattern this publication has tracked: The $1.4 Billion HUD Couldn’t Be Bothered to Count.

    The findings provide an illuminating backdrop to Operation Clean House.

    At the District of Columbia Housing Authority, auditors identified 17 lifetime registered sex offenders participating in housing programs. Thirteen, according to OIG, had been improperly admitted despite a mandatory federal prohibition.

    HUD paid more than $1.6 million in housing assistance associated with those 13 individuals.

    Auditors also identified 13 participants with ineligible immigration status who benefited from another $869,877 in assistance. Another 178 participants could not have their immigration status verified because of problems involving use of the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system.

    The problems were not confined to Washington.

    At the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, HUD OIG examined a population of approximately 98,000 tenants and found at least $770,701 in housing assistance had been paid for 15 tenants subject to lifetime sex-offender registration requirements who were ineligible when they entered the programs.

    In Chicago, auditors found five lifetime registered sex offenders had been admitted to housing programs. OIG also found required criminal-background checks had not been conducted after admission for 14 of the 59 household members auditors reviewed.

    Taken together, the audits describe something considerably more consequential than isolated paperwork errors.

    They show weaknesses in the eligibility and screening machinery responsible for policing access to federally subsidized housing at the same time federal agents were conducting a nationwide campaign to locate fugitives within that system.

    Arrested Does Not Mean Ineligible

    There is an important distinction here.

    A criminal record does not automatically disqualify someone from receiving federal housing assistance, and the fact that someone was arrested during Operation Clean House does not establish that the person was improperly receiving benefits.

    HUD OIG itself examined the issue in a September report concerning criminal-activity requirements across federal rental-assistance programs.

    The rules vary depending on the program and circumstances. Some criminal conduct can result in discretionary eviction or denial of assistance, while federal law establishes mandatory restrictions in particular situations, including certain lifetime sex-offender registration requirements and methamphetamine-related offenses in federally assisted housing.

    That makes Operation Clean House more complicated than a simple story about criminals receiving taxpayer-funded housing.

    It also makes the unanswered questions more important.

    How many of the 491 people arrested were actual HUD beneficiaries?

    How many were authorized members of assisted households?

    How many were unauthorized occupants?

    How many were guests or other people simply located at HUD-assisted properties?

    How many arrests resulted in eligibility reviews?

    How many households subsequently lost assistance?

    How many cases uncovered false information, undisclosed household members, housing fraud or improper federal payments?

    The Oct. 5 announcement does not provide those figures.

    How Did HUD Find Them?

    There is another unanswered question buried underneath the entire operation.

    HUD OIG and the Marshals Service clearly possessed some mechanism for connecting wanted fugitives with federally assisted housing.

    The government has described the results without explaining much about the machinery that produced them.

    It is not clear from the publicly available records whether investigators compared fugitive or warrant databases against HUD beneficiary information, whether the Marshals Service supplied target lists that HUD OIG checked against housing records, whether individual public housing authorities performed searches, or whether investigators relied primarily on addresses and conventional fugitive investigations.

    Nor is it clear whether Operation Clean House represents a temporary enforcement initiative or an ongoing data-matching capability.

    The question is particularly relevant because HUD OIG has separately told Congress that it wants greater technological capability to analyze large datasets and identify fraud.

    In its fiscal 2027 budget justification, OIG described Operation Clean House among its enforcement efforts while also seeking resources for artificial-intelligence capabilities that could help investigators parse large datasets and identify fraud more efficiently.

    There is no public evidence establishing that artificial intelligence was used during Operation Clean House.

    But the documents point toward an inspector general increasingly interested in using large-scale data analysis as an investigative tool.

    That makes understanding exactly how Clean House identified its targets more than a matter of curiosity.

    A Successful Operation, and an Unfinished Accounting

    Measured purely by arrests, Operation Clean House was substantial.

    Nearly 500 people were taken into custody. Some were wanted for extremely serious crimes. Federal, state and local agencies cooperated across numerous cities, and dangerous fugitives were removed from communities.

    But HUD OIG itself has supplied the reason not to stop counting at 491.

    Its audits show that housing authorities have sometimes failed to conduct required background checks, admitted prohibited individuals and made millions of dollars in improper assistance payments.

    Operation Clean House demonstrated that federal investigators could find wanted fugitives connected to federally assisted housing.

    The audits raise the more uncomfortable question of why some people who should never have been admitted to housing programs were able to pass through the front door.

    And the government has yet to explain fully how many of the 491 arrests exposed failures in the housing system itself.

    For now, taxpayers have been given an arrest total.

    The program-integrity accounting is still missing.

    Sources

    Fediverse reactions

  • A Chronic Absenteeism Rate of 125 Percent Is Still an Official Federal Statistic

    There are two kinds of numbers a federal agency can publish. There is the kind that is wrong because the world is complicated and measurement is hard. And there is the kind that is wrong because the agency built the measurement out of two pieces that were never designed to fit together, and kept publishing it anyway. The Department of Education’s chronic absenteeism rates, the only nationally comparable figures on how many American students are missing significant school, are the second kind. Some of them exceed one hundred percent. The Department knows this. It has known for a while. It has decided, as of this year, not to fix it.

    The Government Accountability Office’s review of Department data found implausible chronic absenteeism rates, meaning more students reported chronically absent than were recorded as enrolled, in roughly 2.5 percent of schools nationwide using 2022 to 2023 data, the most recent year available. That is GAO’s word, implausible, chosen with the sort of restraint auditors reserve for things that would otherwise require a stronger one.

    Two Clocks, One Number

    The mechanics are almost embarrassingly simple once laid out. To calculate a chronic absenteeism rate, the Department divides the number of students identified as chronically absent by the number of students enrolled. The chronically absent count is tallied over the entire school year, students who missed ten percent or more of the days they were enrolled, at any point, for any reason. The enrollment count, on the other hand, is captured on a single day, October 1, and never updated. A student who enrolls in November and racks up chronically absent status by May is counted in the numerator of a rate whose denominator was frozen months before that student ever showed up.

    In a stable school with a fixed roster, this barely matters. In a school where students are constantly moving in and out, it produces nonsense. GAO’s own illustrative example makes the point better than any explanation could. A school with 100 chronically absent students and 80 enrolled on October 1 reports a chronic absenteeism rate of 125 percent. Using the number of students who were actually enrolled for at least 10 days over the full year, the same school’s real rate is 66 percent, itself alarming, but at least a number that exists inside the bounds of arithmetic. Somewhere between those two figures sits the actual scale of a real problem, and the Department has chosen to publish the version that cannot possibly be correct.

    The Department’s own EDFacts documentation contains a data note warning users that rates calculated this way may be inflated. Which is one way of describing a nationally reported statistic that occasionally exceeds the maximum value a percentage is capable of holding.

    The Schools Where It Breaks Hardest

    The mismatch is not evenly distributed, and where it concentrates tells its own story. Schools identified for Comprehensive Support and Improvement, meaning the lowest performing schools in the country, the ones this data is supposed to help states target, had implausible rates in nearly 13 percent of cases, compared to about 2 percent for non-CSI schools. These are precisely the schools where students change addresses and schools most often, and precisely the schools where accurate absenteeism data would matter most for deciding where to send help.

    Shared-time schools fare even worse. These serve students who split their day between two buildings, often for career and technical education programs, and can end up double-counted as absent in one building while attending the other. More than 30 percent of shared-time schools had implausible rates, against under 2 percent everywhere else. The variation between states is its own indictment of data quality. Delaware, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, and Rhode Island each report zero shared-time schools with implausible rates. Pennsylvania reports implausible rates in 62 of its 63 shared-time schools, 98 percent. States are not disagreeing about a close call here. They are simply not reporting the same phenomenon the same way, because nobody at the Department has told them how. Education, GAO notes dryly, provides states with guidance on how to report enrollment for shared-time students, but not on how to report their chronic absenteeism, an oversight nobody apparently noticed until an outside auditor went looking.

    A Known Limitation Is Still a Limitation

    In 2024, the Department began requiring states to report the number of students enrolled over the full school year, the same timeframe already used for the chronic absenteeism count, which would have let it calculate a rate that actually means what it claims to mean. It abandoned that effort before completion. GAO’s report ties the reversal to staffing reductions inside the Institute of Education Sciences, whose workforce fell by more than 85 percent between the end of 2024 and the end of 2025.

    In its formal response to GAO’s draft recommendation on this point, the Department did not dispute any of the math above. It disputed the need to change anything, writing that the mismatch is “a known limitation that is already documented,” and that it has chosen to keep working with the data elements it already collects rather than add reporting burden on states. GAO’s counter is worth sitting with, since states already have to identify which students were enrolled at least 10 days in order to calculate the chronically absent count required for EDFacts in the first place. The number the Department is declining to collect is a number states are already generating internally to comply with an existing requirement. The Department is not avoiding new work. It is avoiding one additional column in a spreadsheet the states are already filling out, and calling the result a documented limitation rather than an unfinished fix.

    Documenting a flaw is not the same as correcting it, and a data note buried in a technical appendix does not travel with the number once a school board, a state legislature, or a local reporter pulls it out to argue that a particular school is failing its students at a rate of 125 percent. The number will be believed. It just will not be true.

    Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, K-12 Education: Actions to Improve Oversight of Key Federal Programs and Address High Chronic Absenteeism (GAO-26-107920, September 2026). Related: Eighteen Billion Dollars, and Nobody Assigned to Watch It, and The Department Started Fixing Its Data, Then Fired the People Fixing It.

  • A South Dakota Housing Authority Says Building Homes Without Water Is Becoming Normal

    For more than forty years, an annual line buried in appropriations acts has told the Indian Health Service one thing plainly. It cannot spend its own money connecting water to a new home if that home was built with a Department of Housing and Urban Development grant. Not a workaround, not a special case; a blanket statutory wall between two federal agencies whose programs, if you squint at the org chart, look like they were designed to work together. A new Government Accountability Office report on tribal water infrastructure lays out exactly what four decades of that wall have produced, and the answer is homes with no running water, built on purpose, because the alternative was building fewer homes at all (Government Accountability Office, GAO-26-107178).

    Choose Your Deprivation

    HUD’s Indian Housing Block Grant program funds new home construction on tribal land, and normally the total cost of a new IHBG home is supposed to include the water and utility connections needed to live in it, according to HUD guidance (GAO-26-107178). That is the plan. The reality, as tribal housing authorities describe it to GAO, is a forced choice between two bad options, because IHBG funding has not kept pace with tribal housing need and, for decades, remained essentially flat in nominal terms while material and labor costs rose around it (GAO-26-107178). A tribal housing authority in California told GAO it would take one tribe nearly 350 years to build enough homes to meet its own housing need using only its annual IHBG allocation (GAO-26-107178). Three hundred and fifty years, using the money as currently allotted, to catch up on housing that people need now.

    Given that math, tribes building homes with IHBG dollars have to pick a form of scarcity. Option one, build more homes and skip the water connection, accepting that families will move into a brand new house with no tap. Option two, include the water connection and build fewer homes, meaning some families who need housing get nothing while others get housing with plumbing. According to a senior HUD official, tribes reported that as recently as April 2026, HUD-funded homes were still being completed without water infrastructure (GAO-26-107178). One tribal housing authority in South Dakota told GAO plainly that building HUD-funded homes without running water is becoming the norm (GAO-26-107178). Not an emergency measure in a crisis year. The norm.

    The Alaska Math Nobody Wants

    In some parts of the country the math behind that choice is brutal enough to explain the whole pattern by itself. A HUD official told GAO that in Alaska, connecting a single new home to water can consume roughly 30 percent of that home’s entire construction budget (GAO-26-107178). Under a fixed development cost cap set by HUD regulation, an amount that must cover site work, utilities, and the home itself combined, a water connection eating nearly a third of the budget forces impossible tradeoffs (GAO-26-107178). GAO cites a HUD official describing exactly this kind of tradeoff in practice; a tribal housing authority in Alaska had to shrink a planned project from five homes down to four, specifically to cover the cost of connecting the remaining units to water and replacing a pumphouse the added water demand required (GAO-26-107178). One home, sacrificed to plumb the other four.

    None of this is happening because HUD or IHS want families living without water. It is happening because a statutory prohibition, renewed year after year in appropriations riders since sometime in the 1980s, forbids IHS from spending its own water infrastructure money on any home built with HUD housing funds, full stop, regardless of need (GAO-26-107178). The prohibition does not ask whether the tribe can afford the water hookup out of pocket. It simply removes IHS, the one federal agency whose entire statutory purpose is building water infrastructure for Indian homes, from the table the moment HUD money is involved.

    Nobody Knows What Happens If It Ends

    Here is the strange part, and it is the part that makes this article different from the rest of the series. This is not a case where GAO found an obvious fix sitting on the shelf. GAO explicitly concludes that the effects of removing the prohibition are unclear (GAO-26-107178). HUD and IHS actually tried to find out; the two agencies ran joint formal tribal consultation from 2024 to 2025, specifically asking tribes what role, if any, IHS should play in connecting new HUD homes to water, and what removing the prohibition might change (GAO-26-107178). That consultation produced feedback, not certainty. Nobody, including the agencies whose money is at stake, can currently say with confidence what happens to program costs, agency workload, or existing water infrastructure prioritization if Congress simply deletes the line.

    GAO’s actual recommendation reflects that uncertainty rather than pretending it away. Rather than telling Congress to remove the prohibition outright, GAO recommends that HUD and IHS jointly estimate the cost of providing water connections for newly built HUD-funded homes, aggregating IHS’s cost data with HUD’s home construction numbers, and report that estimate to Congress so lawmakers have real figures to work with (GAO-26-107178). It is a recommendation to do the homework before making the call, which is a modest ask given how long the underlying prohibition has already sat unexamined.

    The Data Congress Already Has

    The most quietly damning line in this section of the report is not about tribes or IHS at all; it is about the excuse HUD gave for resisting even this modest step. In its formal comments on the recommendation, HUD said it disagreed, stating that it lacked the authority to impose new reporting requirements on tribes beyond what statute and regulation already require (GAO-26-107178). GAO’s response is almost dismissive in its simplicity. Implementing the recommendation would not require HUD to collect a single new piece of information from any tribe, because HUD already collects and reports annually on the number of homes built with IHBG funding (GAO-26-107178). The data needed to answer Congress’s question already sits inside HUD’s own annual reporting. Someone would just have to combine it with IHS’s cost estimates and send it up the hill.

    Health and Human Services, for its part, said IHS would work with HUD to find a methodology for combining the two datasets (GAO-26-107178). That leaves the question sitting exactly where it has sat for forty years, dependent on two agencies actually following through on a joint estimate that requires no new legislation, no new appropriation, and no new burden on a single tribe, just an agreement to share numbers each of them already has. The statutory wall between HUD and IHS is one of three structural problems GAO identifies in the same report. Even when water infrastructure does get connected, the odds are roughly even that no certified operator will be on staff to run it — because IHS funds construction but not the ongoing salaries needed to keep qualified personnel in place. And when multiple federal agencies do try to jointly fund a project, the lack of a standardized interagency agreement can add nearly $100,000 in administrative overhead per project — money that, in communities already making impossible tradeoffs, does not go toward water.

    Fediverse reactions

  • FTC Questions Who Really Controls College Accreditation

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

    It turns out that question leads somewhere interesting.

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

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

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

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

    The FTC’s 21-of-27 Example

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

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

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

    Bureaucracy Times did.

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

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

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

    Its organizational structure makes the relationship particularly easy to see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Peer Review or Competitive Barrier?

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

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

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

    But the FTC is now asking a different question.

    What happens when peer review also becomes market regulation?

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

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

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

    The public comment period closed September 21.

    We’ve Seen This Movie Before

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

    That comparison comes with some history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A Very Expensive Gate

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

    But the structure creates an unusual accountability loop.

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

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

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

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

    Fediverse reactions

  • The Watchdog Audited Itself and Found a Dog

    Every year, the Government Accountability Office publishes a few hundred reports informing the rest of the federal government that it is not managing its money correctly. GAO tells the Department of Education it has no idea how absentee students actually are. GAO tells ICE it built detention capacity before it built a plan. GAO tells VA it built a hospital on a business case that never existed. This is the job.

    Congress created GAO in 1921 specifically so somebody, anybody, could look at agency spending and say “no, actually, that’s wrong,” and for over a century the agency has done this with the confident air of an institution that has never once made the mistake it is currently describing.

    On September 25, 2026, GAO’s own Office of Inspector General published OIG-26-3, “Acquisition Management: Opportunities Exist for GAO to Strengthen Its Policies and Procedures.” It examined a five-year, $119 million blanket purchase agreement GAO itself signed in 2019 for commercial facility maintenance, meaning the people who clean and repair GAO’s own building.

    The OIG’s finding is that GAO could not manage this contract correctly, could not explain why, and when confronted with the error, fixed it incorrectly.

    The Rates Nobody Adjusted

    In February 2021, the maintenance contractor told GAO its labor rates were going up. This is not an unusual event in federal contracting; it happens when a contractor’s workforce operates under a collective bargaining agreement, as this one did. The contracting officer and the contracting officer’s representative, the two officials whose entire function is to keep the paperwork aligned with reality, received this notice before the contractor started invoicing at the new rates.

    They did not modify the contract. They approved the invoices anyway. Over 18 invoices, GAO paid $93,688 more than the rates actually written into its own agreement, a gap the OIG could measure category by category, $4.39 an hour too much here, $3.96 there, and so on, compounding invisibly because nobody stopped to check that the number on the invoice matched the number in the contract.

    Asked why, GAO could not say. The contracting officer responsible had left the agency by the time anyone asked the question, which is its own small monument to institutional memory (the person who might explain a mistake is gone, and the explanation left with them). The OIG also notes, almost as an aside, that the contracting officer’s representative believed updating an individual task order was sufficient to fix the underlying agreement, which it was not, a misunderstanding that apparently went unquestioned by everyone else in the chain until an auditor arrived to ask about it.

    The Correction That Corrected the Wrong Thing

    GAO does deserve some credit here, in the sense that when the OIG flagged the overpayment in February 2023, the agency did not deny it. It modified the contract retroactively in May 2023 to apply the higher rates across the remaining option years. This would be the end of the story, a minor embarrassment quietly fixed, except that the fix excluded two of the specific contract line items that contained the labor rates for the very 18 invoices under review. GAO corrected the contract everywhere except the part the audit was actually about.

    The agency has since asserted, per its own comments reproduced in the report, that this was addressed and that documentation was provided to the OIG in August 2026, three and a half years after the contractor first flagged the rate change and well over a year after the audit period closed. The OIG’s own report, dated the same month, states flatly that GAO “has not provided supporting evidence” that the correction covers the line items in question.

    Whether the August paperwork actually closes that gap is something GAO’s own auditors have not yet confirmed as of publication, which is a remarkable place for an accountability agency to leave its own accountability.

    Guidance That Guides Nobody

    The overpayment is the number that will get quoted, but the more instructive findings are the two that never touched a dollar figure at all. GAO’s internal procurement rules, the OIG found, offer no clear standard for evaluating whether a contractor is charging excessive markups on work actually performed by a subcontractor, the practice known in acquisition law as an excessive pass-through charge.

    GAO is not legally required to follow the Federal Acquisition Regulation’s language on this, but it has chosen, as a matter of policy, to generally follow it anyway, and then failed to write down what “following it” means in practice. GAO agreed its own guidance needed updating. It did not have an answer for why, in a hundred-plus years of federal contracting oversight, this had not been written down already.

    The second is almost funnier. One GAO internal order says the agency follows competitive negotiation procedures when buying through the General Services Administration’s Schedule program. GAO’s own standard operating procedure says the opposite, that those procedures do not apply to Schedule purchases. Two official GAO documents, both still in effect, instructing staff to do contradictory things, and nobody had reconciled them until an auditor read both at once. GAO agreed this was unclear too.

    The Footnote That Undercuts Everything Else

    Buried in a footnote is the detail that makes the rest of the report worth reading twice. GAO issued an updated version of its Acquisition Management/Procurement Operations standard operating procedures on May 11, 2026, four months before this report’s release, and the OIG states plainly that the update “does not address the issues identified in this report.”

    GAO had the opportunity, mid-audit, to fix the very guidance the OIG was in the process of criticizing, and did not. The agency then submitted written comments in September concurring with all six recommendations and promising further updates, training, and a new SOP addressing pass-through charges, with a completion date of March 2027 for the recommendations that remain open.

    None of this rises to fraud. Nobody pocketed the $93,688; it went to a contractor’s employees who were, by all accounts, owed the raise. The offense here is narrower and in some ways more honest, an agency whose entire institutional purpose is catching other agencies failing to reconcile their own paperwork, failing to reconcile its own paperwork, for the same reasons it always cites when writing about everyone else.

    Insufficient oversight of contract modifications.

    Unclear internal guidance.

    A responsible official no longer available to explain the gap.

    Read GAO’s finding about ICE’s bed-space contracts, or VA’s Louisville hospital, or the Department of Education’s chronically absent students, and then read this report, and the sentences are nearly interchangeable. The watchdog did not find a new species of failure. It found its own.

    Source: GAO Office of Inspector General, report OIG-26-3, published September 25, 2026.

    Fediverse reactions

  • New York’s Medicaid System Paid for 1,375 People Who Weren’t There to Receive It

    The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General has a specific bureaucratic talent, which is finding the exact place where a state government stopped paying attention. This month it found one in Albany.

    According to audit report OAS-25-02-074, New York’s Medicaid program made $7,551,670 in capitation payments, $6,164,734 of it the federal government’s share, to managed care organizations on behalf of 1,375 Medicaid enrollees who were, for the period in question, incarcerated in state prison.

    Every one of them. Not a sample that suggested a wider problem, not a statistical extrapolation dressed up as certainty.

    OIG reviewed all 1,375 incarcerated enrollees identified in the audit period and found unallowable payments attached to every single one. A capitation payment is a flat monthly fee the state pays an MCO per enrollee, regardless of whether that enrollee shows up for a checkup, a filling, or anything else, because the point of managed care is to buy access, not usage.

    Which means the payment keeps generating on autopilot long after the person it was meant to cover has been removed from the population it was meant to serve, unless somebody tells the system to stop. Nobody told the system to stop.

    The Machine That Forgot How to Check

    Federal law is not ambiguous about this. An inmate of a public institution can stay enrolled in Medicaid, but the federal government will not pick up the tab for managed care coverage while that person is locked up, full stop, with the single exception of inpatient care in an actual medical institution.

    New York’s own contracts with its MCOs say the same thing in plainer language, disenroll someone the moment the state learns they are in a Department of Corrections and Community Supervision facility, effective the first full month of incarceration.

    The mechanism that was supposed to catch this is a monthly match between DOCCS prison rosters and the Welfare Management System, cross referencing Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and names. It broke twice.

    First, New York built system overrides during the pandemic to preserve the continuous enrollment guarantee that came with an enhanced federal match, and those overrides apparently never learned that the incarceration exclusion was never part of the deal the continuous enrollment condition was suspending. The state kept people covered who were never supposed to be eligible for managed care reimbursement to begin with, pandemic rule or not.

    Second, and more damning for how mundane it is, the matching algorithm choked on typos. A missing suffix. An extra space in a last name. A transposed digit in a birth date. These are not sophisticated fraud vectors. They are the kind of clerical noise every large database in America generates by the hour, and New York’s system treated a formatting inconsistency as grounds to keep cutting checks.

    A State That Has Done This Dance Before

    What makes the New York report distinct from its predecessors in this same audit series is not the dollar figure, which is modest by federal standards, but the fact that this specific state has been down this specific road with startling regularity.

    In 2020, HHS-OIG found New York had made an estimated $23.3 million in capitation payments on behalf of Medicaid enrollees who were already dead, a population even less capable of using their benefits than an inmate.

    In 2021, a separate audit found New York owed roughly $9.3 million after paying more than one MCO for the same beneficiary in the same month because its systems couldn’t recognize that two Medicaid ID numbers belonged to a single human being.

    Three audits, three different failure modes, one common denominator: a state that pays managed care organizations by the head count and does not maintain a head count anyone can trust.

    Dead enrollees, duplicated enrollees, incarcerated enrollees, it hardly matters which population falls through, because the underlying defect is the same unmonitored pipe between eligibility data and payment data.

    New York’s own Office of the Medicaid Inspector General had already caught a version of this specific incarceration problem at a single managed care plan back in 2020, identifying more than $1.2 million in overpayments in an internal audit, which means the state’s own watchdog knew the pattern existed years before the federal one showed up with a spreadsheet covering the entire state.

    Ohio’s state auditor found roughly $101 million in improper capitation payments tied to incarcerated enrollees when it reviewed every payment made over three fiscal years, a wider net than New York’s audit, and a bigger number as a result.

    Illinois, audited under the same federal series as New York, sampled 100 incarcerated enrollees, found unallowable payments attached to 48 of them, and projected an estimated $9.5 million statewide. What separates New York’s report is the completeness of the miss. Illinois missed on roughly half its sample. New York missed on all of it.

    Somebody Will Get Around to Asking for the Money

    New York’s official response to the audit, filed by the Department of Health’s executive deputy commissioner, is a masterclass in saying quite a lot while committing to almost nothing. The state did not concur. It did not decline to concur.

    It described, at length, what it has done and what it might do, which in bureaucratic correspondence functions as a kind of grammatical tense reserved for actions that may never conjugate into the past.

    The state’s Office of the Medicaid Inspector General says it is analyzing the payments OIG identified to confirm the encounter data, after which it will pursue whatever the analysis supports, subject to the due process rights of the providers being asked to give the money back.

    This is not stonewalling exactly. It is closer to a promise to eventually check the math on somebody else’s math.

    On the systemic fix, New York’s answer is that the specific pandemic-era override problem should not recur, since the continuous enrollment mandate that necessitated it has expired, which is true and also beside the point, since the demographic mismatch problem that let typos slip incarcerated people past the filter has nothing to do with COVID rules and everything to do with a matching algorithm that has apparently never been asked to tolerate a hyphen. The state says it is exploring a manual review process for near misses. Exploring, in this context, is doing a great deal of work.

    OIG’s response, tucked at the end of the report, amounts to a shrug dressed in institutional language: we acknowledge the steps taken and planned, we still found the money missing, our recommendations stand. Which is the entire relationship between a federal inspector general and a state Medicaid agency in miniature.

    One side documents the leak with forensic precision. The other side describes, in the conditional mood, its intention to look for the bucket.

    Sources: HHS Office of Inspector General, New York Made Unallowable Managed Care Capitation Payments on Behalf of Incarcerated Medicaid Enrollees (OAS-25-02-074, 2026); HHS OIG, New York State Medicaid Capitation Payments After Beneficiaries’ Deaths (2020).

    Fediverse reactions

  • Eighteen Billion Dollars, and Nobody Assigned to Watch It

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

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

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

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

    The Word That Isn’t in the Statute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Congress Gets to Own This One Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The one rule worth a look

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

    Twenty-one Senate bills wait at the desk

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

    New bills and a clock that is running

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

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

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

    The Record, recycled

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

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