News ArticlesExcerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
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The Trump administration plans to take action to remove artificial food dyes from the nation's food supply, according to a media advisory sent by the US Department of Health and Human Services. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary will share more about the administration's plans on Tuesday. In January ... the FDA announced that it had banned the use of red dye No. 3 in food, beverages and ingested drugs. The move came more than 30 years after scientists discovered links to cancer in animals. The Trump administration appears poised to take action on a broader set of petroleum-based synthetic dyes that are used to make food and beverages brightly colored. In March, Kennedy joined West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey to support newly signed legislation to ban certain synthetic dyes in food. The state was the first to institute a sweeping ban on synthetic food dyes, which have been tied to issues with learning and behavior in some children and of which Kennedy has been an outspoken critic. Lawmakers in more than half of states – both Republican- and Democrat-led – are pushing to restrict access, according to a tracker by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit environmental health organization, reflecting a bipartisan push toward a safer food system. Red No. 3, red No. 40, blue No. 2 and green No. 3 all have been linked with cancer or tumors in animals.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption.
On March 12th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a press release about an "enhanced" operation that the agency had conducted the previous week in New Mexico. Forty-eight people were arrested in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Roswell. Twenty of them had been "arrested or convicted of serious criminal offenses," which included homicide, sexual assault, drug trafficking, and shoplifting. Others had committed "immigration violations such as illegal entry and illegal re-entry," and twenty-one had final orders of removal issued by an immigration judge. On March 16th, the New Mexico chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with two oversight agencies within the Department of Homeland Security: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. "ICE has not identified any of the 48 individuals," the letter said. "ICE has not indicated where any of them are being detained, whether they have access to counsel, in what conditions they are being held, or even which agency is holding them." In the past two and a half months, ICE has ended a long-standing policy discouraging arrests at schools, places of worship, and hospitals; its officers have also allegedly entered residences without warrants, arrested U.S. citizens by mistake, and refused to identify themselves while whisking people away on the streets of American cities.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.
Outer space is no longer just for global superpowers and large multinational corporations. Developing countries, start-ups, universities, and even high schools can now gain access to space. In 2024, a record 2,849 objects were launched into space. The commercial satellite industry saw global revenue rise to $285 billion in 2023, driven largely by the growth of SpaceX's Starlink constellation. While the democratization of space is a positive development, it has introduced ... an ethical quandary that I call the "double dual-use dilemma." The double dual-use dilemma refers to how private space companies themselves–not just their technologies–can become militarized and integrated into national security while operating commercially. Space companies fluidly shift between civilian and military roles. Their expertise in launch systems, satellites, and surveillance infrastructure allows them to serve both markets, often without clear regulatory oversight. Companies like Walchandnagar Industries in India, SpaceX in the United States, and the private Chinese firms that operate under a national strategy of the Chinese Communist Party called Military-Civil Fusion exemplify this trend, maintaining commercial identities while actively supporting defense programs. This blurring of roles, including the possibility that private space companies may develop their own weapons, raises concerns over unchecked militarization and calls for stronger oversight.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the military and in the corporate world.
Ever thought of having your genome sequenced? 23andMe ... describes itself as a "genetics-led consumer healthcare and biotechnology company empowering a healthier future". Its share price had fallen precipitately following a data breach in October 2023 that harvested the profile and ethnicity data of 6.9 million users – including name, profile photo, birth year, location, family surnames, grandparents' birthplaces, ethnicity estimates and mitochondrial DNA. So on 24 March it filed for so-called Chapter 11 proceedings in a US bankruptcy court. At which point the proverbial ordure hit the fan because the bankruptcy proceedings involve 23andMe seeking authorisation from the court to commence "a process to sell substantially all of its assets". And those assets are ... the genetic data of the company's 15 million users. These assets are very attractive to many potential purchasers. The really important thing is that genetic data is permanent, unique and immutable. If your credit card is hacked, you can always get a new replacement. But you can't get a new genome. When 23andMe's data assets come up for sale the queue of likely buyers is going to be long, with health insurance and pharmaceutical giants at the front, followed by hedge-funds, private equity vultures and advertisers, with marketers bringing up the rear. Since these outfits are not charitable ventures, it's a racing certainty that they have plans for exploiting those data assets.
Note: Watch our new video on the risks and promises of emerging technologies. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
After deporting 238 Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador–likely in violation of court orders–the Trump administration has triggered an unprecedented showdown with the judicial branch to defend its ability to deport immigrants without presenting any evidence in court. This deportation effort constitutes a clear assault on civil liberties and due process rights. It also represents an arguably darker milestone: The US government is now in the business of trafficking migrants on the global market. On March 15, the Trump administration struck a $6 million agreement with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in which the government traded 238 people to be warehoused for a year in the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo–CECOT–the "crown jewel" of Bukele's deeply antidemocratic domestic security platform. Even after conceding that they illegally deported one Maryland father who had already been granted protected status by an immigration judge, the Trump administration has said it cannot bring him home because he is now in foreign custody–meaning the executive branch is prioritizing its trade relationship with El Salvador over compliance with American law. [The Prisoners] will soon be enlisted in El Salvador's euphemistic "Zero Idleness" program, an obscure labor regime. There's a familiar word for forced prison labor: slavery. By effectively subsidizing and populating a modern penal colony, Trump has reignited the international slave trade.
Note: Allegations that the US government is facilitating human trafficking under the guise of immigration enforcement are not new. Health and Human Services (HHS) whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas testified that "the US government has become the middleman in a large scale, multibillion-dollar child trafficking operation that is run by bad actors seeking to profit off of the lives of children." Watch our Mindful News Brief video on how the US government facilitates child trafficking at the border.
A team of researchers searching for safe, sustainable, and biodegradable alternatives to plastics presented a new type of transparent material at the American Chemical Society (ACS) spring meeting. Unlike previous transparent "wood" designs that sacrifice some biodegradability for strength by including certain types of plastics, the team said its eco-friendly see-through material is made with all natural components. Potential applications for the plastic alternative include electronic device screens, wearable sensors, coatings on solar cells, and transparent wood windows. Bharat Baruah, a professor of chemistry ... said his woodworking hobby led him to research efforts to create transparent wood. He quickly discovered that successfully created transparent wood materials were enhanced with epoxy, a type of plastic, to increase its strength, sacrificing some biodegradability. The professor decided he should see if there were better alternatives. After enlisting Ridham Raval, a Kenneshaw State undergraduate student, to help, the duo used a vacuum chamber, sodium sulfite, sodium hydroxide, and bleach to remove lignin and hemicellulose, two of wood's three components, from a sample of balsa wood. What remained was a paper-like layer of cellulose filled with tiny pores. Instead of refilling the pores with epoxy, the team soaked the cellulose layer in a mixture of egg whites and rice extract. They were "left with semi-transparent slices of wood that were durable and flexible."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing the Earth and technology for good.
The Department of Homeland Security is effectively gutting key civil rights offices within the agency, slashing the number of staff at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. Each of these offices was created by Congress, but DHS has decided to move ahead anyway, saying they "have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles." Four days later, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student with a valid F-1 visa, was pulled off a sidewalk in Massachusetts and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. The Department of Homeland Security, whose agents surround Ozturk in the video, has a long history of civil and human rights abuses. DHS is home to the largest law enforcement cohort in the United States. Its agents have extraordinary powers to stop, arrest, and detain citizens and noncitizens alike throughout the country. When Congress created DHS in 2002, it ... created the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) to provide oversight to guard against abuses. Every year, CRCL files a report to Congress. In its fiscal year (FY) 2023 report, for example, CRCL reported that it received over 3,000 allegations of misconduct and opened 758 investigations into issues ranging from treatment of travelers at airports to discrimination by DHS law enforcement to sexual abuse in DHS custody to deaths in DHS custody.
Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.
The CIA claimed to have confirmed the existence of the Ark of the Covenant by way of remote viewing – aka extra sensory perception or ESP – alleging the mysterious and sacred object is guarded by "entities" with an "unknown" power, a recently resurfaced declassified document claims. When a remote viewer is tasked with searching for a target, the desired object is written down on a piece of paper and put into an envelope. The remote viewer does not know what is written and is guided through the process by another person, retired US Army Chief Warrant Joe McMoneagle explained. McMoneagle, aka remote viewer #1, was the first to do the psychic phenomena experiments for the CIA. Remote viewer #32's vision described a secret Middle Eastern location of the object – which they don't know is the Ark – but they say is "protected by entities," the document reveals. "Target is a container. This container has another container inside of it. The target is fashioned of wood, gold and silver... similar in shape to a coffin and is decorated with seraphim," they relayed, per the file. "The target is protected by entities and can only be opened by those who are authorized to do so – this container will not/cannot be opened until the time is deemed correct," they said. "The purpose of the target is to bring people together. It has something to do with ceremony, memory, homage, the resurrection. There is an aspect of spirituality, information, lessons and historical knowledge," they said.
Note: Explore our resources on remote viewing programs. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on the mysterious nature of reality.
UFOs are swarming Earth's skies and demonstrating capabilities so astonishing that they must represent technologies that are advanced beyond any available on Earth. Claims of mysterious trespassers in American airspace are taken very seriously by the U.S. government for reasons of national security. That's why, at Congress's behest, the U.S. Department of Defense established its All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in July 2022. This office investigates reports of UFOs under the more generic rebranding of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). AARO's work, however, isn't really about chasing down extraterrestrial invaders so much as it involves standardizing reporting methods, curating and analyzing datasets and assessing possible threats posed by UAPs. AARO has reportedly deployed the Gremlin System–a multisensor networked system for detecting, tracking and characterizing UAPs–in an undisclosed location. What is the status of this project? "Gremlin is envisioned to be a test bed for sensor evaluations and sensor fusion," [said AARO director Jon Kosloski]. "We expect it to be a "living" system, always evolving. We will be swapping in and out new sensors and algorithms for various approaches. We want to document what we learn and share that with the public and other organizations inside the government. The hope is they can take what we have learned and replicate that."
Note: Watch a new video by Amber Yang on recent exciting developments in UFO/UAP disclosure. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on UFOs.
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers – Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego – to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon's costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country's largest and most powerful defense contractors – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman – posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC. The very notion of a "military-industrial complex" linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address. In 2024, just five companies – Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) – claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and military corruption.
Business is booming for Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) top deportation flight contractor. On February 28, ICE posted a previously unreported notice that it would award a no-bid contract to CSI Aviation to remove immigrants via flights. The contract is worth up to $128 million and will last for at least six months beginning on March 1, and possibly extend up to a year. ICE modified this contract last Friday to increase the number of ICE removal flights. The recent no-bid contract is the latest of numerous awards in the company's history with ICE, amounting to a combined total of at least $1.6 billion in federal funding since 2005, although business has especially surged in recent years. CSI has long worked with ICE to remove immigrants using planes, working with a network of subcontractors such as GlobalX. Last year, 74% of ICE's 1,564 removal flights were on GlobalX planes. In late 2017, 92 Somali immigrants on a CSI-contracted plane were forced to stay shackled for nearly two days. For about 23 hours, the plane simply sat on a tarmac, and the immigrants were not allowed off. "As the plane sat on the runway, the 92 detainees remained bound, their handcuffs secured to their waists, and their feet shackled together," according to a lawsuit. "The guards did not loosen the shackles, even when the deportees told them that the shackles were painful because they were too tight, that their arms and legs were swollen and were bruised. When the plane's toilets overfilled with human waste, some of the detainees were left to urinate into bottles or on themselves," the lawsuit states.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and immigration enforcement corruption.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's February memo ordering all diversity, equity and inclusion-related content to be removed from Pentagon websites was so vague that military units were instructed to simply use keyword searches like "racism," "ethnicity," "history" and "first" when searching for articles and photos to remove. The implications of Hegseth's memo were overwhelming, since the Defense Department manages over 1,000 public-facing websites and a huge visual media database known as DVIDS – with officials expected to purge everything relevant within two weeks. As a result, the manual work of individual units was supplemented with an algorithm that also used keywords to automate much of the purge, officials explained. Other keywords officials were instructed to search for included "firsts" in history, including content about the first female ranger and first Black commanding general, as well as the words "LGBTQ," "historic," "accessibility," "opportunity," "belonging," "justice," "privilege," respect" and "values," according to a list reviewed by CNN. The department is now scrambling to republish some of the content, officials said. "Of all the things they could be doing, the places they're putting their focuses on first are really things that just don't matter ... This was literally a waste of our time," a defense official said. "This does absolutely nothing to make us stronger, more lethal, better prepared."
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and military corruption.
The for-profit prison company GEO Group has surged in value under President Donald Trump. Its stock price doubled after Election Day. But despite its soaring fortunes, the $4 billion company continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live. At the 1,575-bed detention center GEO runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, detainees once prepared meals, washed laundry and scrubbed toilets, doing jobs that would otherwise require 85 full-time employees, the company estimated. The state's minimum wage at the time was $11 an hour. (It's now $16.66.) In 2017, Washington sued GEO to enforce it, and in October 2021 a federal jury ruled unanimously in the state's favor. This year, GEO and Washington are back in court – for a third time – as the company tries to reverse the earlier decision that sided with the state. Mike Faulk, a spokesperson for the Washington state attorney general's office, said testimony in the minimum-wage issue highlights the problem with housing detainees in private prisons: profit motive. Not only did GEO pay $1 a day for cleaning in Tacoma, it budgeted less than $1 per meal that each detainee ate, one kitchen worker testified. "So the grade of food is abysmal," Faulk said of the detainee's testimony. "He routinely picked out grasshoppers/insects from the food." Conditions in Tacoma are worsening as the number of detainees rises.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and immigration enforcement corruption.
Careless People [is] a whistleblowing book by a former [Meta] senior employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams. In the 78-page document that Wynn-Williams filed to the SEC ... it was alleged that Meta had for years been making numerous efforts to get into the biggest market in the world. These efforts included: developing a censorship system for China in 2015 that would allow a "chief editor" to decide what content to remove, and the ability to shut down the entire site during "social unrest"; assembling a "China team" in 2014 for a project to develop China-compliant versions of Meta's services; considering the weakening of privacy protections for Hong Kong users; building a specialised censorship system for China with automatic detection of restricted terms; and restricting the account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese government critic. In her time at Meta, Wynn-Williams observed many of these activities at close range. Clearly, nobody in Meta has heard of the Streisand effect, "an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information". What strikes the reader is that Meta and its counterparts are merely the digital equivalents of the oil, mining and tobacco conglomerates of the analogue era.
Note: A former Meta insider revealed that the company's policy on banning hate groups and terrorists was quietly reshaped under political pressure, with US government agencies influencing what speech is permitted on the platform. Watch our new video on the risks and promises of emerging technologies. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.
Patients prescribed drugs for movement disorders - including restless leg syndrome (RLS) - say doctors did not warn them about serious side effects that led them to seek out risky sexual behaviour. Twenty women have told the BBC that the drugs - given to them for RLS, which causes an irresistible urge to move - ruined their lives. A report by drugs firm GSK - seen by the BBC - shows it learned in 2003 of a link between the medicines, known as dopamine agonist drugs, and what it described as "deviant" sexual behaviour. It cited a case of a man who had sexually assaulted a child while taking the drug for Parkinson's. Some of the women who described being drawn to risky sexual behaviour told us they had no idea of what was causing it. Others said they felt compelled to gamble or shop with no history of such activities. Impulsive behaviours, including gambling and increased sex drive, have long been listed as side effects in medicine leaflets for dopamine agonist drugs - and are thought to affect between 6% to 17% of RLS patients taking them, according to health guidance body NICE. The cases of what the GSK report from 2003 described as "deviant behaviour" involved two men who were prescribed Ropinirole for Parkinson's disease. In one, a 63-year-old-man sexually assaulted a seven-year-old girl, leading to a custodial sentence. In the second case, a 45-year-old man carried out "uncontrolled acts of exhibitionism and indecent behaviour".
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Pharma corruption.
The Trump administration's Federal Trade Commission has removed four years' worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency's landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft. More than 300 blogs were removed. On the FTC's website, the page hosting all of the agency's business-related blogs and guidance no longer includes any information published during former president Joe Biden's administration. These blogs contained advice from the FTC on how big tech companies could avoid violating consumer protection laws. Removing blogs raises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act, one former FTC official tells WIRED. During the Biden administration, FTC leadership would place "warning" labels above previous administrations' public decisions it no longer agreed with, the source said, fearing that removal would violate the law. Since President Donald Trump designated Andrew Ferguson to replace Khan as FTC chair in January, the Republican regulator has vowed to leverage his authority to go after big tech companies. Unlike Khan, however, Ferguson's criticisms center around the Republican party's long-standing allegations that social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, censor conservative speech online.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and government corruption.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he has a singular mission. "We do warfighting here at the Department of Defense," he said. Right now, the U.S. military is looking to pour money into the renovation of 35 golf course sand traps at the Woodlawn Golf Course at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Air Force Special Operations Command also wants to purchase sterile mushroom compost for the golf course greens at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. The Army, for its part, plans to issue a service contract that will cover maintenance in the golf course clubhouse at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. What golf has to do with lethality is a question that the Defense Department failed to answer. Nor would the Pentagon weigh in on the hundreds of millions of dollars wrapped up in, or swallowed up by, military golf courses. The Pentagon did not provide a full tally of its current inventory of golf courses, which The Intercept put at around 145. Even at a time of rampant cost-cutting across the federal government ... the U.S military's golf habit is not on chopping block. The Trump administration announced this week that hundreds of federal properties were available for sale. The General Services Administration, the government's real estate arm, released a list of 443 structures and properties deemed "not core to government operations." Currently, no military golf courses are up for sale on the GSA's website.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government waste.
Health care is so expensive that 31 million U.S. adults, or 12%, had to borrow a total of $74 billion last year to obtain medical care, new data shows. That includes people with health insurance, making such numbers even more troubling. Almost one-third of the more than 3,500 people surveyed by Gallup and West Health, a group of nonprofit health care organizations, said they're "very concerned" that a major health event would lead to medical debt despite most of them having some form of health care coverage. To avoid taking on debt, families sometimes make tradeoffs, such as purchasing fewer groceries or not paying rent in order to get the care they need. Nearly one in five adults between the ages of 18 and 28 reported borrowing money to pay for health care, according to the survey. Only 9% of Americans between 50 and 64 and 2% of those 65 or older reported having to borrow money to obtain needed medical care. "There are a lot of disparities in terms of who borrows," [Tim Lash, president of West Health] said. That's in part because Medicare, which is available to people who are 65 or older, provides enrollees with relatively comprehensive coverage. As of mid-2024, U.S. residents owed at least $220 billion in medical debt, according to data from the American Hospital Association. Health care bills have for years been a leading cause of personal bankruptcies.
Note: Two-thirds of personal bankruptcies in the US are caused by illnesses and medical bills. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and financial inequality.
In yet another example of Donald Trump announcing new policy via social media, the president has now pledged to crack down on "illegal protests" at universities, warning that "agitators" will be headed to jail or targeted for deportation. On the campaign trail, Trump already pledged to crush pro-Palestinian protests if they ramp up again, including deporting foreign national students who participate. Peaceful protest isn't illegal. But what many do not realize is that counterterrorism law gives enormously wide-ranging discretionary authority to the president, to law enforcement, and to immigration officials that could be used to squelch free speech and dissent. For example: providing material support for terrorism is a federal crime. The breathtaking scope of this provision becomes more clear once we see how the terms are defined. "Material support" includes the provision of "service," "expert advice or assistance," "communications equipment," or "personnel" (including yourself). And the Supreme Court has confirmed that the support does not actually have to go toward any particular violent act that might be considered terrorism, only to a group that is designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. government, even if that support is otherwise lawful. Hamas is designated as an FTO and those opposing U.S. and Israeli policy are often accused of supporting Hamas. Could peaceful pro-Palestine protesters be charged with materially supporting terrorism?
Note: We have documented decades of free speech repression beginning with COINTELPRO. We support freedom for all peoples including Palestinians, and many of these campus protests have indeed been peaceful. However, we can in no way overlook the disturbing cases of campus protesters glorifying the violent attacks on October 7th and using Hamas symbols in banners and protest signs. Protesters have been caught on film screaming "We are Hamas." At NYU, a sign literally said "Death to Israel" and "Death to America." A University of Michigan pamphlet contained the phrase "Death to America." NBC News reported that the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network as a sham charity that allegedly funneled money to a pro-Hamas terrorist organization while also helping organize pro-Palestinian protests on US college campuses. Before October 7th, the human rights abuses and sexual violence Hamas committed against Palestinians were extensively documented. Where is the nuanced dialogue beyond media polarization on this tragic issue?
Every two years since 1990, at the start of each new Congress, [Government Accountability Office] scientists, actuaries and investigators have produced a "high risk list" of where the federal government mismanages its resources and taxpayer money. Over that 35-year span, more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars has been saved by implementing the GAO's recommendations. The 2025 list cites at least $150 billion in payment errors and fraud in each of the past seven years – chiefly in overpayments by Medicare, Medicaid, the unemployment insurance system and the Earned Income Tax Credit. And that $150 billion figure is no doubt vastly understated, given that agencies failed to report improper payments for at least nine "risk-susceptible" programs. The government's failure to collect all the taxes that it is owed was estimated to have cost more than $600 billion in the 2022 tax year alone, which underscores how absurd it is for Musk to cut the Internal Revenue Service workforce in half. The Defense Department ... is responsible for about half of discretionary spending. "There are many major acquisitions across the government, including DOD weapons systems, GAO boss Gene Dodaro [said]. "They're on the high list." Pentagon contracts and the ones the Energy Department signs regarding nuclear weapons, he added, "are consistently overrun, over budget and delays occur. And they don't deliver on the promises."
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government waste.
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