EPA HAS A DISTANT RELATIONSHIP WITH TRUTH ABOUT ITS ‘SUCCESSES:’ EPA published a report earlier this week claiming its diesel emissions reduction program “greatly improved” air quality and public health, to the tune of improvements worth $13 for every $1 of cost. Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group explains why if you believe that claim, EPA has got an incredible deal for you on a certain bridge in Brooklyn.

HILLARY IGNORED MANDATORY ANNUAL CLASSIFIED INFO SECURITY UPDATE BRIEFINGS: She sat for one – on her first day as Secretary of State – then ignored them for the rest of her tenure at Foggy Bottom, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. TheDCNF and Pollock had to take the State Department to federal court to force release of the documents involved.

A former very senior State Department executive with direct knowledge of State Department classified information security protocols was astonished, according to Pollock, saying  “If there is only one instance of her being briefed and nothing for the next four years, then I would consider that to be a lapse in security protocol, even at that level. Even the secretary needs to be reminded from time to time.”

Late Thursday, State Department spokesman  Mark Toner confirmed that all State Department employees are required to take cyber-security training. The lone certificate that Hillary had the briefing on her first day was the only evidence of her being informed about the growing threats to the security of classified secrets. Those threats evolve continually, which is why the mandatory updates are done every year. She missed them.

YOU: DO A SHADY LAND DEAL FOR VA. YOUR BOSS: HERE, HAVE A BIG PROMOTION: In a case that speaks volumes about the management culture in the Department of Veterans Affairs, a project manager on a new medical center in North Carolina was implicated in the government buying land owned by a relative. She admitted to the VA inspector general that she “may have” alerted family members to the forthcoming land selection and purchase, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak.

“Within three months, in June 2015, Gillis was put on a detail to serve as acting associate director, the second-highest position in the hospital, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned. The elevation was a big promotion considering the fact that others were more senior and higher-ranked,” Rosiak reports.

But Gillis was required to take “refresher ethics training.”

NEXT THEY’LL TELL US GOVERNMENT HAS FEWER CROOKS: How else can they explain why the Department of Justice under President Obama has filed fewer public corruption cases each year than either of his two predecessors? The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson sums it up: “The Obama administration has filed an annual average of 390 such prosecutions, which represents a 16 percent decrease from the Bush and Clinton years.”

Alternative explanation: “A particular problem with this Justice Department is if there are claims of corruption within Justice itself, they are the ones who ultimately make the decision to prosecute their own people,” the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky told Watson.

EPA EXECS ROUTINELY FLOUT ACCOUNTABILITY LAWS, USE PRIVATE EMAIL FOR PUBLIC BUSINESS: It’s all but impossible to see why a federal official would use a private email account to conduct government business except that private email can be more easily hidden from public view, which might be especially vital when one of the correspondents is a lobbyist for special interest groups. But they just keep right on doing it.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton reports that lobbyist, Michael J. Brady, asked in a private email for a little favor of EPA General Counsel Joe Goffman, his insider friend at EPA: “Joe, would you please send this email to Gina for me? I would have sent it to her directly with a cc to you but I don’t have a private email address for her and would prefer to not use an office email address.” (Emphasis added) Brady represents a number of green energy groups that want to support EPA’s Cross-State Pollution Rule. Goffman

The casual tone of the email exchange shows “that it is a regular practice of senior officials of this EPA to use private e-mail accounts and other ‘off-book’ techniques to craft rules with ‘green’ activists with clear financial and political interests is now clear beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Chris Horner, the man who exposed former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s “Richard Windsor” email moniker. Horner’s group, the Energy and Environment Legal Group, obtained the Brady/Goffman email via the FOIA.

YES, BRUSSELS CAN HAPPEN HERE, TOO: With security like this at the Keating federal building in Rochester, NY, it may only be a matter of time.

PENTAGON CONTRACT MANAGEMENT IS TRAPPED IN THE DIGITAL DARK AGES: How else to explain that answering this simple question would cost $660 million and take 15 million man-hours. HT: Center for Public Integrity.

HERE’S WHY FEDERAL BUREAUCRAT UNIONS LOVE BIG GOVERNMENT: Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports today that federal employee unions added 40,000 new members in 2015. That’s the biggest annual increase in eight years. But wait, there’s more!

“Due to the growth of the government’s workforce, however, the percentage of unionized federal employees dropped from 27.5 percent in 2014 to 27.3 percent in 2015. The federal government employed 3.59 million people in 2015, up from 3.41 million people in 2014,” according to Watson, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Bigger government means more union members, many of whom will contribute to the unions’ political action committees, which will enable more contributions to sympathetic congressmen who in turn vote for more government. Completing the Iron Triangle are the government contractors and special interests beneficiaries of government. Round and round they go, and can you guess who’s paying for it?

ANYBODY ELSE GET THE FEELING HILLARY IS IN POLITICAL HOSPICE CARE? Judicial Watch attorneys told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia today that they would like to depose eight present and former Department of State employees concerning Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address and home brew server.

They also said it “may be necessary” to depose Clinton “based on information learned during discovery,” but kindly assured the court they would first ask permission. Judge Emmet G. Sullivan will decide after April 15 who among the eight will be deposed. Don’t be surprised if it’s all eight, including:

• Stephen D. Mull, executive secretary of the State Department from June, 2009, to October, 2012. Mull proposed Clinton use a State Department BlackBerry for email. Her identity would have been protected but the messages would have been subject to the FOIA.
• Lewis A. Lukens, executive director of the department’s executive secretariat from 2008 to 2011. Lukens suggested to Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy and Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, have a government computer to read messages sent to her clintonmail.com address.
• Patrick F. Kennedy preceded Clinton at the department, having served since 2007. He became Clinton’s primary adviser on technology and information services issues.
• Donald R. Reid, senior coordinator for security infrastructure in the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, a position he has held since 2003. Judicial Watch believes Reid participated in discussions in 2009 about Clinton’s use of the Blackberry and other communications devices to conduct official government business.
• Cheryl Mills, chief of staff throughout Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
• Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff for the entirety of Clinton’s tenure. Abedin also had an email account on the Clinton server and accompanied Clinton whenever she was seen in public.
• Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s IT guru from her unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign and the individual who kept the private server located at her New York residence operational while she was at the department.
• The eighth individual would be somebody designated by the department to provide information on the process by which FOIA requests are processed in the agency.

WILL THE SUPREME COURT CRIPPLE THIS DEMOCRATIC SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP? Class-action plaintiffs lawyers are likely keeping a VERY close eye on whether the High Court will agree to hear a challenge to settlements that enrich counsel but provide little or nothing to alleged victims. The challenge comes from Ted Frank, director of the Center for Class-Action Fairness at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Frank’s challenge is to the decision by the U.S. Appeals Court for the 11th District to uphold the settlement in Joshua D. Poertner v. The Gillette Co., et. al. in which the trial lawyers got $5.7 million and 99 percent of the estimated 7.26 million class members got zilch. Poertner is just one of the many class-action settlements in which the plaintiffs’ lawyers get rich and the plaintiffs get … stiffed.

Rules vary widely among federal courts on the metrics for deciding whether a settlement is fair and reasonable. Frank hopes the High Court will nationalize something like the Seventh Circuit’s dictum that “the attorney award must be a fraction of the amount actually realized by the class …” Four of the justices must agree to hear the case. The decision will be made public March 21.

Democratic office-holders, candidates and campaign fund-raisers may be paying even closer attention here than the class-action trial attorneys because the latter are routinely among the former’s biggest funders. If the High Court throws a wrench in these settlement bonanzas, it could blow a huge hole in Democratic Party’s bank accounts.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy called the Gold King Mine Disaster in Colordao last August an “unfortunate accident.” Actually, the disaster, which polluted drinking water in three states and the Navajo Nation and turned the Animas River yellow for weeks, was anything but an accident.

The disaster was the direct result of EPA incompetence, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton and TheDCNF Energy Group’s Michael Bastasch. The B&B Boys turned up an Aug.7, 2o15, email from the Bureau of Land Management’s Brent Lewis to colleagues in which he said he was told by EPA:

“The EPA’s plan was to slowly drain and treat enough mine water in order to access the inner mine working and assess options for controlling its discharge. While removing small portions of the natural plug, the material catastrophically gave-way and released the mine water.”

The core of EPA’s incompetence was they knew the abandoned mine’s millions of gallons of toxic wastewater was under pressure, but they failed to have on hand the proper equipment to contain and direct the resulting flow when they unplugged it. But don’t expect there to be any consequences such as lost jobs for anybody at EPA because that’s not how the federal bureaucracy works.

Even so, this isn’t going to get any better for EPA because Barton and Bastasch have more stories on this massive screwup coming for the next several days. And it appears Rep. Rob Bishop, R-UT, and his staff investigators for the House Committee on Natural Resources have done some deep mining of their own. Stay tuned.

ARE “SLIM AND NONE” THE ODDS THIS WILL FIX VA? Department of Veterans Affairs leaders want Congress to let them reclassify dozens of government hospital directors – members of the career civil service’s elite Senior Executive Service – to Title 38 doctors. Doing so would more than double their current salaries that can be as high as $180,000. Yes, you read that right – “more than double their current salaries that can be as high as $180,000.”

These are the same VA hospital directors whose facilities are in many cases hellholes for veterans seeking the medical care they were promised when they put on the nation’s military uniforms. Thousands of veterans have been forced to wait months on end for appointments with doctors and dozens of them died while waiting.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak reports that VA leaders claim the higher salaries are needed to keep the hospital directors from fleeing the government for better-paying positions in the private sector and that changing them from SESers to doctors will make it easier to fire the incompetents. Neither of those claims are true, according to Rosiak. So why is it government’s solutions for its problems so often result in better pay for the bureaucrats?

FEDERAL EMPLOYEE UNION CHIEF LET VETS DIE RATHER THAN TELL REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS: Germaine Clarno wonders “how many lives might have been saved” if she had gone to Sen. Mark Kirk, R-IL, first instead of to Democrat Representatives Danny Davis and Tammy Baldwin? The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak has what may well be one of the saddest stories you will ever read.

HILLARY GRAND JURY PROBING EMAIL AND CLINTON FOUNDATION POLITICAL CORRUPTION: That’s the word from former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. A former FBI agent also tells Pollock that the Clinton Foundation investigative is being led by the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section.

MORE PROOF THAT JFK NEVER SHOULD HAVE ALLOWED FEDERAL WORKERS TO UNIONIZE: Defense Department and Veterans Affairs officials merged two facilities to create the Lovell Health Care Center to serve veterans and active duty personnel in the Chicago region. The hope was military spit-and-polish would provide a model for fixing VA’s scandalously incompetent facilities across the country.

Lovell now approaches the end of its five-year demonstration project tenure and the results have been disappointing. But Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group, says two factors explain the dismal outcome: First, Lovell’s military personnel say too many VA employees are hopelessly incompetent, apathetic and inefficient. Second, the American Federation of Government Employees, the bureaucrats’ union, successfully demanded that nobody lose their job in the merger. After all, saving jobs – and union dues – is far more important than caring for veterans, right?

DOCTORS, HOSPITALS GETTING STIFFED FOR MILLIONS OF DOLLARS BY OBAMACARE CO-OPS: A dozen of the 24 Obamacare health insurance co-ops established at a cost of $2.5 billion in 2012 have failed (and more are expected to do so). Now, hundreds of doctors, hospitals and other health care providers who served co-op policyholders are being muscled aside by federal bureaucrats claiming the government should be the first creditor in the bankruptcy line.

Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports the “Medical Society of New York estimates that hundreds of millions of dollars are owed to doctors and hospitals due to collapse of Health Republic of New York, the largest Obamacare co-op.” That’s just one state. Expect the total losses to be in the billions when all the accounting is completed.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: One of President Reagan’s least-heralded but significant reforms was passage of the 1984 law that put an expiration date on the excessively generous and immensely costly Civil Service Retirement System for federal workers. That law said all employees hired on or after Jan. 1, 1984, would be covered by the then-new Federal Employee Retirement System. Where the CSRS was a defined benefit program, the FERS is a defined contribution program that makes the employee a genuine participant in his or her retirement planning.

So what’s the news here now 32 years later? The 1984 law required federal agencies to fully fund their employees’ pensions, just like the private sector has been required to do for decades. But, as the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson reports today, agencies have ignored the law with the tacit consent of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which oversees both CSRS and FERS.

“For years, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has been taking tax dollars from the U.S. Treasury to fund a growing gap in retirement payments … The OPM funded $23 billion, or 28 percent of all payments in fiscal year 2015, in that manner,” according to Watson. The federal pension system, by the way, is the fourth largest such benefit program in the entire world!

And OPM has been doing it for so long that the pension gap – the amount required to fully fund present and projected benefits versus how much has actually been set aside for that purpose – is now estimated at $1 trillion.  “The taxpayers are being hosed,” former federal internal auditor Tom McKinney told Watson. McKinney analyzed the federal pension system for Truth In Accounting, a non-profit group pushing for honest accounting of federal spending and debt.

MULTIPLE ‘POTENTIAL CRIMINAL CHARGES’ FOR HILLARY, AIDES: That’s the word from an anonymous source familiar with the current thinking of those in charge of the FBI probe, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. New factor now in play is an “honest services fraud” charge. Stay tuned.

WHAT DO COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND FEDERAL BUREAUCRATS HAVE IN COMMON? Neither of them can be fired (once the former get tenure and the latter survive their probationary first year), which means no accountability and endless horror stories. It’s so tedious and time-consuming to fire a federal worker, according to Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group, that managers almost never even try.

Former Sen. Tom Coburn told Watson that the impossibility of firing a fed is one of multiple “symptoms of a greater and bigger problem. You have an uncontrolled federal government that nobody can manage.” And when government is too big to manage, it’s time to start over. That’s why Coburn is pushing this.

REAL RACE CARS HAVE NO FENDERS! That video Glenn posted Monday of the Mazda guy passing 34 competitors at Australia’s Bathurst racing circuit provides a great look into the world of door-slammer racing. But those of us who have or are racing Formula Fords or other open-wheelers know where the real fun at speed is found. So check out this video of FFs on the same track.

CLINTON AIDES IN GLASS HOUSES SHOULDN’T QUESTION OTHERS’ ETHICS: John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s national campaign manager, questions the ethics and independence of Steve Linick, the Inspector General President Obama appointed at the State Department and one of the major players in the investigation of Clinton’s use of a home-brew email server. But Podesta might not be the ideal choice to feature in the Clinton campaign’s gathering campaign to discredit Linick. There are at least three ethics issues concerning Podesta, each helpfully outlined here by yours truly.

IF THESE GUYS CAN’T MAKE HEADS OR TAILS OUT OF UNCLE SAM’S BOOKS: Then America is in far worse financial shape than most of us realize. “These guys” are the green-eyeshade types at the Government Accountability Office, the chief investigative arm of Congress. Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group says GAO just announced – for the 19th consecutive year – that the federal government’s accounting is so bad that it “did not render an opinion on the federal government’s consolidated financial statements.”

Think about that for a moment. If what GAO is saying is true – and if anything GAO is likely understating the problem – then the federal budget is a tissue of fantasies, the national debt is much higher than the official figure of $19 trillion, and it’s impossible to know how many tax dollars are lost every year to waste, fraud and abuse. And on that happy note, welcome to Super Tuesday 2016!

MEET THE WORST CLINTON ALLY THE MSM HAS NEVER TOLD YOU ABOUT: Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss made at least 30 contributions to U.S. political campaigns over a nine-year period, according to FEC records cited by the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock.

Wyss is also the high-dollar Clinton Foundation donor, financial patron of Clinton national campaign chairman John Podesta, bankroller of multiple environmental crusades, and multi-million dollar supporter of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. Still, you likely have never heard of Wyss because mainstream media outlets almost never talk about the guy, even though his money and influence on the Left puts him in a class with George Soros.

Search the Washington Post for “Hansjorg Wyss,” for example, and only one reference appears – a March 22, 2015, reference to him as an “environmentally minded billionaire.” In a story strewn with links to important names, Wyss was not deemed of sufficient significance to provide such additional information.

The New York Times does a bit better on that search, showing nine entries. Two of the entries reference Wyss as a wealthy donor to CAP. The other seven references are older stories that focus on the sale of Wyss’ former company, the medical device-maker, Synthes. Incredibly, none of the seven mentions the fact five people had previously died while participating in illegal drug tests conducted by Synthes under Wyss’ orders. Four Synthes executives went to jail as a result. Wyss was not one of them.

Pollock has been exposing Wyss for several years, as in here, here, here and here. But others are noticing now, too, including Citizens United, the David Bossie-led non-profit that produced the Hillary Clinton expose that ultimately led to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision so loathed by campaign finance reformers.

Bossie’s group wants to know why four Synthes executives went to jail but Wyss did not. An obvious question is whether Wyss’ money and political connections had anything to do with his being spared from prison. Remember who was Attorney General when the decision was made? Eric Holder.

JUST ANOTHER DAY IN “THE MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY:” A computer network at the Merit Systems Protection Board failed, causing the loss of data concerning civil service workers’ appeals in disciplinary cases. Think what you will of government employees but lost data means every one of those cases will either be dropped or restarted from the beginning, meaning thousands more lost hours of productivity.

But forget about finding out what caused the failure, who if anybody at MSPB was responsible or whether the fix being implemented will work. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton reports that MSPB absolutely refuses to make public a report that would answer such questions for curious taxpayers. The agency’s justification is the Freedom of Information Act’s Exemption Five. That’s the “pre-decisional” exemption that is the most frequently abused of the law’s nine exemptions.

CONGRESSIONAL WATCHDOG SAYS MEDICARE FRAUD CAN’T BE MEASURED: “It would be really nice to know how much fraud there is in Medicare and other healthcare programs,” Government Accountability Office’s Health Care Director Kathleen King says on an official podcast. It’s so difficult to know because it’s so easy for fraudsters to fool investigators, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton. Uncle Sam spent nearly $850 billion on Medicare last year.