REWARD FOR SCREWING UP A MAJOR VA HOSPITAL? PLUSH JOB, FREE HOUSE IN THE PHILIPPINES: “Rima Nelson disappeared from public view after the St. Louis Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital she managed potentially exposed 1,800 patients to HIV, was closed twice for serious medical safety issues and ranked dead last in patient satisfaction,” reports the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak.

Nelson wasn’t fired, she was transferred to the Philippines capital of Manila to run VA’s only foreign facility. It’s a small staff that provides outpatient care to the few remaining U.S. and Filipino WWII veterans. She kept her $160,ooo a year salary and lives in a government-provided condo in a country in which the average person makes about $2,500 annually.

Nelson is just one of nearly 100 highly paid VA executives the department has transferred three or more times in eight years, often leaving management dysfunction and chaos behind. The reality of the federal government’s workforce is that it’s easier and less time-consuming to transfer poor performers than to fire them. And VA isn’t the only federal department that does it; the problem is government-wide.

TAKE A RIDE ON VA’S BAD BOSSES MERRY-GO-ROUND. YOU ARE PAYING FOR IT: Something isn’t right when the Department of Veterans Affairs moves a $181,000-a-year senior executive to three different jobs in a few years.

But nearly 100 top VA execs were moved to at least three different jobs in separate states between 2008 and 2014, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak, who also created a cool interactive graphic to illustrate the process for each of them.

And the bad news is that VA is not unique. All federal departments and agencies do the same thing because civil service regulations make it so costly and time-consuming to fire members of the government’s Senior Executive Service. Those are the top career bosses and they are all but untouchable as a result.

SNAILS GUFFAW AS STATE DEPARTMENT CLAIMS IT NEEDS 18 MONTHS TO DO A TWO-PAGE LIST: It’s not just any list, to be sure. It’s a list of the estimated 60 State Department employees granted the same Special Government Employee status as was enjoyed by Huma Abedin, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. The SGE designation allows the designee to draw paychecks from other sources outside the government.

In Abedin’s case, besides her government paycheck, she was also on Clinton’s personal payroll, the Clinton Foundation payroll and the Teneo payroll. The latter is an international consulting firm with deep ties to the Clintons personally and the Clinton Foundation. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock asked for the list of all State Department SGEs in a Freedom of Information Act request in July 2015.

“The estimated completion date (ECD) for this case is: December 2016,” the department told TheDCNF earlier this week. They defended the delay, saying “given the high volume of FOIA requests, in addition to a backlog which the department is working diligently to reduce, there is presently a delay in the completion of FOIA requests.”

Given the growing evidence that Clinton used the department as a conduit for generating and channeling money – much of it from foreign sources – to the foundation, two questions must be asked: Was Abedin’s SGE status somehow related to such efforts, and were other Clinton aides also designated SGEs and for what purposes? The answers to either of those questions may explain why the State Department is loathe to cough up that two-page list. They may also shed light on why the FBI has a second investigation separate from the probe of Hillary’s email and focused specifically on the foundation.

WHAT SHOULD WE CALL NONPROFITS THAT GET 99 PERCENT OF THEIR FUNDING FROM GOVERNMENT? Government “tools?” How about government “extensions?” At the Environmental Protection Agency, they’re called “cheap labor sources.” Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has been digging into a massive database of more than 100,000 EPA grants compiled by Open The Books.

He found six non-profits that got 99 percent of their funding from federal grants to provide jobs for seniors doing EPA work, including retired engineers willing to work for the maximum starting pay of $12.27 per hour. Average salary for a full-time EPA engineer in the civil service is nearly $89,000 or $44 per hour.

Under EPA’s Senior Environmental Employment program, the agency gets experienced seniors at bargain-basement salaries instead of the far more costly civil service pay and benefits. The SEE program has cost at least $321 million since 2009.

Barton has been digging into that EPA grants database for quite a while. For examples, see here, here and here. Don’t be surprised if Barton finds even more.

CAN MILITARY DISCIPLINE SAVE THE VETERANS ADMINISTRATION? Congress must decide soon whether to renew, expand or end the five-year-old Lovell Federal Health Center in North Chicago. It’s a jointly operated hospital that is both staffed and serves veterans and active-duty military personnel.

Among other successes, the center sees patients within one day of their requests for appointments – quite a contrast to the proliferating VA hospital horror stories of vets dying while waiting to see doctors, according to Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.

But here’s the bad news, Rosiak reports: “It is unclear to what extent the current Congress will embrace the larger vision set into motion years ago. Sen. Johnny Isakson , chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, refused to say whether he even knows about the massive experiment, much less what his opinion on replicating it nationwide it might be.”

CHARLES MURRAY NAILS “TRUMPISM” – Buzz is growing about this superb analysis of the Trump phenomenon. But there are a couple of key factors Murray fails to develop sufficiently and a sad implication of his analysis that those of us who had roles in the Reagan Revolution have been lamenting for a long time:

First, most Americans still profess some level of belief in (mostly Protestant) Christianity, but only about a third make their faith a living factor in their understanding of public policy and voting patterns. This is why Trump gives lip service to “religion” but nobody has any reason whatsover to fear that he would establish a theocracy (unless perhaps he would be the object of its worship).

HILLARY’S SECURITY DISEASE INFECTS REST OF STATE DEPARTMENT, TOO: Foggy Bottom’s Bureau of Energy Resources was created during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. The bureau’s purpose was to be the department’s heartbeat for energy diplomacy and security issues. But Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group says State’s Inspector General found an amazing level of disregard for keeping sensitive and classified information out of the wrong hands. The laxity is so widespread in the bureau that nobody checks if secured government equipment is being taken out of the office at the end of the day.

IS IT SNOWING IN HADES THIS MORNING? How else to explain the fact the number two man at the Department of Veterans Affairs just asked Congress to get serious about cutting the bureaucrat protections that prevent firing incompetent managers in the federal civil service. The Merit Systems Protection Board – which recently reversed three VA firings of bad hospital directors – is one of the biggest of many such roadblocks.

Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson wants to strip VA members of the Senior Executive Service and the department’s doctors of the right to appeal adverse personnel actions to the MSPB, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Luke Rosiak. If Congress goes along, which seems likely, Gibson could become the guy behind the most significant and positive civil service reform since, well, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 that created the MSPB. Once it happens at VA, which federal department will be next?

HILLARY CLINTON WAS A NATIONAL SECURITY DISASTER AS SECRETARY OF STATE: That seems to be the emerging consensus among military intelligence experts willing to go on the record about the damage done to national security by Clinton’s use of an unsecured home-brew email server to do official business. Calling for Clinton to “step down” from the presidential race is Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn (Ret.), who was President Obama’s head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Richard Pollock:

“Flynn and other high-ranking former intelligence officials told TheDCNF they are alarmed that some of the nation’s most highly classified documents contained in a secretive program called the Special Access Program (SAP) were transferred to Clinton’s unclassified home server.

“The documents ‘had to be moved off electronically or removed out of the secure site physically, then it had to be put onto an unclassified email system,’ Flynn said. ‘Someone who does this is completely irresponsible, but totally unaccountable and shows a streak of arrogance to the American public that is unworthy of anyone thinking they can run for President of the United States.’

“’This is unbelievable,’ Flynn said. ‘I don’t think anybody should be talking about her being potentially the next President of the United States.’”

WHAT ARE NEW YORK OFFICIALS HIDING ABOUT THE FAILURE OF THE BIGGEST OBAMACARE CO-OP? Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has been all over the 23 Obamacare co-ops established in 2011 at a cost of $2 billion since their inception. Health Republic, the largest of the tax-funded health insurance co-ops intended to compete with for-profit commercial health insurers, has been a particular Pollock focus because founder Sara Horowitz is a long-time political ally of President Obama. Horowitz got $355 million for Health Republic, plus $109 million for the New Jersey operation and $60.6 million for the Oregon co-op.

When Health Republic failed last Fall, it left 210,000 New Yorkers scrambling for new coverage during the holiday season. Pollock has been after documents explaining why the co-op failed but has run into brick walls. The latest one is a rejection by the New York Department of Financial Services. Doctors and hospitals in the Empire State could lose nearly $300 million in unpaid bills for services rendered to Health Republic policyholders. The DFS was established in 2011 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. One of his political proteges ran DFS until last May when he abruptly resigned. The stench here is getting stronger.

FEDS HAND OUT BILLIONS FOR RESEARCH THAT MAY BE BASED ON PLAGIARISM, FAKE DATA: Now, isn’t that reassuring! Allison Lerner is the inspector general at the National Science Foundation. She and her small team of investigators and auditors have been warning for a long time that hundreds of funding proposals submitted to NSF contain plagiarized passages and/or made-up data. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton was told by a senior NSF official that it’s impossible to know if grant recipients actually spend the funds as promised. Maybe it’s time somebody in Congress or at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue listened to Lerner?

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THERE IS ACTUALLY A FEDERAL AGENCY THAT IS WORSE THAN THE VA: The Department of Veterans Affairs is a bureaucratic nightmare, to be sure, but the evidence is steadily mounting that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is much, much worse. But the funny thing is, overseeing a federal department whose financial books often make no sense doesn’t seem to hurt the politicos who become HUD Secretary. Julian Castro, the current incumbent, for example, could be America’s next vice-president.

CLINTON FOUNDATION DONOR/LIBERAL FUNDER’S ILLEGAL DRUG TRIALS KILLED FIVE PEOPLE: But Obama’s Justice Department didn’t prosecute him. Swiss billionaire Hans Wyss – he of the $5 million promise to Hillary’s “No Ceilings” Clinton Foundation project – escaped prosecution after being the unnamed co-conspirator “Person No 7” in a 2009 federal indictment. He ordered four corporate subordinates to conduct illegal human drug trials. Ultimately, five people died in the trials. The subordinates went to jail, but Wyss didn’t. Now Citizens United – yes, that Citizens United –  is demanding documents from Obama’s Justice Department on why.

Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group, who has been all over Wyss for three years, has the story on the Citizens United Freedom of Information Act requests. Wyss is on the Center for American Progress board of directors and one of the liberal think tank’s most generous funders. He also funds huge land grabs in the Western U.S. by enviro groups. Wyss is like George Soros but without the Hungarian accent. “Veddy, veddy bad man,” as Seinfeld’s Babu might well say.

IS BERNIE SANDERS PLAYING OLD-FASHIONED POSTAL PORK BARREL POLITICS? He’s got a Senate hold on five presidential nominations to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors. That means the three people now left on the 11-member board are running the Post Office. Maybe the fact Bernie opposes a Post Office plan to close one of Vermont’s two big postal processing centers has something to do with his holds? Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group connects the letters, uh, the dots.

FIRST AMENDMENT COVERS EVERYBODY … EXCEPT DONORS TO CONSERVATIVE AND TEA PARTY NON-PROFITS: That’s apparently the view of California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is trying to force non-profits in the Golden State to disclose the names of their donors to state officials. “It’s a violation of both the organizations’ First Amendment rights to solicit donations, and the donor’s right to be solicited,” said Washington, D.C. super-lawyer Cleta Mitchell, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Katie Watson.

HILLARY WAS PAID $225K A POP FOR WALL STEET SPEECHES THAT REPORTERS WERE BARRED FROM COVERING: Not only were reporters kept out, but Clinton refuses today to release transcripts. What was she promising Goldman Sachs Group, the Carlyle Group, Morgan Stanley, et. al. that she didn’t want reporters to hear then or us to read now? The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock obtained a copy of Hillary’s Harry Walker Agency speaking engagement contract and much more.

QUICK, WHO SAID THIS? “IT’S FRIDAY, JAN. 22, 2016, AND WE’RE WRITING THIS as yet another alarmist-MSM-declared Storm of the Century hits the Northeast. Seriously, folks: It’s Winter and when it get cold enough, any precipitation takes the form of snow. But before we go any further, since we’re on the subject of white stuff, a quick thought on another manifestation evoked by this photo forwarded by George Lawlor:”

Sorry, but you have to go to The Daily Gouge blog site to see the photo, which is hilarious. The Daily Gouge is the creation of Thom McKee, former Navy F-14 pilot, commercial developer par-excellence and upstate New York humorist responsible for the infamous story of the three-legged pig. I promise, you will thank me for telling you about this guy, especially after he explains the pig.

EPA AWARDS HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN GRANTS IT CAN’T SHOW IMPROVE AIR QUALITY: Diesel emissions, for example, are particularly harmful to air quality, so EPA awarded multiple grants between 2009 and 2014 aimed at reducing such emissions. And $532 million later, an EPA spokesman – who understandably insisted on not being named – conceded to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton that “we cannot definitively establish cause and effect on one project’s impact on a city’s air quality.” The DCNF IG analysis is based on a database of more than 100,000 EPA grants compiled by Open The Books. BTW, if you aren’t familiar with Open The Books, you should be because those guys are doing incredible work bringing government spending at all levels out in the open.

THERE THEY GO AGAIN: IRS officials are being lambasted today for erasing yet another computer hard-drive, this time one that a federal judge had previously ordered to be preserved. House Oversight and Government Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz and Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan told IRS Commissioner John Koskinen erasing hard-drives has been a continuing problem, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson.

“It is stunning to see that the IRS does not take reasonable care to preserve documents that it is legally required to protect,” said Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, and Jordan, an Ohio Republican, in a letter to Koskinen made public late Thursday. The hard-drive is involved in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Microsoft. A federal judge hearing the FOIA lawsuit told IRS to preserve the hard-drive. Then it was erased. Law is for the little people, doncha know.

AND IN OTHER NEWS FROM YOUR NATION’S CAPITAL: Federal civil service managers aren’t supposed to use “administrative leave” – aka paying bureaucrats not to come to work – as a tool for inducing poor performers to quit. But the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak finds solid evidence that agreeing to administrative leave for as much as two years in return for the letter of resignation is common in the federal bureaucracy. Why? Because such informal settlements are far easier than enduring the endless paperwork required to fire a bureaucrat and federal employee unions are sure to appeal, appeal, appeal.

BEING AN OBAMACARE BOSS MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU’RE SORRY: Andy Slavitt, President Obama’s choice to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which manages Obamacare and its struggling co-ops, is testifying before the Senate today. Half of those co-ops have gone belly-up, costing taxpayers somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.6 billion. But don’t expect Slavitt to say he’s sorry, even though he’s been the acting CMS administrator and the deputy before that. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock, who has covered the co-ops from their inception, is on the story today.

FEDS SPEND $75 MILLION DESIGNING AND CONSTRUCTING SPACIOUS NEW BUILDING … FOR THE WRONG AGENCY! What is about the General Services Administration that attracts such corruption, incompetence and idiocy? Whatever it is – GSA is Uncle Sugar’s housekeeping agency – nobody there consulted with the Federal Protective Service about what it needed in the new building. When the building was completed, FPS looked it over and refused to take it.

Why? Because, it turns out, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson, GSA didn’t talk to FPS because GSA thought it was building the facility for the Army Corps of Engineers! Trust me, Watson isn’t making this up, her report is based on a Government Accounting Office analysis. GSA oversees more than 5,900 federal facilities. Your government is in the best of hands.

IT MAY NOT BE A SMOKING GUN BUT, BOY, IS IT GONNA HURT! New email release shows Hillary resisted urging by careerists at State Department to use state.gov email and equipment. Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross has the story, based on a document release forced by federal court.

THANKS FOR FIGHTING FOR AMERICA, VETERAN. WANT TO CLEAN VA TOILETS?: That’s often VA’s message to vets seeking jobs in the department. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak “scraped” thousands of VA job vacancy announcements and found menial janitorial duties were most frequently offered to vets:

“The VA is currently advertising for 3,000 positions, some seeking multiple people each. Only about 50 job ads, seeking an estimated few hundred workers, are accepting applications exclusively from veterans. And of those, all but a handful would have a returning hero trade a rifle for a mop and $13 an hour. At the same time, more than a thousand vacancies, many with no highly specialized skills required, were being advertised as open only to current civil servants.”

It’s mainly a result of VA’s collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees labor organization, which, as Rosiak previously reported, puts current union members first in line for open positions. And then we wonder why VA so often seems not to give a rat’s patooty about America’s returning heroes?

IS 23-CENTS-AN-HOUR CHEAP LABOR OR SLAVE LABOR? That’s the minimum wage in the African nation of Ghana and it’s why long-time Clinton confidant Cheryl Mills thinks investors should invest in that nation’s textile industry. Her firm, BlackIvy LLC, was established after she and Hillary Clinton left the State Department in 2013 and specializes in consulting work in West African nations.  Talk about cheap labor? That ought to devastate what’s left of the textile industry here in the U.S. Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has the rest of the story.