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.

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?