Tag Archives: United States Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship

Why I Don’t Want To Give The Government Any More Money

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On Monday, The Federalist reported the following:

While millions of jobless Americans struggled to make ends meet during devastating government-mandated lockdowns, thousands of federal employees double-dipped from taxpayer-funded pandemic unemployment funds while mostly working from home.

Despite staying on taxpayers’ payroll during the height of the pandemic panic, greedy bureaucrats in the Internal Revenue Service, Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, United States Postal Service, Amtrak, and the Secret Service defrauded taxpayers out of millions more dollars under the guise of Covid unemployment fund and wage assistance programs.

…Thanks to rushed and lax standards, whereby “claimants only needed to self-certify they met eligibility requirements when they filed for [pandemic unemployment assistance] benefits,” more than $8.8 million in taxpayer funds were funneled to 638 DHS employees unlawfully. FEMA’s state workforce agencies also paid out $1.2 million in “lost wages assistance” to 935 DHS workers who were “fully employed.” At least 366 of those ineligible DHS officials were actually paid overtime during the period they were approved, receiving up to hundreds of dollars per week on top of normal unemployment benefits.

I have no way of knowing whether this was corruption or simply bad record keeping, but either way it is totally unacceptable. Unless the government can show us that it is capable of managing the money it collects in taxes, we should not increase the amount of money (or the debt ceiling) that we are giving it.

The article concludes:

Already, the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), an oversight committee within the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, determined that “tens of thousands” of federal employees applied for and received Small Business Administration loans even though their status as government-employed disqualified them from taking the handout.

Ernst (Republican Sen. Joni Ernst), the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, noted in her letter that the PRAC’s investigation into loans is ongoing and could yield even more deception and taxpayer money wasted by government workers.

Federal employees weren’t the only ones who wrongfully raked in millions of pandemic dollars. Hundreds of state and local government staff in Georgia, Indiana, and Louisiana also defrauded taxpayers.

This is not acceptable.

One Law For Me, One Law For Thee

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On Thursday the National Review posted an article about members of Congress’s fraudulent application to the District of Columbia’s health exchange. This application facilitated Congress’s “exemption” from ObamaCare, allowing lawmakers and staffers to keep their employer subsidies.

The article reports:

The application said Congress employed just 45 people. Names were faked; one employee was listed as “First Last,” another simply as “Congress.” To Small Business Committee chairman David Vitter, who has fought for years against the Obamacare exemption, it was clear that someone in Congress had falsified the document in order to make lawmakers and their staff eligible for taxpayer subsidies provided under the exchange for small-business employees.

This is infuriating. The Small Business Committee chairman David Vitter needed a green light from the committee to subpoena the unredacted application from the District of Columbia health exchange. Five Republicans voted against that subpoena, as well as all of the Democrats on the Committee. The five Republicans were Rand Paul, Mike Enzi, James Risch, Kelly Ayotte, and Deb Fischer. In essence all of the Democrats on the Committee, as well as the five Republicans, were supporting ObamaCare fraud.

The article concludes:

 “I think it makes sense to find out what happened,” says Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, a noted conservative health-care voice and a National Review contributor. “It would be pretty interesting to see whose name is on the forms,” he says. “It has to go beyond mid-level staffers.”

I am amazed and dismayed at the lack of integrity in our elected officials. The American voters can do better than this.