Daily Archives: 28 January 2025

A Plenty Good Enough Reason

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President Donald Trump (R) is preparing a series of sanctions against the anti-Semitic International Criminal Court and the bigots populating it. Naturally, those…persons…are unhappy. One carefully anonymous official:

The concern is the sanctions will be used to shut the court down, to destroy it rather than just tie its hands[.]

After all, as Ellie Grant wrote at the link,

Such a move, they say, could bring the court to a standstill, severely hindering its access to the services it depends on to function.
One of the most significant risks posed by sanctions would be the disruption of the court’s ability to access banking and payment systems, IT infrastructure, and insurance providers. A complete block on these services, including US-based companies, would apparently cripple the court’s day-to-day operations.

Since this institution spends so much of its time, funding, IT work, and insurance proceeds attacking Israel and the men and women of the Israeli government on trumped up complaints, these are sufficient, and necessary, reasons for applying the sanctions and shutting off, and shutting down, the nakedly biased institution.

Mission Addendum

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I posted a bit ago about the missions of DOGE and Congress. Here are some data that lend concreteness to that post’s claims; these data concern some $162 billion in misspent monies.

That figure is likely an undercount because not all federal agencies follow reporting guidelines.
Under the Payment Integrity Information Act, agencies are required to manage payments by identifying risks, taking corrective measures, and reporting on their efforts. However, the GAO found that some agencies are not fully following the required guidelines for reporting data annually.

GAO’s 2023 report on the matter had this, summarized at the JtN link above (the second one):

10 federal agencies under the Chief Financial Officers Act were noncompliant in fiscal 2022. Additionally, nine of these agencies failed to meet standards for the same programs in 2021 and 2022.
Agencies that remain noncompliant with payment integrity standards for two or more consecutive years must submit additional proposals to the Office of Management and Budget. OMB is key in dealing with improper payments and outlining improvement plans.
The plans must be included in the agency’s annual budget submission….

GAO identified those agencies that are noncompliant for two consecutive years as

  • DoA
  • DoD
  • DoEd
  • HHS
  • HUD
  • DoL
  • DoT(!)
  • VA
  • SBA

GAO then asked for this:

GAO recommended that OMB ensure that noncompliant agencies explicitly include plans of improvement and plans to achieve compliance in their annual financial statements, post the plans on PaymentAccuracy.gov, or communicate them directly to the relevant congressional committees. OMB agreed with the recommendations.

That’s much too soft. Years of such Pretty Pleases are how we got to these billions of misspent—and willfully unreported—dollars. The management personnel below President Donald Trump’s (R) replacing appointees who remain after those appointees are installed need to be terminated for cause and reallocated to the private sector. Those agencies’ budgets also need to have portions of their budgets equal to the un- or misreported expenditures withheld until reporting and actual spending is brought into compliance.

Given DoD’s blatant disregard for spending requirements, it’s necessary to be especially draconian with that bunch—their refusals to comply cost lives and endanger our national freedom. It’s true enough that DoD’s contractors contribute to the money failures, and they need to be dealt with including contract cancelation, but the overarching failure here is DoD’s decision to not bother with enforcing the financial reporting requirements of those contractors.