April 11, 2025

Is There Any Fraud In The Medicaid Program? Here's A Place To Start Looking

April 11, 2025/ Francis Menton

Elon Musk, of the Department of Government Efficiency, has asserted that his goal is to cut some $1 trillion of “waste and fraud” from annual federal spending.
Skeptics of the effort say that that’s just not possible, mainly because almost half of federal spending constitutes the “entitlements” — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and some smaller health insurance programs — and President Trump has pledged not to cut those. Add something close to $1 trillion for defense, and another close to $1 trillion for interest on the national debt, and the remainder (less than $2 trillion) doesn’t leave nearly enough room for a trillion of cuts.
But here’s the missing piece: What if there are large amounts of fraud in the entitlement programs? Trump hasn’t pledged not to go after that. Could the amounts of such fraud be significant in the context of the huge numbers at issue?
I don’t fully know the answer to that question; but today I’ll look at one example involving very big numbers where obvious fraud is hiding in plain sight.

March 20, 2025

New York Takes A Stab At A Green New Deal Demonstration Project: The Case Of Ithaca

March 20, 2025/ Francis Menton

Many political jurisdictions claim to be on a path to eliminating emissions of carbon dioxide from their energy systems. Notable examples include California and New York in the U.S., and the UK and Germany in Europe. The Biden administration during its term in office even claimed to have set the entire U.S. onto a path toward what they called “net zero.”
But so far none of these places has gotten anywhere near the goal. Indeed, as of today, many hundreds of billions of dollars into the effort, not one of them has even issued a detailed engineering plan of how this is supposed to be accomplished.
For reasons expressed in some dozens of posts on this blog, with the exception of a vast expansion of nuclear energy, I don’t believe that this “net zero” thing can actually be done, at least without entirely impoverishing the people. However, I’m completely willing to be proved wrong.
For many years, I have been calling for a Demonstration Project . . . .

October 27, 2023

October 27, 2023/ Francis Menton

Periodically I post updates here about how more and more government money thrown at so-called “anti-poverty” programs never seems to reduce measured poverty even by a little. I call this phenomenon the “poverty scam.”
The persistent high rate of supposed “poverty” — in the face of well over a trillion dollars of annual spending supposedly intended to cure it — is then repeatedly used to sucker the voters and the Congress into another round of increases in the spending, none of which will ever reduce poverty as measured.
My latest post on this subject was on September 16, occasioned by the issuance from the Census Bureau of its “poverty” statistics for 2022. (That latest issuance of poverty statistics showed a large uptick in measured poverty despite an approximately 8% increase in the spending supposed to cure it.). For dozens of more posts on this subject, go to the Poverty tag in the Archive section.
And yet, among the categories of federal statistics that are cynically crafted to deceive and manipulate the public to support advocacy for growth of programs, there is a category that is even worse than “poverty,” and that is the category of “food insecurity.”

February 11, 2023

February 11, 2023/ Francis Menton

The briefing is now complete in Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council v. EPA. That is the case, currently pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where a small and brave band of electricity consumers, CHECC, challenges the “science” behind EPA’s 2009 finding that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” constitute a danger to human health and welfare. I am one of the attorneys for CHECC.
In the case, we ask the court to compel EPA to go back and re-assess the “science” of greenhouse gas “endangerment.” The briefing process gave EPA the chance to put its best foot forward as to the scientific basis underlying the finding of endangerment.
What is truly remarkable is the extent to which EPA, not to mention the entire government-backed scientific establishment, completely lack any real scientific basis for the claim of great “danger.”

December 21, 2022

December 21, 2022/ Francis Menton

Throughout the agencies of our federal government, an important function is to issue data and information about the state of the country.
These data cover a vast array of topics such as population, demographics, income and poverty, the state of the economy, the GDP, employment and unemployment, activities of foreign adversaries, weather and climate, energy production and use, and much, much more. The Congress and states use this information in making important public policy decisions, and the people use it to make decisions for their everyday lives. Not the least of those decisions is how to vote.
So is the information issued by the government basically honest and reliable for important decisions? Or, instead, is the output of official information cynically manipulated and corrupted by a government interested mainly in perpetuating and increasing its own power?

October 25, 2022

October 25, 2022/ Francis Menton

Yesterday the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC) filed a corrected version of its opening brief challenging the EPA’s Endangerment Finding as to CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
The brief can be found here.
The bizarre reason for the “corrected” filing was that the clerks at the DC Circuit rejected our initial filing on the ground that we used an excessive number of acronyms. They have a rule encouraging you not to use too many acronyms, but the rule gives no clue as to how many is too many. When you use the term “greenhouse gases” thirty times, should you shorten it to “GHGs,” or write it out every time? You only find out when they bounce the brief and require you to correct it. Anyway, with any luck the linked version is now the final one.
When you take a look at the brief, you will see that we are directly and openly challenging the fake science of predicted catastrophic human-caused global warming from GHGs.