Meet the guy who oversaw the recovery of more than a billion dollars of stolen pandemic relief

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne. The government showed how fast it could spend money when  Congress printed trillions for pandemic relief. Well, now it’s the morning after. Our next guest led a nationwide criminal investigation that so far has clawed back more than a billion dollars anyway, awarded to frauds under the Paycheck Protection Program and prevented maybe twice that much from going out in the first place. He’s an assistant special agent in charge with the…

Read More...

What the Student-Loan Debate Overlooks

A core conservative critique of President Joe Biden’s executive action on student-debt forgiveness is that the plan requires blue-collar Americans to subsidize privileged children idly contemplating gender studies or critical race theory at fancy private colleges. That idea, articulated by Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, among others, aims to portray the GOP as the party of working Americans and Democrats as the champions of the smug, well-educated elite. But it fundamentally misrepresents who’s attending college now, where they are enrolled, and the reasons so many young people are graduating…

Read More...

In Fight for Parents’ Rights in Education, DeSantis’ Florida Leads Pack, Says Heritage Foundation 

Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke about how important it was for parents to reclaim their rights in education, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic.  “We’ve seen over the last few years in our country how important policy is, both good and very bad,” DeSantis said at a Heritage Foundation event Friday in Orlando. “There may be no area where the contrast between a free state like Florida and some of the lockdown states was [bigger] than on education during COVID.”  The event featured the unveiling of Heritage’s “Education Freedom Report Card,” which ranked…

Read More...

Biden ignoring centrists in crusade against ‘MAGA Republicans’ ahead of midterms

President Biden has embarked on a risky strategy by vilifying ‘MAGA Republicans’ ahead of the midterms, according to political strategists who say the escalation in rhetoric may invigorate the Democratic base but is a turnoff for the average voter. The Washington Times stories: White House

Read More...

Congress cares about one thing now and its not 2023 appropriations

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne. Congress trucks back to Washington this week with only a few legislative days left before the end of the fiscal year. They’ll have to deal with government funding among other things. Here with the outlook Bloomberg Government deputy news director Loren Duggan, who talked to the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. Interview transcript: Tom Temin:  Let’s begin with what’s the schedules precisely for the House and the Senate. Loren Duggan: Well,…

Read More...

The Val Demings Gamble

On a hot D.C. Wednesday in the middle of July, an 11-foot statue honoring Mary McLeod Bethune—carved out of marble extracted from the same Tuscan quarry that Michelangelo used for his David—stood draped in a black cloak in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. A group of distinguished guests had gathered to honor Bethune, the prominent educator and civil-rights activist who founded a college for Black students in Daytona Beach, Florida, and later served as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is now the first Black American to…

Read More...