By Jay Sekulow
The left's outrage over the IRS turns to a plea to 'move on'
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
It already has taken twice as long as President Obama ordered, and yet his administration is still only about halfway to meeting his June 2011 vow to cut the number of federal websites in half within a year — one of the marquee pledges in his Campaign to Cut Waste.
The Justice Department spent a whopping $58.7 million last year to send its employees to conferences around the world, a jet-setting junket machine that has a key senator questioning the agency's commitment to frugality in an era of sequester budget cuts.
While it's getting the most attention, the $4.1 million IRS conference in California in 2010 that has Congress up in arms isn't even the costliest event the tax agency hosted over the last few years.
Learning how to forgive — it's just one of a handful of classes congressional staffers are entitled to take during Capitol Hill work hours, and that has at least one senator steaming.
Senior Republican senators on Thursday asked the Health and Human Services' inspector general to investigate Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' fundraising drive to promote the new health care law — a practice ethics specialists have said is anything from a legal stretch to a shakedown for cash.
President Obama's proposed policy changes on the use of drones to kill key terrorist leaders have raised more questions than it has answered.
With the IRS scandal over targeting conservative groups still simmering, two senators — one from each party — say the time is ripe to push the beleaguered agency to go after a real, proven target: federal employees who are tax cheats.
The budget cuts known as sequestration were supposed to wreak havoc, forcing the shrinking of critical workforces including airport security officers and food inspectors. But since sequestration kicked in March 4, the government is in the market for 27,000 new employees.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s direct involvement in the Justice Department's decisions to spy on the press should disqualify him from heading any review of the unfolding controversy, Republicans said Sunday.
House Speaker John A. Boehner said repeatedly on Tuesday that he will work with the Obama administration to make sure that it has the resources it needs to support Oklahoma in the wake of the deadly tornado that swept through the state Monday.
From pro athletes who waste money at their charitable foundations to federal employees who don't pay their taxes, legislators have a few suggestions for whom the IRS should have been scrutinizing instead of going after partisan organizations.
Sen. Tom Coburn ripped Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday morning, calling him untruthful, unsuccessful and double-crossing.
Sen. Tom Coburn says that it is just a matter of time before the Senate passes the proposal it rejected this week that would allow gun owners to carry their weapons on federal lands managed by the Army Corps of Engineers in states where carrying weapons is legal already.
The Senate beat back a new push to expand gun rights Wednesday, defeating a plan to let gun owners carry their weapons on federal lands in states where it would otherwise be legal.
While President Obama keeps pounding away to get votes to pass gun restrictions in the Senate, pro-Second Amendment supporters are pushing the upper chamber in the opposite direction. Sen. Tom Coburn introduced two amendments to strengthen the rights of gun owners and keep the federal government in check.
"While taxpayers expect government employees will sometimes need to spend tax dollars to meet in order to share information and gather knowledge on pressing and pertinent issues and to perform outreach in other countries, in these fiscal times, they do not expect or deserve their money to be used on the current jet-set culture at the department," Coburn wrote in a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Eric Holder that was obtained by the Washington Guardian.
DOJ spent $58 million on conferences last year, prompting Senate inquiry →
Coburn argued that the easy spending on training and other expenses contrasted with Holder's own dire warnings earlier this year that the department faced a crisis because of budget cuts imposed by the sequester deal.
DOJ spent $58 million on conferences last year, prompting Senate inquiry →
