President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed outrage to aides because there have been no violent mass street demonstrations against his statements and policies. He believes he needs violent demonstrations against him in order to declare a national state of emergency that would allow him to do anything he wants.   read more

As many as four million Americans could wind up without health care benefits if a new federal rule is implemented as interpreted by the Treasury Department, warned consumer advocates, doctors and Democratic lawmakers.   Under the healthcare refo...   read more

President Barack Obama is not accepting contributions from registered lobbyists, but that doesn’t mean he’s not accepting lobbyists in the Oval Office.   A review of White House visitor logs by The New York Times found that many lobbyists have p...   read more

Simplifying income tax returns may be good for individual Americans, but bad for software companies that do business with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).   Until now, 14 software makers have sold tax preparation programs to the IRS for the a...   read more

The Department of Veterans Affairs is so behind in processing claims and benefits that the waiting list for decisions has doubled since President Barack Obama took office.   Currently, about 870,000 veterans are waiting for the VA to approve or ...   read more

Almost a third of all election-eligible transgender Americans living in states with strict voter-ID laws could be denied the right to cast ballots this November.   Jody L. Herman, a Peter J. Cooper Public Policy Fellow at The Williams Institute ...   read more

Is the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), under attack since the moment of its conception, already in danger of becoming a paper tiger? Congress created CFPB in 2010 as part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protect...   read more

The Election Assistance Commission (EAC), charged with overseeing federal election standards, has no appointed leaders in the year of a presidential election.   Four commissioners, two Democrats and two Republicans, are supposed to head the EA...   read more

Having caused drinking water contamination and outbreaks of earthquakes in rural regions in Montana, Oklahoma, Ohio, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, the controversial practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has gone Hollywood. Resident...   read more

Every spring, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) gives critics of the Defense Department (DoD) a present, courtesy of Congress, in the form of a report on the state of the Pentagon’s major weapons programs. GAO’s report for 2011, released ...   read more

A special program created by the Obama administration to help homeowners hit hardest by the mortgage crisis has aided only a small fraction of those eligible.   The two-year-old Hardest Hit Fund, managed by the Department of the Treasury t...   read more

What do Raymond Knaeble, Ayman Latif, Abe Mashal and Steven Washburn have in common, aside from being veterans of the U.S. armed forces? They all have no idea why they are on the government’s secret “No-Fly List”—and they’re suing the government o...   read more

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy responsible for overseeing the nation’s nuclear weapons complex, pays private contractors tens of millions of dollars to run day-to-...   read more

The cry of “women and children first” during ship disasters turns out to be more of a myth than reality.   In honor of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson of Uppsala University studied 18 passeng...   read more

One of the worst dictatorships in Africa, oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, will soon receive a U.S. ambassador with prior African experience in Sudan and prior dictator experience in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Sudan. Mark L. Asquino was nominated by Pr...   read more

The smallest country on mainland Africa will soon have a new ambassador from the United States. President Barack Obama on March 5 nominated Edward M. “Ned” Alford to be next ambassador to The Gambia. He replaces Pamela White who had served as amba...   read more

American Special Forces provided training during the George W. Bush administration to a terrorist group bent on the overthrow of the Iranian government, according to the New Yorker.   According to a story by investigative journalist Seymour He...   read more