Who even knows what’s true anymore? The same administration that is watching 57,000 kids just stroll across the border, while claiming that the same border is more secure than ever before, now says that funds to deport are getting low.
Even though actual deportations — not the phony ones that the administration claimed for years — are down overall.
The Homeland Security agency responsible for removing immigrants who are in the country illegally will run out of money by mid-August unless Congress approves President Barack Obama’s emergency request for $3.7 billion to help deal with a flood of child immigrants crossing the border illegally without their parents, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson says.
Sounds like extortion.
Additionally, Customs and Border Protection, whose 20,000-plus Border Patrol agents are responsible for arresting illegal border crossers, will be out of money by mid-September at the “current burn rate,” Johnson told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday as he defended the president’s emergency budget request.
Unless Congress passes Obama’s $3.7 billion, of course. The request isn’t mostly going to enforce or secure the border. Any why would it, since the administration still says that the border is more secure than ever before? We don’t need security!
So they’re demanding/extorting more money to do something that they’re supposed to have been doing all along, but haven’t, while over at another government trough, the taxpayers are getting fleeced in a whole different way.
That agency would be the Veterans Administration.
WASHINGTON — The scandal-plagued Department of Veterans Affairs is systematically overpaying clerks, administrators and other support staff, according to internal audits, draining tens of millions of dollars that could be used instead to ease the VA’s acute shortage of doctors and nurses.
The jobs of some 13,000 VA support staff have been flagged by auditors as potentially misclassified, in many cases resulting in inflated salaries that have gone uncorrected for as long as 14 years.
Rather than moving quickly to correct these costly errors, VA officials two years ago halted a broad internal review mandated by federal law. As a result, the overpayments continue.
Moreover, in the two years since thousands of misclassified jobs were identified, hundreds of additional positions have been filled at improperly high salaries. Internal VA documents obtained by The Huffington Post show that between September 2013 and May 2014, for instance, overpayments in annual salaries for the latter jobs alone came to $24.4 million, not counting benefits.
In May alone, senior VA classification specialists identified 284 probably misclassified positions newly posted on the federal jobs site, USAJobs. Once filled, those jobs would result in estimated overpayments of $3.3 million per year.
For that amount of money, the VA could instead hire five neurosurgeons, 10 psychiatrists and five suicide prevention case managers at the average salaries currently offered on USAJobs.
The pattern of overpayment continues, and will continue, forever. The law makes it so that even if the system gets corrected, those little bureaucrats who were getting overpaid must, by federal law, continue to get overpaid. Forever.
The pattern of our government lying about every single thing will continue until at least January 2017, but don’t kid yourself. That’s a permanent deal too.
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