Posted on 04/12/2025 4:58:27 PM PDT by CFW
In 1974, Congress created the Legal Services Corporation to connect lower-income Americans involved in civil disputes with free legal help. The law that established the agency stipulated that authorization for its funding would expire in 1980, when lawmakers were required to vote on whether to keep it alive.
They never did. Still, Congress has funded LSC every year since. In fiscal 2025, its 51st year, LSC’s 135 employees will spend 95% of its now $560 million annual budget paying legal groups to represent Americans in cases such as eviction, domestic violence, and disputes over government benefits, according to Ron Flagg, the agency’s president since 2020.
[snip]
The Legal Services Corp. now stands as America’s oldest “Zombie” program, but it’s far from unique. At a time when the Trump administration is moving aggressively to scale back government, including eliminating the entire Education Department, it’s sobering to note that 1,503 agencies or programs live on despite expired authorizations, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Another 155 will expire on Sept. 30. The Zombies, nearly half of which have been officially dead for more than a decade, persist in a budgetary netherworld. In a deep dive last year, CBO analysts were able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, with total expenditures of $516 billion. They don’t know how much funding the other programs received.
The total federal budget in 2024 was $6.8 trillion, meaning expired Zombie programs take up at least 8% of the budget, and likely much more.
“A lot of programs don’t get reauthorized because Congress is okay with how they’re operating,” said Josh Huder, former congressional staffer now at the Georgetown University Government Affairs Institute. “They continue to get annual appropriations because most members think they’re worthwhile.”
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearinvestigations.com ...
Once an agency is authorized, no matter for how short or long of a time, the funds keep getting sent even if not reauthorized.
This needs to stop. When the left screams "Congress authorized these funds!" maybe that's not true. How can they be funding an agency which authorization has expired?
The US Treasury needs to be required to enter a current, valid authorization reference for every payment made.
Hopefully DOGE will get the system upgraded to provide these most basic safeguards and accountability. If the goal is to get rid of a trillion in waste, just doing that would get them halfway there.
The problem is that if Congress appropriates money for an entity, the entity is authorized. The legal requirement is for an appropriation bill to spend money, and by implication if they continue appropriating money they have authorized the act. It’s sort of like war powers. The Supreme Court long ago decided that if Congress appropriates funds for a specific military action it has authorized the action and a piece of paper entitled “declaration of war” is not necessary the action having been authorized when Congress agreed to pay for it.
Yeah, when Congress votes “aye” on a CR or budget and an entity/agency is funded under the funding bill, it is effectively an “authorizing vote” on the agency in question.
It’s even worse than described. Once money is spent, whether authorized or not, the next budget year, the money is not only added into the next year’s budget, PLUS an increase based on the rate of inflation and the increase in US population (including illegal immigrants). Not only that, but by law, the money must be spent. It cannot be returned to the taxpayers.
"worthwhile" means "buys votes." That's the only value of these zombie programs.
Not only that, but these agencies are punished if they do not spend their fiscal year budget allotment.
Frankly I believe Musk is leaving because the problem is too deep and too entrenched to fix with radical tech that he is prevented from installing, even if he did have clever ideas like shifting stolen SSNs onto the Master Death List to cut off the pendejo grifting.
I fear Musk and Trump have come to the conclusion that the corruption is beyond repair. This is Acceptance on the Kübler-Ross model.
Oy’m not dead. Oy think oy’l go for a walk...
There’s a larger issue here. The laws and court rulings are amorphous so the meaning of the law is constantly changing and frankly writing laws that use a dead language, such as Latin, to lend gravitas to there proceeding and to make a personal arena for people who attend law school. All this is a long way to say as long as the laws are so complex that the ordinary person can’t defend themselves in court, the country should fund lawyers so everyone can navigate the court system and not only the select (well paid) few.
I keep writing my congressman & senators, asking what “oversight” are you doing, exactly?
No answer yet.
p
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