Free Republic

The Trump administration's efforts to stop the use of H-1B workers by IT contractors suffered a major setback in court. This week, a federal judge ruled that the government exceeded the law. Trump administration has been denying H-1B work visa applications for IT contractors through stringent regulation interpretations. The IT contractors sued, claiming the administration's governance was too rigid. This week, the contractors won a significant court victory. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer in Washington, said the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) "exceeded the law" and went too far in its interpretations of H-1B work visa rules. Her...

The ONC interoperability rule is a step in the right direction towards a nationwide health data exchange and enhanced interoperability. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has put the importance of health data exchange and interoperability under a microscope. Niam Yaraghi, a fellow in governance studies at the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings Institution, penned an op-ed to explain why he thinks the US lacks health information technologies to stop or contain the COVID-19 epidemic. “The pandemic has shattered our common beliefs about the type and scope of health information exchange (HIE),” wrote Yaraghi. “It has shown us that...

2020 Election Security: The State of Election Security & Voting Systems U.S. election security is a top national interest. All national, state, and local election organizations are under immense pressure to secure their voting systems and ensure the integrity of the infrastructure. In this webinar, Robert Antia, consultant and President/Board of Directors for the Massachusetts Chapter of InfraGard, will provide an overview of the current state of our election systems and the need to secure the underlying applications that run our elections. Highlights will include: The current state of election security and the ramifications of compromises to the election system...

In the 2016 presidential race, Donald Trump campaigned against the H-1B work visa program. He invited former IT workers at Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, Inc., to speak at his rallies, some of whom had trained visa-holding replacements as a condition of their severance. In a debate in Miami, Trump called the H-1B visa program: unfair for our workers and said we should end it. As president, Trump didn't end the H-1B visa program, and he's made many unhappy over his efforts to reform it. Businesses are complaining about visa denials and delays in approvals. There is more enforcement, paperwork...

Federal workforce too reliant on degrees, says White House President Trump's administration wants to reform federal hiring. It complains of burdensome hiring rules and of losing candidates because filling jobs takes too long. The system "frustrates hiring managers," it said in its 2021 budget proposal. The Trump administration's proposed FY 2021 budget, which it sent to Congress Monday, calls for "transforming" federal workforce hiring. It said federal rules are making it difficult to fill high-demand jobs, especially in technology. It called the hiring and dismissal rules "lengthy and byzantine" and said "stellar performance is inadequately recognized and poor performance insufficiently...

Amazon Web Services is asking a federal claims court for depositions from President Donald Trump, as well as his current and former secretaries of Defense, as part of its bid protest of the Pentagon’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI). The cloud computing company claims there are gaps in the discovery information provided by the Department of Defense about its evaluation of JEDI bids and eventual award to Microsoft, according to court documents filed in the Court of Federal Claims in January but unsealed Monday. Seeking to supplement the record, AWS issued a number of requests for targeted additional...

P-values are used in statistics and scientific publications, much less so in machine learning applications where re-sampling techniques are favored and easy to implement today thanks to modern computing power. In some sense, p-values are a relic from old times, when computing power was limited and mathematical / theoretical formulas were favored and easier to deal with than lengthy computations. Recently, p-values have been criticized and even banned by some journals, because they are used by researchers, who cherry-pick observations and repeat experiments until they obtain a p-value worth publishing to obtain grant money, get tenure, or for political reasons....

Democratic operative Tara McGowan is denying that her high-profile liberal firm ACRONYM played a role in the Monday evening caucus debacle, claiming that her firm was merely an investor in the company Shadow Inc., which developed the app at the center of the controversy. But internal company documents, a source close to the firms, and public records show a close and intertwined relationship between Acronym and Shadow. In addition, ahead of the caucuses, questions swirled inside Shadow over the company’s ability to deliver a quality product, and there was concern from at least one staff member that senior leaders of...

“Research is clear: access to care and other socioeconomic factors plays a significant role in maternal mortality rates in Georgia and throughout this country and actually Georgia has the second highest maternal mortality rate in the country,” said U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath of Marietta at a hearing this week. Pixabay WASHINGTON — Black mothers and babies are dying at staggering rates in Georgia. The national statistics are alarming: black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related issues than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. American Indian women are also more...

George Soros, the financier and philanthropist, has pledged $1bn to support a global network of higher education to train students in civic engagement in response to resurgent nationalism around the world. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Soros lambasted rising populism internationally and picked out US president Donald Trump as well as China’s Xi Jinping, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi — and Brexit. “I believe that as a long-term strategy our best hope lies in access to quality education, specifically an education that reinforces the autonomy of the individual by cultivating critical thinking and emphasising...

HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is continuing the industry's push to incorporate social factors that influence health—like food insecurity and homelessness—into patient care. The 2020 edition of the ONC's interoperability standards advisory, a collection of agency-recognized interoperability standards and implementation specifications, includes resources to support sharing information on four new categories of data related to social determinants: drug use, food insecurity, housing insecurity and transportation insecurity. "As factors like these can greatly impact one's overall health, ensuring this information is known, and captured in clinical systems and available to providers is important," wrote the ONC's...

The federal government funneled billions in subsidies to software vendors who overstated or deceived the government about what their products could do, according to whistleblowers.(LYDIA ZURAW/KHN) This story also ran on Fortune. This story can be republished for free (details). Derek Lewis was working as an electronic health records specialist for the nation’s largest hospital chain when he heard about software defects that might even “kill a patient.” The doctors at Midwest (City) Regional Medical Center in Oklahoma worried that the software failed to track some drug prescriptions or dosages properly, posing a “huge safety concern,” Lewis said. Lewis cited...

Close to one-third of a $1.5 million federal grant meant to fund HIV prevention efforts in DeKalb County could go unspent by an end-of-the-year deadline, state records show. Budget documents from the Georgia Department of Public Health, which won the money from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fund projects in DeKalb, show a projected balance of almost $462,000 when the grant expires at the end of December. Unless federal officials extend the funding deadline, both the county and the state could lose that money. “The DeKalb County Board of Health is actively working with our state and...

A patient’s access to stable housing, transportation, and nutritious food options greatly impacts their long-term health. In fact, these factors, known as social determinants of health (SDOH), can drive as much as 80% of health outcomes. Because of the outsized role of SDOHs in healthcare, strategies and tactics for addressing social determinants are getting more attention and moving further upstream compared to downstream efforts like medical intervention and clinical care. This matters: For some patients, social and mental health intervention is the only way to successfully manage their medical conditions over the long term. Screening patients about social and economic...

More than $12 billion is at stake for the nation’s health insurers Tuesday when the Supreme Court hears another Affordable Care Act case. For the federal government, the potential damages could be far greater, as its reputation as a reliable partner to private businesses is on the line.

Prices for prescription drugs edged down by 1% last year, a rare result driven by declines for generics and slow, low growth in the cost of brand-name medications, the government said Thursday. Though modest, it was the first such price drop in 45 years, according to nonpartisan economic experts at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, who deliver an annual report on the nation’s health care spending.

The burdensome costs of medical care, prescription drugs and health insurance have become dominant issues in the 2020 presidential campaign. But a new report from the Department of Health and Human Services shows the nation remains in a period of relatively slow growth in health spending. Health spending in the United States rose by 4.6 percent to $3.6 trillion in 2018 — accounting for 17.7 percent of the economy — compared to a growth rate of 4.2 percent in 2017. Federal officials said the slight acceleration was largely the result of reinstating a tax on health insurers that the Affordable...

Abortion access varies widely for people in different parts of the country. We're going state by state. Georgia made national headlines in May when Governor Brian Kemp signed into law a bill that would ban abortion after 6 weeks and define fetuses as people. While the law has been blocked as legal challenges proceed against it, the reality is that it's already difficult to get an abortion in the state. What Georgia state law says about abortion: People seeking abortions in Georgia face a number of restrictions. Abortions are prohibited after 20 weeks unless the pregnant person's life is in...

Although you might not have noticed — something else seems to have been going on — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell spent Wednesday and Thursday testifying before Congress. In the end, he delivered a very simple and effective message: The Fed is successfully doing its job; maybe Congress should consider doing its job. As for the first, Powell reviewed the facts on the ground. Gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 1.9 percent in the 3rd quarter, disappointingly down a bit from 2018. The household sector remains strong, buoyed by a very solid labor market — 3.6 percent...

Am I being promised money for little or no effort on my part? Many offers are meant to compromise your security. Don’t interact with people promoting an offer that’s too good to be true.