Free Republic

-Because their technology is already obsolete Navy will decommission its entire fleet of Freedom-class combat warships Four of the $3.2bn fleet set for scrap heap were commissioned in 2019 and 2020 Anti-submarine system 'did not work out technically', naval operations chief said Ships 'incredibly expensive and [lack] the capabilities we expected': Rep. Smith Added: 'They're not ready to do anything... When they are, they still break down' USS St Louis, launched in August 2020, will serve just three years of 25-year life Scrappings will save $391 million as US Navy plans new shipbuilding program Crews at Naval Station Mayport, Florida...

Several lawmakers — including a handful of 2020 Democrat candidates — are recognizing National Period Day in order to elevate “the issue of period poverty,” lamenting that it is “outrageous” that some “people” do not have access to basic menstrual products due to their gender identity. Organizers planned events across the country and encouraged activists to spread awareness online by using the hashtags #NationalPeriodDay and #PeriodPower. A few 2020 Democrat candidates took their cues. “In detention centers and in prisons, in big cities and small towns, women across America don’t have access to the period products they need,” former Texas Rep. Beto...

Navy struggles to find a place for Bath-built Zumwalt stealth destroyers The Zumwalts were built for a mission that the Navy no longer views as a priority. BY NATHAN STROUT BRUNSWICK TIMES RECORD Friday, February 1, 2019 BRUNSWICK — To those who kept a close eye on the development of the Navy’s futuristic, next-generation destroyers, calling the Zumwalt-class program a disappointment could be an understatement. In the early 2000s, the Navy hoped to build 32 highly advanced stealth destroyers built solely at Bath Iron Works. BIW employees were hopeful that the new destroyers would be a source of work for...

A multi-billion-dollar government program launched by Obama to help families hit by the housing crisis squandered millions on parties, employee bonuses, cars, and superfluous data storage. The program is known as Hardest Hit Fund and operates under the Treasury Department, which does little to oversee it and sits by as federal audits expose pervasive fraud and waste. The findings of the latest probe were released this month by the inspector general of another reckless Treasury gem, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Obama’s disastrous initiative to rescue the nation’s ailing financial institutions. The findings are documented in an exhaustive 93-page...

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said Thursday that the days of gym memberships being paid for by the American taxpayer are over. . . . "Well, the gym memberships ended yesterday, it was quite something to hear about that," Pruitt said. He said the agency is investigating the matter, saying "it was the previous administration that granted those gym memberships," which "were rather expensive."

The National Science Foundation (NSF) spent $412,000 for a paper encouraging a feminist approach to glaciology, the study of glaciers, according to a report earlier this year from Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford. “Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions,” the paper said.

A letter sent by a Federal Communications Commission commissioner suggests that taxpayers are footing the bill for half a billion dollars in fraudulent "Obamaphone" subsidies. Ajit Pai, the senior Republican commissioner at the FCC, says there may be as many as 4.2 million duplicate recipients of Lifeline Assistance subsidies, also known as the “Obamaphone” program. In a letter to chief executive of Universal Services Administrative Company (USAC), Pai requests an audit of how carrier sub-contractors vet the applications for new subsidies. In the letter, first published by The Hill, Pai says that cell phone carriers may have bypassed a safeguard...

The Obama administration wants to spend $400,000 on a camel sculpture for a new embassy building in Pakistan, according to a report Monday. BuzzFeed broke the news that the State Department has plans to commission the camel sculpture from John Baldessari, an American artist. The art is called, “Camel Contemplating Needle.” According to a government document posted by BuzzFeed, the sculpture is a “large 500lb fiberglass aluminum, stainless steel, acrylic and painted contemporary art piece.” “Public art which will be presented in the new embassy should reflect the values of a predominately Islamist country,” the document states. While the United...

The federal government is spending $152,000 to study “voice therapy” for transgenders, saying it is incumbent to being “accepted as one's preferred gender.” “This study will illuminate the capabilities of the human larynx and inform the relationship between voice production and perception,” states a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, awarded to George Washington University. “The long term goal of this research is to inform and provide new directions for Transgender (TG) voice care, thereby improving the lives of TG people who feel their voice is a great obstacle to living as their preferred gender.” “Incomplete gender presentation can negatively...

In an article for Slate, scientist Patrica Brennan defended her government-funded research into duck genitalia, paid for by the National Science Foundation. She lamented the fact that 88.7 percent of respondents to a Fox News online poll were against the government funding her study. Brennan's research examines duck rape and how females' genitalia have evolved to prevent insemination because the male ducks' penises spiral counterclockwise while females' vaginas spiral clockwise. Who knew the feminist movement could be inspired by ducks?

The town of Evart is home to fewer than 2,000 people — and an airport pointed to as a case study in government waste. Evart Municipal Airport has two flights per day, one runway, zero employees and five "likes" on its Facebook page. Yet, the federal government spent $150,000 on the airport in 2012 while state and local taxpayers spent thousands more. Patrick Hedger, a policy analyst at FreedomWorks, a grassroots, limited-government group, said he thinks the program is a waste of tax dollars. "These ghost airports are a classic economic fallacy in yet another disguise," Hedger said. "It's the...

If you want to get paid for doing something stupid, just turn to the U.S. government. The U.S. government is paying researchers to play video games, it is paying researchers to study the effects of cocaine on Japanese quail and it has spent millions of dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly. The amount of money that the government wastes is absolutely horrifying. Do you remember all of that political wrangling over the debt ceiling deal last year? Do you remember how our politicians told us that there were cutting spending as much as they possibly could? Well, it...

During the month of February—as President Barack Obama was warning Americans they would see dramatic effects in their lives if “sequestration” of some planned federal spending kicked in—the federal government’s debt climbed by $253.5 billion. That one-month increase in the debt was nearly six times as much as the $44 billion in spending cuts the Congressional Budget Office estimates will take place in all of fiscal 2013 as a result of sequestration. …

Coburn: Sequestration doesn’t have to hurt if we just cut the waste, duplication and ridiculous out of the Pentagon. CBS News ran this report tonight and I was literally stunned at some of the “ridiculous” Coburn has found in wasteful spending in the Pentagon: Sequestration could be Pentagon pork killer

After a year full of victories for big government legislation in Congress, the forces of statism seemed to have met their Waterloo with the farm/food stamp bill. The more people learned of the profligate food stamp spending and the market distorting, risk-inducing agriculture programs contained in the bill, the more they spoke out against this monstrosity. Speaker Boehner has refused to bring the bill to the floor so far. Seeing their political stock rapidly diminish, the bipartisan coalition of government-run agriculture took a page out of Rahm Emanuel’s playbook and decided not to let the crisis of the summer drought...

A one-vehicle accident on rural Highway 141 on Monday triggered a search through the desert for passengers and eventually led to the arrest of one man for suspicion of human smuggling and the pending deportation of four of the passengers. Juan Denys Hernandez Varenez, a Cuban national, has been charged with four counts of smuggling of humans, a class 3 felony. The San Miguel Sheriff’s Office suspects that he was smuggling four undocumented foreigners to the Denver area when the sedan he was driving crashed. All of the passengers, including a 20-year-old female from Grand Junction whose involvement is unknown,...

The next three months in Iraq will look like a veritable fire sale, as 45,000 U.S. forces prepare to leave by the Dec. 31 deadline. Rather than ship home valuable military hardware, incurring excessive shipping costs, the Pentagon is simply going to leave millions of pieces of equipment behind, including everything from vehicles and body armor to trailers and air conditioners. When all is said and done, Pentagon planners estimate 3.47 million pieces of equipment worth $313 million will be handed over to the Iraqi government, which still has not asked U.S. forces to stay beyond the December deadline.

At a Justice Department conference, auditors said Monday in a report that doesn’t come close to topping the Pentagon’s legendary $400 hammer and $600 toilet seat but does, the auditors said, expose “wasteful or extravagant spending.’’ Cynthia Schnedar, the Justice Department’s acting inspector general, said in the report that some conferences featured “costly meals, refreshments and themed breaks” and that Justice failed to “minimize” costs as required by federal and internal guidelines. Among the examples: Beef Wellington hors d’oeuvres at $7.32 per serving; a Cracker Jacks, popcorn and candy snack for $32 per person and coffee costing more than $1...

On some days, the pilots with Great Lakes Airlines fire up a twin-engine Beechcraft 1900 at the Ely, Nev., airport and depart for Las Vegas without a single passenger on board. And the federal government pays them to do it. Federal statistics reviewed by The Associated Press show that in 2010, just 227 passengers flew out of Ely while the airline got $1.8 million in subsidies. The travelers paid $70 to $90 for a one-way ticket. The cost to taxpayers for each ticket: $4,107. Ely is one of 153 rural communities where airlines get subsidies through the $200 million Essential...

ORLANDO, Fla. – Florida officials are investigating an unemployment agency that spent public money to give 6,000 superhero capes to the jobless. Workforce Central Florida spent more than $14,000 on the red capes as part of its "Cape-A-Bility Challenge" public relations campaign. The campaign featured a cartoon character, "Dr. Evil Unemployment," who needs to be vanquished. Florida's unemployment agency director asked Monday for an investigation of the regional operation's spending after the Orlando Sentinel published a story about the program. State director Cynthia Lorenzo said the spending appeared to be "insensitive and wasteful." Workforce Central Florida Director Gary J. Earl...