RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
February 2 to February 8, 2025 In RealClearInvestigations and on his Substack, Lee Fang details how the Trump executive order rolling back "diversity, equity and inclusion" appears radically more far-reaching than originally reported, extending far beyond federal programs to society at large: -
The order was issued to counter a new form of discrimination: Many organizations, trying to right historical wrongs, have fostered bias against groups perceived as privileged – particularly White and Asian men. -
These patterns of discrimination already got a major rebuke in the Supreme Court's historic 2023 ruling against Harvard University. It found that in its admissions, the university had illegally engaged in racial discrimination. -
The Trump executive order builds on the Harvard ruling, and includes a line disclosing that federal contracts and grants will soon carry a new certification stipulating that firms doing business with the government must adhere to colorblind policies. Failure to abide by these rules runs the risk of violating 3729(b)(4) of title 31 of federal law. -
That statute refers to the False Claims Act, which is much more severe than Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: It has no cap on compensatory and punitive damages for corporations over 500 employees. -
Publicly traded companies, foundations, and colleges vowing to keep their DEI policies do so at their peril. -
The order “directly links the maintenance of future DEI programs to False Claims Act (FCA) liability,” cautions a top law firm.
In RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski examines Chicago as an outsized illustration of the troubles rocking public schools nationwide, from its pandemic-fueled academic decline to declining enrollment to growing union militancy: -
First came drops in academic performance and enrollment from lower birth rates and the pull of charter and home schools. Enrollment has plunged 20% in Chicago since 2012. -
Next came the pandemic, which brought with it a mixed blessing that hooked the nation's second largest school district on $190 billion in federal emergency funding -- helping disguise years of deficit spending. -
Now with that aid gone. Chicago’s going cold turkey as budget deficits have ballooned and learning loss continues. -
At the center of the drama is the recalcitrant Chicago Teachers Union and its President Stacy Davis Gates, whose dominant faction has embraced social justice causes over traditional education as it engineered the 2023 mayoral election of one of its own, Brandon Johnson. -
Emboldened by the victory, Davis Gates and other militant leaders are not giving in on demands for higher compensation and staffing and other changes to advance their social justice agenda. - The Chicago Teachers Union last week rejected a neutral arbitrator's recommendations for ending its contract dispute with the school district. It now can give notice to strike after a brief period.
Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books The Political Infighting Dogging DOGE Cuts, RCI
Massachusetts Self-Portrait of an Alleged Crook, RCI
Improper Payments Site Is News to Hill Staff, RCI
Government Printing Ended Up in the Trash, RCI
DHS Employees Could Work 4 Days a Week, RCI Trump 2.0 and the Beltway Trump Actions That Are Defying Legal Limits, New York Times
Jared and the Envoy: How Trump’s Gaza Dream Emerged, Telegraph
All About the Trump Family’s Deals in the Middle East, New York Times
Musk's DOGE Opens Treasury and a Can of 'Fraudulent' Worms, Fox
The Young Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover, Wired
What Is USAID and Why's It Scorned by the Right?, New York Times
USAID Was Warned It Might Be Funding Fraud and Terror, Just the News
J6 Purge Begins as DOGE Enters FBI to Obtain Names, Daily Mail
Trump’s Deportations Prioritize Numbers Over Safety, Reason
Obama's Presidential Center Hit With DEI Suit, Washington Free Beacon
Watchdog: Hunter Biden IRS Agents Faced Retaliation, National Review Other Noteworthy Articles and Series The Catholic Church has long positioned itself as an advocate for poor immigrants and provided them with services in the United States. For decades, including during the great migration waves of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, much of the church’s work was charitable in nature, funded by contributions from parishioners. This article reports that has changed: Over the past 50 years or so, however, Catholic Church-affiliated organizations, especially Catholic Charities, have become government contractors with a stake in a growing welfare state. Even before the last four years of explosive immigration, Catholic Charities nationwide derived more than six of every ten dollars of revenues from government contracts. … Total federal grants and contributions made to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and its affiliate organizations for refugee-assistance programs rose from $14.6 million under the first Trump administration in 2019 to $122.6 million in 2022, according to audited financial statements. … This federal money, often heavily supplemented by local government contracts, has led to a startling growth in groups like Catholic Charities across the country in just four years. The ProPublica database of the financial filings of nonprofits lists 234 Catholic Charities entities around the U.S. The top 25 had revenues of slightly more than $2 billion in 2023, the last year filings are available for all groups. That’s an almost 50 percent increase, a gain of about $660 million, in four years. Now, this article reports, with President Trump changing the immigration focus to border enforcement and deportation, most of the Biden programs that aided in resettling immigrants are being curtailed, along with their funding. That policy change may represent an existential crisis for nonprofits. Even though some American protesters identified themselves as “Queers for Palestine,” this article reports that secret documents show Hamas tortured and executed terrorists within its ranks who talked about or engaged in gay sex. Sources also added some male Israeli victims of the Oct. 7 massacre were raped in captivity: The documents reveal the “crimes” that were allegedly committed by 94 Hamas recruits — lumping “homosexual conversations,” “flirting with girls without a legal relationship” and “sodomy” in with serious allegations of child rape and torture. The allegations, dated between 2012 and 2019, involve recruits to Hamas’ intelligence, military and interior ministry and say the new members were eventually deemed “unacceptable” to continue working with the terror group because of their actions. This article reports that “there were multiple instances of male Hamas fighters horrifically raping Israeli men during the attacks of Oct. 7 – as well as of hostages kept captive after the attack that sparked the Israel-Hamas war, a source close to the Israeli Knesset told the Post.” Technology that would have allowed air traffic controllers to better track the movement of an Army helicopter before it collided with an American Airlines passenger jet over the Potomac River last week was turned off at the time of the crash, Senator Ted Cruz reported. He relayed what he learned in a meeting with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board: When in use, the technology, called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, broadcasts an aircraft’s position, altitude and speed. It allows air traffic controllers to not rely solely on radar tracking, which can have a delay of a few seconds. It thus provides an extra safety layer to help prevent crashes. Military helicopters can turn off the technology during what are called “continuity of government” missions so that no one can track where government officials are being flown. But Mr. Cruz said that was not the case on Jan. 29, the night of the crash. “In this instance, this was a training mission, so there was no compelling national security reason for ADS-B to be turned off,” Mr. Cruz said. This article reports that Jennifer Homendy, the chairwoman of the NTSB, said preliminary findings from the Black Hawk helicopter’s cockpit voice recorder indicated the pilots were using night-vision goggles at the time of the collision. Former Black Hawk pilots interviewed by the Times noted that the combination of dark skies and bright lights surrounding the airport could have affected the pilots’ ability to see the American Airlines jet as it approached for landing, if they were wearing the goggles. This article reports that things in the Arctic have never been hotter. As sea-ice cover in the Arctic has shrunk from an annual minimum of 2.7 million square miles in 1979 to 1.7 million square miles in 2024, the newly navigable waters have become a cauldron of geo-political conflict: In the past year, Russian nuclear submarines have practiced firing cruise missiles near NATO members Norway, Finland and Sweden. That drill followed Arctic wargames by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that included amphibious assaults in the frigid seas. … “The Arctic is a region for potential future conflict,” Russia’s Commander of the Northern Fleet, Aleksandr Moiseyev, told a recent Arctic conference in St. Petersburg, according to Russian state news agency TASS. This article reports that the U.S. has no Arctic deepwater ports to host heavy container ships. Most of Alaska has no roads or rail lines, complicating access to the Far North. Russia is taking advantage of this weakness, along with another U.S. adversary, China: Russia has increasingly opened its Arctic territory up to Beijing as Beijing has propped up the Russian economy and provided dual-use equipment to buttress its military. That support has been prominent in the Arctic, where Chinese companies are significant investors and equipment suppliers in Russian energy projects including the Yamal LNG and Arctic 2 LNG projects. Russia, in return, has been shipping fuel to China using its so-called shadow fleet, by which sanctioned vessels make illicit deliveries of Russian oil to markets in Asia. Will McFadin, improvement guru at Chick-fil-A, had his "eureka" moment while watching a New Orleans Saints game back in 2017. “We can break down drive-through game film just like they break down football game film,” he recalled thinking. In the years since, this article reports, the fast food giant he works for has deployed video mounted drones and closer circuit camera systems to figure out how to serve more customers more quickly at its drive-through windows. Such speed is becoming ever more important: Decades after the drive-through revolutionized restaurants, fast-food chains are betting more than ever on customers who never set foot in their dining rooms. … An estimated 43% of U.S. fast-food orders are placed at drive-throughs … Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A is on the vanguard of fast-food drive-through science, regularly dispatching specialist teams to its more than 3,000 restaurants to study the minutiae of parking-lot traffic patterns and how employees hand off orders. … In years past, some Chick-fil-A operators would climb onto restaurant roofs to study traffic flows. These days, the chain sends out traffic-analysis teams that use drones to capture aerial footage, which team members splice with video from kitchens and drive-through windows to create roughly hourlong videos for store owners. This article reports that the quest for speed never ends. During one busy afternoon, a Chick-fil-A in Rockford, Illinois, served one customer every 13 seconds at its two-drive through lane. The restaurant’s operator is determined to do even better. Studying video from drones and other cameras, he and his team pinpointed a couple of problems: One veteran worker was shouldering too much of the drive-through duties, and the wi-fi used by parking-lot order-takers didn’t extend far enough. |
