Disappearing Data

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.

 Liza Featherstone at TNR:

To declare that Trump has been right and the scientists have been wrong about climate change is so counterfactual that it requires a massive suppression of available data. Good thing Trump has thought of that. Through a combination of layoffs and weird directives, his administration has dramatically reduced its ability to collect data on industrial pollution that causes climate change, extreme weather caused by climate change, greenhouse gases contributing to climate change—really any facts related to the climate crisis. To take just one example, an effort launched by the Biden administration to collect emissions data was canceled by Trump on his first day in office. The same could be said about his Tylenol claims; lucky for him he has made significant cuts to autism research.

...

Trump’s commitment to falsehood—and to eradicating facts at their roots—is not limited to science and public health. This summer he claimed that his policies were leading America into “another golden age” and that economic growth under his presidency “shatters expectations.” The data said otherwise: Whether you’re talking about job growth, inflation, or just about any other measure, the numbers did not chart in a direction favorable to the president. Here again, Trump is not willing to tolerate the facts: When the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month reported numbers that contradicted his sunny narrative, he fired the head of the agency

...

Trump’s administration has greatly reduced its own ability to collect and disseminate accurate information about crime, removing research staff, as well as impeding the public’s access to crime data, making it increasingly easy for Trump and his administration officials and supporters to freely fearmonger about any vulnerable minority.

 ...

This week, Trump’s Agriculture Department cut its annual food insecurity survey, so Americans won’t know how many people are going hungry as a result of Trump’s cuts to food stamps and other vital assistance programs, not to mention his inflationary tariffs.

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We won’t know how badly our children are faring in school as a result of the massive cuts to K-12 education, since he has gutted the Department of Education’s research offices, including the irreplaceable National Center for Education Statistics.

Raw Milk Is Bad

Some would-be policymakers want to encourage the consumption of raw milk.  That idea is stupid.

From FDA:

Milk and milk products provide a wealth of nutrition benefits. But raw milk, i.e., unpasteurized milk, can harbor dangerous germs that can pose serious health risks to you and your family.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from 1998 through 2018, there were 202 outbreaks linked to drinking raw milk These outbreaks caused 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations. CDC points out that most foodborne illnesses are not a part of recognized outbreaks, and for every illness reported, many others occur.

Raw milk is milk from cows, sheep, and goats — or any other animal — that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful germs. Raw milk can carry dangerous germs such as Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, Campylobacter, and others that cause foodborne illness, often called “food poisoning.”

These germs can seriously injure the health of anyone who drinks raw milk or eats products made from raw milk. However, the germs in raw milk can be especially dangerous to people with weakened immune systems (such as transplant patients and individuals with HIV/AIDS, cancer, and diabetes), children, older adults, and pregnant women. In fact, CDC finds that foodborne illness from raw milk especially affects children and teenagers.

"Pasteurized Milk" Explained

Pasteurization is a widely used process that kills harmful germs by heating milk to a specific temperature for a set period of time. First developed by Louis Pasteur in 1864, pasteurization kills harmful organisms responsible for such diseases as listeriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, Q fever, and brucellosis.

The Dangers of Listeria and Pregnancy

Pregnant women run a serious risk of becoming ill from the germ Listeria, which is often found in raw milk and can cause miscarriage, or illness, or death of the newborn baby. If you are pregnant, drinking raw milk — or eating foods made from raw milk — can harm your baby even if you don’t feel sick.


Raw Milk and Serious Illness
Symptoms and Advice

Symptoms of foodborne illness usually include:Vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain
Flu-like symptoms such as fever, headache, and body ache

While most healthy people will recover from an illness caused by harmful germs in raw milk – or in foods made with raw milk – within a short time, some can develop symptoms that are chronic, severe, or even life-threatening. If you or someone you know becomes ill after consuming raw milk or products made from raw milk – or if you are pregnant and think you may have consumed contaminated raw milk or cheese – see a healthcare professional immediately.


Raw Milk & Pasteurization: Debunking Milk Myths

While pasteurization has helped provide safe, nutrient-rich milk and cheese for over 120 years, some people continue to believe that pasteurization harms milk and that raw milk is a safe, healthier alternative.

Here are some common myths and proven facts about milk and pasteurization: 

• Pasteurizing milk DOES NOT cause lactose intolerance and allergic reactions. Both raw milk and pasteurized milk can cause allergic reactions in people sensitive to milk proteins.
• Raw milk DOES NOT kill dangerous pathogens by itself.
• Raw milk marketed for pets and animals IS NOT safe for people to drink.
• Pasteurization DOES NOT reduce milk's nutritional value.
• Pasteurization DOES NOT mean that it is safe to leave milk out of the refrigerator for extended time, particularly after it has been opened.
• Pasteurization DOES kill harmful germs.
• Pasteurization DOES save lives.

Raw Milk

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization.

After a long effort, an Iowa legislator won approval of a bill to legalize the sale of raw milk. Marc Novicoff at Politico:

What changed since 2008 is a vivid example of a larger upheaval in American politics. The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still say raw milk is dangerous and the state dairy lobby sent lobbyists to the Iowa Capitol to defeat Schultz’s bill. But Iowa has flipped — it’s a Republican state now, from the presidential vote to the governor’s office to the near-supermajority Legislature — and that flip has occurred alongside even larger shifts in national politics, spurred on by the rise of Donald Trump. With Trump has come a new GOP electorate, one more rural, more working class, less ideological and generally more distrustful of lobbyists, big business and “the experts.” And that has been a big help for a cause that is bucking just about every one of those groups.

Long a fringe health food for new-age hippies and fad-chasing liberal foodies, raw milk has won over the hearts and minds of GOP legislators and regulators in the last few years. (The Iowa vote broke almost perfectly along party lines with nearly all Republicans in favor and only a handful of Democrats defecting to their side.) And it’s not just in Iowa. Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming all have passed laws (or changed regulations) since 2020 legalizing the sale of raw milk on farms or in stores.

The antivax movement has followed a similar trajectory:  from crunchy left to Trumpy right.

Richard Nixon's father insisted on raw milk.  Nixon believed that it caused the diseases that killed his brothers Harold and Arthur. 

Chefs as Lobbyists

Helena Bottemiller Evich at Food Fix:

About a decade ago, I started noticing chefs were showing up in Washington to lobby on all kinds of issues — child hunger, school nutrition, antibiotics in agriculture, fisheries management, the list goes on. A lot of these cooks-turned-lobbyists had gone through a James Beard Foundation advocacy training program called the Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change. Katherine Miller, the force behind that program — which has now trained hundreds of chefs — recently came out with a book about this work and the impact it’s had over the years. “At the Table: The Chef’s Guide to Advocacy” is targeted primarily at chefs, but it offers insights on advocacy that are applicable far beyond the culinary world.

I recently caught up with Miller about her new book and what I find most interesting about chefs jumping into food fights.

The following conversation excerpt has been edited for length and clarity:

Helena: In the beginning of the book, you note that you were very skeptical at first that chefs should even be advocates. It reminded me of when I first wrote about this trend for Politico back in 2014 and a Republican aide gave me a great snarky quote that it’s hard to take policy advice seriously “from a group who thinks neck tattoos are a good idea.” Let’s start there. What changed your mind about the role chefs can play here?

Miller: I think it’s how some people feel about anyone with a public profile. When Bono started talking about aid to Africa, everybody was like, ‘What does he know about that subject? And why should we listen to him?’ I remember I was on the way to the first Chef Bootcamp, and I picked up a bunch of magazines, and in every single magazine I had picked that week there was Sean Brock with his tattoos. He was in Vogue. He was in TIME. He was everywhere. He was at the first bootcamp. I remember thinking ‘Oh, [chefs,] they’re everywhere!’ But in talking to the chefs, I realized the flip side of being everywhere.

There’s a restaurant on every corner of America, essentially — they are places that we trust. They buy from local farmers. They employ our kids, they employ us, they sort of serve as this living embodiment of a food system. Because chefs are so close to their community, they can have a conversation with a member of Congress who comes in, they can talk to the governor when they come in,

The F in FDA

 Helena Bottemiller Evich at Politico:

Food is not a high priority at the Food and Drug Administration.

A monthslong POLITICO investigation — based on more than 50 interviews — found that drugs and other medical products dominate food at the agency, both in budget and bandwidth. Over the years, the food side of FDA has been so ignored and grown so dysfunctional that even former FDA commissioners readily acknowledged problems. There’s a long running joke among officials: The “F” in FDA is silent.

The dynamic has only been exacerbated during the pandemic. The FDA regulates nearly 80 percent of the American food supply, and each year — according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — more than 128,000 people are hospitalized and 3,000 people die from foodborne illnesses.

We published a deep dive into the agency’s structural failures, lack of action to prevent major produce outbreaks and slowness to try to make food healthier. We encourage you to bookmark it and read it in full.

In the meantime, here are four top-level takeaways. 

1. The food division has structural and leadership problems
2. Congress asked FDA to regulate water to keep deadly pathogens out of produce. 11 years later, it still hasn’t.
3. FDA made little progress on keeping toxic elements out of baby foods.
4. FDA has not taken timely action to help cut sodium consumption

Cannibis Industry

Matt Guilhem at KCRW-FM:

Cannabis is America’s fastest-growing industry, but how much cash does all the cush translate to?

Leafly Senior Editor David Downs tells KCRW the “green rush” is taking over the nation.

KCRW: Where does cannabis stand among other harvests nationally?

When we look at these adult-use states, we often see cannabis being the number one cash crop in that state. In Oregon and Colorado as well as Massachusetts and Nevada and Alaska, cannabis is the number one cash crop.

What's telling is that in a lot of these states, they haven't had legalization for very long. Illinois cannabis is the number three cash crop, and people have been able to shop in stores for just over a year.

How about California?

We think California cannabis farmers on the legal side are producing about 514 metric tons of the crop each year, and the value of that cannabis production in dollars is $1.66 billion.

That ranks cannabis as number five among state crops. Number four is strawberries at $2 billion, and number six is tomatoes at $1.19 billion.

That's a massive market, and the crazy thing is four out of five pounds grown in the state are still growing in the illicit market.

The 514 metric tons amount for the adult-use market is likely just a fraction of the actual amount California is growing. California remains the number one domestic producer of cannabis since the 80s.

Freedom of Information

Paul Farhi reports at The Washington Post:

When Dina Cappiello, until recently the national environment writer for the Associated Press, asked the Interior Department for federal data about bird deaths on wind-energy farms in 2013, she says, she met a stone wall. The industry-supplied information, the agency told her, was “protected” and couldn’t be released because it would harm a private interest.

Cappiello suspected a political motive for the department’s silence: The Obama administration supports the development of wind power, and release of the data might undercut public support if it showed that wind farms kill large numbers of protected species, such as eagles and falcons.

She filed a FOIA request for the records. No dice. “I still haven’t gotten an answer,” she said recently.

The reaction was even more aggressive when Cappiello began asking the Agriculture Department for interviews for a story about the environmental degradation caused by converting non-crop land into cornfields for ethanol production, another administration initiative.

The agency went on the offense, telling officials in the field not to talk to her and her co-writer. A public affairs official further instructed his colleagues not to provide the reporters with the names of farmers for interviews, as they had routinely done for other stories.

“We just want to have a consistent message on the topic,” the official, Jason Johnson, wrote in an e-mail. Cappiello filed another FOIA request for the directive — and noted the e-mail’s existence in her story about the land-conversion policy.

“I think the thread here is that all of these stories are questioning the goals and policies of the administration,” she said. “All of these have the potential to set off controversy.” While government press officials often talk about having “a consistent message,” Cappiello said, “they never seem to insist on having ‘a truthful message.’ I wonder why.””

The Center for Effective Government reports:

This is the second year we have conducted a very detailed comparative analysis of the performance of the 15 federal agencies that consistently receive the most FOIA requests. Combined, these 15 agencies received over 90 percent of all information requests for each of last two years. We examined their performance in three key areas:

• The establishment of clear agency rules guiding the release of information and communication with those requesting information;
• The quality and “user-friendliness” of an agency’s FOIA website; and
• The timely, complete processing of requests for information.

The number of requests each agency receives, the complexity of the requests, and the number of staff assigned within an agency to process them varies widely and can impact performance....

•  A majority of agencies – eight – improved their overall scores from last year. Performance at most agencies is moving in the right direction.
• More agencies received the highest grades possible (A) in each performance area than last year, with significant enhancements in websites, but timely request processing remains a challenge.
• The Department of Agriculture (USDA) was the top performer, with a B grade, and the Social Security Administration came in second with a B-.
• Despite these improvements, federal agencies are still struggling to effectively and consistently implement public disclosure rules.
• Ten of the 15 agencies did not earn satisfactory overall grades, scoring less than 70 out of a possible 100 points.
• The scores of five agencies – the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the Environmental Protection Agency – fell marginally.

A 116 Percent Default Rate

Michael Grunwald writes at Politico:

If you’re curious just what kind of risks the US government is taking with its $3.3 trillion in loan programs — a portfolio considerably larger and significantly stranger than any private bank’s — the best place to start is the Federal Credit Supplement, an obscure batch of tables stashed in the back of the annual White House budget proposal.

...

But the weirdest number lurking in this year’s credit supplement was in Table 3, where the White House budget office explains the assumptions behind its cost estimates for various loan programs. What caught my eye was the default rate for an Agriculture Department program called Broadband Treasury Rate Loans: 116.37 percent.

A default rate above 100%? Was that a typo?

It was not a typo.

So what was it? The average default rate for bank loans is about 3 percent. The troubled student loan program has lifetime default rates around 25 percent. How on earth could a credit program, even a risky one, get to 116 percent? Were the recipients defaulting en masse, then stealing an extra 16 percent from the Treasury?

The explanation I eventually got from the Obama administration was not that damning. But it wasn’t exactly comforting, either. The crazy number was apparently produced by flawed execution of a flawed model of a flawed program. In reality, the Agriculture Department expects to recover about 80 cents of every dollar it lends to telecoms to extend high-speed Internet to undeserved rural areas. Administration officials couldn’t pinpoint the actual default rate, but it’s much lower than 116%. They say the main culprits for that wrong number were a radically overbroad definition of “default,” as well as some inappropriate double-counting.

Basically, it’s complicated, which is true of all federal credit programs—which is a problem with federal credit programs.

Soft Lobbying

Previous posts have discussed the sometimes-murky relationship between economic interest groups and nonprofits such as think tanks.  Tom Hamburger reports at The Washington Post:

A group called Citizens for Health recently began a campaign to encourage consumers to reduce high-fructose corn syrup in their diets, filing a petition with the Food and Drug Administration demanding stricter labeling on food items containing the sweetener.

Yet the petition did not disclose that the organization, which bills itself as the “voice of the natural-health consumer,” received the bulk of its money at the time from sugar companies, which view corn syrup as a threat to their profits. Since 2011, the organization has received at least $500,000 from the industry.

Sugar companies’ investments in this nonprofit group, detailed in newly released internal documents, are part of a growing strategy used by corporate interests seeking to influence Washington policymaking.

No longer content to rely on traditional lobbyists, companies are investing in other messengers, such as nonprofit groups or academicians, that can provide expert testimony, shape news media coverage and change public opinion in ways that ultimately affect decisions in the nation’s capital.

The new approach lacks the transparency that comes from traditional lobbyist registration rules that provide a visible trail of corporate contact with lawmakers and regulators. Nonprofit organizations, now playing an increasing role in lobbying and electoral politics, are not required to publicly reveal their donors.

Agriculture Lobbying

At The Atlantic, Molly Ball explains agriculture lobbying:

The farm lobby's main concern is with the agricultural subsidies in the farm bill. But it also opposes the food-stamp divorce performed by the House. This is partly a matter of political necessity. Just 35 of the 435 congressional districts have agriculture as their dominant industry. "In our opinion, if you separate the two, you would no longer have a farm bill," Bob Stallman, the president of the Farm Bureau, told me. Farmers have another interest in continued food-stamp funding. The SNAP payments constitute another massive subsidy to food producers, giving consumers the money to buy their products. "Food stamps have become a large part of the demand for the food that we raise as farmers," Don Villwock, the white-mustached president of the Indiana Farm Bureau, told me. "When you have one in five Americans on food assistance, that's 20 percent of the demand for food in this country."

In favoring a farm bill that combines agriculture supports with food stamps, the farm lobby parts ways with the GOP's ideological right wing, and sides with the Obama Administration, which has disappointed environmentalists by not aggressively seeking farm-policy reforms. (The agribusiness sector spent $112 million lobbying Congress in 2013, according to the Center for Responsive Politics—more than the defense industry. The Farm Bureau alone employs 52 Washington lobbyists.)

The dynamic is similar when it comes to immigration reform to legalize the millions of illegal workers currently living in the U.S. and create new guest-worker programs. The Heritage Foundation and a hard-right faction in Congress oppose such a policy. But farm leaders paint a grim picture of crops rotting on the vine, and even farmers giving up their land, because of a shortage of workers. In a survey conducted by the California Farm Bureau, 71 percent of tree-fruit growers and nearly 80 percent of raisin and berry growers couldn't find enough pickers.

Interest Groups: Silicon, Potatoes, and Ski Trips

Alex Byers and John F. Harris write at Politico:

Washington types often refer to “the Valley” or “the tech community” as though it were a group of people with a unified agenda.

It’s more complicated than that. That’s one reason that both parties have been striking rich veins of tech money, even though the most famous names in tech are more associated with Democrats.

Different audiences respond to a different message. CEOs and top-level execs tend to want to hear most about hard-core economic issues, corporate tax reform and specific items that will affect their bottom line. Rank-and-file tech workers, in contrast, tend to be socially liberal and are more open to an avowedly progressive message.

This trend is backed by data. Disclosure records show that technology industry money broadly tilted 60 percent to 40 percent to the Democrats in the 2012 election. Technology corporate political action committees, on the other hand, favored Republicans 55 percent to 45 percent, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

“PACs give on business issues of relevance to the company whose PAC it is, and individuals vote on personal issues that matter the most to them as an individual,” said Technology CEO Council Executive Director Bruce Mehlman.

Some issues, of course, have nearly universal support in the Valley. Both ends of the political spectrum believe immigration reform is an urgent priority — and the failure to advance it a glaring example of Washington dysfunction.

Potatoes have interests, too.  The Wall Street Journal reports:

Tucked into the 1,582-page 2014 spending bill passed by Congress this week are 85 words that aspire to end the government's decadelong war on the potato.

The language is aimed at reversing a ban on white-potato purchases by 8.7 million monthly participants in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Women, Infants and Children food program. "White potatoes," in this case, refers to all potatoes—except the sweet version—no matter their skin or flesh color.

To the nation's potato growers and processors, it is about much more. Years of low-carb, whole-grain, antioxidant trends have taken a toll on the humble white potato, whose very color has come to symbolize empty calories: Americans each put away more than 100 pounds of potatoes a year, but the tonnage has fallen steadily over the past decade. The bill language strikes a blow for reversing "general animosity" toward the spud, said John Keeling, chief executive of the National Potato Council, which leads the pro-tater charge in the capital.

The New York Times reports:

Congress, after a corruption scandal that involved golf trips to Scotland and other getaways paid for by lobbyists, passed legislation in 2007 prohibiting lobbyists from giving lawmakers gifts of just about any value. But as is the norm in Washington, the lawmakers and lobbyists have figured out a workaround: Political campaigns and so-called leadership PACs controlled by the lawmakers now pay the expenses for the catering and the lawmakers’ lodging at these events — so they are not gifts — with money collected from the corporate executives and lobbyists, who are still indirectly footing the bill.

Even if no explicit appeals for help are made, the opportunity to build a relationship with the lawmakers, staff members and family — far from the distractions of Washington — is worth the price of admission, the lobbyists said. The donors and lobbyists, 50 to 100 of whom typically attend the events, generally donate individually or through a corporate political action committee between $1,000 and $5,000 apiece, in addition to paying their own hotel bills and airfare. There is no public disclosure that specifically shows how much is raised at each event, and lawmakers are generally unwilling to say.

“An informal setting is an effective way to build a better relationship,” said a health care lobbyist who attended the fund-raising weekend in Vail this month. The event included five House Republicans, none of them from Colorado and two of whom serve on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the health care industry. “It’s a way to get some large chunks of a lawmaker’s time,” the lobbyist said.

Sugar Politics

Many posts have discussed how interest groups can influence public policy.  At The Washington Post, Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger explain the survival of sugar subsidies. (h/t BK)

This year, a well-heeled coalition of sugar-using companies stepped up their lobbying efforts to portray the program as costly to consumers and American workers. Newly elected tea party conservatives vowing to crusade against government meddling in free markets also provided fresh potential support.

“You would have thought that this would have been the year for reform,” said Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), whose state is home to Hershey and who sponsored measures to roll back sugar support. But, he added, “we were up against a force.”

Liberal sugar advocates included [Sen. Al] Franken, whose state is home to a large concentration of sugar-beet farmers, along with Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), whose home areas include Fanjul-controlled refineries.

Nearly the entire Florida delegation — from Rubio, a potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate, to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee — voted to keep sugar protections in place.

Strong support has come from House conservatives, as well, including Rep. Michael K. Conaway (R-Tex.), chairman of a key agriculture subcommittee.

“The sugar guys win votes because they are better at politics than anyone else,” said one lobbyist who is close to sugar executives and requested anonymity to discuss industry thinking. “What other interest group in town do you know that can consistently draw support from hard-core conservatives, ethnic liberals and cost-conscious moderates?”

The industry is tiny in comparison to other agricultural commodities, but it outspends all other crop sectors combined on political-action-committee contributions to federal candidates. Sugar interests have spent $49 million on federal campaign donations and lobbying over the past five years.

On average, sugar farmers and employees gave more than five times as much money to members of Congress who sided with the industry than to members who did not, according to an analysis of key votes conducted for The Washington Post by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Unanticipated Consequences

Well-intentioned public policies can have unanticipated consequences.  Here are some examples.

Efforts to promote nutritious meals in school can backfire if they taste bad and students throw them away.  The New York Times reports:

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required public schools to follow new nutritional guidelines this academic year to receive extra federal lunch aid, has created a nationwide version of the age-old parental challenge: persuading children to eat what is good for them.
...
“Before, there was no taste and no flavor,” said Malik Barrows, a senior at Automotive High School in Brooklyn, who likes fruit but said his classmates threw away their mandatory helpings on the cafeteria floor. “Now there’s no taste, no flavor and it’s healthy, which makes it taste even worse.”

Students organized lunch strikes in a suburb of Pittsburgh, where in late August the hashtag “brownbagginit” was trending on Twitter, and outside Milwaukee, where the Mukwonago High School principal, Shawn McNulty, said participation in the lunch program had fallen 70 percent.

“There is a reduction in nacho chips, there is a reduction in garlic bread, but there’s actually an increase in fruits and vegetables,” Mr. McNulty said. “That’s a tough sell for kids, and I would be grumbling, too, if I was 17 years old.”

Making it easier to vote by mail may increase participation...as well as uncounted ballots and fraud.  Also in The New York Times:

Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond. If the contests next month are close enough to be within what election lawyers call the margin of litigation, the grounds on which they will be fought will not be hanging chads but ballots cast away from the voting booth.

In 2008, 18 percent of the votes in the nine states likely to decide this year’s presidential election were cast by mail. That number will almost certainly rise this year, and voters in two-thirds of the states have already begun casting absentee ballots. In four Western states, voting by mail is the exclusive or dominant way to cast a ballot.

The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.

In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time. Before this year’s primary, for example, a woman in Hialeah was charged with forging an elderly voter’s signature, a felony, and possessing 31 completed absentee ballots, 29 more than allowed under a local law.

California's recycling program is also spawning fraud, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

Just over 8.5 billion recyclable cans were sold in California last year. The number redeemed for a nickel under California's recycling law: 8.3 billion.

That's a return rate of nearly 100%.

That kind of success isn't just impressive, it's unbelievable. But the recycling rate for certain plastic containers was even higher: 104%.

California's generous recycling redemption program has led to rampant fraud. Crafty entrepreneurs are driving semi-trailers full of cans from Nevada or Arizona, which don't have deposit laws, across the border and transforming their cargo into truckfuls of nickels. In addition, recyclers inside the state are claiming redemptions for the same containers several times over, or for containers that never existed.

The illicit trade is draining the state's $1.1-billion recycling fund. Government officials recently estimated the fraud at $40 million a year, and an industry expert said it could exceed $200 million. It's one reason the strapped fund paid out $100 million more in expenses last year than it took in from deposits and other sources.

The "truckful of nickels" maneuver should have been predictable:  in 1996,it was the subject of a Seinfeld episode. 

 

Leading Lobbies

Our chapter on interest groups emphasizes that far more money goes into lobbying than into campaign contributions. Open Secrets reports:

Pharmaceuticals, utilities and big agriculture have led the lobbying charge so far this year, according to preliminary figures from latest lobbying disclosures. The pharmaceutical industry as a whole spent $69.6 million on lobbying in the first three months alone, while electrical utilities spent $43.3 million. The agricultural services industry - which includes heavy hitters like Monsanto, the American Farm Bureau and Archer Daniels Midland - spent far less, only about $12.9 million, but that represented a 48 percent increase over its lobbying in the final three months of 2011.

Overall, the ebb and flow of industries on our list of top lobbyists was dictated by the legislative calendar. While all these groups regularly rank highly in terms of their spending, they all had particular battles early in 2012.
...
To see a full list of the top industries and how they've lobbied Washington in the first three months of 2012, explore our industry lobbying page. Or, check out our top spenders page, to see a list of top organizations and how much they spent on lobbying so far in 2012 (spoiler: once again, the No. 1 organization, by far, is the Chamber of Commerce).

Also at Open Secrets:

According to an OpenSecrets.org analysis of the most recent lobbying disclosure information, five of the top ten bills that have been lobbied the most intensely so far this year are Internet-related, and most have bipartisan and industry backing. Major cash is being laid out to push their passage.

The most recent bill to stir things up is the Cyber Intelligence and Sharing Protection Act(CISPA), which would allow private companies to share far more data on users with the federal government in what backers say is an effort to improve cybersecurity. Opponents claim it would severely undermine the privacy rights of many Americans. The bill was passed by the House last night and now faces a tougher battle in the Senate (and the threat of a veto by President Obama).

A list of companies and organizations that have sent letters of support for the bill to the House Intelligence Committee, where the legislation was created, meshes closely with the list of top lobbying groups so far this year -- not to mention groups that lobbied on SOPA and PIPA.

A Lesson in Bureaucracy

At an Illinois town meeting with the president, a farmer raised concerns about regulations on noise and dust. The president told him to get in touch with the US Department of Agriculture. A Politico reporter did so, and found that it can be difficult to get an answer from the bureaucracy:

Wednesday, 2:40 p.m. ET: After calling the USDA’s main line, I am told to call the Illinois Department of Agriculture. Here, I am patched through to a man who is identified as being in charge of "support services." I leave a message.

3:53 p.m.: The man calls me back and recommends in a voicemail message that I call the Illinois Farm Bureau — a non-governmental organization.

4:02 p.m.: A woman at the Illinois Farm Bureau connects me to someone in the organization’s government affairs department. That person tells me they "don't quite know who to refer you to."

4:06 p.m.: I call the Illinois Department of Agriculture again, letting the person I spoke with earlier know that calling the Illinois Farm Bureau had not been fruitful. He says "those are the kinds of groups that are kind of on top of this or kind of follow things like this. We deal with pesticide here in our bureau."

"You only deal with pesticides?" I ask.

"We deal with other things … but we mainly deal with pesticides here," he says, and gives me the phone number for the office of the department’s director, where he says there are "policy people" as well as the director's staff.

4:10 p.m.: Someone at the director's office transfers me to the agriculture products inspection department, where a woman says their branch deals with things like animal feed, seed and fertilizer.

"I'm going to transfer you to one of the guys at environmental programs."

4:15 p.m.: I reach the answering machine at the environmental programs department, and leave a message.

4:57 p.m.: A man from the environmental programs department gets back to me: "I hate to be the regular state worker that's always accused of passing the buck, but noise and dust regulation would be under our environmental protection agency, rather than the Agriculture Department," he says, adding that he has forwarded my name and number to the agriculture adviser at IEPA.

On Thursday morning, POLITICO started the hunt for an answer again, this time calling the USDA's local office in Henry County, Ill., where the town hall took place.

9:42 a.m.: Asked if someone at the office might be able to provide me with the information I requested, the woman on the phone responds, “Not right now. We may have to actually look that up — did you Google this or anything?”

When I say that I’m a reporter and would like to discuss my experience with someone who handles media relations there, I am referred to the USDA’s state office in Champaign. I leave a message there.

10:40 a.m.: A spokeswoman for the Illinois Natural Resources Conservation Service calls me, to whom I explain my multiple attempts on Wednesday and Thursday to retrieve the information I was looking for.

“What I can tell you is our particular agency does not deal with regulations,” she tells me. “We deal with volunteers who voluntarily want to do things. I think the reason you got that response from the Cambridge office is because in regard to noise and dust regulation, we don’t have anything to do with that.”

She adds that the EPA would be more capable of answering questions regarding regulations.

Finally, I call the USDA’s main media relations department, based here in Washington, where I explain to a spokesperson about my failed attempts to obtain an answer to the Illinois farmer’s question. This was their response, via email:

“Secretary Vilsack continues to work closely with members of the Cabinet to help them engage with the agricultural community to ensure that we are separating fact from fiction on regulations because the administration is committed to providing greater certainty for farmers and ranchers. Because the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction, it does not provide a fair representation of USDA’s robust efforts to get the right information to our producers throughout the country.”

Wasteful Programs

It is not possible to balance the federal budget simply by cutting wasteful programs. But such programs do exist, as recent articles suggest.

In Time, Joe Klein writes:

We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program's effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work.

According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, "I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn't." (See how California's budget woes will hurt the state's social services.)

Waste is not exclusively an American phenomenon, as Virginia Postrel writes at Bloomberg:

“Infrastructure” may be one of the least glamorous words in the English language, but with the right touch the concrete and steel of roads, bridges, tunnels, dams and railroads can look as alluring as a movie star. Witness the sleekly seductive illustrations produced for today’s California High-Speed Rail Authority or the midcentury pictures of effortlessly flowing superhighways, a genre that reached its apotheosis in Walt Disney’s “Magic Highway U.S.A.” in 1958.

This glamorizing extends not just to imagery but also to forecasts. Project promoters routinely overstate benefits and understate costs -- and not just a little bit.

“Cost overruns in the order of 50 percent in real terms are common for major infrastructure, and overruns above 100 percent are not uncommon,” Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor of major program management at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School, writes in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. “Demand and benefit forecasts that are wrong by 20-70 percent compared with actual development are common.”

The American Enterprise Institute points to farm programs:

Today, farm policy consists of an array of subsidies, regulations, spending programs, and land-use restrictions that are widely blamed for the increased cost of food, environmental degradation, fiscal burdens, and the failure of global trade negotiations. These inefficient and outdated policies, subsidized by US taxpayers in the 2008 Farm Bill at a cost of $307 billion, are once again up for approval.

AEI has commissioned academics with extensive knowledge of agricultural policy from all over the country to write papers on specific aspects of the Farm Bill, including their recommendations for reform. SEE THE PAPERS HERE.

The US Subsidizes Brazilian Cotton Farmers

In our chapters on bureaucracy, interest groups, and economic policy, we discuss how interest-group demands add to the federal deficit. Jonathan Rauch notes one example:

In 2002, Brazil filed a complaint against U.S. cotton subsidies with the World Trade Organization, of which the United States is a member. The international trade treaty allows signatories to subsidize farmers, and, in fact, they all do. The assistance, however, is supposed to be limited, and trade-distorting subsidies -- ones that either subsidize exports or encourage overproduction -- are subject to particularly tight limits.

Brazil argued that Washington's generous cotton program violated the trade rules. Despite some legislative and administrative efforts by the U.S. to tweak the subsidies, last year the WTO ruled generally in Brazil's favor. Brazil won the right to levy retaliatory duties on more than $800 million worth of U.S. exports annually, a prospect that manufacturers here reacted to with alarm.

The Obama administration found itself in a hard spot. Substantially changing farm subsidies requires an act of Congress, but the next farm bill is not due until 2012, and trying to get lawmakers to approve a stand-alone subsidy cut seems out of the question. A trade war with Brazil, however, is the last thing that Washington needs, particularly when the U.S. has been found to be in the wrong.

So last month the administration announced a deal with the Brazilians. In due course, Congress will change the cotton program. Until that happens, the U.S. government will send Brazil an annual check for $147.3 million (a sum based on estimates of the cotton subsidies' economic cost to Brazil), which Brazil is to spend on "technical assistance and capacity-building" for agribusiness. Translation: Washington is bribing Brazilian farmers to keep illegal subsidies flowing to U.S. farmers.

Rauch quotes Representative Ron Kind (D-WI):

"If the average person at home realized what's happening with the cotton program, there would be outrage in the streets."

And he explains the moral of the story:

In real life, there is no such thing as Big Government; there are only government programs. Each program has beneficiaries and defenders who care much more about retaining it than anyone else cares about getting rid of it -- which is why the average person at home has no idea what the cotton program is up to, and never will. "The agriculture interests are well entrenched," Kind says, and "it's tough to make this a real election-year issue that motivates people to go to the polls."