Brian is a former Senior Legal Research Fellow
Add the U.S. Department of Education to the list of federal agencies that can invade your home at gunpoint and hold you and your family in custody for hours.
Kenneth Wright learned this the hard way last week, when federal education agents busted down the front door of his Stockton, Calif., home at 6 in the morning. They surrounded the house; it was like a task force or SWAT team, a neighbor told a national news affiliate. They all had guns. They dragged him out in his boxer shorts, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him.
Ransomware gangs becoming more aggressive in working to ‘foment chaos’ against law enforcement
Updated May 09, 2021;
RICHMOND, Va. Police Chief Will Cunningham came to work four years ago to find that his six-officer department was the victim of a crime.
Hackers had taken advantage of a weak password to break in and encrypt the files of the department in Roxana, a small town in Illinois near St. Louis, and were demanding $6,000 of bitcoin.
“I was shocked, I was surprised, frustrated,” Cunningham said.
Police departments big and small have been plagued for years by foreign hackers breaking into networks and causing varying level of mischief, from disabling email systems to more serious problems with 911 centers temporarily knocked offline. In some cases important case files have gone missing.
The Biden administration granted waivers to two former union officials in February and March
The officials who received the waivers are Alethea Predeoux and Celeste Drake
White House officials have argued that the waivers were necessary and in the public interest for them to carry out their job functions
The move has been slammed as hypocritical by critics who claim that the union boss appointments have resulted in anti-worker policies
By Natalie Alms
The Biden administration extended the deadline for federal agencies to implement portions of a Trump-era executive order aimed putting less reliance on educational attainment in federal hiring.
The executive order, one aspect of former President Donald Trump s workforce policy that has not been rescinded by executive action, has the goal of changing federal human resources practice to rely more on skills- and competency-based hiring rather than resumes and college degrees.
The order, issued June 26, 2020, directed agencies to put that aspect of the policy in to practice by the end of 2020. Now an memo from the Office of Personnel Management extends that deadline to Dec. 31, 2021 as the agency considers the policy.
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
Some of you are probably old enough to remember when the Democrats were making demands about getting “dark money” out of politics and closing the “revolving door” of lobbyists going in and out of plush government jobs. That was way back during (checks notes) the 2020 election. Sadly, how people campaign and how they govern are not always the same. One ethics rule regarding keeping lobbyists on the outside for a set period of time has already been taking a beating under the Biden White House and it may come as no surprise to learn that it’s being done at the behest of the labor unions. One official that Joe Biden tapped for a senior position at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) shouldn’t have been able to function in that job due to her prior work as a lobbyist for one of the largest government employee unions in the country. Alethea Predeoux’s job as a lobbyist should have barred her from communicating with her old clients at the Americ