Random Excerpts

Assess the misalignment of VHA facilities and rising infrastructure costs. The VHA operates 172 inpatient medical facilities nationally that are an average of 60 years old. Some of these facilities are underutilized and inadequately staffed. Facilities in certain urban and rural areas are seeing significant declines in the veteran population and strong competition for fresh medical staff.

EXIM boasts an extremely low default rate, but that is because of selection bias. EXIM overwhelmingly takes on low-risk projects that private banks would be happy to finance, although this admittedly could change somewhat with EXIM’s Biden-era mandates to finance climate and other policy-focused projects.

• While individual pesticide registrations are considered adjudications and not reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), consistent with a 1993 OMB guidance, when pesticide tolerances and registrations are withdrawn by the agency (as opposed to being withdrawn voluntarily by registrants), these actions should undergo coordinated interagency review managed by OMB.

“Localization” is a buzzword within the aid community but correctly assumes that more funding through local organizations produces better aid outcomes. Shifting from giant U.S.-based implementers has proved difficult to achieve, however, given intense internal bureaucratic resistance; opposition from the aid industrial complex; and foot-dragging from progressives, who view local NGOs—especially faith-based NGOs prominent in Africa and Latin America—as obstacles to promoting abortion, gender radicalism, climate extremism, and other woke ideas.

2. Codify language to instruct senior military officers (three and four stars) to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda. This direction should be reinforced during the Senate confirmation process. Orders and direction motivated by purely partisan motives should be identified as threats to readiness.

FHA leadership should increase the mortgage insurance premium (MIP) for all products above 20-year terms and maintain MIP for all products below 20-year terms and all refinances. FHA should encourage wealth-building homeownership opportunities, which can be accomplished best through shorter-duration mortgages.* Ideally, Congress would contemplate a fundamental revision of FHA’s statutory restriction of single-family housing mortgage insurance to first-time homebuyers.*° This would include (with support from HUD leadership):

• The President should direct the attorney general to defend the FEC in all litigation when there is a failure of the commissioners to authorize the general counsel of the agency to defend it. No legislation would be needed to accomplish this; the DOJ has the general authority to defend the government and its agencies in all litigation.

housing model. At best, any new public investments will provide maintenance funds to bring substandard housing units and properties up to livability standards but will still fail to address larger aims of upward mobility and dynamism for local housing markets where land can be sold by PHAs and put to greater economic use, thereby benefiting entire local economies through greater private investment, productivity and employment opportunities, and increased tax revenue.

Export subsidies are a mercantilist illusion, based on the illogical proposition that a nation can raise its employment and GNP by giving away its goods for less than what it costs to make them.... Export subsidies subtract from GNP and jobs, not expand them.... Moreover, in 1981, the EXIM’s practice was to bestow about two thirds of its subsidies on a handful of giant manufacturers, including Boeing aircraft, General Electric, and Westinghouse.’

Streamline the non-law enforcement functions within the FBI, such as its Office of General Counsel, and obtain those services from other offices within the department. The next conservative Administration should eliminate any offices within the FBI that it has the power to eliminate without any action from Congress.** For example, few Americans know that the FBI maintains a core of approximately 300 attorneys within its Office of General Counsel, an office that has been involved in some of the FBI’s most damaging recent scandals.*° These attorneys are not necessary to the functioning of the FBI in their current capacity. Legal advice should come from attorneys at the DOJ, whether those attorneys are within the Criminal Division, the National Security Division, the Justice Management Division, or the Office of Legal Counsel. Moving legal review outside the FBI would serve as a crucial check on an agency that has recently pushed past legal boundary after legal boundary. Similarly, the FBI does not need its own Office of Congressional Affairs separate and apart from the DOJ Office of Legislative Affairs, nor does it need its own Office of Public Affairs.