Professor Lynne Weikart, PhD

 January 25, 2025 Trump has fired seventeen independent Inspectors General, flouting a law passed in 2022 that requires 30-days notice and explanation of the firing to be given to Congress,  according to Reuters. The dismissals appeared to violate federal law, which requires the president to give both houses of Congress reasons for the dismissals 30 days in advance. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An inspector general is an independent position that conducts audits and investigations into allegations of waste, fraud and abuse of power. Agencies are pressing ahead with orders from Trump, who returned to the presidency on Monday, to   reshape the federal bureaucracy   by scrapping diversity programs, rescinding job offers and sidelining more than 150 national security and foreign policy officials. According to Meidas Touch,  the firing happened after the Pete Hegseth confirmation to Secretary of State because Senator Chuck Gra...

 January 25, 2025 " Atul Gawande, a former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and former United States Agency for International Development official, took to social media over the weekend to sound the alarm.  "I ran USAID health programs for the last 3 years. Trump’s 90 day Stop Work Order on foreign assistance does serious damage to the world and the US," Gawande said. "Citing some purported "examples," Gawande said the stop work order "stops work battling a deadly Marburg outbreak in Tanzania and a wide outbreak of a mpox variant killing children in west Africa before it spreads further," "stops monitoring of bird flu in 49 countries, a disease which already killed an American on home soil," "stops critical work to eradicate polio," and even "stops >$1B in corporate drug donations and coordination eradicating tropical diseases like river blindness, elephantiasis, and others on the verge of elimination ...

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is a terrible program. What is it? It is the principal path the federal government adopted to provide low-income housing except it doesn't. LIHTC birthed in Reagan's infamous tax bill of 1986, gave  private investors  "a federal income tax credit as an incentive to make equity investments in affordable rental housing." If a developer agrees to 20 percent of the units being so called low-income, then the developer is eligible for the tax credit for those units. However, there are two major flaws: the units are not really low-income and the entire program disappears after 30 years when the developer can charge market rates.  LIHTC became the brainchild of the real estate industry that was desperate to stop the construction of public housing in which the real estate sages could not profit. And stop it they did. Now, almost 40 years later, even liberal think tanks, like the Urban Institute, will laud the successes of LIHTC. After...

 I am writing a second edition to my first book, Follow the Money, and have found interesting events that I had never heard or read about before. My book is an examination of how New York City mayors responded to the demands of federal and state officials as well as financial elites to the city's 1975 fiscal crisis in which city officials were forced to reduce the city's expenditures in order to balance the budget and avoid bankruptcy. Before I write about an interesting event, let me discuss the two political theories are often used to explain decision making around city resources. The first competing theory is pluralism.  The best example of a community power study examining liberal pluralism is Robert Dahl’s famous study of New Haven, Connecticut, Who Governs ?  Dahl concluded that there were multiple centers of power in which groups would come together in different configurations for a particular urban issue. In effect, there are a collection of interest groups all s...

 Reinvent Albany , a NY nonpartisan organization advocating open government, has called upon the NYS legislature to allow the State's Public Authorities Budget Office (ABO) oversight over the NYC's Public Housing Authority. Who knew that the ABO did not? Most people did not know that NYCHA had been conveniently left out of the authorities for which the ABO had oversight. Only the serious policy wonks knew about this slight quirk that all municipal housing authorities had been left out of ABO's jurisdiction. How many public authorities are there in the State of New York? In December 2019, the State Senate Committee on Investigations and Government Operations led by Senator James Skoufis issued a critique of the current law s governing public authorities. "As of July 2019, there are 583 active public authorities, an increase of 298, or by 126 percent, since July 2008, when the ABO issued its first annual report." "The current inventory of covered public autho...

  Jamelle Bouie wrote a column in the New York Times today about Rudy Giuliani and he titled it - "Giuliani Was Always Like This." Bouie recounted the famous scene in 1992 at City Hall when Giuliani spoke to thousands of police officers rioting over African American Mayor Dinkins supporting the Civilian Review Board.  Giuliani supported the police and spoke disparaging about Dinkins. This was not the only incident in which Giuliani aligned himself with racist's cops who shouted - "a n***** mayor," or "the mayor's on crack." Other incidents of Giuliani's racism were ignored. He refused to meet with African American political officials, such as NYS Comptroller Carl McCall and Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields. He spoke pejorative remarks about Al Sharpton.  When Giuliani ran against Dinkins for mayor, he consistently linked Dinkins to Jesse Jackson.  Barry Feinstein , the powerful president of New York’s Teamsters Local 237,  told   Th...

  Recently, I came across one more way investors are making large profits through charter schools. New York State passed a law requiring charter schools to be nonprofit. Although that is certainly making policy in the right direction, when it comes to real estate, don't ever underestimate how real estate interests can rip off the taxpayer. The NYC school system is required by state law to reimburse charter schools for the cost of its leases if the Department of Education cannot house the charter school in a DOE facility.  No other school district in the state is required to house or reimburse charter schools, just the city. Garvin Healy, a CEC2 member, has written an expose of these leases. Per NYS law, 30 percent of a charter school's per pupil funding can be spent on real estate and facility needs. This amounts to almost $5,500. The more students, the higher the real estate budget and the amount per pupil has more than doubled since 2014. So an LLC buys a building, leases it...