It was an “unfathomable institutional failure.” As featured on Fox News, the Goldwater Institute has uncovered the failure of the federal government’s nearly $200 billion “COVID funding flood.” Instead of helping children, this “avalanche” of funds was used in part to fuel the agenda of the “union political machine,” according to a new policy report from Goldwater’s Matt Beienburg.
Using Arizona as a case study, the report shows the state’s public schools spent just $1 billion out of the more than $4 billion of their allocated federal COVID funds by the end of the 2020-2021 school year. This indicates the money has served a very different purpose than the one sold to taxpayers—to help safely reopen schools.
“This massive flood of funding has left public schools awash in cash, while students and taxpayers are left to deal with the…disaster unleashed by the union-prescribed COVID policies,” Beienburg, Director of the Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy and Director of Education Policy, tells Fox News. “Government policies needlessly ignited the most devastating disruption to student learning in a generation, then compounded this failure by pouring billions of extra taxpayer dollars into public schools that are now being used to fund non-COVID-related expenditures.”
Read Beienburg’s “COVID Funding Flood” report here, and read coverage of it in Fox News.
Where did the money actually go? New York’s Rye City School District—where officials forked over more than $31,000 to pay a vendor that conducts “equity audits” to tell schools how “unwoke” they are—won’t say, so Goldwater’s American Freedom Network (AFN) of pro bono attorneys is taking legal action to find out.
Goldwater initially submitted a public records request to expose how the district is spending taxpayer resources, but the district refused to release any communications that led to its decision. On Wednesday, Goldwater’s AFN filed a petition in New York Supreme Court to compel Rye to produce these records—as it is legally obligated to do.
Around the nation, public schools are often more interested in redirecting classroom funds to special interests that seek to indoctrinate students with toxic ideologies—and they’re making these decisions behind closed doors. That’s why Goldwater is working nationwide—with assistance from AFN attorneys—to shine a light on what’s happening in public school districts. For instance, we’ve developed a landmark academic transparency reform that would empower parents to find out what their children are learning. And we’ve designed Open My Government, a comprehensive, step-by-step, and state-by-state guide that outlines best practices for drafting well-defined requests for public information that are tailored to each state’s unique public records law. The Institute is helping Americans expose how the government is spending their money, and AFN attorneys stand ready to help citizens in any state access the information they’re entitled to.
Read more from Goldwater Legal Programs Manager Kamron Kompani at In Defense of Liberty.
Three summers and six waves into the COVID pandemic, a pair of oral antiviral drugs have been shown to greatly reduce the risk of hospitalization and death. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration isn’t letting enough people access them.
While most Americans live near a dispensing site for these treatments, residents of zip codes that the government considers to be the most vulnerable were 50 percent less likely to access the drugs compared to those in less vulnerable areas. Why? Consider the following checklist: patients must have on hand a positive COVID test result, a clinical assessment by a healthcare provider who’s licensed to prescribe the drug, an updated health record, a recent blood work report, and a list of all current medications.
The federal government’s “Test to Treat” program has removed some of the barriers to treatment, but Test to Treat facilities only account for 6 percent of all oral antiviral dispensing sites.
It’s been long enough. The FDA needs to remove bureaucratic red tape and put patients first.
Read more from Goldwater Healthcare Policy Analyst Amanda Hagerman at In Defense of Liberty.
We need your help: Vote Goldwater! When California teacher Kali Fontanilla discovered her public school was indoctrinating students with the lies of Critical Race Theory, she bravely blew the whistle in an exclusive Goldwater video. Now, the State Policy Network has selected that video as a Powerful Storytelling Finalist.
But we need loyal supporters like you to help us win by casting your vote for Goldwater. You can vote here. (Find our name under the section titled: “Pick your choice for 2022’s Powerful Storytelling Award.”) But hurry…voting closes on Friday, August 5, at 11:59 p.m. ET!
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