The Red Tape Roundup — October 11, 2026
This week’s editor’s note goes somewhere unexpected: MySpace, Farmville, getting banned from Truth Social twice, and why social media is a necessary evil when you’re trying to get people to actually read government reports. Plus: FOIA updates, the week’s most-read, and what’s coming next week.
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Amtrak Was Born a Fiction, and Fifty Years Later Nobody Has Fixed It
When Congress chartered Amtrak in 1970, the planners writing ‘organized for profit’ into the founding law privately doubted the claim. Fifty-five years and more than 50 billion dollars in subsidies later, Amtrak’s own former chief executives cannot agree with the railroad’s own accounting about which routes actually lose money —…
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Fed Minutes Reveal AI Boom Is Becoming a Monetary-Policy Problem
The Federal Reserve’s September meeting minutes show the AI infrastructure boom increasingly influencing inflation, capital markets and the debate over how high interest rates need to go.
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Twenty Two Years, Three Audits, One Excuse.
The Social Security Administration’s student benefits program has failed the same audit three times since 2004 — for the same three reasons — and agreed to fix it each time. The dollar figures keep climbing.
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The VA Has a Three Day Rule for Specialty Care. Mental Health Waited Ten.
A VA OIG audit finds mental health, neurosurgery, and cardiology requests for services miss the three day decision standard more often, and by wider margins, than almost any other specialty.
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The Agreement Washington Won’t Let Anyone Update
A State OIG inspection of Embassy Guatemala City finds a frozen Letter of Agreement, unconducted joint evaluations INL was already caught skipping once, and a resource management ledger of seismic gaps, misclassified property, and quietly absorbed IT costs.
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Federal Register Watch: October 9, 2026
An emergency order defers diesel taxes under a statute written for disasters, not price spikes, while a Texas nuclear-and-AI campus clears its first environmental hurdle and the Air Force reopens review of the Sentinel missile program. Plus the Gulf of America’s third lease sale under the reconciliation bill and a…
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Forty Six Percent of Alaska’s Village Water Systems Have Nobody Watching Them
GAO finds 46 percent of Alaska Native village water systems lacked a certified operator in fiscal year 2025, a gap tied directly to two 2025 E. coli contamination events and a 2024 sewage overflow failure.
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The Government That Isn’t: How America Outsourced Its Regulators
The NYSE is a private company. So is FINRA’s parent structure, and so, functionally, are the bodies that license lawyers, doctors, and accountants across the country. A look at the self-regulatory organizations quietly running American professional life under a government veto they rarely use.
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When the Smoke Alarm Undercounts, OMB Pulls the Battery
GAO says CIO risk ratings understate trouble on 24 of 53 major IT projects, and OMB, which has not responded, is retiring the Dashboard that displays them.
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USPS Said Its Lost-Mail Center Returned 39% of Packages. The Inspector General Found Less Than 1%
USPS reported a 39% return rate at its national lost-mail center. Its inspector general found the overall rate was below 1% — and that USPS had undercounted incoming packages by roughly 27 million.
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GAO Measured the Delay; A Judge Had Already Called It Illegal
A new GAO report clocks FEMA’s BRIC disaster mitigation grants at 7 to 9 months for review and an 11-month stretch with zero awards. What GAO calls a timeline, a federal judge had already called an unlawful termination.
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The Department Started Fixing Its Data, Then Fired the People Fixing It
The Department of Education started fixing a known flaw in its chronic absenteeism data in late 2024. Then the Institute of Education Sciences lost 85 percent of its staff. The fix was abandoned. The flaw is still publishing.
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Federal Register Watch: October 8, 2026
DHS wants to charge international students up to $70,000 for a single work permit, CBP is rebuilding the rules for low-value imports ahead of de minimis repeal, and the Army Corps just walked back a 23-year-old commitment to a full environmental review in Louisiana. Here’s what else was worth a…
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The Paperwork Costs More Than the Pipe
A tribal health consortium in Alaska estimates that routing federal water funding through USDA instead of a standard IHS-EPA interagency agreement adds nearly $100,000 in administrative overhead per project, versus about $15,000 with a standard agreement.
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