The Small Business Administration potentially made $11.5 million in improper payments to banks after overruling its own employees who had recommended reducing or denying government guarantees on 16 failed small-business loans.
For another 13 failed loans, SBA took so long to review them that the six-year statute of limitations expired, wasting another $5.4 million, according to an Aug. 27 inspector general report.
Key facts: SBA's 7(a) program helps startups with a risky business model get loans, but it does not generally lend taxpayer money directly. Private banks make loans of up to $5 million, and the government promises to cover as much as 85% of the loss if the borrower defaults.
But taxpayers only have to honor that guarantee when the bank follows SBA rules. If a bank failed to properly determine whether a borrower could repay the loan, verify required investments or follow other safeguards, SBA can reduce or deny the payout to the bank.
Auditors reviewed 32 failed loans where SBA employees recommended reducing or denying the payouts to banks, but higher-level reviewers later overturned those decisions.
For 16 of the 32 loans, auditors found insufficient evidence to justify the reversal, resulting in $11.5 million worth of potential improper payments. That included almost $4.9 million loaned to borrowers who never showed evidence they could repay the money.
One small business defaulted within 18 months. The bank argued that the small business had a sound strategy, but it failed due to the unforeseen loss of a major customer. The bank provided no evidence for its claim, but the SBA paid the guarantee anyway.
The SBA is also taking far too long to review high-risk loans, the audit found. The agency has only six years to sue a bank for violating the loan terms, but auditors found 13 loans where impropriety was not discovered until that deadline had passed. Two of them were not reviewed for more than 20 years after the loan guarantee was paid.
The SBA legally could have withheld other federal payments to the banks even after the six-year time limit expired, but the SBA has no process for doing so, the audit found.
SBA guaranteed $37 billion through 77,600 new 7(a) loans in fiscal year 2025.
Summary: A government loan guarantee is supposed to protect lenders from legitimate business failures, not protect them from following the rules. Taking 20 years to decide which is which leaves taxpayers holding the bag.
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com
Britain's latest public-order farce is not a machete fight, a rape gang or a phone-snatch. It is a man on a high street with a Bible.
Footage circulating Friday shows three female officers surrounding a Christian street preacher in a busy shopping precinct.
One of them looks like she should still be sitting exams at school. The other two hover, phones out, expressions tight, as if they have been sent to defuse a bomb.
The clip is eight minutes of modern Britain in micro. A member of the public reports being "offended" by words. Officers arrive and the preacher is treated as the problem.
The all inclusive term 'hate speech' is waved around and 'intimidation' is offered as the hook for an investigation. The man citing Scripture is expected to justify himself to people who appear unfamiliar with the very statutes they are leaning on.
This is not law enforcement. It is customer service for the emotionally fragile.
As we hear in the footage, Sections 4A and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 are the blunt instruments used again and again against street preachers.
Section 5 makes it an offence to use threatening or abusive words or behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress. "Insulting" was stripped out of Section 5 in 2013. There is a defence if the conduct was reasonable.
Section 4A is the heavier charge. It requires intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress, plus proof that harassment, alarm or distress was actually caused. Police guidance itself describes 4A as aimed at "more serious, planned and malicious incidents."
Yet here are yet more female police officers spewing those statutes at the guy as if they're citing parking restrictions.
Being offended by the Bible is not grounds for a public order offense. Reciting the Gospel in a public street is not automatically "threatening." Calling the encounter "intimidation" because a passer-by disliked the message does not conjure the mental element the statute demands. Courts have said as much, repeatedly, after officers have already cuffed, swabbed and bailed the preacher.
That distinction is lost on too many in uniform. In the new footage the officers look lost in it. One of them is literally a frightened child. The other two look scared of the conversation they started. The preacher is the only person on camera who appears to have read the law.
We've seen this all too often in Britain recently.
In another similar incident, a volunteer Met officer ordered 20-year-old gospel singer Harmonie London to stop performing "church songs" on Oxford Street, claiming she was "not allowed to sing church songs outside of church grounds."
The Met later apologised and admitted the officer "was mistaken," adding: "We're sorry for the offence caused and will take the learning forward."
There are many many more cases.
Pastor Dia Moodley was arrested in Bristol in November 2025 on suspicion of a religiously aggravated Section 4A offence and "inciting religious hatred" after preaching on Islam and transgender ideology.
He was held for eight hours and banned from the city centre over Christmas before the case collapsed.
"Avon and Somerset Police have arrested me twice because my lawful speech was seen as offensive to some Muslims and people with a progressive worldview," he said.
When a Muslim bystander later told him on camera, "If you do that again bro, we'll send the boys round," police filed it as "unpleasant" comments that "do not constitute an offence."
John Steele was arrested in Rotherham after a 30-second conversation about Quran 4:34 at a domestic-abuse stall. Charges were dropped as "not needed in the public interest."
Pastor Steve Maile was handcuffed in Watford and held for 12 hours; Hertfordshire Police confirmed a Section 5 public order investigation.
Shaun O'Sullivan has been arrested 16 times, including for saying "God bless you." A jury acquitted him after a six-day trial that cost an estimated £20,000.
Many such cases.
British Metropolitan Police Officer threatens to arrest Christian Preacher for speaking about God in the street.
"You might be committing offences. If you are making members of the public [feel] harassment, alarm and distress it's a criminal offence."
??? British Christian Preacher gets shut down in Manchester Shopping Centre by the Police because some of the 'locals' can't stand Christianity.
Are you happy with this Britain? Really think if you're ok with the Police treating a British Christian who has probably preached... pic.twitter.com/6rJ8jxS5Y2
A Christian preacher this afternoon was arrested at Southgate station London N14 for preaching about Jesus . @CConcern the police told him it's because public had said he was being islamophobic . We have the full video and wondered when preaching was now illegal ? @Campaign4Tpic.twitter.com/ZxC1DhlZCf
A Christian street preacher threatened with arrest by police because he speaks peacefully through a sound system!! Christians are repeatedly arrested for using speakers to share the Gospel peacefully (Bristol 2024, Glastonbury 2024,... pic.twitter.com/ywnslHt4WZ
? BREAKING: PREACHING THE GOSPEL NOW A CRIME IN MODERN LONDON? ?
Shocking scenes as a Christian preacher is CIRCLED by multiple Met Police officers - and THREATENED WITH ARREST - for simply sharing the Word of God on the streets of London.
Met Police stand watching a Christian preacher in "Modern London", waiting for him to say something from the Bible that may "offend" Muslims to confront him with.
This is not a handful of confused constables. It is policy.
And who exactly is calling the police to report being 'intimidated'?
In February, a lone female Met officer in Whitechapel, was surrounded by angry men insisting "This is a Muslim area," after a Christian preacher dared to recite the gospel.
In a refreshing change, the officer told the men "In this country, we have freedom of speech."
She added: "I understand that you guys don't want to hear it, so I would just recommend that you walk away and don't listen to him. He's not in your home." That officer understood the job. Too many of her colleagues do not.
This is part of a wider crackdown on speech in general.
At least 62,199 people were arrested for communications offences between 2021 and 2025 - roughly 34 a day. Only about one in five of those cases ends in a conviction.
Big Brother Watch's Silkie Carlo called it "an Orwellian mess" and said people have been arrested "for holding blank pieces of paper."
Lord Toby Young asked why authorities police tweets while shoplifting, phone theft and sexual offences rise.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp put it simply: "Police shouldn't be wasting time on the internet. They should be catching real criminals."
After the 2024 Southport riots, police stood up a National Internet Intelligence Investigations team to flag "protest-related" posts to local forces. More than 100 referrals followed. Nigel Farage called it "the beginning of the state controlling free speech."
On the street the same instinct now wears a high-vis jacket. Offence becomes "intimidation." A Bible becomes a public-order risk. Officers who cannot explain Section 4A still feel entitled to demand names and deliver a public grilling.
Anyone who still assumes the person in the uniform knows the statute should watch another clip making the rounds: security guards outside a migrant hotel fail to display SIA licences - a criminal offence under the Private Security Industry Act - and the attending officer's response, after being walked through the law, is: "He's breaking the law. What am I supposed to do?"
This is the depressing reality of the situation. Quote the Act at them and they freeze. Point to an actual offence by the state's preferred clients and they shrug. Send three young women to lecture a preacher because someone felt intimidated by Scripture, and they treat the complaint as gospel.
Keir Starmer told JD Vance last year: "We've had free speech for a very very long time in the United Kingdom and it will last for a very very long time." The high street footage says otherwise. So do the 62,000 speech arrests. So does the officer who looks like a child, standing between a Bible and a country that no longer trusts its own laws.
Freedom of speech that dies the moment someone claims offence is not freedom.
Talyn Vigil, awaiting trial for the 2023 death of 16-year-old Preston Lord, was charged with reckless driving and racing on the highway before being released on a $5,000 bond Thursday night, according to court records viewed by The Post.
Vigil, 20, was caught by police doing burnouts, racing and recklessly driving on a motorcycle alongside another driver as they flew down the streets near the campus of Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., ABC 15 reported.
“Both men were observed by police officers splitting traffic, performing burnouts while stopped at intersections, and participating in an exhibition of speed, including drag racing and disregarding Arizona traffic laws,” Tempe police told the outlet. “Their actions demonstrated a flagrant and reckless disregard for the safety of other motorists.”
Talyn Vigil appears in an Arizona court after he was arrested for reckless driving and drag racing on a motorcycle in Tempe on Sept. 18, 2026. Vigil was held overnight before he was bonded out of jail, according to the court records.AZFamily
A judge revoked his driving privileges, but the snooty murder suspect tried to come up with an excuse for his behavior.
“I honestly, I agree with you,” Vigil said in court Friday, according to AZFamily. “So you guys take it, completely OK with me because I don’t … I’m not going to say anything, you know, but wasn’t my fault, and I’m honestly going to stay off of driving myself.”
Vigil has since been arrested two other times before Thursday night.
He first violated a protection order against him when he was caught making in-person contact and electronic communication, ignoring the release conditions he was under, in September 2025, ABC15 reported.
Talyn Vigil was one of seven teens arrested and charged in the murder of Preston Lord at a Halloween party in 2023. Maricopa County Sheriff's Office
The then-19-year-old was then arrested in February for another reckless driving charge.
Vigil has been under house arrest and electronically monitored as part of his release conditions for Lord’s murder.
Vigil was arrested in March 2024 and charged with kidnapping and murder in the fatal beating of Lord during a Halloween party in Queen Creek, Ariz., on Oct. 28, 2023.
Talyn Vigil has been arrested three times since he was released to house arrest in Lord’s murder case, twice for reckless driving and another for violating a protection order. USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
Vigil was among seven teens arrested in connection to Lord’s death. Treston Billey, William “Owen” Hines, Jacob Meisner, Talan Renner, Taylor Sherman and Dominic Turner also face charges. AZFamily
Vigil was among seven teens arrested in connection to Lord’s death. Treston Billey, William “Owen” Hines, Jacob Meisner, Talan Renner, Taylor Sherman and Dominic Turner also face charges.
Vigil, Renner and Meisner were charged as adults.
Vigil allegedly confessed to a friend over Snapchat that he was a part of the fatal attack.
“I hit a kid and this kid hit his head,” Vigil said to the unidentified, according to police. “And then they kicked his head in the ground and then I got word he died so idk.”
Hines is the only suspect who took a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
All other defendants are awaiting trial set for November.
But in this case, we mean the evident bilking of taxpayers.
As the California Post recently reported: Per the project’s own inspector general, high-speed rail consultants collected more than $680,000 in dubious travel reimbursements — including for first-class plane tickets, international jaunts and rides to places like gyms, tiki rooms and nightclubs.
Taxpayers even covered bills for a flight via private aircraft, Uber Black luxury service, and rides from clubs at 2:30 a.m.
That’s galling — and yet another reason to bring the troubled project to a halt.
California’s high-speed rail experiment, dubbed “the train to nowhere” for its uselessness, has failed.
Among the lowlights: a “shadow government” of consultants that effectively ran the troubled project and approved their own work — detailed in a blistering 2018 California State Auditor report.
Now, the California High Speed Rail Authority admits, again, that it lets consultants run the asylum.
Construction of the San Joaquin River Viaduct, an approximately 4,700-foot structure that will span the San Joaquin River and the Union Pacific tracks parallel to State Route 99, is seen on Wednesday, July 5, 2017, in Fresno, California. The high-speed train is supposed to run between SF and Anaheim at a cost of $64 billion. Getty Images
While the authority has failed to curb consultants gone wild, the project’s budget is untenable: High-speed rail is projected to run dry of cash in 2027, the audit found.
Who can justify pouring more tax money into this mess?
At least one candidate for governor gets it: Steve Hilton, on the ballot Nov. 3, has pledged to halt taxpayer funding for the project on day one if elected.
State and federal taxpayers already have lavished up to $15 billion, combined, on the debacle — with no tracks, no trains and no rail travel to show for it.
Current estimated price tag for the project: $231 billion.
Compare that to what state voters were promised in 2008: a bullet train that would whisk riders from San Francisco to LA in two hours and 40 minutes, to be built for no more than $45 billion and completed by 2020.
A virtual rendering shows the California High-Speed Rail project. California High-Speed Rail Authority
To call that a joke is too charitable.
In 2026, the project inches along as a wasteful, pitiful, downsized shell of those promises.
Seven years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom all but vowed to scrap it, only to backtrack and settle for (dreams of) abbreviated rail from Merced to Bakersfield. He went on to install cronies at the rail authority in May of this year.
This is the same Newsom who in 2014 said the project fudged numbers to keep tax money rolling in: The then-lieutenant gov called ridership projections “wildly overstated” and revenue figures “manipulated.”
Well. Is it any wonder the project’s a laughingstock?
Yet despite all the failure, all the shrunken ambition and all the ridicule — Newsom & Co. won’t consign the mess to the scrap heap.
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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