Federal Programs

Responding to Ohio State University history professor and author Steven Conn's Op-Ed article on Tuesday examining the history of the federal government's relationship with the private sector, reader Barry DuRon wrote: "Conn sets up a straw man and dismantles it. I see no evidence that Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and other Republicans 'insist that the federal government is the mortal enemy of the private sector.' No serious Republican claims there...

PHOENIX - Lilia Romo will tell you plainly: She didn't ask for this fight, but now that the immigration war has been declared in this politically conservative state, the confident 24-year-old says she intends to win it. Romo was brought to the U.S. from Mexico by people her mother hired 20 years ago. All she recalls about the adventure is that the man who drove her illicitly across the border plied her and her two cousins with candy to keep them...

"I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are and what my beliefs are. It's inspired me so much that it's required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. " - Rep. Paul Ryan, Republican vice presidential candidate, in a 2005 speech Paul Ryan laughed. He stood naked on top of the vice president's desk in the Senate chamber, scanning the crowd of sniveling politicians below him. He flexed his muscles, the result of hours spent in the House gymnasium.

Facing his best chance at legal status in the United States, Alan Valdivia struggled to answer some basic questions about himself. When did his family bring him here from Mexico? At what age? By what route? Valdivia, a 19-year-old UC Riverside student, was one of hundreds to appear Wednesday at the offices of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles seeking help in applying for work permits. Tens of thousands more like him lined up nationwide on the first day of a new federal program that would allow people who were brought here illegally as children to defer deportation and obtain work permits provided they meet certain criteria, such as no serious criminal record.

Federally funded community health centers perform equal to or better than private practices on a number of quality-care measures, according to a new study. The results demonstrate that community health centers are capable of providing high-quality care to an often complex patient population. When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act goes into full effect in 2014, the government hopes it will add somewhere between 29 million and 32 million Americans to the rolls of the insured, many of whom will receive their care through a large expansion of Medicaid.

A $7.6-billion federal program to help homeowners avert foreclosure set too few goals for the 18 participating states and didn't do enough to make sure the nation's biggest banks were on board, according to a government audit. The audit criticized the Treasury Department for rolling out the Hardest Hit Fund with no advance notice in February 2010, then leaving the states to implement it on their own. The report by a special inspector general pointed out that it took seven months before the government met with the states, banks and mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to make sure everyone was participating in the program.

Ever since the Democratic Congress passed President Obama's healthcare law, critics have focused their ire on the requirement that all Americans have health insurance beginning in 2014. But some legal experts believe - and progressives worry - the Supreme Court's conservatives will instead target another mandate in the new law: the requirement that states expand the Medicaid rolls and provide subsidized healthcare for as many as 17 million more low-income people. On Wednesday, the third day of oral arguments on the law, 26 Republican-led states will argue that the federal pressure to expand Medicaid to all low-income Americans violates states' rights.

For the second time in as many years, the House Republican leadership has put forward a deficit-cutting budget plan that's more of a political statement than a governing blueprint. The proposed budget for fiscal 2013 promotes a long list of conservative policies that are only tangentially related to the federal fisc - for example, repealing new federal restrictions on Wall Street and ending the moratorium on offshore oil drilling. Even the proposals that are purely fiscal in nature rely on changes in law that Senate Democrats won't support, such as repealing the 2010 healthcare reform law. But then, the annual budgets proposed by the White House are largely political documents too. Besides, the author of the Republican resolution, Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.)

In a rare display of bipartisanship, the Senate approved a $109-billion transportation bill Wednesday that boosts Los Angeles' efforts to speed expansion of its bus and rail system. The measure passed 74 to 22, underscoring the political appeal of a bill that supporters say will create jobs and reduce traffic congestion. The bill, possibly one of the few major pieces of legislation that could be signed into law before the fall election, maintains the current level of funding for highway and transit projects for two years.

Citigroup Inc. is paying $158 million to settle accusations that it took advantage of a federal mortgage insurance program. In a settlement with the Justice Department, Citi admitted that it provided misleading information about the quality of its mortgages to a federal insurance program run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The government provided backing for the mortgages and ended up losing millions when the borrowers defaulted. In the complaint filed Wednesday as part of the settlement, the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan said CitiMortgage violated the rules of the Federal Housing Administration insurance program for six years until it was subpoenaed in July.