Congress is demanding answers after a review found that inspectors general—the federal officials charged with weeding out agency waste and fraud—are failing to police their own. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is asking the body with oversight of inspectors general across multiple agencies, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), to provide additional documents after the Government Accountability Office found that the council missed deadlines in completing investigations, discarded complaints that should be investigated, and failed to properly monitor potential conflicts of interest. The Daily Signal reported in June 2024 on allegations that the CIGIE Integrity Committee—an unelected body—was selectively investigating complaints against Trump-appointed Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari. This came after Cuffari issued numerous reports citing problems with the Biden administration’s border security policies. In September 2024, the House Oversight Committee sought a GAO investigation into the matter. Last week, House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., along with subcommittee chairmen Reps. Pete Sessions, R-Texas; Clay Higgins, R-La.; and Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., signed a letter to CIGIE Chairwoman Cheryl Mason, also the inspector general for the Department of Veterans Affairs, seeking more information and documents. “The issues identified raise serious questions about CIGIE’s ability to effectively conduct investigations into misconduct and wrongdoing within offices of inspectors general,” the lawmakers wrote. “The committee demands that CIGIE take immediate action to rectify these failures and is seeking documents and information to help determine the best legislative solutions to remedy concerns with CIGIE’s Integrity Committee.” The committee gave a July 15 deadline to provide documents that include a list of the actions the inspectors general council took to address the GAO findings, communications between the council’s staff and the Integrity Committee staff, and a plan of action to address the findings in the GAO report. As of Tuesday, the council has acknowledged receipt of the letter from the House, but has not yet responded. “These systemic failures force the committee to consider all options at its disposal, including removing or modifying the duty to investigate wrongdoing within offices of inspectors general from CIGIE,” House Republicans later added in the letter to Mason. “While the committee reviews potential changes to remedy these failures, it is imperative that CIGIE immediately improve its investigation processes to address the issues found by GAO.” The GAO report found that the council regularly missed the 150-day statutory deadline for completing an investigation, and that the minimum length for an investigation was 427 days, while the maximum was three years. It found just 24% of cases met all timeframe requirements. The report, released to the public in June, further faulted the Integrity Committee for “improper reviews that could discard complaints” that should be investigated. The GAO also noted that final investigative reports sometimes “did not reflect the conclusions reached by the investigating office of inspector general.” “Additionally, the IC did not always document required information in case summaries, including recusals of members with conflicts of interest,” the GAO report says. The report later makes eight recommendations that include “adhering to policy on conducting secondary reviews of potentially frivolous complaints; strengthening policies to enhance compliance with required time frames and documentation; improving statutorily required reporting to Congress; and providing full explanations for IC investigative conclusions that conflict with conclusions reached by assisting OIGs.” A CIGIE spokesperson did not respond to the Daily Signal for this story. Mason, the CIGIE chairwoman and a Donald Trump appointee at the Department of Veterans Affairs, wrote in response to a draft report that the committee agrees with the recommendations. “The IG community remains willing and open to discussing these challenges along with possible solutions or reforms with our congressional stakeholders,” Mason wrote to the GAO in response to the draft. Her letter was included in the final report. “CIGIE concurs in principle with all eight of the recommendations made by the GAO and provides suggestions for corrective actions for each.” She added, “A central limit is that the IC as currently construed does not conduct its own investigations and relies on assisting OIGs, each of which has its own resource constraints and competing priorities.”

Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, is taking issue with a new policy adopted by the Cincinnati City Council, the DEI Procurement Ordinance, calling it “potentially illegal and wasteful” in a July 2 letter to Democrat Mayor Aftab Pureval. Moreno went into detail about the waste involved, writing that “the DEI Procurement Ordinance expands an already bloated DEI bureaucracy at City Hall and creates a new office that will likely subject all the City of Cincinnati’s contracts to a DEI analysis.” “The City spends roughly three to five million dollars annually on DEI initiatives, grants, and departments with DEI policy objectives. These public dollars should be used to address real problems such as the City’s $30 million budget deficit or to protect citizens and businesses from violent crime,” Moreno continued. The text of the ordinance, No. 202601864, mentions ordaining a new “Department of Economic Inclusion and Procurement” and also references “an Equitable Opportunity to Compete for Contracts and Subcontracts.” Moreno insisted that the “City of Cincinnati must be a better steward of public funds.” He noted that he agrees with President Donald Trump that “DEI activities are not only unethical and often illegal, but also cause inefficiencies, waste, and abuse within entities that engage in such practices…[and] also create unnecessary costs by reducing the pool of available labor by artificially limiting companies to hiring or promoting certain individuals, suppliers, or intermediaries based on their race or ethnicity.” The president has signed multiple executive orders cracking down on diversity, equity, and inclusion within the federal government, including contractors. The Department of Justice is also involved, issuing a memorandum last July for “recipients of federal funding regarding unlawful discrimination.” Last month, the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s disparate-impact guidelines violate the Constitution, as they “pressured employers to engage in racial discrimination.” Moreno urged Pureval to “review these documents,” as the City “receives significant federal funds.” Citing the ordinance itself, the senator pointed out that the City “[a]mazingly” offers quite the admission with an explanation that the “goal of this restructuring is not to reduce the City’s focus on inclusion. Instead, it is intended to strengthen it.” “Additionally, the adoption of this Ordinance represents a gross misallocation of resources at a time when the city faces a surge in violent crime, including multiple recent homicides, a mass shooting, and a persistent law enforcement recruitment crisis that undermines public safety,” Moreno also wrote. “Instead of fueling divisive social experiments, these public funds should be redirected to protecting Cincinnatians and restoring order to Ohio’s streets.” The senator is looking for a response providing the exact amount of federal funds that Cincinnati received for fiscal years 2024, 2025, and 2026; the projected cost of the ordinance; the process for which the Department of Economic Inclusion and Procurement will seek applications, review, and award contracts; how the city is complying with the DOJ memorandum mentioned above; and the city’s most recent law enforcement professional staffing data. Moreno was vocal about Cincinnati last year, raising concerns about a brutal beatdown that left a woman severely injured. The story gained national attention, including from the DOJ. Of seven suspects arrested, five ultimately pled guilty. Cincinnati has also been plagued by concerns this year, including mayhem on baseball’s Opening Day and a damning investigative report out against now former Police Chief Teresa A. Theetge that led to her dismissal. Theetge has since appealed to get her job back. The Daily Signal reached out to the mayor’s office but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.   On July 3, the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani—and I don’t quite know why the mayor seems to think he speaks for the entire nation—but he wanted to give a Fourth of July speech to the nation at large. It wasn’t a speech; it was an indictment.  And what I could condense his speech [down to], it was essentially that America was ruled by white racists, and they had been very unfair in the past to everyone but themselves, including people, as he said, quote-unquote, the rest of us. He included himself in the group of people supposedly who had calloused hands, who did the work, but they were not paid fairly, or they got the raw end of the deal in a racist and unfair America.  He also said it was based, it being privilege, was based on the right shade of skin and the right accent. And again, he included himself as if he had been a victim.   There’s two things about Mamdani everybody should remember. One, he’s very, very wealthy, and he’s very, very privileged. Two, he’s very racist.  Let me explain. Mamdani comes from the 1% expatriate, what he would call in Marxist terms, settler colonialists that went to Uganda to get rich. And today they only constitute about 60,000 or 70,000 people in a multimillion-person country, but they control 60% of the GDP. So he came from Uganda, and he came to the United States.  His father is an endowed professor at Columbia University, very richly paid. His mother is a subsidized—very successful, though—filmmaker. Both of them have expressed, like their son, Mamdani, anti-American sentiments, even though they came as immigrants asking the host to welcome them, which we did. She’s also a beneficiary of millions of dollars from illiberal Qatar, who pays a lot of her tabs.  As far as race goes, there has been no one who is more racially insensitive than Zohran Mamdani.   Let me explain. He said that he wanted to go into white, whiter neighborhoods and tax them—whiter, richer neighborhoods. If he really wants to go in and tax richer neighborhoods, I don’t know what he means by tax, then why did he have to say white?  If he thinks that rich people are all white people, the largest poverty group in the United States are white. The richest ethnic group is Zohran Mamdani’s Indian Americans. They have the highest per capita and highest per family income. He could have said then, if he was not a racist, “We’re just gonna go in and look at richer neighborhoods,” or “We’re going …”  If he wanted to talk about rich and race simultaneously and he wanted to be honest, he [would have] said, “We’re gonna go in and look at richer and more Indian American groups like my own, who are the richest in the United States.” Of course, he wouldn’t do that.  He’s also said that AIPAC, a Jewish advocacy group, are monsters.  He doesn’t say that CAIR or any Muslim group or any other group. Only Jews are monstrous. He had a housing secretary, a person who’s in charge, or would be in charge, of all public housing in New York—thousands of apartments. She said housing is a weapon of white supremacy. I don’t know what that means.  Apparently, she thinks too many white people have saved, put down a down payment, make their mortgage payments regularly and in full, and therefore they exercise white supremacy. I don’t know what she means about that.   She’s also said that she doesn’t want to see any more whites in office platforms. In other words, she wants to adjudicate who is running New York by the color of their skin.  Remember, this comes from a man who lectured us about the shades of people’s skin. He had an appointment secretary who has a long name, but I’ll just shorten it to Catherine Da Costa. She had said on other occasions that whites must be defeated.  Imagine if you had—if any other mayor said blacks must be defeated, or Asians must be defeated, or Hispanics must be defeated.  That’s about as racist as you can get. This is Mamdani’s appointment secretary. She also termed Jews as money-hungry.  And then there’s Mamdani’s wife. I wouldn’t single her out, except that she’s playing a very prominent political role in his administration. After the October 7 massacre, she went on social media and said she liked over seventy different posts that celebrated the slaughter of twelve hundred Jews.  She offered illustrations for a book, a very anti-Semitic, hateful book, written by an author who had termed Jews ruthless ghouls and soulless vampires.  So what does all this mean? It means that leftists, when they lecture America, they’re usually projecting their own sins, as Mamdani is doing. He’s talking about America being racist when he has expressed more racist sentiment in his first six months in office than any mayor has in the history of New York.  And when they talk about people being exploited by a capitalist unfair system, they’re usually what? Racist and wealthy. Wealthy. The Mamdanis are multimillionaires. They were multimillionaires in Uganda, and when they came here, they got even richer.  And so when we look at these new democratic socialists and they start to lecture us on race or they lecture us on wealth, go back and look at their past, and what will we find?  That they’re racist themselves and they’re quite wealthy.   We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

PROVO, Utah, July 7 (Reuters)—Utah prosecutors showed a video on Tuesday that an investigator said showed the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk last year in a sniper’s position on the roof of a university campus building from which the prominent conservative activist was shot. The evidence was presented during the second day of a preliminary hearing in Provo, Utah, in which prosecutors are trying to convince District Court Judge Tony Graf to bring Tyler Robinson, 23, to trial. Investigators allege he shot Kirk from a rooftop at Utah Valley University while the right-wing activist and ally of President Donald Trump debated with students. Robinson faces seven criminal charges, including aggravated murder. Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty.   Utah investigator David Hull, testifying as the video was shown, said the images were recorded as the shot was fired, “and the individual then stands up and then moves across the building to the north.” Hull identified the person as Robinson.  Tyler Robinson's defense team was hit with a huge blow after the judge ruled prosecutors can play never-before-seen footage of his alleged movements on the day Charlie Kirk was killed. pic.twitter.com/Udxl8cTziB— New York Post (@nypost) July 7, 2026 The hearing, expected to last all week, is the first public test of prosecution evidence concerning Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination, one of a series of attacks that have intensified concern over U.S. political violence in recent years. Erika Kirk, his Charlie Kirk’s widow, was in the courtroom on Monday and Tuesday. Hull testified that surveillance videos showed Robinson making contact with representatives of Turning Point at the university on the day of the shooting. Videos all show him investigating access to the building from which the shot was fired and having lunch at a campus fast-food restaurant. In the early hours of the next day, a police officer stopped a vehicle Robinson was driving and took down its license plate number, Hull said. The encounter took place before law enforcement had identified him as a suspect, Hull said. The defense during the proceedings on Monday and Tuesday tried to raise doubt that Robinson was responsible by suggesting someone else may have been involved. On Tuesday, for example, defense lawyer Kathryn Nester asked Hull about a handgun found in a backpack on the campus after the shooting. Hull responded that the handgun was not determined to be evidence in the case. Robinson turned himself in to police the day after the shooting. He has not yet entered a plea. His lawyers have yet to comment on his guilt or innocence. Kirk, a co-founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was credited with energizing many young voters behind Trump’s campaign to regain the presidency in the 2024 U.S. election. Prosecutors are expected to present further evidence they say ties Robinson to the shooting, including statements he made to friends and relatives and DNA tests linking him to the alleged murder weapon. (Reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico; Editing by Donna Bryson and Will Dunham)

Every political movement eventually reveals what it truly believes. And when it does, voters have a choice to make. For years, Americans were told that the radical Left was little more than a noisy fringe, loud on social media but marginal in real life. That claim is now hard to sustain. Candidates aligned with or inspired by the Democratic Socialists of America are winning elections, shaping debates, and pulling the Democratic Party further from the mainstream. As Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., recently warned, “there are many Mamdanis popping up,” in reference to New York City’s far-left mayor. For Republicans, this is not only a warning sign. It is also an opportunity. The rise of the DSA and the broader radical left has created a widening gap between the Democratic Party’s activist base and many of its traditional voters. Millions of Americans who long considered themselves Democrats are discovering that the party is no longer the same as the one they joined. Political realignments begin when voters feel that their old political homes no longer reflect their values, concerns, or common sense. That is how Reagan Democrats emerged in the 1980s. It is how many blue-collar voters drifted away from a Democratic Party that seemed more interested in elite cultural causes than working families. As Ronald Reagan himself once quipped, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” A similar opening may now be developing. Many Jewish voters, for example, have supported Democrats for generations out of habit, conviction, and a belief that the party stood firmly against bigotry. But especially since the Hamas massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, many of them have watched with unease and horror as anti-Israel activism and outright antisemitism became more prominent in progressive politics. They have seen Jewish students harassed on campuses, anti-Zionist rhetoric treated as fashionable, and too many elected officials speak with moral ambiguity about Hamas when clarity was required. For many American Jews, this has been a painful awakening. Republicans should not assume that Jewish voters will abandon a century of voting patterns overnight. But they should recognize that a door has opened. The GOP can make the case that it is the party most committed to defending Israel, combating antisemitism, protecting religious liberty, and preserving the freedoms that have allowed Jewish life in America to flourish. But Jewish voters are only one part of a much larger political story. Across the country, millions of moderate Democrats increasingly feel politically homeless. They have never thought of themselves as conservatives, but they do believe in public safety. They want police to be supported, not vilified. They believe parents should have a meaningful voice in their children’s education. They want a strong economy, affordable energy, secure borders, and a government that lives within reasonable limits. They do not wake up thinking about revolutionary politics. They just want normalcy, stability, opportunity, and a country they can proudly pass on to their children. These voters are not unreachable. But they must be reached. That requires Republicans to do more than denounce socialism or mock the excesses of the left. It requires persuasion. Republicans need to speak to disaffected Democrats in a language that invites rather than alienates. Joining the GOP does not require having voted Republican one’s entire life. It does not require abandoning compassion, concern for the poor, or civic responsibility. It only requires recognizing that the supposedly good intentions of Democrats are no substitute for sound policy, and that a free society cannot survive if every institution is captured by ideology. The GOP should become the natural home for Americans who believe in ordered liberty, economic opportunity, strong families, religious freedom, public safety, and patriotism without apology. Reaching these people means showing up in communities Republicans have too often written off. It means speaking directly to Jewish voters and independents in New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and even California. It means addressing suburban parents ignored by school bureaucracies. It means talking to working-class Democrats who believe their party now cares more about academic slogans than grocery bills, crime, housing, and wages. Most of all, it means offering a positive vision. Voters rarely switch parties due to anger alone. They switch when they believe there is somewhere better to go. Republicans should resist making this moment only about what the Left has become. They must also explain what the Right has to offer: a country where hard work is rewarded, children are taught to love America, religious communities are respected, streets are safe, allies are defended, and government serves the people. When one party moves too far from the center of gravity of the American people, the other has a chance to build a new majority. But that opportunity will not seize itself. The rise of the DSA is bad for the Democratic Party and dangerous for the country. But it may also become the catalyst for a broader Republican coalition—one that brings together conservatives, Jews alarmed by antisemitism, moderates tired of extremism, parents fighting for their children, and traditional Democrats who still believe in the promise of America. The radical left is pushing them away. Republicans should now act to welcome them in. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.