Fast Takes: How govt begs to be scammed, pushing quack gender medicine and other commentary

Minnesota nonprofit Feeding Our Future’s fraud “was not sophisticated,” gripes Jay Rogers at the Washington Examiner.It used “a stolen identity” to form “an LLC through a state process that verifies almost nothing,” and then enrolled “in a government program” and billed “for services that were inflated or invented.” This required no “mastermind,” just “a government willing to pay first and ask questions never.” “Programs that pay first and verify later” will attract scammers; for a true fix, require “real identity and entity verification before the check goes out,” “independent, third-party auditing,” and “real consequences for officials who ignore audit findings.” Taxpayers can’t undo this fraud but “can demand their government stop manufacturing more of it.”While not “a formal legal monopoly on psychology education,” the American Psychological Association “exerts near monopolistic influence on professional training across clinical, counseling, and school psychology,” notes Joseph Figliolia at City Journal.

And so “the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity should take a long look” at the APA, from it “detailed position statements on gender medicine” to its flagship journal’s recent “special issue on ‘anti-trans’ legislation.” Note the APA’s “dismissal of good-faith criticism of the weak evidence for youth gender medicine as simply ‘misinformation,’ and all opposition to medically transitioning minors as ‘discrimination.’ ” These “political commitments” likely “trickle down into APA accredited programs,” undermine the “field’s professional ethical norms” and fail “to advance the interests of their patients.”When they “voiced concerns” over age-inappropriate school-library books, Crystal Marull & Vicki Baggett recount at The Hill, they “were vilified” — even after one of them earned a “library media specialist c...