New York City is throwing out tens of thousands of low-level summonses issued by the NYPD, with the department’s reliance on pen-and-paper ticketing contributing to the problem, according to Gothamist.
Of roughly 98,000 civil summonses issued by police during the last fiscal year, about 46,000 were dismissed by the city’s administrative court system, according to data obtained by Gothamist. That works out to roughly 47%.
The tickets stem from offenses such as drinking alcohol in public, public urination, illegal vending and pedicab violations. Many never survive the administrative process because of paperwork problems rather than the underlying allegation.
The NYPD remains unusual among city agencies because officers still issue civil summonses entirely by hand. That can produce everything from unreadable writing and incorrect violation codes to omitted details and mistakes made when paper records are later entered into city databases.
Example of civil summons (Gothamist)City watchdogs flagged the issue years ago. A 2020 Department of Investigation review recommended moving agencies away from paper summonses and toward digital ticketing. The NYPD at one point agreed to make the transition but has yet to implement an electronic system.
Gothamist writes that other departments have already moved in that direction. The Department of Buildings now issues about 80% of its summonses electronically. Its dismissal rate last fiscal year was approximately 13%, far below the NYPD’s 47%.
Government transparency and legal advocates argue the current system burns administrative resources while requiring people to contest tickets that may be invalid from the outset. City Councilmember Gale Brewer is considering legislation that could force the NYPD to switch to electronic summonses.
The NYPD maintains that officers are properly enforcing the law and says many of the dismissed cases failed because of procedural or paperwork errors rather than the substance of the alleged violations. The department says additional officer training is underway to reduce those mistakes.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 20:30Authored by Jackson Richman via The Epoch Times,
The Pentagon is changing its process for promoting generals, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced on Sept. 22.
Hegseth announced the new process, known as the Joint Warfighter Evaluation, in a video posted on X.
Today, I am announcing the Joint Warfighter Evaluation. pic.twitter.com/F0JIfbmEKs
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) September 22, 2026Its goal is to reduce bureaucracy and ensure meritocracy across senior ranks, he said.
Starting this year, colonels and Navy captains screening to be a one-star general will undergo the assessment, according to Hegseth.
“While the backbone of our military is our NCOs and our petty officers, victory depends on the commanders who lead them,” he said.
“America needs warfighters who can master a chaotic battle space.”
Hegseth cited Gen. George Marshall using the Louisiana Maneuvers, a massive series of military exercises to prepare U.S. forces before entering World War II.
He said that this kind of testing brought out military leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower, who planned and conducted the U.S. invasion of Normandy and led the liberation of Western Europe; Adm. Chester Nimitz, who led Allied air, land and sea in the Pacific theater during World War II; and Army Gen. Omar Bradley, the first chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who led the U.S. military’s policymaking during the Korean War.
The Joint Warfighter Evaluation “brings that standard to the modern multi-domain fight,” Hegseth said.
“This evaluation is an objective equalizer. The scenario only cares about operational decisions under pressure.”
Hegseth recalled that a year ago he tasked Stuart Scheller, deputy chief of staff to the under secretary of war for personnel and readiness, to challenge years of the promotion process.
“Our troops deserve commanders chosen by proven competence, not paper credentials,” Hegseth said.
“The Joint Warfighter Evaluation ensures our flag is carried by our most lethal and most adaptable leaders.”
Hegseth has emphasized what he calls the “warrior ethos,” pushing for battle-ready personnel based on a high level of fitness. He has criticized what he said has been diversity, equity, and inclusion standards in promoting individuals.
“Real toxic leadership is endangering subordinates with low standards. Real toxic leadership is promoting people based on immutable characteristics or quotas instead of based on merit,” Hegseth told senior military leaders last year in Quantico, Virginia.
While the process of promotion to general is being changed, the Joint Warfighter evaluation is not replacing the existing promotion process, Scheller told Fox News Digital. Rather, it is a factor in addition to performance reports and an officer’s career record.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 20:05Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that about 750,000 people on Affordable Care Act plans were never entitled to the coverage, and that pulling their subsidies will save taxpayers $2.2 billion. Mehmet Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, stood with him. The savings number is an administration estimate. The Congressional Budget Office has not scored it.
CMS had already acted. Rulemaking documents posted Tuesday in the Federal Register say the agency canceled 315,000 marketplace policies on Aug. 31, covering roughly 760,000 people, which the rule describes as unauthorized enrollments submitted through agents and brokers. Vance's 750,000 and the 760,000 covered lives are the same purge, counted two ways.
Officials also plan another pass at about 419,000 current enrollees, checking legal residency first and income second. "We are actually making sure that people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them," Vance said. "Amazingly we weren't doing that before."
Brokers are next. CMS sent notices of intent to terminate to 569 agents and brokers who filed statistically implausible rates of 2026 applications without identifying information, such as a Social Security number. A separate interim-final rule freezes new agent and broker registrations until Feb. 1, 2027, before the usual comment period runs. Administration officials said 40 brokers accounted for about 50,000 suspect enrollments and $45 million in subsidies. The National Association of Benefits and Insurance Professionals said a blanket freeze punishes licensed agents who did nothing wrong and will leave consumers with fewer people to call during open enrollment.
Centene fell as much as 3.9 percent on the first headlines. Molina dropped as much as 3.5 percent, Elevance 1.9 percent, UnitedHealth 1.4 percent. Those firms write a large share of exchange business. Federal premium tax credits are paid to the insurer, not the enrollee.
How The Administration Is Using The WordPart of the case is conventional fraud. Brokers collect commissions from insurers. After Congress fattened the premium tax credits, a lot of low-income plans carried a $0 net premium, so a policy could be opened without the customer ever seeing a bill. CMS recorded roughly 275,000 complaints in an eight-month stretch of 2024 from people who said they had been enrolled or switched without consent. In February, a brokerage president and a marketing-company CEO were sentenced to 20 years each for a scheme that sought more than $233 million in subsidies. HHS has separately said more than a million marketplace enrollments listed no Social Security number.
The rest is a verification net the last administration loosened and this one is pulling tight: income attestations, immigration paperwork, employer coverage, automatic re-enrollment onto free plans.
The Government Accountability Office has found the same weak controls and has not signed off on the claim that millions of current enrollees are fake. GAO flagged at least 160,000 federal-marketplace applications in plan year 2024 for likely unauthorized changes, about 1.5 percent of the relevant pool. It found about 68,000 Social Security numbers used for more than a year of subsidized coverage in 2024; one number appeared on 125 policies. About $94 million in subsidies went out on numbers that matched the death file. Undercover testers got fictitious applicants approved at very high rates, and most of the 2025 fakes were still drawing subsidies months later. GAO has described that work as a set of risk indicators, not a census.
HHS and the Paragon Health Institute produce the bigger tallies. Paragon compares people who signed up claiming income between 100 and 150 percent of poverty - the band that unlocked the largest subsidies - with Census estimates of how many people in that band could even qualify. Whatever is left over gets labeled improper. HHS instead measures how many enrollees in that band filed no claims, against historical norms. HHS put the peak at 5.6 million in 2025 and said 2.6 million are still on the books. Paragon's 2026 figure is about 6.2 million, or 27 percent of open-enrollment selections, with a possible price tag of $25 billion.
Census income is not the projected income the marketplace uses. The survey misses low-income households. People with no claims get counted as phantoms; they are also just people who did not go to the doctor, or who bought a bronze plan with a deductible they never hit. In June, a federal judge in Maryland vacated most of a 2025 rule the administration had justified with Paragon-style estimates, ruling that CMS had overridden the statute. CMS's own paperwork this week floated a different improper-spending figure for 2026: up to $6.6 billion.
Enrollment Was Already FallingExchange enrollment ran from about 12 million early in the Biden term to a peak near 24 million once the extra subsidies landed and verification eased. Congress let those add-on credits expire. Premiums jumped, in some markets doubling. By February, effectuated enrollment was about 19.2 million, down 13 percent from a year earlier and the sharpest drop since the exchanges opened.
The White House credits integrity work. KFF and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities credit the price spike. A phantom account that never should have existed and a family that quit after the bill hit $200 a month both show up as cancellations.
Open enrollment starts Nov. 1. Midterms are Nov. 3. Earlier this month Trump told a Republican midterm convention in Dallas that his "Great Healthcare Plan" would "stop all government payments to the big insurance companies."
Some of the 760,000 were never patients. They were names on a file, opened without their knowledge. Killing those policies stops a check to an insurer and a commission to a broker. Some of the 419,000 in the next pass will lose coverage because they cannot produce papers on the new timeline, including people who were eligible. Democrats have been saying that out loud for months: fraud talk as the instrument for a coverage cut Congress already started by killing the extra subsidies.
CMS has stopped payment on the August book and is closing the broker door. It has not released a table that splits the 760,000 into fictitious accounts, unauthorized switches, income or immigration mismatches, and eligible people who missed a form. Without that, $2.2 billion is still an estimate and 750,000 is a cancellation count.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 19:40