(Washington, D.C.) – For more than a decade, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has celebrated All Hallow’s Eve with its annual compilation of scary, grotesque, and spine-tingling examples of wasteful government spending.  The following is CAGW’s list of nominees for inclusion in the Fiscal House of Horrors for 2015…

Trick: Net Neutrality Opens Ominous Door – On February 26, 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reclassified the Internet as a public utility with its massive 400-page, so-called “Open Internet Order.”  But, the unassuming mask does not obscure the scary reality of the order.  FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said the FCC will now have “the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works.”  Inserting calcified government bureaucracy into a thriving marketplace?  Everyone who accesses the Internet should be very afraid.

Trick OR Treat: The Walking Dead Ex-Im Bank May Live Again – The Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank drew its last wasteful breath when its charter expired on June 30, 2015.  A dusty relic of corporate welfare, CAGW has been trying to close Ex-Im’s coffin since 1998.  Unfortunately, Congress is mounting a last-ditch attempt to bring Ex-Im back from the dead.  After the House passed H.R. 597 by a vote of 313-118 on October 27, 2015, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is an opponent of Ex-Im, has opened the crypt to allowing the bank to be attached to the upcoming highway bill.  We’ll need the cast of The Walking Dead to show up in Washington to make sure the Ex-Im “walker” stays in the ground where it belongs.

Treat: House Passes Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act – This sugary sweet piece of legislation permanently bans states from taxing Internet access.  Unfortunately, the Senate is living up to its well-earned reputation as the legislative graveyard because it has yet to act on this vital bill.

Trick: Internet Tax Ban Will Expire – Internet users should be afraid, very afraid.  The moratorium on Internet access taxes will expire on December 11, 2015 if Congress does not act.

Trick: Improper Payments Growing Into a Fiscal Frankenstein Monster – On October 1, 2015, the Government Accountability Office reported the amount of improper payments made with taxpayer money grew by a ghastly $18.9 billion, from $105.8 billion fiscal year (FY) 2013 to $124.7 billion in FY 2014.

Treat: House and Senate Pass a Budget – For the first time since 2009, the House and Senate agreed on a budget on May 5, 2015.  It was quickly smothered and buried by President Obama.

Trick AND Treat: Congress Hops the Sequestration Fence – Domestic discretionary spending continues to increase, but at a slower rate, due to the budget caps imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011.  However, as part of a ghoulish backroom budget deal, Congress will be raising the caps on spending by $80 billion over the next two years.

Trick: The Battered and Beaten Appropriations Process – The congressional procedures by which the taxpayers’ money is appropriated have been broken for some time, and this year was no exception, as the House approved only six of the 12 appropriations bills for FY 2016, and the Senate approved none.  However, in a bizarre cinematic swerve, the otherwise foolish budget deal that breaks the sequester caps may end up bringing back regular order.

Treat: Enactment of the DHS IT Duplication Reduction Act – Like a mutating zombie virus, the less duplication the better.  Congress took an encouraging step toward scaling down the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) duplicative information technology (IT) software by passing H.R. 1626, which was signed into law on August 6, 2015.  Better management of software government-wide was included in CAGW’s Prime Cuts 2015.

Trick: Zombie Earmarks! – Despite the Congressional ban on earmarks in 2011, members of Congress have continued to find ways to raise pet projects from the dead.  An October 20, 2015 report in Politico that cited CAGW’s 2015 Congressional Pig Book, which exposed 105 earmarks costing taxpayers $4.2 billion, described the deceitful tactic: “In some cases, lawmakers pepper bills with provisions that mention no companies or programs by name but are written in specific ways to nudge agencies toward the intended recipients or shut out potential competitors.”

Treat: Passage of the Trade Priorities and Accountability Act (TPA) – The House and Senate passed TPA in June 2015.  The bill gave the United States an unparalleled opportunity to open up markets in the Pacific and Europe. 

Trick: Obamacare CO-OPs Dropping Like Lemmings Off of a Cliff – Out of the 23 state CO-OPs that were created under the Affordable Care Act, nine have either closed their doors or will do so by the end of the year, leaving thousands of Americans scrambling for new health insurance.  It’s a death spiral that only Obamacare could deliver. 

Trick: Recovery Audit Contractors (RACs) Continue to be Buried by CMS – RACs are fighting harder than teenagers in a horror movie to get away from their CMS overlords and simply do their jobs.  The program returned $1.6 billion to the Medicare Trust Fund in FY 2014; since the RAC program was implemented nationwide in January 2010, it has returned more than $11.3 billion to the Medicare Trust Fund.  While that total is impressive, until the program was stymied and certain audits were suspended by CMS and extended by Congress beginning in October 2013, RACs were recovering $1 billion per quarter. 

Treat: Ohio Checkbook Reveals the Dark Side of State Spending – Thanks to Ohio State Treasurer Josh Mandel’s initiative, every transaction made by the state government and more than 100 municipal entities will be published online in an easy to use database.