by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Below are two instances of waste, fraud, and abuse of federal funds that have been recently identified and dealt with in Virginia:

Hurricane Helene aid—The Virginia Creeper Trail and the tourist revenue associated with it are important to the town of Damascus and the rest of Washington County in southwest Virginia. Hurricane Helene destroyed a significant portion of the trail. Congress included $660 million in recent legislation for repairs to the trail.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) recently told Cardinal News that the money “is not flowing. I am very worried that this money is either part of on-off freeze or just a completely screwed up bureaucracy that has now eliminated people and can’t do its job.”

Sen. Warner is not the only one concerned about how the funding for the trail has seemed to stop. Vice-President J.D. Vance was in Damascus about a month ago and commented on the slow response. According to Cardinal News, the Vice-President said that the administration needed to figure out what was causing delays.

In the meantime, five technicians with the U.S. Forestry Service responsible for repairing walking trails, campgrounds, and other recreational facilities damaged by Hurricane Helene have been fired.

Resident teacher program—Virginia Commonwealth University has a program to train teachers for placement in hard-to-staff schools. A large component of the funding for the program was a five-year $9 million federal grant awarded last fall. That grant has been cancelled.

As described by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, student teachers in the program are placed in middle or high schools for an entire year to train under a master teacher. After graduating, they are supported by career coaches for the first two years of their career. The program pays the student’s tuition and, in turn, the student agrees to work in a hard-to staff school for at least three years.

Begun in 2011, the program was initially limited to placing teachers in the Richmond school system. It has subsequently been expanded. Almost 350 teachers have been placed in hard-to-staff schools through the program. During the current school year, teachers from the program are in schools in 23 jurisdictions in the state, Arlington, Fairfax, and Prince William in Northern Virginia to Norfolk, Newport News, and Hampton in Tidewater.