Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post comments on an issue that is raising hackles and concerns around the Washington, D.C. region — the Department of Transportation’s decision not to fund a rail expansion of the Washington Metro to Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia.   The project, in planning for nearly a decade, has been the subject of much debate, but the DOТ’s decision to drop funding completely (when $900 million had originally been pledged) has been somewhat of a shock even to critics of the plan.  And ideology — rather than a pragmatic look at the real costs and benefits of the project — seems to be at the heart of the decision.  (more…)

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs has determined that a greater number of servicemembers from the National Guard and Reserves (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) had committed suicide after service in Iraq and Afghanistan than did regular service members.   The Associated Press reports in the International Herald Tribune that 53% of recorded suicides among veterans were from Guard and Reserves forces.  According to Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, "National Guardsman and Reservists are literally in Baghdad in one week and in Brooklyn the next, and that transition is incredibly tough."  Read the AP story here.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, a division of the Dept. of Homeland Security, will accelerate green card processing for 47,000 applications delayed due to flaws in the FBI’s security review system.  Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post reports that the change applies only to people who have applied for green cards but whose "name checks" have not been completed by the FBI, which has a slow, outdated system for checking many names.  It does not apply to applicants for actual citizenship, some of whom are also exposed to similar delays in processing.  California Congressman Brian Bilbray notes that "we’ve reached a point where we’re waiving [the] national security requirement because the bureaucracy is not responding."  Will the FBI respond by modernizing and improving its system of checks?  Read Hsu here.