In the News

SEATTLE -- All across Western Washington, people turned out on Memorial Day to remember and honor the service members who gave their lives for the county. "Honoring those that served before us, honoring those that served and made it, twice a year we get to do this so it's pretty important," said Douglas Russell, referring to Memorial Day for the fallen and Veteran's Day for all veterans. Headstones with a single American flag line the hillside at Evergreen Washelli Memorial Park in Seattle. For ... Read more

A week after the national farm bill failed to get through the U.S. House of Representatives, local legislators say that leading up to another vote they’re focusing on funding for rural development, crop insurance, nutrition and conservation. The bill failed 198-213. Another vote on the bill is expected in late June, Lou Wasson, a spokesman for Suzan DelBene, D-Wash, said in an email. It’s unclear at this point if any changes will be made to the bill. The current five-year farm bill expires in Se... Read more

Scott Peters had never played Mario Kart before, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to lose to Darrell Issa. Peters, a Democrat from San Diego who represents California’s 52nd Congressional District, battled Issa, a Republican from the neighboring 49th District, at last year’s Comic-Con. Peters had been pretty good at Pac-Man back in the day, during law school in New York in the 1980s, to the point where, whenever he sees what he calls a “Pac-Man machine,” he’ll stop and give it his best shot, jus... Read more

While it may get no further than the U.S. Senate, legislation that would restore Obama-era open internet rules, otherwise known as net neutrality, should move forward. Senate Democrats, joined by one Republican, filed a discharge petition that will force a vote on legislation that would overturn Federal Communication Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s move last year to scrap net neutrality rules that the FCC established in 2015 under the Obama administration. Net neutrality — for those readers still... Read more

WHEN I heard that House Republicans were looking to expand a bipartisan job training and employment pilot program I spearheaded and that was signed into law by President Obama, I was pleasantly surprised. Speaker Paul Ryan even called it “the precise thing we need to do to get people from welfare to work.” Once I reviewed the text of the recently released Farm Bill, it became obvious that the intent wasn’t to give people the skills they need to obtain higher-paying jobs that provide a livable wa... Read more

Bill Radke talks to Congresswoman Suzan DelBene about immigration, the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and the upcoming midterm elections. Click here to listen to the interview. Read more

With nearly $630 billion in trade flowing between Canada and the U.S. every year, the ongoing NAFTA renegotiation talks have been closely watched. How are NAFTA negotiations weighing on companies’ investment and innovation plans, and what sectors are being impacted the most? Is an overhaul of trade policy likely to make North America more or less attractive to investors? How are leaders in Washington and Ottawa working to ensure the region remains competitive on a global scale? Click here to rea... Read more

A federal bill aimed at updating the Internal Revenue Service’s decades-old IT systems sets out the duties and responsibilities of a new IRS chief information officer, among other modernization efforts. The tax agency’s IT systems are currently led by a chief technology officer, who serves in a similar role as a CIO and reports to the deputy IRS commissioner for operations support. It also has two deputy CIOs, overseeing IT operations and strategy. The bill, introduced earlier this month by Rep.... Read more

The Internal Revenue Service’s online tax filing systems failed widely on Tax Day because of a hardware “glitch” in the part of the agency’s operating system that houses taxpayers’ personal tax records, according to the tax collection agency. The malfunctioning of IRS’s “master file” was discovered around 4 a.m. Tuesday, the biggest tax-filing day of the year. The impact of the problem spread because several other IRS systems rely on data from the agency’s “master file” to function, the IRS said... Read more

News Brief: The IRS systems that allow U.S. taxpayers to file tax returns electronically partially failed Tuesday, less than 24 hours before the tax filing deadline, according to numerous reports. The cause for the failure was not immediately clear, the Washington Post reports, but is likely due to an internal technical failure. There is the possibility the failure was the result of outside actors conducting a cyber attack. IRS officials instructed taxpayers to continue filing as normal. The IRS... Read more