The U.S. continues to accumulate debt, but the recently passed Omnibus budget bill has plenty of waste in it. My nominee for the absolute worst item is the 7 percent increase for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. On Powerline, Paul Mirengoff provides a litany of the awful things OCR does, such as demanding racial quotas in school discipline and pushing colleges to use procedures in sexual assault cases so blatantly unfair that a lot of liberal law school professors have protested.

Is OCR such a sacred cow that the best our “conservative” congressional leaders can do is to fatten its budget?

Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Hans Bader, who formerly worked for OCR, also has blunt words about this.

The appropriations increase of at least $6 million for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights rewards the most extreme left-wing agency around. This unwarranted appropriations increase for OCR rewards it for its bad behavior, and also encourages it to step up its support for campus witchhunts and pressure on colleges to politically incorrect speech, and encourages it to do more to attack local school districts that don’t comply with its illegal demand for de facto racial quotas in school discipline.