"Regulators usually don't negotiate their budgets with the industries they oversee," writes Anna Wilde Mathews, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does. In the early 1990s, drug companies started paying the FDA millions of dollars in user fees, to speed the drug approval process.

The State Department Inspector General has released a report finding that Kenneth Tomlinson, the head of the agency overseeing most government broadcasts to foreign countries has used his office to run a “horse racing operation” and that he improperly put a friend on the payroll.