Recently, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released travel-expense records after the Bader Family Foundation sued it for violating the Freedom of Information Act. The records show that the Commission paid for unnecessary payments made by its then Staff Director, Mauro Morales. For example, in 2022, the Commission reimbursed Morales $527.88 for “Reimbursement for CA State Bar License.” You don’t need to actually spend that much to renew your California bar license.
Moreover, Morales did not need a California bar license to serve as staff director of the Commission, which is not a litigation position (the Commission has its own general counsel to provide legal advice). Strangely, the $527.88 reimbursement lists the “travel dates” for this reimbursement as “01/31/2022–1/31/2022.” But no travel whatsoever is involved in renewing a California bar license — Morales made the payment online using a credit card. Yet, the reimbursement request provides information such as Morales’ “traveler profile.”
It did not, and does not, cost $527.88, to maintain your bar license in California. In 2022, it cost $468, yet Morales was reimbursed $527.88.
That’s because Morales chose to include $45 extra in his dues payment to cover nonprofit legal organizations (left-leaning legal aid groups) — which he had no need to do — and also chose not to deduct $2 for bias-related programs that he could have deducted from his bar dues.
As the State Bar of California explained in the payment summary for Morales’ payment, these payments he made were totally optional:
• Attorneys are not required to pay and may deduct two dollars ($2)from their annual fees if they do not wish to support programs that address concerns of access and bias in the legal profession and the justice system.
• Attorneys are not required to pay and may deduct forty five dollars ($45) from their annual fees if they do not wish to support nonprofit organizations that provide free legal services to persons of limited means. Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 6140.03.
Yet Morales made these voluntary contributions to programs of the California bar. And taxpayers picked up the tab for this $47 extra!
Even if it made sense for U.S. taxpayers to pay the cost of Morales’ California law license, it made no sense for them to pay extra amounts that were not even necessary for him to maintain that license.
But Morales made these extra payments to the State Bar of California in 2023 and 2024 as well ($47 in voluntary donations each of those years to the State Bar of California, for nonprofit organizations and bias), which were presumably also reimbursed at taxpayer expense.
If government employees wish to make voluntary donations, they can do so using their own money, not taxpayer money.
Morales’ 2022 reimbursement seems to include the State Bar of California’s credit card service fee of $12.88 for his payment of $515, even though credit cards commonly provide 1% back to their users in rebates or rewards. Reimbursing the credit card service fee without deducting the 1% back effectively over-reimburses people. You can easily pay your California bar dues online with no fee at all, by having it deducted from your bank account rather than using a credit card, so the credit card service fee was unnecessary to pay Morales’ bar dues. Including the credit card service fee increased Morales’s 2022 payment to the State Bar of California from $515 to $527.88.
When I worked for the federal government, it would never have occurred to me to have my agency pay my California bar dues, even though I was a member of the State Bar of California just like Morales. That’s because it was not required for my job. And I had a stronger case for seeking reimbursement than Morales did, because I was a government attorney. I was an attorney-advisor in the Education Department during the Bush and Trump administrations.
The federal government is already running a $2 trillion budget deficit. It cannot afford to make unnecessary payments to wealthy states like California, which has an unusually large tax base to support it (huge income taxes and capital gains taxes paid by wealthy people in California’s Silicon Valley, the center of the world’s high-tech industry).
The documents cited above can be found in hyperlinks above. The 2022 reimbursement of Morales’ bar dues can be found at this link: https://libertyunyielding.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/528-bar-dues-reimbursed-under-traveler-profile-for-2022-Cal-Bar-dues-for-Mauro-Morales-CTRL-E000014399.pdf
The payment of those bar dues can be found at this link: https://libertyunyielding.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Payment-summary-for-528-paid-for-Morales-bar-dues-in-2022.pdf
