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The Treasury Department will follow through on President Donald Trump’s order to stop producing pennies, Newsmax has confirmed.

New pennies will cease being put into circulation by early next year, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Businesses eventually will need to begin rounding up or down to the nearest 5 cents due to not enough pennies being available for everyday cash transactions, the Treasury said.

Who uses actual pennies? The only time I see pennies In Real Life is in the little Give A Penney Get A Penny dish by company cash registers.

The Mint projects an annual savings of $56 million in reduced material costs by ending penny production.

Which ought to have been done a decade ago when it became plain that the penny was a useless coin. When I was a child in the 1950s a penny could actually buy something – but the steady drip-drip-drip of inflation has reduced its value to insignificance.

UPDATE: Say goodbye to the penny  The Treasury Department placed its final order of penny blanks this month, a spokesperson said. (Alice Tecotzky/Business Insider)

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Current FBI Director Kash Patel is closing down the agency’s Washington, DC, mothership office and moving at least 1,500 employees out of the DC area to regional offices.

…

During the Biden Administration, it was determined that the 50-year-old Hoover building headquarters was structurally decrepit. More germanely, no prior FBI director had ever explained why nearly a third of the FBI workforce was centered in offices in Washington, far from where most of the serious crime in America occurs.

The news is welcome for reasons well beyond the safety of agents in an apparently unsafe headquarters.

It is no exaggeration to state that most of the FBI scandals of the last decade were born in the Hoover building headquarters, suggesting that the agency had long become top-heavy, politically weaponized, and deeply embedded in and compromised by the Washington apparat.

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FBI Director Kash Patel suggested in a recent interview that the agency under former Director James Comey operated independently from the Trump Department of Justice by choosing which cases to prosecute, and ostensibly how it chose to report that information to the public.

While speaking to “Sunday Morning Futures” on the Bureau’s investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James over alleged mortgage fraud, Patel told host Maria Bartiromo that the agency was biased in its Crossfire Hurricane investigation, when it tried to paint President Donald Trump as a patsy to Russia.

“You asked in the beginning,” Patel said, “how the FBI was weaponized. Well, the FBI hijacked the constitutional responsibility of the Department of Justice and the Attorney General, and James Comey and others specifically decided what cases to prosecute and not prosecute. Don’t believe me? Go to the videotape in the Hillary Clinton investigation.”

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The Justice Department will pursue charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-N.J., after an altercation with immigration agents outside a detention center in Newark last week, the New Jersey Globe reported.

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US Naval vessels today regularly take far longer to build than scheduled, and greatly exceed their already-high cost estimates. A 2018 GAO report found that more than 80% of both lead ships (the first ship built of a series) and follow-on ships (subsequent ships of the series) were over budget, sometimes dramatically so. The first Zumwalt-class destroyer was over budget by 38%, and the first two Littoral Combat Ships were over budget by 150%.

Similarly, of eight lead ships reviewed by the GAO, every one was delivered behind schedule, and five of the eight ships were delivered two years late or more. Delays and cost overruns are wasteful and hamper the effectiveness of the Navy: reducing them would mean getting more ships, faster.

Delays and cost overruns are in part driven by the Navy’s ship design and acquisition process. Broadly speaking, the Navy creates high-level requirements for complex, multi-role ships, and then outsources the design of these ships to third-party contractors. Once a design is selected, it is turned into production drawings (so-called “detail designs”), which are used to produce the ships. In an effort to reduce the time it takes to deliver a ship, ship construction is often started before ship design is complete. However, this strategy frequently backfires: as design work is completed, changes to under-construction ships are often required, resulting in costly and time-consuming rework.

There is no excuse for this. If Apple used this procurement process, there wouldn’t be an iPhone until 2015 and it would cost $10,000.

The Foundry.

The Biden administration issued billions in taxpayer-funded green grants—many to large multinational corporations. Now the Trump administration’s Energy Secretary Christopher Wright ordered a review of 179 recipients to save $15 billion.

Meanwhile, some recipients of the Biden-era green grants told The Daily Signal they plan to proceed with the projects.

One of the biggest sources of green grants under the Biden administration was the Energy Department’s Industrial Demonstrations Program. The program was slated to dole out $6.3 billion to 29 taxpayer-funded projects.

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Though details remain limited, the Houthis got worryingly close to downing a U.S. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and reportedly several American F-16 Vipers, during a surge in airstrikes on targets in Yemen this spring. Houthi air defense capabilities are largely rudimentary, but this also makes them a unique and vexing challenge for American combat aircraft. Made up of mainly mobile systems, they can appear virtually anywhere, disrupting carefully laid mission plans. Many of them are also improvised, leveraging non-traditional passive infrared sensors and jury-rigged air-to-air missiles that provide little to no early warning of a threat, let alone an incoming attack.

Last month, TWZ published a deep dive feature on the Yemeni militants’ air defense arsenal that you can access here. You can also get up to speed about what is known about the Houthis’ attempted intercepts of U.S. crewed combat jets earlier this year in our initial reporting here.

Houthi air defenses appear to have prompted an increased use of stealthy aircraft like the F-35, especially for direct strikes on targets in Yemen, as well as costly standoff munitions, in recent months. The U.S. military launched its expanded campaign of strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, dubbed Operation Rough Rider, in March. Last week, the U.S. government announced a ceasefire with the militant group, which authorities in Oman had helped broker.

Long-time readers will recall that I think that the F-35 is a flying piece of shit that costs too much and does too little, and that badly.

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“President Trump and Republicans are protecting Medicaid—and that starts with kicking 1.4 million illegal immigrants off the program to prioritize the Americans who need it,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to The Daily Signal.

The markup removes “people without verified citizenship, nationality, or satisfactory immigration status who would be covered in state-only funded programs under current law.” That’s estimated to be 1.4 million by 2034.

Last month’s budget resolution tasked the House Energy and Commerce Committee with slashing $880 billion in spending. Since then, swirling rumors—especially about Medicaid cuts—have stirred chaos on Capitol Hill.

Democrats have accused Republicans of cutting Medicaid for Americans, failing to note that Republicans are actually cutting coverage for illegal immigrants.

“Republicans are rushing the markup and hoping to pass the bill in the middle of the night because they don’t want people to realize what’s in it, or how many Americans are going to lose their health care as a result,” a spokesperson for Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats said in a statement.

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President Joe Biden’s energy loan czar gave out billions to green energy companies. Now, he’s trying to help them to leave the United States and seek subsidies from European governments.

Jigar Shah, the former director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, has been “talking to officials in Brussels about re-domiciling companies in Europe,” Bloomberg reported this week.

Shah has reportedly started working with “many of the companies that benefited from Biden-era programs [that] are now looking to shift all or part of their business outside the US.”

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

A brief standoff unfolded on Capitol Hill after library workers turned away two top Justice Department officials installed by Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, who has been named acting librarian.

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The Department of Education under President Joe Biden loosened requirements for a student loan program specifically for public servants and nonprofit employees a few months after unions that stood to benefit from the change sent a letter to then-Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.

The watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, which obtained the letter via a Freedom of Information Act request, faulted the unions for self-dealing when they demanded the Biden administration cancel the student loan debt of all public sector and nonprofit workers who completed 10 or more years of service, leaving taxpayers to pay off the balances. The revelation comes as the Department of Education under President Donald Trump is revising the program to root out alleged abuses.

The unions defended their move as keeping in line with the goal of the legislation that created the loan program. Either way, the letter arguably demonstrates unions’ large degree of influence in the Biden administration.

“These unions were lobbying for a direct financial benefit for their members at the expense of the American public,” Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday.

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SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, is one of the nation’s largest welfare programs.

And, like all welfare programs, it is massive, it has grown prodigiously over the years and it is inefficient.

One glaring issue, which is gaining attention as a result of new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, is the kinds of foods that recipients of SNAP funds can purchase.

And here we have convergence of bodily health and fiscal health.

The “N” in SNAP stands for nutrition. The point of the whole program is to help poor Americans eat and not forgo nutrition as result of insufficient funds to buy food. So why should government funds be used to purchase foods that are not fundamental to meeting the requirements of basic nutrition?

The program is funded by the federal government but administered by the states.

Any government program inevitably descends into cronyism, waste, fraud, and corruption–especially if Democrats are involved to any extent.

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Results: Immunohistochemical analysis was performed to evaluate the expression of transforming growth factor beta-1 (TGF-?1), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), caspase-3, and anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) in ovarian follicles. Both vaccines induced significant increases in TGF-?1, VEGF, and caspase-3 expression, with more pronounced effects in the mRNA vaccine group. Conversely, AMH expression in the granulosa cells of primary, secondary, and antral follicles showed marked reductions (p < 0.001). The counts of primordial, primary, and secondary follicles decreased significantly in the inactivated vaccine group relative to controls and further in the mRNA vaccine group compared to the inactivated group (p < 0.001). Additionally, the mRNA vaccine group exhibited a decrease in antral and preovulatory follicles and an increase in atretic follicles compared to the other groups (p < 0.05). The serum AMH level was diminished with the mRNA vaccination in comparison with the control and inactivated groups.

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Sounds like a step in the right direction.

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The deep state and its allies have launched a judicial insurrection against President Donald Trump, and Chief Justice John Roberts effectively just admitted he’s not doing his job to stop it.

Roberts made a rare public statement back in March, criticizing Trump and other Republicans who have suggested impeaching judges to prevent them from taking it upon themselves to make national policy through injunctions. Yet Roberts refused to address the underlying issue, and he dodged again in public remarks Wednesday.

“What do you think of these calls for impeachment of judges based on the decisions that they’ve made?” Judge Lawrence Vilardo asked Roberts in an interview in Buffalo, New York.

“Impeachment is not how you register disagreement with decisions,” the chief justice said, repeating the substance of his comments in March.

“That’s what you’re there for,” Vilardo responded.

“That’s what we’re there for,” Roberts agreed.

Again, Roberts overlooked the underlying issue. Republicans aren’t calling for the impeachment of justices because they disagree with one particular decision—they’re exasperated because judge after judge after judge is effectively usurping the president’s authority by issuing so many nationwide injunctions.

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A U.S. district judge has allowed the CIA to proceed with firing its top physician, who had previously sought a restraining order against the agency, Politico reported.

UPDATE: Judge lets CIA fire doctor who pushed mandatory Covid vaccines for military (Politico)

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Good to hear.

The legal maxim “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” was fine in the day when the only things against the law were things that everyone could be presumed to know were wrong: murder, rape, arson, robbery, etc. It has been a fantasy ever since the rise of the bureaucratic state under Roosevelt.

This has been badly needed for longer than I’ve been alive.

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Amtrak is cutting roughly 20% of its senior management positions, aiming to reduce expenses amid uncertainty over President Donald Trump’s infrastructure investment plans, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

The federally-owned passenger railroad – which operates as a for-profit entity, is targeting $100 million in annual cost reductions through these cuts, a source disclosed anonymously, sharing details not publicly announced.

In an official statement, Amtrak confirmed the elimination of roughly 450 management roles, reiterating the goal of achieving $100 million in yearly savings. The company emphasized these layoffs only impact corporate-level positions and assured that operational railroad jobs would remain unaffected. As of 2024, Amtrak employs approximately 22,700 people. (what!?)

CBS News, a Voice of the Crust.

Because, as we all know, screening West Virginia coal miners from blacklung is TOTALLY the responsibility of the Federal government–and the Federal taxpayer.

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Accountability–it’s not just for white people any more.

Jerking back the curtain.

One favorite Democrat trick is to start with someone who is a political appointee and then figure out some way to convert him to a civil service position, thus entrenching proglodyte views in the permanent bureaucracy. Thus is the Deep State born and strengthened.

Left-leaning federal bureaucrats aim to oppose President Donald Trump from within the administrative state, and some Biden administration appointees have attempted to “burrow in” to the federal bureaucracy by switching from “political” to more permanent “career” positions.

While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in ostensibly nonpolitical, career positions.

“The biggest challenge that every single new Cabinet secretary and their subordinates will face is the entrenched bureaucrat,” Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.

“Some of it is overt, and we saw an example of that with the FBI employee trying to coerce his subordinates to ‘dig in’ against the administration,” he noted, referencing an email FBI agent James Dennehy wrote in January shortly before his retirement.

“What’s worse is the quiet insubordination,” Whitson warned. He said many bureaucrats will “slow policy,” simply ignoring the president’s orders.

Power Line.

Self-deportation is the only practical way to deal with more than 10 million illegal immigrants, and the federal bureaucracy is similar. It is hard to fire government employees, so getting them to quit can be an optimal solution. That is what is happening in the Department of Justice:

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Good. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

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For sufficiently ass-covering values of ‘cleared’. This report contradicts itself.

An investigation has cleared the Federal Emergency Management Agency of any wrongdoing stemming from accusations that employees of the agency were instructed to deliberately avoid assisting homes of then Trump supporters in hurricane ravaged Florida, Politico reported on Tuesday.

The investigation found “no evidence” the agency’s upper management had told field workers to purposely avoid homes with Trump yard signs thereby denying them federal disaster relief benefits, following the devastation caused by back-to-back Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the fall of 2024.

In November it was reported that Marn’i Washington, a FEMA official, gave a directive both verbally and via a Microsoft Teams chat used by relief workers to pass over homes with signage supporting then candidate Donald Trump. FEMA employees told the Daily Wire that a minimum of 20 homes displaying Trump signs were passed over.

Task & Purpose.

‘Sex neutral’ seems to be the popular euphemism for ‘ignoring that men and women are actually different’.

Navy Matters.

A F-18 Super Hornet being towed rolled off the deck of the carrier Truman and fell into the Red Sea.[1] No, this is not an April Fool’s post.

I know the Navy has real problems with competency but this is bad even by Navy standards.

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Why precisely were Anthony Fauci and his cohorts so anxious to blame SARS-CoV-2 on bats and later pangolins in wet markets? It was not just to deflect attention from the possibility that the novel virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan doing gain-of-function research. There was a larger point: to reinforce a very important narrative concerning zoonotic spillovers.

It’s a fancy phrase that speaks to a kind of granular focus that discourages nonspecialists from having an opinion. Leave it to the experts! They know!

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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, the eclectic entrepreneur, has revealed what most of us suspected: our huge deficits are a function of government-led grift.

Billions of dollars of quasi-criminal spending are being uncovered.

This explains why, in best case scenarios, as taxpayers, we are paying ever more for ever less; in the worst, we are paying ever more to feed a beast intent on destroying our civilisation.

“One of the biggest scams we have uncovered, which is really crazy, is that the government can give money to a so-called non-profit with very few controls”, Elon Musk explains in an interview with Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, adding “and there is no audit subsequently of that non-for-profit”.

The managers of these then “gives themselves extremely lavish…. insane salaries, and expense everything to the non-for-profit”.

The Antiplanner.

Transit’s fiscal cliff is the responsibility of transit agencies, advises the Chicago Tribune, and transit riders, taxpayers, and legislators should not be panicked into giving the agencies huge amounts of money to make up for this supposed crisis. Noting that Metra (Chicago’s commuter-rail agency) is paying its lobbyist more than $4.6 million to get more funding from the state, the Tribune suggests that money would have been better spent operating trains.

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“Operation Tidal Wave,” four days of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids working with Florida’s local law enforcement in a “first of its kind” arrangement, have netted nearly 800 illegals for arrest.

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$521 billion. That’s the estimate the federal government itself put forward of annual fraud levels. That’s enough money to rebuild every crumbling bridge and school in the country—all squandered due to government incompetence.

In fiscal year 2024, just 16 agencies reported improper payment estimates that totaled $162 billion—money lost to error, fraud, overpayments, or ineligible claims. That’s part of a staggering $2.8 trillion lost since 2003.

And that’s just what’s been reported. Fraud-heavy programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and housing subsidies likely push the total higher.

This isn’t a mere accounting error; it’s a heist on taxpayers, stealing cash that could’ve stayed in your wallet.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

How are ‘firefighter health and safety programs’ the responsibility of the Federal government? And Federal taxpayers?

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) was created to help advance clean-energy infrastructure and technologies that allegedly had the potential to be adequate energy resources but struggled to secure private investment. With discussions underway about staffing and budget changes, defenders of the climate-centric status quo in energy policy rushed to preserve it, claiming LPO is essential for energy dominance and manufacturing growth.

In reality, LPO is a taxpayer-backed ATM for unreliable energy technologies and infrastructure that can’t compete without federal funding.

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As illegal crossing fall rapidly at the U.S.-Mexico border under President Donald Trump, a dramatic shift is also taking place at the border with Canada, according to recent data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

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The Supreme Court’s ruling in J.G.G. v. Donald J. Trump was not an unqualified triumph for the Trump administration’s deportations of foreign gang members, but it was a definite rebuke not just to Judge Boasberg, but to the entire D.C. Circuit Court shadow government.

The ACLU filed J.G.G. v. Trump in defense of five Venezuelan inmates in New York and Texas. All of the men claimed that they were not gang members and there was no indication that any of them were being deported, denying them any actual standing for coming before the court.

Especially before Judge James Boasberg who is thousands of miles away in Washington D.C.

Despite the lack of standing and the case being filed in the wrong venue, Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court, not only blocked the deportation of all gang members back to Venezuela, but ordered that planes currently over international airspace that were carrying gang members turn around and bring them back to the United States.

Boasberg fumed that the planes were not turned around on his mere word and threatened the Justice Department with repercussions for not recognizing his power over not only the entire country, but also the entire planet.

But why was a judge from the D.C. Circuit Court on a case involving inmates in Texas?

The answer is that leftist organizations and the judges of the D.C. Circuit Court were using one weird trick to seize power over the entire country (if not always the planet) and transform themselves into a shadow government able to block any Trump administration move.

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“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

This defiant and bipartisan defense of the purity of education, delivered by Harvard President Alan Garber, sounds fantastic, right? After all, what society that pretends to value objectivity would dare to allow a government to control the educational decisions of private institutions?

Barack Obama—blessed is he—agreed, celebrating Harvard as a shining beacon of academic freedom!

The reality is that the government, regardless of which party is in power, has been dictating what private universities can teach, admit, and hire since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, and which ares of study and inquiry they can pursue through the granting or withholding of ‘funding’. Harvard was perfectly comfortable with that while the government’s prescriptions aligned with the proglodytes that increasingly dominated the governance of the university; they’re only whining now because the shoe is on the other foot.

The New Neo

The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes clinicians use to report services to health insurers have become a linchpin in the American health care system. These codes are federally mandated, and all health care providers must pay royalties to the AMA to use them. That’s a heck of a cash cow for the AMA.

In 2023, the AMA raked in a staggering $495 million in revenue. A full 62 percent, $308 million, came from royalties tied to the use of CPT codes. And every dollar is paid for by taxpayers, via Medicare and Medicaid, or employers and employees in the private health insurance market.

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Van Hollen went down to El Salvador to do the job Americans — the American president, anyway — won’t do. Senator Van Hollen seeks to restore the deportable illegal alien, wife beater, and apparent MS-13 gangbanger to his happy home in Maryland, where he can vote to return Chris Van Hollen to office! This is important work.

Senator Van Hollen documented his “fight” for Abrego Garcia on X. He’s “fighting” for the gentleman in detention in El Salvador. “Fighting” is the motif of his reports.

I want to collect Van Hollen’s reports here in chronological order. Senator Van Hollen documented his personal journey each step of the way.

Read it.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s office is mum about how much the taxpayers had to shell out for his trip to El Salvador — or whether he or someone else paid — in a failed effort to win the release from prison of a former illegal immigrant who resided in his state.

Spokespersons for the Maryland Democrat’s office did not respond to several phone and email inquiries from The Daily Signal on Wednesday and Thursday asking about the cost of the trip and about how many staffers accompanied the senator when he met with El Salvadoran officials to attempt to get Kilmer Abrego Garcia out of prison.

The Trump administration deported Garcia in March to an El Salvadoran prison as part of its effort to round up and deport known illegal alien gang members. The Justice Department had determined Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang, but there’s a debate over whether the administration made an error in deporting him because an immigration judge granted him asylum to stay in the United States in 2019.

A conservative estimate is that the trip could have cost between $1,525 to $2,216 if Van Hollen took only one staffer, stayed only one night, and booked at least a week in advance. That is based on publicly available information for flight ticket costs and the guidelines for government expenses for meals and lodging.

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Several universities and higher education associations filed a lawsuit Monday against the Department of Energy (DOE) over a new policy capping indirect research funding cost rates at 15%.

The DOE announced April 11 it would limit support for indirect costs, or money that is used for administrative and other non-research related expenses, to 15% for all research funding. The Association of American Universities (AAU), American Council on Education (ACE) and schools such as Cornell, Brown and the University of Michigan claim in the suit that the department’s decision is “flagrantly unlawful” and “will devastate scientific research,” according to the lawsuit.

“[I]f DOE’s policy is allowed to stand, it will devastate scientific research at America’s universities and badly undermine our Nation’s enviable status as a global leader in scientific research and innovation,” the lawsuit argues.

Apparently universities have a Constitutional right to receive and waste Federal taxpayer dollars. Who knew?

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

Thirty years ago, a Ryder rental truck full of explosives detonated in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast killed 167 people and injured hundreds more. According to the official truth, the van was parked at the site by someone named Timothy McVeigh. While he did not act alone, he was the only person in the truck when it was parked at the site. A total of four people were arrested and charged with the deadliest domestic terrorist attack to date.

At the time of the attack, the public naturally assumed there were many people involved, as such a thing should require a lot of hands. There was also the assumption that foreigners were involved. By 1995, the United States had been dropping bombs on Muslims for at least a decade. It was not unreasonable to think that some of those Muslims decided to get some payback. According to the FBI, that was not the case at all and the whole thing was done by four people.

It turns out that this may not be entirely true. At the time, there were news stories claiming that two people exited the Ryder truck. Security cameras captured the parking of the thing and the blast. There was even a manhunt of sorts for the guy they named John Doe #2, but he was never found. Later, the FBI said there was never another guy and there was no video footage suggesting such a thing. The media, as they always do, took that to mean they should drop it.

It turns out that the FBI was lying. This long piece in The Federalist chronicles the long saga of trying to get that information from the government. Why the government would be hiding any information about a domestic crime that occurred thirty years ago is a question that can only have one answer. It is not as if there could be top-secret information in such a case. According to the story, the main reason the FBI is hiding this data is they were lying all along about John Doe #2.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

Read it.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the Covid crisis wasn’t just a health catastrophe, but a financial one too, according to a damning new audit report released Friday. The state government poured $453 million into building an enormous stockpile of medical equipment — and only used 0.000012% of it.

According to state comptroller Tom DiNapoli, New York bought a staggering 247,343 medical devices, but only wound up using a laughable three pieces of equipment out of the vast horde. Worse, the waste was only compounded by the state’s utter neglect of its fiduciary duties to taxpayers. Rather than finding buyers for the once-valuable assets, bureaucrats have been content to let the equipment age and decay in warehouses. As if the erosion of the stockpiles weren’t bad enough, New York is also wasting money on storage costs.

“New York state bought hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of medical equipment at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, including ventilators and x-ray machines, that now sits unused in storage facilities across the state, missing recommended maintenance and costing taxpayers storage expenses,” said Napoli’s office. Of the equipment that requires ongoing maintenance, auditors found that 90% of it is past due, with no process or contract in place to handle that need. Failure to keep up with maintenance risks voiding manufacturer warranties, and also rendering the equipment unusable in an emergency.

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In 1974, Congress created the Legal Services Corporation to connect lower-income Americans involved in civil disputes with free legal help. The law that established the agency stipulated that authorization for its funding would expire in 1980, when lawmakers were required to vote on whether to keep it alive.

They never did. Still, Congress has funded LSC every year since. In fiscal 2025, its 51st year, LSC’s 135 employees will spend 95 percent of its now $560 million annual budget paying legal groups to represent Americans in cases such as eviction, domestic violence, and disputes over government benefits, according to Ron Flagg, the agency’s president since 2020.

“LSC would welcome reauthorization,” Flagg said. “We haven’t hidden from it. Every budget cycle, we go through an exhaustive process before Congress appropriates funds — dozens of meetings with leaders of both parties. We demonstrate our return on investment, how we help 2 million Americans get life-saving legal help.”

The Legal Services Corp. now stands as America’s oldest “Zombie” program, but it’s far from unique. At a time when the Trump administration is moving aggressively to scale back government, including eliminating the entire Education Department, it’s sobering to note that 1,503 agencies or programs live on despite expired authorizations, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Another 155 will expire on Sept. 30. The Zombies, nearly half of which have been officially dead for more than a decade, persist in a budgetary netherworld. In a deep dive last year, CBO analysts were able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, with total expenditures of $516 billion. They don’t know how much funding the other programs received.

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With chronic illnesses soaring across the United States, a group of doctors and nutrition researchers say it’s time to reconsider the foundation of American dietary advice—starting from the bottom up.

How about educating people and letting them make their own choices? ‘Doctors and nutrition researchers’ seem to think they have a God-imposed duty to lecture other people about how to go about their daily lives, rather than just presenting the information and allowing people to take whatever action they deem appropriate. I’ve got a mother, I don’t need a bunch of volunteers.

In a peer-reviewed paper published in Nutrients, the authors contend that the traditional carb-heavy diet has not only failed to safeguard public health but may be contributing to rising rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. They propose a new low-carbohydrate food pyramid designed for the vast majority of American adults showing signs of metabolic dysfunction.

Their model—built on protein, full-fat dairy, and healthy fats—challenges decades of federal guidance and reignites a long-simmering debate about dietary fat’s role in chronic disease.

How about the Federal government stop spending my tax dollars on ‘guidance’? The Nanny State is an ugly thing.

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The late and over-budget Constellation class design is still in flux, with only 15% commonality with the frigate it’s based on, not 85% as planned.

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The House Oversight Committee’s subpanel on government efficiency held a hearing Tuesday exposing billions of taxpayer dollars wasted annually on outdated federal buildings.

Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who leads the Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency, opened the hearing by slamming federal agencies for maintaining a bloated real estate footprint. She pledged to continue pushing to “right-size” the federal government’s real estate portfolio.

“Here in D.C., [the Government Accountability Office] found in 2023 that the vast majority of federal agency headquarters buildings were less than 25% occupied—some much less,” Greene said. “Meanwhile, from 2022 to 2024, the backlog of deferred maintenance on the aging buildings the government owns grew from $216 billion to $370 billion. That’s more than one-third of a trillion dollars it will cost to restore them—if we don’t sell them.”

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Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) introduced companion versions of the No Union Time on Taxpayers’ Dime Act on April 7.

This bill, which calls for eliminating taxpayer funding of federal employees working for their unions, is more relevant now than when first introduced in 2024.

That’s because the Trump administration not only reinstated agency requirements to measure and report what’s called official time; it also signed an executive order precluding wide swaths of federal agencies and offices from engaging in collective bargaining agreements with unions and preventing federal workers in those agencies from engaging in official time.

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A panel of inspectors general has been “wielding power” outside supervision of the president or Congress in targeting officials appointed during the first Trump administration that investigated waste, fraud, and abuse in government, according to a court filing.

Inspectors general have become a contentious issue after President Donald Trump fired 17 in January. However, inspectors general appointed by Trump in his first term have faced targeting from the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, also known as CIGIE.

CIGIE is a body within the executive branch that serves as a watchdog of watchdogs of sorts. CIGIE has an integrity committee that investigates complaints against agency inspectors general. Over the last year, the council has faced scrutiny from Congress and pushback from IGs questioning the lack of transparency by the council and its objectivity.

Interestingly, one of the most powerful positions in CIGIE is held by a non-federal employee. The chair of the CIGIE Integrity Committee is Corporation for Public Broadcasting Inspector General Kimberly Howell, who was selected by a private nonprofit board. Nevertheless, the integrity committee can act against presidential-appointed and Senate-confirmed inspectors general.

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California did not materially comply with the requirements for seven of the 22 federal programs the state auditor examined, including “pervasive” noncompliance in its unemployment benefits program, which could put essential federal funding at risk.

“This report concludes that the State did not materially comply with certain requirements for seven of the 22 federal programs or clusters of programs (federal programs) MGO audited, including one program for which the noncompliance was pervasive,” wrote Deputy State Auditor Linus Li.

“Additionally, although MGO concluded that the State materially complied with requirements for the remaining federal programs it audited, the State continues to experience certain deficiencies in its accounting and administrative practices that affect its internal controls over compliance with federal requirements.”

The audit found that even in 2023 — years after the state made $55 billion in fraudulent COVID lockdown-era benefits payments — the state likely made “potentially ineligible payments” of nearly $200 million. The audit also found that of 138 pandemic unemployment assistance claimants that were tested, 91, or 66%, had verification issues.