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.

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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….

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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.

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Because, as we all know, miners and firefighters will have no protection unless it is provided by the Federal bureaucracy.

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Nearly two months after a top Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) official and support team arrived at IRS headquarters to investigate waste and fraud—aiming to streamline a bloated and corrupt federal bureaucracy—the Trump administration has begun a sizeable workforce reduction across the federal agency.

Fox News reported late Friday evening that the IRS will begin laying off about 20,000 staffers — up to 25% of the workforce — on Friday and through next week.

Most job cuts will center around the IRS Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, which protects taxpayers from discrimination, audits, and investigations.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News, “In a stark contrast to the previous administration’s wildly unpopular plan to hire thousands of additional IRS agents, President Trump is focused on saving tax dollars, eliminating bloat, axing useless DEI offices, and increasing the agency’s efficiency.”

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In the 1980s, peanut allergies were almost entirely unheard-of. Today, the United States has one of the highest peanut-allergy rates in the world. Disturbingly, this epidemic was precipitated by institutions that exist to promote public health. The story of their malpractice illuminates the fallibility of respected institutions, and confirms that public health’s catastrophically incorrect guidance during the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t an isolated anomaly.

The roots of this particular example of expert-inflicted mass suffering can be found in the early 1990s, when the existence of peanut allergies — still a very rare and mostly low-risk phenomenon at the time — first came to public notice. Their entry into public consciousness began with studies published by medical researchers. By the mid-1990s, however, major media outlets were running attention-grabbing stories of hospitalized children and terrified parents. The Great Parental Peanut Panic was on.

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Turning Point USA was holding an event on the campus of UC Davis featuring a black conservative named Brandon Tatum. Just prior to the event, the group set up a pop-up tent and a table outside to promote the event. But a group of Antifa goons dressed in black block marched in and tore down the tent and ran off with it. There were campus police standing there watching but they did next to nothing.

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On March 26, 2017, Jeffrey Ansted herded his family into a private plane bound for the Cayman Islands. The owner of an Ohio-based telecommunications company, Ansted had purchased the Cessna 525C jet one year earlier for $8 million. It had since become his go-to method of commuting to Florida, where he owned a condo and belonged to yacht and country clubs, as well as to his son’s lacrosse games in Towson, Maryland. For local travel, he drove a $250,000 Ferrari.

The trip to the Caymans was the last junket Ansted took before he was busted for fraud in 2018 by the Federal Communications Commission, which found that he had paid for his lavish lifestyle, including the jet and Ferrari, by embezzling millions from the agency’s Universal Service Fund (USF), a little-known program that subsidizes phone and internet access for low-income customers.

Ansted had signed up dead people for service and even fabricated social security numbers in order to obtain subsidies from the program. Then he’d transferred those subsidies from his company, American Broadband, into a personal account, according to a public notice from the FCC.

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I once stood within the halls of academia, benefiting from the generous funding of the National Institutes of Health. I was part of the system, a researcher fueled by grants that were supposed to propel scientific progress.

But after years inside the machine, I have come to a sobering conclusion: The NIH is fundamentally broken and morally corrupted. Corruption, waste, and fraud are not occasional lapses but systemic failures. The agency must be gutted and reformed if we are to salvage scientific integrity.

One of the most damning indictments against the NIH is the reproducibility crisis. Science is supposed to be built on verifiable, repeatable results, yet the vast majority of research funded by the NIH fails this basic test.

A widely cited survey in the journal Nature found that a staggering 70% of scientists surveyed reported failing to reproduce published research. Worse still, in a landmark study by Dr. Glenn Begley, only 11% of oncology studies that were reviewed could be replicated—meaning that 89% of these supposedly groundbreaking cancer studies were essentially worthless.

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green energy loan in November warned investors this week that it’s at risk of going out of business.

Li-Cycle Holdings’s annual report filed with the SEC on Monday states that it has “incurred significant losses since inception” and that there is “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue operating.

The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office finalized the loan for Li-Cycle just two days after former president Joe Biden lost the November election. It was part of a flurry of last-minute loan approvals, totaling over $20 billion, issued by the Biden loan office in the final weeks of the administration.

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California under Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom has funneled around $18 million to the Tides Center, a dark money nonprofit that directs donor cash to various leftist projects, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

The San Francisco-based Tides Center and its sister nonprofits, the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy, direct money to in-house projects known as “fiscal sponsorships,” alongside separate nonprofit entities. This enables Tides to cloak which projects receive the money. The Golden State’s spending database shows that 18 agencies sent payments to the Tides Center, but the database does not reveal which projects received the money, the Free Beacon reported.

California officials told the Free Beacon that the database is missing information from some departments, meaning total payments to the Tides Center likely add up to more than $18 million.

Navy Matters.

In a move eerily reminiscent of the LCS, the Navy today announced the retirement of the not yet completed USS Constellation, first in its class of a new frigate. Apparently, the Navy’s concurrency construction approach has resulted in so many unique modifications that the lead ship of the class has lost sufficient commonality with the subsequent class members to justify its retention.

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If you’ll remember back to last week, when Elon and the DOGE team made their first official appearance together on Bret Baier’s show, I said the segment on Social Security should be required viewing for every little old recipient squawking about a billionaire 400 times over trying to steal their $1500 a month check.

The reason SS recipients now have to personally come to an office to change their banking info if they wanted a bank deposit address changed was because of the rampant phone fraud the DOGE team had uncovered almost immediately. Forty percent of ALL CALLS were fraudulent efforts to change direct deposit info. This was done to protect Granny, not rob her and make her life miserable.

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That the Biden administration in 2024 – one year – gave 2.1 MILLION NON-CITIZENS social security numbers.

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It turns out the system took quite a hit – the worst part being? It was intended to hit the system hard. To create a class of Democratic loyalists, dependent on the state from the very second they stepped over the border.

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In 2023, Rep. Ro Khanna, the most active stock trader in Congress, demanded that some sort of law be passed to urgently stop members like him from trading stocks.

“All I want for Christmas is to clean up the corruption in Congress,” Rep. Khanna, who is Hindu, declared. “Our political system should not be for sale.”

That year, Rep. Khanna made 4,253 trades making him by far the House’s most active trader.

The completely useless resolution that Khanna knew had no chance of passing urged banning “members of Congress from holding and trading individual stocks”, imposed term limits, a ban on PAC contributions, a “binding code of ethics” and term limits for Supreme Court justices.

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As billions in federal COVID relief dollars run out, Pennsylvania is preparing for a wave of municipal financial distress. The Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) wants to add $10 million to the Act 47 fund, which supports struggling local governments. As of March 18, the fund held $17.4 million, and current participants include Harrisburg, Chester, and Newville.

Said municipalities being primarily run (and run into the ground) by Dramacrats, I have no doubt.

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Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong – a transplant surgeon-turned-biotech billionaire renowned for inventing the cancer drug Abraxane – has issued a startling warning in a new in-depth interview with Tucker Carlson.

Soon-Shiong, founder of ImmunityBio ($IBRX) and owner of the Los Angeles Times, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the very vaccines developed to fight it, may be contributing to a global surge in “terrifyingly aggressive” cancers. In the nearly two-hour conversation, the Los Angeles Times owner leveraged his decades of clinical and scientific experience to outline why he suspects an unprecedented cancer epidemic is unfolding. This report examines Dr. Soon-Shiong’s background and assertions, the scientific responses for and against his claims, new data on post-COVID health trends, and the far-reaching implications if his alarming hypothesis proves true.

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A federal law granting broad immunity to vaccine administrators and others does not preempt charges that a mother’s constitutional rights were violated when her son was given a COVID-19 vaccine without her consent, the North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled.

What goes around comes around.

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Perish the thought….

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Since returning to the White House on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump has unleashed a storm of executive orders, a great many of which have been halted or blocked—not by the now-Republican-controlled Congress, but by federal district courts. According to numbers compiled by the Harvard Law Review, U.S. district courts have issued more sweeping injunctions against Trump in the past two months than they have against three former presidents over their entire terms.

Since Jan. 20, lower courts have imposed 15 nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration, compared to what the Harvard Law Review recounts as six over the course of George W. Bush’s eight-year presidency, 12 over the course of Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House, and 14 during Joe Biden’s single four-year term.

During his first term, Trump was subjected to 64 nationwide injunctions. If inferior courts continue issuing nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration at the current rate (15 for every two months in office), then the second Trump administration will have accumulated 360 nationwide injunctions by the time the president leaves office—and a grand total of 424 over the course of both of Trump’s terms. However, there have been a total of over 45 rulings or more targeted injunctions leveled against the second Trump administration overall, according to The New York Times.

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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% 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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Over the past three weeks, anyone interested in free speech (or not) has been on the receiving end of a non-consensual firehouse of flood-the-zone information warfare. Every man and his DOGE has chimed in, capturing via screenshot a score of Osama bin Laden of censorship hideouts – “It’s USAID!” “It’s NED!” “It’s NIH”!

USAID in particular has been made responsible for everything, from funding chemtrails in Naples to biting your own cheek. It’s a shame the word misinformation is of so little use anymore.

USAID is important, but the censorship happens via a system comprising hundreds, possibly thousands, of organisations, small and large. Is there a secret bunker? I don’t know, it isn’t impossible, but the approach is cartoonish. There are key nodes, organisations, and networks that are more important than others, particularly those that hand out money. In fact “complex” was the term that quickly gained favour during the Twitter files, precisely because it captured the system’s complexity – it’s what made it work and minimised public scrutiny.

Open the Books.

Last month Open the Books auditors?took a closer look at the Federal Register?– the official publication of the U.S. government. It publishes every new rule and regulation, every Executive Order and Congressional hearing, and much more. It should be a reliable encyclopedia of government, but we found at least 75 of the 441 entities listed were defunct – defunded, disbanded, renamed, merged with another entity, completed their mission, etc.

We all know waste is rampant – but this was more evidence that federal recordkeeping is also a big mess. The scope and complexity of the task before DOGE became even clearer in this context.

So we set out to catalog every agency that reports data – not just their current costs, but the size of their staffs and spending stretching back decades. The result will be the clearest picture yet of government’s growth over time.

We released the?two batches of data in the ensuing weeks, tracking spending and headcounts for big Cabinet-level agencies like the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Education, and State; as well as more obscure, independent ones like the Administrative Conference of the United States.

At agency after agency, we found spending outstripped growth of the staff and even inflation – often many times over.

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Former Wall Street money manager and financial analyst Ed Dowd of PhinanceTechnologies.com is back with an update of a report on “Danger of Deep Worldwide Recession in 2025.”

It was not just heavy government spending on illegal immigration, but “mind shocking” fraud that has been revealed with DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).

Investigators have uncovered $115 billion so far with many hundreds of billions more to be exposed. Dowd says, “Both sides of the aisle are probably going to have problems…”

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What happens when you cross a Third-World tribal culture with an urban Democratic establishment? You can probably guess the outcome, but in Minnesota we don’t have to guess. We have seen it on display in the sprawling Feeding Our Future case that represents the largest COVID fraud discovered so far in the United States.

A cast of almost entirely Somali immigrants is charged with siphoning some $250 million from the federal child nutrition program administered by the Minnesota Department of Education into their own pockets between March 2020 and January 2022, when federal agents assembled from around the United States to raid the many scenes of the crime around the Twin Cities. Since then 70 defendants have been charged, 37 have pleaded guilty, and 7 have been convicted in the two trials conducted in the case so far. The others have yet to be tried.

Minnesota—mostly the Twin Cities area—is home to some 100,000 Somali immigrants, the largest Somali population in North America. Starting in the 1990s, the State Department directed thousands of refugees from Somalia’s civil war to Minnesota. As Kelly Riddell reported in a 2015 Washington Times story, Minnesota affords these refugees “some of America’s most generous welfare and charity programs.” Riddell quoted Professor Ahamed Samatar of St. Paul’s Macalester College: “Minnesota is exceptional in so many ways but it’s the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state.” After a dip in 2008, the inflow of Somalis has continued unabated and augmented by Somalis from other states. If it takes a village, Minnesota has what it takes.

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“Donald Trump has officially declared war on America’s students,” Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., posted on X.

Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, responded to the news by accusing the administration of aiming to “demolish the nation’s public education system.”

“I’m so mad, I’m spitting mad about this, because it’s hurting the people who can’t vote, children don’t vote!” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said on MSNBC.

These people know, of course, that eliminating the Department of Education doesn’t actually mean “declaring war on America’s students” or demolishing the “public education system.” (Even school choice, which may weaken public schools by allowing tax dollars to follow students to home schooling and other options, will only introduce competition for public schools, not destroy them.)

President Trump didn’t order the demolishing of schools—he ordered the Department of Education to begin the process of turning its functions over to state education departments and to other federal agencies.

The Department of Education wasn’t ever doing any education, much less the education of children. It’s function was to funnel money taken from taxpayers to various education-related Democrat groups, like teachers’ unions, ‘education’ think-tanks, and left-leaning colleges and universities.

“Teacher unions benefit from access to a central place where they can advocate for programs that benefit them,” Butcher told The Daily Signal in a Friday interview. He mentioned Title II spending, which funds teacher training and recruitment. “Any increase in federal Title II spending allows them to promote the idea that they need to hire more staff, which potentially gives them more members.”

“Having access to a central office from which they can lobby for large sums is more cost-effective to them than 50 different states,” he explained. However, having a central office may become a two-edged sword.

Follow the money….

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The “autopen” is in vogue. On March 17, President Donald Trump announced in a late-night social media post that he would ignore several pardons issued by his predecessor, President Joe Biden, because they were allegedly signed by autopen.

An autopen is a machine that reproduces handwriting. In the case of elected officials, who are expected to sign thousands of official documents on a regular basis, autopens are often used to reproduce their signatures in lieu of them signing each paper by their own hand.

The use of autopens has raised constitutional questions for some after Trump’s accusations of autopen use by Biden. They say that autopen use casts doubt on whether Biden knew the documents were being signed at all, thus implicating their validity.

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One of the seven small federal agencies that President Donald Trump ordered downsized or eliminated on Friday was rife with corruption, with its employees hiring friends and relatives, commissioning paintings of themselves, and using government credit cards to indulge in constant luxuries.

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.

FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.

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My, what a surprise.

A host of federal government agencies have overseen massive spending for years while greatly expanding their workforces, according to an OpenTheBooks report.

Annual spending across multiple federal government agencies has exploded over the past several years, often outpacing growth of staff and even inflation rates, according to a report from OpenTheBooks first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The report comes amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to crack down on wasteful spending across the federal government and reduce the federal workforce to save American taxpayers money.

The Department of Commerce’s annual spending grew from roughly $13.1 million in 2021—the year former President Joe Biden took office—to an estimated $20.5 million in 2024, OpenTheBooks’ report found. Meanwhile, the department’s workforce declined from 53,939 in 2020 to 47,650 in 2024.

“Time after time, at agency after agency, we see spending skyrocketing since 2000, even when headcounts grew modestly and stayed flat,” OpenTheBooks wrote in the report. “In this most recent batch of examples, we also saw Biden administration spending priorities reveal themselves through the outlays at key agencies”

Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying that the actual function of government is to hire and pay government em,ployees . These guys have got it down.

The New Neo.

These judges apparently consider themselves the firewall against Trump and the troglodytes who elected him.

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So it’s The Left Strikes Back. Problems at the ballot box? Send in the judiciary. What failed to be accomplished through the kangaroo court lawfare to which Trump was subjected prior to his election – the goal being to prevent him from being elected to a second term at all – could possibly be accomplished by tying his hands whenever he tries to do much of anything as president. These are not unbiased decisions for the most part, but these judges consider it their duty to stop the right from changing things in any big way.

It’s somewhat similar to Russiagate during Trump’s first term, which was an attempt by the intelligence community and the FBI, DOJ, and press to hamstring Trump and if possible remove him from office. That didn’t work, either. Will this? It really depends on SCOTUS, and many people are worried about how Roberts will see his role and that of the Supreme Court.

Read it.

Craig Iffland, an expert on the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, says the files released Tuesday evening show the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to hide embarrassing details about its operations in the 1960s.

It is Iffland’s expert opinion that “[m]ost of the major documents long sought by researchers can be found in this release, including the identities of a CIA-directed infiltration team of anti-Castro Cuban exiles tasked with the assassination of Fidel Castro; a list of CIA assets operating in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 who may have interacted with [Lee Harvey] Oswald during his stay there; a series of reports on the technical capabilities of the Mexico City CIA station that monitored Oswald during his visit to the Cuban and Soviet [embassies] in late September 1963; as well as previously redacted testimony of CIA officials who were involved in monitoring Oswald from the time of his defection in October 1959 until the assassination.”

It is expected to take weeks for researchers such as Iffland to comb through the approximately 64,000 pages of material that were released Tuesday evening. So far, however, the 1960s-era CIA has not come away looking particularly ethical.

My, what a surprise.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

UPDATE: JFK files biggest bombshells from CIA’s chilling claim to UK’s attempts to save him (UK Daily Record)

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Food banks across the country are scrambling to make up a $500 million budget shortfall after the Trump administration froze funds for hundreds of shipments of produce, poultry and other items that states had planned to distribute to needy residents.

And, as we all know, if the Federal government doesn’t do something, it will Never Get Done. (Funding! We need Funding!)

Axios, a Voice of the Crust.

President Trump signed an executive order to close down the Department of Education on Thursday — an unprecedented move that presents big questions for student loan borrowers.

Why it matters: The department plays a key role in managing some $1.5 trillion in student debt for more than 40 million borrowers, and a vast majority of its budget is allocated to the agency that oversees the federal student loan system.

And there you have it. The virtue of the Department of Education, in the eyes of the Deep State and its minions, is not that it actually did any ‘educating’ but as a source of funds for what might be called the Education Establishment, from teachers’ unions to those who have PhDs but no chance of gainful employment and depend on government ‘funding’ in the form of research grants. That’s why the cost of higher education has risen at many timers the rate of inflation–such institutions know that the taxpayer will pick up the tab, whether they want to or not.

This $1.5 trillion in student debt didn’t just rise from the swamp like Godzilla, but came about because of the proglodyte conviction that every child is from Lake Woebegone and therefore Above Average, and so deserves to go to college. Hence the government (without which Nothing Will Be Done) must pay for it, disregarding the fact that (by definition) half of the population is Below Average and can’t cope with college-level work (which, research shows, requires an IQ of at least 110).

As with housing, the government makes it possible for people to do something that, in reality, they have no business doing. All of these situations arise because politicians and government employees set the table with cheap pies and cakes and donuts and then wring their hands because we are undergoing an Obesity Epidemic that came from nobody knows where but which will require more Government Money (‘funding’), taken from the taxpayers, to fix.

As here, the purpose of loyal Minions of the Crust, especially in the Narrative Media, is to wrap this hand-wringing in appropriate tender-hearted clichés so that Low Information Voters will acquiesce in signing off on this great redistribution of ‘funding’ from those who work for a living to those who merely Study and Think Deep Thoughts.

That’s the basis for all of the hate and discontent toward Elon Musk (and, behind him, to Trump): He is threatening the gravy train of taxpayer ‘funding’ upon which al of these drones depend for their BMWs and houses in Chevy Chase.

Read it.

Why are eggs cheaper in Canada and Mexico than in America?

One reason is that Mexico and Canada have culled chickens on a smaller scale than we have. Mexico began vaccinating its chickens in the 90s and doesn’t cull chickens unless the outbreak is severe, while the Biden administration wiped out huge numbers of chickens with little pretext.

“The Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said back in January.

The actual number is now over 150 million when including ducks, turkeys and other birds.

The mass cullings haven’t stopped the spread of bird flu. Ever since the Biden administration launched that policy in 2022, the virus is now present in every state and the cullings actually helped infect human workers who handled the disposal of millions of dead chickens.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Attorneys in the Feeding Our Future trial of Aimee Bock and Salim Said made their closing arguments to the jury yesterday. This is the second trial of defendants charged in the massive $250 million fraud, the biggest Covid fraud discovered in the United States. Of the 70 defendants indicted, 37 have pleaded guilty. Trials of other defendants are scheduled through the rest of this year.

This trial is of particular interest because Aimee Bock was the executive director of the Feeding Our Future nonprofit that sponsored the admitted liars and cheats who operated the “sites” participating in the federal child nutrition program they defrauded. Salim Said ran the Safari restaurant at which the business model of the fraud seems to have been pioneered starting in April 2020.

In its totality, the fraud committed in these cases is gross, disgusting, despicable. What did the lawyers have to say? Their arguments ran over four hours. Here are highlights.

UPDATE: Feeding Our Fraud: Guilty

Read it.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas) declared in February that the government is “not in the business of giving out money” to taxpayers. But when it comes to the simple luxuries in her own life, the firebrand lawmaker is happy to let the public foot the bill.

That includes her taxpayer-funded car. Crockett has billed the public $999.96 every month since she assumed office in January 2023 to pay for a “vehicle lease,” according to House disbursement records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. It’s unclear the make and model of Crockett’s publicly financed whip—lawmakers are not required to disclose that information and her office did not return a request for comment—but it’s enough to pay for a Tesla Model S, Elon Musk’s luxury sports sedan, which leases for $998 per month.

Crockett obtained her taxpayer-funded vehicle through a little-known fringe benefit that allows representatives to bill the public for a fresh set of EPA-approved wheels to traverse their congressional districts. Some 42 lawmakers participated in the program in 2024, including 15 Republican participants who represent geographically expansive districts that average 18,100 square miles each. The Republican participants primarily leased economy vehicles from American manufacturers, with several of their offices telling the Free Beacon that leasing a vehicle is a far more cost-effective way for the lawmakers to traverse their massive districts as opposed to paying for airfare or using their personal vehicle at the IRS reimbursement rate of 67 cents per mile.

My, what a surprise. I doubt that Republicans are significantly better.

Read it.

The first of what is expected to be many deportation flights has landed in the crisis worn country of Haiti this week, carrying 46 aliens including 25 convicted felons expelled from the US.

The Trump Administration has revoked protections established during the Biden Administration that shielded roughly half a million Haitians from deportation. They will lose their work permits and could be subject to removal from the country in the near term. Many of the Haitians deported Tuesday had crossed into the United States illegally or were waiting for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) approval, which grants individuals legal authority to remain in the country but does not offer a long-term pathway to citizenship

Apparently the era of America as the Dumpster of the World is over.

Read it.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit recently determined that the efforts of a Florida middle school to help a minor child socially transition to a different gender behind her parents’ backs were not sufficiently egregious to “shock the conscience” and allow the parents’ claim to proceed. But in granting the school officials’ motion to dismiss the case, the panel’s ruling in Littlejohn v. Leon County wasn’t just bad policy, it was bad legal analysis as well.

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation, and most children were relegated to virtual school, January and Jeffrey Littlejohn’s 13-year-old daughter told January that “she no longer felt like a girl.”

This revelation appeared at the same time that three of their daughter’s friends at her local middle school had also suddenly declared a transgender identity, and while their daughter was struggling with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder that made online learning challenging.

ZMan says the quiet part out loud.

One way to look at the last ten years is as the struggle of the United States to finally close the books on the Cold War and the 20th century. The reason Trump exists, and the managerial system has reacted in such a violent way toward him, is that he represents the end of the conditions that made it all possible. The return of a strong executive and the normal functioning of government is the end of the managerial system and everything around it.

The comparisons to the late Soviet times are compelling because the Russians went through a similarly violent process to escape their own managerial system and the ideology that controlled it. Like the Soviets, America is now run by old people trapped in the past, lacking the talent to adjust to new realities. Like the Soviet system, the American system barely performs basic functions. Like the Soviets, American political actors can only break things.

That last part is important. Reform by its very nature calls into question the legitimacy of current processes. The reason for reform is that the system is not working to the satisfaction of the users, so it must be changed. Good reformers, however, do not attack the core logic of the system, but focus instead on the parts of it that implement that core logic to maintain the legitimacy of the whole. Maybe it means new people or possibly changes to parts of the system.