Read it.

Solar and renewable energy stocks crashed in premarket trading after Senate Republicans unveiled a draft of a bill that would end wind and solar tax credits by 2028, while providing incentives for other energy sources like nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal (which would extend to 2036).

According to Reuters, the draft tax bill released by Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) proposes an accelerated phaseout of clean energy subsidies established under the Biden-Harris regime’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Specifically, the legislation would significantly dial back solar and wind tax credits to 60% of their original value starting in 2026, with complete elimination by 2028. Under current law, these credits are scheduled to begin phasing out in 2032, meaning the proposal would effectively shorten the incentive window.

An illustration of the fact that ‘green energy’ is merely a scheme to get leech off of the taxpayers pursuant to a political agenda.

The Foundry.

The government spent decades trying to make fathers unnecessary. The failure of that experiment put society on the long-term path to collapse.

Father’s Day is Sunday. It’s much less popular than Mother’s Day for a sad reason. Fewer fathers are involved in their children’s lives. That’s caused by two main factors, the first being children born to single moms. In 2022, almost 40% of births were to unmarried women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The second reason is the prevalence of divorce.

Statistically, children raised without a father face a bleak future. Homes led by a single mother are more than four times as likely to live in poverty compared to married couples. Poverty is associated with a host of problems, including lower academic achievement. Children without fathers around are more likely to go to prison. They’re less likely to attend college. Children without dads are more likely to act out and have substance abuse problems. Tragically, teenage girls without a father present are seven times more likely to become pregnant. And thus, the cycle repeats itself.

Read it.

The program office has emphasized that USS Ford was a first-in-class hull, with the inherent issues that come with a first-of-a-kind vessel, and that the teething problems with her new technology were being worked out for the follow-on carriers. But in its annual assessment of defense procurement programs, GAO reports that the Navy expects significant additional delays to future hulls in the series.

Continued issues with the weapons elevators aboard second-in-class CVN 79 could put the planned July 2025 delivery date for the vessel at risk, the program office reported. And the delivery date for CVN 80, the third Ford-class, has been pushed back to May 2030 – more than two years later than the Navy expected.

The problem, according to GAO, is in the availability of materials and skilled labor. HII Newport News has “persistent shipyard workforce issues” that the program office is trying to fix by revising schedules and creating incentives for workers, GAO said.

Buy them from Hyundai, which has excellent shipyards.

Read it.

The U.S. Navy’s future Constellation class frigates are set to be at least 759 metric tons (close to 867 U.S. tons) heavier than expected, a 13 percent increase over earlier estimates. Concerns have previously been raised about how weight growth with the Constellation class design, which was still being finalized as of April, could negatively impact the ships’ top speed and other capabilities. Overall, the frigate program, the entire point of which was to leverage an existing in-production design to help reduce risk and speed up delivery, remains years behind schedule and at risk of ballooning costs.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog, included the new details about the Constellation class design’s weight growth and other updates about the program in an annual assessment of major procurement efforts across the U.S. military released today. The U.S. Navy chose Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, a wholly owned subsidiary of Italy’s Fincantieri, to build the new frigates in 2020. The ship’s core design is derived from the Franco-Italian Fregata Europea Multi-Missione (FREMM).

The Navy currently expects to take delivery of the first-in-class USS Constellation in 2029, three years behind schedule. The service has, to date, awarded Marinette Marine contracts to build six Constellation class frigates.

The Navy procurement system is so screwed up that they would be better off just getting rid of it and starting fresh. Steve Jobs would have fired all of these people by now.

Read it.

Senior officials inside the NIH are working to shut down a Tony Fauci initiative launched in 2020 called the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases or “CREID.” Meanwhile, attorneys inside the Justice Department have launched initial inquiries into one of the CREID grants awarded to Scripps Research Institute researcher Kristian Andersen, who is now in the process of fleeing the United States for a position being created for him at the University of Oslo.

Read it.

Topline: An annex to California’s Capitol Building was supposed to cost $543 million, but the price has doubled to $1.1 billion and now includes hallways designed to hide lawmakers from journalists.

Tell the truth: Who could blame them?

Key facts: KCRA 3 reported that the annex will include a new parking garage and visitor’s center and office space for 120 state lawmakers. The news station pointed out it is almost as expensive as the $1.3 billion spent on Levi’s Stadium, the San Francisco 49ers’ football stadium that seats 68,500 people.

KCRA 3’s sources revealed the annex will include private hallways. The building’s current layout means lawmakers must walk through a public “swing space” to get from hearing rooms to the elevators, where journalists can ask them questions about the day’s proceedings. The new layout will allow lawmakers to avoid the swing space.

Read it.

The taxpayer subsidized “journalists” at NPR are propping up Rachel Accurso, a viral children’s “educator,” as the “modern-day” Mr. Rogers.

Except “Ms. Rachel,” his woke re-incarnation, is a sheltered middle aged woman who turned what seems to be a histrionic personality disorder into a $10 million internet grift.

Read it.

FBI Director Kash Patel sat down with Joe Rogan in Austin, Texas, where he dropped a series of revelations about the Bureau’s ongoing investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, including a promise to release jail cell surveillance footage and newly uncovered evidence that could implicate Anthony Fauci.

…

During Trump’s first term, Patel was in charge of counterterrorism for the White House and National Security Council. In that role, he helped lead one of the administration’s most overlooked achievements.

“Hostages, we can talk about that forever too,” Patel said. “Counterterrorism was a big portfolio, I ran it for the White House and National Security Council in the first Trump administration.”

Then he dropped the number: “We brought home—people don’t know this—President Trump in his first term, brought home and rescued over 50 hostages and detainees from around the world.” He added, “That’s more than every president before him combined.”

Read it.

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino appeared on Hannity Wednesday night to outline the Bureau’s current priorities and address concerns around national security, immigration, and public health transparency.

The interview offered a detailed look into how the FBI, under the direction of Bongino and Director Kash Patel, is approaching both domestic and international threats during the early stages of a second Trump administration.

Read it.

Trump is doing the jobs that Democrats won’t do.

Read it.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring prominent civil rights leaders, including Harvey Milk, who was one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials and a Navy veteran.

News of Mr. Hegseth’s decision, reported earlier by Military.com, comes just days into Pride Month, which celebrates the contributions of luminaries in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

Instead, Mr. Hegseth’s order was intended as a rebuke of Pride Month, keeping with the Trump administration’s drive to expunge diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the federal government, according to a senior defense official familiar with the decision.

In principle I don’t have a problem with it. Harvy Milk’s only claim to fame is that he was the first homosexual politician in a significant office to own up to it; he never had any connection with the Navy or national defense, and the ship was named after him only to pander to the LBGTQRSTUVWXYZ+ crowd.

From a practical standpoint, I don’t like it. It sets a bad precedent when the government starts renaming ships after a change of administration. Where would it stop? It smacks of Stalin’s trick of erasing people from photographs. If a Republican administration starts doing this sort of thing, what’s to prevent a future Democrat administration from renaming the destroyer USS John McCain the USS Greta Thunberg? I don’t think that’s a road we want to start down.

Read it.

“I want to come to America. I want to see a country where the poor people are fat.”

NavyMatters.

China is cranking out high end warships at an impressive rate … at least compared to our anemic shipbuilding effort. That means they’re cranking out serious, high level firepower in various forms. We, on the other hand, seem hell bent on ditching our high end firepower in favor of ever less lethal unmanned toys. The latest idea I came across is Naval News website speculating about cancelling the Constellation program and replacing it with small, unmanned vessels

With a price tag approaching $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion dollars each for the USS Constellation (FFG-62) frigate, Naval News asked RAND and CSIS if the Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel (MUSV) and the DARPA No Manning Required Ship (NOMARS) can replace the troubled FFG-62 frigate program.

… can MUSVs and NOMARS substitute for the FFG-62 frigates in terms of missions, roles, weapons coverage, and functionalities?[1]

As repeatedly documented on this blog, the Constellation is a poor excuse for a WARship but it is still worlds better than any unmanned asset.

Read it.

I think we can presume that the ‘climate change’ gravy train has officially stopped.

Read it.

June 1 marks the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark parental rights decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters.

That historic opinion recognized “the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” It also famously declared that “the child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

Sadly, despite that—and even now—many federal programs continue to encroach on parental rights.

Though parents have a fundamental right to raise and educate their children, and America’s history and tradition recognize the integrity of the family and parents’ rightful role as their children’s primary decision-makers, many courts have failed to properly treat parental rights as constitutionally protected. Instead, they have eroded parents’ rights by not applying the highest level of legal protection. That has contributed to the problems that still exist with many federal programs.

Read it.

A whistleblower from the U.S. Department of Agriculture has charged that the Biden administration was actively operating a policy of forgiving loans to farmers based on the colour of their skin.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.  And watch the video (it will break your heart.)

With the MAGA movement in full swing, maybe now is a good time to Make Air Travel Great Again. I have fond memories of flying in the 70s; easy, simple, inexpensive, relaxing, meal on board. And nowadays it’s unbelievably awful.

New York Post.

The Secret Service has suspended two uniformed officers who were reportedly caught on camera fighting each other outside former President Barack Obama’s home last week.

During the brawl, one federal officer allegedly grabbed her radio and threatened to “whoop this girl’s ass.”

Video published Tuesday shows the female agents punching and shoving each other.

Remind me why we have female Secret Service agents.

Read it.

A visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation praised the U.S. Department of Education’s decision to revoke waivers from California and Oregon universities which allowed them to use federal education funds to assist illegal immigrant college students.

The purpose of the Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth program is to help students with disabilities and low-income students obtain a college education. However, the Biden administration allowed universities in California and Oregon to divert the funds to illegal immigrants, according to a department news release. Under the previous administration, TRIO programs could extend benefits to “illegal aliens.”

The waives have since been revoked, drawing praise from Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former deputy assistant for higher education programs in the first Trump administration.

Read it.

In February, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered $4.7 trillion in payments made by the US Treasury that are “almost impossible” to trace – as Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) identification codes were optional in the system. This left billions in payments blank and unable to be traced.

s”Of the 1.5 billion payments that we send out every year, they are required to have a TAS, a Treasury Account Symbol. We discovered that more than one third of those payments did not have a TAS number,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services earlier this month.

“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE announced via its X account. Thanks to DOGE, those “optional” days are over. “…this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going,” DOGE added.

Read it.

Top Haitian officials called for urgent security support from neighbors at a meeting of the Organization of American States on Thursday, while the U.S. signaled it would not continue current funding aimed at holding back the nation’s armed gangs.

Because, as we all know, fighting gangs in Haiti is TOTALLY the responsibility of the U.S. – and the U.S. taxpayer.

The Antiplanner.

New York University’s Transit Costs Project has been asking the question, “Why do U.S. transit projects cost so much more than similar projects in Europe, Asia, and South America?” A recent report from the project proposes to significantly speed up trains in Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor for only $12.5 billion (plus another $4.5 billion for new rolling stock), which is far less than Amtrak’s proposal to spend at least $110 billion in the same corridor.

Amtrak’s plan called for building a new line for the entire 457 miles between Boston and Washington. The Transit Cost Project’s plan instead proposes to fix specific bottlenecks on the current line. The result, says the project, would be trains that could travel between New York and either Boston or Washington in less than two hours, as opposed to 3 hours (New York-Washington) to 3-2/3 hours (New York-Boston) today.

The most important lesson from this report is that it inadvertently answers the original question: why are U.S. costs so high? That answer is that U.S. transit agencies, including Amtrak, always seek the high-cost solution to any problem. They have no incentive to make a profit because doing so would lead Congress and the states to reduce their operating subsidies. They have no incentive to find affordable solutions to any problem because they regard the federal government and state taxpayers as bottomless pits of money.

Read it.

Gold has been at the heart of the US monetary system since the nation’s founding, evolving from a direct anchor for the dollar to a strategic reserve asset.

Though it no longer backs the dollar, gold remains a cornerstone of central bank reserves, a discreet but powerful force in global finance.

Throughout American history, monetary resets have been a recurring theme—and more often than not, they have revolved around gold because gold is money.

Understanding this history isn’t just about the past—it’s about the future. And if history is any guide, another reset may be coming sooner than most expect.

Gold, as of this morning, is ‘worth’ $3,331.41 per troy ounce. In 1933, when Roosevelt stole everybody’s gold, a twenty-dollar gold piece contained one troy ounce of gold.

So, in reality, the dollar today has 1/166th the value of a dollar in 1933. That’s how bad American inflation has been.

Read it.

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)

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

“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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Sounds like a step in the right direction.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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)

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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:

Read it.

Good. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Read it.

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.