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.

Read it.

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.

…

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

…

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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…”

Read it.

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….

Read it.

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.

…

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Read it.

“During the Biden administration, federal agencies spent millions bargaining sweetheart collective-bargaining agreements that imposed significant costs on the American taxpayer while impeding effective and efficient agency operations,” acting OPM Director Charles Ezell wrote in the memo. “Agencies paid for both the costs of their and their unions’ bargaining teams.”

While the federal government has previously tracked “official time”—the time government employees spend working for the union but for which they get paid by the taxpayer—Ezell noted that the government has not systematically tracked the specific cost of federal collective bargaining negotiations.

Collective bargaining negotiations may cost a great deal. “The Social Security Administration, for example, reported that it cost the agency over $1.8 million to negotiate [collective bargaining agreements] with two of its bargaining units,” Ezell noted. This number did not include the cost of another round of bargaining in the middle of the time covered by the agreement.

Newsbusters.

CBC Chairperson Rep. Yvette Clarke, noting Black Caucus support for Green, then went into the usual refrain about refusing to accept spending cuts in “programs like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security while giving tax cuts to billionaires like Elon Musk.”

But there have been no discussions about cuts in Medicare and Social Security, nor are there tax cuts targeted to billionaires.

Regarding Medicaid, this is the usual Democrat distortion, calling reducing proposed increases in spending a cut.

The Antiplanner.

The Baltimore Peninsula was supposed to be a $5.5 billion walkable city of residences, shops, and offices built on a former industrial site. Promoters convinced the city of Baltimore to put up well over $600 million in subsidies for the project. Now, most of the construction is done and it looks like one of China’s many ghost cities.

Read it.

Imagine my surprise when, Sunday, I read a New York Times editorial admitting that “We Were Badly Misled” about Covid as it was happening.

The op-ed matter of factly concluded what we’ve all known for years — that despite being the overwhelmingly most “common sense” place to look, the Covid-19 lab leak theory was dismissed by scientists and public health officials, who suppressed discussions and misled the public to maintain the appearance of consensus.

Influential studies downplayed the lab leak theory, while private communications among scientists revealed they actually considered it likely, with key figures, including a senior adviser to Fauci, attempting to erase records.

It admits EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, withheld critical information about its research, and only after persistent investigations was it finally banned from receiving federal funding.

It also stipulates that after Covid-19, controversial virus research, including experiments on bat coronaviruses, continues under inadequate biosafety conditions, raising concerns about future accidental outbreaks.

Read it.

Ten days or so after the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project disclosed that nearly every document bearing former President Biden’s signature during his first term had been signed by an autopen—except for one—questions arose over whether executive orders and pardons could be deemed invalid, as we noted that Biden’s staff likely leveraged his rapid cognitive deterioration to sign those documents via autopen.

This raises some very fundamental questions that I’m afraid will have to be answered by the courts.

Overnight, President Trump declared that the 11th-hour pardons, including those given to members of Congress who investigated the January 6 insurrection, were “void, vacant, and of no further force or effect, because of the fact that they were done by autopen.” Some of those last-minute pardons include Deep Staters, such as former Representative Liz Cheney, retired General Mark Milley, and government scientist Anthony Fauci.

I’m not sure that’s correct. All that needs to happen is for Biden to testify, in open court or by affidavit, that the signature in question is, in fact, his signature for it to be valid, same as with ‘electronically signed’ documents.

Now, if it can be shown that at the time they were ‘autosigned’ he was non compos mentis, and there appears to be a good chance that such can be shown, then that calls the whole shebang into question. Again, the courts are going to have to break some new ground here.

Interesting times….

Civil Discourse, a Voice of the Crust.

On March 12, there was reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration’s “reductions in force” directive to federal agencies. Cuts like that call into question whether NOAA will continue to provide the early warnings and predictive modeling that help people prepare for weather emergencies in advance. People who live in hurricane and tornado country keep their “NOAA weather radios” handy, and they are especially important for events that occur, as they frequently do, when most of us are asleep.

In theory, it sounds like one more bad thing to worry about. In practice, it’s much worse. We’ve just had a demonstration of precisely how effective NOAA is and what we stand to lose without it.

Beginning on Friday, violent, long-track tornadoes with damaging winds of up to 80 mph and large hail materialized across the Midwest and South. This was the news Friday night. NOAA’s early warning system, transmitted on social media, radio, television, and by word of mouth, kept it from being much worse.

NOAA? The same guys that are making and faking the models and ‘data’ that pros up the WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE FROM CLIMATE CHANGE Narrative?

Read it.

Johns Hopkins University said on Thursday that it will lay off over 2,000 workers worldwide following the Trump administration’s termination of $800 million in federal funding for the institution.

In the coming year or two it will astonish all of the people who haven’t been paying attention just how much of their money is being spent on toys for the Crust and their minions.

Read it.

When the Biden administration announced $27 billion in environmental grants last April, it set the clock ticking on a predicament: how to get the unprecedented sums for the President’s envisioned NetZero future out the door before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30?

The task was complicated by the fact most of the money – $20 billion – would go to just eight nonprofits that, like the Environmental Protection Agency itself, had never handled such gargantuan grants.

In hindsight, it’s easy to suspect that corners were cut, or laws were broken, or, at the very least, extraordinary measures were taken.

And it makes you wonder how the laundered the ‘10% for the Big Guy’….

Read it.

President Donald Trump on Friday issued an executive order revoking the security clearances of employees of New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Warton & Garrison (Paul Weiss) “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest,” according to the White House.

Paul Weiss is an old-line Wall Street firm.

The law firm has been a close ally to Democrats coming after Trump over his conduct, including the Russiagate collusion investigation that found no collusion, while a partner of the firm and a former leading prosecutor in Mueller’s office brought a pro bono suit on behalf of the DC Attorney General against individuals alleged to have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021 protest at the US Capitol.

Trump singled out Paull Weiss’s hiring of attorney Mark Pomerantz – who left the firm to work in the Manhattan DA’s office to draft a prosecution against Trump regarding Trump’s personal and business affairs. Then, Pomerantz rejoined Paul Weiss after leaving the DA’s office.

Actions have consequences.

Read it.

Five years ago, politicians and bureaucrats went berserk and pointlessly ravaged Americans’ freedom. The Covid-19 pandemic provided the pretext to destroy hundreds of thousands of businesses, padlock churches, close down schools, and effectively place hundreds of millions of Americans under house arrest. Despite all the forced sacrifices, most Americans contracted covid and more than a million were listed as dying from the virus.

Read it.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is seeking a $3.4 billion loan from the general fund to help a shortfall in the state’s Medi-Cal healthcare program. The shortfall problem comes only a year after Newsom expanded Medi-Cal coverage to include millions of illegal immigrants. California’s continuing deficits and mounting debts have some officials concerned that the additional subsidies to illegals will cause a fiscal emergency in the near future.

There are at least 2.6 million illegal immigrants in the state according to recent estimates. However, California has operated on sanctuary laws since 2013 and does not track the migrant status of its citizens. Because of this, there is no way for officials to estimate potential costs associated with welfare programs and medical programs which illegals commonly tap into. Around 60% of all illegal migrants exploit welfare programs upon arrival to the US and access is generally dependent on which state they settle in.

In 2024, California expanded the state’s Medicaid program (also known as Medi-Cal) in two major ways. First, the state opened up Medicaid coverage to illegal immigrants between the ages of 26 and 49. While the state had previously granted Medicaid eligibility to illegal immigrants in other age groups, the 26 to 49 age bracket is by far the largest in California (and nationally), comprising about 75% of individuals who are in the country illegally.

The state’s general fund is, technically, separate from the ample federal funding that California receives, and federal dollars are not legally allowed to go towards migrants. But the way in which the government cycles those dollars through its programs is deceptive and California is far more dependent on federal money than it claims.

Read it.

President Trump’s Homeland Security Department has introduced new transparency regarding the illegal alien invasion under the Biden-Harris regime. The data now reveals that the previous administration “cooked the books,” creating the illusion that illegals were being arrested and detained—when, in reality, many were caught and then dumped into communities nationwide.

“We have uncovered that the previous administration… was cooking the books on ICE data,” acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told reporters on Wednesday.

Lyons explained, “They were purposely misleading the American people by categorizing individuals processed and released into the interior of the United States as ICE arrests.”

“A comprehensive review was done internally here with ICE. We found tens of thousands of cases that were recorded as arrests when, in fact, these instances were illegal aliens that were simply processed and released into the American communities,” he said.

Read it.

In news that we’re certain will have Adam Schiff laying out a multi-national, multi-planetary conspiracy that can only be stopped by impeaching Donald Trump tomorrow, a new report from Bloomberg found that from 2017 to 2019, employees at Evraz North America Inc., a Russian-owned steel manufacturer, falsified quality control tests on armor plating used in the JLTV, according to an internal report and company officials.

The Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), the U.S. Army’s successor to the Humvee, is designed to protect troops from bullets, mines, and explosives. At its Portland, Oregon facility, workers skipped mandatory hardness tests and fabricated results for about 12,800 armor plates, which were falsely labeled as approved. Some of these plates later developed cracks, raising concerns about their reliability in combat.

Oshkosh Defense LLC, a major military vehicle manufacturer, was a key customer for Evraz’s armor plates. The company produces the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), marketed as a “go-anywhere, do-anything” light tactical vehicle. Primarily used by the U.S. military, the JLTV has also been provided to Ukraine, Israel, Brazil, and Lithuania. As of last year, over 22,000 JLTVs had been built, each expected to last around 20 years, the report says.

Read it.

The Environmental Protection Agency canceled two $20 million environmental justice grants that the Biden administration awarded to its own advisers, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

On Monday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency’s latest round of grant cancellations and cost-cutting measures. Included among the more than 400 canceled grants are 2 that the Biden administration awarded in December to Tennessee-based nonprofit Young, Gifted & Green and North Carolina-based nonprofit Democracy Green, a source familiar told the Free Beacon. Both groups had connections to the Biden White House and EPA—and neither had handled such a substantial amount of money before securing the taxpayer funds.

Young, Gifted & Green received its $20 million environmental justice grant after its CEO—LaTricea Adams—personally applied for the funding while simultaneously serving as a member of a top White House environmental justice council, the Free Beacon reported last month. The group has reported just $2.7 million in revenue—about 14 percent the size of the grant—since it registered as a nonprofit in 2020, tax filings show.