Task & Purpose.

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

Navy Matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Antiplanner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

The New Neo

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

…

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.