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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

A senior official at the main U.S. aid agency, which is being dismantled by the Trump administration, told employees to clear safes holding classified documents and personnel files by shredding the papers or putting them into bags for burning, according to an email sent to the staff.
The email sent by Erica Y. Carr, the acting executive secretary, told employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development to empty out the classified safe and personnel document files on Tuesday. “Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” Ms. Carr wrote, according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times.

…

It is unclear if Ms. Carr or any other official at U.S.A.I.D. got permission from the National Archives and Records Administration to destroy the documents. The Federal Records Act of 1950 requires U.S. government officials to ask the records administration for approval before destroying documents.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was able to convince most Republicans to vote for the bill, with the exception of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), while one Democrat – Jared Golden (D-ME) joined the Republicans in passing the measure which increases security spending by $4.4 billion, contains a $440 million boost for immigration enforcement, and cuts the IRS budget by $20 billion.

It also prevents Washington DC from spending $1 billion of its own tax dollars, and allows the Pentagon flexibility to buy new weapons – an odd provision in a stopgap bill that was demanded by GOP defense hawks.

The bill also has no new limits on DOGE, and does not prevent agency heads from firing federal workers or canceling federal grants and contracts – actions which are currently being challenged in the courts in what critics argue amount to illegal impoundments of money approved by Congress.

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American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is known primarily for two things: screaming into microphones at political rallies and making the teacher’s union an extension of the Democratic Party. However, Weingarten had an unintended substantive moment when she changed her earlier position on the elimination of the Education Department. Weingarten previously shrugged off the elimination of the department as not a big deal for education. Recently, she returned to her irate default in denouncing the elimination. The reason, however, was telling.

After Trump was reelected in November, Weingarten said that the elimination was not a big deal and that teachers had originally opposed the creation of the department: “I mean, my members don’t really care about whether they have a bureaucracy of the Department of Education or not. In fact, Al Shanker and the [American Federation of Teachers] in the 1970s were opposed to its creation.”

Read it … if you can….

A Connecticut college student is suing the Hartford Board of Education and the city of Hartford for negligence.

Nineteen-year-old Aleysha Ortiz says she graduated from high school with honors and earned a college scholarship, but she can’t read or write.

In some ways, Ortiz is living an American dream.

The 19-year-old began her freshman year at the University of Connecticut in Hartford this past fall.

U.Conn. has never been known as an educational powerhouse. At least she’s got her DEI to keep her warm.

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Dr. Peter McCullough told The HighWire’s Del Bigtree that the current strain of bird flu likely resulted from gain-of-function research conducted at the USDA Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia.

“This strain of bird flu is different. This looks like it actually came from serial passage research done at the USDA Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia … We’re so sure of it that we’ve published this in a peer-reviewed paper … and it hasn’t been disputed by any of the public health officials. We cite the USDA research.” McCullough told Bigtree.

McCullough continued, “Serial passage is when a blend of viral strains is intentionally put in a mallard duck. They were trying to see which strain would pass to other mallard ducks. The mallard duck is studied because its gullet is where the virus attaches and doesn’t go into the lungs. And indeed, they found CLADE 23446 that looked like it transmitted … and sure enough, Athens was where the first cases were found.”

“The mallard ducks could spread it all over and in migratory waterfowl. It quickly spread into mammals, and now up to 40 different species of mammals,” McCullough said.

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The audit was commissioned by federal U.S. District Judge David O. Carter and completed by Alvarez & Marsal Public Sector Services, LLC. (A&M).

The report noted that A&M found it challenging to completely quantify how Los Angeles officials spent approximately $2.3 billion in funding meant to shelter, feed, and serve homeless people due to the incomplete and inaccurate manner the city’s homelessness program recorded and collected data.

The report painted a grim picture of Los Angeles’ homeless program managed by Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which was established in 1993.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised….

Read it.

According to the report, The TSA has more people doing “full-time union work” vs. performing actual screening functions at 86% of US airports. Put another way, 374 out of 432 federalized airports have fewer than 200 TSA Officers to perform screening functions, while the rest are paid by the government but work “full-time on union matters” and do not retain certification to perform screening.

What’s more, DHS cited a recent TSA employee survey which found that over 60% of “poor performers” are allowed to stay employed and “not surprisingly, continue to not perform.”

(Also, maybe get rid of the nut-grabbers in the TSA patdown area when we don’t want to submit to those Total Recall scanners made by Leidos – formerly SAIC).

Read it.

It’s an absolute disgrace: the Climate United Fund, a shady nonprofit slapped together in November 2022, somehow wangled a jaw-dropping $7 billion grant from the Biden administration’s climate slush fund in April 2024—the largest nonprofit grant in U.S. history. This money, ripped from taxpayers’ pockets, was supposed to fuel clean energy projects under the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) of the Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, it’s become a glaring symbol of political cronyism, grift, and utter mismanagement, leaving Americans furious and demanding answers.

Read it.

The Biden presidency might have been the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the American people. A shocking investigation by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has revealed that virtually every document bearing Joe Biden’s signature during his presidency was signed by an autopen — except for one.

What makes this revelation particularly damning is that the only document confirmed to have Biden’s actual signature was his letter announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race. Let that sink in for a moment.

Remember when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) revealed his discussion with Biden when Biden couldn’t recall signing the executive order halting LNG exports? Now we know why — he probably didn’t. The real question is: Who did? Who was running the country while Biden was not all there?

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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The U.S. remains puzzled about how many weapons the Houthis have or where they get them all, a senior U.S. defense official told The War Zone, adding that the militants are highly innovative when it comes to developing their arsenal. Meanwhile, numerous airstrikes by the U.S. and its allies on Houthi targets in Yemen have not halted the rebel group’s ability to produce the weapons and use them at will, the official said.

“There’s some debate as to what’s in their magazine,” the official told The War Zone during a media engagement at the Air and Space Forces Association Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “There’s a good bit right now we don’t know about the Houthis.”

Your tax dollars at work.

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President Donald Trump pushed border encounters to historical lows, and did so without signing into law a bipartisan border deal relentlessly lauded by his Democratic opponents.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed that there were a mere 200 migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border on Feb. 22, marking the lowest single-day apprehension number in over 15 years. This milestone was followed up by Trump’s announcement that there were only 8,326 migrant apprehensions at the border during his first full month in office, a figure dwarfed by the regular monthly averages seen during the previous administration.

The southern border is becoming so quiet that Tom Homan, who is leading the Trump administration’s deportation operation, says he doesn’t recall activity this calm in his entire career in federal immigration enforcement. The border czar first began working for the Border Patrol in 1984.

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Organic food production is heavily regulated—forbidding genetically modified organisms as well as approximately 700 chemicals that are used in non-organic agriculture—and certification is required.

To achieve organic certification, farmers spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars annually to comply with record keeping requirements and prepare for regular document and facility inspections.

Non-organic farms do not have such overhead costs and thus have fewer expenses priced into the cost of goods sold.

Throughout the growing seasons, organic farms cost more to operate for a variety of reasons, and subsidies that disproportionately benefit chemically intensive agriculture exacerbate the price discrepancies, according to advocates for the organic industry.

As usual, when the question is “Why is [something] more expensive?”, the answer is almost invariably “the government”.

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Doing well by doing good.

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The Biden administration gave Canadian electric bus maker The Lion Electric Company $160 million in subsidies to manufacture 435 buses for schools around the U.S. The company is nearing bankruptcy and laid off almost half its employees, but $95 million of the buses have still not been provided, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

As Elon Musk and his tech team urge their fellow Americans to become “domestic auditors” to help rein in federal spending, people have been encouraged to use the Treasury Department’s usaspending.gov website to identify and track government finance.

But usaspending.gov is wrong on the biggest picture, RealClearInvestigations found.

The total amount of spending across “all agencies,” as recorded at usaspending.gov, appears to be 50% higher than most experts interviewed for this article think it actually was.

In Fiscal Year 2024, for instance, the website pegs total spending at $9.7 trillion, when several experts said it was probably around $6.5 trillion. No one could explain the much bigger figure. Officials with usaspending.gov conceded to RCI that their totals were wrong and said the error, which shows up in similar fashion for the last five fiscal years would be fixed soon. They offered neither an explanation for their higher total nor an estimate of what it should be. Two weeks later, the erroneous figures remain.

Budget experts say the website’s seeming multi-trillion-dollar error illustrates a core challenge Musk and his colleagues at the Department of Government Efficiency face as they try to reduce Washington’s spending. In a twist on the classic Washington line, the problem is not just following the money but finding it in the first place. The federal government has become so big and so expensive that even experts have trouble navigating the morass of contracts, awards, grants, loans, and other items that have transformed the U.S. spreadsheet into a labyrinth pitted with dead ends and rabbit holes.

Accountability and transparency is the thing that the Deep State fears most. This is what the Democrats are fighting so hard to prevent.

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President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that all federal funding will stop for colleges and schools that allow “illegal” protests and that agitators will be imprisoned or sent back to the country they came from.

What the article doesn’t come out and say, because it doesn’t need to, is that this is a Crime Against Humanity and a Threat To Our Democracy. The Deep State has forgotten that when you live by the imperial presidency you can also die by the imperial presidency.

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Welcome to the People’s Republic of the Left Coast, where, in spite of having the highest taxes in the nation, somehow nobody in government seems to have the money to do their actual jobs.

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A recent audit of Oklahoma’s Tulsa Public Schools reported financial mismanagement, noncompliance with state law and district policy, and a lack of transparency by administrators.

State Auditor and Inspector Cindy Byrd said auditors reviewed $37.7 million in Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) expenditures between 2015 and 2023 and found that $29 million was paid to consultants. Byrd said auditors found 1,450 discrepancies in 900 invoices and 90 vendor records.

The report also alleged that TPS may have violated a state law prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in Oklahoma’s public schools.

Where would we be without ‘public’ schools? Probably a lot more educated.

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Not all people who are attracted to government employment are searching for a cushy job with limited work load and even less oversight, but most aren’t working for agencies like the IRS, ATF or USAID because of patriotic duty. In reality, federal bureaucrats act as if they’ve found a cheat code to life. And until the arrival of Elon Musk’s DOGE audits, that assumption was generally true.

As Dan Aykroyd’s character Ray Stantz notes in the movie Ghostbusters:

“Personally, I liked working for the university. They gave us money and facilities. We didn’t have to produce anything. You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector … they expect results!”

For decades it’s been a running joke that government employees do very little while collecting a generous paycheck. For American taxpayers, however, the joke’s not so funny. DOGE audits have exposed considerable waste and fraud within the system. Apologists in the media argue that most of this information was available to anyone willing to look, but this is a misrepresentation of the bigger problem.

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U.S. Central Command has posted the first video ever showing the secretive AGM-114R9X variant of the Hellfire missile in action. R9X is an exotic weapon that features an array of pop-out sword-like blades rather than a traditional high-explosive warhead. It is used as an extremely low collateral damage weapon that can target not just a vehicle, but a specific occupant inside by slashing through the car at just the right spot. TWZ was the first to identify this new weapon’s unique effects back in 2017. It has since become something of a gruesome fascination in the public domain, getting nicknames like the “Flying Ginsu” and “Ninja Bomb” due to its very unique capabilities.

We have the technology.

The American Mind.

It’s long past time to rein in the field of public administration, which supplies the bureaucrats who populate the administrative state. About 12,000 U.S. students a year graduate in the field, mainly at the master’s level through the Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree. About half of all MPA graduates end up in government, mostly at the state (25%) and local (15%) levels, but some (about 10%) at the federal level. This means that about 1,200 public administration graduates enter the federal bureaucracy every year, presumably in leadership and management-track roles.

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In removing General Charles Q. Brown, Jr. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Trump made a necessary and long-overdue correction to a military leadership corps that has lost its way. For too long, the Pentagon has been governed by leaders more concerned with bureaucratic politics and ideological conformity than with the timeless requirements of combat: discipline, cohesion, and lethality.

America’s military is not merely a collection of well-equipped components—it is an institution forged by a distinct moral and martial tradition. Its strength has always come from a warrior ethos that prizes courage, merit, and excellence. Yet over the last two decades, that ethos has been eroded by a leadership class that increasingly serves the managerial regime rather than the nation it was sworn to protect.

In many ways, General Brown exemplified this decline.

To be fair, he wasn’t as bad as Milley.

Read it.

If successful, repealing the endangerment finding would undermine the legal basis for many existing climate regulations, potentially affecting emissions standards for vehicles, power plants, and other sectors. Critics of the finding, including many contributors to this site, have long questioned its scientific grounding, pointing to massive uncertainties in climate models and historical data.

The Antiplanner.

The Antiplanner called Minnesota’s Northstar commuter train a “flop” in 2016. It took the pandemic to do it, but it looks like the state has finally agreed and is now considering plans to shut the line down.

The line, which cost more than $300 million to start up, was supposed to carry 4,100 riders per weekday, which seems absurdly small for the price. Yet it peaked in 2017 at just 2,800 riders and fell to 2,700 riders in 2019. Since the pandemic, it hasn’t recovered to more than about a sixth of that. The state estimates that the costs of running this service would fall from $12 million a year to $2 million a year if it replaced the trains with buses. In 2023, fares covered less than $325,000 of that $12 million in operating costs.

While the Federal Transit Administration has a policy of demanding a refund of the depreciated value of any portion of rail projects paid for by the feds, a report by the state suggests that this could be done with real estate that had been purchased as part of the project. While the state would have to pay the FTA about $30 million to $35 million, if the real estate has appreciated in the meantime, that would cover much of the cost. Of course, Congress could always waive that cost, which would make more sense than continuing to subsidize the trains.

Meanwhile, Amtrak is hoping Minnesota will fund more passenger trains between Chicago and the Twin Cities plus trains from the Twin Cities to Duluth. Before state legislators seriously consider doing so, they should ask whether buses can provide the same service and whether they are already doing so without any government subsidies.

A question that I GUARANTEE will never be asked by any elected official in Minnesota.

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The Trump administration’s effort to rein in federal bureaucracy and spending has a new target in its crosshairs: one of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s favorite projects in the San Francisco area.

President Donald Trump announced in a Wednesday executive order that his administration will look to cut the Presidio Trust to the fullest extent possible, picking a fight with the federal agency that oversees the nearly-1,500-acre park in San Francisco.

Pelosi worked in Congress to establish the Presidio Trust in the 1990s to manage the city’s famous Presidio, and she subsequently helped land a $200 million award to Presidio Trust in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to cover costs of “climate resilience” projects at the park.

Trump’s order specifically orders the rest of his administration to eliminate the Presidio Trust “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,” and it is unclear just how much the federal government will be able to cut from the Presidio Trust. The Presidio Trust told Politico that most of the $200 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding has been allocated, though Trump and other Republicans have promised to look to claw back as much Inflation Reduction Act money as they can.

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Somehow, we will bear it.

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How many climate scientists are willing to bend the truth to keep their access to federal grant money?

How much money are dissembling students and faculty members at the University of Helsinki receiving from the US Government?

How deep is the rot, if the Chancellor of a major university appears to think it is OK to talk positively about students attempting to deceive the US Government, by rewording the titles of their grant applications to evade restrictions imposed by the Trump Administration? Though to be fair, maybe the chancellor did condemn bending the truth to win Fulbright grants, and Guardian reporter Oliver Milman forgot to include the Chancellor’s condemnation in his article.

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The scandalous spending at USAID on foreign programs (think a transgender opera in Colombia) and progressive NGO’s (think The Aspen Institute) set off an explosion of headlines. Separately, our own auditors found $22 BILLION spent by the Office of Refugee Resettlement – a division of Health and Human Services – on aid to migrants since 2020. Again, NGO’s were granted the money to go out and act as ideological proxies for the Biden administration.

It’s become clear that Americans need an exhaustive map of the federal government and how much spending at each agency has grown over time.

When we began that work, we immediately found another problem.

Record keeping within the Federal Register, which is supposed to be the definitive guide to government policy, is shockingly bad.

At least 75 agencies listed there are effectively defunct or obsolete; they’ve been subsumed by other entities, renamed, or don’t even exist any longer.

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Continuing his government-reformation fiesta, President Trump is expected to issue an executive order dissolving the US Postal Service leadership and absorbing the organizaton into the Commerce Department. That bold move may be just a first step toward an even more ambitious and controversial goal: privatizing the perpetual money-loser.

From leadership to rank-and-file employees, the USPS will most certainly mount intense legal and political efforts against both initiatives. The USPS governing board is already gearing up: On Thursday, the USPS board held an emergency meeting in which it hired outside attorneys and directed them to file legal challenges when Trump makes his first move, the Washington Post reported.

…

The Postal Service is politically powerful — starting with its raw headcount: While you may not guess it given the long lines that typify a visit to a post office, USPS has a staggering 650,000 employees, who rise up whenever privatization gains momentum. It’s also popular among Americans — 72% view it favorably, compared just 21% who view it unfavorably, according to a 2024 Pew Research poll.

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It’s 2025, and we’re still dealing with the fallout and ramifications from COVID lockdowns. The inflation bringing down global economies, the devastating learning loss from years of school closures, and the endless masking still visible nearly everywhere.

All based on the assumption from 2020 that COVID was exceptionally dangerous. The World Health Organization claiming that 3.4 percent of people that contracted COVID would die. Anthony Fauci’s series of press conferences warning that reopening was impossible. The CDC, FDA, other expert organizations and politicians demanding vaccine mandates and passports. The politicians and hospital administrators denying medical care to unvaccinated individuals. A practice that continues even today.

All of it stems from the assertion that COVID was a uniquely, extremely lethal virus. We knew long ago that The Experts were wrong about the mortality rate. And now we have more proof that their misleading estimates, which led to a complete societal breakdown, were absurdly, catastrophically inaccurate.

UPDATE: Blockbuster Yale Study: Millions Of Long COVID Patients Might Actually Be Vaccine Injured

Read it.

That was the U.S. Agency for International Development’s approach to protect its autonomy from the president. It had nothing to do with resisting Donald Trump and DOGE—this line was written three decades ago to resist reforms by Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton’s mild-mannered secretary of state.

The career bureaucrats and their aid-industrial complex won out. That marked the last shovelful of dirt on the grave of attempts to rein in USAID.

Until Trump and his DOGE team.

UK Daily Mail.

When a new Yale University study identified a debilitating syndrome linked to Covid vaccines, Lindy Ayers breathed a sigh of relief.

The 31-year-old Army veteran, from Arkansas, has been wheelchair-bound since she took her second Pfizer shot in 2021 as part of the government’s military mandate.

For years she was told her extreme fatigue, sickness and heart palpitations were anxiety. Then doctors said it was long Covid. She was branded an antivaxxer for suggesting it could have been the vaccine.

Thousands of Americans have reported similar stories. After the study news dropped, DailyMail.com spoke to dozens of Americans, including those in healthcare, law, and the military, who said they felt a sense of validation after years of being dismissed as crazy.

Read it.

More than 500 studies on COVID-19 have been withdrawn due to “bias,” “unreliable” information, or unspecified reasons, a blog that tracks retracted documents, found.

Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky told The College Fix via phone interview one reason for the high number of retractions is the academic system’s incentive structure which pressures researchers to rapidly produce studies and get them peer reviewed as quickly as possible.

“Why do they feel the need to rush papers through? Well, it’s because that’s how they get or keep their jobs, that’s how they get grants, everything is based on that,” he said.

“When you know that your whole career depends on publishing papers in particular journals, you’re going to do what you have to do to publish those papers. Most of the time that means you work hard, you hire the smart grad students and postdocs,” he said.

Read it.

The senior Biden administration official tasked with directing former President Joe Biden’s $27 billion climate grant program oversaw a $5 billion grant from the program to his former employer, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Jahi Wise joined the Environmental Protection Agency in December 2022 as the founding director of the newly created Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF, according to his LinkedIn profile. In April 2024, while Wise served in that role, the EPA announced that it would award GGRF grants totaling $20 billion to just eight nonprofits, including the Coalition for Green Capital, a Washington, D.C.-based group that received $5 billion as part of the announcement and where Wise previously worked as the director of policy. There is no indication that Wise recused himself from that process.

To which he will no doubt be returning now that the political climate in D.C. doesn’t align with what appear to be his career goals.

Is anybody surprised by this? Anybody at all?

Read it.

Federal grants are a crucial funding source for local governments, growing from $135 billion in 1990 to an astounding $1.2 trillion in 2022. However, a new study reveals that sudden surges of federal money – so-called “windfalls” – increase local corruption by up to 28%. This research underscores the urgent need for stringent oversight mechanisms, particularly at the federal level, to ensure these funds serve their intended purpose rather than lining the pockets of corrupt officials.

ZMan scopes it out.

The assault on the Blob has taken up most of the attention in Washington, along with the reproachment with Russia, but the biggest item on the Trump agenda is the restructuring of the American economy. If you listen to what Trump says when asked about what has been happening thus far, it often circles back to the economy and how he imagines it to be after his changes. The thing is no one in the media follows up on it so Trump is never asked about that end goal.

There were some hints in the Russia coverage. One of the participants from the Russian side was the head of their sovereign wealth fund. This is something Trump has said he wants to create for the American government. A sovereign investment fund is a state-owned investment fund that does the same things a private investment fund, except it also has an eye on policy. A sovereign wealth fund acts as an additional level in both foreign and domestic policy.

This is not a thing you typically see in the West, as the Western economic model is built on the assumption that the government should not meddle in markets. This is a big lie, of course, as Western governments regulate everything. The thing is the regulations are dictated by the market makers through the miracle of regulatory capture, so the political class has limited control of the regulations. A sovereign wealth fund would put the political class on an even footing with the market makers.