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More than 500 studies on COVID-19 have been withdrawn due to “bias,” “unreliable” information, or unspecified reasons, a blog that tracks retracted documents, found.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

Read it.

Weeks after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell evaded a sitting congressman’s questions about the central bank’s foreign gold holdings, the Fed has also declined to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request for records about such holdings.

The Federal Reserve’s lack of transparency comes amidst reports that countries are removing their gold and other assets from the U.S. in the wake of the unprecedented Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. According to a 2023 Invesco survey, a “substantial percentage” of central banks expressed concern about how the U.S. and its allies froze nearly half of Russia’s $650 billion gold and forex reserves.

Rep. Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., asked Powell about the matter in a December letter, only to have the Fed chair respond last month with evasive non-answers, telling him that the Federal Reserve does not own gold but holds it as a custodian for other entities—a fact that the congressman presumably already knew.

Following Powell’s evasive response, Headline USA filed a FOIA request with the Fed for records reflecting how much gold the Federal Reserve Bank of New York currently holds in its vault, as well as records reflecting the ownership stake that each of FRBNY’s central bank/government clients have in that gold. The FOIA request also sought records about the Fed’s gold holdings prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Read it.

In the weeks since President Trump took office, federal judges have arrogated to themselves the authority to control how the government spends money, whether the government can issue orders to government personnel and even the content displayed on government websites.

Federal judges have claimed that the White House can’t offer buyouts to federal employees, can’t fire political appointees from the previous administrations, can’t pause funding, can’t cut funds to government programs, can’t change formulas allocating government grants and also can’t remove transgender ideology from government websites put there by its predecessors.

And if the White House doesn’t even control government websites, what does it control?

Read it.

US Air Force spy planes have recently conducted signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations along the US-Mexico border, while Green Berets from the US Army’s 7th Special Forces Group have been deployed to a naval facility in Campeche—a Mexican port city on the Gulf of Mexico—for what’s described as a “training mission.” These developments offer a clearer picture of President Trump’s emerging strategy to combat Mexican cartels, which have fueled a drug death catastrophe of 100,000 Americans per year. This approach aligns with Trump’s designation of these cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

The CIA, operating under the Trump administration, has been secretly deploying unarmed (at the moment) General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drones over regions of Mexico dominated by heavily armed drug cartels, according to a CNN report. The report comes from current and former officials with knowledge of ongoing national security operations, shedding light on what is happening under the cloak of darkness – in preparation to disrupt and dismantle drug cartels.

Read it.

The White House has touted January’s 36% decline in border apprehensions—the lowest number of illegal aliens apprehended along the border in almost five years—as the “Trump effect.”

That total includes 29,116 apprehended at the border outside of official ports of entry, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s the lowest since May 2020. And that compares to 47,316 apprehensions outside of official ports in December.

The January total also includes 32,349 apprehensions at ports of entry, compared to 48,719 in December.

Further, the Trump administration has dropped the catch-and-release policies of the Biden administration, where those caught crossing the border illegally would be released into the United States instead of immediately deported.

“Illegal immigration at the southern border plummeted in January amid President Donald J. Trump’s return to office and immediate crackdown,” the White House announced in a Tuesday statement. “Call it the Trump effect.”

I’ll be happy to do so.

Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

Since the response of FEMA to natural disasters has been widely demonstrated (going back to Hurricane Katrina) to be substantially incompetent, it’s hard to find this complaint at all credible.

Read it.

The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are “almost impossible” to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.

Mind you, it’s not as if such a federal tracking system wasn’t already in place — it simply went casually unused for all sorts of payouts adding up to an almost unfathomable $4.7 trillion. Without Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) identification codes associated with those payouts, there’s little hope in figuring out where all that money went.

Read it.

The American people have rightly been appalled at the outrageous expenditures Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been exposing at USAID, which not only demonstrates the striking wastefulness of our government but also an ingenious public relations strategy by the Trump administration.

When Americans learn that their tax dollars are going to fund egregious projects around the world, it lays a foundation for the public relations framework needed by the Trump administration to bring American public opinion along on the necessary journey of restructuring the government. It makes people’s blood boil. And it sets the tone for the effectiveness, and need for, the entire Trump efficiency program, even though the spending in absolute monetary terms on these insane USAID projects is fairly minor compared to the overall $6.9 trillion federal budget.

Read it.

In 2006, after a Hezbollah invasion, Israel launched a military campaign against the Islamic terrorist group. After a month of fighting, the Bush administration forced a ceasefire under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that required the disarmament of Hezbollah and its replacement by the Lebanese Army and a United Nations ‘peacekeeping’ force.

How can Hezbollah claim victory, President George W. Bush wondered, when they were “going to be replaced by a Lebanese Army and an international force?”

The answer was quite obvious. The Lebanese Army and UNIFIL didn’t replace Hezbollah, they were co-opted by it. And nearly two decades later, Hezbollah had far more firepower and attempted to launch its own version of Oct 7 until Israel neutered it with its pager operation.

Read it.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, has revealed data exposing the misuse of funds within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), confirming what many have long suspected.

The Culture Wars are taxpayer funded.

It shows that monies went to places few Americans would ever have wanted their dollars to go.

What is true for USAID will also hold for much larger US government departments.

Free from real scrutiny, absent any consequences, and deeply unpatriotic, the permanent and amoral taxpayer-funded class has mastered the art of hiding its greed behind the suffering of the working class.

Read it.

The U.S. Agency for International Development wasn’t just spending your hard-earned tax dollars on transgender operas overseas—USAID also has troubling connections with the leftist pressure groups that infiltrated and advised the Biden administration.

My book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” exposes the woke activist groups that fed staff into the administrative state and pushed woke policies on the bureaucracy.

As President Donald Trump released information about USAID’s corruption, I started to notice a few familiar names from my research.

The American people should understand just how connected the woke enterprise is to the federal bureaucracy, and USAID provides a powerful example of those ties.

Navy Matters.

Where does perception come from, if not from reality? How is someone’s perception formed? Well, it comes from many sources: one’s own experiences, media news sources (you can instantly see, here, the danger posed by a biased media that presents an altered reality as true reality, but, I digress), social networks, etc. If those various sources are not constantly presenting and explaining the true value of a navy then the perception quickly becomes that the navy has no value.

I can’t address the UK situation specifically but I can note that the US Navy makes almost no effort to talk to the citizenry and present its accomplishments and value in terms that the average person can understand and relate to. Instead, the Navy resorts to blocking the media, circling the wagons, hiding behind bogus classification labels, misleading Congress and, generally, looking down at the general population.

The Navy’s actions off Yemen involving missile attacks and defense should be made into near-movie type adventures to be presented to the public. The exploits of our fearless sailors, fighting off relentless missile attacks so that Americans can get their oil and goods should be the stuff of growing legend. It almost doesn’t matter how precisely true the accounts are. That’s not the point. The point is to present the Navy’s value to the public.

Once upon a time, moviegoers were routinely treated to newsreel highlights of our armed forces. We need to bring back the updated version of that on TV, streaming channels, social media, podcasts, influencers, etc. We need to continuously show the public the value of the Navy. If we do that, the Navy won’t have to beg Congress for ships, the people will do it for them. If we do that, the recruiting problem will solve itself.

Don’t hold your breath.

On a related note, if the US is providing the security for global shipping, then what true value does the RN offer?  Why should the UK citizenry pay for a navy when the US is providing their security for free?  One could see this as a powerful argument for the US to stop providing global security which would, in turn force other countries to increase their naval forces to fill the gap and result in an increase in their true (and perceived?) value.  Thus, one could make the argument, it is in the UK’s best interest for the US to stop providing international shipping security.  Interesting perspective, huh?

Indeed.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reportedly increased grants for migrants from 2020 to 2024, spending more than $22 billion in taxpayer dollars on grants that included money going toward vehicles, home loans, and startup businesses.

The agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), handed out $22.6 billion to a host of nonprofits, effectively acting as a “giant magnet” for migrants crossing the U.S. border and claiming asylum, auditors from OpenTheBooks told New York Post.

The amount of noncitizens eligible to obtain funding that derived from ORR under the majority of former President Joe Biden’s administration soared significantly, with more than $10 billion handed out to grant-receiving organizations in just 2023 alone, the outlet noted.

Read it.

Details are still emerging, but the U.S. Navy supercarrier USS Harry S. Truman has collided with a merchant vessel identified as the Besiktas-M in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Egypt’s Port Said.

The U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet released the following statement:

“The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) was involved in a collision with the merchant vessel Besiktas-M at approximately 11:46 p.m. local time, Feb. 12, while operating in the vicinity of Port Said, Egypt, in the Mediterranean Sea.”

“The collision did not endanger the Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) as there are no reports of flooding or injuries. The propulsion plants are unaffected and in a safe and stable condition. The incident is under investigation. More information will be released as it becomes available.”

Read it.

Once again, RINO Mitch demonstrates that he’s fully imbedded in the Deep State.

Read it.

Five unions sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, seeking to block what they called the possible mass firing of hundreds of thousands of federal employees who resist pressure to accept buyouts.

In a complaint filed in Washington, D.C. federal court, the unions accused the White House and others in the Executive Branch of undermining Congress’ role in creating and funding a federal workforce, violating separation of powers principles.

The plaintiffs include the United Auto Workers, the National Treasury Employees Union, the National Federation of Federal Employees, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.

Labor unions add tremendous amounts of friction to economic activity, making innovation and economic corrections at times almost impossible, leading to the sort of sclerosis that eventually destroys companies, institutions, and ever communities.

Read it.

The US Department of Justice on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the state of New York and key officials over the state’s 2019 “Green Light” law, which has allowed thousands of illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, while blocking federal immigration and border enforcement agencies from accessing the state’s motor vehicle database.

The lawsuit, filed in US district Court in Albany, was announced by Attorney General Pam Bondi during a Wednesday press conference.

Aside from the state of NY, Governor Kathy Hochul, state Attorney General Letita James, and DMV Commissioner Mark Schroeder were named as defendants.

Babylon Bee.

BOYERS, PA — The Iron Mountain Federal Records Center has reportedly lost access to all federal retirement files after miners dug too deep and awakened an ancient Balrog.

Cato Institute.

America traditionally had few immigration restrictions, but since the 1920s, the law has banned most aspiring immigrants. Today, fewer than 1 percent of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally. Immigrants cannot simply get an exception to immigrate any more than restaurateurs in the 1920s could simply get an exception to sell alcohol. Instead, just as Prohibition granted only a few exemptions for religious, industrial, or medical uses of alcohol, people seeking an exception to immigration prohibition must also fit into preexisting carve-outs for a select few.

Many Americans have the false impression that these carve-outs are realistic options for potential immigrants to join American society, but the government’s restrictive criteria render the legal paths available only in the most extreme cases. Even when someone qualifies, annual immigration caps greatly delay and, more frequently, eliminate the immigrant’s chance to come to the United States. Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: it happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.

This study provides a uniquely comprehensive, jargon-free explanation of U.S. rules for legal permanent immigration. Some steps are simple and reasonable, but most steps serve only as unjustified obstacles to immigrating legally. For some immigrants, this restrictive system sends them into the black market of illegal immigration. For others, it sends them to other countries, where they contribute to the quality of life in their new homes. And for still others, it requires them to remain in their homeland, often underemployed and sometimes in danger. Whatever the outcome, the system punishes both the prospective immigrants and Americans who would associate, contract, and trade with them. Congress and the administration can do better, and this paper explains how.

Read it.

The seven NGOs in the chart below, in my view, represent the Uniparty. Each of these organizations receives substantial financial support from USAID or the Department of State.

Around 2019, the phrase “democracy in danger” began to dominate public discourse, amplified by the media. This was odd—after all, the U.S. is a democracy (or more precisely, a constitutional republic). But as I traced the influence of these NGOs, a pattern emerged: they are controlled by establishment politicians, they play a major role in shaping political narratives worldwide, and their core mission is always framed as “protecting democracy.”

Originally, these NGOs were created to support U.S. democratic efforts abroad—many of them emerging during the Cold War to combat the spread of communism. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, their original purpose faded. Instead of dissolving, they redefined their mission. Now, they have positioned themselves as the guardians of democracy itself.

This shift explains why Trump’s re-election was framed as a “threat to democracy.” To these NGOs, “democracy” means themselves. Their survival depends on maintaining that role, and any challenge to their authority is perceived as a direct attack on democracy itself.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it had fired four employees from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including the agency’s chief financial officer, over their roles in disbursing federal funds to house migrants in New York City hotels.

The firings capped a startling chain of events that began on Monday with an early-morning social media post by Elon Musk who claimed, misleadingly, that FEMA had recently sent $59 million meant for disaster relief to New York City to pay for “high end hotels” for migrants, and who called the expenditure unlawful.

New York City officials raced to clarify that the federal money had been properly allocated by FEMA under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year, adding that it was not a disaster relief grant and had not been spent on luxury hotels.

Nonetheless, just two hours after Mr. Musk’s post, FEMA’s acting director, Cameron Hamilton, announced that the payments in question “have all been suspended” — even though most of the money had already been disbursed — and that “personnel will be held accountable.”

Read it.

So what will change?

Read it.

Here is the crazy part. Civilian supersonic aircraft have been banned in the United States for over 50 years! In case that wasn’t clear, we didn’t ban noisy aircraft we banned supersonicaircraft. Thus, even quiet supersonic aircraft are banned today. This was a serious mistake. Aside from the fact that the noise was exaggerated, technological development is endogenous.

We have the same problem with local housing (and other) codes: They don’t mandate desired performance, they mandate the technology that supposedly produces the desired performance. So when new technology comes along that also produces the desired performance, it has to overcome the curb of the interests (commercial and political) that are invested in the existing technology. And government winds up the fly in the ointment once again.

Sarah Hoyt.

I had no clue what USAID was. Like perhaps most people, I thought it was a way for the US to do “charity” abroad.

I had a ton of philosophical problems with it, obviously. For one, I don’t know what the purpose of a government, which takes money from is own people via taxes, but foreign charity is not it. I mean, there’s nothing in our constitution that says the Federal government has the right to take our money and do stuff they consider good abroad, for any purpose, including because they think it someone obscurely benefits us.

For another, because I have noticed for a long time now, that everything the left does abroad is something that will benefit someone else, and preferably is bad for us. Everything including war, the left does for the benefit of someone else. And they like it better if it’s bad for us.

So, on those principles, I disapproved of USAID. But even I was shocked when the full can of worms was open, and they all came crawling out. First because I didn’t know the amounts of money they’d spent in the US and there are things like the fact they funded the Tides Foundation which in turn funded BLM — meaning in essence we paid in taxes to have our own cities burned — which just stick in my craw. But then…. then i found out how it was founded, and why.

Read it.

If you thought that we were going to start with jobs data, you are mistaken. Today, “inflation expectations” deserve some attention. Right around 10am ET Friday, the stock market started to decline. Until that moment, it had done fairly well even as yields increased on the back of the jobs report. Then out came the University of Michigan CONsumer CONfidence data, showing 1-year inflation expectations jumping from 3.3% to 4.3%! This was lucky for us, as we had pointed out in our NFP Instant Reaction – What to Do With Data You Don’t Trust that we were moderately bearish risk assets. Consumer inflation expectations were not on my bingo card of what could turn stocks, so I guess that we can classify that under “better lucky than smart.” We should just run with it, but we cannot help ourselves.

…

In physics, what we consider rules are termed laws. But for most people, rules are a set of “things” that need to be followed. Whether they are laws or axioms, they are things that are clear and explicitly define and control actions. On the other hand, conjectures, educated guesses, and “rules of thumb” are general guidelines that often work or point you in the right direction. But by no means are they immutable rules that must be followed.

So why do economists insist on terming certain things rules that are really conjectures? Probably because it sounds better, especially if you want people to believe that they work. Or maybe it just makes it easier to win prestigious economic awards?

But we revisit this subject today, not to focus on how inaccurate it is to call many of these things rules, but to highlight that the so-called rules definitively don’t work when they are based on inaccurate data!

Read it.

NOAA’s year 2024 updated Relative Sea Level Trend data measurements continue to demonstrate that climate alarmists claim of hugely growing rates of sea level rise acceleration are completely out of touch with NOAA’s overwhelming data reflecting measured rates of relative sea level rise.

Read it.

If the Senate confirms Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary, he has his work cut out for him. His quest to make America healthy again won’t be easy, but it should include tackling Big Sugar, an industry that has substantially increased Americans’ grocery prices—and significantly decreased their health.

In the U.S., sugar costs 40 cents per pound, double the global price of 20 cents. These high prices are the result of Big Sugar’s monopoly on the sugar market, a monopoly that receives vital support from government intervention.

Federal government subsidies for domestic sugar production have existed since the 1980s and consistently contribute to these high sugar prices. Annually, sugar companies receive around $4 billion in increased revenues from subsidies and tariffs. This allows for noncompetitive practices and contributes to a system of cronyism instead of capitalism.

Read it.

The scandal of the week might be called Subscription-gate. It was unveiled that the currently shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development was spending millions of dollars in lavishly priced subscriptions to “Politico Pro,” one of those government-insider news products no one outside the bureaucracy reads.

Over there at The New York Post, Real Clear Investigations contributor Benjamin Weingarten snagged attention with this headline:

Obscene $8M Politico payout just one way feds reward their lapdog media

Read it.

Flight tracking data from Flightradar24 shows a US Air Force RC-135V/W Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft conducted its second signals intelligence (SIGINT) operation near cartel-controlled territories within Mexico this past week. The SIGINT mission coincides with remarks from US Border Czar Tom Homan, who warned on Thursday that he “expects” a hot confrontation between the US military and drug cartels.

Flightradar24 data shows the USAF RC-135V/W Rivet Joint taking off from Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha on Friday evening. The Spy plane arrived at the heavily fortified southern border hours later and flew a SIGINT mission in US airspace from El Paso, Texas, to the Big Bend Ranch State Park, located in west Texas.

The spy plane flew the west Texas route twice, following a figure-8 pattern around the Big Bend Ranch State Park, before returning to Omaha. The SIGINT mission appeared focused on gathering intelligence on drug cartels in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which borders Texas.

Read it.

Despite my advanced age (almost 69 years), during much of which I have paid at least some attention to politics and government policy, I continue to be baffled by how differently government workers and “private sector” workers view their jobs.

A recent befuddlement is the objection by the (national) government workers to even the offer of a “buyout” incentive to quit in anticipation of possible layoffs to reduce the size of the government workforce.

Befuddled because employee buyout offers are common in private industry, especially when the employer seeks to reduce the size of its workforce. Yet the government workers seem offended by even the offer to an employee buyout as a tool to reduce workforce size.

Read it.

If the Biden administration’s green energy agenda were a bus, it would have no wheels, a dead battery, and a $160 million price tag. Enter Lion Electric, a Canadian electric school bus company that was handed nearly $160 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies—only to collapse into bankruptcy, leaving school districts across America high and dry?.

Now, watchdogs like EPA administrator Lee Zeldin are demanding answers, exposing yet another mismanaged, wasteful, and completely avoidable green energy failure.

As part of Biden’s $5 billion Clean School Bus program, Lion Electric was awarded $159 million to produce 435 electric buses. The administration touted it as a hallmark of its climate agenda, with Kamala Harris herself front and center, gushing over the initiative?.

The Other McCain.

Wow, what a week it’s been, huh? Elon Musk’s young wizards at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have applied their superpowers — weaponized autism — to the simple question: Exactly who has the federal government been giving our tax dollars to? The resulting revelations, especially at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), have been shocking — the biggest scandal of my lifetime, and perhaps the biggest since Teapot Dome.

Read it.

During the odious Senate reign of Harry Reid (D-NV), the normal processes for budgeting and appropriations were effectively terminated. Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND), then chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, once opened hearings on the next federal budget, apparently out of some weird, archaic adherence to law, process and procedure. His Majority Leader promptly ordered it shut down.

Continuing resolutions, omnibus bills and absurdly disparate collections of provisions (recall Nancy Pelosi’s infamous remark that her health care bill had to be passed before we could see what was in it) seem to be the norm. The dung beetle paradigm of rolling many things into one big ball is how we are governed. It takes a lot for a single issue or event to get meaningful attention.

I would mind less about funds going to Peruvian LGBTQ comic books or to travelling non-binary street puppet climate theater troupes if such expenditures were actually expressly listed in the authorizing legislation and we could see who actually voted for it.

Read it.

ZMan casts aspersions.

One of the things that is becoming clear to everyone as the USAID scandal unfolds is that much of what has been presented to us over the last several decades, as far as politics, has been an illusion created by the blob. The media was part of the blob, underwritten by the government and cultivated with government access, so they presented a version of political reality that favored the blob. Even the debates over policy were staged by the blob.

That is what is clear in the release of the CBS tapes of the 60 Minutes interview of then candidate Kamala Harris. Calling it an interview is an assault on the language because it was nothing like an interview. It was one part screen test, one part coaching and one part editing to produce what was presented as an interview. Everyone involved knew it was fraud and said nothing. In other words, what we have been seeing is not media bias, but an orchestrated fraud on the public.

As an aside, the corruption was so deep and so normalized that it appears that most people in these media companies were unaware of much of it. The staff at Politico only became aware of who was actually paying their salaries when the USAID money was halted, and Politico could not make payroll. How many people at the BBC knew that USAID was the second largest source of funding to the BBC? Did anyone at the Financial Times know that management were on the pad?

Read it.

Old hands Carville and Axelrod have warned Democrats not to make USAID a hill to die on for the simple reasons that (a) voters do not love foreign aid programs and (b) the USAID funds distribution looks like an elite inside scam.

Read it.

A climate rule issued during the Biden administration is officially dead after judges on Feb. 3 granted the new administration’s request to drop an appeal.

Three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, acting on a recent request from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), dismissed the government’s appeal of a ruling that found the FHWA administrator overstepped his authority in issuing the rule, which forced states to take steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles.

The judges cited a court rule that lets appealing parties dismiss appeals voluntarily if doing so would not create injustice or unfairness. The states that sued over the rule did not oppose the dismissal.

U.S. District Judge Benjamin J. Beaton ruled in 2024 that the rule went beyond the authority that lawmakers had given the FHWA administrator.

Read it.

Oh, the humanity! The wine and cheese set over at Bloomberg has been thrown into full-blown hysteria because—brace yourselves—President Trump turned off the spigot of taxpayer cash that funds their sacred climate cult. Their headline reads like a lost script from The Handmaid’s Tale: “It’s Surreal: Trump’s Freeze on Climate Money Sows Fear and Confusion”?.

“Surreal”? What’s surreal is that these people think they have some divine right to an endless fountain of taxpayer money to fund their political activism disguised as “science.” Imagine a world where these people actually had to produce something of value rather than leech off the federal government. Terrifying, right?

Read it.

By pausing foreign funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, President Donald Trump has dealt a major blow to the ecosystem of nonprofits that promote woke ideology against America’s interests.

It is no accident that USAID’s funding has dovetailed with the grantmaking of leftist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations—and the foreign funding pause will undermine his efforts.

Trump placed a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance on his first day in office. This weekend, agents of the Department of Government Efficiency entered the USAID facility and the USAID website shut down. On Sunday, Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio acting head of the agency.

Read it.

The Los Angeles wildfires estimates have hit $40 billion and may continue to rise. These are four times the losses of the most recent destructive fires and that is likely to convince even more insurance companies to leave the state and make homeowners even more uninsurable.

The exodus of insurance companies led to a 123% increase in the number of California homeowners relying on the state’s FAIR Plan. The FAIR Plan, a government gimmick that seemed good at the time, has $458 billion in total exposure and $4.8 billion in exposure from the current fires, but only has $377 million to cover claims. Once that’s exhausted, the state is likely to hit up insurance companies and homeowners to make up the difference. With mudslides expected to arrive after the rains, the chain of disasters may just be getting underway.

While the state’s worst insurance crisis was going on, Sen. Susan Rubio, the former chair of the Senate Insurance Committee, was fighting for illegal aliens while under suspicion of bribery.

Illegal aliens like her.

“We do not let Trump harass, intimidate, and push our immigrant community,” Sen. Susan Rubio threatened at a ‘healing circle’ convened by the state legislative building to protest Trump.

Rubio, who varyingly claims to have been deported when she was 4 or 6 years old, has made that her claim to fame. That and also having her sister serve in the assembly. And being caught up in the wave of FBI corruption investigations hollowing out the California Democratic Party.

Over the last decade, 576 California officials were convicted on federal corruption charges.

ZMan does a deep dive.

The most surprising and most consequential event of the President Trump sequel has been the USAID scandal. No one thought that part of his revenge tour would be a direct assault on one of the main centers of the foreign policy hive. Until now, few people had any knowledge of this entity. Now it is in the center of the news because Trump has shut it down and put Musk and his whiz kids to the task of auditing the organization while the staff paces outside in the streets.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was sort of created by Congress in 1961 as a way to regulate foreign aid. Congress did not actually create an organization to do this. It directed the White House to create an organization, which is how the independent, not-for-profit entity called USAID came into existence and how it has operated ever since. It gets money through the State Department for its various programs, but it also raises money on its own.

To this point, there has been no oversight of USAID. It has been free, for example, to give money to George Soros organizations that do things like back candidates for state prosecutor in the United States. That seems like an odd use of foreign aid, but it really is the tip of the iceberg, which is why Trump is closing it down. That lack of oversight plus decades of existence created an organization that was operating like a government outside the government that financed it.

Read it.

World Health Organization member states will discuss cutting part of its budget by $400 million in light of President Trump’s move to withdraw the United States, its biggest government funder, from the agency, a document released on Monday showed.

Opening the agency’s annual executive board meeting, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also defended the agency’s work and recent reforms and reiterated a call for the U.S. to reconsider its exit and enter into dialog with the WHO about further change.

“We would welcome suggestions from the United States, and all member states, for how we can serve you and the people of the world better,” he said.

And especially how we can get better access to your taxpayers’ money.

Read it.

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

Read it.

“Indigenous knowledge,” a pseudoscience that posits Native Americans possess an innate understanding of how the world works, is thriving in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D.) administration has contended that “Western science” must embrace “the generations of knowledge held by Indigenous communities,” according to a Washington Free Beacon review of state documents.

Since Newsom entered office six years ago, the California state government has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars on programs promoting the idea, which the state also refers to as “traditional ecological knowledge,” and has leveraged it across several government functions, including wildfire mitigation, energy development, wildlife recovery, and land conservation, the documents show. The Newsom administration has made indigenous knowledge a central pillar of its climate agenda in particular.

The extensive taxpayer-funded indigenous knowledge efforts in California, which are detailed in an intricate web of state initiatives, reports, programs, and laws, highlight just how far a fringe academic theory has proliferated throughout Democratic Party-controlled governments. While scientists describe it as “dangerous” and a rejection of the scientific method, the Biden administration forced indigenous knowledge into agencies across the federal government, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the Department of Defense.