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….

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”