Read it.

My, what a surprise.

A host of federal government agencies have overseen massive spending for years while greatly expanding their workforces, according to an OpenTheBooks report.

Annual spending across multiple federal government agencies has exploded over the past several years, often outpacing growth of staff and even inflation rates, according to a report from OpenTheBooks first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The report comes amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to crack down on wasteful spending across the federal government and reduce the federal workforce to save American taxpayers money.

The Department of Commerce’s annual spending grew from roughly $13.1 million in 2021—the year former President Joe Biden took office—to an estimated $20.5 million in 2024, OpenTheBooks’ report found. Meanwhile, the department’s workforce declined from 53,939 in 2020 to 47,650 in 2024.

“Time after time, at agency after agency, we see spending skyrocketing since 2000, even when headcounts grew modestly and stayed flat,” OpenTheBooks wrote in the report. “In this most recent batch of examples, we also saw Biden administration spending priorities reveal themselves through the outlays at key agencies”

Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying that the actual function of government is to hire and pay government em,ployees . These guys have got it down.

The New Neo.

These judges apparently consider themselves the firewall against Trump and the troglodytes who elected him.

…

So it’s The Left Strikes Back. Problems at the ballot box? Send in the judiciary. What failed to be accomplished through the kangaroo court lawfare to which Trump was subjected prior to his election – the goal being to prevent him from being elected to a second term at all – could possibly be accomplished by tying his hands whenever he tries to do much of anything as president. These are not unbiased decisions for the most part, but these judges consider it their duty to stop the right from changing things in any big way.

It’s somewhat similar to Russiagate during Trump’s first term, which was an attempt by the intelligence community and the FBI, DOJ, and press to hamstring Trump and if possible remove him from office. That didn’t work, either. Will this? It really depends on SCOTUS, and many people are worried about how Roberts will see his role and that of the Supreme Court.

Read it.

Craig Iffland, an expert on the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, says the files released Tuesday evening show the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to hide embarrassing details about its operations in the 1960s.

It is Iffland’s expert opinion that “[m]ost of the major documents long sought by researchers can be found in this release, including the identities of a CIA-directed infiltration team of anti-Castro Cuban exiles tasked with the assassination of Fidel Castro; a list of CIA assets operating in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 who may have interacted with [Lee Harvey] Oswald during his stay there; a series of reports on the technical capabilities of the Mexico City CIA station that monitored Oswald during his visit to the Cuban and Soviet [embassies] in late September 1963; as well as previously redacted testimony of CIA officials who were involved in monitoring Oswald from the time of his defection in October 1959 until the assassination.”

It is expected to take weeks for researchers such as Iffland to comb through the approximately 64,000 pages of material that were released Tuesday evening. So far, however, the 1960s-era CIA has not come away looking particularly ethical.

My, what a surprise.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

UPDATE: JFK files biggest bombshells from CIA’s chilling claim to UK’s attempts to save him (UK Daily Record)

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Food banks across the country are scrambling to make up a $500 million budget shortfall after the Trump administration froze funds for hundreds of shipments of produce, poultry and other items that states had planned to distribute to needy residents.

And, as we all know, if the Federal government doesn’t do something, it will Never Get Done. (Funding! We need Funding!)

Axios, a Voice of the Crust.

President Trump signed an executive order to close down the Department of Education on Thursday — an unprecedented move that presents big questions for student loan borrowers.

Why it matters: The department plays a key role in managing some $1.5 trillion in student debt for more than 40 million borrowers, and a vast majority of its budget is allocated to the agency that oversees the federal student loan system.

And there you have it. The virtue of the Department of Education, in the eyes of the Deep State and its minions, is not that it actually did any ‘educating’ but as a source of funds for what might be called the Education Establishment, from teachers’ unions to those who have PhDs but no chance of gainful employment and depend on government ‘funding’ in the form of research grants. That’s why the cost of higher education has risen at many timers the rate of inflation–such institutions know that the taxpayer will pick up the tab, whether they want to or not.

This $1.5 trillion in student debt didn’t just rise from the swamp like Godzilla, but came about because of the proglodyte conviction that every child is from Lake Woebegone and therefore Above Average, and so deserves to go to college. Hence the government (without which Nothing Will Be Done) must pay for it, disregarding the fact that (by definition) half of the population is Below Average and can’t cope with college-level work (which, research shows, requires an IQ of at least 110).

As with housing, the government makes it possible for people to do something that, in reality, they have no business doing. All of these situations arise because politicians and government employees set the table with cheap pies and cakes and donuts and then wring their hands because we are undergoing an Obesity Epidemic that came from nobody knows where but which will require more Government Money (‘funding’), taken from the taxpayers, to fix.

As here, the purpose of loyal Minions of the Crust, especially in the Narrative Media, is to wrap this hand-wringing in appropriate tender-hearted clichés so that Low Information Voters will acquiesce in signing off on this great redistribution of ‘funding’ from those who work for a living to those who merely Study and Think Deep Thoughts.

That’s the basis for all of the hate and discontent toward Elon Musk (and, behind him, to Trump): He is threatening the gravy train of taxpayer ‘funding’ upon which al of these drones depend for their BMWs and houses in Chevy Chase.

Read it.

Why are eggs cheaper in Canada and Mexico than in America?

One reason is that Mexico and Canada have culled chickens on a smaller scale than we have. Mexico began vaccinating its chickens in the 90s and doesn’t cull chickens unless the outbreak is severe, while the Biden administration wiped out huge numbers of chickens with little pretext.

“The Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said back in January.

The actual number is now over 150 million when including ducks, turkeys and other birds.

The mass cullings haven’t stopped the spread of bird flu. Ever since the Biden administration launched that policy in 2022, the virus is now present in every state and the cullings actually helped infect human workers who handled the disposal of millions of dead chickens.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Attorneys in the Feeding Our Future trial of Aimee Bock and Salim Said made their closing arguments to the jury yesterday. This is the second trial of defendants charged in the massive $250 million fraud, the biggest Covid fraud discovered in the United States. Of the 70 defendants indicted, 37 have pleaded guilty. Trials of other defendants are scheduled through the rest of this year.

This trial is of particular interest because Aimee Bock was the executive director of the Feeding Our Future nonprofit that sponsored the admitted liars and cheats who operated the “sites” participating in the federal child nutrition program they defrauded. Salim Said ran the Safari restaurant at which the business model of the fraud seems to have been pioneered starting in April 2020.

In its totality, the fraud committed in these cases is gross, disgusting, despicable. What did the lawyers have to say? Their arguments ran over four hours. Here are highlights.

UPDATE: Feeding Our Fraud: Guilty

Read it.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas) declared in February that the government is “not in the business of giving out money” to taxpayers. But when it comes to the simple luxuries in her own life, the firebrand lawmaker is happy to let the public foot the bill.

That includes her taxpayer-funded car. Crockett has billed the public $999.96 every month since she assumed office in January 2023 to pay for a “vehicle lease,” according to House disbursement records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. It’s unclear the make and model of Crockett’s publicly financed whip—lawmakers are not required to disclose that information and her office did not return a request for comment—but it’s enough to pay for a Tesla Model S, Elon Musk’s luxury sports sedan, which leases for $998 per month.

Crockett obtained her taxpayer-funded vehicle through a little-known fringe benefit that allows representatives to bill the public for a fresh set of EPA-approved wheels to traverse their congressional districts. Some 42 lawmakers participated in the program in 2024, including 15 Republican participants who represent geographically expansive districts that average 18,100 square miles each. The Republican participants primarily leased economy vehicles from American manufacturers, with several of their offices telling the Free Beacon that leasing a vehicle is a far more cost-effective way for the lawmakers to traverse their massive districts as opposed to paying for airfare or using their personal vehicle at the IRS reimbursement rate of 67 cents per mile.

My, what a surprise. I doubt that Republicans are significantly better.

Read it.

The first of what is expected to be many deportation flights has landed in the crisis worn country of Haiti this week, carrying 46 aliens including 25 convicted felons expelled from the US.

The Trump Administration has revoked protections established during the Biden Administration that shielded roughly half a million Haitians from deportation. They will lose their work permits and could be subject to removal from the country in the near term. Many of the Haitians deported Tuesday had crossed into the United States illegally or were waiting for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) approval, which grants individuals legal authority to remain in the country but does not offer a long-term pathway to citizenship

Apparently the era of America as the Dumpster of the World is over.

Read it.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit recently determined that the efforts of a Florida middle school to help a minor child socially transition to a different gender behind her parents’ backs were not sufficiently egregious to “shock the conscience” and allow the parents’ claim to proceed. But in granting the school officials’ motion to dismiss the case, the panel’s ruling in Littlejohn v. Leon County wasn’t just bad policy, it was bad legal analysis as well.

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation, and most children were relegated to virtual school, January and Jeffrey Littlejohn’s 13-year-old daughter told January that “she no longer felt like a girl.”

This revelation appeared at the same time that three of their daughter’s friends at her local middle school had also suddenly declared a transgender identity, and while their daughter was struggling with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder that made online learning challenging.

ZMan says the quiet part out loud.

One way to look at the last ten years is as the struggle of the United States to finally close the books on the Cold War and the 20th century. The reason Trump exists, and the managerial system has reacted in such a violent way toward him, is that he represents the end of the conditions that made it all possible. The return of a strong executive and the normal functioning of government is the end of the managerial system and everything around it.

The comparisons to the late Soviet times are compelling because the Russians went through a similarly violent process to escape their own managerial system and the ideology that controlled it. Like the Soviets, America is now run by old people trapped in the past, lacking the talent to adjust to new realities. Like the Soviet system, the American system barely performs basic functions. Like the Soviets, American political actors can only break things.

That last part is important. Reform by its very nature calls into question the legitimacy of current processes. The reason for reform is that the system is not working to the satisfaction of the users, so it must be changed. Good reformers, however, do not attack the core logic of the system, but focus instead on the parts of it that implement that core logic to maintain the legitimacy of the whole. Maybe it means new people or possibly changes to parts of the system.

Read it.

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

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

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

Newsbusters.

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

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

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

The Antiplanner.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting times….

Civil Discourse, a Voice of the Crust.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

Paul Weiss is an old-line Wall Street firm.

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

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

Actions have consequences.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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”.

Read it.

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.

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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.