Authored by Aaron Maté via RealClearPolitics,

Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to serve as President Trump’s director of national intelligence hinges on questions about the judgment and patriotism of the former congresswoman and Army veteran, doubts that are expected to take center stage at her Senate confirmation hearing Thursday.

Echoing a charge first lodged by Hillary Clinton, Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Elizabeth Warren have spread innuendo that Gabbard is a “compromised” “Russian asset” who has been “in Putin’s pocket.” Former CIA Director John Brennan has speculated that Gabbard may deliberately “withhold” or even “skew” vital intelligence in briefing President Trump. Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has called Trump’s selection of Gabbard to oversee the nation’s 18 spy agencies “a bit baffling” and predicted a defeat of her nomination in the Senate.

While eyebrows have been raised over Gabbard’s support of a pardon for Edward Snowden – the contractor who stole and released classified information revealing that the U.S. government was conducting domestic mass surveillance and who eventually received asylum in Russia – the main criticism involves Gabbard’s views on Syria, whose recently deposed, Russian-backed dictator, Bashar al-Assad, engaged in a long and brutal war against U.S.-backed insurgents. 

In January 2017, just as the U.S. was winding down a covert war to topple the regime, Gabbard met with Assad in Damascus. With designated terror groups occupying swaths of the war-torn country, Gabbard warned that Assad’s removal would create a destabilizing power vacuum filled by Al-Qaeda. And when these same insurgent groups accused Assad’s government of chemical weapons attacks, Gabbard voiced skepticism of the allegations, particularly in two incidents that prompted U.S. military airstrikes.

The charges against Gabbard – which have recently been revived in the Washington Post and other news outlets – are that her dissenting opinions on Syria put her at odds with the consensus views of U.S. intelligence agencies, which therefore calls into question her fitness to oversee them as the nation’s top spy chief.

Yet Gabbard’s record on Syria, and that of the intelligence community she is poised to lead, shows that her views are not the fringe position that her detractors claim. Gabbard has never offered support for Assad or issued a blanket denial of chemical weapons use by his recently ousted government. In a 2020 statement during her run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gabbard described Assad as a “brutal dictator” and said that “[t]here is evidence” that both his forces and anti-government insurgents “have used chemical weapons.” 

While Gabbard has indeed voiced skepticism about specific chemical weapons allegations lodged against the Assad government, she is far from alone among U.S. officials, including at the top of the intelligence leadership. On this contentious issue, the available evidence shows that Gabbard’s skepticism does not contradict that of the U.S. intelligence community, which has never released formal assessments in the cases where Gabbard has raised doubts. 

‘No Violations’ in Visit to Assad

When Gabbard met Assad in Damascus in January 2017, she characterized the encounter as an effort to end one of the 21st century’s deadliest wars. “In order for any peace agreement … there has to be a conversation with him,” Gabbard said.

To Gabbard’s critics, “particularly … Democrats,” the meeting instead “served to legitimize the dictator,” as the Washington Post put it earlier this month. Although the Post’s article cast Gabbard’s Syria trip as a red flag hanging over her nomination, it only briefly mentioned the Office of Congressional Ethics investigation of her visit in which “no violations were found.” The Post also failed to note that such efforts by members of Congress are not unprecedented: Beginning in 2007, for example, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Secretary of State/presidential nominee John Kerry met separately with Assad in Damascus, with Kerry doing so multiple times, and despite Bush administration complaints that that such meetings legitimize the dictator. 

The controversy surrounding Gabbard’s Damascus visit came amid wider unease over her opposition to the U.S. government’s covert support for the insurgency fighting Assad’s government. Shortly after her Syria trip, Gabbard introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, which called for banning any U.S. weaponry or assistance to the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (another name for Al-Qaeda’s Syria franchise), all major forces in the armed rebellion.  

A recent Foreign Policy article argued that Gabbard’s bill was unnecessary because these were groups “that were already designated terrorists by the U.S. government and therefore barred from receiving any kind of support.” Yet Gabbard’s bill also singled out assistance to “any individual or group that is affiliated with, associated with, cooperating with, or adherents to such groups.” This reflected what was by then common knowledge at the highest levels of the U.S. government: The U.S.-armed insurgency was dominated by Al-Qaeda, and at times even fighting alongside ISIS.

Jake Sullivan, who would become national security adviser under Joe Biden, acknowledged this in a February 2012 email: “AQ [Al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.” Later that year, a Defense Intelligence Agency report noted that “Salafi[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency,” which, it added, has the “support” of the U.S. and its allies.

When President Trump shut down the CIA’s covert Syria program in July 2017, he too echoed Gabbard’s position. “It turns out it’s a lot of al-Qaeda we’re giving these weapons to,” Trump remarked.

Another of Gabbard’s warnings has since proved to be prophetic. “[I]f President Assad is overthrown,” Gabbard warned in 2017, “then Al Qaeda or a group like Al Qaeda … will take charge of all of Syria.” When Assad was finally toppled last month, the head of the new government became Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the founder of Al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria and a former deputy leader of ISIS. Jolani’s militia, since renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is still a U.S. government-designated terrorist organization, though the Biden administration announced in its last days in office that the U.S. will no longer enforce the $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Doubting Press Releases, Not Intel 

While Gabbard’s concerns about the Al-Qaeda-dominated insurgency in Syria are now seldom challenged, her skepticism of chemical weapons allegations against the now former Syrian government have emerged as a major stumbling block to her nomination.

A statement released by Foreign Policy for America, a Democratic Party-aligned think tank, recently assailed Gabbard for having “publicly cast doubt on U.S. intelligence reports and overwhelming public reporting that Assad carried out chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians.” 

This criticism relies on a widespread misnomer. Gabbard has not “cast doubt on U.S. intelligence reports” about Syrian chemical weapons attacks, because no such reports have ever been released.

In the three major incidents where Gabbard has challenged a U.S. military intervention over alleged Syrian government chemical attacks – in Ghouta (2013), Khan Shaykhoun (2017), and Douma (2018) – the U.S. intelligence community has never published a formal report making the case. In a deviation from established practice where the intelligence community issues declassified summaries of its conclusions, the Obama administration established a precedent in which the White House, not the nation’s spy agencies, have released statements lodging allegations against the Syrian government. 

In Syria’s most notorious chemical weapons incident – the August 2013 sarin attack in Ghouta that crossed President Obama’s self-declared “red line” – the nation’s top intelligence official, then-ODNI director James Clapper, explicitly refused to release an intelligence product accusing Assad’s military of guilt. And on the question of Syrian government culpability, Clapper adopted a position that would later mirror that of Gabbard, his would-be successor.

As Obama and his senior aides mulled bombing Syria after sarin-filled rockets killed scores of civilians in Ghouta, Clapper personally visited the White House to issue an impromptu warning. At the president’s daily briefing, Clapper told Obama that the evidence implicating Assad’s forces in the sarin attack in Ghouta was not a “slam dunk.” This was a deliberate reference to the term used by George W. Bush’s CIA Director, George Tenet, in vouching for the falsified intelligence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, the pretext for the Bush administration’s decision to invade. 

Clapper went out of his way to repeat that same warning on two other occasions, including at a meeting of White House principals, which nervous aides soon leaked to the media. Obama, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg later reported based on an interview with the 44th president, was “unsettled” by Clapper’s visit. He may also have been influenced by intelligence emanating from the Pentagon. According to a leaked assessment prepared for the Defense Intelligence Agency in June 2013, al-Nusra in Syria maintained a sarin production cell that marked the group’s “most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort.”

After invoking the Iraq WMDs debacle, Clapper told his administration colleagues that the intelligence community would not produce an intelligence product for public release. Instead, he handed off the task to Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and top speechwriter. “It took me a moment to understand what he was suggesting,” Rhodes later wrote in his memoir. “In all my time at the White House, I had never written that kind of assessment, and never would again. These were usually technical documents produced by teams of people in the intelligence agencies.”

With the job left to him, Rhodes, who had no intelligence experience, was unsettled as well. The former aspiring novelist spent more than two days drafting what he called a “U.S. Government Assessment,” a term that carries no formal significance and that amounts to a White House press release. “I felt waves of anxiety,” Rhodes recalled, “anticipating how I might be hauled before Congress if things went terribly wrong after a military intervention. I was responsible for writing the public document that would justify the United States’ going to war in Syria.”

Gabbard, then serving in Congress, was among the lawmakers to oppose a U.S. military strike on Syria. In criticisms of Gabbard’s position, it is widely overlooked that her skepticism did not entail challenging the formal assessment of the U.S. intelligence community. Instead, she did not accept the argument produced by Rhodes, a creative-writing MFA who felt “waves of anxiety” writing it. 

While Rhodes centered Clapper’s “slam dunk” warning in his memoir, Clapper omitted it from his. Instead, Clapper claimed in his 2018 book that the intelligence community “obtained evidence” of the Assad regime’s guilt in Ghouta. Yet Clapper also hinted that this evidence was far from convincing. The IC’s classified assessment on Ghouta, Clapper recalled, “gave alternate explanations” to an Assad regime chemical attack “and highlighted the things we didn’t know.” The former intelligence chief also disclosed that Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, was another skeptic. Donilon, Clapper wrote, “seemed to keep raising the evidentiary bar we needed to meet before he believed our reports.”

In a different section of the book, Clapper owned up to participating in the intelligence deception that led to the Iraq war, which undoubtedly informed his “slam dunk” warning over Syria. The U.S. “failure” in Iraq, Clapper wrote, belongs “squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn’t really there.” 

Clapper was acknowledging that he had failed to stick to the known facts about Iraqi WMDS, and instead help come up with evidence that “wasn’t really there” – in other words, fraudulent. 

Against the wishes of many of his senior aides, Obama ultimately abandoned his “red line” and declined to bomb Syria. In public, the White House claimed that Obama pulled back after Russia offered to facilitate the destruction of Syria’s decades-old chemical weapons stockpile. It was only in his last months of his presidency that Obama acknowledged the “slam dunk” warning from Clapper – and that war skeptics like Gabbard were handed a vindication. 

Challenging a False Flag Coverup

While Clapper’s role in questioning Syrian government culpability in the 2013 Ghouta attack remains widely overlooked, Gabbard has attracted significant controversy for raising questions about two other alleged chemical attacks by Assad’s forces in the period since.

In a 2020 statement, Gabbard said that she was “skeptical” of the Assad regime’s guilt regarding attacks on Khan Shaykhun in 2017 and Douma in 2018 – two towns that were both “under the control of al-Qaeda-linked opposition forces.” In these incidents, she wrote, “there is evidence to suggest that the attacks may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war.” 

Here again, Gabbard was not alone. As one former U.S. Ambassador to the Middle East put it, Obama’s “‘red line’ was an open invitation to a false-flag operation.” David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst who spent years covering the Syrian war, is of the view that “most of the chemical weapons attacks that have occurred during the war [were] perpetrated by the regime.” However, he added, “there was obviously a desire on the part of al-Nusra [Al-Qaeda in Syria] and others to gain access to chemical weapons stores—certainly, a desire to frame the regime for attacks, if they could.” 

As with Ghouta, the U.S. intelligence community did not release an assessment in either incident to make the case against Assad. Instead, the White House again issued lengthy press releases written by non-intelligence officials. 

The April 2017 statement on Khan Shaykhun, released by the National Security Council under the direction of then-national security advisor H.R. McMaster, claimed to represent “an unclassified summary of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s analysis.” Given that the summary did not come directly from the intelligence community and did not have its imprint, this claim was impossible to verify. 

In the only nod to U.S. spies’ data on the incident, the document referenced “signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence,” without offering any details on what was obtained. “We cannot publicly release all available intelligence on this attack due to the need to protect sources and methods,” it added. It also pointed to “a significant body of credible open source reporting, that tells a clear and consistent story.” This was a reference to publicly available material not collected by U.S. spy agencies, and therefore not immune to manipulation by biased actors. 

Spies Relying on ‘Public Reporting’

One year later, the U.S. government’s statement on Douma contained only a qualified mention of “[r]eliable intelligence,” without explaining what was acquired or how it was deemed reliable. Instead, the statement again made several references to “open-source information.” Rather than drawing on secret intelligence collected by U.S. agencies, the statement cited “social media users, non-governmental organizations, and other open-source outlets”; “photos and videos”; and “reporting from media, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other open sources.” Adopting the same title of Ben Rhodes’ statement on Ghouta five years prior, the White House document was labeled a “United States Government Assessment,” meaning that it did not come from the intelligence community.  

In his memoir, John Bolton – who oversaw the U.S. response to the Douma incident as Trump’s third national security adviser – hinted that that the U.S. government did not collect an overwhelming body of evidence. “We discussed at length what we did and didn’t know regarding Syria’s attack and how to increase our understanding of what had happened,” Bolton recalled. This included, he added, uncertainty over the exact nature of the toxic agent used in Douma, with U.S. officials unsure “whether sarin nerve agent was involved or just chlorine-based agents.” The “[p]roof of the Assad regime’s chemical-weapons usage,” he added “was increasingly clear in public reporting.” Those who claimed that there was no evidence, including voices on Fox News such as Tucker Carlson, “were wrong.”

Yet Bolton’s admitted reliance on “public reporting” suggests that the U.S. government’s case was not supported by concrete intelligence. While “open source” information can sometimes be reliable, it can just as easily be compromised by the biases of the unidentified actors that White House officials extensively cited.

Bolton’s argument undercuts the main argument against Gabbard’s nomination – that she rejected the firm conclusions of intelligence agencies. 

An Aversion to Politicized Intelligence

Questions have also emerged about U.S. claims that Assad was behind the attack.

According to leaked documents, the original investigative team sent to Douma by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog, did not find evidence to support allegations of a Syrian government chemical attack, raising the possibility that the incident was staged by insurgents. Two members of the Douma team later accused senior OPCW officials of manipulating the investigation and publishing a final report that baselessly implicated the Syrian government in a chemical attack. 

The OPCW has refused to meet with the veteran inspectors who challenged the cover-up. U.S. officials have dismissed the OPCW’s Douma controversy as “Kremlin disinformation,” yet have never commented on its substantive issues. Establishment U.S. media outlets have also ignored the story, with the exception of the New York Times, which vaguely mentioned it once in passing. To illustrate, a Washington Post article that sought to discredit Gabbard’s skepticism of Syria chemical weapons allegations, published just days before her scheduled confirmation hearing, made no mention of the OPCW whistleblowers and leaked documents.

Amid government and media silence over claims of a cover-up in a Syria chemical weapons probe, Tulsi Gabbard has been a rare exception. In 2021, she signed a letter urging the OPCW to address the cover-up and meet with the dissenting inspectors. “The issue at hand threatens to severely damage the reputation and credibility of the OPCW and undermine its vital role in the pursuit of international peace and security,” the statement said. 

Once again, contrary to her detractors’ claims, Gabbard was not adopting a fringe position. Among the signatories were five former senior OPCW officials, including the organization’s founding director-general Jose Bustani. Others included senior U.S. official Lawrence Wilkerson and Lord Alan West, a former senior U.K. Royal Navy officer and advisor to former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown. 

In Senate meetings ahead of her confirmation hearing, Gabbard has stressed that she is not questioning all Syria chemical weapons allegations, but instead harbors skepticism about the above cases. After speaking with Gabbard, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly complained that Gabbard was citing “experts that were not credible” – a presumed reference to the OPCW whistleblowers, two highly decorated veteran inspectors with more than 25 years of combined experience. “I have a hard time understanding why you would want to do that, to use your political capital to try to prove something when there are multiple cases,” Kelly added.

Yet throughout her political career, Gabbard has explained her reasoning for questioning allegations that can lead the nation to war. “I served in a war in Iraq, a war that was launched based on lies, and a war that was launched without evidence,” she told a CNN town hall in 2019. “So as a soldier, as an American, as a member of Congress, it is my duty and my responsibility to exercise skepticism any time anyone tries to send our service members into harm’s way or use our military to go in and start a new war.”

Yet again, Gabbard’s outlook does not set her apart from her would-be predecessor, Clapper. In his account of the Ghouta episode, Ben Rhodes stressed that the then-U.S. intelligence chief had a similar motivation. “I understood,” Rhodes wrote, “that Clapper was protecting the intelligence community from a repeat of the role it played before the war in Iraq.” 

With Gabbard now up for the job that Clapper once held, her nomination may come down to whether the Senate sees that same aversion to politicized intelligence as a liability, or a virtue.

Aaron Maté has provided extensive coverage of corruption within federal intelligence agencies as a contributor to RealClearInvestigations. He is also a contributor to The Nation, and his work has appeared in Democracy Now!, Vice, Al Jazeera, Toronto Star, The Intercept, and Le Monde Diplomatique. Maté is the host of the news show Pushback with Aaron Maté.

Authored by Blake Fleetwood via RealClearPolitics,

Any NYT reader looking at the buzzy front page headline below would immediately think that Robert F Kennedy Jr. is a madman.

Can he really be an advocate for repealing the polio vaccine, a disease that has killed and crippled tens of millions of kids?

“Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine”

To the ordinary reader, the headline says pretty clearly that Kennedy asked his lawyer to revoke the polio vaccine. The headline makes the shocking accusation that Kennedy is in favor of banning the polio vaccine. There is no other way of interpreting it.

But it is flagrantly false and a gross distortion of the truth. There is not one polio vaccine; there are six different polio vaccines that are used worldwide. Moreover, Aaron Siri, the lawyer in question, does not represent Kennedy in his petition.

Contrary to the misrepresentations the NYT has been making, Kennedy does not oppose vaccines or want to take away anybody’s vaccine. All seven of his children were vaccinated, including with the polio vaccine, and his grandkids were also vaccinated against polio.

Most importantly, Kennedy has long insisted publicly that he is “all for the polio vaccine.” He has said that the polio vaccine has prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths, a seemingly relevant fact that the Times deliberately omitted from its punchy but reckless news article.

Kennedy does question the long-term of some vaccines and wants further studies about them. When RFK is quoted as saying no vaccines are safe, he is saying no vaccines are “completely” safe – they all have side effects.

The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine supports Kennedy’s positions regarding vaccine safety and has called for more funding for “Post Authorization Vaccine Safety”:

“Progress in vaccine-safety science has understandably been slow.”

“We recommend the National Academy of Medicine conduct an independent and comprehensive review to address these important and complex structure and governance issues. The highest quality research should be funded.”

The NEJM also called for a review of the 1986 Act of Congress, which holds that pharmaceutical companies cannot be held liable for adverse reactions to vaccines and cannot be sued.

The main reason Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic is that the widely accepted reality that the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control are hugely influenced by Big Pharma. A nefarious revolving door allows executives to ping-pong back and forth between the regulatory bodies that approve vaccines and the drug companies that profit from them. Nine of the last ten FDA chiefs moved on to well-paid jobs with Big Pharma. This corporate capture inevitably leads to a conflict of interest, a corrupt dynamic not permitted in other countries.

Moreover, Big Pharma receives billions of dollars from the government to prepare the drug studies it submits and which the FDA relies on for licensing new drugs. Today, nearly 45% of the FDA’s $5.9 billion budget comes from the user fees companies pay when they apply for drug approval. These industry-paid fees have increasingly resulted in a lower burden of proof for medication approval, according to Public Citizen (a Ralph Nader spinoff). Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

This latest NYT article and other mainstream media repetitions predictably provoked an outpouring of more than 10,000 comments calling Kennedy “a lunatic” and “a present danger to our health.”

This is but a continuation of a slew of NYT articles seeking to falsely link Kennedy to the misleading position that he wants to ban the polio vaccine and all other vaccines.

What RFK Jr. Has Said About the Polio Vaccine in Recent Years

As Polio Survivors Watch Kennedy Confirmation, All Eyes Are on McConnell

Opinion | RFK Jr. Is a Vaccine Cynic, Not a Skeptic

RFK Jr. Sought to Stop Covid Vaccinations 6 Months After Rollout

How Lagging Vaccination Could Lead to a Polio Resurgence

Millions of people worldwide reading these headlines and other anti-Kennedy articles – echoed by much of the mainstream media – would naturally conclude that Kennedy’s policies would bring on a horrific trail of death akin to genocide.

Kennedy himself has said, “If I believed everything I read about myself in the mainstream media, I would think I was a madman.”

Aaron Siri, the lawyer in question, called the headline “hysterical and an absolute lie” and said that his petition did not ask the FDA to revoke the approval of “the polio vaccine” or any other vaccine.

He accused the Times and other mainstream media of “deliberately stoking fear and outrage about vaccines in an attempt to derail Donald Trump’s nomination” of Kennedy for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The NYT article falsely suggested that Siri (and, by implication Kennedy) sought to eliminate all polio vaccines. This damning and scandalous accusation spread to all the other media in the nation: The Washington Post, the AP, and all the legacy networks – without any independent checking.

Siri also says he does not question “The Polio Vaccine.” In fact, according to the World Health Organization, six licensed polio vaccines are used worldwide. Continuing debates among experts exist about which of the six is most efficacious and provides the most prevention.

Siri’s client is questioning only one of the six polio vaccines: a specific brand of the IPV injection, IPOL, licensed in 1990 by Sanofi. There are a handful of similar brands.

Siri’s petition claims that the IPOL brand was tested for only three days, and there were no controls before approval. According to the petition, a peer-reviewed study found discrepancies between the tested aluminum levels – scientifically proven dangerous – in this novel-formulated injected vaccine and the amounts listed on their FDA-approved labels.

IPOL is not one of the traditional polio vaccines that Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, or Hilary Koprowski developed. It is the newest vaccine approved and may already be falling out of favor.

The IPOL brand was not double-blind tested. The original Salk vaccine was double-blind tested in a massive clinical trial in which 1.5 million schoolchildren were injected with either the polio vaccine or a placebo.

If they only skim the article, NYT readers will not realize the IPOL brand vaccine is not “the polio vaccine.” Moreover, the latest conclusions from the World Health Organization suggest that it is not even the recommended polio vaccine in many places.

After the Times’ piece about Siri was released online, the Times integrated an unrelated rant from Sen. Mitch McConnell, which blasted the idea of eradicating the polio vaccine as “specious disinformation” that will threaten the advancements of “lifesaving medical progress.”

This opinion by Sen. McConnell, a polio survivor, was used by the NYT to further prop up their misleading premise that Kennedy was seeking to do away with “the polio vaccine.”

A WHO report discusses the debate among experts about the various polio vaccines, which may provide a poetic resolution: A combination of both vaccines may be the most effective prevention.

So why is The New York Times, our most distinguished newspaper, abandoning the standards of balance, fairness, and accuracy it has championed for over a hundred years?

Their code of ethics explicitly states that the paper should not be a player in the field of politics.

But the Times must cater to its readers, who are 83% liberal and afflicted with a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome; hence, reporters and editors are naturally inclined to bash and misrepresent Trump and Kennedy.

Moreover, the Times seems to feel that any skepticism of vaccines or call for further study will lead to vaccine hesitancy. This is a strange position for a newspaper that vows to deliver “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

It prefers to keep its readers in the dark.

They couldn’t defeat Trump at the ballot box, so now they are going after Kennedy via the printed word.

Of the more than 2000 reporters and editors who work at the Times, I have not heard of one who will admit to voting for Trump.

I was a reporter for The New York Times in the late 1970s and early 1980s, writing major front-page articles and magazine stories. You knew what to write about and how to frame articles to please the editors to make the front page – you didn’t have to be told. I was generally more leftish than my editors and tried to slip in small progressive nuggets that were perhaps a bit off-brand.

In 1981, I wrote a negative story about one of the Times’ oldest advertisers: Tiffany’s. The iconic jewelry store was getting a significant financial incentive from New York state for agreeing not to move to New Jersey. My editors moved the Tiffany piece, which should have been the lead, to the 17th paragraph. Deep inside the page, you had to hunt for it. I didn’t cause a fuss. At least it made the front page.

I have read the Times cover to cover for 70 years and still do.

But I always look for their agenda and try to extrapolate the nuggets of truth behind each story from the facts they deliberately omit or downplay. Often, the most relevant facts are hidden deep down in the articles.

The Times and much mainstream media have recently succumbed to political pressure. For example, 15 days before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post published a story about Hunter Biden’s lost laptop.

The story, and the salacious facts revealed in it, might have critically cut into Joe Biden’s narrow victory over Donald Trump. However, the Times refused to report on the story even though the CIA had earlier authenticated the laptop. Moreover, the NYT gave substantial coverage and legitimacy to a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials calling the Biden laptop a “Russian information operation.”

None of the intelligence officials had even reviewed the laptop’s contents. Recently, the Republican House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees uncovered evidence that then-Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken drafted the letter, which may have helped swing the 2020 election in Biden’s favor.

It took the Times 18 months to acknowledge that the laptop was authentic and that the letter debunking it was a campaign hoax.

Reporters at the Times generally don’t write the headlines to their stories, and I don’t think that reporters Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote the misleading headline, but they certainly didn’t object to it. They mischaracterized the Siri petition to the FDA and neglected to mention that five other polio vaccines are being widely used. Clearly, they cherry-picked the facts and unfairly misquoted and mischaracterized Kennedy’s positions as part of a political agenda.

The goal of The New York Times is to cover the news as impartially as possible — “without fear or favor,” in the words of Adolph Ochs.

Blake Fleetwood was a reporter for The New York Times and has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Hill, the Village Voice, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly on a number of issues.

Following through on Donald Trump’s campaign promise to eradicate “transgender insanity,” the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has launched a probe targeting a Denver high school’s all-gender restroom. 

Denver East High School, the largest in the Denver Public Schools system, caused controversy when it recently converted the only girls’ restroom on the second floor into an all-gender restroom, while leaving the boys’ room on the same floor untouched. With a word choice that seemed like a Freudian slip, district spokesman Scott Pribble confirmed to Denver’s 9News that “the transition of the girls’ bathroom…occurred over the winter break,” but denied that there was any agenda other than convenience. However, the Denver Post reports that the school board in 2020 set forth a requirement that every school must have at least one all-gender restroom.  

The “transitioned” restroom’s stalls are divided by 12-foot partitions and metal blocks to prevent peeking through the space around the door. Earlier this month, East High parent Lori Ramos told the school board that the move was way out of line:  

“[The] Administration has sacrificed the comfort of these young females for this dubious change by now limiting their options…We, as adults, should be protecting students at all costs, not using minors for this social experiment. This in my opinion is unlawful, immoral and it is, in fact, a form of abuse.”

The Trump administration’s move against the Denver district is likely the first of many across the country. “Let me be clear: It is a new day in America, and under President Trump, OCR will not tolerate discrimination of any kind,” said Department of Education Acting Assistant Secretary of OCR Craig Trainor in a statement. “I have directed OCR’s Denver regional office to investigate this matter fully.”

Denver Public Schools is the largest district in the state, with some 85,000 students, 14,000 employees, 200 schools and a $1.45 billion budget. Superintendent Marrero’s official profile contains a red flag alerting readers to his wokeness: He describes himself as the first “Latinx” head of the district. That leftist-contrived, gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” is rejected by 75% of Latinos who are familiar with the term.  

In a notification letter to district superintendent Alex Marrero, Trainor said the “investigation will examine whether the District discriminates against students on the basis of sex by installing multi-stall all gender restrooms in District school facilities, in violation of Title IX.” The district is susceptible to charge thanks to its receipt of federal money — $96 million during the current academic year alone.  

Some doubt that the investigation will ultimately compel a reversal. “They are arguing that an all-gender restroom isn’t comparable to a single-gender restroom,” the Association of Title IX Administrators’ Brett Sokolow told the Post. “You’d have to establish that somehow you have a right to a single-sex bathroom, and while the Trump administration may believe that, I don’t know if that will be upheld by the courts.”

The district scoffed at the development. “It is unprecedented for the Office for Civil Rights to admittedly initiate its own investigation, into a single bathroom, as a result of local media coverage,” said Pribble in a district statement. He and others should brace for many more precedent-breaking moves by a Trump administration that seems hell-bent on smashing government-imposed woke-ism in all its forms.  

The hands of the symbolic Doomsday Clock are set at 89 seconds to midnight – closer to global catastrophe than ever before…

The Doomsday Clock, or the Nuclear War Clock, represents how close we are veering towards a human-made global catastrophe.

According to the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”, a magazine for nuclear scientists, the latest downtick is based on the continued threats of nuclear weapons, climate change and the potential misuse of biological science and new technologies. 

But as David Middleton writes for WattsUpWithThat.com, it’s amazing that these clowns didn’t explicitly blame this on President Trump…

Closer than ever: It is now 89 seconds to midnight

In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned the Science and Security Board continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course. Consequently, we now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.

[…]

In regard to nuclear risk, the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation. Conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control into a wider war without warning. 

[…]

The impacts of climate change increased in the last year as myriad indicators, including sea-level rise and global surface temperature, surpassed previous records.

[…]

In the biological arena, emerging and re-emerging diseases continue to threaten the economy, society, and security of the world. The off-season appearance and in-season continuance of highly pathogenic avian influenza…

[…]

An array of other disruptive technologies advanced last year in ways that make the world more dangerous. Systems that incorporate artificial intelligence…

[…]

The dangers we have just listed are greatly exacerbated by a potent threat multiplier: the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.

[…]

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Seven paragraphs full of “misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories” followed by a stern warning about spreading “misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories”…

I couldn’t make this sort of schist up if I was trying.

Nuclear Risk

[T]he conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation…

That risk left the White House on January 20, 2025, right after preemptively pardoning his entire crime family.

Climate Change

Sea-level rise and global surface temperature, surpassed previous records…

According to NASA sea level has risen by 100.9 mm since 1993. That’s almost four whole inches!!! Enough to swamp four quarters or a baseball card or even a beer can!

Sea level actually receded a bit since last June…

2024 was the warmest year in the satellite era…

Roy Spencer, PhD

2024 beat the previous record by a whopping 0.4 °C. Let’s apply some scale and context:

It’s currently about 1.4 °C warmer than when “The Ice Age Cometh“…

If not for the warming allegedly caused by capitalism, it would still be just as cold now as it was in March 1975:

Science News March 1, 1975

Seems kind of mild compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis or Soviet tanks rolling into Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.

Pandemics and Skynet and Free Speech! Oh My!

The off-season appearance and in-season continuance of highly pathogenic avian influenza…

Breitbart

The price of eggs sucks! But… 89 seconds to Doomsday? Not!

Systems that incorporate artificial intelligence…

AI is a long way from Skynet I Googled my favorite garbled lyric from the Toto song Africa: “There’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do.” The Google AI confirmed my garbled lyric:

The actual lyric is, “There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do.” Now I know how Captain Kirk was able to short circuit androids.

The dangers we have just listed are greatly exacerbated by a potent threat multiplier: the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.

Remember when this was a misinformation conspiracy theory that would get you banned from social media?

Breitbart

The Shamdemic and 2020 coup de d’état clearly demonstrated this principle:

The notion that we are much closer to Doomsday now than when we were losing the Cold War is clearly the perfect example of “the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1980

So… I say… Let’s run out the clock!

Let these clowns keep on crying wolf right on down to midnight. I’m pretty sure we’ll still be…

Sales of US existing homes last year slumped to their lowest level since 1995. With the Federal Reserve expected to slash interest rates twice (2x 25bps) this year, homebuilders will likely thrive while the secondary market remains subdued. 

Goldman’s Susan Maklari, Charles Perron-Piche, and others released a note this week highlighting single-family permits as a key real-time indicator of housing supply and demand trends across the broad US market and individual regions. 

The analysts provided clients with a heatmap of homebuilders based on single-family permit activity over a 3-month and 12-month period, offering critical insights into future housing supply, builder confidence, and consumer demand. 

Here’s what they found on a broad level and region by region:

On a trailing 12-month basis, single-family permits rose 8% YOY in December, vs +10% in November and off a 6% decline a year ago. Single-family home values grew 3% YOY nationally according to Zillow, similar to the prior month, with 13 states seeing gains of 5+% vs 12 in November, while 34 rose 0-5%, down from 36 sequentially. Louisiana saw home values contract 1% YOY while Florida and Texas were roughly flat. That said, Nevada and Virginia both rose 5% and California increased 3% while Tennessee, Georgia, Utah, and the Carolinas were all +2%. The lift in permits comes despite the 30-year mortgage rate holding near 7% as the start of the selling season approaches and reflects builders’ willingness to use rate buydowns to support closings, at the expense of profitability.

…

Permits Rise on Rolling 3-Month Basis Despite Underperformance in Florida: Single-family permits for the 3-months ended December rose 2% YOY, compared to a 1% increase in November and off +25% a year ago, and grew 6% vs the comparable pre-pandemic period. There were 16 states that rose more than 10%, down from 17 in November. We note the relative underperformance of Florida as public builders across price points adjust to the rise in for-sale inventory over the last several months and ongoing weakness in key markets such as Tampa coming into the year. In our view, this should help stabilize conditions as these areas are also continuing to recover from the hurricanes last fall.

Trailing 12 Month Single-Family Permits by State

Trailing 3 Month Single-Family Permits by State

Southeast Markets Lag on MSA Basis: Permits in the top 50 MSAs decreased 1% YOY for the 3 months ended December, vs -2% in November and off +34% a year ago. On a YOY basis, Stockton, CA (+56%), Salt Lake City, UT (+39%), and Boise, ID (+31%) showed the greatest gains while Myrtle Beach, SC (-45%), Lakeland, FL (-36%), and Tampa, FL (-32%) lagged. On a 2-year stacked basis, growth was led by Provo, UT (+181%), Boise, ID (+160%), and Stockton, CA (+118%). On a 2-year stack, we note 7 of the top 10 MSAs are in the South or West.

Zillow Single-Family Home Value Index YOY % Change

In a separate note, Nick Gerli, CEO and Founder of real estate analytics firm Reventure Consulting, wrote on X, “Probably my favorite housing market graph right now. Orange line is inventory levels in Florida & Texas, combined. Blue line is inventory level across entire Northeast US.” 

The takeaway is that housing markets across the Sun Belt, like Florida, face mounting headwinds, such as elevated inventory, after several boom years during the Covid era of low interest rates. The heatmaps of single-family permits show a real-time pulse of these markets ahead of the spring selling season.

*  *  *

More on the housing market for prospective homebuyers…

Goldman Delivers Grim Outlook For Prospective Homebuyers https://t.co/MFOHGG4jn7

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 13, 2024

. . . 

Authored by David Stockman via The Brownstone Institute,

The following is excerpted from Chapter One of David Stockman’s latest book, How To Cut $2 Trillion: A Blueprint From Ronald Reagan’s Budget Cutter To Musk, Ramaswamy And The DOGE Team.

Under our three savings bucket scheme, “Slashing the Fat” from the Federal payroll and bureaucracy would account for just $400 billion or 20% of DOGE’s $2 trillion per year savings target. Needless to say, however, even that small portion would be far easier said than done.

That’s because, unlike the case of typical US businesses, where payroll costs can range from 15% to 40% of total costs, such expenses comprise only a tiny fraction of total Federal spending. Setting aside DOD payrolls for the “Downsize the Muscle” bucket, we estimate fully-loaded nondefense employee compensation costs at $215 billion in the target year of FY 2029. That’s just 3.1% of the $7 trillion of nondefense outlays projected under current policy by CBO for what would be the final Trump budget.

So there is a lot of wood to chop in other areas of nondefense spending, but we start with the assumption that $85 billion or 40% of nondefense payroll costs would be a fair component of a broader plan to generate the $400 billion of “Slash the Fat” savings. At the projected FY 2029 cost of $160,000 per Federal employee for payroll, benefits, and fringes, this would require termination of 535,000 positions from the current total of 1,343,000 nondefense employees.

On its face, this headcount reduction target is eminently plausible given that the Washington Swamp is a vast cesspool of padded payrolls, useless projects, endemic inefficiency, and misbegotten government enterprises. But what is especially telling is that our 40% payroll cut would amount to just half of the 80% staff reduction that Elon Musk achieved at the old Twitter. And he did so in the context of a labor-intensive business without missing a beat in terms of operations and customer accommodation at the new “X.”

So we begin the payroll savings analysis by bringing the hammer down terminally on the 16 worst and most unneeded Federal agencies, including the FBI, OSHA, the FTC, and the Department of Education. Eliminating these 16 bureaucracies entirely would reduce Federal employment by 71,000 jobs and save $11.1 billion per year of direct compensation costs. That’s nothing to sneeze at, of course, but to place it in budgetary context it does represent only 13 hours’ worth of the $8.0 trillion per year of total baseline Federal spending for the target budget year of FY 2029.

We also show that cutting 50% of the staff levels at another 9 dubious departments–including the EPA, NASA, and GSA–would shrink the Federal payroll by an additional 93,000. That would save a further $15 billion annually in compensation costs.

Still, we would need an additional $59 billion in nondefense savings to achieve the $85 billion target for direct compensation reductions. Accordingly, upwards of 371,000 positions would need to be eliminated from the balance of the nondefense agencies or about 34% of the 1,084,000 current jobs at everything from the Agriculture Department to the Social Security Administration and Veterans health care system.

In addition, we estimate that $85 billion in compensation cost savings would generate an additional $45 billion of indirect savings in the related costs for agency overhead, occupancy, supplies, and outside contractor services.

In summary, therefore, we’d propose that about one-third of the “Slash the Fat” savings target of $400 billion be obtained from the following areas inside the four walls of nondefense government. Chapter 6 will also outline $270 billion of savings from outside the walls of nondefense government in the form of cuts in corporate welfare, farmer subsidies, the Green New Deal, and other wasteful private sector subventions.

Summary of Savings From Headcount and Nondefense Agency Waste Reductions (FY 2029):

• 100% Elimination of Staffing at 16 Unnecessary Federal Agencies: $11 billion.

• 50% Staffing Cut at 9 Dubious Federal Agencies: $15 billion.

• 34% Staff Reduction at All Other Nondefense Departments: $59 billion.

• Indirect Overhead savings from nondefense staff reductions and agency eliminations: $45 billion.

• Total Nondefense Staff and Overhead Savings: $130 billion.

We begin with a summary of the 16 agencies to be shut down, along with the number of staff positions to be eliminated and the resulting direct employee compensation savings. These agencies are slated for complete elimination because in the context of a roaring fiscal crisis, they are either utterly unnecessary or inappropriate functions of government or comprise activities that are already being handled by other Federal agencies, state and local governments, or the private sector.

Self-evidently, these 16 agency closures would result in only a small down payment against the $2 trillion per year savings goal. Yet it is crucial to start here because each of these agencies represent cases of egregious regulatory excess or Washington-based enterprises that are not remotely the business of the central government in any season, but most especially not during a time when the Federal government is careening toward the fiscal shoals.

Stated differently, the list below comprises a kind of Litmus Test of fiscal resolve.

If these Federal bureaucrats and agencies can’t be eliminated, the prospect for reining in America’s unfolding fiscal calamity is dim indeed.

16 Agencies To Be Eliminated–Staff Cuts and Payroll Savings:

• National Endowment for the Arts: 100 staff and $16 million savings.

• National Endowment for the Humanities: 100 staff and $16 million savings.

• Legal Services Corporation: 800 staff and $128 million savings.

• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA): 600 staff and $96 million savings.

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): 1,125 staff and $180 million savings.

• Corporation for Public Broadcasting: 100 staff and $16 million savings.

• OSHA: 2,200 staff and $352 million savings.

• Consumer Products Safety Commission: 600 staff and $96 million savings.

• Agency for Global Media: 1,125 staff and $180 million of savings.

• National Endowment for Democracy (NED): 162 staff and $26 million savings.

• Education Department: 4,245 staff and $680 million savings.

• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: 1,500 staff and $240 million savings.

• Agency for International Development (AID): 10,000 staff and $1.6 billion savings.

• FBI: 34,000 staff and $5.4 billion savings.

• BATF: 5,300 staff and $848 million savings.

• DEA: 9,315 staff and $1.49 billion savings.

• Total 16 Agencies To Be Eliminated: 71,000 staff and $11.3 billion savings.

As it happens, many of the above listed agencies were on the original Reagan zero-out list of 1981. Yet they are still alive and prosperous because the Swamp is relentless in the defense of its own, and especially because on the margin even most of the GOP movers and shakers on the Congressional spending committees have been Washington lifers, RINOs, and political weaklings afraid to resist the politically correct dictates of the Washington establishment and their megaphones in the MSM.

National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities

For instance, they are still spending about $420 million per year on the National Endowments for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Back in 1981, when the public debt was still under $1 trillion and 31% of GDP, we argued that the cultural institutions supported by the endowments should be funded by private philanthropy and public admission tickets to museums, operas, etc., not hard-pressed bus drivers in Milwaukee struggling to feed, clothe, and shelter their families; and most certainly not via borrowing from future taxpayers through endless deficit finance.

At the time, the net worth of the top 1% of households was about $3 trillion, indicating ample capacity among wealthy patrons to support America’s important cultural institutions and endeavors, along with the voluntary support of millions of other less prosperous but culturally engaged citizens.

Well, here we are 44 years later with a public debt of $36 trillion and heading skyward, while the net worth of the wealthiest 1% of US households has risen by 16X to $47 trillion. And that staggering wealth pile stands alongside an additional current net worth of $10 trillion for the next 9% of wealthiest households. Yet and yet: The clueless politicians on the Potomac are still borrowing money to fund cultural institutions when the top 10% of US households alone have $56 trillion of net worth available for support of the arts and humanities.

In this instance, we’d suggest that Elon Musk set the example by pledging $2 billion over the next five years to enable cultural institutions and artists time to locate alternative sources of funding, thereby permitting the national endowments to be zeroed out immediately. This would at least get the agency-elimination ball rolling with a bang!

To be sure, shutting down the two endowments would result in a reduction of only 200 Federal jobs and a compensation cost savings of just $32 million per year, but as we will detail below, it would also generate additional savings from grants and overhead of $390 million.

In any event, this is surely the place to start. After all, if the Trumpified Washington can’t even eliminate these two agencies, why then, truly, all is lost.

Legal Services Corporation

The same goes for the 800 staffers and $128 million of savings from eliminating the Legal Services Corporation. For crying out loud, this whole operation is a liberal hobby horse dating back to the early days of the War on Poverty in 1965.

If the dubious political litigation it mainly supports via direct staff and another $432 million of grants and contracts has not found non-Federal funding more than a half century later, it doesn’t deserve another dime from Uncle Sam. Period.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)

In the case of the NHTSA, we have the very worst of the Nanny State. It has not only usurped the role of the private market and legal liability system in determining appropriate engineering standards for auto safety, but for decades has been knee-deep in setting idiotic average fuel economy standards (CAFE) for the entire fleet of each automaker.

This causes immense distortions in vehicle offerings, pricing, and production sourcing. That’s because to meet fleetwide fuel economy mandates each automaker must average together the lower fuel economy ratings of heavier, higher performance and profitable vehicles the public actually wants to buy with the artificially high fuel economy levels of small, stripped-down, under-powered cars that they must be deeply discounted to move the metal owing to limited marketplace appeal. In the process of compliance, automakers also tend to shift sourcing of the latter small, cheap “compliance” vehicles to Mexico and East Asia in order to relieve the strain on profitability resulting from these largely unprofitable NHTSA-mandated autos.

Accordingly, we would propose to abolish the NHTSA and in one fell swoop get rid of 600 bureaucrats and an overall waste of $1.2 billion per year, including about $500 million of safety grants to the states. With respect to the latter, if the genius socialist legislators in Sacramento and Albany want to steer their own unwashed driving masses to purportedly safer modes of happy motoring, let them do so on their own taxpayers’ dime.

Abolition of the NHTSA would also return consumer vehicle choice to the marketplace and likely bring a lot of current foreign-sourced auto production back home. That is to say, most of today’s auto companies–both the Big Three and foreign brands–make a decent profit manufacturing full-sized sedans, SUV’s, and pickups in the United States. Upon abolition of the CAFE program, therefore, Nanny State-mandated and foreign-sourced econo-boxes would lose their helping hand from Washington, paving the way for more US-built vehicles on dealer lots that consumers actually wish to buy.

And, yes, if consumers want six airbags per car as now mandated by the NHTSA (standard sedans are required to have two frontal airbags, two side airbags and two curtain airbags to protect occupants in the event of a side-impact crash), manufacturers will offer dealer-installed options at the appropriate (steepish) markup to base sticker prices. Indeed, the idea that consumers need a Federal Auto Nanny in order to choose a “safe” vehicle goes back to Ralph Nader’s original grab for regulatory power back in the 1970s and 1980s, which we fought in Washington when at least some Republicans still understood the statist scam of alleged “market imperfections.”

Federal Trade Commission

America imports $3.1 trillion of goods every year, which is testimony in itself that planet earth is crawling with potential competitors, fair and unfair. This actual and potential competition militates against the ability of any domestic manufacturer to monopolize anything.

In fact, students of sound market economics have understood since at least the 1960s the populist idea that private capitalism is an incubator of monopoly is just plain nonsense. With extremely rare exceptions, monopolies and rigged oligopolies only arise when they are enabled by the state via regulatory favoritism and capture, subsidies, and/or protectionist restraints of both domestic and international trade.

So what Washington needs is not anti-monopoly policemen, but the elimination of crony-capitalist policies that bestow unfair and coercive competitive advantage on politically privileged competitors. Most certainly, therefore, two anti-monopoly bureaucracies are way beyond the ken, meaning that the FTC should be abolished entirely. If need be, any minor residual meddling with business in this area can be handled by a low-cost rump operation in a drastically downsized antitrust division of the DOJ.

Again, savings of $180 million per year of FTC compensation expense is more than warranted, even as it would free American business from Nanny State meddling that results from 1,125 FTC staffers scurrying around in search of imaginary problems to justify their salaries. And, as we will amplify below, there would be a bonus savings here of $250 million, representing the non-payroll waste incurred by the FTC.

Corporation for Public Broadcasting

Even back in the world of 1981, there was no case for public funding of radio and TV, but by the year 2024 it has become a screaming instance of “Oh, puleeeze!”

The powerful presence of “X” (nee Twitter) is testimony itself that the dominant hometown newspaper and three broadcast networks no longer have even a remote monopoly on the news. That was the ostensible reason for the government-funded NPR back in the day, which, predictably, was bypassed by the flowering of tens of thousands of technologically and market-based alternative media and news/information/entertainment venues. And then, even as NPR became redundant and utterly unnecessary, it morphed into a state propaganda agency to boot.

Accordingly, the CPB’s 100 staffers should be told to send their resumes to the blooming, buzzing world of alternative media on Day 1, even as the expense of $16 million for compensation and $520 million for affiliate grants and contracts is eliminated. Cold turkey would be the obvious way to serve up the savings in this case.

OSHA (Occupational Health and Safety Administration) 

As it happens, there are approximately 90,000 units of state, county, city, village, and township government in the United States–the overwhelming share of which are involved in the business of grassroots public health and safety administration and enforcement in some form. So, if these manifold units of government can’t look after safety in the workplace–from farms to warehouses and factories–what’s even the point of the Founders’ genius? Namely, their acute understanding that healthy democracy requires a decentralized federalist form of the state, not a unitary power in a capital city distant from the daily life of the people and the marketplaces and communities in which they operate.

Beyond that, there is no absolute science of workplace safety. Always and everywhere, it involves a trade-off between levels of protection and costs, and also choices among an infinite array of engineering versus behavior approaches to safety–all of which have their pros and cons. That’s why a federalist approach is tailor-made for the very function and jurisdiction of OSHA.

That is to say, Justice Brandeis had the answer more than a century ago when he argued that the states were the proper laboratories of democracy and that many of the functions Washington has since usurped might be better experimented with and executed at the state and local level.

In the case of cowboy safety, for example, the California-style approach illustrated below might be appropriate for a state that lost its cowboys long ago, anyway. But Texas, which still has some, might well prefer a more practical and less burdensome approach.

In any event, 2,200 bureaucrats and inspectors on the OSHA payroll are absolutely unnecessary to insure safe workplaces in America. Not only would the elimination of OSHA save $350 million of staffing costs and $1.3 billion of annual Federal expense overall, but it would also relieve businesses and workplaces in America of literally billions of compliance costs and millions of hours of paperwork that represent the inherent overkill of a centralized bureaucracy that has become a captive of its own labor union constituencies.

Besides, we’d bet that Florida, the Carolinas, and Texas would be more than happy to accommodate the relocation of businesses that might be chased away by a mini-OSHA in Albany, Sacramento, or Springfield. That is, competition among the states for investment, jobs, and a favorable business climate is likely to be a far more powerful brake on regulatory agency excesses than the so-called Congressional oversight committees ever have been, or even the courts–neither of which have real skin in the game.

Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC)

Even more than OSHA, the Consumer Products Safety Commission is a case of the Nanny State run wild. When you look at the main product categories of its regulatory focus listed below, you have to wonder how in the world American consumers even dared go into a furniture mart, hardware store, or children’s toy emporium without risking the life and limb of themselves and their families before CPSC’s enactment in 1972; and also what the other 90,000 units of state and local government were doing with respect to the very prosaic matter of household product safety–to say nothing of parents and grandparents.

As to the latter, we have fond memories of a 12-foot-high swing our grandfather rigged up from the high limb of a big Maple tree in our backyard. He was undoubtedly not CPSC-compliant in his swing making, but he damn well knew what was safe for kids and therefore secured the ropes and seat far more safely than what happened when we kids used his swing to “bail out” in imitation of fighter pilots exiting a burning plane.

Then again, the free market has a very powerful incentive for vendors to make and sell safe products: Namely, the protection of their brand franchises and avoidance of devastating legal liability settlements for defective products, which settlements in today’s world can badly impair or even bankrupt a careless or crooked business. After all, the torts bar was a powerful health and safety line of defense for consumers long before the Nanny State even arose.

In any event, as in the case of workplace safety there is no “science” whatsoever with respect to “safe” baby cribs, adult mattresses, power drills, deodorants, or ATVs. It’s all a matter of trade-offs between cost and functionality, on the one hand, versus product safety, on the other. It also involves complex issues of engineering versus behavior-based risk mitigation, and ultimately turns on consumer preferences and risk propensities.

For instance, the “sport” of skydiving is both hazardous and fully legal, but an inherently safer ATV must have CPSC-compliant roll bars, seat belts, helmets, safety instruction manuals, and speed governors on models designed for younger drivers.

Indeed, if any of the products listed below actually require state-imposed regulation reaching beyond the inherent protections of liability law, there is still absolutely no reason to supersede the ample net of traditional regulation by state and local governments, trade associations, and insurers of product liability risk that existed before 1972.

Yet this very observation tells you all you need to know about Nanny State regulation. To wit, the CPSC has thrived politically over the decades since 1972 because crony capitalists have learned to love regulation from the Washington Swamp. Very simply, it avoids the inconvenience and costs of meeting different regulatory standards in California versus Utah and Indiana; makes for one-stop lobbying on K-Street; and creates barriers to entry for upstart competitors.

Then again, it is not the legitimate business of the Federal government to protect American businesses from the foolishness of regulatory zealots in the Socialist Republic of California or the New York Soviet in Albany. Once again, in fact, the only practical way to minimize wasteful and costly regulatory interference with the production and sale of the myriads of everyday consumer products listed below is via energetic competition between the states.

We are quite confident that the likes of Utah, Kansas, Tennessee, and Florida would find the right balance with respect to the safety of cribs, toasters, bicycles, and camping gear long before consumers were forced to march on Sacramento seeking regulatory relief from California-mandated high-cost and low-performance versions of these same products.

Functions of the CPSC:

• Ensuring the safety of toys, cribs, strollers, and other children’s items.

• Regulating items like furniture, mattresses, and household appliances to prevent injuries from fires, falls, and electrical hazards.

• Ensuring the safety of sports equipment, bicycles, and playground equipment like slides and swings.

• Ensuring that consumer electronics, including small appliances and power tools, meet safety standards to prevent electrical shocks and fires.

• Regulating household chemicals, cosmetics, and personal care products to reduce risks of poisoning, burns, and other injuries.

• Overseeing the safety of items like ATVs, boats, and camping equipment.

Agency For Global Media

The Congressional foreign affairs and national security committees thrive upon globetrotting junkets and strutting around foreign lands as visiting plenipotentiaries of the American Empire. So they have found it inconvenient to acknowledge that the Cold War ended 34 years ago and that many of the institutions erected to fight it are now utterly obsolete, if they were ever necessary in the first place.

The prime example of this would be the string of US government propaganda agencies including the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Network. These were all designed to counter exaggerated claims that the commies were on the march toward global domination and that the backward peoples of other nations needed to be educated as to this danger by enlightened patriots bivouacked on the banks of the Potomac.

Of course, the commies are now long gone. Well, unless you think the Red Capitalists of Beijing are really mobilizing a vast armada of 100 aircraft carriers and troop ships to disembark on the shores of California, thereby destroying their own global export trade, Ponzi economy, and basis for continued rule in the process.

To the contrary, of course, the picture is more nearly the opposite: The calamity of Vietnam, two pointless but bloody and destructive wars in Iraq, the veritable carnage visited upon Syria, Libya, and Yemen by American arms and the missiles and bombs stamped “Made in the USA” now raining down from the skies in Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine surely leave serious doubt about whether any of these obsolete propaganda agencies are convincing the unwashed masses anywhere on the planet to bend a knee toward Washington.

In any event, an America First national security policy focused on an invincible nuclear deterrent and safeguarding of the North American shorelines and airspace from conventional attack, as we will outline under the “Downsize the Muscle” basket in Chapter 7, doesn’t need to waste a single dime on the 1,125 bureaucrats employed by the parent agency of these Cold War relics. And that’s especially the case in an internet-saturated world where even the muscular dictators of Beijing and their Great Firewall of China can’t effectively suppress unauthorized communications emanating from outside the Middle Kingdom.

Abolishing the Agency for Global Media would thus save $180 million per year in direct compensation costs and an additional $770 million wasted on contractors, facilities, communications equipment, and rentals, etc. In a world with today’s communications technology, in fact, America is inherently, for good or ill, the proverbial light on the hill.

That’s because anything and everything which transpires here–from sea to shining sea–is transparent to the entire planet. The world now sees on the internet all that we do in real time and makes its own judgment. Washington doesn’t need to waste dollars it doesn’t have on the salaries of journalism school graduates peddling Warfare State propaganda in the process of building up their own resumes for more lucrative opportunities in the MSM.

National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

The 162 staffers and $315 million annual budget of NED are not only a waste, but also a purely destructive project of the Washington neocons and warhawks. We fought it tooth-and-nail when it was concocted in 1983 by neocons in the Reagan White House, arguing it would become a sinecure for Washington national security lifers who didn’t make the big grades at the CIA, State, and DOD.

We were right about that in spades. A former president of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), Carl Gershman, became its first executive director in 1984 and was still there in 2021, when they finally gave him his gold watch. But like all former Trotskyites who turned neocon under the tutelage of the detestable Irving Kristol and his equally reprehensible son, Bill Kristol, Gershman spent the 37 years of his tenure carrying out the CIA’s regime-change function that was seconded to NED in the 1983 legislation.

Among all of the “color revolution” follies promoted by NED during these years, the most insidious was its role in organizing, funding, and enabling the Maidan uprising in Kiev during February 2014. That pointless exercise in regime change paved the way for the Washington-fostered putsch which installed neo-Nazi-sympathizers and militant Ukrainian nationalists in power in Kiev.

In turn, Washington’s illegal deposing of the legitimately elected Russian-speaking and Russian-sympathizing president, Viktor Yanukovych, who had won office in 2010 on the back of massive 80%+ margins in the Donbas, Crimea, and Black Sea rim, paved the way for the current civil war carnage, and disastrous proxy war on Russia. After all, the Ukrainian nationalists who were picked, named, and recognized by Washington quickly put joining NATO into Ukraine’s constitution, outlawed Russian language, and launched a brutal civil war against breakaway Russian-speaking regions, thereby eventually provoking the Russian invasion of February 2022.

Since then, the US has spent upwards of $150 billion on a pointless war of human and infrastructure destruction–a veritable demolition derby of senseless military intervention. And one which now threatens to bring Washington’s reckless proxy attack on Russia to the brink of nuclear confrontation. Yet the Ukraine disaster is the very quintessential work of NED. That alone merits its abolition–no more questions asked.

But, alas, there is another point. More than half of NED’s annual $300 million of taxpayer money is used to sustain the worst kind of Washington insider corruption, log-rolling, and self-justifying promotion of the Warfare State. To wit, half the funds are divided up among institutions controlled by the four big political powers which operate on the banks of the Potomac. That is, the union-promoted “American Center for International Labor Solidarity,” the business-sponsored “Center for International Private Enterprise,” the Democrat-controlled “National Democratic Institute for International Affairs,” and the GOP-controlled “International Republican Institute.” The purpose of these Beltway duchies, of course, is to fund cheerleaders for the projects of Empire abroad.

Moreover, for good measure, the balance of the $300 million goes to hundreds of NGOs based abroad. These are essentially the advance guard of Washington’s Empire First policies and should not get a dime under a regime of America First.

It can be well and truly said, therefore, that there is no conceivable waste more egregious and more rotten than that embodied in NED. It needs to be shot deader than bin Laden at the very earliest opportunity.

Education Department

Needless to say, the Education Department should never have been potted on the banks of the Potomac because education is meant to be a state, local, and parental function across the length and breadth of the land. Indeed, centralization and national dictation of educational processes, standards, content, and institutional arrangements is the very last thing that should come under the control of the central state.

The current education department came into existence, in fact, only in 1979 as a desperate Carter administration sop to the teachers’ unions, which were the backbone of his political coalition. Accordingly, an immediate shutdown of this still infant and unneeded department was a high priority on the Reagan administration’s zero-out list.

As it happened, however, squirrely GOP politicians on the Congressional education committees and a Secretary of Education who spent his time in office sabotaging the president’s budget prevented the Department from being strangled in the cradle as intended. Instead, the education lobby’s victory over the Reagan challenge enabled the new department to thrive without interruption for the next 40 years until reaching a monstrous $350 billion spending level at present.

Still, there is only one way to ensure free expression, diversity of pedagogical approaches, and unfettered experimentation in the education sector. To wit, abolish the Department of Education completely, spin off existing Federal grant activities in block grants to the states, at a reduced percentage of existing funding levels, and slash subsidized student aid by 40%, as we outline in Chapter 8.

Actually, this is not mission impossible. During 2024 the broad allocation of the Department of Education’s funding was as follows:

• Elementary and secondary education grants and support: $52 billion.

• Special Education, Adult, Career, and other Education programs: $18 billion.

• Higher Education Pell Grants, Work Study, and other student direct aid: $30 billion.

• Subsidized Student Loan Outlays: $250 billion.

• Total, Federal Education Programs: $350 billion.

Needless to say, DOGE could dispense with the Department of Education’s 4,245 bureaucrats and their $680 million compensation costs in one fell swoop by proposing to eliminate the department entirely. Yet the educational institutions of America would be no worse for the wear if the massive array of programs and activities now administered by the department at huge overhead costs were to be bundled up into block grants and distributed on a no-strings basis to the states in direct proportion to each state’s share of Federal taxes.

Thus, the first two lines above could be combined in the form of an “Elementary and Secondary Education Block Grant” and funded at 70% of current levels or $49 billion per year, while the dozens of programs under the third line would be packaged into a “Higher Education Block Grant” at an initial level of $18 billion. Since both block grants would represent a pure return of Federal taxes paid by the states’ taxpayers, the block grants could be phased out progressively over the ten years after 2029–an ample period of time to permit the states to tax and fund their own education programs or return the money to taxpayers, as they so choose.

Finally, the very idea of “student loans” is flat-out ridiculous because in today’s dynamic world it is virtually impossible to solvently underwrite the value of a higher education. And that’s true whether in advanced mathematics or basket-weaving, as the case may be. Indeed, as the recent Biden reelection-driven loan forgiveness ploy reminds, “student loans” are essentially nascent welfare grants waiting for opportunistic politicians to cancel the repayments.

This whole area of student financial assistance therefore belongs entirely in the realm of income transfer payments and social redistribution. If the latter is to be done at all, it should preferably be based on economic need and structured according to the lights of voters and their legislators in the several states. So if California wants to offer college students a bonanza of subsidies, it should ask its own taxpayers to foot the bill.

In any event, abolishing Federally funded student loans would mainly reduce the current deep implicit Federal subsidies to the affluent upper middle class and the rich who owe most of the $1.74 trillion of student loans outstanding. That’s a most worthy goal in its own right, while the favorable FY 2029 and longer-term budget impact will be amplified in Chapter 8.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

Never has a more unnecessary and utterly wasteful agency been created in Washington than the CFPB, which was a conscience-relieving sop to Congressional liberals and other Beltway politicians concocted by Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank to atone for Congress’ egregious $700 billion TARP bailout of Wall Street. Yet the so-called Great Financial Crisis had been caused by reckless mortgage and housing market speculation enabled by the Fed’s hideously low interest rates, not sharp practices at retail banking windows.

Even the abuses of so-called liars’ loans and other scams in the home mortgage market were a function of easy money and lax oversight by bank supervisory agencies, not because mortgage borrowers got tricked into lying about their income or assets!

So there was exactly zero reason to stand up a new $650 million per year regulatory agency sporting 1,500 more bureaucrats to protect financial services consumers. Well, except to humor Congressional grandees like Dodd and Frank and their GOP co-conspirators on the other side of the aisle.

Indeed, the CFPB’s stated mission “to protect consumers in the financial marketplace by ensuring transparency, fairness, and accountability” is outright nonsensical. The fact is, due to regulatory protections and generous government subsidies like FDIC insurance the US economy is vastly overbanked.

There are now roughly 5,400 banks and thrifts holding $24 trillion of assets–along with 4,600 credit unions, 240 money market funds, and a proliferating array of online nonbank alternatives that expand by the day. And all of these institutions are hungry for business and aggressively compete for customers. One bank’s sharp practices, therefore, is the next bank’s sales pitch as to why it is more trustworthy and reliable.

So it’s time Washington finally recognizes that the consumer’s best and ultimate protection is the competitive free market and that today’s financial system is prodigiously endowed with exactly that. Consumers plainly do not need a Financial Nanny on the banks of the Potomac minding the business of their business.

Yet here is what we have today: $640 million worth of bureaucratic busywork and meddling going down the drain for no good reason whatsoever. For crying out loud, the central government should not be funding the $100 million shown below for “consumer education, engagement, and response,” whatever that is.

Moreover, banks and financial institutions, which were already the most regulated and supervised businesses in America back in 2010, didn’t need another $300 million layer of Washington busybodies and regulatory gumshoes overlooking their activities, as also shown below. They already had the Federal Reserve, Office of the Controller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the SEC, the National Credit Union Administration, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and at least 50 state banking supervisors and regulatory agencies.

In short, termination of the current 1,500 employees of the CFPB and their $240 million annual expense is a no-brainer. So is saving the $400 million balance of the CFPB’s budget, which is currently wasted on contractors, grants, advertising, and other superfluous overhead.

And, no, the fact that these expenses are charged to the Federal Reserve’s budget is no excuse. Under the law, the Fed remits all system profits to the US Treasury, which profits are now being unnecessarily reduced by the $640 million annual waste of the CFPB.

CFPB Annual Budget

Agency For International Development (AID)

Foreign aid has always been a waste and failure, even in the context of an Empire First foreign policy and quasi-balanced fiscal environment. But under an America First regime and in fiscal conditions literally hemorrhaging red ink, foreign aid amounts to a Sacred Cow that needs to be slaughtered forthwith.

In Chapter 7 we will amplify on how a true America First national security policy would focus almost exclusively on maintaining an invincible strategic nuclear deterrent and a powerful conventional defense of the coastlines and airspace of North America. But suffice it here to note that wasting money Washington doesn’t have on development projects, so-called humanitarian relief, and walking around money for corrupt foreign governments does absolutely nothing for homeland security properly defined.

For want of doubt, here are the 10 largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid (excluding weapons financing) for 2024. Self-evidently, the disastrous proxy war against Russia is enabling Ukraine to absorb the lion’s share of the grift. Yet the result of keeping the Ukrainian government on Washington-infused life support is ultimately a threat, not a boost, to homeland security if it leads to nuclear confrontation with Russia.

Likewise, Ethiopia, Jordan, Somalia, Nigeria, and the now ascendant jihadist opposition forces which overthrew Assad in Syria (who actually get the money) have absolutely nothing to do with safeguarding the liberty of Americans from Maine to Hawaii. And most especially the multi-billion slice of the AID budget which goes to “implementation of the National Strategy for Gender Equity and Equality…(and) to uplift the role of women and girls in all their diversity, including as part of marginalized populations” is purely wokish nonsense utterly irrelevant to national security.

Top Recipients of Non-Military Foreign Aid

1. Ukraine: $16.5 billion

2. Ethiopia: $2.2 billion

3. Jordan: $1.2 billion

4. Democratic Republic of Congo: $1 billion

5. Somalia: $1 billion

6. Yemen: $933.9 million

7. Nigeria: $904.4 million

8. Afghanistan: $815.1 million

9. South Sudan: $794.2 million

10. Syria: $748.2 million

Thus, simply closing the Agency for International Development would rid the Swamp of 10,000 bureaucrats at an annual direct compensation cost of $1.6 billion. But that would be just the tip of the iceberg. AID has offices and operations in more than 70 countries around the planet. And these offices are loaded with bureaucrats in the service of Empire First, who are equipped with checkbooks from which upwards of $30 billion of grants are funded annually.

Indeed, zeroing out AID in its entirety is a downright mandatory component of any attempt to slash the Federal budget by $2 trillion. When America is careening toward a ruinous $150 trillion public debt by mid-century it borders on criminal negligence for Washington to send $794 million per year to the likes of South Sudan. The latter is a godforsaken hellhole in central Africa with a GDP of barely $5 billion and per capita income of just $400. Yet AID is shoveling in assistance equal to more than 16% of GDP!

Even more ridiculous is the fact that while Washington has been bombing the Houthi-controlled northern areas of Yemen to smithereens at a cost to the US military of $3 billion in the last three years alone, it is also sending foreign aid of $933 million per year to the government in the south of the country, thereby enabling the Sunni south to pursue its decades-old civil war against the Shiite north. Perhaps it might be more rational to stop both streams of funding and allow the Yemenis to pursue their own civil war in peace–or at least without supervision and meddling by folks on the banks of the Potomac.

And, no, protecting the shipping lanes into the Red Sea is not a matter of US national security. The Chinese container ships and Saudi oil tankers heading for Europe through the Bab-El-Man-deb Strait can always reroute around the Cape of Africa at a small premium if they deem the Red Sea route too hazardous. And, self-evidently, Washington has no business subsidizing cheaper ocean freight to Europe for the oil princes and Chicoms.

At the end of the day, the Yemen idiocy on display above is no aberration. It represents the inherent stupidity and waste of an imperial foreign policy that attempts to dominate every obscure corner of the planet for no reason of homeland security whatsoever. Therefore, one of the first initiatives of President Trump’s pivot to America First must be the complete shutdown of the AID.

FBI

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is a Washington institution steeped in ignominy and disdain for constitutional liberty and democracy. Its forerunner was created during the horrific Red Scare Raids of Attorney General Mitchell in 1919; it flourished prosecuting the idiotic regime of Prohibition during the 1920s; rose to malefic aspect during the Hoover era of Communist witch-hunting and vicious prosecution of civil rights and peace leaders like Martin Luther King Jr; became a fount of false fear-mongering, stings, and entrapment ploys during the War on Terror; and ended up being weaponized by Deep State nomenklatura to destroy the duly elected President of the United States in 2016 and after.

In short, that’s 100 years of assault on the rule of law, not its promotion. That history is reason enough to abolish the FBI completely, thereby shrinking the Federal payroll by more than 37,000, at a savings of $6 billion in direct compensation costs and another $5 billion in overhead and operating expenses.

The fact is, there never was a need for the FBI in the first place–outside of political opportunism and the furtherance of crusades which are not within the proper purview of the Federal government. Again, however, we have 90,000 units of state and local government for a reason: That is, to decentralize the exercise of government power, and enforcement of the criminal laws is precisely one of those functions best kept as far away from the nation’s capital as possible, as the checkered history of the FBI proves in spades.

In any event, as a practical matter crime prosecution and enforcement is already overwhelmingly conducted by state and local police forces and courts. For instance, there are currently about 7.4 million arrests in the US each year, but only about 10,000 of these are executed by the FBI. That’s just 0.14%.

Likewise, there are currently 1,214,000 police and law enforcement personnel on the payrolls of state and local governments in the US. That compares to just 15,000 FBI officers (out of 37,300 staff) involved in domestic criminal law enforcement. This includes all agents and support personnel who work on a wide range of federal crimes such as cybercrime, drug trafficking, violent crime, and white-collar offenses, but, again, it amounts to only 1.2% of the state and local police force level.

At the end of the day, just $2.5 billion of the FBI’s $11.4 billion budget is involved in what it generously classifies as “counter-terrorism.” We’d say cut that figure by 60% and spin these personnel and activities off to a $1 billion per year counter-terrorism unit in the DOJ. Any real threat of terrorism in the US, as opposed to self-serving FBI concocted stings like the alleged plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, can be readily handled on a $1 billion annual budget.

After that, close down everything else to the tune of a 34,000-headcount reduction and direct compensation cost savings of $5.4 billion per year–along with another $5 billion of savings from FBI overhead, contractors, occupancy, travel, and other costs.

Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)

The War on Drugs was misbegotten from the get-go back when Tricky Dick Nixon launched it in 1970. The only thing it has accomplished is to breed criminals and a brutal underground distribution system funded by the wildly excessive profits owing to the artificial scarcity created by drug law enforcement and interdiction. It has also filled the nation’s jails and prisons, mainly on possession charges, thereby providing a taxpayer-funded program where inmates get a free in-house education on how to conduct real criminal activities after their release.

In short, the War on Drugs is a grotesque violation of Market Economics 101. There is simply no other way to characterize the utter stupidity of fostering criminal cartels to do the work of growing, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, and sales that would otherwise be handled by the far more pacific channels of everyday commerce. Indeed, the harsher and more intensive the enforcement against so-called illegal drugs, the greater the amount of crime and the more extensive and tragic the collateral harm that is created as a secondary consequence.

For instance, the plague of fentanyl deaths is clearly owing to the high price of heroin, meth, and other illegal substances stemming from the War on Drugs, which, in turn, encourages the importation and use of fentanyl. Fentanyl is cheaper to produce, easier to smuggle, and extremely potent, making it a lucrative alternative for traffickers. This economic incentive drives its widespread distribution and use, despite its high lethality.

In any event, the surest way to reduce crime at both the borders and in the cities and hinterlands of America alike would be to shut down the DEA cold turkey, releasing 9,300 Federal bureaucrats for more productive work elsewhere. Needless to say, once these hobnailers are off the street, the price of illegal drugs would fall sharply, along with the profitability and incentives for violence among the criminal cartels which run the drug trade.

In all, terminating the DEA would cut its direct compensation cost by $1.5 billion per year, as well as save another $1.6 billion for operations, contractors, and overhead functions. There is hardly any other agency termination candidate where the case is so overwhelming.

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)

Ronald Reagan famously said that a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life, and surely the ATF is testimony to that aphorism. In 1920 it was born as the Prohibition Bureau, which housed the hated “revenooers.” After the Volstead Act was repealed in 1933 it continued to stumble between the Treasury Department and the Justice Department over the decades, looking for missions to justify continued funding. Even in relative bureaucratic obscurity, it gained notoriety for the armed standoff at Ruby Ridge, the extermination of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, and the gun “misplacement” scandal of Operation Fast and Furious, among numerous other bureaucratic misfires.

Yet an analysis of what its 5,300 employees and $850 million compensation budget actually accomplish makes clear that the time to terminate the agency arrived long ago. There is absolutely no reason for the Federal government to be in the alcohol, tobacco, and explosives enforcement business at all. Those are inherently functions of state and local government, if they are to be legally regulated and enforced at all.

Allocation of ATF’s $1.7 Billion Budget

Likewise, its $500 million budget for “firearms enforcement” is just a polite term for the administration of gun control laws, which self-evidently don’t control much of anything. Thus, the number of deaths–both suicide and homicides–due to guns has more than doubled from 20,336 in 1968 to 47,284 in 2021, which translates to rates of 10.1 per 100,000 population in 1968 and 14.1 per 100,000 in 2021. So much for the ATF’s enforcement prowess.

In any event, whatever these ATF bureaucrats might be doing that is necessary and legitimate should be turned over to regular state and local law enforcement. If any rump agency is needed to enforce largely ineffective federal gun control laws–given that there are upwards of one-half billion guns in circulation in the US–these activities can be seconded to a modest residual bureau in the Justice Department at the approximate size of the Office of Violence Against Women ($500 million).

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Wednesday that the Trump administration will cancel funding to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that facilitate illegal immigration.

The comment was made as federal immigration officials ramp up enforcement efforts across the United States and in major cities.

Noem said that the administration “has stopped all grant funding that’s being abused by NGOs that’s being used to facilitate illegal immigration” into the United States.

“Many of these NGOs actually have infrastructure and operations set up in Mexico, on that side of the border, and are telling those illegal immigrants to come to them, and they will get them across the border,” Noem said in an interview on the Fox News Channel’s “Will Cain Show.”

Those NGOs, she said, are “not just operating in the United States, they’re operating outside the United States to help make it easier for those who want to break our laws.”

As Jack Phillips reports via The Epoch Times, the Trump administration will freeze funding to those groups and determine whether those funds were going to causes aligned with the White House’s policies, she said. A review will be carried out, and before then, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will not spend more to help “the destruction of this country,” she added.

“When somebody said NGO to me, I thought that [was] a nonprofit telling somebody about Jesus or spreading faith and salvation,” Noem said.

“Then I realized over the years, it’s been perverted into this shadow government.”

Noem, who was confirmed as DHS secretary over the weekend, posted a video and photos of her near a New York City immigration enforcement operation on X early Tuesday, highlighting the arrest of a suspect and saying the Trump administration was “making our streets safe.”

The Trump administration has stepped up immigration arrests in recent days with about 1,000–1,200 arrests per day, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in updates posted on social media. The daily average in fiscal year 2024 was 311.

Trump has issued an array of executive orders to crack down on illegal immigration after taking office on Jan. 20, including actions aimed at deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants from the United States.

Trump says urgent action is needed after millions illegally entered during the Biden administration, while critics say Trump could hurt businesses and separate families.

Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget earlier this week issued an order to freeze federal grants and funding before that memo was rescinded later. That order had impacted funding to certain NGOs, including a Catholic charities organization that provides services to illegal immigrants and poorer Americans.

In a statement, Catholic Charities USA head Kerry Alys Robinson called on the Trump administration to reconsider the funding freeze because it has been providing “vital services” such as access to health care, housing, food, and more.

Noem also said in the Fox News interview that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now working to find ways to convince other nations to accept the return of their nationals.

“I was talking to him on the phone at 1 o’clock in the morning, and he was up and still discussing negotiations with other countries,” she said. “And the president, clearly, will exercise all the authority and power that he has to make these countries take them back.”

Senior officials within the Department of Justice (DOJ) have held discussions with federal prosecutors in Manhattan about the possibility of dropping their corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, which emerged after Adams voiced criticism against the Biden administration’s open border policies, the NY Times reports, citing (as always) anonymous sources.

DOJ officials, through the office of President Trump’s new deputy AG, Emil Bove, have also spoken to Adams’ defense counsel since Donald Trump took office, the NY Post further confirms.

Adams notably met with Trump on Jan. 17 at the President’s West Palm Beach, Florida golf course. The Mayor has denied that his legal woes were discussed during the visit, though Trump did speak about a “weaponized” DOJ, according to a person briefed on the meeting.

Adams’ legal team is led by Elon Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro.

Prior to taking office, Trump had discussed the possibility of pardoning Adams, saying he thought the NY Mayor had been “treated pretty unfairly.”

Instead of a pardon, however, discussions have pivoted to the DOJ simply dropping the charges, sparing Trump from having to use those pardoning powers, according to the Times, which notes that if prosecutors were to dismiss the case, it would allow Adams to tout his innocence as he seeks reelection.

Responding to the Times‘ anonymous sources who claim that Adams wouldn’t be willing to play ball with Trump’s immigration crackdown if he remained under indictment, Spiro strongly denied the suggestion, calling it “a complete lie.”

DOJ officials in Washington are expected to meet with Manhattan prosecutors, as well as Adams’ team, as soon as this week.

Adams was indicted in September on charges including bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions in an investigation that began in 2021. He has pleaded not guilty and maintained his innocence.

The Times admits that it’s not unusual for DOJ officials in Washington to discuss high-profile criminal cases with Manhattan prosecutors (Trump case, anyone?) – however there is no indication that officials in the Southern District of NY plan to drop the case. It’s also common for defense lawyers in high profile cases to ask senior DOJ officials to scale back or drop prosecutions.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Last week saw every manner of wailing and gnashing of teeth about the so-called meme coin of the Trump campaign called $TRUMP. It was created three days before the inauguration, soared to a $50 billion market cap, and settled down, with half the owners new to the crypto market.

Another coin is $MELANIA, and it followed a similar path.

We’ll see if these have much of a future, but they sure did generate commentary, with even people inside the industry furious that the coin exists at all.

Others described this as nothing short of corruption and a very bad sign that Trump has linked arms with a wealthy tech set and is using those contacts to pad his personal wealth with $TRUMP as the main case in point.

The new tokens were floated by CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC, both Trump family companies. Yes, Trump stands to benefit but only if the initial investors cash out right now. The market capitalization is not the same as profits.

The high dudgeon of opposition surrounding this product is quite ridiculous, in my view, and telling because nothing else that the Trump team has done has generated this level of frenzy. People rolled their eyes at the gold sneakers, the non-fungible trading cards, and the “Fight, Fight, Fight” cologne. Somehow, when the exact same marketing approaches are deployed within the spooky land of crypto tokens, everyone loses their minds.

Let’s take a step back and examine the history of the technology in question. After the digital age kicked off in the 1990s, there were myriad attempts to figure out how to use these new tools to create digital forms of money and finance. The perception was that this was a new age and that we needed upgraded forms of payment and finance—and maybe more—to go along with it.

But there were several major problems standing in the way. The internet as a technology can be seen as a giant and nearly infinite copying machine, whereas money, payments, and finance are all about ownership and title transfer. Without a secure and unhackable record of who owns what at any given moment, the experiment would always fail given the nature of digital distribution.

Sure enough, many attempts to create money and payment systems in that period failed. They were hacked. They were flooded with database calls that crashed sites. And there was always a trust problem because the ledgers were proprietary and lacked any real means of verifying what belonged to whom or even whether the whole company was really a scam.

Many years went by before a group of developers put together all the necessary pieces to make Bitcoin possible. They included double-key encryption, a public ledger, protocol to incentivize the hosting of the ledger, and a strict limit on the pace of token creation. The innovators called it the blockchain, and Bitcoin was the premier product. The result was the creation of a distributed system of data ownership and exchange that operated without any institutional intermediaries.

Bitcoin was not a proprietary technology. It was a headline demonstration of an underlying technology that was advertised as peer-to-peer cash. The original protocol even contained smart contracting possibilities that later came to evolve with the system Ethereum. This is why it immediately spawned other coins and tokens such as Litecoin and XRP among many others. Fifteen years later, there are tens and even hundreds of thousands of such products, including oddities such as non-fungible tokens of art and so on.

No day goes by when I do not get pitched another product along with a fancy-sounding white paper. I long ago gave up on all these things because so many were what anyone would describe as “scams.” That such scams exist is not the fault of the technology any more than fake art is the fault of paints and canvases.

In addition, the technology has been used for money laundering for political purposes, as we saw with Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. We do not know the fullness of who or what was behind this racket but its so-called investors included some of the biggest names in finance and politics.

That said, among many sketchy projects are many wonderful ones too.

When Bitcoin was released, many people assumed it was just an alternative money and that was all. But we gradually came to realize that the real value was in the underlying technological suite that enabled something else—namely, the democratization of finance too. Blockchain tokens can be used to raise capital outside banks, non-banks, and traditional venture capitalists. The people themselves were suddenly in a position to make a vote of confidence in a venture simply by adding a token to their portfolios.

This realization gave rise to wild joy in the period between 2013 and 2017 concerning the rise of a new method of money, finance, and capital markets all based on blockchain technology that enlisted people of all incomes and classes into the grand project of making prosperity. The rise of these token markets was part of it.

It was also during this period that regulators became ever more involved in the burgeoning sector. They were trying to hammer the new technology into behaving exactly like the technology it was replacing. That was never going to happen, but the attempt created a vast and growing regulatory thicket surrounding the crypto market that mostly ended up benefiting armies of lawyers that are now required to do anything in this realm.

This is precisely what Trump has sworn to wipe out, finally embracing blockchain and crypto as a worthy innovation with the hope that the United States will emerge as the global leader in this sector. If he succeeds, it would be glorious for prosperity and freedom in the United States. For those of us who have followed this industry from its inception, this is a very exciting prospect.

If you have stayed with this piece so far, there is another strange feature of this market you need to understand. From the very beginning of this industry, there was a group that believed that instead of a broad-based technology, the innovation in question was exclusively about Bitcoin only. I’ve never understood this argument, so I have a hard time recreating the arguments for it other than to say that such people exist and that they are very powerful.

Over time, they developed a name for themselves, Bitcoin Maximalists, and they were successful in turning Bitcoin from a people’s money into a restricted token for specialized use, even to the point of railing against any other token or deployments as inherently fraudulent. They pushed all existing holders of Bitcoin never to sell but only buy, which raised the question of what precisely this token is for apart from making money for the people who got into the market earliest. Their answer involves a whole series of claims I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, I’ve never believed that this market would thrive by restricting innovation and competition; indeed, the whole point of crypto is to foster both.

The so-called Maximalists have been highly influential in Trump circles, having backed him for president and winnowed their way toward political and regulatory influence. This has always concerned me because their primary interests, so far as I can tell, are less about freedom as such (plus disintermediation, democratization of finance, and monetary entrepreneurship) but industrial success for a single product that they happened to own.

One thing about Trump that we should know by now is that he recoils against any interest group that claims to have a hold on his thinking and decision-making. He is always in a daily and hourly struggle to declare his independence against special interests. He is glad to work with powerful and rich people but resists all attempts by such interests to manage his own judgment about what should happen.

This is precisely why I saw the pre-inaugural creation of the meme coin called $TRUMP as a wonderful thing. The usual suspects within the crypto world condemned the whole episode as terrible for the industry, an opinion happily echoed by the likes of New York Times journalists and so on.

As a longtime observer of the pushes and pulls within this sector, the deployment of $TRUMP as a marketing tool for Trump’s enterprises strikes me as a very good sign. The technology is complicated and subject to mischaracterization, but it is best to think of this as the same as Trump cologne, sneakers, and pens. You are free to think such things are tacky, but the market is what speaks in the end.

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Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.