Category: Government

BLUF:
Most importantly, Trump and Musk should keep their ears to the ground, to see what sort of sedition might be brewing among these soon-to-be-former elites.

Because something will be.

Smashing the ‘rice bowls’ — Why elites are lashing out at Trump and Musk’s reforms.

Philosopher Eric Hoffer once wrote, “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”

As President Trump, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency get on with their business of trimming waste, fraud, abuse and graft from the federal budget — a business that is vitally important, given the government’s parlous financial outlook — they need to keep this in mind.

Less than two weeks in, DOGE teams poring over federal spending records are discovering all sorts of problems.

“Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress,” Musk reported Sunday.

Money from the US Agency for International Development and other agencies is going for organizations shipping illegal migrants to the United States or paying their expenses upon arrival — which then oppose, on “humanitarian” grounds, any effort to stem the flow.

Musk and hedge-funder Bill Ackman wrote that the government funded non-governmental organizations to get around laws that are supposed to keep taxpayer dollars out of party politics and dangerous scientific research.

USAID officials even tried to physically stop DOGE technicians from accessing the computers that contained information on payments, leading Musk to comment, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”

Meanwhile Trump suspended payments to NGOs and nonprofits until a formal re-evaluation of the nature, purposes and legality of the spending is complete at each grant-making agency.

It’s a safe bet that once they’re re-evaluated, far fewer grants will be made.

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‘Second Amendment Summer’ tax holiday on guns and ammo in DeSantis’ proposed budget
DeSantis unveiled his proposed $115.6 billion budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year during a news conference in Tallahassee on Monday

A new sales-tax “holiday” on guns and ammunition is one of several included in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new proposed state budget.

DeSantis unveiled his proposed $115.6 billion budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year during a news conference in Tallahassee on Monday.

The budget includes a number of temporary tax savings, or “holidays,” that the governor’s office says will provide around $296 million in temporary tax savings.

Many of the tax holidays are returning after they were included in previous budgets.

But among the new ones is the “Second Amendment Summer” sales-tax holiday, which would run between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.

The measure would temporarily remove sales taxes on ammunition, firearms and related items and would save shoppers an estimated $8 million, according to the governor’s office.

“We are unveiling the ‘Second Amendment Summer’ tax holiday, so from Memorial Day to the Fourth of July, you can get your ammunition, your firearms, and your accoutrements tax free in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said Monday.

Another new savings measure in the budget is a “Marine Fuel” tax holiday. That two-month holiday would provide a 29.5 cents per gallon reduction of the motor fuel taxes levied on commonly used boat fuels, saving boaters $27 million, the governor’s office said.

Among the measures returning would be the 14-day “Back-to-School” sales tax holiday that exempts certain school supplies, clothing, computers and other items ahead of the start of the school year.

Here’s what you can get tax-free during Florida’s back-to-school sales tax holiday. As the calendar inches closer to the start of a new school year, parents are busy helping their children get ready by stocking up on school supplies. NBC6’s Kris Anderson has more on Florida’s back-to-school tax holiday.
A pair of “Disaster Preparedness” sales tax holidays are also included, which apply to certain supplies at the start and height of hurricane season.

Also returning would be a 7-day “Tool Time” sales tax holiday on certain power tools and equipment used by skilled trade workers.

A “Freedom Month” sales tax holiday would also return in July, which includes boating, fishing and camping supplies like pool toys, tents, and even kayaks. Outdoor supplies such as grills and bicycles will also be tax-free.

Trump nominee will review Biden restrictions on firearms exports

WASHINGTON, Feb 3 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Commerce Department said on Monday he will review the Biden administration’s year-old restrictions on firearms exports that were aimed at limiting foreign criminal groups acquiring U.S. guns.

Nominee Howard Lutnick said in written comments that if confirmed he would “ensure the department reviews this policy and takes appropriate action.”

After a temporary export pause on firearms exports in 2023, the Biden administration in April 2024 imposed restrictions on sales to non-governmental users in 36 countries where the State Department determined the firearms were at high risk of diversion.

At the time, the Commerce Department forecast the restrictions would reduce average annual U.S. firearms exports by 7% or $40 million.
Lutnick was responding to a question from Senator Eric Schmitt who said the policy “cost U.S. manufacturers and exporters hundreds of millions of dollars annually.”

An industry association estimated in 2023 that the sales loss would be $238 million a year.

Then-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the rules would limit diversions of guns to drug cartels, criminal groups, gangs and others. “The days of exporting military-style weapons to civilians in unstable countries are over,” Raimondo said.

The Senate Commerce Committee will vote on Lutnick’s nomination on Wednesday.

Border Crossings Down 93%.

White House Border Czar Tom Homan told Fox News on Sunday that illegal border crossings are down 93% since Donald Trump won his belated reelection in November. Speaking with Maria Bartiromo, Homan also promised, “When we find that criminal, he’s most likely with others, and they’re gonna go too. So if you wanna be a sanctuary city, you’re gonna get exactly what you don’t want. More agents in the community and more non-criminals arrested.”

“We got more work to do,” Homan concluded — and what a welcome change that is from the last four years.

As a candidate, Joe Biden sent the message loud and clear that America would be open for… anything, really… for illegal aliens. Need a job? Want to sell drugs? Cartel or gang member? Terrorist? No problemo! The surge of illegals began virtually the moment Biden was declared the winner.

And for four years of record-busting waves of illegals, Biden and his Chief Enabler at DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas, swore up and down that the border was secure.

So here’s Homan, only in office at DHS for a couple of weeks, overseeing a 93% decline and admitting, “We got more work to do.”

The rapid decrease began before Trump was sworn in, before another foot of border wall was erected, and before a single soldier was ordered to the border.

So what changed?

The incentives.

Trump’s simple promise to begin mass deportations was probably enough, but Homan’s strong language — going back to before Trump appointed him — underscored Trump’s point with firm authority.

Now we have the DOGE boys stopping the flow of taxpayer dollars to the NGOs that worked so hard under the Biden cabal to incentivize illegal crossings and, frankly, widespread settlement with negative incentives for assimilation.

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In the federal civil service, it’s a difficult task to terminate employment as it can take several instances of a problem that an employee doesn’t resolve before they’re terminated, however, insubordination is one of the things that management can, and will quickly send someone packing for, especially if they’re in the ‘excepted service’ which is – mostly – management. I suspect this guy will soon be g-o-n-e.

BLUF
Unlike Trump 1.0, when bureaucrats frequently ignored the administration and stymied its agenda, this time around, the lesson has been learned. Resistance is being met with immediate action. Gottlieb may very well hit the leftist podcast circuit, dining out on his reputation as a “martyr” and “truth teller,” but the lesson will not be lost on other people who aren’t anxious to follow that path.

The Resistance Attempts a Coup at USAID and It Doesn’t Go Well.

The director of employee and labor relations at the US Agency for International Development has been placed on administrative leave after a stunning refusal to follow directions given by President Trump’s transition team.

Tuesday, acting USAID Administrator Jason Gray ordered nearly 60 senior bureaucrats placed on indefinite administrative leave for taking actions to evade Trump’s executive orders; see Trump Suspends As Many As 60 Senior Bureaucrats for Trying to Evade His Executive Orders – RedState. In a memo, Gray said, “We have identified several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders and the mandate from the American people.“ As a result, we have placed a number of USAID employees on administrative leave with full pay and benefits until further notice while we complete our analysis of these actions.”

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Gun Owners Still Waiting on Pro-2A Executive Orders

President Trump must act on the Second Amendment

President Trump promised gun-owning voters that Biden’s unconstitutional anti-gun disasters would “get ripped up and torn out” during the first week of his Administration.

We just officially passed that milestone in the Trump-Vance Administration – and Biden’s anti-gun policies are still in effect.

Look, we all know there’s quite a lot to fix after four disastrous years of Joe and Kamala, but defending the Second Amendment of the Constitution MUST be a TOP priority for the President of the United States.

That’s why GOA is mobilizing gun owners like YOU to remind the President that we are still waiting on him to deliver on his promises to roll back the Biden-era anti-gun policies and revive the Second Amendment.

Please add your name to our pre-written letter reminding President Trump to deliver on the promises he made to gun owners like YOU.

On the campaign trail, President Trump specifically promised to take the following actions to roll back Joe and Kamala’s anti-gun record:

  • Stopping the Biden Pistol Brace Ban
  • Revoking the Universal Background Check Rule
  • Ending the “Zero Tolerance” policy on gun stores

Not only does out letter remind the President of these three explicit promises, but we are also urging him to withdraw the frame and receiver rule immediately and eliminate the ATF’s illegal gun registry.

President Trump makes it a point of saying how much he listens directly to the American people.

That’s why it’s critical that gun owners – a key voting bloc that helped give him the presidency – to speak up right now and ensure our voices are heard in the White House.

BLUF:
There’s a lot of legalese to the order, but let’s boil it down to its core meaning: we’re sick of the hate, the intolerance, and the violence on our campuses, and if you’re part of it, time to find a different country where you can peddle your extremism.

Trump to Pro-Hamas Students Here on Visas: Get Out

Remember all the violence and hate that pro-Hamas students and outside agitators brought to a number of our nation’s universities in their twisted response to Hamas’ savage Oct 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel that left over 1,200 brutally murdered? When Israel retaliated for the atrocity and started a just war with the terrorist organization in Gaza, the activist class went nuts at Columbia University, Harvard, Cornell, UCLA, and so many other institutions.

It was an embarrassment to our country.

Donald Trump noticed, and now that he is back as president, he’s taking action:

President Donald Trump ordered a law enforcement crackdown on antisemitism on college campuses, including removing pro-Hamas activists with student visas from the country, Fox News has learned.

Trump’s directive gives all federal agencies a 60-day window to identify civil and criminal authorities available to combat antisemitism and deport anti-Jewish activists who broke any laws.

In other words, radical extremists—mess around, find out.

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We Finally Get Some Answers About the Wild New Jersey Drones Thanks to Trump

Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of mysterious drones—some the size of refrigerators and compact cars—filled the skies over New Jersey and then they were everywhere. They hovered over homes, freaked out local elected officials, and caused mass panic. The Biden Administration offered no answers.

We heard they were prompted by Iran from a “mothership” off the coast. We were told they were Chinese spy drones. Were they hobbyists or malefactors, friend or foe? Nobody knew.

And then, suddenly, the drones stopped, Christmas came and went, and America turned the page.

But when he was running for president, Donald Trump promised to find out what the hell was going on and report back.

He reiterated the promise last week while signing executive orders when a reporter brought it up.

On Tuesday, during the first White House press briefing, we got some answers. But the answers prompt even more questions.

Trump spokesman Karoline Leavitt opened the first White House press briefing with the update on the drones.

Here’s what Leavitt said Trump dictated to her from the Oval Office mere minutes before the briefing:

After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons.

Many of these drones were also hobbyists, recreational and private individuals that enjoy flying drones. In time, it got worse due to curiosity. This was not the enemy.

In other words, if they were nothing and “not the enemy,” why couldn’t the Biden Administration have told Americans this information at the height of the frenzy? Instead, the Biden Administration chose to lie to the American people about the drones—failing to allay fears that some malevolent force was filling the skies with drones to provoke and frighten the American people.

Who was the target of the research, exactly? It appears that the American people were the focus of the Biden Administration’s research project.

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Pushback: The left discovers it doesn’t have the right to break the law

In the past few months, since Trump won re-election in November, the string of legal and political victories by the thousands of individuals blacklisted by the left and the Democratic Party in the past decade has been so overwhelming that for me to report each story as it happened would have required me to change the focus of this website entirely, something I did not wish to do.

Instead, I have collected a short list of these victories, hardly complete, and am now posting them here in one essay. This will not only put these victories on the record, it will show unequivocally how many leftists since 2020 somehow came to believe they were not required to follow the law in imposing their leftist agenda on others. The belief however was a delusion. It has just taken a few years to make the rule of law regain its primacy.

Read now and celebrate. Note also that Trump’s election win was completely irrelevant to most of these stories. While his return to the presidency clearly accelerated the trend, the trend had been established long before his election. And that trend has only just begun.

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The Case Against Birthright Citizenship

Trump’s executive order stands on a firmer footing than its vocal critics acknowledge.

One of Trump’s most daring executive orders now declares that citizenship rights should be denied to children whose mother under current law was “unlawfully present in the United States” or whose presence in the United States was “lawful but temporary,” but only if that person’s father “was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”  That general command was subject to two key qualifications.  The first is that it did not take effect until 30 days after the order, which grandfathered out of the E.O. all individuals who became birthright citizens as the children of both illegal aliens and sojourners into the U.S. The E.O. rightly did nothing to undo the current status whereby the children of lawful permanent residents were entitled to obtain the documents needed to certify their citizenship.

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Cynical Publius
@CynicalPublius

To fully understand just how remarkable today’s exchange with Colombia was, you need to understand how Washington DC has traditionally worked through these sorts of issues, and the different way it works now under Trump.

I’ll illustrate.

Traditional Approach:

1. Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
2. On Monday, the State Department convenes an interagency task force with DoD, NSC, DEA, INS, ICE, Commerce, Treasury and Homeland Security.
3. The task force meets for four days and develops a position paper.
4. The position paper is rejected by the Secretary of State, who is unhappy that insufficient equity considerations are built into the process.
5. The task force reconvenes a week later to redevelop three new, equity-centric courses of action and create a new position paper.
6. The process is delayed a week because Washington DC gets three inches of snow.
7. SecState approves the new position paper for interagency circulation, and considerable input is received from the heads of other departments so the task force must reconvene.
8. The original three proposed responsive courses of action are scrapped in favor of a new, fourth course of action that achieves the worst aspects of the three prior courses of action but satisfies the interagency.
9. Someone in State who disagrees leaks to the Washington Post, who writes a story about how ineffective the Presidential administration is.
10. The White House Chief of Staff sets up a session three days later to brief the President, who approves the new fourth course of action.
11. Over a month after the issue is first raised, the State Department Public Affairs Officer holds a press conference announcing that Colombia has agreed to try to send fewer criminals into the US and everyone declares victory.

Trump Approach:

1. Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
2. After a par-5 third hole where he goes one under par, Trump uses his iPhone to post on social media as to how the USA will destroy Colombia’s economy if they do not do what the USA demands.
3. By the time Trump gets to the par-4 sixth hole, Colombia’s President has agreed to repatriate all the illegal Colombians in his own plane, which he will pay for.
4. Trump finishes three under par and goes to the clubhouse for a Diet Coke where he posts a gangsta AI image of himself and the new FAFO Doctrine.
5. Winning.

See the difference? It’s called LEADERSHIP.