My antennae started twitching about Trump and Isaacman on Monday, when space reporter Eric Berger (probably the best in the business) published this story for Ars Technica: Capitol Hill is abuzz with talk of the “Athena” plan for NASA.

Long story short, Athena was Isaacman's plan for cutting costs at NASA and restoring the agency's "mission-first" culture — and getting us back to the Moon, at a price we can afford and before China does. Needless to say, Athena involved upsetting an awful lot of well-anchored apple carts and taking way some gold-plated iron rice bowls.

For starters, Isaacman wants to ditch the stupidly expensive, technological dinosaur knowns as the Space Launch System (SLS), meant to carry Americans back to the Moon. Not only is SLS built from yesterday's disposable rocket parts, but "at $4 billion a launch, you don’t have a Moon program," interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy (and full-time Transportation Secretary) said back in September. //

Washington read that as "Isaacman is too close to Elon Musk and too far from Lockheed," and that's when the long knives came out for the 42-year-old billionaire and record-setting private astronaut.

AND ANOTHER THING: "Old Space" refers to old-school contractors who have been in the business forever, mostly doing the same things in the same ways — and also to NASA. "New Space" encompasses the free-thinking startups, large and small — and hopefully to NASA under new leadership. //

Cliff_Hanger
a day ago
Thanks for the "ANOTHER THING."
I thought "Old Space" was a cheap knock-off cologne but couldn't figure out what it had to do with NASA.

anon-a-miss Cliff_Hanger
a day ago
It smells almost like "Old Spice", but not quite...

Why settle for Old Space cologne when you can use Musk! //

KS
a day ago
SLS was specified by the Senate to use existing equipment. "Senate Launch System"
The whole point is to spend money on companies that make nice paybacks to politicians.

The reason SpaceX can lauch so cheaply is because they do blow stuff up to find out what works and what doesn't.
If NASA did that, congresscritters would complain "They're wasting taxpayer money! I prefer other ways of wasting taxpayer money!"

I have seen this for 45 years, not just space but FAA. The ATC computer system was seriously obsolete in 1980, but Congress didn't want to allocate money to update it. One big deal to handle the ATC strike was "flow control" - monitoring how busy airspace would be so planes could be held on the ground when there would be delays. The PROTOTYPE was more capable than the deployed system, because Congress insisted the FAA use the obsolete IBM mainframes they bought in the 1960's instead of more modern computers.
(Which is why I think Air Traffic Control should be privatized and paid for by user fees, not funded by Congress. They would be able to make better decisions).

Snowblind KS
a day ago
Which Is crazy as IBM mainframes are transaction monsters. Always have been. But 20 years is a LONG time, 6 or 7 genrations.

I mean sure, the mean time between failures is 25 years.... but that does not mean you should keep them that long! Maintenance goes way up after 2nd Gen has passed, or 6 years. Cost less to replace them.

KS Snowblind
a day ago
These were 360/30's and 40's customized for real-time operation and called 9020's after the Univacs they replaced. By the 1980's, the connectors were suffering metal fatigue.
Both hardware and software had advanced quite a bit and newer more reliable distributed systems were possible.
KS Snowblind
a day ago
Better would be a distributed system. Even replacing the 360's with 370's would have been better, but PDP-10's were quite capable (the flow control prototype I mentioned was written for a PDP-10) and better at real-time work. Although minicomputers such as PDP-11's would do a lot of the I/O.
The problem was, the old mainframes were customized and software would not necessarily run on a newer 360/370 system.
What was done was to somehow get IBM or IBM clones to run the software.
Of course, if this was a government project, we'd still be working on it, and consultants would have made a lot of money.
BTW, back then, I was a subcontractor to DOT from a small company as their cash cow; that company never did make it (technology wasn't ready for a "specification language") but it did have a connection with the space program. HOS - Higher Order Software, started by Margaret Hamilton and Saydean Zeldin (sp?). Look up Margaret Hamilton - did a LOT for the Apollo program. //

polyjunkie
a day ago edited
Elon Musk will greet NASA from his condo on the moon by the time NASA builds a rocket to get there. And his grandchildren will greet NASA on Mars by the time it gets there.

Here’s the way fix NASA: Close it. Make in an Accounts Payable Desk with a list of projects it will pay for:

1) $5B for the first 30 day sojourn on the moon.
2)$2B for an additional 6 months.
3) 25B for the first round trip to Mars with a 30 day stay.
4) $100B for the first 2 year stay on Mars and return for 50 people.

Etc.

The reviewer begs the reader’s indulgence for combining a book review with an appreciation of the author. Yes, Leonard Read is my guide and inspiration, and I was thrilled to learn of the republication of Government: An Ideal Concept (FEE, 1997, $12.95 paperback). This book is to me much like the fruits of scripture.

In 1982, I wrote to Read asking if he still believed what he had written in 1954. His reply: Just the other day I re-read Government: An Ideal Concept. Today I wouldn’t change a word of it. All of my books have been consistent with this book you like.

I have read all of Leonard Read’s books; they are consistent. Read is constant in character and consistent in thought. Given his premises, his freedom philosophy, as he called it (to disassociate himself from the anarchists who had appropriated his earlier use of libertarian), is consistent and corroborated by history. Read has grasped and described a natural law.

In Government: An Ideal Concept, he limits himself to basics and a few clear examples. Other issues and secondary points he leaves for other books, other writers. The argument of this work is logical, consistent, and neither circular nor abstruse.

Read is never a polemicist but warns against provoking antagonism with unnecessary personal attacks and criticisms of error, when what is needed is self-improvement and demonstration of truth. Although he says Government: An Ideal Concept is an essay in clarifying his own thinking, he writes with the authority and serenity of someone already possessed of a truth.

Not at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 nor when Read wrote Government: An Ideal Concept, says Read, was there any well-defined . . . principled, spelled-out ideal theory of government or liberty. The founders attempted to limit government, but lacking was a well-defined theory or positive rationale as to why limitation.[1]

Read was familiar with political and philosophical ideas from earliest writings to the present. Yet he was convinced that extant theories of liberty and government were inadequate and that this lack would have to be supplied before American society could secure the Blessings of Liberty cited in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution.

Read’s plan is to try to justify government, an effective but surprising strategy for one who sees that government, the immune system of society, designed to protect from internal and external dangers, has itself grown unhealthy, and, by proliferation, become an agent of social dysfunction. He seeks to understand the healthy state of government in society as the ideal—a key word in this book’s title. Properly limited government, he asserts, because it is necessary, must be a positive good rather than a necessary evil.

Fundamental to Read’s theory of limited government is his analysis of social versus individual problems, and the role of force and coercion in society. By definition, government is organized force. It monopolizes the legal use of force in those geographical, social, and economic areas under its jurisdiction. Read posits, Man’s purpose on earth is to come as near as possible in his lifetime to the attainment of those creative aptitudes peculiarly his own. He then explains why all of creative human emergence can only be a personal, voluntary undertaking. This leaves those actions of man which impair the source of creative energy and stifle its exchange, and also the actions which are parasitic on the flowing energy as the only social problem. To remove these inhibitory actions, it is necessary to restrain aggressive force and/or penalize those persons who indulge in it. Read explains why force can only restrain, never create. Therefore, the only proper use of force is to restrain aggressive use of force and fraud.
...

Beef costs have stayed relatively stable over the last 50 years. One pound of ground beef in 1980 was equivalent to the earnings of less than 15 minutes of labor, and that ratio is roughly the same in 2025.

At the same time, input costs have soared. //

“A hamburger full of high-quality protein and nutrients for $6 is an incredible deal, especially when you consider the cost of foods with far less to offer,” said Justin Tupper, president of the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association.

Others contrast beef prices to the cost of nutritionally empty, mass-produced products.

“A Snickers bar weighs 1.86 ounces,” said Chris Earl of Reverse Rocking R Ranch in New Mexico. “At $2.69 a bar, that equals $23 dollars a pound for a Snickers.” //

Many producers believe Trump is responding to demands from powerful meatpacking companies to increase supply and slash the premium prices they are being forced to pay for American beef products.

The advocacy group R-CALF USA has long criticized the unchecked power of the four meatpacking companies that process 85 percent of the American beef supply.

“Packers and retailers have become so concentrated they now control the market,” R-CALF posted in an X statement. “A generation ago, ranchers earned over 60% of the consumer beef dollar. Today, they get under 40%. Trying to lower prices by inviting even more imports only speeds up the dismantling of America’s beef industry. We don’t need more foreign beef. We need fair markets and country of origin labels.”

At the very least, ranchers argue, they should have the right to compete against imported beef with clear and transparent labeling.

“I don’t really care if Argentina imports beef, as long as it’s clearly labeled,” said Arizona rancher Casey Murph. “American ranchers are more than ready to compete with the rest of the world’s beef with their lax standards.”

Mandatory country of origin labeling (MCOOL) would require meatpackers to label beef products with the country they came from, giving American producers a market edge. Ranchers have called for this legislation for years to no avail.

Burke warned that flooding the market with cheap foreign beef could turn ranchers against a president who has historically enjoyed enormous popularity in cowboy country.

Tariffs are taxes on American consumers and businesses. They make inputs more expensive, reduce choice, and slow investment. They don’t bring jobs back—they make the tools to create those jobs more costly.

During the campaign, Vice President JD Vance claimed that “a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” The line got applause. But it betrayed a dangerous economic illusion.

Vance sees the toaster. He doesn’t see the millions of families who bought that toaster for $20 instead of $80 and used the savings for groceries, medicine, or a child’s school supplies. He doesn’t see the small business owner who bought cheaper equipment and hired another worker. He doesn’t see the everyday miracles of freed-up capital, redirected investment, and second-order job creation.

Henry Hazlitt called this the fallacy of the “seen and unseen.” It’s the oldest trick in politics: show the factory job you might save, hide the thousands of better futures you quietly destroy.

If we want a freer, fairer global economy, we don’t get there by torching trust and slapping taxes on ourselves. We get there by enabling investors and entrepreneurs to build competitive industries, by investing in lifelong education and innovation, and by strengthening institutions that last longer than one man’s grievance.

That’s what America used to stand for: rules, not whims; institutions, not improvisation.

Steve Miran argues that because the US has run trade deficits for decades, the economic models must be broken. But that’s like saying gravity stopped working because planes fly. The persistent US deficit isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s a reflection of how much of the system depends on us. Models need to be read with the institutional context in mind.

The stakes are bigger than a trade balance. What’s being traded away—at a terrible cost—is the American model of principled leadership, rooted in liberty, trust, and rules. We lose that, we lose the quiet miracle behind a billion pencils.

The result would be a "checkpoint society" where identity checks become an unavoidable part of daily life, Big Brother Watch says.

The group says such a system would fundamentally alter the relationship between citizen and state, creating a surveillance infrastructure vulnerable to abuse, discrimination, and hacking. A Big Brother Watch poll, carried out by YouGov, shows that 63 percent of Brits don't trust the government to protect their data – hardly surprising given Whitehall's track record of bungled IT projects, data leaks, and multi-billion-pound write-offs.

The group has also sounded the alarm over the UK's existing digital identification system, One Login, which underpins the credential issuing process in the so-called "BritCard" proposal, which it says is known to suffer from substantial cybersecurity and data protection weaknesses.

Big Brother Watch also warns of mission creep, arguing that once a system is live, "voluntary" quickly becomes mandatory. Those who fail or refuse to enrol risk being locked out of jobs, housing, or healthcare, while errors could leave people wrongly excluded from essential services.

"The notion that digital ID will provide a magic-bullet solution for unauthorised immigration is ludicrous," said Rebecca Vincent, interim director of Big Brother Watch. "It will not stop small boat crossings, and it will not deter those intent on using non-legal means of entering the country from doing so. But digital ID will create a huge burden for the largely law-abiding 60 million people who already live here and insert the state into many aspects of our everyday lives."

Unlike its rival, Intel, AMD saw the need for battery efficient chips. It bet better than Intel. It will now be competitively disadvantaged by the United States government becoming Intel’s largest single shareholder.

Apple, too, is a major player in microchip architecture. Using ARM chip architecture, which is very power efficient, Apple engineers and manufactures all its chips for its devices. The Mac uses M-chips. The iPad Pro uses M-chips. Apple’s other devices use A-series chips. Many of Apple’s processing features run faster with less power than Intel’s chips.

But, again, the United States now is the largest shareholder of Intel, which puts every other microchip company at a disadvantage. Why? Because Intel now has subsidy by taxpayers. Instead of having to let the creative destruction of the market place pick apart Intel, which has chronically made bad decisions, the leadership that made those bad decisions has been rewarded.

Uncle Sam insists it will exercise no voting with its stock. But the fine print of the deal shows Uncle Sam is getting common stock with voting rights. Saying it will not vote and not actually voting are two different things. If the situation continues and a Democrat takes back the White House, you will see ESG and DEI explode as Intel seeks to humor its largest shareholder.

This is another step down a dangerous path. Defenders will say the government bailed out Fannie and Freddie. The government bailed out General Motors. The government even bailed out Chrysler. //

The government keeps making companies too big to fail and hiding behind “national security” as the excuse. In fact, that has become the consensus talking point among defenders who will say things like, “I’m uncomfortable with this, but national security…”. It is an excuse and justification, but not reality.

Intel can now ignore most of its other shareholders. Its competitors now face a company subsidized unfairly by taxpayers. Its business decisions get to shift with the whims of political administrations.

This is a terrible decision. Donald Trump has beaten Mamdani to seizing the means of production.

The Preamble

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Government: 'Trust us, it'll be different this time'

The reason for asking the civil government to proclaim the goodness of traditional family life is not because men and women in marital covenant wish to become a special interest group. Rather, the official acknowledgement of the traditional family’s goodness is proper because one of the government’s most basic duties is to promote virtue. Challenging the county commission to honor this role offered them the opportunity to proclaim truth amidst a backdrop of other governments, businesses, and institutions promoting vice.

You would cry too, if you were losing a compensation package bigger than the salary of the president of the United States. In 2022, CPB CEO Patricia Harrison’s compensation was $524,000, according to the CPB’ most recently available 990 tax exempt form. //

Each year, Congress gives CPB loads of federal taxpayer money, and CPB decides the amount to give to 1,581 public radio and television stations. But the Big Beautiful Bill trimmed CPB out of appropriations, meaning it gets zero money instead of the $1.07 billion it expected for 2026 and 2027. //

In 2022, CPB gave KSDP $211,000. The radio station’s total revenue was $265,000. The CPB portion could have been paid by Harrison’s salary alone for two years. The folks at KSDP might be angry to learn that their annual budget for the compensation packages for all employees combined that year, ($141,067), was slightly less than Harrison’s 2022 bonus ($144,645). At least one person on the KSDP staff has a second job.

If the CPB board really cared about keeping broadcasting viable in small towns like Sand Point, it would not have a huge, overpaid staff in Washington, D.C.

In 2022, CPB spent $19.3 million on salaries and benefits. At least 14 CPB employees that year had compensation packages worth more than $260,000. Of those, five employees were paid over $470,000. //

The Aleutian Islands are not a typical U.S. community and there KSDP radio may actually be a treasure to the 6,000 residents in its listening area, but in 2022 it only took in $1,650 in contributions; zero in membership drives; and just over $18,000 in “underwriting,” which is tax-free advertising. The station is almost fully subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. That is how it works at most public broadcast outlets.

The Internet Archive is now a federal depository library, meaning it can provide free access to bills, laws, regulations, presidential documents, studies, and other documents.

The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), run by the US Government Publishing Office (GPO), was established in 1813 to open up free access to official federal documents. Currently, there are 1,150 FDLs across all 50 states; all of them, except a few, are physical libraries.

Then, in the mid '70s, the federal government instituted the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards, and at a stroke, all those huge station wagons weren't being built anymore. But there was a loophole: Light trucks had a more lax standard, which led to the rise of minivans and SUVs. People want big vehicles, and they're going to have them.

Now, though, in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), Congress pulled a good one - they didn't repeal the CAFE standards, but they zeroed out the fines manufacturers pay for exceeding them. //

Obama imposed a fuel economy mandate that was supposed to hit 54.5 mpg for cars and light-duty trucks by 2025, which, as we pointed out in the pages of Investor’s Business Daily at the time, was designed to force EVs onto the market, because even compact hybrid cars can’t get that kind of mileage. //

Trump is again planning to roll the CAFE standards back. But Congress did him one better. Rather than wait for regulators to rewrite the rule, which can take years and be subject be endless lobbying and litigation from various interest groups – lawmakers simply zeroed out the penalty as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Now, if a car company sells cars that, on average, exceed whatever the fuel-economy limit is technically in force in a given year, they pay… nothing.

Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47
·
.@SecRollins on moving USDA staff out of DC to be closer to farmers: "This is literally what @POTUS has tasked his Cabinet to do — to deconstruct the Administrative State... This is aligned with our Founding Fathers' vision... where the government should be closer to the people."

10:35 AM · Jul 25, 2025 //

So yesterday, USDA announced we're going to be moving most of our headquarters staff out into the country, in the five cities, the five states that you mentioned, taking our, getting closer to our constituents, the farmers, the ranchers, the producers, ... //

bpbatch
3 hours ago
Now move the IRS to Antarctica.

Min Headroom bpbatch
3 hours ago
Wait I thought that was why Trump wanted Greenland…

rhhardin | July 21, 2025 at 6:23 pm
The Fed matches the number of dollars circulating to what the economy can do at once, so that the dollars don’t bid up the price of stuff that’s more than the economy can do at once, or have parts of it fall idle for lack of bidding dollars.

It does this by creating or destroying dollars.

It creates or destroys dollars by selling stuff it has (e.g. bonds) at a greater rate, or buying back stuff with newly created dollars (buying back debt, e.g.).

What regulates this selling or buying back is the target interest rate. They change this target rate in monthly meetings according to leading indicators of inflation. If inflation looks rising, it sells more debt and burns the dollars it gets. You can’t spend debt so that restricts bidding for goods and services. If inflation looks falling, it buys back more debt with newly printed dollars so there can be more bidding on goods and services. In between setting new targets, whether the market short term interest rate is above or below the target tells the fed to buy or sell more to hold the interest rate at the target.

Something gold can’t do for you.

What most people don’t understand, I think, is that money is not wealth. It is to an individual, but not to a country. Money is a ticket in line to say what the economy does next, presumably something for you. The Fed creates and destroys tickets to match what the economy can do at once.
There’s no increase or decrease in wealth, anybody’s wealth.

Maybe that takes some of the sinister magic out of it. //

rhhardin in reply to CommoChief. | July 21, 2025 at 8:36 pm
If productivity goes up 10% as well, then your $100 buys exactly what it did before. LIkewise is money velocity declines by 10%. Stuff changes and the Fed responds to keep the value of the dollar constant. Actually 2% inflation is the target because that adds stability to the economic system against sudden failures. //

Milhouse in reply to CommoChief. | July 22, 2025 at 3:03 am
Chief, the problem with a gold standard is that the gold supply grows at random, at rates that have no connection with the need for an expanded money supply. The gold supply grows and shrinks as new mines are discovered and old ones play out. If you suddenly have a huge influx from newly opened mines, you get inflation; even hyperinflation, as Europe experienced when the gold from the New World started flowing in. And if production has a major spurt, and the gold supply doesn’t increase enough to match it, then you have deflation, which is even worse than inflation; no one wants to invest money in anything, because they’re better off just sticking it in a vault and letting it appreciate on its own.

The idea of the Fed is to control the money supply and make it grow at the same rate as production does, or as close to it as possible. Now at times the Fed has failed to do this, but at least when it’s doing its job properly we can expect good results, whereas with gold it’s always up to pure chance. //

Milhouse in reply to destroycommunism. | July 22, 2025 at 2:57 am
Money doesn’t need to be “backed” by anything. It’s a medium of exchange in itself, and its value comes entirely from the fact that people are willing to accept it in exchange, confident that other people will be equally willing in turn. And they get that confidence from the fact that the IRS guarantees it will accept it, so if worse comes to worst you can use it to pay your taxes, and also from the fact that it’s legal tender, so you can discharge private debts with it whether your creditor likes it or not.

The idea that the government must be willing to sell you gold for dollars, at a fixed price, is obsolete and stupid. It reflects a mindset stuck in the olden days when gold was money and dollars weren’t themselves money but merely represented money. It’s the opposite now; dollars are money, and gold is merely a commodity, exactly like diamonds or wool. //

Milhouse in reply to rhhardin. | July 21, 2025 at 8:30 pm
What most people don’t understand, I think, is that money is not wealth. It is to an individual, but not to a country.

As Smith taught us 250 years ago! The Wealth of Nations should be required reading before anyone comments on economics in any way.

Smith destroyed the “gold equals wealth” myth by pointing out that Spain was flush with gold, but was a very poor country. Beggars had gold plates but nothing to eat off them. Whereas Poland had very little gold, but was a very rich country. Therefore the quantity of gold in a country could not be a measure of its wealth.

U.S. states have built less than 400 electric vehicle charging ports through April under $7.5 billion federal infrastructure programs, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday.

As of April 2025, 384 charging ports are operating at 68 stations in 16 states, GAO said, saying a joint office overseeing the program "has not defined performance goals with measurable targets and time frames for its activities." //

Nationwide, there are about 219,000 publicly available EV charging ports, according to the Energy Department. //

Oh, and for the sake of comparison, there are 198,443 gasoline stations in the United States, and to make it apples-to-apples, since the number of EV charging ports are just that - ports, equivalent to one single gas or diesel nozzle - just for the sake of argument, let's assume an average of six pumps per station, with two nozzles per pump; that's 2,381,316 gasoline or diesel ports in the United States. Even our own little local gas station, up the road in our little Susitna Valley village center, has six gasoline pumps and two diesel pumps, so I'm pretty confident with that number.

The Heritage Foundation's Defense Budget Tool provides a user-friendly method to aid in both the analysis and transparency of the U.S. defense budget and facilitate more informed debate about how the Department of Defense ought to be directing spending.

Until now, individual line items of the defense budgets have only been published on the website of Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller) each year. This data is published in disparate PDFs and spreadsheets, with no mechanism for viewing all the data at once.
This tool:

• Provides an itemized accounting of the U.S. defense budget for analysis by national security experts.
• Allows a user to create customizable defense budgets that can be saved and shared for future reference.
• Makes defense budget data more accessible to Americans interested in the composition of the U.S. national security budget.

Reagan warned about unchecked government spending.

Obnoxious and entitled federal bureaucrats’ attempts to resist reform are making it hard to say good things about public service. //

Well, having been a political reporter in D.C. for 26 years, the fact there are extraordinary federal workers is unsurprising to me. I personally know good, talented people in the trenches. What is likely surprising to Lewis’ affluent center-left readers is that the bad federal workers are so, so much worse than unmotivated nine-to-fivers. //

So I would encourage you to read Who Is Government? and do it with an open mind. Let’s build a “culture of recognition” that rewards good federal employees, and better educates the public on the good things our federal agencies are doing for us. I would just humbly suggest that a culture of recognition is worthless without also building a strong culture of accountability. Based on the petulant reaction and baseless legal resistance to an elected president’s fairly modest attempts at reforming and downsizing an unelected bureaucracy, we have a long way to go before we get bureaucracy that puts the citizens’ needs before its own.

California's high-speed rail project officially began in 2008, although it was initiated on paper earlier. The whole system was initially planned to comprise 776 miles, with a completion date set for 2020. To date, none of the proposed rail network is operational. By way of comparison, the Transcontinental Railroad is 1,911 miles long, cutting through the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, and it was completed in 2,314 days, despite the Civil War and Indian raids. An [Irish track-laying crew laid 10 miles, 1,320 feet of track on a single day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracklaying_race_of_1869#Ten_Miles_of_Track,_Laid_in_One_Day:~:text=new%2520record%2520with-,10%25C2%25A0miles,-1%252C320%25C2%25A0feet%2520(16.496), while California has managed to lay 1,600 feet in nine years. //

The ballyhooed three-hour trip from LA to San Francisco only works if there are no stops. Once you add stops, the time starts to increase. There is no universe in which this rail line would not require large-scale government subsidies because the daily passenger demand just isn't there. At best, this is a sinecure for politically connected construction and consulting firms. At worst, it is outright theft. If California's voters are willing to foot the bill, they should be allowed to do so. The rest of us should be allowed to opt out, and thanks to Secretary Duffy, we have.

Fox News reported Wednesday that the Trump administration found every step of the streamlining and reorganization process to be difficult. Even something as simple as getting a list of the people who actually worked for the State Department turned out to require major effort. “It took us three months,” recounted one Trump State Department official, “to get a list of the people that actually work in the building.”

That’s your taxpayer dollars at work. “They couldn't tell you how many people worked here. It’s sort of scary as a taxpayer and as a public servant to think that we don’t even know how many employees we have. This is a national security agency, you know. Who are these people?” Yeah, good point. Not only were unknown amounts of money being wasted, but the State Department could have been the place of employ of any number of people whose loyalties lay elsewhere, or who were even at place in Foggy Bottom in order to gather information for hostile entities.

Inconceivable? If only it were.