Joni Ernst

@SenJoniErnst
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You can’t make this up…

Federal employees showed up to the office — not to work — but to protest returning to work.

@DOGE and I are fighting to get Washington working for YOU!

12:01 PM · Apr 9, 2025.

A Veterans Affairs manager responsible for scheduling veterans appointments posted on social media that he was “phoning it in from a bubble bath” while calls to the VA have gone unanswered. An Army veteran gave up on getting mental healthcare from the VA because after years of trying to get an appointment, he met with a therapist who “spent the appointment singing the praises of remote work with a cat draped around her neck.” He said that it was such a disaster that “now I’m just on my meds doing my best.” A HUD employee was arrested for drunk driving at 3:30 in the afternoon on a Friday and may have been paid for time spent sitting in jail, HUD had no idea until I told them. For more than three years, a Social Security employee was running a home inspection business. Meanwhile, his mother was responding to his emails.

The previously legislation passed in July, 221 to 198, after Democrats stated noncitizen voting is already illegal.

But just because noncitizen voting is already illegal doesn’t mean it’s not happening — or that current law does anything to prevent it. Current law prohibiting noncitizens from voting is largely toothless, with prospective voters simply checking a small square box on a federal registration form attesting under penalty of perjury that they are a citizen.

The SAVE Act would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act to make documentary proof of citizenship a requirement to register to vote.

Donald Trump’s first term began with an unsuccessful attempt to repeal Obamacare. His second term could begin with a successful attempt to expand it.

That’s one possible outcome from a strategy Senate Republicans are attempting to use to pass their budget and spending blueprint. The wonky accounting maneuvers could make it easier to pass a permanent extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) provisions, but they could also make it easier to pass a permanent extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies in the process.

The imbalance within this industry illustrates the broader trade issues that leave the U.S. at a disadvantage. //

The U.S. has had a free trade agreement with Australia for 20 years. In that time, Australia has sold $28.7 billion of beef to U.S. consumers, but fresh U.S. beef has been banned for sale there. //

“Australia has used a myriad of sanitary concerns and endless bureaucratic red tape to delay the approval of U.S. beef even though the United States is internationally recognized as having some of the highest food safety and animal health standards in the world,” the NCBA wrote in a statement to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. “For the past few years, we have been told by the Australian government that we are in the final stages of approval, yet we continue to see delays … If the Australians will not accept our beef products, then it is only fair that we reciprocate.” //

In the past five years, Brazil has sold $4.45 billion of beef in the U.S., but Brazil has placed many non-tariff restrictions on U.S. beef. In the same time frame, the U.S. has sold $21 million of beef to Brazil. Like Australia, we are comparing billions in imports to millions in exports.

The staggering $4.3 billion beef trade deficit with Brazil is concerning, but NCBA says it is more worried about something else: importing meat contaminated with foot-and-mouth disease as well as mad cow disease, known scientifically as atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

In November 2021, then-Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack received a letter from the NCBA warning that Brazil took “several weeks” to report two cases to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), while most countries report BSE within hours or days. //

In 2003, China and other countries banned the import of U.S. beef after the U.S. found a case of BSE. The USDA worked to restore the market and in 2016 the Chinese market started to reopen under President Barack Obama, but with heavy non-tariff trade restrictions.

The first shipment of beef was in 2017, under Trump, after the U.S.-China 100-Day Action Plan removed many restrictions, and China recognized the authority of the USDA Food Safety Inspection Service (FISA). China became a $2 billion a year market for U.S. beef.

In the 2020 Phase One Agreement, China promised to “conduct a risk assessment” for ractopamine, a growth additive in cattle and swine feed allowed in the U.S. but banned or restricted in some countries. It has accepted swine with ractopamine but the agreement is not specific about beef.

China started to reject beef shipments if it detected any ractopamine, and banned further shipments from beef processing plants and cold storage facilities that sent such beef.

That $2 billion market is now effectively closed, //

“The United States is a prized market for beef sales,” according to the NCBA comments. “Developing countries like Paraguay and Colombia see market access to the U.S. as an endorsement of their product and that is why beef access has been a top policy goal for these governments. Brazil and Paraguay were granted access under highly questionable conditions, and we do not want the U.S. government to continue using beef access as trade bait with South American countries, including Colombia.”

Biden granted Paraguay permission in 2023 to sell fresh beef in the U.S., and Colombia is waiting for access to the U.S. beef market. Both countries have had foot-and-mouth disease, which has been eradicated from the U.S since 1929.

Trump’s tariffs are not designed to encourage Americans to borrow money and maximize their consumption. Nor are they designed to encourage participation in speculative stock market or real estate bubbles. America’s free trade policies encouraged such excesses after the end of the Cold War, and we can’t stand a repeat of the folly. While his critics wrongly invoke the Smoot-Hawley tariff failures of 1930, Trump’s emerging tariff policies, particularly if combined with the appropriate monetary policy, will have much better results and Make America Great Again.

Each of these cases seeks to return our nation to the original intent of religious liberty in our U.S. Constitution — an intent that was misconstrued and misinterpreted by Justice Hugo Black in his majority opinion in Eversen v. Board of Education in 1947.

It was in this case that Black inserted the phrase, “wall of separation of church and state,” words found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution but instead from a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists in 1802.

The irony is that those who oppose any religious expression or rights of conscience for religious believers have also distorted Jefferson’s words to advance their anti-faith agenda. Up until Black’s opinion, the court had interpreted the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to support and encourage religious belief.

Unfortunately, with Black’s words, the damage was done. For the next generation, the Supreme Court, encouraged by groups such as the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, wielded Black’s words like a legal wrecking ball to any public expression of religious faith.

So many of our current cultural issues and rapidly deteriorating public discourse is the result of the fundamental misunderstanding and misconstruing by previous Supreme Courts after Black’s opinion.

By restoring religious liberty to its rightful place, where people can openly practice their faith, regardless of what it may be, and the government encourages, but not endorses a certain faith, can we return to the original intent of our Founding Fathers.

What if I told you that when federal district judges issue injunctions blocking President Donald Trump’s policies in a judicial insurrection, they were the ones breaking the law?

No, it’s not just because these judges are effectively usurping the authority of the president over the executive branch. It’s more clear-cut than that.

When Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., issued an order demanding the Trump administration return reputed members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to the U.S., he wasn’t just making immigration policy—he was violating a black-and-white rule laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s called the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c). Here’s what it says:

The court may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order only if the movant [that is, petitioner] gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained. The United States, its officers, and its agencies are not required to give security.

What does that mean? It means that when the ACLU files a lawsuit against the Trump administration and asks the judge to issue an order forcing Trump to turn around, in midflight, the planes deporting violent gangbangers, the ACLU has to put up or shut up.

The ACLU has to put down a “security” payment when asking for the court order, just in case a later judge strikes down the order after it already cost the government money to follow it.

This commonsense requirement isn’t a Trump wish list item. It’s a rule with the force of law. //

So, why isn’t the Department of Justice formally asking judges to enforce this rule?

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression may give a hint at the answer.

“Courts have long recognized exceptions for public-interest litigation, especially when it comes to those seeking to protect constitutional rights,” FIRE’s Ronnie London explained.

Perhaps the Justice Department is unwilling to press its rights on this issue because groups such as FIRE would like a public-interest exception.

Still, Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told The Daily Signal, “There is no exception.”

Daniel Huff, who worked as an attorney in the first Trump White House, wrote about the issue for The Wall Street Journal.

He called the “public interest” exception “made-up” and “subjective.”

“This elitist conceit presumes that it is in the public interest to exempt activists from standard legal rules so they can block actions ordered by the president, for whom 77 million Americans voted,” Huff wrote.

He cited no less a judge than since-deceased Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when she served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

In National Kidney Patients Association v. Sullivan (1992), a district judge tried to invoke public interest to waive the security payment. A panel of the D.C. Circuit, which included future Justice Ginsburg, rejected the claim outright: “This completely overlooks a key purpose of the bond … to make plaintiffs consider the damage they may inflict by pressing ahead with a possibly losing claim.”

The "initial survey of Unemployment Insurance claims since 2020" found that thousands of people with future birthdates claimed benefits.

The survey also indicated that thousands of supposedly very young and very old people had claimed benefits.

The DOGE post states that the survey found, "24.5k people over 115 years old claimed $59M in benefits," "28k people between 1 and 5 years old claimed $254M in benefits," and "9.7k people with birth dates over 15 years in the future claimed $69M in benefits."

"In one case, someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41k," the post also notes. //

That's crazy — so no one was performing any kind of a "sanity check"? And if they let these things go by which had such obvious issues and should have been immediately flagged, what about other things that were probably also fraud but perhaps not as obvious? They're supposed to be evaluating the validity of the claims, but it sounds like complete incompetence or lack of concern about the issues if this is true. And this is just what they've found so far. //

But instead of being concerned about the fraud and the waste and how to rectify it, you have the left instead attacking Elon Musk and his team, with some protesting and even attacking Tesla in order to try to stop him. One has to conclude they don't want the problems stopped. It's next-level insanity.

The thumbnail version of that is that we don't have the shipbuilding capacity we need, and we don't have the skilled tradesmen we need to build ships. You can see from the Senator's comments that Austal is literally going through all of the local community, even, as Senator Tuberville puts it, "through fast food joints" looking for tradesmen or anyone who could be trained. This is another aspect of something I've been saying and writing for years: our education system is not placing enough focus on the trades. When I was in high school in the '70s, even my small-town eastern Iowa school had a full auto shop, a full wood shop, and a full metal shop. A friend of mine graduated high school and, because of his classes in machining, was hired in a tool & die firm within days of graduating.

Building ships requires tradesmen: welders, pipefitters, electricians, and more. We don't have enough of those. //

This hearing illustrates very plainly why this rebirth of our shipbuilding capacity isn't going to happen overnight. And we don't have the luxury of time and distance we had in 1941. //

OrneryCoot
9 hours ago
High school teacher here. Did my master's thesis on something relevant to this. What would benefit our country greatly (as well as our youth) is an investment in career academies. Basic model is you do a normal K-8 education, and then spend your high school years learning a trade. Welding, construction related fields, tech related work, medical training and the like. After 4 years of real, hands on training in the field, get certified as a welder, electrician, plumber, etc. Having work studies with nearby industries is also a must. Also learn functional math that deals with how to handle finances at home and work, English for practical communication needs via email, resumes, work related correspondence, and a civics course to learn about how our nation functions and to install civic pride. Not everyone needs 4 years of Shakespeare, and that is coming from a teacher certified to teach English and history classes. An education like this provides something that is lacking for many students: a valuable, tangible benefit from their education. Not everyone wants or needs college, but they DO need to make a living. Career academies provide that. I'm sure companies like Austal in Mobile would love to see a school like that in their county, and would provide work studies galore for students

Yes, that's right. We're paying for a group of "consultants" whose funding depends on their spreading climate panic. I'd love for anyone to show me in the Constitution where this is an enumerated power of any portion of the federal government. Hint: It isn't, but that's never stopped the left and big-government advocates (but I repeat myself) from spending more and more of our money. //

This group, mind you, has a defined budget nearing $2 billion, and, as I wrote in March, takes money from a variety of government sources:

There are reports that funding from our federal government to ICF runs as high as $7.4 billion. //

There does not, as of this writing, appear to be any indication that the DOGE or the Trump administration has their eyes on this waste. That needs to change; after all, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money. //

anon-7lqi
9 hours ago
It starts as a movement, evolves into a business then degenerates into a racket. //

Froge
8 hours ago
That is the research racket for everything though. If I wanted to study the Western Sparrow, just to find out it range and nesting habits etc, and came to the conclusion, it is an interesting bird and is doing just fine - I will never receive another grant to study my bird. So even if things are going well, I will have to write pages and pages of what could go wrong, and it is easy to glom onto Global Warming as the problem. Government grants are predisposed to award people who discover problems, if it isn't a hard science. And if the problem is really big, the government loves it because they get to set up a department to help fix the problem.

So that is the racket with everything. Environmental studies, nutrition studies (though with nutrition, "we don't know but it could cause cancer heart disease and even death" is more likely than GW) medical studies, the works. And the studies don't even have to be true, as we learned with the Alzheimer's plaque studies which were bogus but led to years of fake research accusing aluminum from frying pans and other things that "cause the plaque."

The report you're about to read would normally be unbelievable.

A U.S. president's administration holding private talks with Communist Chinese officials about the administration's concerns over the potential impact on this country's relationship with China if the origin of a Chinese spy balloon and its intent were disclosed to the American public — all of which occurred before the public was notified about the spy balloon. //

U.S. officials identified the spy balloon infiltrating U.S. airspace on Jan. 28, 2023, and an Air Force fighter jet shot down the Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina Feb. 4, 2023, two days after the Pentagon issued a statement on the matter.

Biden officials held discussions with Beijing Feb. 1, 2023, about the balloon, and discussed the impact disclosing the balloon to the public could have on the relationship with China, internal State Department documents show, two Trump administration officials told Fox News Digital. //

Cowboysurfpunk
5 hours ago
I don't think they were going to tell us,.. until that woman in Montana took a video of it and put on the internet...then they had to...

Trans-identifying male Redmond Sullivan is out on the women’s team after female fencer Stephanie Turner refused to compete against him and was given a black card in response, removing her from the competition.

“We are in full compliance with NCAA and NEC rules and regulations. The fencer is not a member of our fencing team,” Wagner College Spokesperson Jim Chiavelli said in a statement to silive.com about Sullivan.

At the time of this publication, it is unclear if Sullivan was removed from the team or voluntarily stepped down.

Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday rolling back a federal regulation he has blamed for poor water pressure. His order would eliminate restrictions the Obama administration placed on how much water can flow from shower heads, an effort to conserve resources. Trump relaxed those standards during his first term, but President Joe Biden put them back in place.

“No longer will shower heads be weak and worthless,” said a draft of Trump’s order, adding that it intended to “make America’s showers great again.”

Trump has for years lamented the effect of low water pressure on his “gorgeous” and “perfect” hair.

Governments should just get out of the way of free trade among consumers and businesses. //

If we want trade reciprocity, the government should get out of the way and let businesses and consumers engage in voluntary exchanges with each other and overseas partners as they please. ///

So it's okay for Vietnam to charge 90% on imports from USA to protect their economy and industry, but it's not okay for USA to charge a tariff on imports from Vietnam to protect ours? How is that reciprocal?

Decades of efficiency mandates have made dishwashers weaker, A.C. units feebler, and appliances more expensive. A new rollback offers a rare win for function over dogma.

Like with the Japanese internment during World War II, the current move to deport alleged alien criminals is driven by hysteria.

Sean Parnell @SeanParnellATSD
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Secretary Hegseth has removed U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield from her position as U.S. representative to NATO’s military committee due to a loss of confidence in her ability to lead. The Defense Department is grateful for her many years of military service.
10:24 AM · Apr 8, 2025

Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett @RepJasmine
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They fired Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield—not because she couldn’t do the job, but because she wouldn’t hang up pictures of Trump and Hegseth. This ain’t about merit—it’s about ego.

Sean Parnell @SeanParnellUSA
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Congresswoman, I realize this may be a foreign concept to you but here at the DoD if you disrespect the chain of command & don’t do your job, you will be replaced.

Period.

“I consider Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to be the leader of the Democratic Party," Kennedy declared.

He then just killed the room and sent them all off into gales of laughter, “She's entitled to her opinion. I'm entitled to mine. As I've said before, I think she’s the reason there are directions on a shampoo bottle. Our plan for dealing with her is Operation Let Her Speak.”. //

anon-ia42
31 minutes ago
She also the reason for the warning on hair dryers.......do not use this appliance.....in the shower.

“104 percent tariffs in China are not enough. I’m advocating 400 percent,” he said.

“I do business in China. They don’t play by the rules,” continued O’Leary, who is also the chairman of O’Shares Investment and private-equity firm O’Leary Ventures. “They’ve been in the World Trade Organization for decades. They have never abided by any of the rules they agreed to when they came in for decades. They cheat, they steal, they steal [intellectual property]. I can’t litigate in their courts. They take product technology, they steal it, they manufacture it and sell it back here,” he said.

O'Leary explained this wasn't about tariffs anymore but about how no one has taken on China for decades while they behaved badly — no one, until Trump.

"As someone who actually does business there, I've had enough," O'Leary said, saying he spoke for "millions of Americans." He said finally, with Trump there was an administration who was saying "enough."

O'Leary said we had all the cards and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader should be on a plane here to work it out because "Xi can only stay the Supreme Leader if people are employed." He didn't hold back, "It's time to squeeze Chinese heads into the wall."

China may end up getting there themselves. The latest from China is that they are going to raise their 34 percent tariffs to 84 percent on Thursday. But at the same time, they were calling for "dialogue" with the U.S.

In the first few months of the new administration, we have witnessed an unprecedented dismantlingopens in a new tab or window of the national scientific and research enterprise. While certain shifts were anticipated in the wake of the 2024 presidential election, the speed and scope of these changes have been alarming. The consequences are rippling across every domain of science and medicine, leaving the academic community grappling with how to move forwardopens in a new tab or window in a rapidly shifting landscape. While debate is integral to the advancement of science, division across partisan lines harms the advancement of science and our collective health.

At a time when many individuals and organizations are unsure of how to respond, one thing is abundantly clear: silence will not protect science. As health equity researchers, our fields of science -- reproductive health, workforce diversity, and cancer disparities -- are once again at the center of conflict. One commonly observed response has been to obscure or rebrand "controversial" areas like diversityopens in a new tab or window or sexualityopens in a new tab or window in an attempt to avoid scrutiny. For example, researchers are considering and being asked to make changes to language in grants and manuscriptsopens in a new tab or window.

This strategy is both ethically and strategically flawed. Obfuscation erodes public trust and weakens the integrity of scientific inquiry. The recent threat of NIH indirect cost cutsopens in a new tab or window and canceling of grantsopens in a new tab or window and public health programsopens in a new tab or window serves as a stark warning: when we permit vulnerabilities in one area of research, the resulting fracture inevitably undermines the entire scientific infrastructure. //

George_Avery_PhD
2 days ago
We needed people to speak up when leaders at NIH tried to suppress the Lab Leak hypothesis in order to cover up the fact that the agency may well have paid to create the COVID virus. We needed people to speak up when Washington was trying to suppress those who held true to the fundamental virtue of science, which is skepticism - not just on COVID, but other areas of science. We needed to speak up when the Climategate e-mails revealed a conspiracy to suppress dissenting research. We needed to speak up for years as nutritional research clung to the ideas of Ancel Keyes, even when it was revealed that he suppressed his own results when they did not fit his ideas. We needed to speak up over the crisis in peer review. We need to speak up about health economists who neglect to consider that government intervention is itself a market failure. We needed to speak up about the misrepresented and exaggerated risks of nuclear power, and the false idea that solar and wind generation can meet growing baseline needs.