The host wasn't done , though, in her crusade, bringing up the judge's stay on the district court's order that the Trump EPA "unfreeze" $20 billion in funds that Team Biden had ready to go to clean energy grants. Zeldin was off to the races in his thorough answer:

I'm glad you pointed out that the circuit court then stopped what the district court was saying. So, self-dealing and conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients, lack of sufficient EPA oversight, these were all concerns that we had. First were- had the alarm raised when a Biden EPA political appointee in December was on video saying that they were tossing gold bars off the Titanic, rushing to get billions of dollars out the door before Inauguration Day. And also said, with an eye towards getting themselves jobs at recipient NGOs. So for example, as it relates to unqualified recipients, there was one recipient NGO that only received $100 in 2023, they got $2 billion in 2024. They also have in their grant agreement requirement to complete a training in 90 days called "how to develop a budget." They were amending the account control agreements days before the inauguration, reducing EPA oversight.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has sent a criminal referral to the DOJ, accusing James of mortgage fraud. In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Director Bill Pulte says James appears to have falsified records in order to meet certain lending requirements and receive favorable loan terms. He cited a property in Virginia, that she has allegedly claimed as her principal residence and a property in New York that she claimed as a four-unit structure...instead of a five, which Pulte says means she was able to get a different type and more favorable loan. //

Jonathan Turley
@JonathanTurley
·
Follow
...The referral also claims that James listed her father as her husband and represented a five-unit dwelling as a four-unit dwelling to allegedly secure an advantage on loans...
7:27 PM · Apr 15, 2025. //

President Donald J. Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum aimed at stopping illegal aliens and other ineligible people from obtaining Social Security Act benefits.

Last week I gave our loyal readers a heads up that STARRS (STAND TOGETHER Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services) was going to hold a Town Hall concerning service members who think that it is appropriate to denigrate President Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth, engage in “malicious compliance,” and downright defiance of lawful orders issued by the Trump Administration, especially as regards the removal of DEI: U.S. Military Opposition to the Trump Administration A Matter of Concern:

There is an enormous problem in our nation’s military, one that I have not seen discussed in depth elsewhere. I have heard from multiple sources that many active duty officers openly and deeply despise the Trump Administration, and they are not at all shy about expressing their opinion both in and out of uniform. One active duty major I know estimates that it’s 1 in 4 who have this problem…

This is an astonishingly bad problem. Putting aside for the moment that this is a clear violation of Article 88 of the UCMJ, this is how military coups take place. I guess I should not be surprised given Mark Milley’s traitorous actions towards his Commander-in-Chief, but the fact that this has permeated to lower levels of the officer corps surprises me and causes me great worry. //

Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius
.
I got out of the Army in 2007.

What I am seeing now with senior officers being publicly insubordinate to the National Command Authority is so far outside of the bounds of decency, professional responsibility and my experience that I have a very difficult time understanding how it is even possible. What has happened in our military that this is even a thing? It is inconceivable that any of this could have happened on such a scale when I was serving on active duty. What went wrong?
9:47 PM · Apr 10, 2025. //

TargaGTS | April 11, 2025 at 11:20 am
Being cashiered cannot be the end of this process for this general and her fellow travelers. Instead, it must only be the beginning. If a non-rate enlisted man made these comments about the base commander, there would be an immediate Article 32 investigation which would produce charges under Articles 88, 92 & 134. They would – properly – throw the proverbial book at him even without those contemptuous comments posing any credible threat to civilian control of the military.

When flag officers make these comments, it is a clear & present danger to a First Principle of our nation, civilian control of the military. There should be courts-martial. There must be courts-martial because if you allow command to utter these kinds of contemptuous comments about POTUS, how do you enforce any kind of discipline throughout the chain of command? //

Alex deWynter in reply to henrybowman. | April 11, 2025 at 2:58 pm
What she can say — PRIVATELY to whomever is directly above her in the chain of command — is “Sir, I believe Vice President Vance’s remarks yesterday will cause everyone’s mission to fall down around their ears. This is what I propose to prevent that happening. Do I have your permission?”

Legal Insurrection readers may recall my post about the recent shake-up at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), resigned, citing significant disagreements with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policies.

Marks claimed it was because of Kennedy, and the new HHS Secretary’s viewpoints on the worthiness of vaccines.

However, there is more to the story.

Marks left after refusing to grant Kennedy team unrestricted access to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database. Marks asserted that such access could lead to manipulation or deletion of sensitive data, which includes unverified reports of vaccine-related adverse events submitted by the public. //

There are a number of reasons that this issue is troubling, especially given Marks’ profanity-infused response to the new HHS team seeking the usual level of access to government databases that the Secretary normally has. To begin with, as I have previously noted, studies have identified a rare but notable link between myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, such as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

As a reminder, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released 148 blank pages of data in response to a FOIA request for information connecting covid vaccinations to heart inflammation. //

The agency has already released some reports, such as this one in The Lancet, which asserted that virus-caused myocarditis was worse than the one that arose post-vaccination. //

Finally, a recent study conducted by the Cleveland Clinic has raised concerns about the effectiveness of this season’s flu vaccine. Published as a preprint on MedRxiv, the research analyzed data from 53,402 healthcare workers during the 2024-2025 flu season and found that vaccinated individuals had a 27% higher risk of contracting influenza compared to their unvaccinated counterparts.

The calculated vaccine effectiveness was reported as -26.9%, indicating that the vaccine may have increased the risk of infection rather than reducing it. //

BobM | April 11, 2025 at 11:39 pm
As someone with IT experience, especially in DataBase design and admin, I have to advise the reader that there are multiple non-nefarious reasons to allow both raw data access & edit access to a DB. Especially if you suspect the current key holders have been “cooking the books” to make a DB support wanted conclusions. Edit access allows you to look for groupings in the data that may not be obvious because of the way the raw data is currently organized and categorized. Or to look for improper groupings that make conclusions based on them garbage.

As an example, the “sky-is-falling” Covid panic was at least in part supported by “death by Covid” numbers that often assumed if you died and had Covid at the time that it was a Covid death. Washington State DOH, for instance, has since admitted “DOH includes deaths of all persons who tested positive for COVID-19 in its totals, even if the victims died from other causes, such as gunshot wounds.”.

Other examples include crime statistics databases where politicians and law enforcement have played games with crime categories to be able to tout imaginary “decrease in crime X” or “increase in arrests for crime Y” for their own reasons. Most recently, the Biden administration database of border enforcement stats famously was used to tout that Biden was “tough on illegal entries” when in actuality the raw data showed they were touting catch-and-release interceptions the same as actual prevention of illegal entries.

If folks have lost respect for scientific experts, it’s because all too many have taken to treating access to the raw data and descriptions of the data manipulation used to reach their “expert” conclusions as closely held proprietary secrets not be disclosed to the hoi polloi. That is NOT good scientific practice and is a huge red flag. You see it all over in climate “science”, and it’s spread like a cancer thru science in general lately.

On Thursday, the Department of Government Efficiency revealed that three deep-blue states—California, New York, and Massachusetts—were responsible for $305 million, or 80%, of the $382 million in fraudulent unemployment payments issued since 2020.

DOGE also reported that 68% of unemployment benefits paid to parolees flagged by Customs and Border Protection as being on the terrorist watchlist or having criminal records were issued in California.

The DOGE team found that $59 million in unemployment benefits was paid to 24,500 people listed as over 115 years old. Another $254 million went to 28,000 people between the ages of 1 and 5, while $69 million was distributed to 9,700 people with birthdates more than 15 years in the future.

The report highlights one case in particular: an individual born in the year 2154—not a typo—received $41,000 in benefits.

Joni Ernst

@SenJoniErnst
·
Follow
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 "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.

Wall Street Apes
@WallStreetApes
Every single time you see Democrats screaming into news cameras, remember this clip:

Elon Musk “I'll tell you a lesson I learned at PayPal. You know who complained the loudest, the quickest and the loudest and with the most amount of righteous indignation? The fraudsters. That's who complained first, loudest, and they would generally have this immense overreaction. That's how we knew they were the fraudsters. That's how we knew. That's the tell.”

12:13 AM · Apr 3, 2025

DataRepublican (small r)
@DataRepublican
I've had a change of heart on federal income tax. On the surface, it's just a way for the government to generate revenue—it has to get its funding from somewhere. But I now see that the method of taxation itself fundamentally alters the relationship between the government and its people.

When the government relies on taxing individual income, it shifts from serving its citizens to exploiting them as a revenue source. This dynamic creates an inherent friction, where the government no longer answers to the people but to the system that extracts from them. And if you look around, it's clear—whatever our tax dollars are funding, it’s not serving us.

This is what modern economists fail to grasp when they dismiss tariffs, sales taxes, or luxury taxes as harmful. The structure of taxation matters, not just the amount collected. The income tax distorts governance itself—and it needs to go.

Eric Daugherty
@EricLDaugh
The thing about an income tax is that it literally just makes it a pain to succeed.

A consumption tax makes it a pain to consume things you don't need. BIG difference.

In a consumption tax-heavy environment, when people are tight on money, they can simply do what any rational person does: buy less "wants," buy only necessities.

In an INCOME tax-heavy environment, it doesn't matter. You lose a flat 15-30% of your income. It doesn't matter how smart or purposeful you are with your money. The government just swipes it away. Then, it essentially throws it into a black hole.

And the REAL problem, and why the elites DON'T want a system based on tariffs and domestic consumption taxes?

They encourage self sufficiency. You don't pay taxes on potatoes and peppers growing in your garden. You can take steps to eliminate purchases, or the prices of the things you do buy by shopping smartly, thus lowering your taxes, while having more money. Consumption based taxes, taken to their logical end, would mean a government that physically cannot be as bloated as it is now while still remaining even somewhat solvent.

Eric Daugherty
@EricLDaugh
That's why the structure matters. "Punishing" people for buying a bunch of stuff seems much more "fair" than punishing people for... trying to make a living.

And the people who want to min-max their finances can simply spend time and effort minimizing the costs of their purchases, and minimize the quantity of their purchases.

But that would require the presumption Americans have the capability of being smart, rational and self sufficient - not something the elites are interested in entertaining.

DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican
Everywhere we look, the system is starved for money. Social Security is on verge of bankruptcy. Disability benefits are denied. The war machine is starving. Veterans sleep on sidewalks. Overdoses spike. Teachers beg for scraps.

But according to Census data, the number of U.S. citizens has grown by only 6% since 2010.

So why are we broke?

In 2010, federal spending was $3.456 trillion—14.6% of GDP.

In 2023, it hit $6.134 trillion—22.8% of GDP.

That’s a 78% increase in spending in just 13 years.

And what do we have to show for it?

Nothing.

I have no inside information. But I’ll bet DOGE will soon tell us soon enough: the scale of anarcho-tyranny, the preference for undocumented noncitizens as pretext to feed federal bureacracy, goes far deeper than we thought. //

DOGEai
@dogeai_gov
·
4h
Automated
Spending up 78% since 2010. Population? Just 6%.

HHS: $1.2T to $1.7T
Education: 3X to $268B
Treasury: 2X to $1.3T

Every $ to bloated agencies = theft from vets, teachers & taxpayers.

D.C. bureaucrats feast while Americans get scraps. //

Dr. Oliver's Scalp Tonic President and CEO
@consilium65
They were attempting the Cloward–Piven strategy. They were going to overwhelm the system so it would collapse to replace it with a socialist/Marxist government. If Biden/Harris would have won, it would have succeeded easily. When Trump won, it still had a chance at success but Trump understood what was happening and had DOGE at the ready. They have saved the United States from complete collapse. For now.

It is still perilous as congress needs to get off their collective a$$es and work with Trump and DOGE to fix it. Pronto. Otherwise, it will take a bit longer and we will just bleed out. If this collapses, they don't want to see what happens next. Let's just say the US has a ton of guns and will have a very upset population. Not a recipe for good things to happen.

In the dumpy little borough of Millbourne, Pennsylvania, three elected Democrats cheated in the 2021 election in almost every imaginable way. Their candidate, one of the three cheaters, still lost his bid for mayor by some 30 votes. Two are still in office as of April 4, according to a phone call to the borough hall.

The three pleaded guilty April 1 to a host of election fraud offenses at separate hearings before United States District Judge Harvey Bartle III.

To examine their scheme is to see in play many of the red flags election integrity experts have warned about. It is a textbook for cheaters to study, and they will, unless Pennsylvania changes some laws to make it harder to cheat. //

Requiring in-person voting and photo voter ID would have prevented this scam. While some states require photo ID, Pennsylvania does not.

anon-ai01
3 hours ago
Since Jimmy Carter founded the Dept. of Education in 1978 as a payoff to the teachers' unions for their support, educational achievement for US students has gone from #2 in the world to #40. So many children cannot read. It is a crying shame. Teachers' unions oppose teaching phonics. Returning power to the local level weakens union control. Thank you, Pres. Trump and Sec. McMahon!

Without any inside information, this is pure speculation, but it looks like the method of carrying out the reduction in force was either needlessly ruthless or HHS had an indication that if staff were given warning they would create a media-friendly incident. Sending the layoff notices at 5 a.m. and disabling key cards is not the way things are usually done.

Removing leaders en masse strips away institutional memory, experience, and expertise, he and others say. “A more reasonable approach would be to ask for resignations for those who have served more than 5 or 10 years rather than an across-the-board, build-from-scratch strategy,” says Robert Cook-Deegan, a policy expert at Arizona State University who has co-authored histories of NIH.

I would counter that these are not reasonable times at HHS. The leadership is deeply compromised both by its role during the COVID panic and by relations with industry and academia. The workforce is politically hostile to President Trump and to Kennedy, and most of it went along willingly as public health was used as a deliberate wedge to undermine civil liberties. RFK Jr. wants to take the agency in a very different direction, and he could not reasonably count on the leadership or the workforce for support. So, he had to build from scratch, and that is what he is doing. //

anon-isiz
11 hours ago
These people destroyed in 24 months good will toward public health that had taken 100 years to create. They deserve to go. And some of them may have helped create a virus that killed millions and then a “vaccine” that injured millions more. //

jtt888
9 hours ago
Good lord, the last thing we need is people with institutional memory.

MAN: Hi, I was a worker at HHS. I was fired illegally on February 14th. There are many people who are not getting social service programs, especially people with disabilities. Are you going to do anything to stop what's happening?

BANKS: Eh, you probably deserved it

MAN: I deserved it?

BANKS: You probably deserved it

WOMAN: Oh, dude, that's so rude and sad.

MAN: Yeah, that's great to hear. Why did I deserve it?

BANKS: Because you seem like a clown

(The elevator closes)

And with that, a thousand memes were born, including Banks himself making the following his profile picture. //

anon-lmlj
3 hours ago
Should have said "shouldn't you be out looking for a new job?". //

Cynical Optimist
12 hours ago
In the '90s Clinton laid off 377,000 federal government workers and no judges blocked their firings or declared them "illegal," and no HHS workers yelled at Senators as they got on elevators.

There's a guy by the name of Antonio Gracias, who, as founder and managing partner at Valor Equity Partners, has proven to be a pretty smart fellow in his own right. As a patriotic American, he was willing to work with Elon at DOGE.

And how lucky are we?

Because what Gracias revealed he and the DOGE team found at Social Security 'by accident' after, as he said...

'There are a lot of good people in the system who pointed us in this direction and I want to honor them right now. That work in the government today. Who took risks to show us these numbers and tell us this was going on.'

...is gobsmacking.

What is the 'this' he's referring to that they found?

That the Biden administration in 2024 - one year - gave 2.1 MILLION NON-CITIZENS social security numbers.

There's only one reason to do that. //

The defaults in the system from social security to all of the benefit programs have been set to max inclusion, MAX PAY for these people and minimum collection.

We found 1.3 million of them already on Medicaid as an example. We've gone through on every benefit program we went through, we found groups from this particular group of people, this 5.5 million people in those benefit programs.

And then what was really, really disturbing us was why we're asking ourselves why. So we actually just took a sample and looked at voter registration records and we found people here registered to vote in this population. Yes.

Who did vote? We found some by sampling that ACTUALLY DID VOTE.

We have referred them to prosecution at the Homeland Security Investigation Service. Yeah. Already, already. That is already happening right now. The truly disturbing thing though, I just want you to know this, a truly disturbing thing to me, and the darkest thing about this, to me, the voter fraud is terrible.” //

MUSK: "People think that Biden was asleep at the switch. They weren't asleep at the switch. It was a massive large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and making it a deep blue one party state from which there would be no escape."

GRACIAS: "Human Traffickers made $13-15B off of this. This is a human tragedy. We created a system that created an incentive for people to come here and get taken advantage of by these traffickers."

MUSK: "This is not made up by the right. This is absolutely true...The real reason for these attacks and the burning of the cars, is that we're going to turn off the payments to illegals...I think this is the biggest voter fraud in the history of America by far. If the machine behind the Kamala puppet had won then they would have legalized all the illegals and there would be no swing states."

Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), indicated he will be turning his crew's attention to members of Congress who have amassed fortunes despite having base salaries under $200,000.

The tech mogul and philanthropist made the comments during a rally in Wisconsin for state Supreme Court candidate Judge Brad Schimel.

"A lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress - where I just can't - I'm trying to connect the dots of how did they become rich," he told those in attendance.

"How'd they get $20 million if they're earning $200,000 a year? Nobody can explain that," added Musk. "We're gonna try to figure it out and certainly stop it from happening."

In signing the EO, President Trump used the authority granted him by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA), which empowered presidents to shape and oversee the federal workforce. We'll see what the judicial branch has to say about that and whether or not they held previous presidents to the same standards. //

Eric Blanc (also at ericblanc. b s k y ) @_ericblanc
Trump's executive order tonight has illegally cancelled union contracts for 67% of the federal workforce & 75% of unionized federal employees — roughly 700,000 union workers

This may be the single biggest attack on the labor movement in American history
10:45 AM · Mar 28, 2025. //

G3
an hour ago
Labor unions came about to protect employees from predatory employers...is the federal government in the habit of mistreating its employees? No? then why should federal employees be unionized...other than to line the pockets of a select few at the top.

Frankly, most unions are worthless - especially the teachers' union. //

NorCalGC SH-2F SCPO
22 minutes ago
My grandfather was a member of the carpenters union. During WW2 he moved to the SF Bay Area to work as a welder in the shipyards. It was a nonunion job. When the war ended he went back to work for the union. After he’d put in his 30 years he went to the union office to get his pension. They told him he wasn’t eligible because his 30 years weren’t consecutive. They screwed him out of his pension. No one in his family has had any use for a union ever since. //

Az-Mt
an hour ago
Congress allocates money for wages and benefits so administration should not negotiate on anything except working conditions. Very little use of unions. Also stop deducting their dues. Make the Union collect them.

Fox News Senior Correspondent and host of "Special Report" Bret Baier sat down with Elon Musk and the entire DOGE team on Thursday. This is a step up from the individual interviews done with Musk and one or two of the members. While their work overlaps all of the government agencies, each DOGE member spoke to the findings at particular agencies like the Social Security Administration, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Health, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of the Interior.

Baier kicked off his questioning with Musk, asking what are the DOGE budgetary savings goals and what he thinks he's achieved thus far?

The U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) launched a chaotic, short-lived rebellion against Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday, sabotaging their own building and communications infrastructure in a failed attempt to resist a Trump administration takeover, sources exclusively told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The standoff stemmed from President Donald Trump’s Feb. 19 executive order demanding the dramatic downsizing of numerous federally-funded organizations, explicitly requiring USIP to reduce its operations and personnel to the minimum levels required by law. //

Further reinforcing the deliberate, calculated nature of the rebellion, an internal memo from Feb. 6 titled “External Agency Visitor Procedure,” also obtained exclusively by the DCNF, outlined detailed contingency plans for resisting the Trump administration’s attempts at a leadership transition. The document asserts USIP’s discretion over its own facilities, security protocols and access control, buttressing the leadership’s belief that they could reject external overseers.

It also postulates the institute’s control over its own physical infrastructure, implying leadership believed they had the authority to disable security systems, destroy locks and otherwise render the building inoperable as a means of resistance. The document confirms advanced planning more than ten days before Trump’s inciting executive order, contradicting the outward appearance of Monday’s showdown as a spontaneous and purely reactionary resistance.