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.

Burgum said:

Again, I have to smile because, apparently... having been in the private sector for my whole life until being a governor, and then working in a state where we had to balance the budget, which is different.

I mean, if the federal government is like a ranch that, where they threw everything in the barn for 100 years, and great grandpa and grampy never threw anything away, and has accumulated everything and you never had to clean it out, that would be—that's what the federal government is. //

From administration to administration, Democrat and Republican, they have simply thrown things into the federal barn without any assessment of whether they have any purpose or use, and instead of assessing this, they hire people to manage or oversee the barn, without assessing whether its contents are even worthy of management or oversight.

Burgum continued,

And typically the federal government would send in a committee of 25 people who pick up one object, spend two weeks talking about, should we get rid of it, what did great grandpa use this for, maybe we should save it, it might be historic. What we're doing right now is emptying out the barn and deciding what should go back in. And what should go back in is what actually serves the American people. //

Take national parks for an example. There is so much overhead of people that work for the park system that don't work in a park. We could actually increase the number of people. Like this summer, we'll have more people working in Yellowstone than we had in 2020. More people working, but we could end up with fewer people across the whole park system. Because, guess what? We may not need that many people in IT, we may not need that many people in HR, there's things that we can do to streamline. And if we've got people who are in this business because they care about the environment and they care about our lands, we've got customer-facing, land-facing jobs available. We have 5,000 jobs posted to go work in the parks[..]. wildfire fighters, people that are for summer help, come work for us. But work in a job where we're serving the public as opposed to in D.C. or in a regional location, where you're just doing overhead that's part of the barn that's never been cleaned out. //

Random US Citizen
30 minutes ago
The federal government owns 640 million acres. That's almost 30% of the land in the U.S. Fully 80% of Nevada is owned by the feds. In Utah, it's 65%. While that's a lot of land to manage, that management shouldn't require 50% of its 80,000 employees to live in Washington D.C. Probably 800 of them should be in D.C. and the other 79,200 should be on or near the land that's being managed.

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

Do you have a grievance with how the federal government is spending your tax money? A complaint over some wasteful practice or feather-bedded bureaucracy? I know I do - I could fill several volumes with complaints about government waste.

Well, now the Department of Government Efficiency - the DOGE - has an internet portal where you can take your complaint directly to them.

"Your voice in federal decision making," reads the website Regulations.gov, "Impacted by an existing rule or regulation? Share your ideas for deregulation by completing this form." https://www.regulations.gov/deregulation //

Dawgly One
4 hours ago
Somebody check me if I’m wrong, I didn’t look it up. Boil the 18 enumerated powers down to the following:
1). Protect our sovereign borders
2). Maintain armed forces
3). Maintain the currency (we don’t even do this, we leave it to the Fed, which is murky sorta government)
4). Run a post office
5). Maintain post roads (I translate this as the interstate hwy system)
6). Regulate interstate commerce.

That’s it, all of it. I figure we could cut Federal spending by about 60%. Everything else needs to handled at the state level.

Ward Clark Dawgly One
4 hours ago
Looks like a good list to me.

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.

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."

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.

Baptiste @BaptisteVicini
·
Apr 7
"They amputated their own legs on this," Stewart admitted.

This reveals a deeper issue: complexity as a control mechanism.

By making internet deployment convoluted, officials control who gets access.

The implications are troubling for democracy.

Internet access isn't just convenience—it's opportunity.

When bureaucracy blocks connectivity, it creates knowledge gaps.

Those in power benefit when information access is limited.

Musk retweeted Stewart's viral reaction and ...

Stewart's realization reflects a growing consensus:

The problem isn't about politics—it's about effectiveness.

When these systems prioritize process over people, we all lose.

Technology should connect us, not be used to divide us further.

While the government spends years on paperwork, companies like Starlink deploy solutions in weeks.

This raises questions about whether bureaucracy is intentional.

By keeping access complicated, information flow remains controlled.

This affects our entire society.

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."

Weminuche45
4 hours ago edited
The Marxist woke religion invented a new version of original sin which, unlike Christianity, only applies to certain people and offers no possibility for salvation or redemption. If an outside government wanted to demoralize and destabilize the US, this is how they'd do it, but this is an inside job.

Marxist Methods of Demoralization

Infiltration of Education:

• The education system is targeted to indoctrinate younger generations with ideologies that challenge traditional values and national identity.
• Historical narratives are distorted, and critical thinking is replaced with ideological conformity.

Manipulation of Media:

• Media outlets are used to spread disinformation, promote divisive narratives, and undermine trust in institutions.
• Entertainment industries (e.g., Hollywood) are leveraged to normalize alternative ideologies and cultural relativism.

Undermining Cultural Institutions:

• Traditional values such as religion, family structures, and patriotism are systematically attacked.
• The family unit may be replaced by allegiance to the state, as seen in parallels with Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Promotion of Moral Relativism:

• Societal norms are inverted, celebrating victimhood and dependence while vilifying strength and independence.
• This creates confusion around truth and morality, fostering passivity among citizens.

Psychological Conditioning:

• Individuals are conditioned to accept contradictory beliefs (akin to Orwell’s "Doublethink"), making them unable to discern truth even when presented with factual evidence.

Outcome of Demoralization

Cognitive Paralysis:

• Citizens lose the ability to critically analyze information or recognize manipulation. Even when exposed to authentic facts, their perception remains distorted.
• Such individuals become "programmed" to react predictably to stimuli aligned with the subverter's goals.

Erosion of National Identity:

• The population becomes detached from its historical and cultural roots, weakening societal cohesion and pride in national values.

Generational Indoctrination:
Demoralization over an extended period of time results in widespread acceptance of the subverter’s ideology among key influencers in government, media, and academia.

Inability to Resist Subversion:

• A demoralized society becomes passive and incapable of mounting effective resistance against external or internal threats. This sets the stage for destabilization, the next phase in ideological subversion.

Reversing demoralization requires significant effort over generations, as deeply ingrained perceptions are difficult to change once established.

BILL MAHER: "Why do we need to subsidize? We're so polarized. These outlets became popular at a time when Republicans and Democrats didn't hate each other and weren't at each other's throats and didn't think each other was an existential threat. In that world, you can't have places like this, I think, anymore. They have to be private.". //

COUltraMAGA
6 hours ago
I hate that equivocation of Maher’s. “We all hate each other”.

It’s like the Paly’s and Israelis. If the Paly’s let down their arms, there would be peace. If the Israelis did, they would cease to exist.

If the Dems stopped being insane and terrorist sympathizers…we could have a great country. If the Republicans stopped trying to g to fight their insanity, we would cease to be a country.

Our fight matters, and it’s not because we ”hate each other”, Maher.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Friday that the Trump administration had granted permission to West Virginia to ban the use of federal food assistance dollars to buy soft drinks. At an event in Martinsburg, WV, RFK Jr. gave West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrissey a first-of-its-kind waiver to permit the ban and had a message for the rest of the country: “Apply for a waiver to my agency, and we’re going to give it to you.” //

This marks a turning point in the battle between nutritional advocates and beverage manufacturers and sellers over whether SNAP dollars should be used to buy soft drinks.

Soft drinks are the top item purchased with SNAP benefits.

Soft Drinks
Fluid Milk
Ground Beef
Bag Snacks
Cheese
Baked Breads
Cold Cereal
Fresh Chicken
Frozen Handhelds and Snacks
Lunchmeat
Candy
Infant Formula
Frozen Pizza
Refrigerated Juices/Drinks
Ice Cream
Coffee and Creamers. //

Personally, I think the framing of this issue as a "government overreach" or "rights" argument is the height of dishonesty. SNAP benefits, as the name indicates, are "supplemental" to the normal food budget. The money is a government benefit and it has the right to decide what that benefit can be used for. If you want to buy candy and soft drinks, go right ahead, but use your own money. The other major nutritional program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC, already prohibits soft drink purchases, and the sky didn't fall in.