Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. DOGE
2. FBI / ICE
3. MN House
4. Budget
5. Rescission
6. Trans
7. Hunter
1. DOGE. This week, the battle between the Swamp and DOGE was joined, as the black-robed corruptocrats on the federal bench weighed in with tens of Temporary Restraining Orders (TROs) against Trump Executive Actions. This presents both a problem and an opportunity. The problem comes from the wanton delay in the action demanded by the Appellate Court Judges. The opportunity comes from reminding them of their perfidy, something that Chief Justice Roberts is up to bat to perform. As Roberts has been playing institutional defense for a couple decades, it is no surprise at the possibility. Whether he chooses to do so is another thing entirely,
- First, and most concerning is that democrats have gone into pure messenger shooting mode, tearing into Musk for heading DOGE and his team of youngsters. Per the democrats, anything he finds is an obvious assault on the poor, indigent and disabled. Yet he persists. Anyone who listens to Musk for more than a millisecond figures out that he is in it for the Greater Good, something the political left used to claim to care about before selling its collective souls to the Swamp. Somewhere along the line, this is going to put his life and others at risk.
- Jeff Childres writing in Coffee & Covid 2025 wrote an extended piece Weds suggesting that DOGE was not the main event. Rather, it is a reconnaissance operation intended to point out the problems for the main battle group, congress with the upcoming budget bill. Congress should (and perhaps will) lock in all the proposed budget and manpower cuts in the upcoming budget. If they do it soon enough (this summer), they can mitigate the possible loss of 40+ Republican House seats in 2026, retaining control of the House. Newt Gingrich has been loudly beating this drum publicly for a week or two, noting that failure to quickly pass tax cuts doomed the Reagan revolution in 1982 and the Trump version of it in 2018. More on this later.
- DOGE is showing up essentially as external (or internal or infernal) auditors with root access to the various systems, which is what auditors do (and have) when they show up at any business or financial institution. Democrats and their lackeys in the activist courts are attempting to make the case that the government is immune from auditors. In the past, when a new administration showed up in DC, they relied on the embedded bureaucracy to conduct the audit for them. This goes particularly poorly when an incoming Republican administration attempts to find out what went on during the previous democrat administration as the embedded bureaucracy is for all intents and purposes embedded democrats who obstruct them at every turn. This time with DOGE, it’s different.
- The other thing that DOGE does is defund the left, thus depriving them of their shock troops, the government funded protestors. When you aren’t paying for protests, you aren’t going to get as many of them, particularly the violent ones. How many of these bozos are going to organize and protest on a “trust me” card?
- One thing to watch as all of this plays out are the designated liars that the media trot out to bemoan all Trump’s daily outrages. These guys are booked to lie about what is happening. The difference today is that all the intel community liars (think of the list of 51 signatories on the fraudulent Hunter laptop is Russian disinformation) had their clearances pulled and can no longer speak authoritatively on anything intel related while the current group of anti-DOGE liars can. Today’s anti-DOGE liars include (in no particular order): Jamie Raskin, Dan Goldman, Adam Schiff, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer and Maxine Waters.
- There is also a connection between USAID and the very leftist American Bar Association. That connection has supported their lawfare against Republicans for years. Expect the Trump administration to start treating the ABA like they do any other Soros funded organization. Also expect the ABA to lose its ability to accredit law schools and revert back to operating like any other partisan legal organization like the Federalist Society.
- Liz Warren’s CFPB has gone dark. She thought it was a pretty neat trick to disconnect its funding from congressional oversight. Indeed, it worked pretty well for a time. The problem is that when the Federal Reserve provides its funding, the president can shut it down without any recourse from congress or the courts.
- As of this writing, over 75,000 federal employees took the 8-month buyout offer. Depending on whose garbage numbers you believe, that is either much higher or lower than expected. I would tend to believe it is on the high side, given that once you make it past probation, these are for all intents and purposes lifetime jobs. Harris – Biden intentionally increased the number of civil servants from around 2.3 to over 4 million, especially toward the end. This presents yet another opportunity for Trump who is removing all the probationary hires. The only problem with these resignations (other than court holds on the buyout), is that retirements are apparently not automated, handled by feds in a limestone cave somewhere in VA that can reportedly only handle 10,000 a month. I would expect the process to shortly be automated, which is right up the DOGE alley.
- Early returns has at least $100 billion paid out of Social Security who have no social security numbers (SSAN). Worse, the population of 190+ year olds in this country is astonishingly large and likely fraudulent.
2. FBI / ICE. ICE planned several raids aimed at the Venezuelan Tren Aragua gang over the last week starting in Chicago, Denver and finally in LA. All three raids were tipped and gang members weren’t present when ICE showed up. Immigration Czar Tom Homan was not pleased, claiming to know who tipped local media who in turn tipped the gang bangers. It turns out that the leak was from the FBI to newly purchased Soros radio stations. One Tren Aragua leader was nabbed in NYC during a raid. Note that the FCC is reviewing the rushed approval of the Soros purchase of 200+ radio stations to see if it is possible to reverse the transaction. Nothing like giving them another excuse. In a related story, DHS Secretary Christy Noem announced last week that she had clawed back $59 million in payments to 5-Star NYC hotels to house illegals. The FEMA employee who authorized the payments has reportedly been fired. The money came from FEMA which is rightfully on the chopping block based on their politicized response to Hurricane Helene caused flooding in NC, GA, and TN. Trump signed an EO in Jan establishing a policy of pursuing criminal charges against people who facilitate illegals stay in the US. Note that as of this writing, the border is essentially closed, which demonstrates what you can do when you actually want to do it.
3. MN House. 10 days ago the MN House settled a 3-week long standoff between absent democrats and Republican legislators. The power sharing agreement seated a democrat in a disputed seat, elected a Republican House Speaker, the first black woman Speaker in state history, and allowed the House to get to work. To recap, democrats lost a 67-67 tie when one of their members was expelled for being fraudulently elected. He didn’t live in the district he won in Nov. Republicans showed up and organized Jan 14. Democrats claimed to have been sworn in in a secret ceremony by the Secretary of State (also a democrat) the previous weekend. They refused to show up for legislative session after being sworn in. Republicans ceaselessly hammered them for getting paid while refusing to show up for work. Eventually the public pressure forced them to cave. They wanted to stay out until a special election in March filled the seat. Thing is, that the closest they can get is a 67-67 tie even if they win the special election, which is what this power sharing agreement locks into place. Should the Republican candidate win, Republicans end up with a real majority and the power sharing agreement will be tossed. The other player in this is the democrat majority on the MN Supreme Court, which rewrote state law on the fly requiring 68 votes to constitute a governing majority. Democrats are on very thin ice here, with a single vote majority in the state senate and a single vote deficit in the house. In the end the optics of refusing to show up for work did them in. Perhaps those same optics will elect a Republican in the special election. Note that as of this writing, MN is evenly balanced with Republicans ascendant. NJ may not be the only blue state on deck to flip purple or even red in future elections.
4. Budget. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich was on Hannity’s radio show last week. He really pushed the importance of getting an early, substantive budget out of congress as soon as possible. He noted that Reagan’s first budget was late, the tax cuts were not in place long enough to grow the economy, and as a result Republicans lost 26 seats in the House in 1982. Similarly, the Republican House majority in congress dragged its collective feet passing the Trump tax cuts in his first term, ending up losing 40 seats in 2018, flipping the House to Nancy Pelosi. Thank you, Paul Ryan. Gingrich believes it is imperative the budget be passed as early as possible to allow the economy to grow. We will see if they are smart enough to do it.
5. Recission. Another major budgetary target of the Trump administration is the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. This was passed in response to President Nixon’s refusal to spend everything congress had appropriated. Impoundment was reportedly one of the factors leading to his pending impeachment before his resignation later that year. The issue at hand is how does or even can congress compel the president spend what they have allocated. As congress passed this piece of legislation as they chased Nixon out of office, it has never been challenged in federal court. In picking this fight, Trump will start to redefine who is in charge of the budget – congress or the Executive. Congress gets to appropriate. Does the Executive have to spend what they appropriate? And if he (or she) has to, precisely how? Over the last century or so, the spending arrow always points up. Somewhere along the line, we will have to consider the questions about how and why that arrow can’t go down. Should Trump win, and there is a good chance he will, we will see yet another monumental rebalancing of power between the legislative and executive branches.
6. Trans. Another piece of good news is that the orchestrated trans hysteria appears to be over as a national issue. There is the lagging difficulty of kids who have been brainwashed into questioning their sexuality and the momentum of the infrastructure grown to treat these unfortunates as cash cows for the rest of their lives, but as soon as you turn the money off and remove the federal mandate, it is difficult to entice the unfortunates and their frightened parents into doing something life-altering and irreversible. The final piece is a series of Trump EO’s removing all federal support (demand) for transitioning.
7. Hunter. One of the other revelations about Biden’s last months and years in the WH is who was actually running the country after Biden’s disastrous debate performance. A bunch of us thought it was O’Bama through his acolytes infesting the WH. While that is a pretty good guess, it lost much of its power when Susan Rice left the WH a couple years ago as Biden became increasingly enfeebled. The leadership then went to Jill Biden and finally to Hunter Biden, who apparently sat in on all presidential meetings when he was in town. No wonder the Secret Service and FBI buried the WH cocaine story.
More later –
- AG