Free Republic

Congress funds roughly 1,500 “Zombie” programs with expired authorizations, costing at least $516B, while DOGE eyes cuts. Lawmakers lack time to reauthorize, keeping agencies in legal limbo.In 1974, Congress created the Legal Services Corporation to connect lower-income Americans involved in civil disputes with free legal help. The law that established the agency stipulated that authorization for its funding would expire in 1980, when lawmakers were required to vote on whether to keep it alive.They never did. Still, Congress has funded LSC every year since. In fiscal year 2025, its 51st year, LSC’s 135 employees will spend 95% of its now...

Trump Administration directs ALL Federal Agencies to prepare for massive downsizing by March 13th.

If Presidents can't control the Executive Branch, elections don't really matter. The Administrative State exists to perpetuate unelected Democrat control, no matter who wins or loses. It has to end. Ninety years ago, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal created a constitutional obscenity: agencies of government that violated separation of powers and that were not accountable to the elected President. You might find it odd that as dynamic a President as FDR would want this, but oh dear reader, you are missing the point. The agencies were staffed almost entirely by Democrats, who were happy to do Roosevelt’s bidding. It’s after Roosevelt,...

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1. Policy and Purpose. The Constitution vests all executive power in the President and charges him with faithfully executing the laws. Since it would be impossible for the President to single-handedly perform all the executive business of the Federal Government, the Constitution also provides for subordinate officers to assist the President in his executive duties. In the exercise of their often-considerable authority, these executive branch officials remain subject to the President’s ongoing supervision and control....

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency group has made swift work of the billionaire's goal to scale back or dismantle much of the federal government, end diversity policies and otherwise further President Donald Trump's agenda. DOGE employees, many of whom have no government experience, have been going through data systems, shutting down DEI programs and in some cases, whole agencies. As of Feb. 10, ABC has tracked Musk and his DOGE team gaining access to at least 15 federal agencies. The White House and Republicans have claimed, without citing details, that DOGE is accountable to the president and will be...

Donald Trump handed Elon Musk even more control over the federal government by preparing an executive order requiring agencies to cooperate with Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a team Trump has assembled, when told to cut their workforces and limit the hiring of replacements. The White House order, titled Implementing The President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Workforce Optimization Initiative, said the goal is to “restore accountability to the American public” and that “this order commences a critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy. By eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity, my Administration will empower American families, workers, taxpayers, and our...

Staffers and allies of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have fanned out across Washington in recent days, seeking access to sensitive data and disrupting operations in at least 14 government agencies in pursuit of a dramatically smaller federal government. DOGE, which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, has not disclosed the names of its staff. But The Washington Post has identified more than 30 people working for or closely with it by examining the internal directories of multiple agencies and interviewing numerous federal workers, virtually all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Files should be open to the public unless otherwise specified, not secret by default. We the people have a right to know what our government does in our name, and to know our own historyEarly in his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to establish a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to “declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and abuses of power.” The phrase “Truth and Reconciliation” recalls bodies established to investigate abuses by toppled Communist regimes such as East Germany’s, or the former apartheid government of South Africa. The framing suggests that Trump views the entire...

California police departments are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Teslas to comply with the state’s zero-emissions mandate — only for some to find them “nearly unusable” as squad cars. Multiple municipalities have started buying modified electric cars since Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill in 2020 ordering that all vehicles sold in California be zero-emission by 2035. However, other departments have bought Teslas to test as regular squad vehicles — only to report a slew of concerns, including fears officers would be left charging them at unfamiliar stations while still carrying criminals, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The...

Iran, Hamas, and other Iran-sponsored terrorist groups have targeted Israel and the U.S. for destruction for years. But somehow, our intelligence experts never caught wind of all these meetings by Hamas for years where they planned the attack on Israel. Secret Documents Show Hamas Planned Oct. 7 for Years, Delayed Massacre As They Begged for AlliesThe New York Times reported Saturday that they had obtained minutes from secret Hamas meetings that were seized by the Israeli military, and they provide some stunning — and concerning — revelations. The intel comes from the minutes of 10 planning meetings by Hamas leaders...

When the Biden administration announced in 2022 that it would remove some 4 million acres of federal land in Western states from oil and gas exploration, environmental groups hailed the decision as a milestone in their fight against global warming. “With the oil and gas industry bent on despoiling American’s public lands and fueling the climate crisis, this is a critical opportunity for the Biden administration to chart a new path toward clean energy and independence from fossil fuels,” said Jeremy Nichols, a director with WildEarth Guardians. But Nichols could just as easily have slapped himself on the back: The...

The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in two related cases challenging a 40-year-old precedent that requires courts to defer to the judgment of federal agencies in administrative law cases. At the end of three-and-a-half hours of arguments, a majority seemed disposed to overturn Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council, and consign the so-called "Chevron deference" principle to the compost heap of terrible Supreme Court precedents.Ever since the creation of the administrative state during the administration of our first socialist president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, federal agencies have assumed the authority to interpret federal statutes pretty much as they please. This became...

President Joe Biden has agreed to stop funding the construction of United States-Mexico border wall using funds from the Defense and Treasury Departments. On Monday, the Biden administration entered a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to halt funding border wall construction with money deriving from federal agencies approved under former President Trump. According to the ACLU, representing the Sierra Club in its initial lawsuit, the border wall construction “catastrophically harmed natural resources and communities” along the border, though not mentioning illegal immigration’s impact on the environment.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that if he is elected president he would seek to close four federal agencies as part of an effort to reduce the size of government. "We would do Education, we would do Commerce, we'd do Energy, and we would do IRS," DeSantis said in an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum when he was asked whether he favored closing any agencies. . . . . In the current fiscal year, the budgets for the Commerce, Energy and Education departments were $109 billion, $160 billion and $194 billion, respectively, according to government spending data.

Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case about commercial fishing that raises an issue the current members of the Court have been very interested in as of late—Chevron Deference. With the Court agreeing to hear the case, there has been a lot of speculation about what the end of Chevron may mean across the legal landscape. But what might it mean for gun rights? First, it’s important to understand what Chevron Deference is. Chevron, as it’s not-so-affectionately called among legal circles, is a doctrine that was established by the Supreme Court in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense...

Leadership of House Committees of the 118th Congress have announced plans to investigate previously unchecked Administration activities or inactivity, including the Administration’s handling of the border crisis. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) reported in August 2022 that nearly 4.9 million immigrants had entered the United States since Joe Biden took office. At that rate, at least 11 million immigrants will pour into the into the country during this administration’s four-year term. This is compared to the 12 million that passed through Ellis Island in its full 152 years (1802-1954) of operation.The House leadership is also acting to investigate...

Did Twitter start its meetings related to the Election Integrity Project in October of 2020 and did they just get caught admitting that their focus was to censor conservative free speech with the help of the US government? We know that Twitter was a big part of the focus of the Election Integrity Project (EIP). We’ve written about this project previously. Tonight (Friday night), Twitter released some more information regarding its activities during the 2020 election up to the time period when Twitter removed the President of the United States from its social media platform. But first, remember what we...

CHRISTOPHER Sign's apparent suicide was linked to the "Clinton crime syndicate" by Rep Lauren Boebert after the author who wrote a Bill exposé died. Police confirmed that they believe Sign, a local TV news anchor and former University of Alabama football player, died by suicide on Saturday. Sign, 45, broke a story about Bill Clinton meeting then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2016 while she was probing the private email server of the former president's wife. He later went on to pen a book about the secret meeting in 2019, Secret on the Tarmac. Boebert, a Colorado representative who has been...

How many federal agencies do we pay for? I bet you think, as I once did, that a quick internet search would tell. But researching for an essay a couple of years ago, I found numbers varying from 78 to 158, and websites saying the exact number was impossible to determine. Looking at the USA.gov website recently, I discovered a tab for Federal Agencies A to Z (actually there are none past W). Scrolling around the list for two days, subtracting duplicate listings, like Useless Policy, Office of and Office of Useless Policy, I counted 456 (and a few more...

(CNSNews.com) – The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction told lawmakers on Wednesday that his office has issued 11 reports and 600 audits since its creation in 2008, but that despite “all of the reports we’ve done, no one in the government has been held accountable.” “I always joke that the only person who’s ever going to get fired over Afghanistan is probably going to be me,” John Sopko told the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that deals with international development. “Nobody else,” he said. “Not the generals who came up [to the Hill] and spun and spun and spun, and...