Free Republic

If it’s happening in Georgia, you can bet it’s happening all over the country. Embedded bureaucrats are quietly rewriting the policies voters put in place. Georgia’s Medicaid program exists to serve the state’s most vulnerable — low-income children and foster youth, pregnant women, and disabled adults. It was never meant to be a vehicle for radical politics. But recent revelations about how the state awarded multibillion-dollar Medicaid contracts show exactly how far left-wing ideologues inside government agencies will go to push their agenda. Internal documents reveal that senior staff at Georgia’s Department of Community Health inserted ideological land mines into...

David Zweig is a novelist and journalist who lives near New York City and was a early skeptic of Covid lockdowns and school closings. (In other words, he’s me, but nicer.) Somehow, Zweig didn’t get canceled. In 2020 he became one of only a few legacy media writers to push for school reopenings. Now he has a new book out: An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. It demolishes the false narrative that public health bureaucrats and teachers’ unions were just doing their best at the time with the information they had. I...

A legal fight over free insurance coverage for HIV-prevention drugs and making a self-insured Christian company "complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior" reaches far beyond its Obamacare context, but ordinary Americans wouldn't know that by reading pro-government friend-of-the-court briefs submitted to the Supreme Court. Affordable Care Act provisions that force insurers to charge beneficiaries nothing for preventive services on a list determined by a task force – neither appointed by nor answerable to the president – are symbolic of unaccountable bureaucrats throughout the federal government making unconstitutionally unreviewable decisions, newly filed briefs argue. The high court hears oral argument later this...

“This town is now as nervous as it’s ever been.” That’s Congressman Chip Roy’s assessment of the mood in Washington, D.C., since President Trump’s return to the White House. It’s one of several dozen refreshingly blunt descriptions of American politics in Ned Ryun’s new documentary based on his book, American Leviathan. The documentary is available to anyone with an Internet connection, and it is nothing short of a declaration of war on the administrative state. I highlighted Ryun’s book when it came out last September for several reasons. First, it is a remarkably clear description of the ideas, people, and...

The Justice Department has removed top national security officials as part of a widespread purge of senior career leaders across the law enforcement agency, according to people familiar with the decisions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues. The transferring of at least three national security officials amounts to a complete gutting of leadership in the highly sensitive National Security Division, which is charged with working with the FBI and other intelligence agencies to protect the nation from threats. It is unclear if the national security officials were provided a reason for their removals. They were...

Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is turning over the rocks in the nation’s capital, every day revealing some ridiculous federal expenditure for DEI programs in Serbia, LGBTQ+ comic books in Guatemala, and climate programs everywhere. These abuses, as many say, are the inevitable by-product of allowing unelected bureaucrats to make regulations and decisions about spending without proper review or oversight. It comes as no surprise to find out that they have been abusing their privileges. Some of this is no doubt true: bureaucracy is a longstanding challenge in democratic societies. But there is a deeper problem: nearly all of...

A coalition of 20 Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration Friday for firing thousands of probationary federal workers without providing advance notice. Led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the plaintiffs argue the mass terminations violate federal law, which they argue mandates at least 60 days’ notice before large-scale layoffs. The lawsuit centers on various Office of Personnel Management (OPM) directives instructing agencies to review the employment of thousands of probationary employees “based on agency judgement regarding mission needs.” “These large-scale, indiscriminate firings are not only subjecting the Plaintiff states and communities across the country...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) argued that “the prices at the grocery store are going up because democracy is being taken away.” And “The impact on you in terms of your health care, 770,000 people in Illinois will lose health care as a result of what Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the Republican Congress are doing right now, it’s a danger to your way of life, and that’s what people need to understand.” Pritzker said, “When you lose, as is happening in my state –we’re losing our meat and poultry inspectors....

Has it gotten to this? Not just illegals voting in elections, but taking it to the next step. They now lord over us as city bureaucrats -- amounting to an illegals ruling class. What else can one conclude from this City of San Diego memo to city employees about how to evade ICE enforcement? 🚨San Diego City Hall just issued a guide to its employees on how to stall, deny & stonewall @ICE Oddly, City Hall seems most worried about ICE asking about city staffers. Are there employees working for the city illegally? What is @MayorToddGloria trying to hide?… pic.twitter.com/0yIpIgcdgf...

"We have watched with alarm as these values have been tested by recent actions of the Department’s leadership. Some of you have been ordered to make charging decisions based expressly on considerations other than the facts and the law, including to serve solely political purposes. Some of you have been forced to consider whether your actions will result in the elimination of the Public Integrity Section, created in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and whose vital work is intended to protect the public from government corruption. Several of you have resigned, and others are wondering what will happen to...

“The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now.”

President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order Monday closing a federal executive staff development school. Though not well-known to the general public, the Federal Executive Institute was terminated “to refocus Government on serving taxpayers, competence, and dedication to our Constitution, rather than serving the Federal bureaucracy,” according to the order. The FEI was created by the Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 as a senior staff college “to endow the career leadership levels of the federal government with the capacity and motivation to bring proactive change to a huge enterprise” according to a history of the school. An alumni organization...

Now it is starting to make sense. Unbeknownst to the vast majority of Americans, Politico was receiving huge amounts of taxpayer money from USAID. As Donald Trump and Elon Musk seek to gut the corrupt agency and stop the disbursement of billions of dollars around the world, many people have pointed out some of the most ludicrous “grants” handed out by USAID. Among the lucky recipients is Politico, a prominent digital news company covering U.S. and global politics. Politico is a for-profit venture. In 2021, it was bought by Axel Springer for a staggering $1 billion. Nevertheless, the company has...

This is an excellent discussion with Mike Benz who discusses the criminality of USAID.

USAID has been completely unaccountable for decades, run by bureaucrats with agendas who believed they answered to nobody. Here are a few more of the ridiculous projects on which they spent YOUR money: — $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language” — $20 million for a new Sesame Street show in Iraq — $4.5+ million to “combat disinformation” in Kazakhstan — $1.5 million for “art for inclusion of people with disabilities” — $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala — $6 million to “transform digital spaces to reflect feminist democratic principles” —...

David Lebryk, the top-ranking career U.S. Treasury Department official, will leave his post where he has been a top official for years.Elon Musk and the DOGE team are currently examining the treasury payment systems.Lebryk clashed with Musk over access to a “sensitive system” used to pay over $6 trillion a year in Social Security and Medicare benefits.The results of the audit may not bode well for David Lebryk.According to Elon Musk, the payment approval officers were told to ALWAYS approve payments, even to fraudulent groups or terrorist organizations!“The DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury...

Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials. Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists. Musk, the billionaire Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab CEO and X owner tasked by Trump to slash the size of the 2.2 million-strong civilian government workforce, has moved...

Security agents escorted the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture out of her office on Monday after she refused to comply with her firing by the Trump administration, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Phyllis Fong, a 22-year veteran of the department, had earlier told colleagues that she intended to stay after the White House terminated her Friday, saying that she didn’t believe the administration had followed proper protocols, the sources said.

January 20, 2025 MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES SUBJECT: Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives Career Senior Executive Service (SES) officials are charged to “ensure that the executive management of the Government of the United States is responsive to the needs, policies, and goals of the Nation and otherwise is of the highest quality,” as required by section 3131 of title 5, United States Code. SES officials have enormous influence over the functioning of the Federal Government, and thus the well-being of hundreds of millions of Americans. As the Constitution makes clear, and as the Supreme...

The incoming Trump administration is preparing executive orders aimed at the federal workforce that could be implemented within days, kicking off an effort that they see as essential for wresting power away from career government employees, according to four people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.