Free Republic

...Afederally funded project recruiting landlords to house refugees kept operating after the Trump administration suspended its State Department award—with support from another federal agency. The project, Refugee Housing Solutions, is run by Church World Service. It recruits property owners and connects them with ReHome, an online platform matching refugees and other newcomers with rentals.... Its own suspension announcement⁠ explains how the operation continued: work funded by the State Department stopped, while services supported by the Department of Health and Human Services remained. One federal funding stream was suspended. Another kept the project running. The housing arrangements can include substantial financial...

The 5 percent barrier has long since been left behind. This week, the yield on 30-year American government bonds hit 5.6 percent, its highest level since way back in 2002, while the cost of ten-year borrowing rose to its highest level in 20 years. However hard the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tries to control it, the interest rate the American government has to pay to finance its vast deficit keeps on rising relentlessly. As it climbs towards 6 percent and perhaps even higher, surely we must soon see a change in the political debate. Three decades of financial complacency will...

You don't have to work on Wall Street to care about Treasury yields. You don't have to own a farm to care about diesel prices. And you don't have to be shopping for a house to care about mortgage rates.Eventually, these numbers have a way of finding all of us.America is entering a period in which several economic warning signs are flashing at the same time. None of them, by itself, proves that a recession or financial crisis is around the corner. In fact, parts of the economy remain remarkably resilient.But taken together, they tell us something important: the financial...

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday ordered the cancellation of $810 million in congressionally appropriated funding, including large sums meant for illegal immigrants and race-focused programs, in the second “pocket” rescission in 49 years, The Post has learned. The action eliminates 11 pools of unspent money at seven federal departments and agencies as part of a drive by fiscal hawks to whittle down executive-branch expenses. “In accordance with… the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, I herewith report 11 rescissions of budget authority, totaling $810 million,” Trump wrote in a notice to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). “The...

Tyler Hassen's initiation into Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, started as a series of tests. The Houston oil executive says he was given vague instructions to show up at an unfamiliar D.C. address. He hastily packed three suitcases and flew east, taking an Uber to a building that he soon learned belonged to Elon Musk's SpaceX. He was whisked to a private office, acutely aware that his tailored suit stood out among the hoodie-clad engineers "too locked in" to their laptops to look up. He was ordered to go through the website of the Department of Commerce...

In 1980, economist Milton Friedman said the National Institutes of Health should be abolished. Friedman said the same about another government research agency, the National Science Foundation. And when he was asked what the NSF should be replaced with, he replied: “Nothing.” Whistleblower documents highlighted in a recent report showed what happens when private billions meet a public agency that can be influenced: Bill Gates’s foundation spent two decades steering the NIH research agenda toward its own priorities — with agency officials as willing partners. The NIH has become a government entity captured by special-interest groups — just as Friedman...

Snap Chief Executive Evan Spiegel and his wife, supermodel Miranda Kerr, have helped pay off $550 million in medical debt for more than 261,000 Californians. The couple made a multimillion-dollar donation to Undue Medical Debt, a nonprofit that provides debt relief to people in financial need. The organization acquires medical debt in bulk from hospitals, physician groups, collection agencies and other groups for a fraction of the cost. "When someone you love is sick. All you want to do is focus on helping them get better," said Kerr, who is also the founder of skincare company KORA Organics, in a...

The idea sounds prudent enough: limit the amount the federal government can borrow and you limit its ability to overspend. But this, like many Washington contraptions, is a mirage. The debt ceiling, as it currently functions, is not a tool of restraint. It is a lever of dysfunction, a mechanism that paradoxically leads to more spending, higher deficits, and greater economic instability. It is a relic that should be scrapped entirely. This might surprise even some conservatives. Elon Musk, no stranger to fiscal rigor, recently argued against raising the debt ceiling in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. His instinct is...