Free Republic

Many Americans were skeptical of Elon Musk’s grandiose claims that DOGE would take a “chainsaw” to federal spending. One “tax nerd” was so skeptical he decided to “bet his life savings” on Musk’s promises being a flop — and it paid off big time, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Musk has seen his approval rating descend as he has taken a more publicly active role politically, plus ongoing criticism and litigation over his management of his social media platform X and support for far-right politics in Europe. He jumped into his work with the Department of...

For Ashley Garley, the past year has been “messy, challenging and heartbreaking.” Garley, a former contractor and malaria expert with the US Agency for International Development, was among the first people impacted by the Department of Government Efficiency’s massive shrinking of the federal workforce last year, led by billionaire Elon Musk, which began almost immediately after President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Garley, who lost her job after the US froze all foreign aid in late January 2025, is struggling to find a full-time job with benefits more than a year later. To contribute to the bills, she...

https://x.com/wcdispatch/status/2023987491007521081 Walter Curt@wcdispatchAlright!! Finally everything is working!Right now, the live Medicaid intelligence map covers all 50 states and includes 208 discovered billing codes, with 11 high-priority codes currently enabled for focused monitoring.The national map view currently includes 4,167 unique provider lead points and 350 hotspot tracts, with deeper investigative views tracking 3,530 high-risk entities, 1,797 T1019-focused leads, and 2,874 critical address clusters.Each lead is ranked with a confidence score and priority tier so teams can triage faster and focus on the highest-impact signals first.The scoring is based on a multi-signal model that looks at payment scale, utilization intensity, concentration patterns,...

One of the world’s largest and most influential scientific societies held its annual conference last weekend, which a Fox News Digital review found was littered with examples of progressive messaging, criticisms of the Trump administration, and “woke” workshops. Attendees who showed up at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) event, held at the Phoenix Convention Center from Feb. 12-14, were immediately greeted at registration with identifier stickers that used gender pronouns such as “they/them,” “xi/xer,” “xe/xem,” and other descriptors that critics have alleged have little to do with science and biology. During the meeting’s opening night, shortly...

Beyond all reckoning, the goofy DOGE geniuses did it! It’s done. For six years, they guarded this data like the nuclear codes. Yesterday, DOGE slapped it on the internet, ribbon-wrapped for Valentine’s Day. DOGE —whose death was obviously slightly exaggerated— just dropped a tactical nuke on both the vaccine debate and welfare fraud— and launched the biggest crowdsourcing project in human history. Yesterday, Axios ran the story headlined, “Elon Musk declares victory with Medicaid data release.”

🇺🇸 The DOGE team dropped the largest Medicaid dataset in history: 10.32 GB of aggregated claims, procedures, and payments (2018–2024) open-sourced for anyone to download and analyze. Goal: crowdsource fraud detection in an $800B+ program. Already spotlighting cases like Minnesota’s $20M autism therapy scam and massive outliers. The hunt for waste, fraud, and abuse just got crowdsourced. Source: @doge_hhs, @elonmusk

In a social media announcement posted Wednesday, Tucson Pride’s Board of Directors said the organization has made the “difficult decision to close Tucson Pride as an organization" and therefore is also canceling the Tucson Pride Festival scheduled for Feb. 21, 2026. The Facebook post, attributed to the newly appointed board, said the decision came after “thoughtful discussion and careful consideration.” The statement thanked volunteers, sponsors, artists and activists and highlighted Tucson Pride’s role in the community “since 1977,” calling it a space of “visibility, advocacy, celebration, and resilience for nearly five decades.”

Astronauts haven't been to the moon since 1972 but if all goes well a manned mission to the moon will lift off as soon as next month. It's called Artemis II and the plan is to take four astronauts and send them into space on a trajectory that will wrap around, but not orbit, the moon. Just this weekend, the rocket that will launch the astronauts made its way to the launch pad. After many months inside the VAB being stacked and prepared for launch, the NASA SLS rocket has come outside fully as it rolls out to LC-39B ahead...

🚨 ALERT: Sen. Chuck Schumer just threatened: If Dems win 2026 midterms, they’ll REVERSE 100% of Trump’s DOGE cuts, undoing every efficiency gain and wasting YOUR tax dollars AGAIN! NUKE THE FILIBUSTER before the democrats fck everything up!

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) revealed that Democrats would “restore most of the cuts” that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had made. While taking part in a discussion at the Center for American Progress, Schumer received a question about what he “can do about bringing” the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) back, after DOGE came in and made cuts. “If you look at the budget actually, we’re working on right now — and we’ll have the T-HUD budget, you know, transportation and HUD budget, we restore most of the cuts and even go higher than previous...

PITTSBURGH — Two Pittsburgh business owners are accused of stealing food benefits and turning them into profit. Investigators with the Attorney General’s office call it a fencing operation, where someone buys and resells stolen goods for profit. On Monday, the AG’s office issued a warrant for the arrest of a husband and wife who were reportedly stealing from the federal government. “You’re robbing from the taxpayer that’s working so hard,” Mike Ichimura said. Shoppers like Ichimura were shocked to hear Munir Chaudhri and Rachna Anwar are accused of coming to Sam’s Club on Mount Nebo Road to use stolen EBT...

Elon Musk's much heralded chainsaw couldn't make the cut. Despite the Trump administration's efforts to slash government spending through the Department of Government Efficiency, federal expenditures actually increased in fiscal year 2025. A new investigative report from the New York Times released this week showcased that many of the contracts cut by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by tech billionaire Musk for the start of Trump's term, were already winding down, or were not on track to reach their maximum spending allotment. The findings were stark: Of the top 13 contract cancellations in DOGE's database all 13...

A disembodied notion of American identity means that America is really nothing at all, and no one is really an American.You might have noticed there is a heated debate underway on the American right over the question of American identity. What makes someone an American? Is it based on lineage or is it propositional? Is America a nation and a people, or is it an idea based on universal principles?After World War Two, these questions were largely swept under the rug. The dominant narrative, pushed by nearly every mainstream institution and both political parties, was that America was a credal,...

House Republicans brought the receipts to this week's "USAID Betrayal" hearing exposing the U.S. international aid agency's widespread waste and abuse of American tax dollars. Amid intense examination of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)'s spending spree, Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY), a majority member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, listed off more ways USAID has wasted taxpayer money. [snip] According to the congressional committee's findings, USAID spent: $11.75 million on measuring the effectiveness of DEI promotion efforts in Nepal (Award ID #AID367C1500001); $750,000 on Princeton University's DEI survey in the Middle East (Award ID #7200AA21C00087); $859,000 on hiring...

Video. In an interview on "The Katie Miller Pod," Elon Musk said DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, was a "somewhat successful" venture, but he wouldn't do it again. KATIE MILLER: You are in the Roosevelt Room, if you remember this, getting sworn in, and they hand you a computer and a phone. I want to go back to what happened next. I think the story of DOGE, from your perspective, has never been told. What was your first thought on how DOGE was going to proceed? ELON MUSK: Well, I guess I couldn't believe I was there, for the...

In an interview on "The Katie Miller Pod," Elon Musk said DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, was a "somewhat successful" venture, but he wouldn't do it again. KATIE MILLER: You are in the Roosevelt Room, if you remember this, getting sworn in, and they hand you a computer and a phone. I want to go back to what happened next. I think the story of DOGE, from your perspective, has never been told. What was your first thought on how DOGE was going to proceed? ELON MUSK: Well, I guess I couldn't believe I was there, for the most...

WASHINGTON — The US Postal Service’s promised all-electric fleet is still woefully behind schedule, with more than $3 billion in taxpayer funding out the door and just 612 of the expected 35,000 battery-powered delivery trucks built, according to a letter sent to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and obtained by The Post. Former President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) set aside $3 billion for what Ernst has since ripped as a green “boondoggle” that saw almost all of that amount paid to Wisconsin-based defense contractor Oshkosh to build the environmentally friendly mail trucks. Ernst, who chairs the Senate’s DOGE...

DoGE has been DoGE’d. The once fearsome government efficiency office has been shut down eight months before its contract officially ends in July 2026. What was supposed to be an organization that exploded traditional ways of running the federal government has turned into a damp squib. It was established by President Trump on the first day of his second term in office. Headed by Tesla chief Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (who resigned early on to run for Ohio governor), it struck the kind of fear into government bureaucrats that a visit from the Red Guards might instill during...

The Trump administration’s much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has dissolved with months left on its mandate, federal officials say. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor confirmed to Reuters earlier this month that DOGE “doesn’t exist” as a “centralized entity.” *** “Their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026 – A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time. “I am confident they will succeed!” *** “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,”...

A new disclosure by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to the House Judiciary Committee reveals that, under the Biden administration, the IRS leaked the taxpayer information of more than 405,000 Americans–including President Trump.Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, began an inquiry into the leaks last year and with this latest disclosure has found that the scope of the leak was much larger than the Biden administration initially led the public to believe.The Obama IRS targeted conservatives. The Biden IRS leaked your data. https://t.co/hOO66tONWX— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) February 25, 2025The scandal began in late 2019 when...