Free Republic

A slow-moving storm that dumped more than a foot of rain in the Texas Hill Country has killed 27 people, with dozens more missing, and officials are saying they weren’t prepared because the National Weather Service got the forecast wrong. Wonder if Donald Trump and Elon Musk laying off 600 National Weather Service staffers earlier this year could have had anything to do with that? …Deadly flash floods are, unfortunately, not uncommon – 10 teens at a summer camp died during a flash-flood event from a storm that dumped 11 inches of rain in Kerrville in 1987, and 13 people...

Federalizing the National Guard in response to ICE protests risks bloodshed—which is exactly what this administration wants.

A Decapitation Event It was a surreal juxtaposition. On the Hill, Kash Patel – the dangerously unqualified avowed enemy of the FBI – was going through the motions of a Senate confirmation hearing to lead the bureau, while the Trump White House was proceeding right along with an illegal purge of the FBI’s leadership ranks..... In the span of 10 days, President Trump has succeeded in crushing two of the most important institutions in the federal government for upholding and defending the rule of law. The FBI and DOJ purges, as with the other illegal firings across government, are ousting...

With a blizzard of executive orders, President Donald Trump has jump-started an extraordinary plan to transform the federal government into a leaner operation packed with his loyalists. The fine print of those directives reveals how shrewdly the new administration is maneuvering — and sometimes outright ignoring — the arcane laws, rules and regulations that have long protected the civil service of 2.3 million from a political takeover. Trump has skirted Biden-era rules by essentially declaring them unlawful, used probationary periods to place masses of civil servants in limbo and issued a memo lifting restrictions on hiring temporary political appointees to...