Free Republic

Why should taxpayers have to fund a government that hates them? There is plenty of evidence that taxpayer dollars are funding the anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Here’s how that happens: domestic agitators set up “non-profits” and other kinds of “non-governmental organizations” with deceptively innocuous names. They apply for monetary grants from state and federal agencies. Government agencies use their discretion to award outside groups. These groups then pay rioters to cause mayhem on the streets. Voila! Government-funded pop-up revolutions are ready to go! This isn’t anything new. Politicians have been diverting taxpayer funds to their favorite “public...

South Africa can expect roughly 44% of its population (28.7 million) on social grants, relying on only 12% (7.4 million) taxpayers. This imbalance between the number of grant recipients and taxpayers highlights a significant concern for the nation’s fiscal health, as nearly half of South Africa’s 64 million people depend on social assistance. The South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) data for 2023/24 underlines the scale of reliance, which includes a range of grants for elderly people, children, disabled individuals, and others in need. Moreover, 9 million individuals receive the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, initially introduced in 2020...

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is up for re-election next year. She may be vulnerable to primary challenges within her party, and some polls show Republicans within striking distance of her in the general election setting. She underperformed in 2022, when former Congressman and current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin gave her all she could handle. At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, Hochul demonstrated her ignorance about a string of heinous crimes committed by illegal immigrants who were shielded and protected by her reckless 'sanctuary' policies. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who may run for governor in 2026, made the most of...

WASHINGTON — (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration this week provided deportation officials with personal data -- including the immigration status -- on millions of Medicaid enrollees, a move that could make it easier to locate people as part of his sweeping immigration crackdown. An internal memo and emails obtained by The Associated Press show that Medicaid officials unsuccessfully sought to block the data transfer, citing legal and ethical concerns. Nevertheless, two top advisers to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the dataset handed over to the Department of Homeland Security, the emails show. Officials at the Centers for...

President Donald Trump on Saturday warned Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., he would be “playing right into the hands of the Democrats” if he votes against Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.” “If Senator Rand Paul votes against our Great, Big, Beautiful Bill, he is voting for, along with the Radical Left Democrats, a 68% Tax Increase and, perhaps even more importantly, a first time ever default on US Debt,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday afternoon. “Rand will be playing right into the hands of the Democrats, and the GREAT people of Kentucky will never forgive him! The GROWTH we are experiencing,...

An evenly divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that states cannot provide funding to religious charter schools, turning away from a potential decision that would have fundamentally changed K-12 education.The 4-4 split meant the justices upheld the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling that both Sooner State law and the US Constitution prohibit taxpayer funding from going toward religious schools. Justice Amy Coney Barrett had recused herself from arguments, having taught at the University of Notre Dame’s law school for about 15 years. The school’s religious liberty clinic had been representing one of the parties in the case, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic...

The Trump administration has started paying illegal migrants to $1,000 each to “self-deport” from the US, and the Department of Homeland Security said it will save taxpayers up to $1 million per family. Immigrants can avoid arrest by federal immigration agents if they choose to use the Trump administration’s CBP Home app. The DHS will pay for commercial flights out of the US, and then send cash once they confirm they’ve left. Despite shelling out the cash, DHS projects that taxpayers will save 70% over the cost of rounding up and deporting each illegal migrant. It costs taxpayers an average...

Texas taxpayers paid nearly $122 million to provide Healthcare to illegal migrants in November alone, says the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC). The Texas HSHC is reporting that the costs to the state for health care for illegal migrants has topped $121.8 million in unpaid care in just the month of November alone. And that estimate is probably low. ...

Every year for the last half-century, thousands of the poorest Utahns have turned to Planned Parenthood for free or discounted family planning health care, like birth control or testing for sexually transmitted infections. But under a directive from President Donald Trump’s administration to freeze the federal funds that helped pay for those services, Planned Parenthood Association of Utah was forced to raise its fees earlier this month. And now, it will close a quarter of its clinics in the state — the two furthest from Salt Lake City, and ones most accessible to some of Utah’s most rural residents. “When...

Colorado Governor Jared Polis has signed a bill forcing Colorado taxpayers to fund abortions. Polis signed SB25-183, a recently approved state measure that would allocate a minimum of $1.5 million per year of taxpayer funds to cover elective abortions. With Colorado having abortions up to birth, that means taxpayers will be on the hook for paying for killing viable babies who could easily live outside the womb. And with the $1.5 million figure a minimum, Colorado residents may be forced to pay even more to kill thousands of babies. “One thing pro-life and pro-choice people agree on nationwide is that...

The Trump administration has been mulling ways to get more Americans married and having kids — including a $5,000 “baby bonus” for every new mom after delivery, according to a report. White House officials have recently been brainstorming plans to tackle the declining birth and marriage rates — and push more Americans toward the traditional family values of Trump and his allies. Policy experts and advocates for boosting the birth rate have been meeting with White House aides to come up with plans to convince more women to have babies, four people who have been part of the meetings told...

The Internal Revenue Service’s top lawyer has reportedly been demoted as Elon Musk’s DOGE agency continues its push to get access to confidential taxpayer data. William Paul, the IRS’ acting chief counsel, was recently removed from his position, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing multiple sources. Paul is expected to be replaced by another IRS lawyer, Andrew De Mello, who was nominated to be the Education Department’s inspector general during President Trump’s first administration, according to the sources. The exact circumstances surrounding Paul’s demotion weren’t immediately clear. Paul, who is a non-political appointee, has been running what is essentially...

A state audit found taxpayers in Gov. JB Pritzker’s (D) Illinois paid out a whopping $1.6 billion for healthcare programs for illegal immigrants since 2020. The news comes after Republican legislators pushed for the audit to be released, Fox News reported on Friday. In regard to the audit, state Senate Republican leader John Curran said it showed there has been rampant overspending. “And it also showed that the governor was unable to manage this program. Thousands of people were allowed to sign up for free healthcare for years on the state taxpayer dime that should not have been eligible under...

Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), a radical left-wing activist group, is closing down a grantmaking program that the Biden administration sought to seed with $50 million in taxpayer cash, the Daily Caller News Foundation has confirmed. CJA is sunsetting the “environmental justice”-focused grant program that the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sought to fund with $50 million from one of the agency’s massive “environmental justice” grant programs, a spokesperson representing the group confirmed to the DCNF. The funds that the Biden EPA looked to route to CJA did not make it out the door before President Donald Trump and his team...

Why is the hard anti-American left so angry at Elon Musk? They’ve been unmasked. He and his warriors at DOGE have found them out. For years, they’ve been getting paid with your money, a billion dollars a week of American tax dollars, and laughing at you as the United States faces a fiscal deficit and as you’ve pinched your pennies hoping to survive the Democrat Party’s 20 percent inflation, as their leftist allies were living large . That’s why Democrats are so angry. They’ve been discovered. We see the hate and madness in their eyes directed at us for seeing...

USAID in 2016 gave $310 million of your taxpayer money to a Palestinian cement factory. What did the Palestinians in Gaza use all that cement for, paid for by your taxpayer dollars? Any ideas? Oh yeah, that would be the 300 miles of terror tunnels that Hamas built underneath the Gaza Strip leading to the complete destruction of the Gaza Strip after October 7th. So, just slow clap for the geniuses in the permanent bureaucratic state.” - BEN SHAPIRO

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” —...

Elon Musk, director of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and his staff are sleeping in the federal personnel office to save taxpayers about $1 billion a day, a person familiar with the situation told the New York Times. Sleeping in office buildings is not unusual for Musk, who deployed the same cost-saving measure at Twitter and Tesla. “Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days!” Musk posted on X over the weekend. “Working the weekend is a superpower.”

Yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to enforce the Hyde Amendment, reinforcing the prohibition of federal funds for elective abortions. This action underscores the administration’s commitment to preventing taxpayer dollars from being used to fund killing babies in abortions. The Hyde Amendment, first enacted in 1976, has been a longstanding policy barring the use of federal funds for abortions, except in very rare emergency cases. Trump’s executive order not only reaffirms this policy but also revokes previous executive orders that sought to protect access to abortion, thereby reversing this part of Joe Biden’s radical abortion agenda. In conjunction...

New York City’s biggest overtime hogs for a second straight year are mostly rank-and-file workers responsible for tackling the Big Apple’s $6 billion-plus migrant crisis, The Post has learned. Fifty-one of the 100 city employees who racked up the most OT during the fiscal year ending June 30 work at the Departments of Social Services and Homeless Services, and their duties include assisting migrants, an examination of city payroll records shows. Each worker accumulated at least 1,851 hours in extra pay. Leading the way was Kashwayne Burnett, a DSS bookkeeper who worked 3,303 hours of overtime in the agency’s Manhattan...