Free Republic

The world’s richest man is dying to figure out how lawmakers on Capitol Hill got “strangely wealthy” despite their comparatively modest public salaries. Speaking at a town hall in Wisconsin Sunday night, Elon Musk suggested that his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will investigate how certain members of Congress have achieved generational wealth. One attendee at the town hall had asked Musk if DOGE had uncovered evidence of funds wired from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “They’ll [the government]...

He’s pulling the mask off, and it’s wild. 1]. IRS’ Massive IT Dept. Outstrips Midsize Banks by 175x Budget and 40x Staff “A typical midsize bank will have somewhere between 1 and 200 people in IT and they have an operations and maintenance budget in like the $20 million a year range. We have 8,000 people in IT, and our operations and maintenance budget is $3.5 billion a year. I don’t really know why yet.” 2]. Contractors Eat Up 80% of IRS’ Massive Operations Budget “I will tell that you 80% of that budget goes to contractors and licenses——We cannot...

If you’d have asked a Roman citizen on New Year in the year 1 AD what kind of a nation he lived in, he’d have likely said a Republic. And he would have been right. That year, just a few years after Jesus was born, Rome was ostensibly a proud republic. While they had a Senate, which was an unelected aristocratic, they also had Consuls, a two-man quasi executive which was elected by representatives of the people. They had Tribunes, who were elected by the people (sans the aristocrats) and who acted as a check on the Senate and Consuls....

Who knew that Johns Hopkins University had a head count so bloated that it could easily cut 2000 staff members? Honestly, I could have guessed that without looking up the student enrollment. It is a university of some size, and therefore has an uncounted number of useless or worse employees whom they can afford to keep on board because the federal government keeps pouring ungodly amounts of money into Higher Ed, even though the return for both the country and for the students is getting worse and worse. Johns Hopkins University announces it will fire nearly 2,000 workers over cut...

The Department of Government Efficiency announced that the National Institutes of Health has canceled more than $2.1 billion in grants, including one for $620,000 involving a "teen pregnancy prevention program for transgender boys." In addition to the teen pregnancy program, DOGE wrote in a post Tuesday night on X that the NIH canceled a $699,000 grant for studying "cannabis use" among "sexual minority gender diverse individuals," $740,000 for examining "social networks" among "black and Latino sexual minority men in New Jersey," $50,000 for assessing "sexual health" among "LGTBQ+ Latinx youth in an agricultural community," and $75,000 for researching "structural racism."...

The Trump administration is halting a $1 billion program that helps preserve affordable housing, threatening projects that keep tens of thousands of units livable for low-income Americans. Preserving these units gets less attention than ribbon-cuttings, but it’s a centerpiece of efforts to address the nation’s housing crisis. Hundreds of thousands of low-rent apartments, many of them aging and in need of urgent repair, are at risk of being yanked out from under poor Americans. On it’s face, the over $1 billion Green and Resilient Retrofit Program, passed by Congress in 2022, is intended for energy-efficiency improvements. It is distributed in...

During the final months of the Biden administration, the National Institutes of Health awarded $28 million to a mysterious venture-backed company called Vaccine Company Inc., a biomedical firm founded in 2022 whose chief financial officer happens to be one of former president Joe Biden’s top COVID advisers. To Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), the September 2024 grant from the NIH’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health doesn’t pass the smell test. Vaccine Company has left virtually no public footprint showing what it has done with the taxpayer funds, which the Biden administration doled out to a seemingly random post office...

The Department of Health and Human Services has terminated a contract with a nonprofit that was paid millions each month to operate a Texas overflow facility that sat empty, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In a social media post, DOGE said a former U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement employee and Biden transition team member joined Family Endeavors in early 2021, where they helped the organization secure a sole-source HHS contract for overflow housing from licensed care facilities. "As a result, Family Endeavors’ cash and portfolio of investments grew from $8.3M in 2020 to $520.4M in 2023, the...

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, sparked a firestorm on social media over comments questioning DOGE chief Elon Musk’s allegiance to the U.S. given that he has been a citizen for "only" 22 years. "Mr. Musk has just been here 22 years," Kaptur said outside the Capitol on Wednesday. "And he’s a citizen of three countries. I always ask myself the question, with the damage he’s doing here, when push comes to shove, which country is his loyalty to? South Africa? Canada? Or the United States? And he’s only been a citizen, I’ll say again, 22 years."

Amy Gleason, a relatively low-profile health-care executive who did a past government stint, has been named as the administrator of the U.S. DOGE Service. It ends the uncertainty over who was technically in charge of DOGE after the White House said last week that Elon Musk, who had been the face of the agency and its efforts to cut government spending, had “no actual or formal authority” over government decisions, and was neither the official in charge nor an employee there. Here’s what to know about Gleason. 1. She is a former health-care executive and worked for Trump and Biden...

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stated in a house committee meeting that federal employees do not deserve their employment or compensation, leaving fellow representatives shocked. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform met on Tuesday to discuss recent developments occuring within the government, including the Trump administration's decision to terminate thousands of federal employees and cut funding from various federal departments in an effort largely spearheaded by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi brought up the administration's stated goals of privatizing the United States Postal Service, citing a report from the Washington Post...

Democrats/socialists/communist (D/s/cs) remain shell-shocked by Donald Trump. Who could have imagined a politician keeping campaign promises? Worse, who could have imagined a politician really and truly dismantling the Deep State and returning power on loan from the people to the people rather than just slinging soaring rhetoric? ... The D/s/cs’s response, other than lawfare that they know they’re going to lose, has been to try to construct narratives: ... Musk’s DOGE operatives are just children! Your point? Many of the most consequential people in history, including American history, have been in their teens and early 20s. Age isn’t the real...

...Sidney Noble clocked out from his job as a botanist for the Payette National Forest last Friday afternoon after surviving the first wave of federally mandated workforce cuts. By Sunday night, he too had been fired. .. The statement said the USDA let go employees in the probationary period of their employment.... ...The firings have left vacancies across the Payette and Boise forests that employees who have not been fired claim will be difficult, if not impossible, to fill.... ... Those projects include work related to wildfire risk mitigation, timber harvest preparations, ,,,......environmental reviews,,,,,,and maintenance of bridges, roads, campgrounds, and...

Chris Cuomo: Elon Musk didn’t even come up with the idea that’s now being called the “Doge Dividend.” It should be called the “Fishback Discount.” That’s the guy who came up with it. It came from James Fishback, an investor who’s one of the advisers to DOGE. He said, “You know what we should do? When we save all this money, we should give some of it back to the American family. Once we hit our $2 trillion target, it’ll be $5,000 each.” “Sounds great,” Musk said. “I’ll take it to the President.” So, Musk brought it to President Trump,...

What is a good way of reducing plane crashes? Obviously do not fire air safety experts and instil paranoia in those who remain. Yet that is what Elon Musk is doing to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), three weeks after America’s deadliest air collision in years. His team is moving fast to break things, as though Washington were an app. Other than China’s cultural revolution, history offers few parallels to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) assault on the state. Musk’s declared aim is to slash US deficits by rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. His model is the...

The explanation for apparent 150-year-olds receiving checks could relate to arcane coding practices, experts said.In a closely watched Oval Office event, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk shared some of the findings and rationale behind his Department of Government Efficiency, which President Donald Trump has tasked with cutting spending across the government. As an example of his work so far, Musk cited some “crazy things” that had emerged in just the “cursory examination of Social Security” his team was undertaking. “ We’ve got people in there that are 150 years old,” Musk said Feb. 11. “Now, do you know anyone who’s...

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Monday accused the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of targeting him with a politically motivated audit in the last days of the Biden regime, calling the move a “total sham.” “Of course the outgoing Biden IRS rushed an ‘audit’ of the incoming SecDef,” Hegseth wrote on his official X account, adding: “Total sham.” Hegseth included a photo of an IRS document stating that he and his wife Jennifer owed the government $33,558.16. The IRS said the sum needed to be paid immediately to avoid further penalties. “The party of ‘norms’ and ‘decency’ strikes again. We...

Toxic RINO Senator Mitch McConnell on Wednesday voted ‘no’ on Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation vote. The Senate voted 52-48 to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as the next Director of National Intelligence. McConnell was the lone RINO who voted against President Trump’s nominee. Recall that McConnell was also one of the three Senators to vote against Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as Defense Secretary. Shortly after the confirmation vote on Wednesday, McConnell went off on Tulsi Gabbard. McConnell said Tulsi Gabbard’s record proves she is “unworthy of the highest public trust.” Per Fox News’ Chad Pergram: [The Senate’s power of advice and consent is not...

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump Administration to restore the gender ideology webpages it deleted. US District Jud7ge John Bates of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a George W. Bush appointee, ordered Trump to restore the pages by midnight tonight. Last month, President Trump scrubbed public health websites of all things related to “gender ideology.” A group dubbed Doctors For America sued the Office of Personal Management and numerous government agencies, claiming the removal could prevent doctors from helping patients. Judge Bates agreed with Doctors for America and ordered the extremist ideology to...

(Reuters) -A federal judge on Tuesday ordered U.S. health agencies to restore websites that they abruptly took offline in response to an executive order by President Donald Trump telling them to scrub websites of "gender ideology extremism." The temporary restraining order by U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington, D.C. came in response to a lawsuit by the left-leaning medical advocacy group Doctors for America, which said the sudden removal of websites by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration hampered doctors' and researchers' ability to fight disease. Bates ordered all websites specifically identified...