HOUSE HAS DOGE HEARING BUT IGS NOWHERE IN SIGHT: House Subcommittee of Delivering Government Efficiency (DOGE – see what they did there?) convened its first-ever hearing on the Trump DOGE blitzkreig against waste and fraud. Special emphasis was placed by Republicans on the $200+ billion lost annually to improper payments, which is a huge part of the overall waste, fraud and abuse problem.

But what is quite possibly the biggest chunk of opportunity for making huge and permanent progress in cleaning up the national disaster that is the federal bureaucracy. What might that be?

The nearly 14,000 cost-cutting and efficiency open recommendations by Inspectors-General (IG) and 300 similar Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendations being ignored by departments and agencies. As I report in The Epoch Times, nary a word was said by GOPers or Democrats. What’s up with that?

IS ELON’S NON DE PLUME “EKO?” Read this latest installment of deeply revealing pieces on DOGE and you may well know the answer.

HOUSE PANEL GOING DOGE ON IMPROPER PAYMENTS: Rep. Marjorie Greene (R-Ga.) leads a House subcommittee hearing tomorrow morning — assuming D.C. doesn’t shut down completely due to several expected inches of overnight snow — to focus on the hundreds of billions of dollars in improper payments issued annually by federal bureaucrats.

As I report in The Epoch Times this afternoon, the most basic challenge facing Congress and the Trump administration is quite possibly the difficulty of establishing with reasonable certainty the actual total amount of improper payments and if agencies actually abide by new laws, presidential executive orders, OMB regulations or anything else designed to stop them and prevent their recurrence.

SAY WHAT??? If you hail from below the Mason-Dixon, you likely know that phrase is a tipoff that something somebody said doesn’t add up. It was also my response when first I heard of a survey that found 65 percent of Trump voters support tax dollars for PBS. Here’s my Epoch Times report on it.

THERE’S $10 MILLION FOR ANYBODY WHO CAN DUPLICATE ABIOGENESIS: That’s the process way back in the very beginning when life emerged from non-life. If abiogenesis actually occurred — non-life producing life — then there is no need of a  life-giver extrinsic to the process.

To win the cash, which was first offered in 2019, all you have to do is create “a purely chemical process that will generate, transmit and receive a simple code without any information snuck in from an intelligent designer,” according to Daniel Witt, quoted on HillFaith.

Just in case you are guessing the judges of the “Artificial Intelligence + Origin of Life” prize could be a couple of Bible Thumpers who never set foot in a scientific lab,  they are George Church, a geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist, and Professor at Harvard and MIT. The second judge is Denis Noble, one of the top 100 scientists in the UK and the first person to build a computer model of an organ. The heart. Using punch cards.

DOES THIS GUARANTEE TRUMP TAX CUTS EXTENSION? The Winston Group conducted a recent focus group and survey and among much else in the way of incisive and important insights was this, as related by Newt Gingrich, courtesy of Rod Martin:

“In a direct choice, government spending was overwhelmingly seen as a bigger problem (76 percent) than not enough revenue coming in from taxes (16 percent). This is the case across party (Republicans: 89-7; Independents 77-15; Democrats 63-27).”

There are no guarantees in politics, of course, but when three-quarters of the public says keeping tax cuts in place compared to 16 percent who want higher levies, odds are it ought to happen without much drama.

WHY THE WORST IS YET TO COME FOR THE LEFT: The underlying Trump strategy and the initial feints, counter-actions and deep penetrations of the first two weeks are becoming much clearer now. Check out my latest PJMedia column to see how it happened.

HOW TRUMP OUT-SMARTED THE DEEP STATE BUREAUCRATS: There are no sources for this otherwise inspiring report on EKO. I can’t vouch for it’s accuracy, but, if it is true, then the Left had no clue about what was about to happen to them after November 5.

TOM COBURN KNEW ALL ABOUT USAID CORRUPTION: And it made him so angry that it helped build his case for creating USASpending.gov, the first-ever official web site to make public most federal spending. That was a huge step forward for government transparency. Many more are needed. Here’s the back story on USAID funding of a prostitution ring in India.

TRUMP’S 5-D CHESS WITH THE DEEP STATE: Flopping Aces takes up the question of whether President Donald Trump’s multi-front assault on Leviathan’s arrogant, overweight, out-of-touch, anti-accountability workforce is evidence that the 47th Chief Executive is playing the Deep State right into a corner.

QUESTION OF THE DAY IN D.C.: How many feds take up Trump’s buyout offer? My sources tell me the total is much more than the reported 40,000 so far, but a judge extending the deadline to Monday should boost the final total a good bit.

NO COMMON SENSE ON THE LEFT: When President Donald Trump promised during his inaugural address that he would spark a “Revolution of Common Sense,” most Americans likely reacted with something along the lines “It’s about frigging time.”

As Issues & Insights (I&I) points out today, though, common sense may be the hardest commodity to find on the Left of the American political spectrum these days. And for that reason, leaders over there are out-doing themselves with displays of utter political nonsense.

“When Trump figured out how to email every federal employee at once – something businesses have been able to do since email was invented – federal workers sued. When he offered buy-outs to workers, the left screamed that this was illegal. When he paused grants, nonprofits cried that they couldn’t pay their rent. On and on it goes,” I&I observes.

Odds are good we will be seeing these displays for at least the next four years.

WHAT’S THIS, A TEEN REVIVAL? New data from Barna finds more than three-quarters of teenagers surveyed are either very or somewhat interested in learning more about Jesus Christ. That’s quite a contrast to the extensive media coverage in recent years of the growth of the “Nones.”

PINKS SLIPS FLYING IN USAID: The Washington Stand’s Ben Johnson lays it out in detail as President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the DOGE SWAT team move to shutter a rogue bureaucracy that for decades has been the subject of waste and fraud exposes.

NPR, PBS CHICKENS COMIN’ HOME TO ROOST: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is chairman of the DOGE subcommittee on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. Boy did she ruffle some feathers Monday when she “invited” the CEOs of NPR and PBS to come for a hearing in March. Can you guess what the focus of that hearing will be?

TRUMP’S TROOPS AT OPM RESPOND TO UNIONS, DEMS: The ink was barely dry on the memo to all federal workers about an extraordinary buyout offer authorized by President Donald Trump before the biggest federal employee union, AFGE, Democrats like Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and a host of others on the left was making multiple claims that proved to be wrong.

Yesterday, officials at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a significant rebuttal that is well-worth reading in its entirety. Note also at the end of my Epoch Times story this morning the Supreme Court cite that somehow got cut short in the editing process.

Here’s the full intended cite. Note the broad swath of direct managerial authority over the daily operations of the federal workforce the High Court recognizes the Constitution intended for the President to exercise:

“The President must be able to remove not just officers who disobey his commands but also those he finds ‘negligent and inefficient,’ Myers , 272 U.S. at 135, 47 S.Ct. 21, those who exercise their discretion in a way that is not ‘intelligen[t] or wis[e],’ ibid. , those who have ‘different views of policy,’ id., at 131, 47 S.Ct. 21, those who come ‘from a competing political party who is dead set against [the President’s] agenda,’ Seila Law , supra , at ––––, 140 S.Ct., at 2204 (emphasis deleted), and those in whom he has simply lost confidence, Myers , supra , at 124, 47 S.Ct. 21.”

ANOTHER HAMAS HOSTAGE OUTRAGE: Richard Pollock’s latest on Substack provides an in-depth look at the chaos that erupted as Hamas released three more of the October 7 2023 hostages.

TRUMP’S CIVIL SERVICE CRITICS SHOULD READ THE LAW: Specifically, the Pendleton Act of 1883 that established what we know today as the federal government career civil service.

Yes, bureaucrats are to be hired, promoted and fired strictly on the basis of their professional skills and not in any way connected to their political views. And guess who decides how that skills-based process is to be administered? The guy in the Oval Office. It’s my latest PJ Media column.

FEDS IGNORE 13K+ COST-CUTTING WATCHDOG RECOMMENDATIONS: House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky) has some thoughts about that, BUT they won’t set well with more than a few long-serving Members of Congress from both political parties.

UPDATED

BAN HOMESCHOOLING? As President Donald Trump moves to encourage the home schooling movement, the Left and the public education unions — but I repeat myself —  are marshaling their usual fallacies in opposition.

But the homeschooling movement is all but certain to continue growing because of the deepening rot of public education and the reality that homeschooled kids learn far more and more of the essential skills than do kids in the average public school. That’s according to the latest “What Would You Say” video from the Colson Center on HillFaith.

TRUMP REPEALS LBJ’S 1965 AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ORDER: It’s getting much less Mainstream Media outrage than expected, but President Donald Trump has repealed the 1965 Executive Order LBJ used to set the federal Leviathan on the road to mandating racial and sexual discrimination in government contracting and thence throughout the private sector.

That’s a big deal and you can rest assured the Left will not remain quiet. A close reading of the Trump EO’s text suggests, however, that the new chief has already undercut their line of attack by making clear racial discrimination was already illegal in hiring before 1965.

IS TRUMP SERIOUS ABOUT CUTTING BUREAUCRATS? Those seven Executive Orders (EOs) the new/old President signed on Day One suggest that he is indeed serious about cutting the size and costs of the federal career civil service workforce.

TRUMP EO EASES FIRING FED MANAGERS: They called it Schedule F the first time around, but President Donald Trump has a tougher version of an Executive Order that makes it considerably simpler and quicker to fire incompetent senior managers in the federal workforce.

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW THIS ABOUT MLK JR: This might be the most unexpected 1:18 video watch of this day, which President Donald Trump declared as Liberation Day for America. And it’s also Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which makes this video on HillFaith of particular interest.

TIME TO EXPAND THE HATCH ACT TO COVER CONTRIBUTIONS? Ever since FDR was in the White House, the Hatch Act has barred federal workers from partisan activities while on duty.

Now that there are so many of them, making an average $101,000+ annually, they provide millions of dollars to Democrats and Republicans who protect their jobs and programs. And nearly half of the managers in the nation’s capital openly declare in a recent survey they will actively oppose President Donald Trump’s policies and programs.

All of which raises a logical question that I cover in my latest PJMedia column: Should feds also be barred from contributing to partisan political campaigns?