TRUMP, HOUSE GOPERS NEW APPROACH TO WASTE, FRAUD: The President and a couple of GOP House Committee Chairmen are implementing a new approach to fighting waste, fraud and abuse. We can only wonder how much better the federal government’s financial health would be had this approach been tried decades ago.

THE GREATNESS OF JUSTICE THOMAS: If you read nothing else this week, this month, this year, sit down in a quiet place and focus your mind on the words delivered April 20 at the University of Texas by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Don’t skim it, don’t skip long paragraphs, read it carefully, slowly and fully focused. It may well be the most vital and energetic explanation of the American founding since Madison, Hamilton and Jay collaborated on The Federalist Papers.

ED DEPT DEFINES INSANITY: You know the maxim, doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Well, a new data deep-dive by Open the Books shows the Department of Education illustrates the accuracy of the maxim.

THREE ‘FACTOVACY’ GROUPS YOU SHOULD KNOW: What is “factovacy” you ask? It’s what I hope becomes common conversational currency describing highly credible non-profit groups that provide advocacy on behalf of fact- and data-driven analyses.

Check out my latest Substack column describing three such groups — Just Facts, Open the Books and Truth-In-Accounting — that are blazing new trails in equipping citizens to hold government accountable.

PROMOTED FROM MONDAY EVENING

GABBARD NOT GOING QUIETLY: Matt Margolis sees a month-worth of weekly revelations from departing Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard.

WHEN REALITY BITES: Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md) claim, respectively, that Trump gutted Medicaid to pay for tax cuts and Trump created a hush fund to convert J-6 rioters into his “private militia.”

Reality bites for politicians like Ossoff and Raskin when their claims meet, for example, Jim Agresti’s Just Facts Daily. It’s the first of what I hope will be a continuing series of PJ Media columns in which lying politicos in both parties are confronted with Just Facts.

WHAT’S UP AT CIA? A CIA veteran tells a Senate committee that political leaders in the agency reversed the draft assessment that Covid was leaked from China’s Wuhan lab. But just before the hearing opens, the CIA’s Director of Public Affairs releases a bruising condemnation of the proceedings. Apologies demanded, but not given. Silence from the White House and CIA chief John Ratcliffe. My latest Washington Stand post explores the behind-the-scenes eruption that seems to be brewing.

UH-OH! WATCHDOG CAUGHT IN FLAGRANT FOIA VIOLATION: Hans Bader offers an illuminating illustration of how the Council on Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) flagrantly violated the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The violations by CIGIE — representing the 72 statutory internal government watchdogs — are so obvious that they illustrate why no federal employee has ever gone to jail for violating the FOIA.

14 CALIFORNIA COUNTIES WITH GROWING POPULATIONS: There are 58 counties in the Golden State, and 44 of them have been losing population for years. But 14 of them are actually gaining new residents. Pacific Research Institute’s John Merline dug into the data to find out why those 14 counties have growing populations at the same time California leads the 50 states in net-out-migration.

UNACCOUNTABILITY AND THE NEW YORK TIMES: Richard Pollock digs into the corporate structure underlying the Old Grey Lady and finds a complex setup that permanently empowers and insulates Sulzberger descendants to maintain a death grip on every aspect of the newspaper, including what is and isn’t reported, and how. Interestingly, the Sulzberger and Ford families use the same technique to maintain iron-clad control.

FANG FANG’S SISTER? Turns out, according to the Daily Caller, that California Treasurer/Candidate for Lt. Governor Fiona Ma has a history of meetings with Chinese intelligence

NOW WE REALLY KNOW HOW THE LEFT PLAYED THE SBC: A deeply deceptive piece in the Texas Monthly illustrates how the Left uses sequential linking of otherwise unrelated entities to create a damaging narrative. How they did it to two giants of the SBC is examined in my guest column on Substack this morning.

PORTENT OF PROBLEMS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA: A recent survey of congressional aides working on Capitol Hill for senators, representatives and committees find a big portion of them have in the past year either significantly reduced their social media scrolling or stopped it altogether. Check it out on HillFaith this morning.

TRUMP, XI AND THE THUCYDIDES TRAP: Few Americans these days have read “The Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides, so the significance of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s two references to the “trap” associated with the great Greek writer is undoubtedly lost on most, including especially the journalists covering President Donald Trump’s Beijing visit.

That said, Rod Martin lays out the amazing changes in the U.S./China relationship on the world stage in the two years since the Biden administration closed and the second Trump term commenced. Read it and you will quickly forget what the talking heads of the MSM are saying about Trump’s alleged Beijing failures:

“Xi is very aware of his own problems. Two years ago, he was on the verge of controlling the approaches to North America. Today, America has flipped that script. So isn’t it at least possible that Xi is recognizing how we’ve kicked his butt out of the Caribbean, humiliated his armaments industry in Venezuela and Iran, and locked down Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok with our new Indonesian defense pact(s)?

“And that’s not even mentioning Japan’s reassertion as both a major power and arsenal to our allies, South Korea’s and Australia’s nuclear submarine deals with the U.S., the defensive implications of the Taiwan arms deals, the growing forest of missiles in Luzon, and the recently announced $1.5 trillion Trump defense budget, up from under $1 trillion. If we obsess about China’s strengths, do we really think they don’t obsess about ours?”

And speaking of Thucydides, here’s a reading project that will both entertain and instruct the inquiring mind: Read his book on the great conflict between Athens and Sparta, then sit down with Shelby Foote’s masterful three-volume “The Civil War.” So many similarities among the combatants in both conflicts and innumerable lessons to be learned from the character portraits each author provides of the men leading each side.

WAS THAT A BRAIN JOLT? As the number grows of credibly reported and analyzed Near-Death Experiences (NDE) involving claims of divine experience, folks who deny the existence of deity are scrambling to come up with an alternative explanation. And, according to the Discovery Institute’s Denyse O’Leary, their latest one consists of the argument that such experiences are merely the product of a staccato burst of stimuli in the brain occurring simultaneously. Hmmm.

THEY’RE STILL ADDICTED: To earmarks, that is, the Gateway Drug to Federal Spending Addiction, as Dr. No, aka Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), famously said years ago as he exposed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” Today, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) unveils the 2026 edition of its Pigbook, documenting the thousands of earmarks Democrats and Republicans pigged out on in the current federal budget.

THE REAL LEWIS & CLARK: School children used to learn about the incredibly courageous expedition undertaken beginning in 1804 by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the vast lands acquired by President Thomas Jefferson with the Louisiana Purchase. Today, if they hear about it at all, it’s likely in the false context of the White Man stealing the frontier from the “Indigenous Peoples.”

In fact, as Rod Martin lays it out this morning, the Lewis & Clark Expedition was a crucial event in the establishment of the young American republic as a continental power. Without it, the North American continent likely would today look like Europe, an assemblage of disparate, feuding dominions. Lewis & Clark expanded America and not just geographically.

“Together they left behind an incalculable contribution to science, to exploration, and to the advance of the American Republic. Their expedition was not merely an adventure but an assertion: that America would not be a coastal power clinging to the ocean’s edge, but a continental one, willing to push into the unknown, to master it, and to make it a civilization and a home,” is how Martin puts it. This one ought to be essential reading for every American, beginning in elementary school.

BIPARTISAN BILL BANS CHINESE EVS HERE: House Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) have teamed up on a proposed bill that would effectively ban import of Chinese, Russian, North Korean and Iranian Electric Vehicles to compete here on the U.S. market.

WHY ARE YOU CURIOUS? That’s an apt description of a “research study” funded by federal taxpayers. Don’t believe it? Check it out here.

THEY DON’T DO GRADUATION ADDRESSES LIKE THIS NOW: Every Tuesday on HillFaith there appears a featured post entitled “FAITH OF THE FOUNDERS” that provides readers with a quote illustrating the deep influence on that remarkable generation.

Today’s installment is a passage from the address by then-Columbia University President William Samuel Johnson to the first graduating class after the American Revolution’s successful conclusion. Johnson was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and was subsequently elected to the Senate. His father had previously served as Columbia’s first president.

The contrast between his deeply faith-informed address and the typical Critical Race Theory-based orations heard on today’s campuses points to the vast distance our nation has travelled in the wrong direction.

HOW THE SBC GOT PLAYED: That’s “SBC” as in the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination. You may recall events from 2019 during which the SBC was convulsed and damaged by multiple allegations of sexual abuse of women.

The story you heard on the MSM and elsewhere was the SBC was guilty, tried to coverup its guilt and ultimately only conceded when so many victims  came forward there was no other choice. Now, seven years and multiple revelations of what actually happened as opposed to incessant claims of reform advocates, the whole truth is out.

What the whole truth is ain’t pretty, for the Left or the powers-that-be of the SBC. What it is is a detailed description of the Left’s five-phase strategy for taking over and emasculating a Christian denomination. The SBC wasn’t the first to endure this strategy applied, so you’d think they would have been better prepared. They weren’t. Check out “How the SBC Got Played.”

DEALING WITH DEATH CULTS: Islam is not the first foreign threat to the United States that practiced a warrior death cult. Richard Pollock reminds of the Japanese Bushido code in World War II. There are lessons here for dealing with Islam.

SEVEN WAYS WE’RE ALL EQUAL: Thanks to our long-failing public education system, few young Americans know the full story behind the Declaration of Independence, and in particular the meaning of those “inalienable rights,” including the one about all men are equal.

In a high-quality, entertaining 7:22 video produced by the Discovery Institute, host Adam Nieri uses Dr. John West’s superb “Endowed by Our Creator” and other sources to describe the seven fundamental ways in which all men are equal before the law, according to the Founders. Check it out and then share it with the kids, grandkids, neighbor kids, etc. etc.

BACK FROM THE WASTELAND: J. Budziszewski has been a University of Texas professor for 45 years, but the J strolling to the lecturn today might well not even recognize the one who first accepted the Austin position.

To understand why, check out Terrell Clemmons’ interview with one of the most intellectually courageous people you may encounter in American academia. The interview first appeared in Science & Culture Today. Here’s a taste of the conversation:

“I had come to think that there couldn’t be any real moral authority for anything, that good and evil were things we made up; I am just a process; I don’t have personal responsibility for my actions; I’m not free. But I loved my wife and children.

“Now consider: love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person. But I didn’t believe in objective good, I didn’t believe in persons, and I didn’t believe my commitments were in my control. So it wasn’t that I didn’t love them. It was that I couldn’t make sense of this love. That was horrible.”

LABOR ECONOMISTS REJECT MINIMUM WAGE HIKES: A survey of 166 economists, most of whom are academics specializing in labor economics, found solid opposition across ideological camps to huge minimum wage increases proposed by House Democrats, lefty activists and Mayor Mamdani.