February 5, 2025

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.

Posted at 11:32 am by Mark Tapscott

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Crazy Talk, Vol. 1: Trump’s Radical Plan to Force Putin to Talk Peace. “It’s been a busy month for the Trump 47 administration these first few days in February, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I missed one of the potentially biggest developments until a full 36 hours after it happened on Monday. It was Tuesday evening — a good three weeks after lunch on Monday in Trump 47 Standard Time — that I read about another one of those crazy-stupid Trump ideas that just might work.”

Posted at 10:09 am by Stephen Green

TYLER O’NEIL: Trump Deals a Huge Blow to the Left’s Funding Empire.

By pausing foreign funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, President Donald Trump has dealt a major blow to the ecosystem of nonprofits that promote woke ideology against America’s interests.

It is no accident that USAID’s funding has dovetailed with the grantmaking of leftist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations—and the foreign funding pause will undermine his efforts.

Trump placed a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance on his first day in office. This weekend, agents of the Department of Government Efficiency entered the USAID facility and the USAID website shut down. On Sunday, Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio acting head of the agency.

Full details at the link. It isn’t just USAID, either, that’s going to feel the sting. I missed this WSJ piece on Sunday but the headline tells a brutal truth: Democratic States Are Wards of Washington.

Democratic states and their economies depend much more on Washington largesse than Republican states do. This year, New York received roughly $4,900 per capita from the feds and California $4,300—two to three times as much as Florida ($1,700) and Texas ($1,500). That’s because Democratic states provide more generous social welfare, which is increasingly funded by Washington thanks to regulatory changes by the Biden administration.

Democratic states also received a disproportionate share of the more than $1 trillion that Congress sent to state and local governments in 2020 and 2021 as pandemic relief. Between 2018 and 2022, federal dollars flowing to state and local governments increased by about $515 billion, more than the rise in Social Security and Medicare combined.

Most Covid funds are running out, though the Biden Federal Emergency Management Agency planned to hand out disaster-relief funds to states and cities for pandemic “emergency” spending through August 2026. This year’s Los Angeles city budget includes $208.2 million in FEMA Covid funds, including for housing vagrants in hotels. New York state’s budget this year includes nearly $3.5 billion in FEMA dollars for Covid “emergency protective measures” such as home test kits.

DOGE is derailing the gravy train at USAID and State but taxpayer subsidies to tax & spend blue states ought to be next.

Posted at 9:38 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump 47 —Come for the Freedom, Stay for the Democrats’ Exploding Heads. “That new noise that you may be hearing in any part of this great land is the weeping and gnashing of teeth in the United States Department of Justice. The Swamp rot is critically deep there, and they know that the new sheriff in town will not take kindly to what they’ve been doing these last four years. The Department of Justice will once again be focused on — surprisingly — justice.”

Posted at 9:07 am by Stephen Green

WHAT’S A BROWN MEDICAL DEGREE CURRENTLY WORTH?

Not as much as it used to be.

The cost, however, is still dear.

More at the X thread.

Posted at 8:36 am by Stephen Green

CHANGE: GOP Reaps Rewards of Party Switchers.

Regardless of personal motivations, we are watching the long, slow death of the Florida Democrats. Recent party switches are just another nail in the coffin. The policy consequences could be huge—how will future Democratic administrations approach Cuba, for example? The electoral calculus changes too. With Florida out of reach, will Democrats double-down on the Midwest? Try to claw their way back in Texas? Expanding the playing field will be crucial to the party’s long-term prospects.

Southern party switching in the Obama years made sense: conservative legislators joined the conservative party. Recent party switchers have been more transparently opportunistic—akin to swapping jerseys in the 9th inning with your team down five runs. Democrats have every right to be upset.

But we shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. Valdes and Cassel are symptoms of a larger problem: Democrats have collapsed in places they used to carry comfortably.

Florida is in the bag. Meanwhile, Scott Presler continues working to do in New Jersey what he did in Pennsylvania:

Want to clean up Colorado next, Scott?

Posted at 7:34 am by Stephen Green

FUCK THESE FASCISTS:

Audit, prosecute, convict.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, YES.

Posted at 7:06 am by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA: Nation Shrugs as Godzilla Eats Washington: Donald Trump’s sequel return is already an epic monster movie, and the country seems to think the capital’s trampling is a net plus.

Trump has been in office two weeks and changes are coming so fast, even I’m freaked out. He’s Godzilla, stomping on everything: news networks, billions in federal grants, USAID, DEI, Mexico and Canada and China, South Africa, immigrants, maybe the Department of Education, and many other things. His daily “No more of this shit!” signing sessions have become destination television:

Courts will be busy for years weighing which of his acts are legal, with virtually all under challenge. In the interim, carnage continues, with opposition in total message paralysis. Whether it’s planned or just Trump’s luck is unclear, but harrumphing bureaucrats are now daily rushing to defend the indefensible, from Jaffer’s slanderous networks to Schiffer’s waste and budget scammery. Monday scenes of legislators like Ilhan Omar and Jamie Raskin chaining themselves to the Matterhorn of suck that is USAID were just the beginning of what looks like a rash of optics suicides. We’ve never seen anything like it.

Popcorn, please.

Screenshot

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds