USDA Axes Millions in Contracts, Including
$230K for ‘Brazilian Forest and Gender Consultant’
Posted By: Dreadnought, 2/17/2025 12:58:28 AM
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has slashed millions in contracts that were active under the Biden administration, including for a “Brazilian forest and gender consultant” and a “Central American gender assessment consultant.” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the cuts on Friday, saying that the department has terminated 78 contracts totaling more than $132 million. Rollins said 1,000 contracts are also currently under review for potential termination. The findings are the result of a review by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
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We reported on a preview clip that was dropped from the interview that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk did with Fox's Sean Hannity. In that clip, the two made clear they spoke about the leftist tactic to try to separate them and break up the power team they've formed. Both Trump and Musk said they were aware of it, and the left would not succeed. They spoke about their relationship, which was clearly a mutual admiration society. Trump explained how impressed he was with what Musk did to save lives in North Carolina with Starlink, and the amazing things he's done, such as the ability SpaceX
We’re Going to Win
1 reply
It is often said that the future belongs to those who show up. And the most relevant way of showing up, is having children.
Anecdotally, it has been obvious for a long time that conservatives are more likely to have children than liberals, and apt to have more children. But the data are clear, and getting clearer: I think it is totally rational for liberals to respond to President Trump’s election by not having children. I encourage them to stand firm in that decision. And never forget global warming! Who can contemplate bringing into being a new generation, when the Earth might get warmer? (Or colder, since it’s “climate change.”)
While Donald Trump has made multiple excellent choices for his cabinet and agency heads, his choice for Labor secretary is opposed to a key part of his platform (making America prosperous) and is endorsed by the most woke, dictatorial, and radical of teacher union heads.
Lori Chavez-DeRemer's Senate confirmation hearings begin on Wednesday. The former Planned Parenthood employee and loyal union stooge needs to be replaced — Trump should never have chosen her. In fact, she’s an absolute gift to the most leftist and most corrupt unions. It is one thing to appeal to union membership, as Trump undoubtedly did in the last election, and another thing
At a news conference Tuesday, President Donald Trump blamed Kyiv for the Russia-Ukraine war. Speaking on his peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump told reporters that Ukraine did not need a seat at the negotiating table because it "should've ended [the war] in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal." The Context
February 24 will mark three years since Russia invaded Ukraine and launched the war that has become Europe's deadliest since World War II, with staggering losses of life, tanks and equipment on both sides.
To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, there are two ways to descend into autocracy: gradually and then suddenly. Right now, we are on the bullet train.
With President Trump in office only a month, many say his “shock and awe” campaign — issuing executive orders to abolish birthright citizenship, defund national health, invade sensitive Treasury payment systems, shutter USAID, impound funds allocated by Congress, fire civil servants and the like — puts us well on the road to autocracy. And the presence of his satrap, billionaire Elon Musk, makes even Republicans nervous and underscores the anxiety over where we are headed.
The Democrats are stunned, wringing their hands.
Trump signs new executive orders, including
one to make fertility treatments 'more affordable' 1 reply
one to make fertility treatments 'more affordable' 1 reply
PALM BEACH, Fla. -- President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Domestic Policy Council to "examine ways to make IVF and other fertility treatments more affordable for more Americans," White House staff secretary Will Scharf said during a press conference with the president Tuesday afternoon. "The Order directs policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a post on the social platform X.
Neither Leavitt nor a White House fact sheet offered details about how the executive order would achieve that goal.
A federal judge has declined to grant a request for a temporary restraining order in the case brought by state attorneys general arguing that Elon Musk's appointment to make sweeping government changes was illegal. On Feb. 13, 14 attorneys general sued Musk, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and President Donald Trump, alleging that President Trump had violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. The suit argues that any power to change government through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency must be granted by the Senate, not the president.
USAID in a Nutshell
8 replies
USAID is/was an octopus, with tentacles extending everywhere.
What did those tentacles do? First and foremost, they extended into the taxpayers' pockets to extract tens of billions of dollars a year, transferring those dollars to organizations and agencies favored by the transnational elite. The projects could be anything from overthrowing a government or two to putting some spending money into the pockets of the favored elites.
A grain or two of rice might be given to some starving people for appearance's sake, but that was hardly the point. The grift and the power were.
Everyone is still howling about DOGE. Although with as many seemingly good things and astonishing finds coming out of them, it looks to be harder and harder for the opposition to come up with objections that will work anyone up into a lather over what the teams are doing.
For instance, the acting head of the Social Security Administration stepped down after butting heads with a DOGE team and a request for access to information she would have rather not granted.
The top official at the Social Security Administration, Michelle King, stepped down from her position this weekend after she refused a request from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency
In our weekly VIP Gold chat shows on Wednesdays (1:30 pm ET), my friend Cam Edwards often says, "Everything is stupid and it's only getting worse." Perhaps another way of saying this is that everything is broken, and everyone knows it -- but does nothing about it.
At the Free Press, Oliver Wiseman picks up on that same sense of frustration in the electorate, and asks whether the political poles have changed. Forget Republicans and Democrats, progressives and conservatives, or even the class-warfare arguments, all of which nibble at the edges of this political moment. Wiseman recalls Tablet editor-in-chief writing about "brokenism," and posits that the real divide
Multiple news outlets report that the CIA is now stepping up drone flights over Mexico. The currently unarmed flights are said to be searching for fentanyl labs run by Mexican cartels designated by President Donald Trump as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
One U.S. official told the New York Times the flights “go well into sovereign Mexico.”
The flights reportedly began during the Biden administration but were stepped up by CIA Director John Ratcliff after President Trump made the foreign terrorist designation. The flights are not authorized to use lethal force at this time. The CIA officers are gathering the intelligence data and passing it along to Mexicn officials, the Times reported.
Frank Figliuzzi, a top FBI official during Obama’s first term and current NBC News analyst, concocted a wild theory that somebody in the White House is "spoon-feeding" President Trump white supremacist talking points. And, he adds, anybody who voted for him needs to question whether or not they can still be considered American.
Figliuzzi, a consistent source of these absurd theories linking Trump to white supremacist ideology, made his latest comments during Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Deadline” with Nicolle Wallace. Over the weekend, President Trump posted a quote on X that espouses the idea that leaders sometimes must engage in extraordinary actions in times of national crisis.
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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that some $4.7 trillion in payments from the Treasury Department were missing a critical tracking code which made tracing the transactions “almost impossible.”
The transactions were reportedly missing the Treasury Account Symbol, or TAS, an identification code which links a Treasury payment to a budget line item, according to DOGE, which described the use of such code as a “standard financial process.”
“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” read an X post from DOGE.
Actor Robert Picardo, who played The Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager, said that America should cancel Presidents Day due to Trump allegedly canceling “our justice system” and other causes.
Picardo issued his decree on the social media platform Blue Sky.“Being that papers straws, The Gulf of Mexico and our justice system have been recently cancelled, let’s cancel Presidents’ Day,” he said.
Being that papers straws, The Gulf of Mexico and our justice system have been recently cancelled, let’s cancel Presidents’ Day.
— Robert Picardo (@robertpicardo.bsky.social) February 16, 2025 at 8:15 PM
Acting head of Social Security Administration
resigns after dispute with Elon Musk’s
DOGE: report 24 replies
resigns after dispute with Elon Musk’s
DOGE: report 24 replies
The Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner reportedly resigned over the weekend after a dispute with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) over the Elon Musk-headed group’s efforts to access sensitive government records.
Michelle King, a career federal worker who had been with SSA since 1994, quit over the DOGE disagreement Saturday and was replaced by Leland Dudek, the Washington Post reported on Monday.
Dudek, who has been supportive of DOGE’s efforts to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, will serve as acting commissioner of SSA until President Trump’s pick to lead the agency, Frank Bisignano, is confirmed by the Senate, according to the outlet.
ROME — Pope Francis is seriously worried about his health after being hospitalized with severe bronchitis, and is rushing to tie up loose ends ahead of the battle to succeed him. The pope was admitted to a special ward earlier this month in Gemelli Hospital in Rome with a respiratory infection, and he has since been forced to cancel a number of public appearances. (Snip) As his health has deteriorated over the last month, Francis has also moved to complete key initiatives and appoint sympathetic figures to key posts, following a progressive-tinted papacy marked by bitter ideological divisions. Since he became
Those of us of a certain age remember the Yugo. It was a typically Eastern European automobile of the '80s and '90s, small, cheap, and bearing a questionable reputation for safety and reliability. They were sold here in the United States from 1985 to 1992, with a total of a bit over 140,000 sold. Few seem to survive today, but then, the American auto companies in these years were still recovering from the late '70s to early '80s quality slump themselves. In the States the Yugo picked up a pretty bad reputation;
The ‘leaders’ of Europe got together in Paris, France at the request of French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss how to handle a peace agreement if Putin, Trump and eventually Zelenskyy come to terms. The outcome perfectly encapsulates the EU.
After essentially saying the United States would not send military troops into Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping mission, President Trump sent a communique to each of the leaders, “asking them to spell out what they would be prepared to offer to enforce a peace agreement,
(snip) said they would not send military assistance to Ukraine, without the leadership of the United States, and specifically without U.S. military troops
The Washington Post is reporting that DOGE fired thousands of government employees over the weekend, many of whom were on probationary status often reserved for new hires.
Many federal government employees were dismissed over the holiday weekend as managers confronted a Trump administration demand to fire workers by Tuesday. In group texts and in online forums, they dubbed the error-ridden run of firings the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”
The firings targeted new hires on probation, who have fewer protections than permanent employees, and swept up people with years of service who had recently transferred between agencies, as well as military veterans and people with disabilities
Kamala Harris Signs With CAA
19 replies
Former Vice President Kamala Harris has signed with CAA for representation in all areas, with a focus on speaking engagements and publishing. CAA will work closely with Harris on her post-White House initiatives, creating strategic opportunities that expand her platform in support of the issues she has championed throughout decades-long career in public service.
This marks a return to the agency for Harris, which previously represented the then-U.S. Senator prior to her being sworn in as the 49th Vice President
Last November, Democrat fraudsters bypassed the presidential race and focused instead on the down-ballot races. In Florida, local Democrat candidates received more votes than either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris at the top of the ballot. Something was definitely amiss.
For instance, Republican Rocky Rochford was running against incumbent Democrat Kathy Castor for the U.S. House seat in Congressional Race 14 (FL-14). The district straddles Hillsborough and Pinellas counties and includes the cities of Tampa and St. Petersburg. Castor was declared the winner, but Rochford is now contesting the race, claiming voter fraud, primarily by vote-by-mail ballots.
This weekend, Kamala Harris took in some Broadway.
And she reminded America that we truly dodged a bullet by not electing her.
She and her husband Doug Emhoff met with the cast of “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical,” and she gave a pep talk that was in the style made famous by Damon Wayans’ “In Living Color” character Oswald Bates — a jailbird who delivers soliloquys which are merely a string of big words that amount to a whole lotta nonsense.
In the video, she was stumbling and bumbling through yet another word salad filled with meaningless platitudes.
To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, there are two ways to descend into autocracy: gradually and then suddenly. Right now, we are on the bullet train.
With President Trump in office only a month, many say his “shock and awe” campaign — issuing executive orders to abolish birthright citizenship, defund national health, invade sensitive Treasury payment systems, shutter USAID, impound funds allocated by Congress, fire civil servants and the like — puts us well on the road to autocracy. And the presence of his satrap, billionaire Elon Musk, makes even Republicans nervous and underscores the anxiety over where we are headed.
The Democrats are stunned, wringing their hands.
Media elites are calling for a national boycott of President Donald Trump in response to the Associated Press’s feud with the White House.
If the establishment media boycott Trump, networks would likely suffer financially, while their biased coverage would not seep into the national discussion and distort the president’s actions. Americans’ trust in the establishment media to report current events “fully, accurately and fairly” plummeted to a record low in 2024, Gallup polling found in October.