How Rand Paul Can Seize A Golden Opportunity To Cut Federal Waste
Fiscal conservatives on Capitol Hill are right to raise concerns about the rising federal debt and unsustainable deficit spending. But voting no is not enough.Fiscal conservatives on Capitol Hill are right to raise concerns about the rising federal debt and unsustainable deficit spending. But voting no is not enough.Trump’s SEC pick would blow up Biden’s lawless financial agenda
The media’s narrative has done its job. Many Americans now see Donald J. Trump not as a reformer but as a symbol of corruption. That perception is both dishonest and deeply misleading.
The reality? The first 100 days of Trump’s second term leave no doubt about his goal: to reform and remake the federal government.
Reform should mean growing the economy, not growing the bureaucracy.
It’s about time. Too many unelected bureaucrats accountable to no one infest the federal government like roaches, wielding unchecked power over our lives, liberty, and happiness. They treat the mandate for reform as a nuisance. Their mission: obstruct Trump’s appointees and protect the status quo.
Organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Voice of America have deservedly drawn the president’s attention. But many others deserve the same scrutiny. One that stands out is the Securities and Exchange Commission, which repeatedly overstepped its authority during the Biden years, using vague regulatory powers to impose sweeping social mandates under the guise of financial oversight.
Trump tapped former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins to fix it. As chairman, Atkins can be counted on to take a best-practices approach to administrative responsibilities and to ensure that the SEC conducts its mission as described by the law: “facilitate capital formation; maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and protect investors.”
That’s a welcome clarification of responsibility. Gary Gensler, who ran the SEC for Joe Biden, was often accused of having a reach that exceeded legitimate bounds, as when, for example, he tried to regulate the market for precious metals.
Gold and silver are not securities. Neither are individual retirement accounts. Yet the Gensler-era SEC attempted to assert authority over companies offering precious-metals IRAs to individuals and families who wish to own gold and silver.
As the Heritage Foundation’s David Burton told the House Financial Services Committee in March 2024, “The commission is statutorily required to promote efficiency, competition, and capital formation by responsible participants in the capital markets.” Still, under the Biden administration, “it increasingly does the opposite.”
John Gulliver of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation told the same committee that Gensler’s SEC had “an unprecedented rulemaking agenda that will radically redesign the regulation of our securities markets and will have a major impact on the cost of being a public company and investing in our markets.”
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Atkins can and must guide the SEC away from such nonsense. As CEO of Patomak Global Partners, Atkins oversaw the development of best practices for managing digital assets. Congress should follow his lead wherever it may go, solidifying his reforms into law and preventing the agency from trying to regulate financial instruments that are not securities.
The overreach matters. The United States is in a race with China for cryptocurrency dominance. The winner gets to establish the terms under which everyone else must live. It’s no surprise that the SEC’s failure to establish what Burton called “basic rules for responsible actors to follow” undermines America’s ability to take the lead.
“I am not entirely sure whether this irresponsible failure to provide basic rules is a function of the limited understanding of those charged with regulating in this area or their desire to simply have no rules so that the commission can engage in regulation by enforcement,” Burton told the committee.
Regulation by enforcement doesn’t just stifle innovation — it cripples the economy. It may also violate new limits the U.S. Supreme Court just imposed on federal agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which ended the Chevron deference doctrine.
But Atkins can’t fix the SEC alone. Congress must step in and rewrite the law to bar the commission from using backdoor tactics to seize authority over emerging markets and financial technologies.
If lawmakers fail, they’ll guarantee a future where financial technology innovation gets strangled in red tape while real fraudsters skate by untouched. That’s bad news not just for entrepreneurs, but for America’s investors — roughly half the population — who rely on strong markets to secure their retirements.
Reform should mean growing the economy, not growing the bureaucracy. With Atkins at the helm, the SEC finally has a chance to get back to doing what it was meant to do.
When bureaucrats rule, even red states go woke
If it’s happening in Georgia, you can bet it’s happening all over the country. Embedded bureaucrats are quietly rewriting the policies voters put in place.
Georgia’s Medicaid program exists to serve the state’s most vulnerable — low-income children and foster youth, pregnant women, and disabled adults. It was never meant to be a vehicle for radical politics. But recent revelations about how the state awarded multibillion-dollar Medicaid contracts show exactly how far left-wing ideologues inside government agencies will go to push their agenda.
When the bureaucracy pushes a progressive agenda behind closed doors, the public has no choice but to push back. Loudly. Clearly. Immediately.
Internal documents reveal that senior staff at Georgia’s Department of Community Health inserted ideological land mines into the bidding process for companies seeking to serve more than 1 million Medicaid recipients — most of them children. This included a scenario question focused on how insurers would treat a hypothetical “fourteen (14) year-old, transgender White female (assigned male sex at birth but identifies as a female).”
Responses that didn’t align with leftist orthodoxy were penalized. In other words, companies lost points unless they promised to steer kids toward hormone therapy — despite state laws banning gender reassignment procedures for minors. That isn’t just dishonest. It’s a direct subversion of the law.
Just this year, Georgia’s legislature passed bills barring men from girls’ sports and locker rooms. But inside the state’s Medicaid agency, officials rewarded insurers for endorsing gender transitions for minors. One winning bidder justified its position by claiming such treatments “could come up in the future.” Never mind that they’re illegal in Georgia.
One losing insurer offered to connect the hypothetical child with a range of community resources, including faith-based organizations. That response was met with scorn. A state official actually complained that faith-based groups shouldn’t have been included — because they weren’t mentioned in the scenario.
Never mind that faith-based organizations have served Medicaid populations for decades. They often provide the only consistent care in struggling communities. But for these bureaucrats, churches and people of faith pose a bigger danger to kids than radical gender ideology.
This is no small issue. Georgia expects to spend $4.5 billion next year on Medicaid and PeachCare, the program for uninsured kids. That makes this one of the largest contracts in state history — and leftist staffers nearly hijacked the entire process.
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Lawmakers have a duty to step in now. During the last session, they considered a bill that would have barred ideologically charged questions from state procurements. It didn’t pass. That needs to change.
There’s still time. The Medicaid contracts haven’t been finalized. Legislators must act. They should demand a full rebid, remove these radical questions, and ensure that reviewers score responses based on biology, patient welfare, and fiscal responsibility — not on whether companies genuflect to left-wing doctrine.
Georgia’s leadership has worked hard to uphold conservative values and protect taxpayer dollars. But as we’ve seen in Washington, unelected bureaucrats can — and will — undermine that progress if no one stops them.
When the bureaucracy pushes a progressive agenda behind closed doors, the public has no choice but to push back. Loudly. Clearly. Immediately. We must call it out, correct course, and pass the kind of reforms that ensure this never happens again.
How Republicans can shut down this overbearing agency once and for all
With accountability and spending restraint more urgent than ever, Congress should shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for good. Eliminating the CFPB would mark a decisive move to protect taxpayers from another bloated, unaccountable government agency. If Republicans, Congress, and President Donald Trump want to keep their promise to rein in Washington’s runaway bureaucracy, they must ensure this agency stays dead — and buried for good.
The CFPB’s unchecked growth and regulatory overreach have raised red flags for years. Born out of the 2008 financial crisis, the agency operates with minimal oversight and has long avoided serious scrutiny. Its expanding budget and vague authority continue to spark legitimate questions about fiscal responsibility and constitutional limits. Closing down the CFPB would end a failed bureaucratic experiment and send a clear message: Every federal agency answers to the taxpayers. No exceptions.
Consumers deserve clear, commonsense policies — especially after years of market confusion driven by the CFPB’s heavy hand.
The CFPB was built to operate independently, beyond the reach of Congress or the president. Lawmakers granted it broad, vague authority — allowing unelected bureaucrats to meddle freely in the U.S. economy. Beyond its track record of economic failure, the CFPB’s structure flatly contradicts the American model of representative government.
President Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, acted quickly. They made high-impact decisions to show Americans they were serious about cutting waste, reducing overreach, and eliminating redundancy across the federal bureaucracy. When the CFPB came up for its DOGE review, the administration halted its operations and dismissed hundreds of staff.
That move triggered criticism from the usual quarters, but consumers and lawmakers should look deeper. Ending the CFPB isn’t just about cost-cutting. It signaled a broader plan to streamline the federal government and promote efficiency across every agency.
Still, even the DOGE can’t finish the job without Congress. Only Congress can repeal the statute that established the CFPB — and only Congress can shut the agency down for good. Lawmakers must do so.
The CFPB currently controls its own funding, bypassing the regular appropriations process and evading critical checks and balances. Reclaiming those dollars would help reduce the deficit, and redistributing the CFPB’s limited useful functions to other agencies would ensure continued consumer protections under proper oversight.
The Federal Reserve and other agencies already handle key aspects of financial regulation and could easily absorb the CFPB’s remaining duties. Congress must finally draw the line: no more duplicative mandates, no more unchecked authority, and no more mission creep. If consumer protections matter — and they do — then Congress must deliver them through a structure that answers to the people.
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Fortunately, the CFPB has begun scaling back some of its overreach. Earlier this month, the agency dropped its lawsuit against Credit Acceptance Corporation, an auto lender. That move signals a step in the right direction — away from regulatory overreach and toward a more balanced role in the economy.
Every unnecessary enforcement action piles compliance costs on businesses, stifles innovation, and hampers economic growth. Reassessing these missteps marks progress toward a regulatory approach that defends consumers without punishing industry.
Consumers deserve clear, commonsense policies — especially after years of market confusion driven by the CFPB’s heavy hand. They also deserve policies shaped by accountable officials, not by bureaucrats operating in defiance of congressional oversight. Credit access remains essential for Americans seeking financial stability in times of need. Crafting sound regulations — and eliminating those that never made sense — protects both their financial futures and the broader economy.
Consumers also deserve protection they can trust. Creditors need clear, consistent rules to serve their customers without facing unpredictable regulatory entanglements. Any reform bill must address these concerns directly and distribute the CFPB’s remaining legitimate duties across existing, accountable agencies.
As these changes take shape, stakeholders must stay engaged. Reforms should be implemented deliberately and effectively — promoting economic growth while preserving oversight where it’s needed. If President Trump wants to cement his legacy as the president who dismantled the administrative state, he must make sure the CFPB doesn’t just get paused. It must stay gone for good.
Trump’s downsizing isn’t cruelty — it’s the last hope for solvency
For more than a century, one trend has defined American politics: the relentless expansion of federal power. The Founders built a limited framework of law and order to protect liberty and promote a flourishing society. That framework has morphed into a sprawling leviathan that reaches into nearly every aspect of American life. Each crisis, often of the government’s own making, brings the same answer: more bureaucracy, more spending, more control.
Generations of Americans have paid the price to support a self-described “problem-solving” class that fails to solve anything — and demands even more to fix the failures it created. Under President Trump, however, the country finally has a leader who sees bureaucracy not as the solution but as the root of the problem.
The choice is clear: a government that serves the people — or an unaccountable leviathan that consumes them.
In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal exploited economic collapse to justify a sweeping expansion of federal agencies. Lawmakers used the crisis to transform the relationship between government and the free market.
By the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society pushed federal overreach farther, binding millions of Americans to Washington through government handouts. Decades later, after 9/11, George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act, giving federal agencies unprecedented access to Americans’ private lives — all in the name of national security.
Today, the federal government reaches into your doctor’s office, your child’s classroom, and even your kitchen appliances — often without a single vote in Congress.
This unchecked sprawl, always justified by its own failures, has saddled taxpayers with $37 trillion in debt, a crushing weight that future generations must carry.
Enter Donald Trump.
In fewer than 100 days, Trump removed 126,000 federal workers and targeted another 100,000 positions for elimination. He gutted USAID — a bloated redistribution agency infamous for funding “Sesame Street” in Iraq — cutting more than 99% of its workforce. The IRS shed 3,600 auditors, directly rejecting President Biden’s plan to hire 87,000 new agents through the Inflation Reduction Act.
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For the first time in years, an American president has moved decisively to dismantle the administrative state — rejecting Washington’s bipartisan instinct to grow government and funnel more power to unelected bureaucrats.
No one should be surprised that Trump’s efforts to downsize the federal government have sparked outrage from Democrats, who now portray federal workers as the new victim class. Their narrative paints Trump and Republicans as “cruel” and “heartless.”
But here’s the truth.
While more than 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, Washington’s bureaucratic elite dominate six of the 10 richest counties in the country — all clustered around the nation’s capital.
During the 2008 financial crisis, 8.6 million Americans lost their jobs — 5.5% of the national workforce. Yet Washington barely flinched, shedding just 1.1% of its taxpayer-funded positions. While global economies collapsed, the D.C. bureaucracy grew, kept afloat by billion-dollar federal contracts. Politicians demanded more money for “problem solvers” to solve the problems they created. After all the “assistance” and bailouts, average Americans were left with just one thing: nearly $1 trillion in new debt.
Trump’s war on the administrative state doesn’t stem from cruelty — it reflects a long-overdue reckoning with bloated federal power. His success represents a win for working Americans. While Trump has made historic gains against the bureaucracy, many of his reforms remain tied up in court, blocked by forces determined to preserve the status quo.
If real change is the goal, Congress must do more than applaud. Lawmakers must codify Trump’s actions and pass his proposed spending cuts. The choice is clear: a government that serves the people — or an unaccountable leviathan that consumes them.
Trump’s Latest Order Could Keep You Out Of Prison For Crimes You Didn’t Even Know You Committed
A new executive order targets hidden criminal laws and restores basic due process to federal enforcement.The ‘education establishment’ always resorts to fearmongering
If the U.S. Department of Education suddenly went away, what would change for local families and communities? Not much.
For starters, the Department of Education doesn’t “educate” anyone. It’s a middleman. Americans send their taxes to Washington, D.C., the bureaucracy takes a big chunk of it to pay staff and overhead, and the rest is sent to states and local communities with a bunch of red tape. Reducing that bureaucracy should save money, which means schools could actually receive more funding.
Parents are better at making decisions for their children than federal bureaucrats.
Furthermore, there’s no evidence that the federal involvement has improved education. Since the department was created in 1980, federal per-pupil spending has skyrocketed, but results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — also known as the Nation’s Report Card — have been largely stagnant.
Yet a recent Fast Company article declared that ending the Department of Education “would be disastrous for Title I schools,” with a special emphasis on Greater Johnstown Public Schools in Pennsylvania. And who is making that claim? Not surprisingly, it’s largely people who benefit from the current system, including the head of the local and state teachers’ unions, the director of the law firm that’s led efforts to increase school taxes, and the director of a policy center that has historically received substantial funding from unions.
When your only arguments are nothing more than fearmongering, you’ve ceded the debate.
Title I will remain
For better or worse, ending the Department of Education would not end Title I funding, which is supposed to help low-income students. Title I existed before the Department of Education and would likely be administered through a different department if the agency were shuttered.
As with other federal involvement, we have no evidence that Title I has been effective overall. For example, the Nation’s Report Card has for decades shown a consistent achievement gap between economically disadvantaged and non-economically-disadvantaged students.
There has been talk of changing how Title I is distributed to improve its effectiveness. One option is converting the funding to block grants that states could administer with fewer strings. This would put decision-making power closer to the students who are impacted by these decisions and enable state leaders to direct funds where they see the most need. It would be an improvement over the current Washington-based system.
Better still would be to bypass the states and convert the funding to scholarships, enabling parents to choose the educational support that their children need. Ultimately, there’s no constitutional role for the federal government when it comes to education, which makes sense given the impossibility of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., knowing what’s best for children in, say, Pennsylvania.
One of us was formerly a teacher and principal in Johnstown public schools and is now the principal of Bishop McCort Catholic School, also in Johnstown. He has dealt with Title I firsthand in both environments and seen the problems caused by the red tape and lack of flexibility with the funding. He’s confident that dismantling the Department of Education — and making any federal funds portable so parents could choose the best environment for their children — is the best way to support the students served by Title I.
Parents over bureaucracy
And that’s the bottom line when it comes to education. Parents are better at making decisions for their children than federal bureaucrats. Pennsylvania public schools spent nearly $22,000 per student in 2022-23 (the latest data available). In the Greater Johnstown School District, per-pupil spending was more than $23,000. Yet 82% of students scored below proficient in math, and 77% scored below proficient in English. Imagine what parents could do if they could direct even half of that funding to the educational option that worked better for their kids.
Dismantling the U.S. Department of Education will not destroy education, but it may put a dent in the public schooling bureaucracy. Despite the fearmongering of people who work in the system, less bureaucracy and more freedom for parents and students are good things.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPennsylvania and made available via RealClearWire.
‘Less Generals, More GIs’: Hegseth Orders Reduction In High-Ranking General And Flag Officers
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo Monday that aims to reduce the number of four-star generals and flag officers in the U.S. military. This directive “is a historic one, and it’s in keeping with President Trump’s commitment to achieving peace through strength,” Hegseth said in a video message announcing the order. “We’re gonna shift […]Woke wordplay warps language — and the meaning of freedom
Someone just sent me a Passover greeting that traced the arc of tyranny from the ancient pharaohs to our current “dictator” in the White House. The message left little to the imagination: Donald Trump, apparently, is the modern-day pharaoh.
The sender works, unsurprisingly, in our state bureaucracy in Harrisburg. She was happy as a lark during Joe Biden’s “compassionate” presidency, but now seethes at his swamp-draining successor.
This isn’t a debate over rights. It’s a collision between incompatible worldviews.
In the past, I might have written her back. I might have reminded her who actually weaponized the federal government against political opponents. I might have pointed to the sweeping executive orders, the censorship collusion, and the criminalization of dissent that flourished under the true despotism of President Joe.
Unlike Biden and his handlers, Trump has made his intentions clear — and he’s doing what he promised. Transparency used to matter in politics. Apparently not any more.
I might also have noted the waste, incompetence, and embedded corruption in the federal bureaucracy, including the office that cuts her checks. The Department of Government Efficiency was not a stunt. It was a necessary start. And its housecleaning is long overdue.
Different ideological universes
I’ve come to realize that trying to debate this acquaintance would be pointless. We’d only talk past each other. Words don’t mean the same thing to both of us. It’s not that I believe in “freedom” or “constitutional government” and she doesn’t. It’s that the definitions we assign to those words are so radically different that even if we used the same language, we wouldn’t truly agree.
This insight came into focus while reading A. James Gregor’s “The Ideology of Fascism,” a book that sheds valuable light on political semantics. Gregor notes that fascists and communists genuinely believed in their own concepts of “democracy” and “freedom.” They weren’t just twisting the language — they inhabited entirely different ideological universes. And so, certain political divisions can’t be bridged. The terms are familiar, but the meanings diverge.
To the woke left, for instance, it seems entirely reasonable to remove children from parents who “misgender” them or who insist on using biologically accurate pronouns. In their framework, punishing such offenses against identity isn’t oppressive — it’s the fulfillment of authentic freedom. The law, they argue, is merely shielding the vulnerable from unnecessary psychological harm.
This isn’t a debate over rights. It’s a collision between incompatible worldviews.
A new left lexicon
It’s apparently ignorant — or worse — to define “fascism” narrowly, as something confined to the interwar European dictatorships. According to today’s progressive orthodoxy, fascism now flourishes wherever LGBTQ guidelines aren’t strictly followed or wherever anyone dares to advocate for a less “compassionate” form of government — say, one that distinguishes between citizens and undocumented migrants.
The logic, such as it is, goes something like this: Germany once drew sharp legal lines, and look where that led — tyranny and genocide. Ergo, any policy that establishes firm national boundaries or citizenship norms must be a step toward fascism.
Meanwhile, “oligarch” no longer refers to the mega-wealthy class in general. As I’ve gathered from watching MSNBC, an oligarch is now anyone who donates to MAGA Republicans or refuses to get rid of a Tesla after learning that Elon Musk is a “fascist.”
Likewise, the label “white nationalist” has been repurposed to apply to any MAGA-aligned Republican who fails to support the Democrats’ latest campaign against “white nationalism.” Trump’s support for voter ID laws or efforts to deport criminal illegal aliens? Those too, we’re told, reek of white nationalism — never mind that many of the ICE agents enforcing those policies have dark skin. That detail is irrelevant because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
What many on my side view as a sprawling, wasteful, and unconstitutional bureaucracy, our political opponents treat as the very embodiment of constitutional government. The Constitution they revere is not the one written in Philadelphia. It is a “living document” — one that demands a constantly expanding class of civil servants to fulfill the goals of “democracy,” which now include identity politics, lifestyle diversity, and environmental dogma.
Trump, in their view, is a modern pharaoh not because he consolidates power but because he makes life harder for the benevolent bureaucracy. He obstructs the compassionate machinery of the state. Worse, he sows “chaos” — unlike the Democrats, who have dutifully welcomed millions of illegal migrants to enrich America with fresh waves of sanctioned diversity.
Liberty’s language hijacked
None of this is to say that millions don’t cynically exploit these twisted definitions of political virtue. Nor am I suggesting a moral relativism. I know where I stand. But it’s clear that large numbers of voters have swallowed these ideological rebrandings whole. And when basic political terms no longer mean the same thing to both sides, meaningful debate becomes nearly impossible.
Western Europe now offers a sobering example. Countries across the continent have begun curtailing freedom of expression — not in spite of democracy but in its name. To those driving this trend in what we still, somewhat naively, call the “free world,” there is no contradiction between repression and the preservation of liberty.
Even European governments that our own vice president has scolded for their illiberal tendencies insist they are safeguarding democracy and freedom. Against what? Against such “reactionary” threats as national sovereignty, religious conviction, and traditional gender norms.
Even worse, a growing number of voters in both Europe and the United States agree. The language of liberty has been hijacked to justify its opposite. And for now, the hijackers have no shortage of passengers willing to go along for the ride.
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