Teens Who Attacked DOGE’s ‘Big Balls’ Let Off With Probation Sentence
'Be ready for the consequences'
While the lights are off, let’s rewire the government
The United States faces an existential threat from the accelerating military power of communist China — a buildup fueled by decades of massive economic expansion. If America intends to counter Beijing’s ambitions, it must grow faster, leaner, and more efficient. Economic strength is national security.
The ongoing government shutdown may not be popular, but it gives President Trump a rare opportunity to make good on his campaign pledge to drain — and redesign — “the swamp.” Streamlining the federal government isn’t just good politics. It’s a matter of survival.
A government that builds wealth rather than expands debt can out-produce China, sustain deterrence, and restore the American ideal of self-government.
George Washington ran the nation with four Cabinet departments: war, treasury, state, and the attorney general. The Department of the Interior came later, followed by the Department of Agriculture, added by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 when America was an agrarian power.
The modern Cabinet, by contrast, is a bureaucratic junkyard built more in reaction to political problems than by design. The Labor Department was carved from the Commerce Department to appease the unions. Lyndon Johnson invented the Department of Transportation. Jimmy Carter established the Department of Energy in response to the Arab oil embargo. The Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence emerged after 9/11.
The result is a patchwork of agencies wired together with duct tape, overlap, and patronage. A government designed for crisis management has become a permanent crisis unto itself.
Enter the Department of National Economy
A return to first principles starts with a single question: How can we accelerate American productivity?
The answer: consolidate. Merge the Departments of Commerce, Labor, Agriculture, Transportation, and Energy into a Department of National Economy. One Cabinet secretary, five undersecretaries, one mission: to expand the flow of goods and services that generate national wealth.
The new department’s motto should be a straightforward question: What did your enterprise do today to increase the wealth of the United States?
Fewer bureaucracies mean fewer fiefdoms, less redundancy, and enormous cost savings. Synergy replaces stovepipes. The government’s economic engine becomes a single machine instead of six competing engines running on taxpayer fuel.
Fold Homeland Security into the Coast Guard
Homeland Security should be absorbed by the U.S. Coast Guard, which already functions as a paramilitary force with both military and police authority, much like Italy’s Carabinieri. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, DHS personnel would share discipline, training, and accountability.
FEMA would cease to be a dumping ground for political hacks. Any discrimination in disaster aid — such as punishing Trump voters — would trigger a court-martial.
The Secret Service would focus solely on protective duties, handing its financial-crime work to the FBI. The secretary of the Coast Guard would gain a seat in the Cabinet.
Restoring intelligence to the OSS model
The Office of Director of National Intelligence should be re-established as the Office of Strategic Services, commanded by a figure in the tradition of Major General “Wild Bill” Donovan. Elements of U.S. Special Operations Command would be seconded to the new OSS, reviving its World War II lineage.
All intelligence agencies — CIA, DIA, FBI, the State Department, DEA, and the service branches — should share common foundational training. The current decline in discipline and capability at the National Intelligence University, worsened by the DEI policies of its leadership, demands urgent correction. Diversity cannot come at the expense of competence.
RELATED: Memo to Hegseth: Our military’s problem isn’t only fitness. It’s bad education.
Law enforcement and the flat tax
At the Department of Justice, dissolve the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Shift alcohol and tobacco oversight to the DEA, firearms and explosives to the U.S. Marshals.
Let the DEA also absorb the Food and Drug Administration, which would become its research and standards division.
Return the FBI to pure investigation — armed but without arrest powers. Enforcement should rest with the U.S. Marshals. Counterintelligence would move to the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, reinforced by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
The IRS should be dismantled and replaced with a small agency built around a flat-tax model such as the Hall-Rabushka plan.
Move the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response to Homeland Security. Send its Office of Climate Change and Health Equity to NOAA — or eliminate it entirely.
At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, expand the inspector general’s office tenfold and pay bonuses for rooting out fraud.
Restoring deterrence
The Pentagon needs its own overhaul. Because of China’s rapid military buildup, the Air Force’s Global Strike Command should be separated from U.S. Strategic Command and report directly to the secretary of war and the president under its historic name — Strategic Air Command.
Submarines and silos are invisible; bombers are not. Deterrence depends on visibility. A line of B-1s, B-2s, B-52s, and 100 new B-21 Raider stealth bombers, all bearing the mailed-fist insignia of the old SAC, would send an unmistakable message to Beijing.
Toward a leaner republic
With Trump back in the White House, this moment is ripe for radical efficiency. A government that builds wealth rather than expands debt can out-produce China, sustain deterrence, and restore the American ideal of self-government.
George Washington’s government fit inside a single carriage. We won’t return to that scale — but we can rediscover that spirit. A lean, unified, strategically organized government would make wealth creation easier, limit bureaucratic overreach, and preserve the republic for the long fight ahead.
Government grinds to a halt after Democrats force first shutdown in 6 years
While congressional Democrats continue to dig their heels in, the federal government has officially shut down for the first time in over half a decade.
The government shut down at midnight on October 1 after Democrats continuously blocked the Republican-led funding bill in the Senate. The GOP's funding bill is a clean, 91-page continuing resolution with no partisan anomalies. The only new provision in the Republican bill is a bipartisan provision that boosts security funding for politicians in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's horrific assassination.
'The ball is in the Democrats’ court.'
Rather than passing the clean bipartisan resolution, Democrats have insisted on ramming through their $1.5 trillion funding bill that reverses every meaningful legislative accomplishment Congress passed earlier in the year with President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Some of these Democratic priorities include continuing $350 billion worth of Biden-era subsidies, reviving federal funds for PBS and NPR, and reinstating public health care benefits for illegal aliens.
"House Republicans passed the SAME clean, nonpartisan CR that Chuck Schumer himself voted for back in March — and called 'the right thing to do,'" Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wrote in a post on X. "The ONLY thing that’s changed since then is pressure from his base to close down the government. That’s not leadership, it’s cowardice."
RELATED: White House dares Democrats with nuclear response to looming shutdown
"The ball is in the Democrats’ court," Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said in a post on X. "But Chuck Schumer wants a Schumer shutdown."
The House previously passed the GOP's continuing resolution in a 217-212 vote, with just one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, joining Republicans to keep the government open. Republican Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana voted against the bill.
The Senate eventually took up both the Republicans' clean CR and the Democrats' hyper-partisan funding bill on Tuesday, both of which failed. Although Republicans enjoy a supermajority in Congress, the CR needs 60 votes to pass the Senate. Assuming all 53 Republicans vote for the bill, at least seven Democrats will have to cave to reopen the government.
Notably, Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania as well as independent Sen. Angus King of Maine voted in favor of the Republican funding bill. One GOP senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted against it. Both bills will be up for a vote again in the Senate on Wednesday.
Although shutdowns have historically proven to be unpopular, Republicans are seizing the opportunity to continue implementing the MAGA mandate.
Ahead of the shutdown, Russell Vought's Office of Management and Budget began circulating a memo directing different agencies to identify programs whose funding would lapse following the shutdown and to begin drafting reduction in force notices for employees who would be affected.
As of this writing, Vought announced that roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been halted to "ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles."
"It is unclear how long Democrats will maintain their untenable posture, making the duration of the shutdown difficult to predict," Vought wrote in a memo released Tuesday. "Regardless, employees should report to work for their next regularly scheduled tour of duty to undertake orderly shutdown activities. We will issue another memorandum indicating that government functions should resume once the president has signed a bill providing for appropriations."
To Vought's point, it remains unclear how long Democrats will allow the government to stay closed. The last shutdown began on December 22, 2018, during Trump's first term, after Congress failed to approve a spending package that included funding for Trump's border wall. The shutdown lasted 35 days, the longest in history.
The government eventually reopened on January 25, 2019, after Congress reached a deal to pass a temporary spending bill without border funding, and Trump signed it.
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Trump Should Take Down The American Medical Association’s Licensing Grift
As a government-backed, overtly left-wing monopoly, the AMA no longer deserves a privileged role in the country’s health ecosystem.The WILDEST deep-state story the mainstream media won’t tell you
On paper, the U.S. Institute of Peace does exactly what its name suggests: It promotes peace and conflict resolution in global conflict zones.
But dig a little deeper into its operations, and it becomes clear that the quasi-governmental, quasi-private agency is a deep-state snake pit. According to newly appointed acting President Darren Beattie, the USIP pushed to restore the opium trade in Taliban-run Afghanistan, had former Taliban member Mohammad Halimi on its payroll, and attempted to destroy evidence during a chaotic takeover by the Department of Government Efficiency.
Beattie recently joined Glenn on “The Glenn Beck Program” to share the shocking details.
When the DOGE infiltrated the USIP in March of this year, the agency erupted into chaos.
“They barricaded themselves in the offices. They sabotaged the physical infrastructure of the building. There were reports of there being loaded guns within offices. There was one hostage situation where they held a security guard under basically kind of a false imprisonment-type situation,” says Beattie.
“In the course of all of that, they tried to delete a terabyte of data, of accounting information that would indicate what kind of stuff they were up to, what kind of people they were paying.”
Thankfully, the DOGE was still able to uncover a major scandal: “One of the people on their payroll was this curious figure who had a prominent role in the Taliban government,” says Beattie, referring to Halimi.
On top of that, the DOGE discovered that “that one of the U.S. Institute of Peace's main policy agendas was basically lamenting the fact that the opium trade had dissipated under Taliban leadership.”
“They had multiple reports coming out basically saying 'this is horrible that the opium trade has diminished under the Taliban. We need to find some way to restore it,'” says Beattie.
When ProPublica got hold of Halimi’s story, it published a twisted piece titled “DOGE Targeted Him on Social Media. Then the Taliban Took His Family,” in which authors Avi Asher-Schapiro and Christopher Bing argued that Halimi was an “exiled Afghan scholar” victimized by Elon Musk and the DOGE, alleging that the payments he received from USIP were for legitimate work.
“I'm not an expert on this particular person's history, but what's very clear is he was a former Taliban guy, and he was probably one of these people who was playing all sides,” says Beattie.
He points out that the USIP’s hostile behavior upon the DOGE’s arrival stands in stark contrast to ProPublica’s narrative. If the payments were legitimate and Halimi had nothing to hide, then why the scrambling to delete data?
“This is the real deep-state stuff that I think bothers people so much,” says Glenn. “We expect our CIA to do stuff … but when it's in the State Department, when every department is pushing out money to NGOs to overthrow governments and everything else, it's out of control.”
To hear more details from the story, watch the video above.
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23 attorneys general call on EPA's Lee Zeldin to defund radical climate science institute
Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has been an instrumental figure in dismantling the climate science regime during the second Trump administration, including major funding cuts in partnership with the Department of Government Efficiency. Now, nearly half of the states' attorneys general have called on Zeldin to strike at the head of another climate institution: the Environmental Law Institute.
Headed by Attorney General Austin Knudsen of Montana and signed by 22 other state AGs, the letter calls on Zeldin to cut funding grants for the Environmental Law Institute, which operates the Climate Judiciary Project.
'The Environmental Law Institute's Climate Judiciary Project is using woke climate propaganda, under the guise of what they call "neutral" education, to persuade judges and push their wildly unpopular agenda through the court system.'
The letter says that ELI "received approximately 13% of its revenue in 2023 and 8.4% in 2024" from federal grants and appears to expect this funding to continue, according to its financial records.
RELATED: Trump targets 2009 EPA climate rule in bold regulatory shift
"As attorney general, I refuse to stand by while Americans' tax dollars fund radical environmental training for judges across the country. The Environmental Law Institute's Climate Judiciary Project is using woke climate propaganda, under the guise of what they call 'neutral' education, to persuade judges and push their wildly unpopular agenda through the court system," Knudsen said in a statement obtained by Blaze News.
The Climate Judiciary Project, the letter continues, has a clear mission: "Lobby judges in order to make climate change policy through the courts."
The Climate Judiciary Project claims it "is a first-of-its-kind effort that provides judges with authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science, the impacts of climate change, and the ways climate science is arising in the law. Since its creation in 2018, the Climate Judiciary Project estimates that it has hosted more than 50 events and trained more than 2,000 judges."
The revelations about ELI make clear that it is not shy about political lobbying.
Jason Isaac, the CEO of the American Energy Institute, said in a statement obtained by Blaze News: "Its curriculum is developed by climate alarmist allies of the plaintiffs and delivered to judges behind closed doors. Public funds should never be used to finance political advocacy disguised as judicial education."
Many supporters of this move have cited legal and ethical concerns as well as issues with consumer protection. "As we have long warned, the left has a plan to reshape American society by using lawsuits in courts all across the country, especially in places like Hawaii and other coastal enclaves. The new wave of revelations about ELI is further concerning evidence of how committed the left is to imposing mandatory Progressive Lifestyle Choices through this courtroom maneuvering and how big a threat it really is to all our ways of life," O.H. Skinner, the executive director of Alliance for Consumers, said.
The letter was signed by the attorneys general of Montana, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The signatories are calling on Zeldin to have the EPA "cancel any on-going grants to ELI and ensure that ELI does not receive any future grants while it is sponsoring the Climate Judiciary Project."
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State Department isn't buying ProPublica's sob story about Taliban alumnus whose funding was exposed by DOGE
ProPublica — an investigative journalist outfit that has received donations from Laurene Powell Jobs and her leftist Emerson Collective, from George Soros' Foundation to Promote Open Society, and from Crankstart Foundation, Lincoln Project donor Michael Moritz's family foundation — ran a sob story on Friday about a so-called "Afghan scholar" whose receipt of American funds through the U.S. Institute of Peace was exposed earlier this year by the Department of Government Efficiency.
The liberal publication tried to paint former Taliban official Mohammad Qasem Halimi as a victim, the work he did as "routine" yet "ambiguous," DOGE's publicization of Halimi's financial link to the U.S. as irresponsible, and the DOGE worker who briefly controlled USIP as inept.
The game the establishment media is playing is 'an insult to our nation.'
ProPublica's concern-mongering has not found resonance at the Trump State Department, which is aware that Halimi was part of the regime that harbored the terrorists who attacked America on 9/11.
In a Monday statement to Rikki Ratliff-Fellman, executive producer for Glenn Beck, the department defended cutting off Halimi, reiterated that he was indeed a former Taliban member, and underscored that the game the establishment media is playing is "an insult to our nation."
Quick background
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 19 aimed at reducing the scope of the federal bureaucracy.
Among the federal entities that the Trump administration subsequently worked to shutter or scale down was the USIP, a think tank with an apparent problem with political bias and a budget last year of $55 million.
RELATED: America First foreign policy gets an Office of Natural Rights
The Trump administration canned 10 voting members of the USIP board of directors along with the institute's president, former Clinton official George Moose; terminated nearly all of the institute's staff and activities around the world; had elements of the DOGE take over the institute's headquarters; and transferred USIP's property to the General Services Administration.
Fired members of the board sued on March 18 to prevent a housecleaning at the USIP, claiming the wind-down was a "lawless assault." Although an Obama judge declared in May that the changes at the federal entity were "null and void," the D.C. Court of Appeals stayed the lower court's ruling.
DOGE highlights Taliban link
Following its takeover of USIP headquarters and just hours after notifying Halimi of his contract's termination, the DOGE shared some of its findings in March 31 on X, noting, "USIP contracts (now cancelled) include: — $132,000 to Mohammad Qasem Halimi, an ex-Taliban member who was Afghanistan's former Chief of Protocol."
According to Halimi's bio on the Doha Forum site, "he is the former Minister of Hajj and Religious Affairs in Afghanistan" and "was assigned as a Deputy Justice Minister of Technical and Professional Affairs in 2017."
That bio omits any mention of Halimi's arrest and detention by American forces from 2002 to 2003 at Bagram Air Base or his time with the Taliban.
Deutsche Welle reported that Halimi went to work for the Taliban in 1998, working first in its foreign ministry, then becoming chief of protocol.
'This is real. We don't encounter that in most agencies.'
"I don't deny that I supported the Taliban," Halimi told DW. "I had a very good time in the Foreign Office. It was really the best time in my life. Back then, Afghanistan really needed the Taliban."
Halimi spoke glowingly about Mullah Mohammad Omar, the first leader of the Taliban who offered sanctuary to Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden both before and after the 9/11 attacks, stating, "I cannot say it any differently today than I said it back then: Afghanistan needed Mullah Omar back then."
RELATED: The Islamification of America is well under way
Speaking to DW in 2017, Halimi stated, "To this day I still have friendly relations with the Taliban" — an organization Secretary of State Marco Rubio is looking at for a possible foreign terrorist organization designation.
Halimi reportedly switched sides after his release by American forces.
The USIP contract for this friend of the Taliban was mentioned again in an April 1 post on X, which was shared by Elon Musk and ultimately went massively viral.
The caption on the corresponding post read: "With help from the FBI and Metro Police DOGE was able to access the agency and discovered massive fraud, waste and abuse-including payments to Taliban and Iraq."
The following month, a DOGE staffer told "Jesse Watters Primetime" in a May 1 group interview, "We found that [USIP] were spending money on things like private jets, and they even had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban. This is real. We don't encounter that in most agencies."
Tears for the Taliban
According to ProPublica, Taliban security forces allegedly beat and temporarily imprisoned members of Halimi's family just days after news of his USIP funding was brought to light.
Blaze News has reached out to Afghanistan's Ministries of Interior Affairs and Foreign Affairs for comment.
While the alleged violence was perpetrated by Halimi's former comrades, the liberal publication characterized the Trump administration's public recognition of Halimi's Taliban link and exposure of his supposedly benign USIP contract as an "attack" — an attack that former State Department and White House officials supposedly said was "not only absurd, but also dangerous."
ProPublica, which downplayed Halimi's Taliban past and highlighted his work with the former Karzai government, complained that after this "attack," Halimi is now without work and "wonders how he will support his wife and children and whether there’s any chance he can clear his name."
'An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt.'
"Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?" Halimi said to ProPublica. "Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed."
Whereas the liberal publication proved eager to portray the former Taliban official as a sympathetic character, the publication alternatively characterized Nate Cavanaugh — the former DOGE staffer who worked ardently to expose the rot at USIP, briefly served as its president, and canceled Halimi's contact — as a privileged incompetent.
The publication noted, for example, that Cavanaugh: is a "28-year-old college dropout"; "had nothing in his background to suggest he would be chosen to wind down an international conflict-resolution agency"; started two companies that haven't "successfully" taken off; and "comes from a wealthy family."
Cavanaugh — whom Blaze News has reached out to for comment — apparently made no apologies for carrying out the task President Donald Trump mandated him to do.
"An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt," said Cavanaugh.
Cavanaugh's successor similarly appears not to be panged by ProPublica's sympathies for the Taliban alumnus.
Darren Beattie, undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department and acting president of USIP, said in a statement to Ratliff-Fellman, "Under President Trump's February 19 Executive Order, the United States Institute of Peace was directed to reduce operations to its statutory minimum — ending, among other things, a contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi."
"The idea of funding former Taliban members on one hand, and publicly lamenting the Taliban’s success in reducing Afghanistan’s opium production on the other, highlights the schizophrenic and dangerous approach to 'conflict resolution' adopted by USIPs previous leadership," continued Beattie. "The fact that the establishment media defends using taxpayer dollars this way is an insult to our nation and the heroes who have fought to protect it."
Beattie added, "Above all, this underscores President Trump’s resolve to end the weaponization of government, cut off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peace-building programs that end up undermining our national security."
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