If Intel gets government cash, taxpayers deserve equity



The Trump administration has negotiated a 10% federal stake in Intel in exchange for the disbursement of $8.9 billion of grants originally allocated by Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act.

First, let me offer a disclaimer: I disapprove.

If companies don’t want their equity diluted, then they should not have the option of taking taxpayer money.

Not of the Trump administration’s negotiation — but of the fact that this money was ever appropriated in the first place. The CHIPS Act was a redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to corporations. What Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are doing is simply making the best of a bad deal.

If Intel had raised this capital on Wall Street, it would’ve had to sell debt or dilute its shareholders. This is not popular among free-market conservatives because this is not how capitalism is supposed to work.

In free-market capitalism, Congress would never have appropriated $8.9 billion to Intel. Therefore, we are no longer talking about free-market capitalism. If Intel is accepting capital injections, its existing shareholders deserve to have their equity diluted.

Moreover, the government’s 10% share of Intel will be nonvoting stock. The federal government will not have management control. It will just hold a passive ownership share — something it can sell down the line to recoup what taxpayers were forced to spend.

The core issue of this deal is the redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to corporations. Yet much of the pearl-clutching among “free-market” conservatives is about the stock ownership, not about the massive taxpayer grants to corporations.

“Not long ago,” the Wall Street Journal groaned, “it would have been hard to imagine a Republican president demanding government ownership in a private company, but here we are.”

Oh, please. Before George W. Bush, I couldn’t imagine a Republican president bailing out Wall Street either. But the Journal didn’t seem to mind when its banking buddies got billions in bailouts with no strings attached, which was also footed by “we, the taxpayers.” That is much more offensive to me than the taxpayers taking a nonvoting equity share of a company that is appropriated by my tax dollars.

The Journal forgets how “principled” conservatives defended Bush’s $700 billion handout to the very institutions that caused the 2008 financial crisis. In return, those banks gave the government preferredstock, which didn’t have voting rights either — but did give the government first dibs on dividends and liquidation. That’s ownership.

Even better, Bush’s Treasury also demanded warrants — rights to convert into common stock down the line. If Trump had exercised those warrants in his first term, the federal government could have taken actual equity in Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and the rest.

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Photo by Kwangmoozaa via Getty Images

National Review is up in arms too. Its editorial board — which tried to get us Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris — scolded Trump’s plan like it was some socialist scheme:

Looking at that sad situation, the Trump administration wants a piece of the action. Rather, it wants to use your money to get a piece of the action.

The White House said it was entertaining the U.S. taking a 10 percent stake in Intel, a roughly $10 billion investment at the company’s current valuation. A government $37 trillion in debt and running a $2 trillion deficit has no business playing investment manager with even more borrowed money. And the idea that what Intel really needs to fix its long-running problems is the managerial genius of the federal government is laughable.

That is deeply dishonest. Trump and Bessent negotiated about money already allocated to Intel by Congress under Joe Biden. They did not propose new spending. What’s more, the 10% equity stake does not give the Trump administration governance rights over Intel.

We’ve seen this play before with EV handouts. In 2024, the Department of Energy approved an $80 million grant to Blue Bird to manufacture electric school buses. Trump froze those appropriated funds. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) threw a fit, demanding the money get released.

If Blue Bird gets that $80 million, then taxpayers should have an equity share in Blue Bird, and the ownership of its current stockholders should be diluted accordingly. This isn’t a free market. It’s crony capitalism — or worse, corporate communism with the redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to publicly traded companies. If they don’t want their equity diluted, then they should not be taking taxpayer money.

I’ll let Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have the final word. “We should get an equity stake for our money,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “So we’ll deliver the money, which was already committed under the Biden administration. We’ll get equity in return for it.”

The real fraud in higher ed: Universities need that Chinese money



The universities preaching that America is structurally racist now say they need international students to survive. Sad but true.

President Trump on Monday floated a proposal that has conservatives buzzing. Just before meeting with the president of South Korea, while discussing trade negotiations with China, Trump suggested that the deal might include allowing 600,000 Chinese students to attend American universities.

Instead of winning hearts and minds, universities would be exporting American self-loathing. Why should taxpayers fund that?

I’ve learned not to sprint ahead of Trump’s negotiations. He often uses public remarks as part of the bargaining table — dangling outrageous possibilities to shove the other side into error. And inconveniently for his critics, it usually works. Still, this one deserves a closer look.

Universities built on sand

As a professor at Arizona State University, the nation’s largest state school, I see firsthand how fragile higher education has become. Universities increasingly depend on international students to prop up their budgets. They reorient themselves not around local students but around foreign ones, reshaping programs and communications to make sure outsiders feel at home.

ASU boasts 195,000 students. Yet when the semester began, the university’s homepage highlighted international arrivals, not Arizona students. The welcome-back email did the same. Arizona families — the taxpayers who actually fund the place — were treated as an afterthought.

Administrators justify this by pointing to economic contributions, diversity, and talent. But native students notice the slight. Parents notice it too. The message is clear: Tuition dollars matter more than the citizens who built these schools. ASU may call itself the “New American University,” but more often it presents itself as the “No Longer American University.”

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Moor Studio via iStock/Getty Images

A house of cards

Here’s the truth: Many American universities cannot survive without international tuition checks.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted as much on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, saying the bottom 15% of U.S. colleges would simply shut down without that revenue. Universities have operated like Ponzi schemes, built on the illusion that enrollment growth never ends. But as American students tire of being hectored with radical political agendas, growth slows and the budgets collapse.

The U.S. already hosts about 270,000 Chinese students, not counting tens of thousands more from India, South Korea, and elsewhere. ASU alone has 16,000 international students, down from 18,000 last year. Trump’s proposed deal would more than double the number of Chinese students nationwide overnight.

What are they learning?

Even if you grant the economic benefits, the bigger question — maybe the biggest — is: What sort of education would these 600,000 students receive?

We could introduce them to the greatness of the American experiment, the sweep of Western civilization, and the biblical truths that shaped both. We could even present the gospel to hundreds of thousands of students who may never have heard it before. That would be a noble exchange.

But that isn’t what happens on most campuses.

Drop them into a humanities classroom and they’ll be steeped in anti-racism, DEI dogma, LGBTQ activism, “decolonizing the curriculum,” and the thesis that America and the West are irredeemably wicked. Instead of winning hearts and minds, universities would be exporting American self-loathing — either by turning foreign students into residents who despise their host country or sending them home as ambassadors of contempt.

Why should American taxpayers fund that?

A higher-ed reckoning

Universities like ASU showcase international students while sidelining their own. They rely on foreign tuition to mask fiscal rot. And in exchange, they sell a curriculum that treats America as racist, the West as evil, and Christianity as oppressive.

No “economic benefit” offsets that catastrophic formula.

If American universities want to survive, they must first clean their own house.

  • Admit the harm caused by their reckless anti-America, anti-West, anti-Christian curriculum.
  • Abandon DEI dogma, corrosive identity politics, and “decolonized” philosophy.
  • Value American students — the citizens and taxpayers who fund these schools.
  • Reorient higher education toward the people of the states and communities that built it.
  • Teach again that we are created by God, equal in worth, and capable of knowing truth, goodness, and beauty.

Only then can we discuss whether more international students make sense. Until then, it is rich with irony: The same universities that teach contempt for America now admit they need foreign students to survive.

Jasmine Crockett funds lavish lifestyle off taxpayer dollars; staff calls her an ‘influencer’ and a ‘diva’



Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) has been heavily criticized by the right for changing her accent and persona based on who she’s speaking to — and now, not even her congressional aides can take it anymore.

“She is never in the office and is very disengaged. She does her b**ls**t that goes viral, and then freaks out over the most random things,” one aide told the New York Post.

“It is widely known that she’s not nice to staff and is just not a really dedicated member focused on constituents,” a second source said.

A third source who has worked with Crockett accused her of being “focused almost exclusively on being an influencer, not a member of Congress” and described her as “all diva, no wow.”


And apparently, when Crockett does go to the Hill, she forces her staffers to pick her up in rented vehicles — which she requires to be an Escalade or a similar higher-end vehicle. Most lawmakers allow their staff to pick them up in their own cars.

She then makes them open the door for her as she gets in the back seat.

“‘That’s the type of persona that I want to give the rest of the country,’” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales mocks on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.” “I mean, that is really embarrassing and that certainly is not indicative of someone who believes that they are there to serve the people.”

And that’s not even the worst of it.

According to the official congressional expense report for January through March of this year, her staff total was $293,198.61. Her travel total for those two months was $129,301. Other services totaled $18,679, rent/communication/utilities were $30,679, and her office was almost $383,000.

“Grand total, almost a million dollars. $854,313.75, just over a time of three months, which averages to $9,492.37 of your tax dollars spent per day,” Gonzales says.

“You see the way she carries on. You see the way she conducts herself,” she says, adding, “Of course she thinks that she’s entitled to all of that.”

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How George Soros and the 'deep state' funnel YOUR money to radical groups



The massive left-wing radical groups that wreak havoc on the country wouldn’t be so successful unless their pockets were full. And unfortunately, the reason their pockets are full is because the American people are unwittingly filling them with their tax dollars.

“You get Congress to allocate a whole bunch blindly, usually through these organizations. An insane allotment to government agencies,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck says, singling out the United States Agency for International Development and Department of State.

“The USAID money that was doled out to foreign recipients in 2023 alone, $4.17 billion,” Glenn explains. “The money is then moved from State and USAID to other trusted organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).”

Once the money is in one of those “trusted organizations," the money then somehow gets to people like George Soros and foundations like Open Society.


“Now, we know how your tax dollars spread a globalist progressive agenda regardless of who’s president. But knowing just this isn’t enough, we have to fill in this blank,” Glenn says, noting that the blank is between how the money flows from a trusted organization like the NED to Soros.

“So who do you audit? The CIA, the State Department, USAID? Well, yes, but if you stop there, the deep state lives on. We have to go deeper,” he continues.

This is where an organization like the Tides Foundation comes in.

“The Tides Foundation is receiving U.S. tax dollars,” Glenn says. “The entire purpose of Tides is to be a progressive left-wing dark money machine. It's money laundering. Legal, but money laundering nonetheless. You cannot trace money. Once it goes in, it goes dark. You can see what’s coming out, but you don’t know who’s giving it.”

“Leftist billionaires, organizations, they all donate to Tides specifically so their money can go dark. So why is the Tides Foundation getting tax dollars?” he asks, before showing that the Tides Foundation is also involved in the Tides Center.

“They’re spreading tax dollars to each other,” he explains, adding, “and then they spit out to places like Soros.”

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WashPost Dork Philip Bump Says Medicaid Isn’t Welfare If You Simply Don’t Call It Welfare

[rebelmouse-proxy-image https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-10-at-4.06.49 PM-e1752178280378-1200x675.png crop_info="%7B%22image%22%3A%20%22https%3A//thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-10-at-4.06.49%5Cu202fPM-e1752178280378-1200x675.png%22%7D" expand=1]It’s always a good time to identify the Washington Post’s Philip Bump as a duplicitous little dork, so let’s look at his latest column in which he argues that government-run health insurance for low-income individuals (and their unfortunate children) is not a form of welfare if you simply call it something else. Bump, who famously […]

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Glenn Beck: EVERY TAXPAYER ‘should be raising holy hell’



The cuts to Medicaid have Democrats scrambling for ways to fight back and keep draining the American people of their tax dollars, but Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t letting them get away with it.

“I don’t know if you understand this, or whether you’re just mouthing the Democratic talking points. The cuts to Medicaid are for fraud, waste, and abuse. And I'll tell you what that means,” RFK Jr. said to Representative Josh Harder (D-Calif.) in a congressional hearing.

“Because of DOGE, we were able to determine that there are a million people who are claiming Medicaid from multiple states. That’s illegal. It’s a theft. You’re not allowed to do that,” he continued, “these are the only cuts that are being made to Medicaid.”

“And guess what Gavin Newsom did? This morning, he said we’re going to take all the illegal aliens off the California Medicaid rolls because the feds aren’t spying for them anymore,” he added.


“This is RFK arguing with Democrats about Medicaid, fraud, abuse, and he’s saying ‘We’re just taking people off that are illegally using Medicaid,’” BlazeTV host Glenn Beck explains on “The Glenn Beck Program.”

“Who is against this, honestly?” Glenn asks. “Now, Gavin Newsom is putting everybody on California aid. Excuse me, California, how are you going to afford that? Every taxpayer left, right, and center, every taxpayer in California should be raising holy hell.”

“How are you going to pay for that?” he continues, adding, “Your state is going to collapse economically.”

However, Glenn is convinced this isn’t a mistake.

“That’s part of the plan,” Glenn says. “Overwhelm and collapse the system, and they’ve already done it. They did it in New York City back in the '70s, and New York City collapsed. Now, they’re doing it to states, and it’s going to happen the same way. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to send my taxpayer dollars to California.”

“You come to the United States of America, and you ask us to bail you out, and anybody in Congress that is from my state, I will make it my mission to put you out on the street, I will make it my mission if you vote to bail out California,” he warns.

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