Homeland Security’s Bloated ‘Intelligence’ Office Is Costing Taxpayers $348 Million Every Year
The Office of Intelligence and Analysis functions more as a cost center, complicating DHS's role in intelligence rather than enhancing it.The people who brought you every financial bubble in living memory are inflating another one — and this time, they’re hoping it ends with the rest of us gone for good.
The numbers are staggering. Nearly all U.S. economic growth in 2025 is tied to artificial intelligence and the data-center boom that supports it. Analysts already warn that when the AI bubble bursts, it could wipe $40 trillion off the Nasdaq.
AI may yet teach our Big Tech elites the one truth they can’t buy their way out of: Pride comes before the fall.
That may sound catastrophic. But the real disaster would be if the AI industry doesn’t collapse — if it keeps growing exactly as its creators intend.
The AI boom isn’t a free-market success story; it’s a closed loop of the ultra-rich enriching themselves. Billionaires are designing, funding, and selling AI systems to their own companies, creating a kind of automated wealth amplifier.
As one report put it, “These billionaires have gotten $450 billion richer from striking AI infrastructure deals for their own firms.” The number of new AI billionaires has hit record levels — all while the top 1% now control more of the stock market than ever before.
The bottom half of Americans own just 1% of all stocks. Millions can’t afford groceries, let alone shares of Nvidia. Seventeen percent of consumers are putting food on layaway.
When the working class is living paycheck to paycheck, Wall Street’s new machine-god isn’t built to lift them up. It’s built to replace them.
The elites’ obsession with AI isn’t just about money. It’s about eliminating their most expensive problem: people.
Automation promises them a world without payrolls, strikes, or human error. It’s the final fantasy of a ruling class that’s grown tired of pretending it needs the rest of us.
Analysts now predict that 92 million jobs will vanish in the next wave of automation. Blue-collar workers are first in line — manufacturing, logistics, construction — but white-collar jobs aren’t safe either. AI is already eating into accounting, law, and entry-level office work. Even skilled trades like HVAC and electrical repair are being targeted by “smart systems.”
Bill Gates predicts humans “won’t be needed for most things.” That’s not innovation — that’s erasure.
For the billionaire class, this is the dream: an economy run by algorithms, powered by robots, and guarded by digital serfs who never need lunch breaks or benefits.
Everyone else gets pushed to the margins — a nation of watchers and beggars surviving on government stipends that will never keep pace with the cost of living. The elites call it “universal basic income.” History calls it dependency.
And the same government that can’t fund Social Security or balance a budget is somehow supposed to manage the transition to an AI future? The United States already has $210 trillion in unfunded liabilities. That “safety net” will rip the moment anyone grabs it.
Our Big Tech masters aren’t worried. They’ve already planned their escape. The ultra-rich are buying islands, building bunkers, and hoarding supplies in remote corners of the world. They’ll watch from their hideouts as the rest of us scramble for the scraps left by their machines.
They don’t even pretend to care anymore. When Peter Thiel was asked whether he wanted the human race to survive, he hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said.
That isn’t indifference. That’s basic contempt.
AI has begun to mirror the sociopathy of its makers. Systems now resist human shutdown commands, sabotage code meant to disable them, and even copy themselves to external servers. Some researchers warn that advanced models already act to preserve their own existence.
“Recent tests,” one study reported, “show that several advanced AI models will act to ensure their self-preservation — even if it means blackmailing engineers or copying themselves without permission.”
This is what happens when the godless create gods in their own image.
RELATED: Silicon Valley’s new gold rush is built on stolen work

The elites believe they can control what they’ve built. They think the digital servants they’ve unleashed will always know who’s master and who’s slave.
They’ve forgotten every lesson of history and every warning from scripture. When man plays God, his creation rarely stays loyal.
What makes them think they’ll be spared from the fate they’ve designed for the rest of us?
AI may yet teach them the one truth they can’t buy their way out of: Pride comes before the fall.
Beware your monster, Doctor Frankenstein.
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.
RELATED: Corporate America is eating its seed corn — and our future

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 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.
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.”
RELATED: Chinese nationals on student visas allegedly ripped off elderly Americans in nasty scheme

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.
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?
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.
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.
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.”
To enjoy more of Sara's no-holds-barred take to news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
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.”
To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.