1) Uncle Sam Spent $8 Million on Politico Subscriptions!
You may have heard the news out of DOGE and the White House that the feds spent $8 million last year on the leftist inside Washington news and gossip newspaper Politico and its affiliated publications. This has been apparently verified by USA Spending. No wonder the Politico founders are now multi-millionaires.
Like Trump, we wonder how much our bankrupt government spends on subscriptions to the Washington Post and the New York Times?
Ok, we at the HOTLINE have come up with an easy way to save the federal government more than $10 million a year.
Cancel all paid newspaper subscriptions and we pledge to send the HOTLINE to every single federal employee each morning - FOR FREE! And the government workers will learn a lot more about how the world really works.
Speaking of taxpayer ripoffs. We've never heard of a foundation grant that includes 60%+ for overhead, but that was the norm for federal research grants from the National Institutes of Health until this week:
Of course, the health establishment and the media howled in protest and misreported this as a cut to critical medical research - even though, for any given amount of funding, spending less on overhead means spending more on research.
Jay Greene of Heritage noted that "the biggest whopper came from a Washington Post story covering the NIH announcement with the headline: 'NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately' ... A more accurate headline would have been, 'NIH cuts billions in administrative expenses, allowing more to be spent on biomedical research.'"
Critics of the 15% cap do have one valid point - some of the spiraling overhead has been driven by federal regulations.
The good news is that Trump has already ordered the greatest deregulation in American history - and making universities sensitive to regulatory compliance costs instead of forcing taxpayers to absorb them can only help in that effort.
3) More Evidence That ESG Investment Was a Giant Fraud
We're proud at Unleash Prosperity that we did the first study grading investment firms that were ripping off their investors. But the left punched back and cited studies showing that ESG was good for investors. (That's almost a mathematical impossibility since investment mandates like this limit the universe of investment opportunities.).
It turns out that academia is finally catching up to this reality:
The Left and the media keep claiming that DOGE is only targeting left-wing pork and not programs that benefit conservatives.
But the Trump Transportation Department is ordering a halt to a $7.5 billion Biden program to build electric charging stations in all 50 states. The program passed almost four years ago, but has so far installed a total of just - count 'em - 55 stations. And guess who is one of the biggest beneficiaries of that historically wasteful boondoggle: Elon Musk and Tesla.
As we've reported many times on these pages, the original Biden goal was to have half a million chargers up and running by 2030. This is the program that former Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg will be defending (good luck!) when he runs for the U.S. Senate in Michigan next year.
Lawsuits are already being filed demanding that Trump "unfreeze" the pause that blocks federal money for chargers flowing to state agencies.
Musk's Tesla electric car company has received at least $31 million in federal funding for charging stations, or about 6% of the money already allocated. It also won't be happy with Trump revoking the 2021 Biden executive order that strived to make 50% of new vehicle sales electric or plug-in hybrids by 2030.
Will this stop progressives and the media from charging that Musk is using DOGE to make himself richer? Nah.
The lede sentence of a CNN "news" story this past weekend describes Elon Musk's DOGE as "the chaos-causing Department of Government Efficiency."
That is quite a pejorative for a news story supposedly based on facts not opinions, but at least CNN provided a link to "chaos-causing," to verify the accuracy of the charge, and so against our better judgment, we went ahead and clicked on it. Here's the story that popped up:
And guess who wrote that story? CNN's source was...itself. In other words, it must be true because we said it ourselves. So there you have it: the mainstream media admits it's just a giant echo chamber.
