Washington Free Beacon

The Biden administration doled out taxpayer-funded contracts to senior White House adviser Anita Dunn’s consulting firm to facilitate media training for former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg and other senior officials, according to federal spending data reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Some of the payments came around the same time Dunn left the White House to rejoin the firm—and publicly downplayed ethics concerns over the arrangement.

Federal agencies awarded Dunn’s firm, SKDK (formerly SKDKnickerbocker), more than $500,000 in contracts during the Biden administration, the data show. That includes a $50,000 contract in July 2021 to facilitate “media training” for then-transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg as he embarked on a nationwide tour to promote former president Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. One month after the Transportation Department awarded the contract to SKDK, in August 2021, Dunn relinquished her position as Biden’s senior communications adviser to once again lead the firm.

As a “special government employee,” Dunn was exempt from filing financial disclosures to the public. Her brief stint at the White House during the first year of the Biden administration raised concerns among ethics experts that she could have used her influence with the president to steer business to SKDK, the New York Times reported.

SKDK provided media training to Buttigieg and other Transportation Department administrators and officials as part of the contract, a department spokesperson told the Free Beacon. The contract expired in July 2022, by which time Dunn had again left the firm to serve a second stint in the White House as Biden’s senior communications adviser. Dunn left her White House gig in August 2024 to serve as a senior adviser to Future Forward, a Democratic super PAC that spent nearly $560 million propping up former vice president Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid.

The Transportation Department awarded the contract to Dunn’s firm as Buttigieg blanketed the airwaves during the early stages of the Biden administration and established himself as an omnipresent member of the former president’s cabinet.

Buttigieg logged countless appearances on television news programs in 2021 promoting Biden’s agenda, leading the press to speculate that the former small-town mayor could be the octogenarian’s successor in 2024 or 2028. But Buttigieg saw his star fall following a series of transportation scandals under his watch, including the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, widespread airline cancellations during the 2022 holiday season, and his ill-timed overseas vacation in August 2022 during tense negotiations with rail worker unions threatening catastrophic strikes.

The revelation that the Transportation Department used taxpayer funds to pay for “media training” comes as Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency aim to slash $1 trillion from the federal deficit by removing waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal bureaucracy and eliminating DEI programs and other liberal initiatives.

Buttigieg, who has moved to Michigan and is reportedly “taking a serious look” at running for the Senate seat that will be vacated by Sen. Gary Peters (D., Mich.) in 2026, has seen a resurgence in relevance for his attempts to connect DOGE’s efforts to a series of airline incidents in recent weeks, including the deadly helicopter collision with a passenger plane in Washington, D.C., in January that killed 67 people. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rebuked his predecessor on Tuesday, saying Buttigieg failed to upgrade the department’s ancient air traffic control systems and did not address the air traffic controller shortages during his four years leading the department.

The Transportation Department did not return a request for comment.

SKDK also brought in $18,000 for “executive media training” and “hearing preparation training” from the Department of Education in April and June 2021 under then-secretary Miguel Cardona, federal spending records show. The Department of Education did not return a request for comment.

The Smithsonian Institution also awarded SKDK two federal contracts in 2022 totaling $440,000 to provide “strategic communications services” for the institute’s African American Women’s History Museum.

SKDK did not return a request for comment.

SKDK wasn’t the only prominent Democratic communications consulting firm to receive taxpayer dollars from the Biden administration. The Education Department awarded $132,000 to Precision Strategies, a consulting firm founded in 2013 by former Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, in 2024 for public relations and communications services, according to USA Spending.

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In their most shocking propaganda display to date, Hamas terrorists paraded the coffins of two dead children, their mother, and an 83-year-old man through the streets of Gaza before throngs of cheering Palestinians.

The macabre scene unfolded on Thursday morning as Hamas returned the bodies of four Israeli captives who were held for more than 500 days: Shiri Bibas, 32; her two children, 4-year-old Ariel and 9-month-old Kfir; and 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz. The caskets bore smiling pictures of those killed alongside messages listing their “date of arrest” as Oct. 7, 2023.

Hamas displayed the caskets on a makeshift stage in front of an anti-Semitic sign depicting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a bloodthirsty vampire snarling above a photo of the murdered captives. The sign included the caption, “The War Criminal Netanyahu & His Nazi Army Killed Them with Missiles from Zionist Warplanes.” There is no evidence to date that supports the claim.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) dispatched one of its staffers to sit with a uniformed Hamas terrorist at a camouflage table and sign “paperwork.” The committee then transported the bodies through the Gaza Strip as cheering crowds of onlookers celebrated, waving Palestinian flags and shouting “victory” in Arabic. Other videos show masked Hamas gunmen casually chatting with excited Gazans out on the streets.

HAMAS staged a parade showcasing the coffins of the Bibas family, and many Gazans turned out to cheer the jihadists’ “victory” in murdering Jewish women and babies. pic.twitter.com/UWq2EmIaDe

— Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) February 20, 2025

When the coffins reached Israeli soil, they were scanned for bombs and booby traps and then opened for examination to confirm the identities of those inside. Hamas locked the caskets shut but did not provide keys to Israel, forcing authorities to smash the locks open.

The ICRC’s role in the barbaric display is likely to bring increased scrutiny toward the organization, which failed to fulfill its mandate to visit the hostages and assess their health, as the group routinely does during traditional conflicts. It has since participated in Hamas’s propagandistic hostage release displays, sending officials to appear on stage with Hamas terrorists, shake hands, and sign papers in similar scenes to the one that played out on Thursday.

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have responded to those displays by threatening to cut funding for the ICRC and strip protections that protect the organization from terror-related lawsuits, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The disturbing Thursday display drew immediate outrage in Israel and made clear that Hamas has no interest in tamping down a series of hostage release proceedings that have sparked celebratory riots across the war torn Gaza Strip, even when those proceedings include the bodies of murdered children.

“As the bodies of four Israeli hostages are transferred by Hamas to the Red Cross, hundreds of ‘innocent Gazans’ dance to music, and happily film this tragic event,” Israel’s government press office said in a statement posted to social media. “Speechless doesn’t begin to describe how this makes us feel.”

“Agony. Pain. There are no words,” wrote Israeli president Isaac Herzog. “Our hearts—the hearts of an entire nation—lie in tatters.”

Shiri Bibas’s husband, Yarden, was released earlier this month by Hamas under similar circumstances. He was held hostage in a different part of Gaza, separated from his wife and young children. Hamas abducted the family from their home in kibbutz Nir Oz while carrying out the Oct. 7 terror attack.

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During its first three months in operation, a green nonprofit linked to Stacey Abrams, Power Forward Communities, reported just $100 in revenue. Shortly thereafter, the Biden administration awarded it $2 billion to help install solar panels, EV chargers, and other green tech.

The Biden EPA announced that grant in an April 2024 press release lauding the organization for its dedication to “decarbonizing and transforming American housing” in “low-income and disadvantaged communities.” But it didn’t send Power Forward Communities the money directly. Instead, the Free Beacon‘s Thomas Catenacci reports, it parked the $2 billion meant for Abrams’s group, plus another $18 billion in taxpayer-funded “Greenhouse Gas Reduction” grants, into an account at Citibank.

The arrangement allows Power Forward Communities and seven other grant recipients to draw from the funds over time. In doing so, it “restricts the Trump administration’s ability to claw the funds back,” writes Catenacci.

“The revelation that Power Forward Communities is among the beneficiaries of the funds Zeldin’s team located raises ethics questions about how the Biden administration selected recipients of such massive grants and whether it played favorites when doling those grants out,” Catenacci continues. “It also appears to validate concerns expressed for years by Republicans that Biden administration allies would prop up organizations that were specifically designed to receive federal funding under programs like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created to operate as a ‘green bank’ by Democrats’ behemoth Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

Read more: DOGE Finds $2 Billion in Taxpayer Funds Earmarked for Stacey Abrams-Linked Group

The Los Angeles wildfires are fully contained but left-wing mayor Karen Bass is still feeling the heat. She sat down with Fox’s L.A. affiliate on Tuesday to discuss the infamous trip that placed her at a cocktail party in Ghana when the fires broke out.

Talk about an object lesson in passing the buck. Bass carped that nobody in her administration warned her that “something terrible could happen, and maybe you shouldn’t have gone on the trip.”

And yet, the L.A. division of the National Weather Service publicly upgraded the severity of its wildfire watch one day before Bass left the country, warning of “Critical Fire Conditions” and “Major Risk” before urging residents to “Take Action.”

The day after she left, on Jan. 5, most of Los Angeles County was put under a “red flag warning,” a designation that indicates the most severe fire risk. Bass stayed in Ghana, and the fires broke out on Jan. 7.

“The interview is the latest example of Bass’s attempts to shift responsibility or cast blame on others for leadership failures ahead of the wildfires, which are already projected to be the costliest disaster in the nation’s history with an estimated $250 billion in damage,” our Susannah Luthi writes. “It comes as she battles dismal approval numbers and threats of a recall.” Harris-Bass 2028?

Read more: Karen Bass Says She Wasn’t Adequately Warned of LA Fire Risk Ahead of Ghana Trip. Her City’s Weather Service Warned of ‘Critical Fire Conditions’ the Day Before She Left.

According to the Washington Post, the Palestinian Authority Security Forces is “the linchpin to the Palestinian Authority’s ability to maintain law and order” in Gaza and the West Bank. In the reality-based community, it’s a driving force of terrorism in the West Bank, where its members have carried out scores of attacks on both Israeli soldiers and civilians. In the past, those members have done so with the help of millions in U.S. taxpayer funding. Now, the money is frozen.

The move, our Adam Kredo reports, is part of the Trump administration’s broader global aid freeze and “comes as the Palestinian Authority and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, jockey for control of post-war Gaza.” It also comes after the Biden administration “pushed to make PASF a central player in its plans for the war-torn strip, showering it with tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer cash even as it acknowledged that the aid could boost Hamas.”

That funding was a policy reversal from the first Trump administration, which froze aid to the PASF. After old Joe got the gravy train going again, the PASF’s off-duty members carried out dozens of attacks against Israelis.

“In February 2024, for example, a first lieutenant in the PASF opened fire on Israeli troops at a checkpoint near the northern West Bank city of Nablus,” writes Kredo. “Another member of the forces, Capt. Ahmed Abdullah Abu Shalal, was a terrorist leader with the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an internationally designated terror group. He was killed in an Israeli airstrike after carrying out an April 2023 shooting in East Jerusalem that wounded two Israeli civilians.”

Israeli groups celebrated the funding pause, with Meir Deutsch, director of the Regavim movement, telling Kredo that Trump understands “the true nature of the Palestinian Authority, which shares the same ambitions and objectives as Hamas.”

Read more: Trump Admin Freezes Funding to Palestinian Authority ‘Security Forces’ Behind Terror Attacks on Israelis

Away from the Beacon:

• Left-wing protesters broke out in interpretive dance to protest Donald Trump’s equitable shakeup of the Kennedy Center board. Watch the video at your own peril here.
• Speaking of Stacey Abrams-linked nonprofits, staffers at the embattled New Georgia Project, the voting rights group Big Stace founded in 2013, say they were fired for trying to unionize.
• Hakeem Jeffries has a new name for an upcoming spinoff of The Cannonball Run Donald Trump and his allies: “Captain Chaos and the Extreme MAGA Republicans.”
• New DNC chair Ken Martin released his “framework detailing how the Democratic Party will fight against Trump’s war on working people.” It’s already getting rave reviews like this one from Yashar Ali: “This is a deeply embarrassing and useless document from the DNC Chair.”

The post DOGE Exposes $2 Billion in Taxpayer Funds Set Aside for Stacey Abrams’s Green Group. Plus, Karen Bass Leads the Department of Buck Passing. appeared first on .

The senior Biden administration official tasked with directing former President Joe Biden’s $27 billion climate grant program oversaw a $5 billion grant from the program to his former employer, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Jahi Wise joined the Environmental Protection Agency in December 2022 as the founding director of the newly created Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF, according to his LinkedIn profile. In April 2024, while Wise served in that role, the EPA announced that it would award GGRF grants totaling $20 billion to just eight nonprofits, including the Coalition for Green Capital, a Washington, D.C.-based group that received $5 billion as part of the announcement and where Wise previously worked as the director of policy. There is no indication that Wise recused himself from that process.

Wise departed the Coalition for Green Capital in January 2021 to join the White House Climate Policy Office as a special assistant to the president, a position he held until he joined the EPA less than two years later.

The EPA’s $5 billion grant to the Coalition for Green Capital and Wise’s involvement is also notable because former Biden administration official David Hayes serves on the group’s board of directors. Hayes rejoined the group’s board in October 2022 after having served as a special assistant to the president in the White House Climate Policy Office since January 2021, meaning he and Wise were close colleagues at the White House for roughly 21 months.

After joining the Coalition for Green Capital’s board, Hayes said he was “hopeful that tens of billions of dollars of additional clean power investment, focused on low-income and disadvantaged communities, lies in the immediate future of CGC.” The group simultaneously appointed Cecilia Martinez, who had served as a Biden White House environmental justice official, to its board, saying the pair would be involved in its forthcoming Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund application submission.

The revelation that Wise was involved in doling out a massive grant benefiting both his former employer and former White House colleague raises serious ethics and conflict-of-interest questions, experts told the Washington Free Beacon. Federal ethics laws place strict limits on officials’ involvement in matters involving past employers.

It also provides fresh fodder for Trump administration officials who have set the GGRF program and its massive grants in their sights. On Tuesday, Denise Cheung, the top criminal prosecutor in the Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney’s Office, was forced to resign after she declined to open a grand jury investigation into the EPA’s GGRF program funding, CNN first reported.

“The story of the Biden EPA’s gold bars never stops,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin told the Free Beacon. “The waste and abuse was so deeply interwoven in the last administration that not only did the leaders who oversaw this not bat an eye at billions of your taxpayer dollars going towards partisan pet projects, but serious conflicts of interest were ignored. That should have raised red flags.”

Zeldin—who added that he is “committed to restoring accountability in government, focusing the agency on its core mission”—announced last week that he and White House DOGE officials located the $20 billion in GGRF funds, including the Coalition for Green Capital’s $5 billion grant, in a Citibank account. He said clawing back those funds is a priority and said the placement of the funds at an outside bank limits federal oversight.

The Biden EPA appears to have parked those funds at Citibank in August 2024, a first-of-its-kind arrangement at the EPA, shortly before Wise departed the agency. In September 2024, Wise joined billionaire Democratic donor George Soros’s behemoth nonprofit the Open Society Institute as a “leadership in government” fellow—during the 18-month fellowship, Wise will study policies that accelerate the mobilization of public and private capital into climate projects.

The Coalition for Green Capital and Wise did not respond to requests for comment.

“For years, Protect the Public’s Trust and others have been warning of the GGRF’s potential for abuse, to say nothing of the greater IRA,” said Michael Chamberlain, the director of watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust. “Between David Hayes, who sandwiched stints at CGC with one at the White House in which he helped create IRA climate programs, presumably including GGRF, and Jahi Wise, CGC couldn’t have been better positioned for the GGRF windfall.”

“The way they and others pin-balled around the Biden administration’s ‘green’ offices and then shot back out to the climate industry should be set to The Benny Hill Show theme,” Chamberlain added. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing funny about the unheard-of billions in taxpayer dollars they helped transform into an activist slush fund. Administrator Zeldin has his work cut out for him.”

Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of ethics watchdog Americans for Public Trust, echoed Chamberlain and said Zeldin should continue to investigate GGRF grants issued during the Biden administration under Wise’s leadership.

“The founding director of the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund awarding $5 billion to his former employer is the sort of self-dealing revolving door that has become a hallmark of green energy handouts,” Sutherland told the Free Beacon. “Secretary Zeldin is right to set his sights on the Coalition for Green Capital as he seeks to reclaim taxpayer money.”

Wise, meanwhile, emerged as a hero of Biden’s climate agenda among his colleagues and media outlets given his role overseeing the GGRF program.

Danielle Deane-Ryan, a former GGRF senior adviser, said in a LinkedIn post last month that Wise’s leadership was “critical to getting GGRF launched and funds obligated.” And Politico and Newsweek each identified Wise as one of a handful of officials overseeing key Biden-era climate programs, though the two outlets failed to ask him about his relationship with Coalition for Green Capital in interviews conducted after the group was awarded its grant last year.

“We are well aware of the importance of this program and the scrutiny that it warrants, and we will continue to push ourselves and our program to be as radically transparent, efficient, and effective with public funds as we can,” Wise told Politico in an April 2024 interview.

Wise and the EPA never stated that he had recused himself from the matter involving the Coalition for Green Capital.

Overall, the GGRF is the single largest non-tax investment within the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The program was created by Democrats to act as a green bank, directing billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to intermediaries, which then finance green energy and environmental justice projects across the United States.

The GGRF was immediately criticized by Republican lawmakers and energy experts after it was established, with experts warning that its size and scope could lead to significant government waste and abuse. They also argued that, while massive, the program would have little impact on climate change.

“The system is corrupt in the sense that there’s an enormous amount of self dealing that’s going on,” Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview. “It really has nothing to do with climate as a practical matter because there’s no evidence of a crisis and, even if there was, these programs would make undetectable differences anyway.”

Zycher authored a report in December 2022 that concluded the “obvious objective” of the GGRF program is “the provision of large subsidies to favored interest groups.”

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Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) has once again managed to enrage some very annoying people by writing and publishing a collection of words. Almost five years after liberal journalists whined about feeling “unsafe” because the New York Times published Cotton’s op-ed about restoring law and order in American cities, the Republican senator has just released a new book about China that has thoroughly aggravated a handful of Chinese communists and other joyless incels, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis of book reviews on the Barnes & Noble website.

Dozens of first-time users flocked to the site last month to leave angsty one-star reviews of Cotton’s book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, which came out on Tuesday. The vast majority of comments appear to have been written—with the help of artificial intelligence or Google Translate—by goons loyal to the communist regime. Several users didn’t even bother to translate their rants into English. “Tim should not earn any income from this book,” first-time user TikTok Refugee wrote in Mandarin. The poorly translated English reviews were far more colorful and creative.

“Why Is A Whyte Senator Writing About China?” wrote one user called banCNappbutwriteaboutit. “This is the most confusing book ever starting from the title. I mean if you can’t even understand the difference between china and Singapore who are you to write about a book to people to read [sic]?” Country Thompson, claiming to be from New York, wrote that Cotton “wants to banned [sic] tik tok for his book to look good he is no good,” referring to the Chinese spyware app TikTok.

“Complete Garbage Don’t Waste Your Money,” wrote Mot Nottoc, who described himself or herself as a casual reader. “Tom can’t even point China out on a globe so I highly doubt he knows anything at all about it, let alone enough to write an actual book. Money is his only concern. He holds greed superior and doesn’t care who he tramples on. One Disgusting human being.” Another aggrieved customer, a “highbrow reader” called Agamidae94 from Baton Rouge, said Cotton’s book was “Worse Than Mein Kampf.”

One first-time reviewer by the name of Tom Cotton Book No Good was particularly displeased. “The writing is bloated, the jokes are cringe-inducing, and the author’s grasp of nuance is as firm as a wet noddle,” they wrote. “Save yourself the time and skip to the end, where you’ll find the only thing worth reading: the back cover.” Whatever that means. Another user called Thisbooksucks! argued, somewhat expectedly, that the book was “terrible” and not deserving of a recommendation. Dontbuythisbook77 agreed that the book was bad, slamming Cotton for failing to “address a bipartisan issue” and “presenting a biased perspective that is politically incorrect.”

Few were as semi-coherently outraged as Bob53 from New York. “Horrible Trash Scum Redneck,” they wrote in a review that 16 other users found to be helpful. “I hope Tom cotton falls down a set of stairs is [sic] breaks his legs and is unable to walk again.” Many of the reviews expressed concerns that Cotton was too mean to China. Kon79 slammed the author’s “narrow and alarmist perspective [that] is built on sweeping generalizations that undermine the rich history, culture, and the multifaceted nature of China as a nation.”

Casual reader Bob222018304 was also aggrieved at Cotton’s lack of respect for the ChiCom regime. “The exact same senator who has written the book tried to ban TikTok for something about china, what’s so bad about china?” they wrote. “This author is just a racist who hates Chinese people.” Another reader did not appreciate the “misinformation, ignorance, and Sinophobia” they allegedly found in the book. “I am socked [sic] that people think this way,” wrote mm082356 from Arkansas. “This author is deeply mentally and emotionally disturbed. I hope he gets the help he needs because this kind of thinking and hatred is very dangerous.”

Be smart: China is bad.

Read more: Why the Left Fears Tom Cotton

The post Tiananmen Squares: Dozens of Chinese Incels Are Furious at Tom Cotton for Writing a Book That’s ‘Worse Than Mein Kampf’ appeared first on .

Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass (D.) on Tuesday said she traveled to Ghana ahead of the deadly blaze that scorched through her city because fire chief Kristin Crowley didn’t warn her about threats of wildfires. But the National Weather Service warned of “extreme fire weather conditions” two days prior to Bass’s trip—then upgraded the threat the day before she left.

“When I talked about it with the fire chief, what she said is is that we have warnings of Santa Ana winds a lot. But predicting this?” Bass told Fox 11’s Elex Michaelson during the mayor’s first sit-down interview since the wildfires. “That level of preparation didn’t happen. So it didn’t reach that level to me to say something terrible can happen and maybe you shouldn’t have gone on the trip.”

“If it had, I wouldn’t have even gone to San Diego, let alone leave the country,” she added.

While fire watches are somewhat regular in Southern California, the National Weather Service’s Jan. 2 alert warned that there could be “extreme fire weather conditions” the following week, when Bass would be in Ghana. The next day, that escalated to a “major risk”—the weather service’s second-most severe alert—and warned of “Critical Fire Conditions.”

“Any fire starts may grow rapidly in size with extreme fire behavior,” the notice, covering “much” of Los Angeles County, read.

Bass left for Ghana on Jan. 4, the day after the alert was upgraded.

The warnings only became more severe. Most of Los Angeles County was put under a “red flag warning” on Jan. 5, indicating the most severe fire risk.

“Fire Weather Watches have been converted to Red Flag Warnings … for areas where there is highest confidence of reaching critical Red Flag thresholds,” the National Weather Service reported.

Warnings continued to mount the next day, when they escalated into a “particularly dangerous situation” in Los Angeles. On the evening of Jan. 6, Bass’s office posted its first warning about the weather, sharing already out-of-date information. By the time the fire broke out on Jan. 7, the mayor was enjoying a cocktail party following Ghana’s presidential inauguration.

The wildfires burned through some 40,000 acres and more than 17,000 structures until they were finally contained on Jan. 31.

The interview is the latest example of Bass’s attempts to shift responsibility or cast blame on others for leadership failures ahead of the wildfires, which are already projected to be the costliest disaster in the nation’s history with an estimated $250 billion in damage. It comes as she battles dismal approval numbers and threats of a recall.

Bass has pointed the finger at Crowley before, notably when she returned to the fire-ravaged city from Ghana and refused to answer questions about her involvement in an alleged delay in deploying extra firefighters when the blazes first hit. She deferred instead to Crowley, who said the department had done all it could in the face of wind and fire warnings, without knowing where the blazes would break out. Since then, the Los Angeles Times has reported that the fire department could have deployed 10 engines to the Palisades ahead of the fires, potentially mitigating damage.

Bass’s office did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon query on whether Crowley knew the mayor was leaving the country during the fire warnings and denied that she was pressuring Crowley to resign.

The mayor likewise repeatedly deflected blame for her decisions last year to cut the fire department budget by more than $17 million, even though Crowley had warned her its inadequate staffing would hamper wildfire response. Instead, Bass said she was “confident” the cuts hadn’t hurt the response and blamed climate change for the disaster’s magnitude.

“I think we all understand in our city that, due to climate change, we’re going to continue to see very unusual weather events,” Bass said, noting that severe winds “not seen in L.A. in at least 14 years” propelled the fires.

A few days later, her office scrubbed a November memo from Crowley that stated Los Angeles had roughly half the number of firefighters necessary for a city of its size, the Free Beacon has reported.

Bass isn’t the only one trying to block political criticism. Her longtime supporter and appointed “recovery czar,” Steve Soboroff, told elite Hollywood agents that scrutinizing public failures is simply a “bus to no” in a private call last month obtained by the Free Beacon.

“There are only two buses here: one’s to yes, which I’m on, and one is the bus to no,” he said. “And the bus to no is looking for the reasons why this happened, looking at the politicians, looking at the reservoir, looking at the science. All that’s ok, it’s just, I can’t spend any time on that.”

The post Karen Bass Says She Wasn’t Adequately Warned of LA Fire Risk Ahead of Ghana Trip. Her City’s Weather Service Warned of ‘Critical Fire Conditions’ the Day Before She Left. appeared first on .

New York governor Kathy Hochul (D.) on Wednesday moved to sue the Trump administration after it terminated New York City’s congestion pricing program.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in a letter earlier Wednesday informed Hochul that the department is revoking the November 21 agreement, which imposed a $9 toll on most drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street at peak hours. The congestion pricing, which took effect in January, drew widespread backlash and made New York the most expensive American city to drive in, the New York Post reported.

Hochul, however, said the pricing was necessary. “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” she wrote in a statement. “The [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] has initiated legal proceedings in the Southern District of New York to preserve this critical program. We’ll see you in court.”

Duffy in a statement called the city’s congestion pricing plan, which former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg approved under the Value Pricing Pilot Program (VPPP), “backwards and unfair” and “a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners.” The plan, Duffy said, “leaves drivers without any free highway alternative” and “takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways.”

“Every American should be able to access New York City regardless of their economic means. It shouldn’t be reserved for an elite few,” Duffy said, arguing that commuters have already financed city roadways through their taxes.

The tolling system, the Transportation Department said in a press release, “runs contrary to the purpose of the VPPP, which is to impose tolls for congestion reduction—not transit revenue generation.” The surcharge also violates the federal highway aid program, which prohibits charging tolls on federally funded roads unless Congress grants an exception, the press release said.

Duffy’s letter said that officials will contact the state to “discuss the orderly cessation of toll operations,” though it remains unclear when collection will officially stop.

The post Hochul Sues Trump Admin for Revoking NYC’s Congestion Pricing Program appeared first on .

DOGE discovered $2 billion in taxpayer funds set aside for a fledgling nonprofit linked to perennial Georgia Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

The Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration awarded Power Forward Communities the grant in April 2024 as part of the agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program. Power Forward Communities received the green energy grant despite the fact that it was founded months earlier in late 2023 and never managed anywhere near the grant’s dollar figure—it reported just $100 in total revenue during its first three months in operation, according to its latest tax filings.

Power Forward Communities’ grant was one of just eight Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants that the EPA doled out in April 2024 and that, altogether, totaled $20 billion. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Feb. 13 that his staff and Department of Government Efficiency officials discovered that the Biden administration parked that same $20 billion at an outside financial institution before leaving office, limiting the federal government’s oversight of the program.

The revelation that Power Forward Communities is among the beneficiaries of the funds Zeldin’s team located raises ethics questions about how the Biden administration selected recipients of such massive grants and whether it played favorites when doling those grants out. Abrams was a vocal proponent of the Biden administration’s green energy agenda and campaigned for former vice president Kamala Harris.

It also appears to validate concerns expressed for years by Republicans that Biden administration allies would prop up organizations that were specifically designed to receive federal funding under programs like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created to operate as a “green bank” by Democrats’ behemoth Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word,” Zeldin told the Washington Free Beacon. “When we learned about the Biden Administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this.”

“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been,” the EPA administrator continued. “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

Power Forward Communities and Abrams did not respond to requests for comment.

Power Forward Communities was established in October 2023 as a coalition of groups led by Rewiring America, a left-wing group that advocates for electrification policies and a transition away from fossil fuel dependence. Abrams, who serves as Rewiring America’s senior counsel, said at the time that she was “thrilled” to be part of the Power Forward Communities coalition. “This is how we expand access to clean energy—by prioritizing housing, equity and resilience,” she wrote in an X post.

According to its website, Power Forward Communities is the first nationwide program to finance home energy efficiency upgrades at scale. The group states that its mission is to assist homeowners, developers, and renters with home upgrades replacing gas-powered appliances like a traditional stovetop with electric appliances like an induction stovetop.

In its only press release to date, Power Forward Communities said that, in addition to induction stoves, it would use the $2 billion received from the EPA to help install heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, solar panels, home battery systems, EV chargers, and weatherization upgrades.

“For an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant—it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud,” Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, alleged in an interview with the Free Beacon.

Power Forward Communities lists a large number of partners on its website that it works with to implement its mission. Among its partners are the Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count, two left-wing nonprofits founded by Abrams in the wake of her 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election defeat.

The Southern Economic Advancement Project, which seeks to boost racial equity and “economic power” in the South, is a fiscally sponsored project of the Tides Center, a group known for giving millions of dollars to left-wing environmental and social activist organizations, according to Influence Watch.

Power Forward Communities’ list of partners also includes the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO, two powerful Democratic-aligned labor unions.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten and Abrams both serve on the national advisory board for Climate Power, which helped launch a $55 million advertising campaign in September in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

“President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people to stop the fraud and abuse by leaders who irresponsibly shoveled boat loads of cash to far-left, activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity, instead of serving the American people,” Zeldin said. “Those days are over.”

Shortly before leaving office, Biden’s EPA parked the $20 billion located by Zeldin’s team and DOGE officials in an account at Citibank. While the eight recipients of the funding—which, in addition to Power Forward Communities, includes groups like Climate United Fund, the Coalition for Green Capital, Inclusiv, and Justice Climate Fund—have only tapped into a small slice of the funding so far, the arrangement restricts the Trump administration’s ability to claw the funds back, though Zeldin has made retrieving the funds a priority.

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The Trump administration this week ended funding for an immigrant legal group that says the immigration system is “intentionally designed” to exploit minorities and has called for disciplinary action against attorneys and judges who fail to use correct pronouns for illegal aliens during court proceedings.

The Acacia Center for Justice said Tuesday that the Department of the Interior ordered it to “stop all work” on its contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied alien children—those apprehended at the border without parents. Acacia Center is the lead contractor on a $769 million contract to provide the services.

The agency did not provide a specific reason for the stop work order. But the Trump administration has waged a broad effort through the Department of Government Efficiency, the quasi-agency led by Elon Musk, to cut wasteful federal spending. DOGE has set its sights on spending for DEI programs and other progressive initiatives.

While Acacia Center says its federal programs help illegal aliens navigate the complex immigration and deportation process, it also pushes activist rhetoric about the immigration system, the Washington Free Beacon reported this month.

Acacia Center, launched in 2022, argues that “no immigrant should be detained,” that the use of ankle monitors to track illegal aliens “must be abolished,” and that the use of local law enforcement to carry out immigration enforcement “must be dismantled.”

Acacia Center says the immigration detention and deportation system is “intentionally designed to exploit, exclude, criminalize, detain, and deport” people deemed to be “undeserving of inclusion in our national fabric, particularly Black and brown people.”

In a report last year, Acacia Center recommended that attorneys and judges who appear in the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency that handles immigration cases, should face disciplinary action if they fail to “affirm gender identity for noncitizens” during court proceedings.

The center relies on dozens of subcontractors for its legal programs, many of which oppose Trump’s immigration and deportation policies.

Acacia Center has given nearly $6 million to the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, formerly known as the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, to serve as a subcontractor. Amica Center, which spun off from the Acacia Center in 2023, has sued the Department of Justice over its pause to several federal grants programs to provide legal services to illegal aliens. But while Amica Center claims in the lawsuit that the funding freeze will force it to lay off staff, the group is also running Facebook ads calling to “dismantle Trump’s deportation machine,” the Free Beacon reported.

Acacia Center says it provides legal representation through the federal program to 26,000 unaccompanied alien children, including many who have been trafficked or exploited.

“The administration’s decision to suspend this program undermines due process, disproportionately impacts vulnerable children, and puts children who have already experienced severe trauma at risk for further harm or exploitation,” said Acacia Center executive director Shaina Aber.

The Department of the Interior did not respond to a request for comment.

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The United States has designated Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa cartel, and six other drug cartels as global terrorist organizations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday in a notice.

The cartels threaten U.S. national security, foreign policy, and economic stability, according to the notice. The designations follow President Donald Trump’s executive order directing officials to assess whether transnational gangs and drug cartels should be classified as terrorist organizations.

The move marks a significant escalation in Trump’s efforts to combat cartel-driven crime following record-high illegal border crossings under the Biden administration. Classifying the cartels as terrorist groups helps disrupt their “finances through sanctions, including asset freezes and travel bans,” though the scope of Wednesday’s designations remains unclear, Reuters reported.

Last May, then-Drug Enforcement Administration head Anne Milgram, a Biden appointee, said the United States is facing “the most dangerous and deadly drug crisis” in history, particularly pointing to “synthetic, chemical-based drugs, like fentanyl and methamphetamine.” Fentanyl is responsible for around 70 percent of overdose deaths, the DEA noted at the time, with meth responsible for the remaining 30 percent.

“At the heart of the synthetic drug crisis are the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels and their associates,” Milgram said.

Since taking office, Trump has declared a national border emergency and ordered top officials to prepare to invoke a 1798 law that could allow the administration to swiftly deport suspected gang members without court hearings. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has reinforced border security and overseen the deportation of thousands of illegal immigrants.

Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang, has expanded its operations across several U.S. cities, terrorizing residents at apartment complexes and engaging in human trafficking, extortion, and drug smuggling. Federal authorities have arrested dozens affiliated with the gang, including 67 members on January 26 alone.

Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel is “woven into our communities,” both in major U.S. cities and other places, retired Drug Enforcement Administration supervisory special agent Brian Townsend told Fox News on Tuesday. “We have some larger locations that are well known for Sinaloa control, like Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, Dallas, Atlanta, and New York City.”

“But they have distribution points throughout the United States,” Townsend went on, “and from there, they use those hubs, and then [the distribution] spoke out from there into our communities.”

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