WND

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Saturday unveiled a short-term funding bill that would avert a shutdown at the end of next week and keep the government running through the end of September.

Johnson has said he will bring the funding bill to the floor for a vote early next week, likely Tuesday, before money runs out late Friday night. It’s unclear it has the votes to pass either chamber, as it was not negotiated with Democrats, making it an important test for the new Republican trifecta on a must-pass bill that requires bipartisan backing to become law.

President Donald Trump has backed Johnson’s approach and said he’ll sign the bill if it reaches his desk, which would avoid a shutdown less than two months into his term.

“All Republicans should vote (Please!) YES next week,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post shortly after the bill was released. “I am asking you all to give us a few months to get us through to September so we can continue to put the Country’s “financial house” in order. Democrats will do anything they can to shut down our Government, and we can’t let that happen.”

An illegal immigrant who once served as an aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has reportedly self-deported to Colombia, praising the “freedom of movement” in the South American nation after working in Congress despite being in the country illegally.

Diego de la Vega was born in Ecuador and immigrated to the United States as a 7-year-old in 2001 on a visitor’s visa that he overstayed, Migrant Insider reported.

The news raises thorny questions about his employment status for the Queens-based congresswoman.

“It’s bittersweet. I hadn’t left the country in 23 years — from age seven to age 30,” de la Vega told Migrant Insider. “Now, I can’t go back to the U.S. It feels like exile. It’s a very permanent move. But my wife and I are confident we made the right decision. And, after some time, it’s been a real pleasure to be here.

To crack down on Pentagon spending, the Defense Department adopted a program in 2015 to track spending on lodging and entertainment. But so few officials used the Visa government travel charge card that nearly 4 million card transactions worth $1.2 billion couldn’t be reviewed in enough detail to check for misuse, abuse, and fraud, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General said last month.

The travel card failure is just one example of why the Pentagon has never passed an annual financial audit. Since the 1990s, every federal agency has been subject to audits, but the Pentagon refused to conduct any until 2018. With its shoddy bookkeeping, uncounted inventories, and efforts to improve doomed by non-compliance, it has flunked every audit since. The situation is so tangled that when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed that the Pentagon would finally earn auditors’ approval, the earliest he could promise a passing grade was 2028. There’s skepticism that the situation could be turned around even by then.

The Pentagon has never faced consequences for failing an audit, though 80% of voters say that it should have to earn a thumbs up in the yearly accounting review before getting a budget increase. Nonetheless, its budget has risen every year since 2015.

The Pentagon’s accounting mess reflects financial disorder widespread in the executive branch. In what has become an almost annual event, the Government Accountability Office reported last month that it “was unable to provide an opinion on the reliability of the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2024 and 2023.” As it has in previous cycles, it stressed “the need to address serious deficiencies in federal financial management and address the federal government’s unsustainable long-term fiscal path.”

This is the chaos facing Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. Though Musk and his team have been tasked with scrutinizing all aspects of government spending, the Defense Department likely presents the DOGE team with its toughest test. The Pentagon provides a number of unique challenges: It’s gargantuan – a $850 billion proposed budget for 2025 ranks it second-highest among Cabinet-level agencies; its systems are outdated; it has little incentive to correct its problems; and its dealings involve countless outside contractors, among them two of Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX.

As audits show, the Defense Department’s fiscal shortcomings were myriad and sprawling in Fiscal Year 2024. Researchers at government budget watchdog OpenTheBooks found that accounting in 15 of the Pentagon’s 28 financial subcomponents – departments within the agency such as the Special Operations Command and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA – whose ledgers are individually audited – received “disclaimers,” meaning that their accounting wasn’t up to snuff. That’s 68% of the Pentagon budget failing the financial test. The remaining 13 agencies received “unqualified,” or positive, audit opinions or had yet to file reports.

In 2024, there were 28 material weaknesses listed in the Pentagon audit, the same number as in 2023 and an increase from 20 material weaknesses in 2018, when audits began. A material weakness is an issue with a company’s accounting so severe that it could lead to mistakes on its financial statements. The audits of the Pentagon’s subcomponents showed at least 140 material weaknesses combined in 2023, according to research by the fiscal watchdog group OpenTheBooks. That marked a slight improvement from the 156 material weaknesses in 2018, but the Navy and the Army both had more material weaknesses in 2023 than in 2018.

A major headache is the Defense Department’s $4.1 trillion of assets, including cash, buildings, investments and inventory — everything from tanks to tubas for the marching band. That’s 72% of government assets, located in a multitude of locations around the globe. The latest accounting audit, for FY 2024, found snafus everywhere. For example, it lists 21 different ways the Army lost control of its $20 billion of inventory, including a failure to even choose anyone to keep an eye on it. Inventory glitches were just one of nearly two dozen problem areas that auditors identified in the Army’s accounting alone.

The struggle to manage these assets is pervasive. The Army, Navy, and Air Force all hold inventory themselves and use storage facilities at third-party sites. But managers couldn’t say where some of the third parties were located or how the inventory was being used.

In several instances, the Air Force’s inventory records conflicted with the Defense Logistics Agency, which was holding assets for the Air Force. Rather than figuring out where the missing inventory went, managers simply adjusted their records without logic or explanation, the audits said.

The Navy hasn’t been counting its inventory at all. Its Working Capital Fund owns roughly 900,000 items stored across 2,500 locations and multiple countries. The inventory is required to be accounted annually, but it isn’t.

While the Defense Department develops weapons like the F-35 fighter jet, which is expected to be in use until 2070, its IT systems can be more evocative of the 1970s. It relies on those systems to produce financial statements, which are vulnerable to fraud and mistakes, according to auditors. Employees who left their jobs, even those who’d been fired, still had access to IT systems potentially containing confidential information. The Air Force didn’t even require employees to make complex passwords to log in to confidential government systems.

Auditors wrote that “weaknesses in such controls can compromise the integrity of sensitive data and increase the risk that such data may be inappropriately used and/or disclosed.”

The Pentagon is required to report its spending to the Treasury Department, which keeps track of how much money is left in its annual budget. But each year, the Treasury and the Pentagon disagree over how much is actually available to spend. Poor accounting makes it impossible to track. Treasury’s manuals warn that this “increases the risks of fraud and waste” and prevents Pentagon officials from monitoring their budget to ensure efficient spending.

In September 2023, the Defense Department had a Treasury balance of $768 billion – money that Congress authorized the Pentagon to spend and that’s been set aside until it does. But several agencies couldn’t say where the money they already spent had gone. The Special Operations Command alone recorded a $34 billion difference between its own spending records and the Treasury’s.

To augment the Pentagon’s paper-and-pencil methods, the Navy hires groups such as the Defense and Finance Accounting Service to track its finances, but there’s little supervision. The DFAS left incomplete journal entries in the Navy’s books that haven’t been resolved.

Procurement isn’t much better. The Navy estimates its bulk spending when buying items, but those estimates appear to be inaccurate and “do not have adequate analysis” to support them, auditors said. There are systems in place to create accurate estimates; the rules just aren’t followed.

Such flaws contribute to taxpayers getting overcharged by contractors. Recently Lockheed Martin, the biggest U.S. defense contractor, settled a $30 million lawsuit accusing it of ripping off the Pentagon for years on the F-35. Halliburton allegedly billed a Kuwait military base $16 million more than it should have for mess hall services. In 2015, the Army discovered that Lockheed Martin and its subcontractor, Boeing, were overcharging by 40% for Patriot PAC-3 missiles. Then there are the ridiculously clownish expenditures –$149,000 on soap dispensers and $14,000 toilet seats.

Smaller contractors, too, have been gobbling up more than their fair share at the taxpayer trough. TransDigm Group has followed a business plan of buying small companies that are the exclusive manufacturers of certain aviation parts for the Defense Department, then taking advantage of their monopoly supplier status by jacking up prices as much as 4,000%. Though TransDigm executives have been hauled before Congress for periodic scoldings, they continue with business as usual because what they do is legal and the Pentagon needs their products. The company is a Wall Street darling; its stock has more than quadrupled since March 2020. Its co-founder, W. Nicholas Howley, received a prestigious leadership award in 2022. Forbes Magazine says he’s a billionaire.

Then there’s the failure of Pentagon officials to use their Visa cards in a way that helps the accountants instead of giving them heartburn.

“Until the Government Travel Charge Card program is compliant with regulations and the DoD implements an effective oversight process, there will be missed opportunities to identify and mitigate misuse, abuse and potential fraud,” Pentagon Inspector General Robert P. Storch said on Jan. 21. “The DoD must take steps to ensure adherence to internal controls to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars.”

Less than a week later, President Trump fired Storch and 16 other inspectors general who oversee other executive branch agencies. Storch is part of a group now suing for wrongful termination.

The Pentagon doesn’t appear to have a battle plan to turn around seven straight years of audit failures. Officials tend to repeat the notion that the department is making incremental progress. Congress threatens each year to take away part of its budget, such as with the Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023, but these bills rarely make progress.

This is the context in which the world’s wealthiest man and his DOGE team will be asked to perform the long-awaited miracle of straightening out the Pentagon’s finances.

As Elon Musk and his tech team urge their fellow Americans to become “domestic auditors” to help rein in federal spending, people have been encouraged to use the Treasury Department’s usaspending.gov website to identify and track government finance.

But usaspending.gov is wrong on the biggest picture, RealClearInvestigations found.

The total amount of spending across “all agencies,” as recorded at usaspending.gov, appears to be 50% higher than most experts interviewed for this article think it actually was.

In Fiscal Year 2024, for instance, the website pegs total spending at $9.7 trillion, when several experts said it was probably around $6.5 trillion. No one could explain the much bigger figure. Officials with usaspending.gov conceded to RCI that their totals were wrong and said the error, which shows up in similar fashion for the last five fiscal years would be fixed soon. They offered neither an explanation for their higher total nor an estimate of what it should be. Two weeks later, the erroneous figures remain.

Budget experts say the website’s seeming multi-trillion-dollar error illustrates a core challenge Musk and his colleagues at the Department of Government Efficiency face as they try to reduce Washington’s spending. In a twist on the classic Washington line, the problem is not just following the money but finding it in the first place. The federal government has become so big and so expensive that even experts have trouble navigating the morass of contracts, awards, grants, loans, and other items that have transformed the U.S. spreadsheet into a labyrinth pitted with dead ends and rabbit holes.

“When you see the process has become so arcane even I don’t claim these are real, hard numbers, then you know the process is definitely and irreparably FUBAR,” said David Ditch, using the acronym for “fouled up beyond all repair.” He spent years poring over federal budgets and spending at the conservative Heritage Foundation before moving this month to the Economic Policy Innovation Center.

Musk’s job may strike everyday Americans as ordinary in the sense that he’s trying to balance accounts, but Washington is a different animal, and several experts told RCI it stays that way on purpose. The complexity and layers Musk’s team has encountered are a feature, not a bug, according to this view.

“Federal government spending is nebulous and almost designed to be that way because no one person benefits from it being straightforward,” said Lydia Mashburn Newman, a managing director at the American Institute for Economic Research. “No one is trying to get a holistic picture of what this or that agency is doing and the way money gets appropriated is very fragmented.”

Newman has seen the beast from two sides, as a congressional aide and federal worker, and she says the comprehensive nature of DOGE is something new under the sun for the Washington bureaucracy.

“There is no total view of the budget. Congress simply takes last year’s number and changes it, usually to a larger number,” she said. “So the unique thing about DOGE is that it is providing a top-to-bottom audit. It’s not just asking if the books balance, but what is the money actually spent on.”

While Musk initially promised to cut some $2 trillion from the federal budget – and news accounts have focused on his efforts to reduce the federal workforce – DOGE’s real accomplishment so far has been to bring attention to the federal government’s broken accounting systems.

Despite the hue and cry raised over DOGE, previous alarms have been rung by some other agencies only to be ignored.

On Jan. 16, four days before Biden vacated the White House, the Government Accounting Office said it was “unable to provide an opinion on the reliability of the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2024 and 2023.”

The Office of Management and Budget has also flunked six of the 24 departments and agencies it looked at, including Labor and Education. The Defense Department has failed seven consecutive audits, while the Department of Education hasn’t gotten a “clean” opinion for three years.

It is hard to pass an audit when you don’t follow the basic rules of accounting. Musk reported that he was having difficulty tracing $4.7 trillion in federal spending because the Treasury Access Symbol (TAS)—a code that links payments to budget items— was allowed to be optional for years and often left blank. In response, Musk tweeted, the Treasury Department now requires “all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. … All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!”

At the Treasury’s usaspending.gov, which experts use regularly and consider valid despite the big topline errors, nearly $150 billion is slotted every year into an “unreported data” box.

While Musk’s team is reportedly using advanced artificial intelligence systems to comb federal records, it will face a different challenge when tackling the federal employee retirement system. DOGE will confront the “sinkhole of bureaucracy”: records still kept on paper and processed almost entirely by hand by some 700 workers who toil 230 feet below ground in an abandoned limestone mine in northwestern Pennsylvania.

The government’s use of antiquated systems helps explain some of Musk’s team’s biggest mistakes so far. This month, they claimed that millions of deceased people – some listed as more than 300 years old – are receiving social security benefits. It turns out DOGE probably misread the data sets, which includes millions of dead people not receiving benefits, in the antiquated, 1960s-era computer system Social Security still used to disperse more than $1.3 trillion to some 68 million people last year.

Musk conceded errors will be made, but experts told RCI some are impossible to avoid when trying to get a visible net around the surging ocean of federal government spending.

“Complexity isn’t an accident; it’s a consequence of a government that has grown far beyond its core functions and is tied down by a self-serving bureaucracy and public-sector union power,” said Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“That complexity isn’t just an inconvenience – it shields waste, fuels inefficiency, and makes reform harder,” she said. “A government that has grown too big and too far-reaching makes it difficult to track what’s spent, let alone rein it in.”

Simply getting the information that Musk and some popular domestic auditors like DataRepublican have made public so far is an accomplishment. In the past, including Trump’s first term, efforts to put all the government’s financial laundry hanging on the line were met with indifference or resistance, according to Newman.

“All this seems ordinary to most Americans, but before Musk sent his teams in to get information, it was very time-consuming to get data,” she said. “In Washington, that’s just protocol: You ask for something, and it could take months to get. But DOGE, in partnership with OMB, is no longer allowing the stone-rolling that plagued the last Trump administration.”

One of the biggest challenges DOGE might face involves its effort to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. As RCI reported last year, “Since 2003, when the government first started tracking improper payments, it is estimated that they have added up to more than $2.7 trillion, according to paymentaccuracy.gov, the public website where government agencies report their numbers.” That total is almost certainly a low-ball figure because the feds often rely on states, which also disburse money and often provide spotty accounting of their spending.

That $2.7 trillion figure does include $764 billion in improper payments paid during the first three years of the Biden administration to the wrong recipients, for the wrong reasons, or in the wrong amounts. The federal government estimates that nearly 6% of its total spending went to improper payments during Biden’s presidency, according to OpenTheBooks.com. During its first four-year term, the Trump administration issued an estimated $673 billion in improper payments, which were about 5% of government outlays, the watchdog group said.

Yet that money has proven extremely difficult to claw back.

An analysis by the Associated Press, for example, “found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.”

All that DOGE has done so far has dominated headlines and infuriated an entrenched elite in Washington’s bureaucratic warrens. But Trump remains a steadfast supporter of Musk’s work thus far, and in typical fashion promises more to come: “In less than a single month, the Department of Government Efficiency has already saved over 55 — this is just a short period of time — $55 billion, and we’re just getting started.”

Over the last 50 years, the left has directed two opposing criticisms at Christian conservatives. In the late 1970s and 1980s, progressives denounced the Moral Majority for injecting faith-based values into public life. The religious right’s deplorable mixing of faith and politics, progressives contended, compelled Christian conservatives to dwell on divisive issues like abortion. Since the 2015 rise of Donald Trump, progressives have denounced Christian conservatives for declining to inject their faith-based values into public life. This disgraceful refusal to apply religious morality to politics, progressives maintained, permitted Christian conservatives to embrace President Trump despite his egregious moral transgressions. It is tempting to conclude that in progressives’ eyes, Christian conservatives are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Much progressive enmity toward Christian conservatives stems from poor understanding of American constitutional government, from animus toward religion, or both.

America’s founding documents adopt a friendly stance toward religion. The Declaration of Independence holds that God endowed human beings with unalienable rights and that it is government’s chief purpose to secure them. Article I of the Constitution protects religious liberty by refraining from delegating to Congress authority to legislate in matters of faith. The First Amendment underscores the constitutional priority of religious liberty – banning “an establishment of religion” and guaranteeing religion’s “free exercise” – by placing it first among the five crucial rights that Congress may not impair.

In his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessment – composed two years before the Constitutional Convention that he helped to organize and to which he made a decisive contribution – James Madison affirmed that religious liberty is an unalienable right. He maintained, moreover, that government is neither “a competent Judge of Religious Truth” nor authorized to “employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy.” The former, in Madison’s view, “is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world” while the latter is “an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.”

In “Democracy in America,” published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville added the complementary observation that separation of church and state empowers religion and freedom to collaborate to fortify American democracy. The same individual freedom and democratic equality that enable people to worship God in accordance with conscience let loose desires, untether the imagination, and unleash conduct contrary to conscience. Amid these temptations, Tocqueville argued, Christianity imposes limits on wants and ambitions, fosters virtues, and supplies transcendent moral standards. This enables free and democratic citizens to maintain balance, discharge their responsibilities, and contribute to the public interest.

Rare among critics of Christian conservatives, my friend Jonathan Rauch (who recently joined Carl Cannon on the RealClearPolitics podcast) cherishes American constitutional government and admires its friendly stance toward religion. Nevertheless, in “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy” Rauch takes to task white evangelicals for familiar reasons: politicizing religion, imposing their sectarian will on the nation, and supporting Donald Trump. However, Rauch’s central criticism, as he notes, is surprising coming from a secular Jewish homosexual: Christian conservatives are not too Christian but rather are not Christian enough.

A veteran journalist, Brookings Institution senior fellow, and contributing writer for The Atlantic, Rauch has authored several excellent books in defense of liberal and enlightened politics and thought. In “Cross Purposes” he espouses the modern tradition of freedom, which presupposes that human beings are by nature free and equal, that legitimate government must be grounded in the consent of the governed and must be limited, and that generally applicable laws must secure individuals’ equal basic rights. He champions the Madisonian view that limited constitutional government fosters the mutual give and take and compromise essential to freedom and democracy, particularly in America’s exceptionally diverse – multireligious, multiracial, and multiethnic – political society. And over the years – and, he explains, thanks to considerable reflection, study, and conversation – he has been persuaded that Tocqueville was correct that the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom in America are “intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land.”

Today, Rauch reports, Christianity is in crisis. Between 2007 and 2023, the number of American Christians declined 15%, which set off an avalanche of church closures and precipitated a substantial shrinkage of church congregations. If the present trend holds, the nation would “lose 30 to 40 percent of its congregations in the next 20 years.” However, a Pew Research Center study published last week indicates that the contraction of America’s Christian population has slowed and may have stabilized.

Rauch rejects the postliberal explanation for Christianity’s decline (which he rightly traces to Nietzsche) prominently associated with University of Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen and his books “Why Liberalism Failed” and “Regime Change.” Postliberals argue that the modern tradition of freedom must decline into “an aggressively godless, consumerist, hyperindividualistic, and self-absorbed culture, which dissolves faith and tradition.” Rauch replies that postliberals exaggerate America’s depravity, obscure its achievements, and overlook free societies’ self-correcting mechanisms. But he does acknowledge that “we see evidence everywhere of the inadequacy of secular liberalism to provide meaning, exaltation, spirituality, transcendence, and morality anchored in more than the self.”

Rauch is not scandalized by secular liberalism’s inadequacies because he understands the “implicit bargain between American democracy and American Christianity.” That bargain extends beyond the Constitution’s promise of religious liberty and religion’s promise to operate within law’s boundaries. It also encompasses the expectation that each will supply a critical lack in the other. Under a limited government that leaves questions of salvation and the best life to individuals and their families and communities, Christianity forms character, inculcates morals, and gives spiritual depth. While Christianity focuses on the soul and redemption, limited government provides the institutional structure and laws – alongside systematic and scientific inquiry that yields indispensable knowledge and know-how – that enable a diverse citizenry to live together in peace and prosperity.

The bargain is crumbling, observes Rauch, and he faults Christian conservatives. While the United States has largely upheld its end of the deal, Rauch argues, Christianity – mainline Protestants as well as evangelicals – betrayed its obligations by becoming “thin” and “sharp.” Christians cast aside their rich transcendent spiritual mission, Rauch laments, to pursue harsh partisan political goals.

The gravest offenders, according to Rauch, are white evangelicals, and their gravest offense is supporting Donald Trump, a “semi-fascist,” maintains Rauch: “MAGA may not be the full Mussolini, but it gets at least halfway there.”

Rauch finds an inspiring alternative to white evangelicals’ thin and sharp Christianity in the “Thick Christianity” taught and practiced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Church members, Rauch reports, learn about individual dignity, toleration, pluralism, forgiveness, and mutual accommodation from the Bible. And they bring these virtues, which are also virtues of freedom, to politics. Rauch highlights the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ support for a 2015 bill passed by the conservative Utah state legislature “extending non-discrimination protections to LGBT Utahns while also providing targeted exemptions for religious organizations.”

Rauch’s unconventional, sophisticated, and illuminating summons to Christian conservatives to put faith before politics reflects a welcome respect for religion and its vital place in America’s constitutional order. Nevertheless, he is unlikely to move many Christian conservatives to repudiate Trump. Three reasons stand out.

First, correcting one church by urging it to emulate another church – especially one that subscribes to some fundamental doctrines rejected by the church whose correction is sought – is of doubtful efficacy.

Second, Rauch’s treatment of white evangelicals departs from his laudable determination to listen carefully and sympathetically to other perspectives. Rauch provides alarming examples of Christian conservatives who subordinate Christianity to politics. And he quotes eloquent Christian critics of Christian conservatives. Yet he barely sketches or finds a responsible figure to explain the white evangelical case for Trump.

Indeed, Rauch misstates it. For example, he attributes white evangelical anger to fears for their religious liberty, though “Never before in American history have the law and the Supreme Court been as protective of religious liberty as they are right now.” What is true about the law on the books and the Supreme Court, however, does not hold for progressive ideologues and activists in and out of government. Organizations such as Becket and Alliance Defending Freedom have their hands full filing lawsuits to counter attacks on religious liberty. Moreover, Christian conservatives’ quarrel with the status quo reaches well beyond religious-liberty concerns. They support Trump for leading a robust countermovement to an illiberal progressivism that, they believe, threatens the moral and cultural foundations of American freedom.

Third, and relatedly, while harshly condemning Christian conservatives’ broken bargain with democracy, Rauch neglects – indeed, he comes close to denying – democracy’s broken bargain with Christianity. Yet the Justice Department’s and the FBI’s brutal eight-year lawfare campaign against Trump coupled with their sweeping under the rug of Hunter Biden’s crimes and the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes subverted the rule of law. The mainstream media’s cover up of President Joe Biden’s cognitive deterioration further damaged the public’s trust in journalism. The Biden administration’s open borders policy harmed national security, accelerated the flow of deadly drugs into the United States, and diminished confidence in government’s competence and motives. Rampant diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that classify based on race eroded toleration and political cohesiveness. A transgender ideology that belittles the pertinence of biological sex outraged common sense. And elite-university students’ siding with blood-thirsty jihadists who hate freedom and democracy confirmed the growing public sense that the educational system, dominated by progressive administrators and faculty, was failing the nation.

In opposing these abuses of power, many white evangelicals do not aim to impose their religion on the nation but to call out and undertake the repair of the federal government’s and elite organizations’ broken bargain with the people. These Christian conservatives are not hotheads, fanatics, or authoritarians. Madisonian constitutionalism counsels fellow citizens to heed their voices, too.

Topline: The Department of Education’s employee headcount fell by 13.9% between 2000 and 2024 but its spending increased by 749% during that time, according to a new report from OpenTheBooks.com. Meanwhile, reading and math student proficiency on standardized tests has fallen.

Key facts: In 2000, the Department of Education had 4,930 employees and spent $33.5 billion. In 2024, the department had only 4,245 employees but spent $250.73 billion.

When President Trump began his first term in 2017, Department of Education spending increased by $34.7 billion from the year before. Outlays then soared during the Covid-19 pandemic as relief funds were sent to public schools, reaching a then-record $204.42 billion in 2020 under Trump and ballooning to $639.37 billion in 2022 under President Biden.

Spending has not decreased back to the 2019 level of $104.37 billion, before the pandemic.

The department also added 566 staff positions between 2019 and 2024.

Last year, only 60% of 4th graders and 67% of 8th graders scored at least “basic” in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress standardized test, according to the Associated Press. In math, 77% of 4th graders and 61% of 8th graders scored at least “basic.” All four of those percentages are lower or the same as scores from 2004, despite the increase in education spending.

Background: The revelation comes weeks after President Trump announced he is drafting an executive order that directs the Secretary of Education to scale back the department and calls on Congress to eliminate the agency entirely.

Spending has increased at a faster rate than staff headcount at plenty of other agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, Agency for International Development and many more. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is perhaps the best example: employee count rose by 290% since 2000, but spending far exceeded it with a 2,096% increase.

Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Critical quote: Savannah Newhouse, a Department of Education spokesperson in the Trump administration, told Fox News that past administrations were “frivolously spending taxpayer dollars on priorities that do nothing to help our students learn.”

“Under President Trump, the department is aggressively auditing our spending to ensure maximum impact for students and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” Newhouse said.

Summary: Increased government spending is rarely a good idea, but it’s especially concerning when there are few positive results to show for it. Yet high outlays have been the one constant for the federal government this century, regardless of which party was in power.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

The U.S. Department of Agriculture canceled a grant worth $600,000 for the study of menstrual cycles in transgender men, Secretary Brooke Rollins said Friday.

The Southern University Agricultural & Mechanical College in Louisiana was the recipient of the grant, according to a database on USAspending.gov.

“The first occurrence of menstruation occurs at approximately 12 years of age and ends with menopause at roughly 51 years of age,” the grant description reads. “A woman will have a monthly menstrual cycle for about 40 years of her life, averaging to about 450 periods over the course of her lifetime.”

“It is also important to recognize that transgender men and people with masculine gender identities, intersex and non-binary persons may also menstruate,” the description adds. “At any given moment about 26% of the world’s population is menstruating.”

A report from the American Center for Law and Justice has confirmed that an “environment of intimidation” created by a radical leftist teacher for students in a school district has been ended, following its demand letter to the school district.

The location of the district and the identities of the student and teacher involved were not released, as the dispute never rose to the level of a court action.

But the ACLJ, which for years has battled on behalf of constitutional rights, confirmed the dispute was resolved satisfactorily.

Its own reporting confirms it was a “major victory” on behalf of the student, “whose constitutional rights were systematically violated.”

When it became aware of the weaponization of a classroom against conservative students, the ACLJ wrote to the district insisting on corrective action.

The teacher in question “spent up to one-third of the 90-minute class” delivering her own politics, in an “aggressive” fashion, and attacking President Donald Trump.

“This teacher also engaged in a deeply troubling pattern of viewpoint discrimination that strikes at the core of First Amendment protections. She used her classroom as a political forum for discussion but then shut down our client, a Christian student with conservative beliefs, whenever she disagreed with the teacher and supported President Trump,” the ACLJ reported. “The classroom became a forum where students who agreed with the teacher’s political views were encouraged to speak, while those with conservative perspectives were systematically suppressed. The teacher went beyond merely sharing opinions into creating an environment of intimidation that prevented students from expressing alternative viewpoints.”

Included in the teacher’s wild claims were about Trump establishing “concentration camps” for African Americans – using time that could have been focused on “actual course material,” the report said.

“We were prepared to file a lawsuit in federal court on the student’s behalf to ensure that this conduct stopped. We are pleased that our legal demand letter got the attention of the district before the deadline we provided. It responded and resolved this situation to our client’s satisfaction,” the legal team said.

Among the district’s commitments are that it will “comply with the requirements of the First Amendment and district policy.”

The FBI has arrested three individuals on charges of treason, marking a significant development in an ongoing investigation under the agency’s new director, Kash Patel. The arrests were announced on Friday, just two weeks after Patel took office. Authorities have yet to disclose the full details of the case, but sources confirm that the suspects allegedly betrayed the nation and attempted to sell government secrets to China.

The U.S. Department of Justice said that two active-duty U.S. Army soldiers, Jian Zhao and Li Tian, and a veteran, Ruoyu Duan, were in the process of attempting to sell national defense intelligence to Chinese agents. Zhao and Tian were stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

In addition to treason charges, Tian and Duan face counts of bribery and theft of government property. Meanwhile, Zhao faces a charge of conspiracy to transmit national defense information to someone not authorized to have it.

“Jian Zhao and Li Tian, active-duty U.S. Army soldiers stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, along with Ruoyu Duan, a former U.S. Army soldier, were arrested today following indictments by federal grand juries in the District of Oregon and the Western District of Washington,” the DOJ said in a press release.