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Today on WorldNetDaily Live, Dan Bongino is stepping in as deputy director of the FBI, teaming up with Kash Patel to overhaul the broken federal law-enforcement system. With these two at the helm, real reform is finally happening.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk and Doge are making the federal government leaner and more efficient – saving billions in taxpayer dollars and winning massive public support. And as expected, the media meltdown continues, but the fake news empire is crumbling so fast that even Joy Reid’s show on MSNBC has finally been canceled.

All that and more – tune in now!

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The probate commissioner who ruled against Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to consolidate control of the media titan’s vast empire has a history of supporting Democrat candidates and causes, a Daily Signal investigation revealed.

Edmund “Joe” Joseph Gorman Jr., the probate commissioner for Washoe County, Nev., ruled in December that Rupert Murdoch would be unable to change his family trust to give his eldest son, Lachlan, more control over the Murdoch media empire upon his death. Lachlan is committed to maintaining Fox News’ conservative viewpoint.

Before the commissioner’s ruling, even members of the Murdoch family had a hard time uncovering Gorman’s sympathies and biases. At the time, three of Rupert’s other children—James, Elisabeth, and Prudence—and their spouses huddled inside a house at Lake Tahoe. “They searched Google for Edmund Gorman, the Nevada probate commissioner overseeing the proceedings, hoping to ascertain any biographical details that might reveal his sympathies,” a report from McKay Coppins of The Atlantic read.

For the first time, The Daily Signal is revealing some of those clues about Gorman.

He and his wife, Lauren, are both registered Democrats, documents obtained by The Daily Signal show.

Federal Election Commission filings also reveal Joe and Lauren have made a series of donations to Democrat candidates, such as Bernie Sanders’ and Joe Biden’s presidential campaigns. Joe earmarked over $150 to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns through ActBlue, a left-wing PAC and fundraising platform, and earmarked $50 in a later ActBlue donation to Biden For President. Joe has made at least another $450 in donations to liberal candidates dating back to 2013.

Lauren also made donations to ActBlue, earmarking $191 to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns between 2015 and 2020. Another $50 in a 2020 donation made by Lauren was earmarked for Fair Fight, Inc. PAC, which was founded by Stacey Abrams in 2018 to fight against alleged voter suppression.

Lauren is a public defender on the county and federal level and made headlines in 2021 when working on behalf of a convicted drug trafficker who re-entered the U.S. illegally from Mexico after he was deported. In a podcast with “This is Reno,” Lauren said she argued in front of the District Court of Nevada that the law that criminalizes reentering the U.S. after deportation “was racist in its intent and its effect.” The district court’s chief judge, Miranda Du, ruled in Lauren’s favor. That ruling, however, was overturned on appeal.

The Daily Signal also found Joe Gorman engaged with left-wing legal theories while in law school.

In 2009, the same year he graduated Stanford Law School, Gorman wrote a book review of “Water, Place, And Equity” for the Stanford Environmental Law Journal. Gorman criticized the authors of the book for “declin[ing] to engage in a deeper analysis of the human activities that have brought carbon emissions to disastrous levels” when considering equity-based policy solutions.

As currently constituted, control of the Murdoch media empire will be divided evenly between the four Murdoch children upon Rupert’s death. In recent years, however, Rupert has wanted to give control of the empire to Lachlan, who replaced his father as head of Fox News and News Corp after Rupert stepped down in 2023. Rupert sought to change the family trust to give the conservative Lachlan control. But Gorman struck down that effort in a 96-page opinion, which called the plan a “carefully crafted charade” to “permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch’s executive roles… regardless of the impacts such control would have over the companies or the beneficiaries.”

When contacted by The Daily Signal, Commissioner Gorman declined to provide comment.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]

Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt said Monday that Massachusetts officials who released child rapists instead of turning them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would be “punished by God.”

The House Oversight Committee announced probes into Boston, Denver, Chicago and New York City in January over “sanctuary city” policies in January, while Attorney General Pam Bondi announced lawsuits against Illinois and New York over sanctuary policies since taking office. After playing remarks from a speech border czar Tom Homan gave at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Earhardt lit into the officials.

“I’m coming to Boston. I’m bringing hell with me,” Homan said during the Saturday speech, later adding, “Nine child rapists in jail in Massachusetts were, rather than honoring ICE detainers, released them back into the street. You’re not a police commissioner, take that badge off your chest, put it in the desk drawer, because you became a politician, you forgot what it was like to be a cop.”

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“Message to Susan and to all the people who live in Boston that support these sanctuary cities’ ridiculous rules, these are child rapists. That’s the worst, that is evil,” Earhardt said. “You will be punished by God one day because of that. That is evil, it is so wrong, and to defend them and let them out early so they can be back on the streets and do it again, they ruined lives, those lives will never be the same. Those are heinous, evil crimes. So, I don’t understand how a city council person can defend or this police officer, the commissioner, can defend these criminals.”

ICE has captured other sex offenders released by Massachusetts authorities despite the agency requesting they be detained for deportation in the past. In June 2024, ICE agents arrested a 24-year-old illegal immigrant from Guatemala who had been released on bail after being charged with raping a child in Bristol County.

ICE also took an illegal immigrant from the Cape Verde Islands repeatedly convicted on public lewdness charges into custody in April 2024.

Long a signature issue of President Donald Trump, illegal immigration made a resurgence as a top issue in the 2024 campaign amid a series of high-profile crimes involving illegal aliens and border crisis under the Biden administration.

Authorities in Oklahoma arrested 23-year-old Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, for the August 2023 murder of 37-year-old Rachel Morin in Maryland June 14.

Authorities in Houston arrested two men June 20 and charged them with capital murder in the rape and murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray. In February, Jose Antonio Ibarra, an immigrant from Venezuela who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, was arrested by University of Georgia police and charged with murdering 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The U.S. Supreme Court has just missed an opportunity to fix American law and precedent on speech limits that are in place around the topic of abortion.

That’s according to Justice Clarence Thomas, who warned that the limit established by the court in Hill v. Colorado years ago is nothing more or less than a content-based restriction, which is unconstitutional.

The Washington Examiner explained the failure came in the court’s decision not to hear arguments in a new case.

In the Hill case, the court affirmed the leftist state of Colorado’s imposition of “buffer zones” around abortion businesses, where pro-life Americans’ free speech can be criminal.

“The court today declines an invitation to set the record straight on Hill’s defunct status,” he explained in a dissent.

He said the Hill result “contradicted more than a half-century of well-established First Amendment principles.”

The new case was Coalition Life v. City of Carbondale which came out of Carbondale, Illinois.

There officials imposed a draconian law barring protesters from approaching within eight feet of people near abortion businesses without consent.

Thomas explained the Carbondale ordinance and others like it, the report said, are nothing other than content-based restrictions on speech.

Carbondale just months ago repealed the ordinance, but Thomas said that damage already was done by the months the First Amendment violation was in place.

Justice Samuel Alito also said the new case should be heard.

The majority decision, however, leaves in place, Thomas said, confusion in lower courts about what the law should be.

Coalition Life, a group of sidewalk counselors, said it will continue to fight the free speech limits in Hill.

“The Supreme Court has denied our appeal, but we will not be denied the ability to perform our lifesaving work on the sidewalk,” said Brian Westbrook, of Coalition Life. “Sidewalk counselors will continue to show up for the women who need us every single day, in every place we are called…as we expand our operations across the United States, we will continue to advocate for these women and our fundamental right to speak with them to offer help, hope and information that they desperately need.”

Peter Breen, of the Thomas More Society, which fought on behalf of the pro-lifers, said city officials “quietly repealed its bubble zone ordinance in a shadowy, four-minute, weekend meeting, knowing full well their bubble zone would fail constitutional scrutiny if it came before the Supreme Court.”

During President Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, his maximum pressure agenda for Iran brought the rogue Islamic regime’s terrorism to a trickle, as the government there simply didn’t have the funding it wanted to pursue violence against the world.

Joe Biden’s term reversed that, in that it opened the door for hundreds of millions of dollars to flow into the coffers of the Islamists.

Now Trump is turning that back again.

The Washington Examiner is revealing Trump has confirmed a new round of sanctions on Iran’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers used to deliver its oil to overseas customers and return with piles of cash.

The sanctions were announced Monday by the office of Foreign Assets Control in the Treasury Department along with the State Department and are just a part of Trump’s restored “maximum-pressure” efforts to cut Iran’s access to cash, in order to reduce its sponsorship of terror, which in recent years has included Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

“Iran continues to rely on a shadowy network of vessels, shippers, and brokers to facilitate its oil sales and fund its destabilizing activities,” explained a statement from Scott Bessent, the U.S. treasury secretary.

“The United States will use all our available tools to target all aspects of Iran’s oil supply chain, and anyone who deals in Iranian oil exposes themselves to significant sanctions risk.”

The administration has placed sanctions on more than 30 people and vessels in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, India and China, the report said.

“This includes Hong Kong-based oil broker Petronix Energy Trading Limited, which the Treasury Department said used two shadow tankers under Panama and Cook Islands flags to transport hundreds of thousands of metric tons of Iranian crude,” the report said.

Entities based in Malaysia and Seychelles also were listed.

What the move means is that those people and groups are blocked from the U.S. financial system, halting access to property and interests in America.

The report said such ships are “dark fleets,” which ship Iranian oil to customers under the radar.

The Trump administration has set a goal of limiting Iran’s oil production and sales to 100,000 barrels a day, when that figure of late has been 1.6 million barrels a day.

Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark attempted to convince CNN host Sara Sidner Monday that her party is racking up victories against President Donald Trump.

A CNN/SSRS poll found that 73% of voters who lean Democrat believe that congressional leaders in the party are doing “too little” to oppose Trump, with just 22% saying they are responding appropriately to the president. During an appearance on CNN, Clark claimed her party is holding Trump and Elon Musk “accountable” by using the court system to stop their attempts to eliminate wasteful government spending.

“Seventy-three percent of Democrats, or Democratic leaders, believe their party is not doing enough. Since Democrats do not control the House or the Senate, what is your plan to try and give Donald Trump some checks and balances?” Sidner asked.

“First, let me tell you, you got to understand how frustrated people are [as they are] watching what is happening with this administration and with the unvetted, unelected, richest man in the world [Elon Musk] running rough shot across our personal data and making — threatening the basic services that they provide … We understand that we are the minority party in the House and the Senate and they have the White House. And what we have seen is cowardice from House Republicans who won’t stand up for their constituents because they don’t want to step out of line. So we are calling out the illegal and unconstitutional acts that we are seeing in the courts. That’s our first line of defense,” Clark said. “Over 78 cases have already been brought, and we are winning, and holding Elon Musk and Donald Trump accountable.”

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Clark further said her party is “putting pressure” on just a few House Republicans, who she said hold a “slim majority,” to join Democrats and oppose Trump’s agenda.

“We are asking and putting pressure on 3 Republicans. That’s all it takes to have the courage to stand up for the people who sent them to Washington and say no to this. Say no to stealing their hard-earned tax dollars that we all once spent efficiently and handing it over to the billionaire class in this country,” Clark continued.

While the congresswoman accused Republicans of ignoring their constituents, polls have found that a majority of Republican voters support the efforts made by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). An Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from Jan. 24 found that 58% of Republicans supported the agency.

The CNN/SSRS poll found that while most Democrats are criticizing their party, most Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters, 64%, are satisfied with their party’s support for Trump.

Some Democrats have used violent rhetoric during their protests of Trump and Musk, and many have brought dozens of cases to court in an attempt to block DOGE from eliminating wasteful government spending. DOGE reported on Feb. 17 that the agency has saved $55 billion in federal spending by conducting mass layoffs and by dismantling the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID) for wasting billions of dollars on left-wing causes, such as providing sex change operations in Guatemala.

Despite all of the legal challenges to DOGE, Democrats have been largely unsuccessful in stopping the department’s agenda. Fourteen Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit on Feb. 18 requesting that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan temporarily block DOGE, which she denied based on the lack of evidence that the agency caused any “imminent, irreparable harm” to the plaintiffs.

Trump’s approval rating reached its highest point across both of his terms in early February, with 53% of according to a CBS News/YouGov poll from Feb. 9. The same poll found that 70% of Americans believed that Trump is fulfilling his campaign promises.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Democrats at the national level have been in a panic even since before President Donald Trump was elected a second time and took office. Why else would there be nonstop claims that he’s, more or less, an Adolf Hitler who would “destroy” democracy.

He’s, in fact, living out democracy now by doing a cleanup job at the federal government level that is just exactly what he promised voters who chose him.

But now that panic is hitting Democrats at the state level as Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, run by billionaire Elon Musk, uncovers what has been going on.

It is there, now, that officials are insisting on a halt to any more investigations, calls for accountability and more.

“Democratic state attorneys general seem to want to shut down any further review of waste, fraud, and abuse,” explained a report from the Washington Examiner,

The publication cited a recent lawsuit from 14 of those state officials in which they claimed Trump gave Musk “unchecked authority” without approval from Congress.

In fact, Trump named Musk a special government employee and has approved his actions within his power of the executive branch of government.

After seeing what the report described as “sensible cuts coming from DOGE,” the problem now is that “people are calling for accountability at the state level.”

That has resulted in “fierce” pushback from Democrats, the report said.

For example, the report cited last week’s revelation that a $2 billion grant had been given by the federal government to Power Forward Communities in April 2024.

“Power Forward Communities is a nonprofit organization that was founded mere months before the massive grant was bestowed upon them. The organization, which is associated with the failed Georgia Democrat nominee for governor, Stacey Abrams, had reported just $100 in revenue before the windfall grant,” the report said.

That is, according to Lee Zeldin, “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.”

Further, the report cited the fact that there was a $20 million grant from the Michigan legislature in 2022 for Global Link International, founded 11 days after lawmakers approved the gift by Fay Beydoun, one of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s business development appointees.

Beydoun, in fact, resigned after revelations she was spending grant money on a $4,500 coffee maker, an $11,000 first-class plane ticket to Budapest, more than $40,000 on furniture, and $408,000 in salary for two people for three months’ work.

She was collecting a $550,000 annual paycheck, the report said.

And, the report said, when former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu wondered about the $59 million the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave for housing illegal aliens in luxury hotels in New York City, Anderson Cooper, on CCN, attacked him.

The report suggested that waste needs to be addressed, whether it’s at the federal or state levels.

In fact, the report called for, “What Trump and Musk are doing at the federal level should serve as a model to develop DOGE-like agencies at the state level.”

 

NBC host Kristen Welker questioned Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker Sunday on whether his party’s increasingly popular talking point about America supposedly being in a “constitutional crisis” is a winning strategy.

Towards the end of former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign against President Donald Trump, she and fellow Democrats ramped up their rhetoric, claiming Trump was not only a “threat to democracy,” but also a “fascist,” comparing him to Adolf Hitler. On “Meet the Press,” Welker pressed Booker on the Democrats’ new talking point, playing a clip of multiple lawmakers repeating the phrase “constitutional crisis” before reminding him that similar rhetoric did not win them the November election. 

“Some of your colleagues have been saying that America is in a ‘constitutional crisis,’” Welker said. “Senator, as you know, Democrats just lost an election, largely with the closing argument accusing Trump of being a threat to the democracy. Is that the most effective messaging right now?”

“I think the most effective messaging is talking about the crisis that’s happening to Americans,” Booker responded.

Welker then intervened, stating that based on Booker’s response, the party “shouldn’t be talking about a constitutional crisis.” However, Booker pushed back, saying the “crisis” is occurring “now,” and calling out the Trump administration’s budget and personnel cuts across the federal government.

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“No — I’m saying we should be talking about what’s happening to Americans. I had one of the biggest hospital leaders in my state call me up and talk about the cancer research that’s now in crisis, literally ruining years of research, literally having to take cancer treatments away from people, cutting edge breakthrough treatments,” Booker said.

“What’s crazy is crisis when you have planes falling from the sky and you’re cutting FAA folks. It is a crisis when nuclear regulatories who are keeping our safe regulators are being cut,” Booker continued.

The New Jersey lawmaker’s claims about the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) cuts being linked to “planes falling from the sky,” echoed his fellow party member Democratic California Rep. Norma Torres who held Trump responsible for the fatal aircraft collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in January. In February the FAA fired less than 400 employees from its workforce of 45,000, according to Reuters, though Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has repeatedly confirmed that positions critical to aviation safety like air traffic controllers and inspectors have been protected.

Booker went on to highlight claims from farmers complaining to him about the lack of federal funding, before focusing on the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) Elon Musk and his team.

“Look, all this talk about USAID. I have visited people on the front line stopping infectious diseases from coming here. To have scientists in dangerous areas like Kampala suddenly not be able to get their access to their cell phone, their emails,” Booker said. “And be cut off by a president and Elon Musk or in a hand handed incompetent way, cutting funding that makes no sense and ultimately won’t make a difference on our deficit because the president wants to rack it up to give tax cuts to the wealthiest and create even bigger deficits in our country.”

Since Musk’s announcement on an X space discussion about his and Trump’s agreement to overhaul the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Democrats have protested and pushed back against Musk’s involvement in cleaning out government waste.

Reports have revealed that some international programs not only aided left-wing social engineering, such as LGBT advocacy, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and tech censorship, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars. Regardless, Democrats have continued to question the cuts, with some lawmakers claiming the move of USAID to the leadership of Secretary of State Marco Rubio was unlawful.

Democrats’ messaging, however, has appeared to struggle since Trump’s historic election win, as he secured not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote and the swing states. With Harris losing once-key Democratic voting blocs, some party members have blamed the social justice policies that the left has been pushing, while others, like Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have blamed voters for not “understanding” what their party has done for them.

Echoing Schumer’s sentiments from January, the Democratic National Committee’s new chairman, Ken Martin, told the New York Times on Feb. 2, after his win for the position, that the struggle he saw within the party was a “messaging” and “brand problem.”

“The policies that we support and the message that we have is not wrong,” Martin told the outlet. “It is a messaging problem and a brand problem. Those voters are not connecting our policies with their lives.”

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While public-sector unions file lawsuits to block President Donald Trump’s reforms to the bureaucracy, federal government workers are getting paid by the taxpayer for time they spend doing work for those very same unions.

The little-known practice of “official time” allows bureaucrats to bill the taxpayer for hours they spend doing work for the union. Members of Congress have filed bills to ban the practice, but a budget expert suggests that taxing the practice instead might pose a smaller hurdle for getting it through Congress.

While most bills face a 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster and get through the Senate, senators could pass such a tax through a process known as budget reconciliation—a process by which bills only require a majority of senators’ votes to pass.

Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., a member of the House Budget Committee, told The Daily Signal he supports the idea of taxing official time.

“Taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for federal employees to conduct union business instead of fulfilling their official duties,” Cline said in an emailed statement Wednesday. “Taxing or ending ‘official time’ altogether are commonsense options to ensure taxpayer dollars are used responsibly while increasing accountability in the federal workforce.”

“It’s important that public funds serve the American people, not private union interests,” he added.

Senators Weigh In

Senate Republicans also condemned official time.

“Federal employees should not engage in union activities on the taxpayer’s dime, which is why I’ve introduced legislation to ban the practice,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told The Daily Signal. He was referring to the No Union Time on the Taxpayers’ Dime Act, a bill he filed in July. The bill never made it out of committee.

“So-called ‘official time’ has been abused as essentially publicly funded political organizing by government employees on federal property, which would be illegal in any other context,” Lee added. “We should get rid of it. Public servants should serve the public while on the clock.”

“Bureaucrats seems to have forgotten that they serve the American people, not themselves,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told The Daily Signal. “If federal employees want to engage in union activity while on the clock instead of doing their job, they need to reimburse taxpayers for every last cent.”

“My Protecting Taxpayers’ Wallet Act ends the absurd practice of taxpayer-funded union time and eliminates tax dollars for public unions,” she added. Ernst was referring to legislation banning official time that she filed earlier this month.

Ernst has exposed bureaucrats claiming to be on taxpayer-funded union time while sitting in jail or after moving to Florida. As chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, which aims to help the Department of Government Efficiency combat fraud, waste, and abuse, Ernst moved to outlaw official time as part of her effort to get the federal workforce back to work.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, suggested he would be open to passing a tax on official time through the budget reconciliation process.

“I think that’s an interesting idea,” he told The Daily Signal in an interview on Thursday. “There’s no doubt we are going to need to consider a number of ideas that are fundamentally transformational. If you look at the election in November, this was a mandate. … We have an historic opportunity right now; we can’t miss the moment.”

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., agreed that Congress should get rid of official time.

“We shouldn’t be paying for somebody to do something besides their job as a federal worker. That’s the No. 1 thing,” Scott told The Daily Signal in an interview on Thursday. “The American taxpayer is not interested in paying for somebody to do a job that’s not part of their job, to provide a service or provide a product, or something like that.”

He did not specifically address taxing official time in budget reconciliation, but he insisted that the government should not “allow people to get paid to work on doing something that’s not their job as a federal employee.”

“That needs to be changed,” Scott added.

Why Budget Reconciliation?

While Lee’s and Ernst’s bills take aim at official time, they may fall short of the mark when it comes to getting through the legislative process, experts note.

“Though this practice of abusing official time should be banned outright, Democrats are unlikely to join with Republicans to give them the 60-vote threshold in the Senate that’s required to do so,” Richard Stern, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Grover Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told The Daily Signal. “Banning the practice would also not fit with the tight requirements of what could be done in a reconciliation bill—which only requires 51 votes in the Senate.”

“However, imposing taxes on the practice would fit the parameters of reconciliation,” Stern noted. “Using tax policy in this manner would allow a conservative majority in Congress to pass a policy that would work towards ending this terrible abuse of the taxpayer’s dollar.”

To drive the point home, Stern noted, “Your tax dollars quite literally go to pay for the salaries of people while they are doing work for unions that is often at odds with what is in the best interest of the country.”

Sean Higgins, a deregulation and labor union analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, agreed.

He told The Daily Signal he would prefer to ban official time outright, but “if reconciliation is a means to do this, it’s an interesting approach and a worthy try.”

Biden Hides the Ball

Higgins noted that the Office of Personnel Management previously published the amounts the federal government spent on official time in a regular report titled “Taxpayer-Funded Union Time Usage in the Federal Government.” The Biden administration not only stopped publishing the reports but removed the web page hosting previous reports.

“They got rid of it because it was embarrassing,” Higgins said. “The unions just don’t want us to know that this happens. I’m sure the broader public doesn’t know it exists or would be surprised to find out about this phenomenon.”

Ernst and Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, wrote to Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management in the new Trump administration, to restart the annual reports, and an OPM spokesperson told The Daily Signal the office will again release this information under Trump.

“OPM is committed to transparency and accountability,” the spokesperson told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement Thursday. “We are in the process of compiling this data and will begin releasing this information again. Unfortunately, the previous administration halted its publication, shielding unions from taxpayer scrutiny. We are working to restore this critical transparency for the American people.”

The Deep State Effort Against Trump

Higgins, the Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar, noted that official time is “literally just people being paid by the government not to work for the government but to work for entities that seek to increase costs for the taxpayer.”

Only 5.9% of private sector workers were union members last year, while 32% of public sector workers had joined unions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The aggregate number of employees belonging to unions in the public sector (7 million) was roughly the same as those in the private sector (7.2 million).

Higgins contrasted “the days when a union worker was someone who worked in a factory and was trying to get a few extra hours or a safety regulation” with today. “Now, the typical worker is someone who works for the government, and the union makes it impossible for them to get fired by the government.”

He further noted that “any person who works for any organization tends to get territorial and parochial” and will likely “resent anybody from the outside telling them what to do.” Bureaucrats have often seen their work as apolitical and have stayed in the administrative state from one administration to another.

Trump is not carrying out business as usual, however. Higgins described Trump’s reforms as “the first time somebody has tried to seriously throw a wrench in the system and rework it from the ground up.”

Now, public sector unions like the American Federation of Government Employees, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, are filing lawsuits to block Trump’s reforms.

“They’re just trying to protect their members as they see fit,” Higgins noted. “They’re for the status quo ante, and the administration is not.”

A recent poll found that 64% of Washington, D.C.-based federal employees who voted for Kamala Harris in November say they will refuse a lawful Trump order if they consider it bad policy. Trump aims to prevent this deep state from growing.

The American Federation of Government Employees did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about whether federal employees have claimed official time in work related to the lawsuits they have filed against the Trump administration.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]

The Supreme Court is being asked to hear a case that the justices could use to reform – fix actually – a practice through which the government can deny individuals their 4th Amendment rights.

It is the New Civil Liberties Alliance that is asking for a review of the Harper v. O’Donnell case that concerns financial records unlawfully seized by the Internal Revenue Service.

Sheng Li, litigation counsel for the group, said, “The judge-made third-party doctrine was ill-conceived from the start, with dozens of states repudiating it over the past half century. The doctrine has become even less defensible in the modern age, where sharing confidential information with third-party companies such as internet, healthcare, and even cryptocurrency companies, has become an increasingly common part of American life.”

The legal team explained the IRS took financial records belonging to NCLA client James Harper and more than 14,000 others from the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange through a “John Doe” summons.

“IRS took Mr. Harper’s documents without any individualized suspicion to believe he had under-reported his income or failed to pay taxes. The Supreme Court should take the opportunity to fix the third-party doctrine, which the government has relied on to strip away the Fourth Amendment rights of millions of Americans who share data, such as internet browsing histories and medical records, with third-party companies,” the alliance explained.

The case history includes a ruling from the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals that Harper could take the IRS to federal court for gathering private financial information about his use of virtual current from third-party exchanges without a lawful subpoena.

However, a federal judge in New Hampshire then failed Harper, by dismissing his case against IRS in May 2023, incorrectly ruling that he had failed to state a claim. The First Circuit invoked the third-party doctrine to uphold that dismissal last September.

The NCLA pointed out, “The Supreme Court must revisit the third-party doctrine to recognize Fourth Amendment protection for Mr. Harper’s cryptocurrency data and other digital records, which Americans now routinely store with third-party service providers. Digital records are a modern-day individual’s ‘papers’ and ‘effects’ that the Fourth Amendment explicitly safeguards against government’s prying eyes. Justice Sonya Sotomayor has observed that the third-party doctrine is ‘ill suited’ to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.”

“The Constitution promises security to Americans in their ‘papers and effects.’ Until the Supreme Court clarifies its rulings for the digital age, that promise is unfulfilled,” said John Vecchione, a litigation counsel for NCLA.

It was in 2019 that the IRS notified Harper that it had obtained his financial records concerning ownership of bitcoin “without any particularized suspicion of wrongdoing.”

The IRS took those records “without a valid subpoena, court order, or judicial warrant based on probable cause.”