While the lights are off, let’s rewire the government



The United States faces an existential threat from the accelerating military power of communist China — a buildup fueled by decades of massive economic expansion. If America intends to counter Beijing’s ambitions, it must grow faster, leaner, and more efficient. Economic strength is national security.

The ongoing government shutdown may not be popular, but it gives President Trump a rare opportunity to make good on his campaign pledge to drain — and redesign — “the swamp.” Streamlining the federal government isn’t just good politics. It’s a matter of survival.

A government that builds wealth rather than expands debt can out-produce China, sustain deterrence, and restore the American ideal of self-government.

George Washington ran the nation with four Cabinet departments: war, treasury, state, and the attorney general. The Department of the Interior came later, followed by the Department of Agriculture, added by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 when America was an agrarian power.

The modern Cabinet, by contrast, is a bureaucratic junkyard built more in reaction to political problems than by design. The Labor Department was carved from the Commerce Department to appease the unions. Lyndon Johnson invented the Department of Transportation. Jimmy Carter established the Department of Energy in response to the Arab oil embargo. The Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence emerged after 9/11.

The result is a patchwork of agencies wired together with duct tape, overlap, and patronage. A government designed for crisis management has become a permanent crisis unto itself.

Enter the Department of National Economy

A return to first principles starts with a single question: How can we accelerate American productivity?

The answer: consolidate. Merge the Departments of Commerce, Labor, Agriculture, Transportation, and Energy into a Department of National Economy. One Cabinet secretary, five undersecretaries, one mission: to expand the flow of goods and services that generate national wealth.

The new department’s motto should be a straightforward question: What did your enterprise do today to increase the wealth of the United States?

Fewer bureaucracies mean fewer fiefdoms, less redundancy, and enormous cost savings. Synergy replaces stovepipes. The government’s economic engine becomes a single machine instead of six competing engines running on taxpayer fuel.

Fold Homeland Security into the Coast Guard

Homeland Security should be absorbed by the U.S. Coast Guard, which already functions as a paramilitary force with both military and police authority, much like Italy’s Carabinieri. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, DHS personnel would share discipline, training, and accountability.

FEMA would cease to be a dumping ground for political hacks. Any discrimination in disaster aid — such as punishing Trump voters — would trigger a court-martial.

The Secret Service would focus solely on protective duties, handing its financial-crime work to the FBI. The secretary of the Coast Guard would gain a seat in the Cabinet.

Restoring intelligence to the OSS model

The Office of Director of National Intelligence should be re-established as the Office of Strategic Services, commanded by a figure in the tradition of Major General “Wild Bill” Donovan. Elements of U.S. Special Operations Command would be seconded to the new OSS, reviving its World War II lineage.

All intelligence agencies — CIA, DIA, FBI, the State Department, DEA, and the service branches — should share common foundational training. The current decline in discipline and capability at the National Intelligence University, worsened by the DEI policies of its leadership, demands urgent correction. Diversity cannot come at the expense of competence.

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Photo by Isaiah Vazquez/Getty Images

Law enforcement and the flat tax

At the Department of Justice, dissolve the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Shift alcohol and tobacco oversight to the DEA, firearms and explosives to the U.S. Marshals.

Let the DEA also absorb the Food and Drug Administration, which would become its research and standards division.

Return the FBI to pure investigation — armed but without arrest powers. Enforcement should rest with the U.S. Marshals. Counterintelligence would move to the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, reinforced by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The IRS should be dismantled and replaced with a small agency built around a flat-tax model such as the Hall-Rabushka plan.

Move the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response to Homeland Security. Send its Office of Climate Change and Health Equity to NOAA — or eliminate it entirely.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, expand the inspector general’s office tenfold and pay bonuses for rooting out fraud.

Restoring deterrence

The Pentagon needs its own overhaul. Because of China’s rapid military buildup, the Air Force’s Global Strike Command should be separated from U.S. Strategic Command and report directly to the secretary of war and the president under its historic name — Strategic Air Command.

Submarines and silos are invisible; bombers are not. Deterrence depends on visibility. A line of B-1s, B-2s, B-52s, and 100 new B-21 Raider stealth bombers, all bearing the mailed-fist insignia of the old SAC, would send an unmistakable message to Beijing.

RELATED: Exclusive: China behind massive nationwide SIM farm network that directly threatens American critical infrastructure

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Toward a leaner republic

With Trump back in the White House, this moment is ripe for radical efficiency. A government that builds wealth rather than expands debt can out-produce China, sustain deterrence, and restore the American ideal of self-government.

George Washington’s government fit inside a single carriage. We won’t return to that scale — but we can rediscover that spirit. A lean, unified, strategically organized government would make wealth creation easier, limit bureaucratic overreach, and preserve the republic for the long fight ahead.

The world cut the cord. Government won’t.



The world is cutting cords at every opportunity. Wireless has become the default. Faster, cheaper, and more convenient beats wired every time. Consumers know it. Industry knows it. Government, as usual, lags far behind.

Americans used a record 132 trillion megabytes of wireless data in 2024. That follows 100 trillion in 2023, 74 trillion in 2022, and 53 trillion in 2021. The trajectory isn’t slowing. Artificial intelligence alone will accelerate demand.

Cutting cords makes life easier. Cutting government waste would, too.

Why the stampede to wireless? Because the technology now outpaces wired service. Fifth-generation networks can deliver speeds 20 times faster than 4G LTE. Sixth generation promises to be up to 100 times faster still.

Consumers are responding. More than one million Americans cut the cord on cable internet in 2024. Less than half of all cord-cutters now rely on cable providers for home service. The trend is irreversible.

Even cable companies acknowledge it when they install Wi-Fi routers after stringing fiber into a home. Wireless is the product people actually use.

Government’s fiber fetish

Everyone is adapting — except government. Because government is just that stupid.

State officials still funnel billions into fiber even as private-sector wireless has already done the job.

Barack Obama himself declared victory in 2015: 98% of Americans connected to high-speed wireless. At the time, average speeds were 10 Mbps. Today, average wireless speeds reach 155 Mbps — more than 15 times faster. The private market delivered that progress.

RELATED: Trump nukes Biden’s broadband gimmick, saving taxpayers billions

imagedepotpro via iStock/Getty Images

Yet in 2025, states like Louisiana and Virginia plan to spend 80% of their federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program dollars on fiber. That program carries a $42.5 billion price tag. Fiber may be reliable in limited contexts, but it is costly and slow to deploy. Starlink has flagged projects with per-household connection costs exceeding $10,000. That’s not infrastructure — it’s idiocy.

The mismanagement is staggering. The BEAD program, launched in 2021, has yet to connect a single person. By late 2024, the score was still zero. Another year has passed, and states remain bogged down in bids and bureaucracy. Meanwhile, nearly every American has been online for a decade.

The market already won

Wireless continues to do the work. It connects homes, cars, and devices at ever-increasing speeds. The private sector solved the access problem years ago. The government now wastes hundreds of billions pretending to fix a problem that no longer exists.

That money buys ribbon-cuttings, not results. It funds reports and grants, not connections. It props up a fiber fetish that ignores how people live and work.

The pattern is clear: When consumers get to choose, they choose wireless. When politicians get to spend, they throw billions at fiber networks no one needs.

The market has spoken. Government refuses to listen. Cutting cords makes life easier. Cutting government waste would, too.

Fake money fuels real pain as elites cash in and families fall behind



Think for a moment about the “speed of life.” Two centuries ago, it took months to cross the Atlantic on a wooden ship. Today, it takes five hours by plane. The Pony Express once needed weeks to deliver a message. The telegraph shrank that to seconds.

Human ingenuity has always accelerated life, but it was still bound by reality — the limits of earth’s raw materials.

On August 15, 1971, America traded reality for illusion.

Technology built from those natural parts is real, sustainable, and grounded. But when systems detach from the real world, they become artificial. They may run for a time, but they cannot endure.

Now consider money as a form of energy. Once, it was tangible: gold coins, silver dollars, bills you could hold in your hand. Even when transactions became electronic, they were still tethered to reality, with gold as their anchor. Cotton became fabric, chickens became food, gold became money. Nature set the limits.

That changed on August 15, 1971.

Faced with economic pressures, President Richard Nixon severed the dollar from gold. In doing so, he handed America’s financial energy supply to the Federal Reserve and the political class — a system now untethered from nature. Money no longer reflected real value. It was conjured from nothing. Now the government, once dependent on the real economy, had the power to create its own artificial economy.

You can’t print money to pay your bills. You live in reality. Washington escaped it — at least temporarily. The result is a false economy where the supply of “financial energy” outruns the natural world.

The treadmill effect

That’s why ordinary Americans feel like they are running on a treadmill that only speeds up. The $37 trillion in so-called “debt” isn’t debt at all. Debt requires repayment. It is the measure of money created out of thin air. When fake energy collides with real commodities, prices rise.

Look around you. Everything in your home — your chair, your phone, your groceries — is either a commodity or built from one. Oil powers the machinery that produces and delivers them. Since 2000, the cost of commodities has risen about 8% every year. Wages, in contrast, have only risen about 3% annually. That gap explains why families can’t keep up, why the middle class shrinks, and why frustration mounts. And because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, this inflation doesn’t just punish Americans — it ripples out to every nation on earth.

The burnout economy

Think of the human body. It runs on about six volts of electricity. Plug it into 220 volts and you’ll get incredible output — briefly — before the system burns out. That’s what the Federal Reserve and political elites have done to our economy: forced humanity into hyper-speed, compressing decades of natural economic activity into a few frantic years. The result is burnout — social unrest, inequality, rage, endless wars, and declining health.

Even environmental strain ties back to this misalignment. Artificial money fuels artificial demand, driving overproduction and overconsumption. Elites congratulate themselves for “managing” the system while ordinary citizens pay the price — in higher bills, weaker wages, and a constant sense of instability.

This was not inevitable. For nearly two centuries, the dollar was worth 100 cents, because it was tied to gold. Today, it’s worth about three cents. The rest has been stolen — not from us, but from the future. Tomorrow’s dollars are being dragged into yesterday’s spending. But eventually, nothing will be left to plunder. That is the endgame of artificial money: a collision between illusion and reality.

RELATED: Is Fort Knox still secure?

Photo by nopparit via iStock/Getty Images

Most Americans don’t fully understand this, but they feel it in their bones. They sense that something is wrong, that they work harder only to fall farther behind. Artificial money creates artificial problems — and artificial problems have no real solutions. Only a reckoning with reality can set them right.

Reclaim reality

Elites in Washington and on Wall Street will not save us. They are the ones benefiting from the distortion. The rest of us are left to adapt. For many, that means simplifying life, rediscovering the virtues of family, community, and localism — the parts of America still tethered to reality. In the countryside, where life is slower, you can still glimpse the America that once was.

On August 15, 1971, America traded reality for illusion. The day Nixon closed the gold window, government and elites unshackled themselves from the limits the rest of us still live under. Until we recognize that truth, we will keep chasing solutions to problems that can’t be solved — because they were never real to begin with.

Ilhan Omar Issues Error-Ridden Denial of Free Beacon Report on Her Skyrocketing Net Worth

Say it ain't so. Rep. Ilhan Omar issued an error-ridden denial of a Washington Free Beacon report on her newfound wealth, accusing this reporting of peddling fake news for citing her latest financial disclosure, which revealed the Minnesota Democrat and her husband saw their personal fortune explode to as much as $30 million.

The post Ilhan Omar Issues Error-Ridden Denial of Free Beacon Report on Her Skyrocketing Net Worth appeared first on .

Omar pushes corporate taxes while husband's company skipped IRS bills: Report



The husband of Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who advocates ensuring corporations "pay their fair share," previously owned a company that reportedly owed money to the IRS.

Tim Mynett, Omar's husband, and William R. Hailer, Mynett's business partner, operated EStreetCo, an advertising, design, and public relations business that dissolved in June 2022, according to a Thursday report from the Washington Free Beacon.

'The company has no outstanding tax obligations from the COVID era; in fact, we have a balance due to us.'

A document obtained by the news outlet revealed that in 2023, after the company's dissolution, the IRS filed a lien for nearly $206,000 in unpaid income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes.

Omar announced in February that she introduced an amendment in the House Budget Committee to "make corporations pay their fair share." The representative has opposed Republicans' budget resolution, calling it "a blueprint for American decline."

"Let's be clear: They want to exploit your labor, take your tax dollars, and gut your earned benefits — all to bankroll tax cuts for their wealthy friends and donors. They want to increase your health care costs — while Elon Musk and his friends hoard even more wealth," Omar said in February during a speech on the House floor.

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Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

The Free Beacon noted that Omar's personal wealth is as much as $30 million. In a 2021 financial disclosure, she described EStreetCo as a "creative agency," claiming that her husband's share in the firm was worth $1,000 or less.

The news outlet reported that the Sonoma County recorder does not have any record that the IRS released its lien against EStreetCo.

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Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Annual Legislative Conference

However, a spokesperson for EStreetCo told Blaze News, "The company has no outstanding tax obligations from the COVID era; in fact, we have a balance due to us." Documents provided by the spokesperson showed that the IRS owed the company approximately $3,000 as of September 3, 2025.

A representative for Omar did not respond to a request for comment.

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Company Owned by Ilhan Omar's Multimillionaire Husband Owes IRS Over $200,000 in Unpaid Taxes

A company owned by Tim Mynett, the multimillionaire husband of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), failed to pay its fair share of taxes in 2021, according to a tax lien obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The post Company Owned by Ilhan Omar's Multimillionaire Husband Owes IRS Over $200,000 in Unpaid Taxes appeared first on .

Trump’s tariffs haven’t sparked predicted trade war



For months, Americans were warned by the media about a global economic trade war that would begin in the wake of President Trump’s tariffs — but it hasn’t happened.

“All the fearmongering was totally wrong,” the Heartland Institute’s Justin T. Haskins tells BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler on “The Liz Wheeler Show.” “It was just totally and completely wrong.”

“As of right now, the data that we have clearly shows that the tariffs that have gone into effect have not dramatically increased prices for consumers. We obviously are not in the midst of an economic catastrophe or something like that,” he continues.

Haskins also points out that “revenues are up” and “tax revenues are up.”


“That’s a good thing because we have a gigantic deficit problem in this country and a gigantic government debt problem long-term, and this could be a potential solution to that,” he explains, though he notes that the mainstream media is not reporting any of the good.

“If you just were to Google this story and look around the internet, you’ll see people say that the tariffs are causing lots of inflation. You’ll see it in headlines all over the place, and I just want to give real data from the government that proves that that’s not the case,” Haskins says.

Haskins points to the CPI inflation rate, which is the standard used for measuring inflation.

“In July, the 12-month inflation rate from July 2024-2025, 2.7%, is basically the same as in June. That’s less than what it was in December and in January before Trump was even president. So at that point it was around 3%,” Haskins explains.

“So the inflation has actually gone down over the past eight months, if you’re just comparing it in that way. If you start looking at individual numbers, parts of the economy prices, CPI prices in specific parts of the economy where you would expect to see tariffs causing inflation, if tariffs do cause inflation, you’re not seeing it,” he says.

One example Haskins uses is with clothing, of which, he explains 97% is not made in the United States.

“We are seeing prices actually go down … so if tariffs are causing inflation, then you would think that would be one area where you’d expect to see prices soaring, and we’re not seeing that.”

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Oregon considers transportation tax hike on EVs to save government jobs



In an effort to prevent mass layoffs at the Oregon Department of Transportation, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek (D) is proposing a new, mandatory tax program for electric vehicles. While Republicans say the governor's proposal would be unnecessary if the state managed its money well, the tax proposal is set to be considered today in a special session announced last month.

Oregon is attempting to fill a $354 million budget gap for transportation infrastructure construction and repairs, possibly resulting from vehicles becoming more fuel-efficient.

'We invite Democrats to join us in funding essential services without raising taxes, to stand with Oregonians who cannot afford to shoulder more costs.'

“This could still be prevented today, without a special session, if Democrats made the decision to use existing revenue from the emergency board. We can still protect these jobs without raising taxes — and we should,” Oregon House Republican Leader Christine Drazan said last month. "We invite Democrats to join us in funding essential services without raising taxes, to stand with Oregonians who cannot afford to shoulder more costs.”

RELATED: Out of juice: Only 5% of US car buyers want an electric vehicle

Christine Drazan, former Oregon gubernatorial candidate and current House Republican Leader.Photo by Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images

The proposal, according to the AP, includes an EV road-usage charge that is equivalent to 5% of the state’s gas tax. It also includes raising the gas tax by six cents to 46 cents per gallon, among other fee increases.

EV drivers would be required to enroll in a pay-per-mile system based on road usage. They could either pay 2.3 cents per mile or a flat $340 annual fee, with a break-even point just under 14,800 miles per year.

ODOT policy adviser Scott Boardman said drivers would have several options for the government to track their mileage, including a smartphone app and the vehicle's telematics technology.

Oregon's existing system, OReGO, which was launched on July 1, 2015, is currently a voluntary program. Kotek's proposal would mark a departure from this system by making it mandatory. Skeptics warn that this may discourage car buyers from considering buying electric vehicles in the future, with the program set to take effect starting in 2027 and extending to hybrids in 2028.

If it passes, Oregon will join Hawaii as the only states to begin a mandatory pay-per-mile program for electric vehicles. Oregon lawmakers will debate and vote on the bill, which requires a supermajority in both the House and Senate to pass.

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Time to pump the brakes on Big Tech’s AI boondoggle



America already learned a lesson from the Green New Deal: If an industry survives only on special favors, it isn’t ready to stand on its own.

Yet the same game is playing out again — this time for artificial intelligence. The wealthiest companies in history now demand tax breaks, zoning carve-outs, and energy favors on a scale far greater than green energy firms ever did.

Instead of slamming on the accelerator, Washington should be hitting the brakes.

If AI is truly the juggernaut its backers claim, it should thrive on its merits. Technology designed to enhance human life shouldn’t need human subsidies to survive — or to enrich its corporate patrons.

An unnatural investment

Big Tech boosters insist that we stand on the brink of artificial general intelligence, a force that could outthink and even replace humans. No one denies AI’s influence or its future promise, but does that justify the avalanche of artificial investment now driving half of all U.S. economic growth?

The Trump administration continues to hand out favors to Big Tech to fuel a bubble that may never deliver. As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip pointed out earlier this month, the largest companies once dominated because their profits came from low-cost, intangible assets such as software, platforms, and network effects. Users flocked to Facebook, Google, the iPhone, and Windows, and revenue followed — with little up-front infrastructure risk.

The AI model looks nothing like that. Instead of software that scales cheaply, Big Tech is sinking hundreds of billions into land, hardware, power, and water. These hyperscale data centers devour resources with little clarity about demand.

According to Ip’s data: Between 2016 and 2023, the free cash flow and net earnings of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft rose in tandem. Since 2023, however, net income is up 73% while free cash flow has dropped 30%.

“For all of AI’s obvious economic potential, the financial return remains a question mark,” Ip wrote. “OpenAI and Anthropic, the two leading stand-alone developers of large language models, though growing fast, are losing money.”

Andy Lawrence of the Uptime Institute explained the risk: “To suddenly start building data centers so much denser in power use, with chips 10 times more expensive, for unproven demand — all that is an extraordinary challenge and a gamble.”

The cracks are already beginning to show. GPT-5 has been a bust for the most part. Meta froze hiring in its AI division, with Mark Zuckerberg admitting that “improvement is slow for now.” Even TechCrunch conceded: Throwing more data and computing power at large language models won’t create a “digital god.”

Government on overdrive

Yet government keeps stepping on the gas, even as the industry stalls. The “Mag 7” companies spent $560 billion on AI-related capital expenditures in the past 18 months, while generating only $35 billion in revenue. IT consultancy Gartner projects $475 billion will be spent on data centers this year alone — a 42% jump from 2024. Those numbers make no sense without government intervention.

Consider the favors.

Rezoning laws. Data centers require sprawling land footprints. To make that possible, states and counties are bending rules never waived for power plants, roads, or bridges. Northern Virginia alone now hosts or plans more than 85 million square feet of data centers — equal to nearly 1,500 football fields. West Virginia and Mississippi have even passed laws banning local restrictions outright. Trump’s AI action plan ties federal block grants to removing zoning limits. Nothing about that is natural, balanced, fair, or free-market.

Tax exemptions. Nearly every state competing for data centers — including Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Nebraska — offers sweeping tax breaks. Alabama exempts data centers from sales, property, and income taxes for up to 30 years — for as few as 20 jobs. Oregon and Indiana also give property tax exemptions.

RELATED: Big Tech colonization is real — zoning laws are the last line of defense

Photo by the Washington Post via Getty Images

Regulatory carve-outs. Trump’s executive order calls for easing rules under the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other environmental statutes. Conservatives rightly want fewer burdens across the board — but why should Big Tech’s server farms get faster relief than the power plants needed to supply them?

Federal land giveaways. The AI action plan also makes federal land available for private data centers, handing prime real estate to trillion-dollar corporations at taxpayer expense. No other industry gets this benefit.

Stop the scam

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) put it bluntly: “It’s one thing to use technology to enhance the human experience, but it’s another to have technology supplant the human experience.” Right now, AI resembles wind and solar in their early years — a speculative bubble kept alive only through taxpayer largesse.

If AI is truly the innovation its backers claim, it will thrive without zoning exemptions, tax shelters, and federal handouts. If it cannot survive without special favors, then it isn’t ready. Instead of slamming on the accelerator, Washington should be hitting the brakes.

Bed Bath & Beyond Joins Countless Other Companies Ditching Bad-For-Business California

Despite these troubling economic conditions and many businesses leaving, it seems unlikely that Gov. Newsom and the Democrat majority in the legislature will change their ineffective policies.