Tag: taxes

Useless Without Transmission: DOE Backs $581 Million TVA Grid Expansion

On Tuesday, DOE said it plans to help the Tennessee Valley Authority fund 84 transmission and distribution projects across eight states to add about 2.5 gigawatts of grid capacity. The award totals roughly $581 million, with $250 million in federal money and $331 million from TVA.

“America’s electric grid cannot become a roadblock to economic growth,” said Katie Jereza, who heads DOE’s Office of Electricity.

Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly went further, blaming “years of misguided energy policies under the previous administration” for leaving the bulk power system “less robust than it should be.”

From $250 Million To $10.5 Billion

The announcement for TVA support from the DOE is alongside the ongoing SPARK program under the GRIP program… If the acronyms are starting to blur together, here is the simple version:

  • Tuesday’s award is for $250 million, written to TVA and its local power companies.
  • SPARK, DOE’s acronym for “Speed to Power through Accelerated Reconductoring and other Key Advanced Transmission Technology Upgrades,” is the bigger, nationwide program. It puts $1.9 billion of federal money, plus $3.35 billion in cost share, into 31 projects in 26 states that will reconductor or rebuild more than 1,500 miles of existing lines and free up over 23 GW of capacity. TVA’s slice is about $80 million to upgrade roughly 125 miles of lines in Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina with advanced conductors, adding about 1,900 MW.
  • GRIP, the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program, is the even bigger $10.5 billion pot created by the 2021 infrastructure law, and it pays for both SPARK and the new award announced Tuesday afternoon.

Add TVA’s two awards together and it has nearly $741 million in planned grid investment for more than 4,300 MW of added grid capacity.

The Real Bottleneck

As we just covered, the hyperscalers are fighting over how much of the grid’s bill is theirs, with one telling Senate staff that shared upgrades provide a “system benefit which should be shared among all ratepayers.”

Tuesday’s award is that argument in practice, with taxpayers and utility customers splitting the cost of wires everyone uses, on a national grid where, by the senators’ own count, about a third of transmission and half of distribution infrastructure is “near or beyond its useful life.”

You can build all the combined-cycle gas plants, reactors and geothermal wells you want, and line up every data center and electrified factory in the country to buy their output. If the grid can’t carry the power from one to the other, none of it matters.

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AfD’s Weidel Tells Berlin The Truth: A German Company Goes Bankrupt Every 19 Minutes While Merz Sends Billions To Kyiv

German businesses are going bust in alarming numbers, claims AfD co-leader Alice Weidel. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is devoting his strength and taxpayers’ money to Kyiv, she charged. The numbers for the first part of her statement are dramatic.

“A wave of bankruptcies is sweeping across our country,” Weidel said. “Every 19 minutes, a company in Germany goes bankrupt. In the third quarter of this year alone, the wave of insolvencies affected 41,000 jobs. Many of them will disappear permanently.”

The 19-minute figure traces to official data from the Federal Statistical Office. There were 2,373 corporate insolvencies in July, 8% up on the previous year and thus the highest July figure since 2013. As small-business expert Marc Evers of the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry told n-tv: “Every 19 minutes a company in Germany goes insolvent.” In the seven months to end-July a total of 15,185 corporate insolvencies were registered, 6.9% up on the same period of the previous year. Insolvencies were most frequent in the transport and storage sector, followed by the hospitality industry and construction.

The figure of 41,000 jobs also corresponds with the third-quarter insolvency tracker from the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH). According to this, there were approximately 4,880 cases of insolvency of partnerships and capital companies in the third quarter, down 2.3% from the record high of the second quarter. However, this still corresponds with the second highest number of quarterly cases of insolvency since 2005 and approximately 41,000 jobs were affected, about 10% fewer than in the second quarter. Weidel’s assertion that many of these jobs will disappear permanently is her own assessment and not a statistic.

Smaller businesses have not yet experienced the upswing the government is predicting for this year. Instead, according to n-tv, they are slipping into insolvency more and more often. Evers said the small upswing “threatens to be short-lived, because it is based mainly on high, debt-financed government spending.”

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Government-Funded Group Helped Push Australia’s Digital Censorship Bill

Teach Us Consent, a group whose latest financial statements show it is nearly 90 percent funded by the Australian government, was one of those who supported the government’s Digital Duty of Care bill, and even stood beside Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as he presented it.

The bill, that the group lobbied for privately and publicly, is a censorship law. It will force platforms to police content more stringently, and gives a minister the power to add to the list of “harms” that they must protect against. The eSafety commissioner will be able to issue removal notices, and can even create “sock puppet” accounts to patrol the internet, and fine platforms up to A$109.2 million.

Teach Us Consent wrote to the Prime Minister’s office on March 30, 2026, in a “private letter” that was co-signed by Digital Rights Watch and Reset Australia, to ask for a meeting to discuss the bill. An adviser replied the next morning, and a meeting was set for April 9. On September 8, the group was by the Prime Minister’s side as he announced the censorship bill, calling it “an example of change from the bottom-up, my Government listening and acting.”

Teach Us Consent then announced that the government “heard our calls and committed to the #FixOurFeeds campaign.” And: “We did it.” But the group did not do it on its own: in the 2024/25 financial year, it had “total revenue of $2,738,561, representing a substantial increase of approximately 975% from the previous financial year’s total of $254,807.” Of that, $2,436,156 was “government funding” – 89 percent.

This is not money the group received to lobby – the government gave it for “Consent resources” aimed at people 16 and older. But the grant guidelines, released under freedom of information, shows that the Department of Social Services approved the content strategy.

The government also gave Teach Us Consent $4.4 million for a porn literacy campaign. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet grant was approved on March 6, 2026.

The bill’s exposure draft was released on September 8, and it reveals that the duty to protect against “harm” will be imposed on social media, games, apps, and AI chatbots.

The eSafety commissioner will have the power to issue removal notices to companies, and the minister will be able to add any material “that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm.”

The eSafety Commissioner may assume a “false or fictitious identity” – a sock puppet – and “generate material using an online service (including by means of artificial intelligence).”

Those powers apply “despite anything to the contrary in any other law.” Penalties will reach A$109.2 million.

Opposition communications spokesperson Sarah Henderson said: “It provides the minister with unfettered powers to make any regulation into what she would describe as serious harm.” And: “The government could shut down any content or material that they deem to be harmful.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: “It’s not about censorship. It’s about giving people control themselves over what they see.”

Network Affects called the feed-choice framing “a ruse,” finding the only explicit reference in the draft is “by providing control over the kind of content that is recommended for the user”: 

“Fourteen vague words in a Bill containing more than fourteen thousand.”

The group had a specific proposal for the legislation, the “Fix Our Feeds” campaign. The page for the campaign on the group’s website states that “it takes just 23 minutes for a social media account mimicking a 16-18 year old boy to be fed misogynistic content, regardless of the account’s viewing preferences.”

The claim was repeated by Minister Tanya Plibersek on ABC Insiders, and it is based on a study conducted by Dublin City University. But the study used only ten accounts, and no real teenagers were involved. Instead, the researcher “watched and liked the video” when shown problematic content.

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You Can’t Make This Up: Supreme Court to Decide If Nigerian Terrorist Group’s Personal Chef Deserves U.S. Asylum and Taxpayer Benefits

Just when you think the radical open-border lobby and activist judges have pushed the legal system to its absolute limit, the United States Supreme Court is now being forced to step in to answer a question that should take precisely two seconds to answer:

Should a man who cooked thousands of meals to sustain members of an armed terrorist organization be granted legal asylum inside the United States?

The case, Blanche v. Ozurumba, involves Izuchukwu Ozurumba, who entered the United States illegally in July 2023 after spending roughly six months in 2022 as a cook for a group known as the “Unknown Gunmen.”

Court records show he prepared three meals a day for 15 to 17 of the group’s leaders at a remote camp outside Lagos, potentially thousands of meals over the period. U.S. officials determined the Unknown Gunmen qualify as a Tier III terrorist organization, The Center Square reported.

An immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals found that this constituted “material support” for terrorism under the Immigration and Nationality Act, rendering him ineligible for asylum. He was later removed to Nigeria.

Ozurumba claims “he was lured” by a job tip, discovered the true nature of the camp, and was forced to continue working (including unpaid for part of the time) under threat before escaping during a grocery run and eventually fleeing to Venezuela and then the U.S. The Board of Immigration Appeals has held that the statute contains no duress exception for providing support to terrorist groups.

A divided panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed in September 2025. Judge Andrew Wynn (an Obama appointee) ruled that Ozurumba’s cooking, using food and supplies provided by the group itself, was not “material” because it did not provide anything the organization could “use or readily divert to plan or carry out its terrorist activities.” The majority described him as a “captive laborer.”

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So the FBI Did Another Big Raid You Might Have Missed…

Did you hear the one about the FBI investigation in the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners that caught one of them with his hand in the cookie jar of his own nonprofit?

It’s no joke, but it’s one of those stories of Democrat corruption that somehow [cough, cough] got lost in the shuffle. Let’s bring a little sunshine to it, shall we?

Three years ago, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott appointed longtime social worker and behavioral-health entrepreneur Mujahid Muhammad to the city’s Board of School Commissioners. His primary organization, KEYS — Keep Encouraging Youth to Succeed — since 2009 purportedly was involved it counseling, youth recreation, senior services, workforce training, and “culinary therapy”—using grocery deliveries and cooking lessons with families needing mental-health support.

KEYS took a kind of unconventional approach I’d usually think was noteworthy for all the right reasons.

Purportedly.

Project Baltimore reported last week that it “has been digging into KEYS Empowers financials and found that in federal filings, KEYS reports paying out over $400,000 in salaries to zero employees.”

Then there’s this from the Baltimore Banner: “A nonprofit called KEYS Empowers Inc. that lists the same address as its headquarters and Muhammad as the executive director reported receiving more than $4.7 million in government funds for the 2023 and 2024 tax years, tax filings show. That money made up the entirety of KEYS Empowers revenue for those years.”

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Trump Administration Arrests Nearly 500 Criminal Fugitives Hiding in Taxpayer-Funded Housing Across America — Murder, Rape, Child Sex Crimes, Drug Trafficking — 10 Firearms Seized!

The Trump administration is cleaning house… literally!

Nearly 500 criminal fugitives living in taxpayer-subsidized housing have been arrested in a sweeping nationwide law enforcement operation targeting dangerous offenders who were allegedly using government-assisted housing as a refuge from justice.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), under Secretary Scott Turner, announced that 491 fugitives were arrested during “Operation Clean House,” a coordinated federal crackdown involving the HUD Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Marshals Service, and state and local law enforcement agencies.

The multi-month operation unfolded throughout 2026 across 12 cities, including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and New Orleans.

According to HUD’s official October 8 announcement, authorities targeted fugitives residing in federally assisted housing, including individuals wanted on outstanding felony warrants for some of the most serious crimes imaginable.

The offenses associated with those arrested included:

  • Rape and second-degree murder
  • Sex offenses against children
  • Drug trafficking
  • Illegal weapons offenses
  • Aggravated assault
  • Fraud
  • Possession or manufacture of an incendiary device

Authorities also seized 10 firearms during the operation.

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Chronically Absent Mary Peltola Drew Highest Salary in Alaska Legislature, Billed Taxpayers Hawaii Vacation

Democrat Mary Peltola was Alaska’s highest-paid state house representative yet missed 18.6 percent of votes in her five terms in office in the legislature, yet she found the time to bill taxpayers for a corporate retreat in Hawaii. In 2008, Peltola’s final year in office, she drew a taxpayer-funded salary of $77,884 while missing nearly one-fifth of votes.

Her time in office was marked by leading Alaska’s “tolerance commission” to implement woke DEI policies and also advocating for reintroducing a state income tax to “protect the rich,” according to one news outlet. The “tolerance commission” recommended banning state employees from asking the immigration status of people seeking taxpayer-funded services, providing health care for sex offenders, and diversity training for state employees and law enforcement.

Peltola established a pattern of running for office and missing large stretches of votes before cashing out and lobbying her former colleagues in her home state and in Washington.

The Hawaii conference was reported by the Anchorage Daily News. In 2006, the outlet revealed, “lawmakers billed the state for more than just plane tickets. Some get per diems, meals, and hotel rooms,” which included $1,525.06 to Peltola.

In 2011, she was elected to the Bethel City Council in western Alaska. Peltola missed more than a third of the city’s official meetings during her time in office. She subsequently became a lobbyist for the city, where she raked in at least $144,999.66 from 2015 to 2017, records from the Alaska Office of Public Commission showed.

Peltola was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022 and again missed stretches of votes while not seeing any legislation signed into law. Her tenure was marked by one of the highest staff turnover rates in Congress.

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The $64 Million Harrisburg Question

A few weeks before Gov. Josh Shapiro arrived in Harrisburg to make a splashy announcement of $64 million toward a revitalization plan for the capital city, local officials faced a far less photogenic task: finding $2.3 million to return to the state. The city had failed to finish a playground project at Reservoir Park before its grant deadline expired, despite multiple extensions. Indeed, in Pennsylvania’s capital, even free money apparently requires more administrative competence than we can reliably supply.

That’s why the mood in Harrisburg is flickering somewhere between cautiously optimistic and carefully pessimistic after Shapiro’s September 28 announcement of $64 million in public and private investment — including $22.7 million of state money —under the banner“Harrisburg Works for All of Us.” Given the city’s current moribund state, that slogan almost feels ironic — it barely works. It’s too bad the plan’s long-term success relies heavily on the two parties least equipped to deliver it: a corrupt, incompetent mayor in Wanda Williams and a do-nothing City Hall often at war with her.

First, the good news. On paper, there is plenty to like: a new downtown hotel, improvements to the criminally underutilized Susquehanna Riverfront, and funding to develop a master plan to revitalize City Island. There’s also vague talk of improving public safety technology and parking woes. But for nearly every nice bullet point in Shapiro’s Harrisburg agenda, there’s a caveat or an incomplete grade.

What no one will say is that this plan is a compensation package for the partial withdrawal of the state government. This is a company town, and that company is the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It’s by far the biggest landlord here, and it pays no property taxes. Harrisburg became a ghost town during Covid, and six years later, it still hasn’t fully returned to its pre-2020 self. Why? Despite a return-to-office mandate, many Commonwealth employees have stayed fully remote or work hybrid, and the old five-day lunch crowd is a thing of the past. Shapiro’s Space Optimization & Utilization Project (SOUP), released in 2025, reflects this new reality; it shrank the government’s office footprint in Harrisburg and beyond to cut costs. In the end, there was no reason to keep up the facade of big office spaces with fewer people.

The savings make sense on the state’s balance sheet. But what’s good for Pennsylvania taxpayers is bad for Harrisburg on the ground, and the scarcity of state workers has helped fuel the doom-loop effect. Walk downtown on a Monday or Tuesday morning, and you’ll find nearly as many homeless people shuffling through the streets near the green-domed Capitol building as state workers. Over the last three years, restaurants, pharmacies, and other needed retail have closed, and a stretch of Second Street resembles a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with trash in the streets and people sleeping in doorways of abandoned buildings. When pasta joint Pastorante closed in mid-2025, the owner cited declining business, neighborhood bar fights, the odor of marijuana everywhere, and a shop window shattered by gunfire. They moved to nearby Steelton, which isn’t exactly fleeing to a crime-free paradise.

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New York made $7.6 million in improper Medicaid payments to incarcerated people, audit reveals

A federal audit found that New York made about $7.6 million in Medicaid managed care payments on behalf of people who were incarcerated in state prisons.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General uncovered the payments and revealed that the money went to 1,375 Medicaid enrollees who were incarcerated between January 2021 and December 2024.

The new report specified that the money was paid to managed care organizations, not directly to incarcerated people. The federal share was $6.1 million.

The Inspector General is recommending New York return that money to the federal government.

The audit found that New York did not always remove people from Medicaid managed care after they entered prison.

“We determined that the State agency did not always disenroll individuals from Medicaid managed care after receiving notification that an enrollee was incarcerated,” read the report.

In one example, an individual remained enrolled in managed care for 23 months while incarcerated and monthly payments were made on the person’s behalf.

Auditors said New York has systems designed to identify Medicaid recipients who entered prison, but those systems did not consistently match incarceration and Medicaid records.

The state told investigators that system limitations and overrides during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to some of the payments.

Auditors also revealed that discrepancies in personal information, such as names and dates of birth, could prevent the state from matching records and making an incarcerated person ineligible for payments in the system. 

The Inspector General noted that its review focused on managed care payments and did not determine whether the individuals received inpatient medical treatment.

New York officials told auditors that the state’s Office of Medicaid Inspector General was reviewing the payments and would eventually recover any outstanding overpayments. 

The audit concluded that New York needed to improve its process for identifying incarcerated Medicaid recipients and halting managed care payments that should no longer continue.

The state told investigators that it planned to improve its process for cross-referencing New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) and Medicaid records.

“The State agency clarified that it would continue its systematic data-matching process to match DOCCS records with Medicaid enrollment data, but it is exploring development of an enhanced report to identify mismatches using lower-probability matching criteria and identifying individuals with minor demographic discrepancies through manual review,” read the report.

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Government spending $300k per year on unused limos for former PMs

Taxpayers spent $298,359 keeping the chauffeured cars on standby last year. They were used for just $10,921 worth of trips.

The government has been spending around $300,000 per year to provide Crown limousines to former prime ministers and their spouses – even though the service goes mostly unused. 

Former prime ministers and governors-general are entitled to lifetime 24/7 access to chauffeur-driven cars from the Crown fleet for any travel “related to his or her role as a former prime minister”. The perk is managed by the government’s VIP Transport Service, part of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA).

The government spent a total of $340,646 providing this service in 2025, according to the DIA annual report. That’s despite the 15 eligible former prime ministers, governors-general and their spouses barely using the service. The entire cohort claimed just $10,921 towards land transport, which includes the use of chauffeur-driven cars charged out at an hourly rate.

Jenny Shipley was the largest individual claimant in 2025 with $3,877, followed by Helen Clark with $2,567. By contrast, many former prime ministers do not use the service at all. John Key has claimed just $56 in the last two years, while Jacinda Ardern has not claimed anything since she has been out of the country during that time.

The difference between the relatively small amount of actual use and the high total cost of the service is categorised entirely as an “availability fee”. In 2025 this fee was $298,359, up from $265,919 in 2024. DIA documents state that the availability fee is “designed to ensure that a fit-for-purpose on-call service is available to entitled customers”.

Briget Ridden, DIA’s general manager of ministerial services, said the annual fee “covers all other costs associated with providing the service. This includes fixed costs such as depreciation, capital charges, allocated overheads, and vehicle costs. It also covers other costs incurred to make the 24/7 chauffeur drive service available to users such as administration, transport coordination, an online booking portal, staffing, property and overheads.”

Technically, DIA considers the service to be “user-funded” because there is no direct Crown appropriation to run the vehicle fleet. However, former prime ministers don’t pay anything out of their own pocket. The cost of using the service and the cost of running the service are both ultimately paid by the taxpayer.

On top of access to chauffeur-driven cars, former prime ministers are also entitled to free transport on any plane, train, ferry, bus or taxi for travel “related to his or her role as a former prime minister”. They also have the option of using other luxury taxis and driver services that have similarly high charge-out rates but don’t require the taxpayer to fund the back-end services. 

Outside of the chauffeur-driven cars, airfares are the most significant travel perks claimed by former prime ministers, at a combined cost of $32,147 in 2025. Again, Jenny Shipley was the largest claimant with $9,296. 

Other benefits available to former prime ministers include lifelong use of a government-owned car with all fuel and maintenance costs covered, and an annual annuity of up to $64,000 per year ($12,800 for each year they served as prime minister). 

In December 2025, the government announced a $5.7m purchase of 10 BMW i7 xDrive60 luxury sedans, which retail for about $300,000 each, as well as 19 smaller, more economical vehicles.

Crown fleet vehicles are also available to all current ministers, the leader of the opposition, senior judges and diplomatic guests. These other users are funded through different departments and agencies.

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