Tag: taxes

Trump Admin. Awards $1.26 Billion for the Largest Migrant Detention Center in the U.S.

The Trump administration is awarding $1.26 billion to build the nation’s largest detention and deportation center, to be located at Fort Bliss, Texas.

Fort Bliss, which is near El Paso, encompasses more than 1.12 million acres of land along the border with Mexico, and also features an airport. The new facility will have room for 5,000 beds and will likely serve as a deportation hub for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to Bloomberg.

The housing is set to consist of tents that will feature heating and air-conditioning. The contract is being awarded to Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics Company with $232 million of the total price being put up by the U.S. Army.

An ICE official told Bloomberg that the federal government “is indeed pursuing all available options to expand bedspace capacity. This process does include housing detainees at certain military bases.”

The announcement of the contract for Fort Bliss comes only a week after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that DHS will be setting up new deportation and detention facilities at military bases in Indiana and New Jersey.

Since Trump came into office this year, the administration has added 60 facilities to the list of those used to house migrants marked for deportation.

Now two more are being added to that list. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth informed Congress in a letter that Camp Atterbury in central Indiana and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey will be available “for temporary use by the Department of Homeland Security to house illegal aliens.”

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Trump Signs Executive Order Aimed at Helping Cities and States Get Homeless People Off the Streets and Into Treatment Centers

President Trump has just signed a new executive order which is intended to help cities and states get homeless people off of sidewalks and streets and into treatment centers. It’s part of his effort to make America safe again.

Homelessness has always been an issue in America but has exploded in certain blue cities in recent decades and the people who run these places seem unwilling or unable to deal with the problem.

For some reason, many liberals seem to think it is compassionate to allow people to continue to live in filth, addicted to dangerous drugs.

FOX News reports:

Homeless people can be removed from streets by cities, states in new Trump executive order

As part of his effort to “Make America Safe Again,” President Donald Trump signed an executive order to allow cities and states to remove homeless people off the streets and into treatment centers.

Trump signed the order, “Ending Vagrancy and Restoring,” Thursday afternoon.

The order states that the “number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the Biden administration — 274,224 — was the highest ever recorded.”

It directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to “reverse judicial precedents and end consent decrees” stopping or limiting cities and states from removing homeless individuals from the streets and moving them to treatment centers.

Though it is unclear how much money will be allocated to the effort, Trump’s order redirects federal funds to ensure that removed homeless individuals are sent to rehabilitation, treatment and other facilities.

Additionally, the order requires Bondi to partner with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to prioritize federal grants to cities and states that “enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use, urban camping and loitering, and urban squatting, and track the location of sex offenders,” according to USA Today.

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Brits Rage as Government Piles Hundreds of ‘Migrants’ Into 4-Star London Hotel

New protests have broken out in response to the latest outrage perpetrated against British citizens as the government moves hundreds of migrants into a four-star hotel in London.

Amid ongoing demonstrations in Essex following the alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by an African male staying at a ‘migrant hotel’ there, U.K. authorities quietly took over the Britannia International Hotel in the posh financial district of Canary Wharf in order to pack it full of ‘asylum seekers.’

With a nightly rate averaging around $600, the 500-room Britannia might easily gross $300,000 per day if filled to capacity, indicating British taxpayers could be on the hook for an astronomical bill.

London-based reporter Jack Hadfield has been covering mounting protests outside the Britannia, where police and masked private security are patrolling a “ring of steel” erected to keep the public at bay.

“You’re seeing more and more normal people not being violent, but angrily protesting,” Hadfield told Border Hawk during an interview on Wednesday.

“It’s more powerful to have a strong, angry protest that doesn’t turn violent, because then it’s so much harder to paint it all as ‘far-right, violent, Nazi, fascist thugs,’ as opposed to angry citizens who are fed up with their government.”

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Trump Doesn’t Support Government Doing Business With Musk’s AI Company: White House

President Donald Trump is not interested in allowing the federal government to do business with tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on July 23.

During a White House press briefing on Wednesday, Leavitt was asked whether Trump supports federal agencies contracting with Musk’s company, xAI.

“I don’t think so, no,” Leavitt said.

But last week, the company, alongside Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, scored a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense to boost the agency’s adoption of artificial intelligence.

When asked whether the president wanted to cancel the contract, Leavitt said she would discuss it with Trump.

All four companies were awarded contracts with the same $200 million ceiling from the Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to advance the Pentagon’s adoption of AI.

The same day the contracts were awarded, xAI announced a new series of AI products for the U.S. government, referred to as Grok for Government.

Last year, Musk stepped into the political arena and decided to endorse Trump, donate to his campaign, and act in an advisory capacity. Trump then tapped him to lead his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which recommended a series of federal worker layoffs and steep cuts to multiple agencies.

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Report: More Than $25M in DHS Grants Went to Radical Groups With Terror Ties

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent more than $25 million to extremist groups with ties to Islamist terror groups between 2013 and 2023, according to a new report from the Middle East Forum.

Gregg Roman, executive director of the think tank, told JNS that the forum pored over publicly accessible government spending data.

“We matched these grants with extremist groups found in our research archives to identify the misuse of taxpayer dollars on a grand scale,” he said.

“Americans should know that their hard-earned money was allocated to build up security around a luxurious mosque compound in Maryland owned by Turkey’s Islamist government and that mosques in Michigan and Texas that serve as outposts for Iran’s regime were also recipients of DHS funds,” he told JNS.

Some $750,000 in federal grants went “to mosques suspected of operating on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran or its proxies,” according to the report. The report acknowledges that it is not known if the U.S. government ultimately paid the grants, only that it earmarked them in a specific year. (JNS sought comment from the Department of Homeland Security.)

The report, which the forum published on Monday, examines three federal grant programs — the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, Countering Violent Extremism, and the Disaster Relief Fund — from which the extremist groups received funding.

The Nonprofit Security Grant Program is “the greatest source of DHS funding to extremist groups,” as support for the program surged from $10 million in 2012 to $454 million in 2024, per the report.

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An Offensive Shield — for Impunity, and Genocide: The Iron Dome and U.S. Complicity in Slaughter of Gazans

The House of Representatives has approved giving Israel an additional $1.3 billion in “emergency defense assistance” for its Iron Dome missile defense program, another installment of countless billions sent from the United States to intensify a one-sided war against the Palestinian people.

The Iron Dome system intercepts short range rockets (launched from 2.5 to 43 miles) through the joint work of the IDF, Israeli contractors, and U.S. weapons manufacturers like Raytheon. Radar batteries detect incoming missiles, calculate direction and threat level, and, if necessary, target the menacing projectile and speed interceptors to destroy it.

The Iron Dome destroys incoming rockets at high altitude, but, since its emplacement in 2011, the system has also functioned to enable Israel to conduct ethnic cleansing and perpetuate genocide with impunity in Gaza and the West Bank.

It has underwritten an astonishingly deadly campaign of collective punishment, with lengthy, targeted air, drone, and guided missile strikes in densely populated areas. These deadly attacks are carried out against a people who have no army, no shield, and no means of response.

When we fund one-sided protection without justice, we destroy the possibility of peace for them, and for ourselves.

The Iron Dome, then, is not just a “defense” system. It is the preeminent strategic enabler of Israel’s asymmetric genocidal war against Palestinians. First the shield, then the sword.

It must be said clearly: Opposing genocide and illegal occupation is not antisemitic. It is the defense of humanity. The Israeli government’s ongoing colonization of Palestinian land, its collective punishment of a captive population, and its refusal to recognize a sovereign Palestinian people all constitute violations of international law.

To oppose this violence is not to oppose Jewish people. It is to stand against the machinery of oppression, just as we should for any people subjected to such inhumanity.

By eliminating the possibility of reprisal, the Iron Dome has insulated Israel from accountability, enabling it to continue inhumane policies of dispossession and aggression without consequence. This strategic impunity dulls domestic dissent and emboldens a government that continues to seize land and to erase Palestinian life.

War crime inquiries, censures, sanctions, none of it matters while the Netanyahu government pursues with single-minded intensity a “Greater Israel,” using the most advanced military technologies against people who cannot fight back.

That the whole of the United States is not consumed with outrage at the mass murder, the diabolical, Torquemadan cruelties of the IDF, the self-appointed agents of death who gleefully kill children, laugh while shooting starving people desperately scrapping for a morsel of food to survive, and bomb hospitals, mosques, churches, markets, cafes, even tents, — is a wrenching testimony to the psychic numbing that occurs with distance from the grim reality of war and the power of the dehumanizing narrative to which many Americans have succumbed. The capacity to emotionally respond to the agonizing suffering of Palestinians has been muted by distance and by relentless propaganda in the West.

I remember years ago, during the Vietnam War, daily news accounts of the carnage in Southeast Asia eventually dissolved into an undifferentiated mass of information, causing readers to turn the page or switch the channel. Information overload can normalize atrocity as it dulls cognition. Then, when battle scenes of U.S. soldiers being killed or injured were carried by US television networks, the powerful emotional impact drove home the true cost, propelled public opposition to the war and forced President Lyndon Johnson from office.

Spectators of events in Israel can become morally anesthetized as high technology is employed in mass murder, when journalists are targeted and killed, when civilian casualties roll up like an odometer at high speed. Except for random videos posted online, the only testimony is that of the IDF, which denies, denies, denies, cries “anti-Semitism” at exposure, and then, after a pause for a drink of limonana, efficiently continues the killing.

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Democrats’ All-Electric USPS Fleet Sees Each Truck Come With A $6.8 Million Price-Tag

According to a recently published New York Post report, the Biden administration played a major role in the push to massively electrify the United States Postal Service mail truck fleet. From a USPS press release in 2022:

The United States Postal Service today announced that it expects to acquire at least 66,000 battery electric delivery vehicles as part of its 106,000 vehicle acquisition plan for deliveries between now and 2028. The vehicles purchased as part of this anticipated plan will begin to replace the Postal Service’s aging delivery fleet of over 220,000 vehicles.

The Postal Service anticipates at least 60,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDV), of which at least 75% (45,000) will be battery electric.

But, like Buttigieg’s E.V. charging stations, which cost about a billion dollars each, or Kamala Harris’s $42 billion rural internet “flop” that connected a whopping zero rural Americans to the web, or her one-billion-dollar solar panel plan for Puerto Rico which resulted in “only a few” installations), Biden’s “green” USPS plan has been an absolute cluster.

From the Post item:

A Biden administration plan to create a ‘green’ fleet of postal vehicles has churned out a mere 250 electric mail trucks in just over two years — after shelling out taxpayer funds meant to build thousands…

The nearly $10 billion project — which called for more than 35,000 battery-powered US Postal Service (USPS) vehicles to be completed by September 2028 — was funded in part by $3 billion in funding from former President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

(I suspect the Post item has a typo, because as you see above, the number from the USPS is 45,000, not 35,000.)

So far, the disbursed IRA funds are around $1.7 billion, which means that if Congress is able to claw back the $1.3 billion still allocated for the project, each of these 250 trucks have cost U.S. taxpayers a minimum of $6.8 million a piece—the whole plan was a $10 billion “investment,” so who knows how much else was spent from other sources. Now, “investments” are supposed to give the investors a return on their money, haven’t these financial whizzes heard?

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NIH Director Details Crackdown on Fees Monopoly Publishers Charge

In an exclusive interview with The DisInformation Chronicle, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya explains his latest policy to control monopoly science publishers now raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers, while sometimes playing partisan politics and pushing fake narratives. The NIH announced yesterday that they will soon cap the “article processing fees” that publishers can charge NIH-funded researchers to make their studies public and available to American taxpayers.

NIH funds much of the planet’s biomedical science, but this research has remained locked up by pricey science journals that charge Americans expensive fees to read the results of the very studies they funded. The publishers of Science Magazine, for example, demand $30 to read a single study.

However, this changed recently when Dr. Bhattacharya demanded that journals make NIH-funded studies public as soon as they publish them. However, taxpayers are still on the hook, paying the “open access fee” that journals charge scientists.

In the case of the esteemed Nature Magazine, this means a $12,600 fee. Of course, scientists don’t have thousands of dollars lying around for publishing fees, so NIH-funded researchers simply charge that cost back to the American taxpayer as part of their NIH grants. In effect, taxpayers get charged twice: first when they fund an NIH grant for a university professor, and second when they pay that professor’s publishing fee to a science journal.

And this money quickly adds up.

The six largest science publishers charge researchers $1.8 billion in publishing fees every year, with American taxpayers soaking up a large portion of that money. NIH’s latest policy will control these costs in the future, ensuring more NIH money goes to scientists and their research.

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Did Trump Expose the DC Sham on Waste and Fraud?

On January 24, President Trump fired 17 inspector generals working for a wide array of federal agencies. Trump’s action jolted Washington because most of those officials could supposedly only be removed for cause — specific misconduct or other abuses. Trump also scorned the federal law requiring giving Congress 30-days notice before terminating such officials. 

Some of the inspector generals that Trump axed had done good work exposing government abuses while others had defaulted to the lap dog mode. A White House official justified the firings: “These rogue, partisan bureaucrats who have weaponized the justice system against their political enemies are no longer fit or deserve to serve in their appointed positions.” The official said the firings will “make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.” 

Maybe the White House wanted inspector generals who could bring bigger brooms to sweep evidence under rugs? The controversy that erupted over Trump’s firings largely ignored the long history of inspector generals either being wrongfully terminated or being worse than useless. 

Politicians create facades to make citizens believe that government automatically guards against waste, fraud, and abuse. The purpose of inspector generals is to create the illusion of honest government — to make people think that oversight is going on. While inspector generals are routinely portrayed as paragons of integrity, many are appointed by the chief of the federal agency they oversee. Their jobs and budgets depend directly on the political appointees they are supposed to investigate, and they grovel accordingly.

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Five Reasons Why No Amount of Additional NATO Support to Ukraine Can Stop Russian Steamroller

The US and its European NATO allies are working on new arrangements to keep the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine going for as long as possible. Here’s why the outcome will be the same no matter how much additional support is delivered.

  1. Ukraine Has Already Lost

Long term, “there is no material-technical nor political strategy” to avoid Ukraine’s defeat, Quincy Institute fellow Almut Rochowanski told Responsible Statecraft this week, stressing that the West simply doesn’t have the capacity to arm Kiev sufficiently to stop it from losing more territory, troops, arms and infrastructure.

  1. Russia’s Advance Has Become Unstoppable

Case in point? The ongoing summer offensive, which even the Russophobic NYT admits has scored “its biggest monthly gains in territory since the beginning of the year” in June – attributable to advantages in troops, airpower and the “methodical” destruction of Ukraine’s army.

  1. Any New Resources Delivered Will Be Wasted

Currently, new deliveries include promises of additional Patriot batteries, sourced from European (not US) stocks, and 49 used Australian M1 Abrams tanks.

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