Tag: taxes

Congresswoman Faces Expulsion After Indictment for Stealing FEMA Funds, Filing False Tax Return

Far-left Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick might soon be expelled from Congress if House Republicans get their way.

The reason: A federal grand jury has indicted her and other defendants, including her brother, for purloining $5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and using it for contributions to her 2021 congressional campaign.

The indictment isn’t Cherfilus-McCormick’s first brush with federal law. In April, she was the target of a complaint to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for myriad shenanigans with campaign funds and contributions.

The indictment and the FEC complaint are cited in the expulsion resolution from GOP Representative Greg Steube, also of Florida.

The DOJ Indictment

The Justice Department’s (DOJ) summary of the indictment explains that Cherfilus-McCormick, 46, and her brother, Edwin, 51, “worked through their family health-care company on a FEMA-funded COVID-19 vaccination staffing contract in 2021. In July 2021, the company received an overpayment of $5 million in FEMA funds.”

The defendants conspired to steal the money, then attempted to disguise the sources by routing the funds through “multiple accounts,” DOJ alleges:

Prosecutors allege that a substantial portion of the misappropriated funds was used as candidate contributions to Cherfilus-McCormick’s 2021 congressional campaign and for the personal benefit of the defendants.

The indictment also claims that Cherfilus-McCormick and another conspirator, Nadege Leblanc, 46, “arranged additional contributions using straw donors” from that contract. That went to “friends and relatives who then donated to the campaign as if using their own money.”

Also involved in the scheme, prosecutors allege, was Cherfilus-McCormick’s tax preparer, David K. Spencer, 41, who helped the congresswoman file a false return in 2021. The pair “falsely claimed political spending and other personal expenses as business deductions and inflated charitable contributions in order to reduce her tax obligations,” DOJ alleges.

Cherfilus-McCormick could go to prison for half a century, while big brother Cherfilus faces up to 35 years. Spencer and Leblanc face 33 years and 10 years, respectively.

Said U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi:

Using disaster relief funds for self-enrichment is a particularly selfish, cynical crime. No one is above the law, least of all powerful people who rob taxpayers for personal gain. We will follow the facts in this case and deliver justice.

“This is an unjust, baseless, sham indictment — and I am innocent. The timing alone is curious and clearly meant to distract from far more pressing national issues,” Cherfilus-McCormick claimed.

Keep reading

HUGE WHITE COAT WASTE WIN: Trump Administration and RFK Jr. Deliver, CDC Completely Shuts Down Taxpayer-Funded Monkey Labs

In yet another major victory for fiscal sanity and animal welfare under President Trump, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has officially shut down its primate laboratories that were imprisoning and experimenting on hundreds of monkeys on the taxpayer dime.

The CDC confirmed the shutdown today, and Science magazine was the first to report it.

The decisive action comes directly from aggressive advocacy and behind-the-scenes work by the White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a watchdog group that has been partnering with the Trump administration to cut wasteful, cruel government animal testing since his first term in 2017.

WCW President and Founder Anthony Bellotti gave The Gateway Pundit the following statement celebrating the win:

“This is another historic White Coat Waste victory — and we couldn’t be prouder to have worked with the Trump Administration to cut CDC’s government monkey business. Secretary Kennedy has now delivered on his promise to work with White Coat Waste by completely shutting down the CDC’s primate labs, where hundreds of victims were infected with smallpox, hemorrhagic fevers, hepatitis, and HIV-like viruses at taxpayer expense. Gateway Pundit’s reporting on White Coat Waste’s transgender monkey testing investigation was pivotal in making primate testing cuts a priority for the Trump administration. 

During the first Trump Administration, a White Coat Waste investigation and campaign also prompted the FDA to end wasteful nicotine addiction tests on baby monkeys and — for the first time ever — retire the primates to a sanctuary.  We’ve been working with Trump’s HHS to secure the same reprieve for as many CDC lab survivors as possible, which White Coat Waste has been urging the agency to do for years.

While legacy groups in the animal rights establishment throw red paint, we cut red tape — and, since 2017, White Coat Waste has led winning campaigns to wipe out entire federal primate labs under President Trump. The solution is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness!” 

Bellotti cites The Gateway Pundit and WCW’s August 2025 exposé on NIH and Florida state dollars being used to create “transgender monkeys” as a key factor that elevated the issue inside the new administration and helped make primate lab defunding a top priority.

In addition, in August, Laura Loomer reported in response to the TGP article, “Secretary Kennedy, who wrote about White Coat Waste’s viral ‘Beaglegate’ investigation in his book ‘The Real Anthony Fauci,’ said he looks forward to working with White Coat Waste to identify and cut more wasteful, inhumane, and unnecessary taxpayer funded animal tests.”

Keep reading

Trump’s tariffs expected to bring in $1 trillion less than expected – and that could drastically change his $2,000 check plan

President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs program will cut the national deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade, $1 trillion less than expected, according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

The tariffs imposed in the first year of Trump’s second term in the White House would cut primary U.S. deficits by $2.5 trillion if they are left in place as they are until 2035, by the CBO’s reckoning.

Such a reduction would also mean a massive decrease in borrowing, saving the country a further $500 billion in interest and bringing the total to $3 trillion, which is still well short of the $4 trillion the office forecast in August and would make only a relatively small dent in the total national debt, which currently stands at $38 trillion.

White House spokesman Kush Desai reacted to the downgrade in expectations by saying, “The fact of the matter is that President Trump is set to raise trillions in revenue for the federal government with tariffs – whose costs will ultimately be paid by the foreign exporters who are reliant on access to the American economy, the world’s biggest and best consumer market.”

But the revised forecast threatens to complicate the president’s plan to send out tariff dividend checks worth “at least” $2,000 to American citizens, even as the U.S. Supreme Court is still weighing up whether the tariffs are even legal in the first place.

Trump said in a Truth Social post on November 10 that only “FOOLS” opposed his tariffs and declared: “We are now the Richest, Most Respected Country In the World, With Almost No Inflation, and A Record Stock Market Price.

“We are taking in Trillions of Dollars and will soon begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT, $37 Trillion. Record Investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place. A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was not much clearer about the practicalities during an interview with ABC News’s This Week around the same time, saying only that the “$2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms, lots of ways.”

Keep reading

REPORT: Minnesota Taxpayers Are Being Robbed Blind, and Their Money is Funding Terrorism in Somalia

An explosive new investigative report by writers Ryan Thorpe and Chris Rufo reveals that American taxpayers in Minnesota are helping to fund terrorists in Somalia.

This is being done through a shell game that is played with our health and human services programs. Minnesota is ground zero for this fraud with Somalia because of the massive number of Somalis now living in the state.

This is insane.

From City Journal:

Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.

In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

Minnesota taxpayers should be outraged about this. All Americans should:

On September 18, Thompson announced criminal indictments for HSS fraud against Moktar Hassan Aden, Mustafa Dayib Ali, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, Christopher Adesoji Falade, Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, Asad Ahmed Adow, and Anwar Ahmed Adow—six of whom, according a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson, are members of Minnesota’s Somali community. Thompson made clear that this is just the first round of charges for HSS fraud that his office will be prosecuting.

“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just overbilling,” Thompson said at a press conference announcing the indictments. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.”

Thompson said many firms enrolled in the program “operated out of dilapidated storefronts or rundown office buildings.” The perpetrators often targeted people recently released from rehab, signing them up for Medicaid services they had no intention of providing.

Keep reading

Zohran Mamdani Has No Idea How He’s Going to Fund ‘Free’ Buses in New York City 

Zohran Mamdani, the new Democratic Socialist (communist) mayor-elect of New York City clearly has no idea how he is going to pay for all of the supposedly ‘free’ buses he has promised to voters.

He was recently pressed on this issue by a reporter, and when he could not answer the funding question, he simply said that it’s more important that they get it done, not how they fund it.

That’s not how things work in reality.

Transcript via Real Clear Politics:

MAMDANI: Well, I think the mayor will find that he’ll have a tough time trying to stymie the momentum that we have as a campaign and as a movement, because more than a million New Yorkers came out to vote for our vision of making the city more affordable. I know that’s difficult for the mayor because he ran an administration where, for four years, he made it more difficult for those New Yorkers to afford this city.

And even one of the people he floated appointing to the Rent Guidelines Board is a star of a show that I think is called Selling New York, which in some ways is a description of what Eric Adams tried to do.

MANNARINO: But if he does it, does that put a foil — or at least a pause — on freezing the rent?

MAMDANI: I think it’s an obstacle, but it’s one that I think we can overcome.

MANNARINO: And the other one — talking about fast and free buses, and your meeting with the governor. I’ve heard you say many times that you don’t want to take money away from the MTA — you want to put money back in. And it’s something she agrees with, right? “We don’t want to take away money from the MTA.”

How are you getting that $700 million to make the buses free into the MTA if she’s not for raising taxes?

MAMDANI: You know, I think the two clearest ways to raise that money is through raising the state’s corporate tax to match New Jersey. A lot of this is still a case to be made — whether it’s the corporate tax or the personal income tax on those who make more than a million dollars a year. I think these are the clearest ways.

I’ve also said that if there are other ways to raise this funding, the most important fact is that we fund it — not the question of how we do it, but that we do it.

Keep reading

Energy Department loans $1B to help finance the restart of nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island

The U.S. Department of Energy said Tuesday that it will loan $1 billion to help finance the restart of the nuclear power plant on Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island that is under contract to supply power to data centers for tech giant Microsoft.

The loan is in line with the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration, including bolstering nuclear power and artificial intelligence.

For Constellation Energy, which owns Three Mile Island’s lone functioning nuclear power reactor, the federal loan will lower its financing cost to get the mothballed plant up and running again. The 835-megawatt reactor can power the equivalent of approximately 800,000 homes, the Department of Energy said.

The reactor had been out of operation for five years when Constellation Energy announced last year that it would spend $1.6 billion to restart it under a 20-year agreement with Microsoft to buy the power for its data centers.

Constellation Energy renamed the functioning unit the Crane Clean Energy Center as it works to restore equipment including the turbine, generator, main power transformer and cooling and control systems. It hopes to bring the plant back online in 2027.

The loan is being issued under an existing $250 billion energy infrastructure program initially authorized by Congress in 2022. Neither the department nor Constellation released terms of the loan.

The plant, on an island in the Susquehanna River just outside Harrisburg, was the site of the nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident, in 1979. The accident destroyed one reactor, Unit 2, and left the plant with one functioning reactor, Unit 1.

In 2019, Constellation Energy’s then-parent company Exelon shut down the functioning reactor, saying it was losing money and Pennsylvania lawmakers had refused to subsidize it to keep it running.

The plan to restart the reactor comes amid something of a renaissance for nuclear power, as policymakers are increasingly looking to it to shore up the nation’s power supply, help avoid the worst effects of climate change and meet rising power demand driven by data centers.

Keep reading

SNAP Fraud: A $50,000 EBT Card, One Person Getting Benefits from 6 Different States – This Is What Taxpayers Are Funding

If there’s any good that’s come from the government shutdown, it’s exposing all the fraud being committed to exploit the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

To be sure, there are millions of needy Americans who were hurting from being deprived of SNAP as they tried to support children and keep their families from going hungry. This is not about them. This is about the other people — the individuals who dip into this program unjustly at the expense of the taxpayer.

Just the News reported that Department of Agriculture Deputy Secretary Steven Vaden has indicated his agency is engaging in data collection relating to SNAP across several states to see where funds for the program are going.

So far, what he’s uncovered is not promising.

Vaden cited an instance of one individual getting SNAP in six separate states.

Another person had over $50,000 loaded onto their electronic benefits card.

EBT cards work like credit cards for anyone getting government assistance, with funds rolling over to the following month.

Clearly something is amiss.

As Vaden put it, “The taxpayers have a right to know what is being done with their money and that, when we have appropriations, we are spending more than nine billion a month.”

On the case of a $50,000 card, Vaden clarified, “[Taxpayers] especially have a right to rest assured that only those who truly need are benefitting from the program, because every dollar you give to someone who has a balance of more than $15,000 on their EBT card cannot go to someone who is truly in need.”

SNAP fraud gets worse when considering recent comments by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins on “The Ingraham Angle.”

Over 500,000 people were found to have been taking SNAP benefits twice, with 5,000 dead people receiving it.

Keep reading

Massachusetts out-of-state SNAP spending soars, including in Hawaii

With the federal government reopened, Massachusetts SNAP benefits continue to reach far and wide, with out-of-state expenditures on the rise as the feds consider revamping the program to reduce waste, fraud and abuse.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins discussed SNAP benefits on Newsmax TV Thursday, telling the network that SNAP data from blue states is “going to give us a platform and a trajectory to fundamentally rebuild this program, have everyone reapply for their benefit, make sure that everyone that’s taking a taxpayer-funded benefit through SNAP or food stamps, that they literally are vulnerable and they can’t survive without it.”

According to data from the state Department of Transitional Assistance, there have been notable increases in out of state spending through the SNAP program in eight states. From FY24 to FY25, these expenditures have jumped by 48.7% in Illinois, 47.1% in New Jersey, 25.9% in Arkansas, 21.8% in Minnesota, 20.8% in California, 10.9% in Washington, and 1.9% in New York. There was even a 16.7% increase in SNAP spending in Hawaii by Massachusetts residents.

This as other states, notably four of the other five states in New England, are getting the cold shoulder from Bay State SNAP purchases. Massachusetts EBT spending in Alaska was down 55% in FY25 and Florida experienced a 12.5% drop. Out-of-state EBT spending in Connecticut dropped 6.5% with a 5.9% slump in New Hampshire. Rhode Island and Maine saw decreases of 3.2% and 2.9%, respectively.

Acting DTA Commissioner Michael Cole tells the Herald that the out-of-state expenditures are negligible compared to what Massachusetts SNAP recipients spend at home and regionally.

“The SNAP program is a lifeline for more than one million Massachusetts residents, including veterans, seniors, children and people with disabilities. It brings in $2.7 billion annually that is spent at over 5,500 retailers and small businesses in Massachusetts,” Cole said.

He also emphasized the importance of allowing online purchases: “While 91% of all EBT transactions are made within Massachusetts and nearby states, it is important that recipients also have the ability to purchase food online. For example, some seniors are home bound due to their health or disabilities and are unable to physically visit a grocery store. All of these policies are set by the federal government.”

The DTA also says many Massachusetts SNAP recipients could be visiting or taking care of sick relatives and loved ones in other states, requiring them to spend money on food while away.

Keep reading

Albany Republicans’ $20B shame: state spending madness is their fault, too

Albany Republicans, the minority in the state Senate and Assembly for the last seven years, face a long hike back to political relevance.

They can start by answering the $20 billion question.

That’s the difference between what New York state expects to spend this fiscal year — $148 billion, excluding federal aid and borrowing — and what it would be spending if the last budget enacted with GOP support, in 2018, had kept growing only at the rate of inflation.

That amount is $128 billion.

Republicans correctly note state spending is higher than ever — and, given Albany’s reliance on a small subset of high earners, rising unsustainably.

But they can’t put the blame on the Democrats alone.

The $20 billion question isn’t about what Republicans would cut if voters again entrusted them to steer the state.

It’s a deeper challenge: It asks them to explain, to themselves especially, how they can credibly claim to be the taxpayers’ champions when they not only supported much of this fiscal bulge, but pushed to make it worse.

Most of the budget growth since 2018 has been in just two programs: Medicaid and school aid.

Republicans supposedly concerned about the state’s fiscal picture have repeatedly agitated for higher spending on both.

New York spends $4,942 per resident (enrolled or not) on Medicaid, per Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. That’s 23% more than the next-highest state, Kentucky, and double what New Jersey spends.

A credible opposition party would be hammering Gov. Kathy Hochul on this, arguing that the program is pushing up taxes, crowding out essential services and often failing the vulnerable people it’s meant to help.

But the tiny group of upstate fiscal hawks making these points are undercut by their own Republican team: Sen. Pat Gallivan, ostensibly his conference’s health care point man, last year joined 1199 SEIU, the state’s largest health care union, to demand  “Medicaid equity,” a budget-busting increase in what the state pays hospitals and other providers.

New York’s GOP can’t even credibly levy its evergreen complaint about “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid.

The Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, a once-tiny initiative meant to help a small group of people live outside nursing homes, mushroomed into a $9 billion boondoggle that pays more than 400,000 people to care for 250,000 New Yorkers.

Republicans should have been first to sound the alarm on CDPAP — yet when Hochul proposed modest reforms by eliminating middlemen, they called her suggestion a “full-blown catastrophe” and all but ignored the fiscal hemorrhaging.

Keep reading

US Debt Rose By $620 Billion During The Government Shutdown

“This package demonstrates that we can govern without surrendering to big spending or letting Democrats dictate priorities,” wrote the House Freedom Caucus in some talking points released to the media.

“We successfully stiff-armed a massive omnibus spending bill; locked in disciplined, flat spending levels; preserved President Trump’s policy priorities… and kept our leverage for the next round in January.”

People can say whatever they want, but I’m pretty sure our politicians closed the US government for a record 42 days and changed absolutely nothing. That’s quite an accomplishment. Sublime ineptitude. Congressional approval ratings supposedly declined 11pts to 15% during the period. Remarkable.

If a trader knew that 85% of his decisions were losers, he’d become the richest man on earth by simply doing the exact opposite of his instinct. I’m guessing Pelosi made good money trading the chop, but the broad equity market ended the shutdown period roughly a percent higher than where it started.

Extrapolating the recent pace of deficit spending, the Federal government accumulated another $600bln of debt during the shutdown, adding more leverage to the system, sustaining the economy, supporting asset values.

Keep reading