Last month, a source called me. As usual in D.C., he wanted to talk on Signal. The encrypted communications app long ago replaced Blackberries as the default way to message in D.C.
So it wasn’t that surprising that a magazine editor somehow got added onto a Trump administration Signal chat involving J.D. Vance and other administration figures discussing air strikes against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. Since everyone under 50 in D.C. is constantly messaging each other and media contacts, something like this was eventually bound to happen.
In an age where high-level remote government meetings have become the norm, important decisions in America and Europe are arrived at by video chat and text.
But there may be bigger reasons why the Trump administration and everyone in D.C. should be wary about using Signal. While the app is ubiquitous because it’s perceived as being more ‘private’ than WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, Brian Acton, the man behind WhatsApp, created the Signal Foundation and is a major liberal donor. Moxie Marlinspike, Signal’s other founder and coder, claims to be an anarchist, and no fan of the Trump administration.
Liberal foundations helped fund Signal’s rise and the initial fiscal sponsorship for Signal was provided by the Freedom of the Press Foundation whose key figures, Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, are better known for leaking damaging government information to leftists, rather than for keeping it secret.
Signal continues to be run today by leftists who passionately hate the Trump administration.
The Signal Foundation’s president, Meredith Whittaker, described as the “woman in charge of the secure communication channel”, became famous leading a revolt against Google when it dared to add the black female president of the Heritage Foundation to its AI council.
“There is zero proof that anti-conservative bias exists. In fact, these companies bend over backwards to not enforce their terms of service for people like President Trump,” Whittaker falsely claimed.
Other foundation board members include Katherine Maher, the current head of NPR and former head of Wikimedia, who famously claimed that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
Maher had said that, “the number one challenge that we see here is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” She had cheered Hillary and Kamala, and denounced President Trump as a “deranged racist sociopath.” Rounding out the board are Jay Sullivan, a former Twitter exec ousted by Musk and Amba Kak, a Whittaker protege with ties to the Biden administration.
Signal is a leftist activist group which makes it all the more strange that so much of D.C. is convinced that their privacy is secure using it. So much so that key Trump administration figures, including the vice president, could chat about an upcoming military strike on Signal.
For now there’s no evidence that Signal calls or chats were compromised by anything other than ‘user error’ of the kind that leads random people to occasionally try to add me to groups on Skype, WhatsApp, Signal and every known communications app in the free world.
Signal’s leaders continue to boast that they are committed to the security of the app and the organization’s actual CTO, Ehren Kret, occasionally retweets Elon Musk, but the fundamental difference between WhatsApp and Signal lies not in the technology, but its credibility.
“Signal either works for everyone or it works for no one. Every military in the world uses Signal, every politician I’m aware of uses Signal. Every CEO I know uses Signal because anyone who has anything truly confidential to communicate recognizes that storing that on a Meta database or in the clear on some Google server is not good practice,” Whittaker said.
The question is whether there might be a tipping point at which the value of sabotaging the ‘right’ takes priority over operating a credible platform, as it did when Whittaker went to war against having even one single conversative sit on Google’s AI ethics review board.
Signal is just a digital incarnation of leftist civil libertarianism of the kind that created the ACLU and other free speech movements because they believed that privacy and speech innately favored insurgent revolutionary movements over establishment conservative ones.
“I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which worker’s rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever,” ACLU co-founder Roger Nash Baldwin wrote in ‘Soviet Russia’.
The entire quote is important because it makes it all too clear that civil libertarianism for groups like this is a strategy, a means, not an end, a way to bring down the system and then rule over it.
The ACLU’s current Case Selection Guidelines lay out a more sophisticated version of this argument calling for a consideration of the “impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression” on the organization’s leftist political agenda. And in the last election, you could find the ACLU holding events on “ways to combat the spread of disinformation”.
The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation still, for the most part, oppose the government use of big tech companies to engage in censorship, known as ‘jawboning’, but other digital civil libertarian groups, notably the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have come out on the side of some government censorship. The Knight Foundation, which helped fund Signal and retains ties to it, has sympathies for ‘jawboning’ censorship.
Katherine Maher, a Signal board member, described taking “a very active approach to disinformation,” based on “conversations with government” in her past career.
Privacy on Signal, like that on any platform or app, depends on the commitment of those in charge to maintaining its integrity. Where WhatsApp is seen as an information gathering tool for Facebook’s data hungry operation, Signal emphasizes that it’s a non-profit and has no reason to spy on you. But Facebook does things to make money whereas Signal’s motives are ideological. And that ideology is hostile to conservatives and the Trump administration.
I use Signal, the way I use every communications app or service, with the assumption that anything I send is vulnerable to being intercepted, seen and heard if there is a sufficiently motivated party inside or outside the organization behind it. That’s not paranoia, it’s pragmatism. Privacy can be improved, but it can’t ever be absolutely ensured.
Conservatives should use Signal cautiously and Trump administration officials would do well not to hold meetings using a supposedly secure app run by some of their worst enemies.
The American system was founded on a simple idea: three branches of government, each with its distinct role. The president executes the law, Congress creates it, and the judiciary interprets it. However, at some point, activist judges became more than just referees; they began seeing themselves as emperors, wielding gavels like scepters and rewriting the rules to fit their desires. These black-robed radicals believe they possess more power than the president, and it’s time for conservatives to confront them as the tyrants they have become.
Consider the immigration saga under Donald Trump. In 2017, Trump issued an executive order—a travel ban targeting countries plagued by terrorism. It was bold, unapologetic, and squarely within his constitutional authority to protect national security.
Then came the activist judges. Federal courts in Hawaii and Washington state blocked the order, with unelected judges like James Robart and Derrick Watson acting as armchair commander-in-chief. Their rationale? Trump’s campaign rhetoric caused hurt feelings, so the policy must be discriminatory. Forget the Constitution or the will of the voters who placed Trump in office—these judges concluded that their moral superiority outweighs executive power. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the ban, but not before years of chaos demonstrated the reality: activist judges do not interpret the law; they create it.
Image by Grok.
Then there’s the abortion racket. For decades, Roe v. Wade stood as a symbol of judicial overreach, a 1973 decision concocted from thin air by justices who discovered a “right” to abortion lurking in the shadows of the Constitution. Fast forward to 2022, when Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health finally overturned it, returning the issue to the states.
You’d think that would settle things, but activist judges aren’t finished. In states like Ohio and Michigan, lower courts have rushed to block pro-life laws, twisting state constitutions into pretzels to keep the abortion mills operational. These judges don’t care that Dobbs stripped their federal protection; they’ll concoct new rights faster than you can say “living document.” They’re not answering to voters or executives; they’re answering to Planned Parenthood and the progressive elite.
What about guns? After Trump’s ATF tried to crack down on bump stocks—those nasty little devices that turn rifles into machine guns—activist judges swooped in again. 2023, the Fifth Circuit struck down the ban, with judges like Jennifer Walker Elrod arguing that the agency had overstepped.
Fair enough, except the pattern repeats: courts don’t just check the executive—they supplant it, deciding policy from the bench. Meanwhile, in blue states, judges uphold every gun control scheme the Left dreams up, ignoring Bruen (2022), in which the Supreme Court demanded strict historical scrutiny. These aren’t rulings; they’re power grabs, with judges picking winners and losers based on their politics, not the Second Amendment.
The arrogance is staggering. Millions elect presidents, and these presidents are accountable to the people every four years. Judges, however, are appointed for life, so they’re insulated from consequences, yet they behave as if they run the show.
When Trump attempted to end DACA—Obama’s illegal amnesty-by-fiat—courts blocked him, with judges like Nicholas Garaufis in New York asserting that the move was “arbitrary.” But when Biden pushes climate edicts or vaccine mandates, activist judges support him, and rubber-stamping executives overreach as long as it’s their guy. The double standard is evident, but the message is clear: these judges believe they’re above the Oval Office, holding veto power that no election can challenge.
This isn’t what the founders intended. Article III of the Constitution assigns courts a limited role: to resolve “cases” and “controversies,” not to dictate national policy. Alexander Hamilton referred to the judiciary as the “least dangerous” branch, lacking the purse of Congress or the sword of the executive. But tell that to the modern judiciary, where lifetime appointees like Ruth Bader Ginsburg (before her passing) and Sonia Sotomayor treat the bench as a progressive throne, issuing decrees that undermine tradition and sovereignty. They don’t just see themselves as ranking above the president—they consider themselves above us all.
Conservatives must act. Demand that Senate Republicans thoroughly question judicial nominees—no more stealth activists slipping through. Advocate for term limits for federal judges; life tenure was never intended to create demigods. And when rogue judges act, eventually, they will force a situation in which governors and presidents find themselves channeling Andrew Jackson: “The court has made its decision; now let them enforce it.” The judiciary has no army—its power depends on compliance, and we don’t have to go along with it.
Activist judges aren’t the guardians of justice; they are usurpers in robes, intoxicated by their authority. They have transformed courts into super-legislatures, bypassing both presidents and voters. The Right cannot remain passive while these petty tyrants dismantle our republic. It’s time to strip the emperor’s clothes and remind them: in America, the people rule—not the gavel.
This is verging on a crisis and how to rein these individuals in is a controversial topic.
If you have already read the following, my apologies. I feel it is a disturbing truth and worth repeating.
The left knew they were lying to us all along
Victor David Hanson
For years, the left has advanced utter untruths for cheap partisan purposes that it knew at the time were all false. And now when caught, they just shrug and say they were lying all along.
Once it was known that the first COVID-19 case originated in or near a Chinese communist virology lab engineering gain-in-function deadly viruses — with help from Western agencies — the left went into full persecution mode.
They damned as incompetent, racist, and conspiratorial any who dared follow logic and evidence to point out that the Chinese government and its military were both culpable for the virus and lying.
A million Americans died of COVID. Millions more suffered long-term injuries. Still, the left-wing media and Biden administration demonized any who dared speak about a lab origin of the deadly virus.
The lies were designed to protect the guilty who had helped fund the virus’s origins, such as Doctors Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins.
The Biden government also tried to use the lab theory to ridicule a supposedly pro-Trump “conspiracy.”
Western corporate interests deeply invested in China did not want their partner held responsible for veritably killing and maiming hundreds of millions worldwide.
Almost as soon as Joe Biden was inaugurated, the left knew that he was physically and mentally unable to serve as president.
Indeed, that was the point.
Biden’s role was designed as a waxen figurine for hard-left agendas that, without the “old Joe Biden from Scranton” pseudo-moderate veneer, could never have been advanced.
His handlers operated a nightmare administration: the destruction of deterrence abroad, two theater wars, 12 million illegal aliens, a weaponized justice system, hyperinflation, and $7 trillion more in debt.
By 2017, the public knew three truths about the so-called Christopher Steele dossier.
One, it was completely fallacious — fabricated by a has-been, ex-British spy Christopher Steele. He childishly had cobbled together lurid sex stories, James Bond spy fictions, and Russian-fed disinformation to destroy the Trump candidacy and later presidency.
Two, it was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. She hid her checks behind the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GSP paywalls.
Three, the FBI under James Comey hired Steele as an informant. It helped disseminate his concocted files and was also instrumental in trying to subvert the Trump campaign and later administration.
No sane person ever believed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was the work of “Russian disinformation.” Its contents a year before the 2020 election were verified by the FBI, but it kept mum about its confirmation.
The pornographic pictures, the evidence of prostitution and drug use, the electronic communications implicating Joe Biden in his family’s illicit shake-down operation of foreign governments — all were never challenged by anyone who was associated with the laptop’s contents.
Yet future Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, along with former interim CIA Director Mike Morrell, sought to fabricate a colossal lie to arm their candidate, Joe Biden, with plausible denial in the last presidential debate before the 2020 election.
They rounded up a rogue’s gallery of 51 now utterly discredited former intelligence authorities to lie to the nation that the laptop was likely fake.
All knew the FBI had verified the laptop. But they also knew that their titles would empower their lies that the Russians likely invented the laptop to aid the sinister Trump.
And the ruse worked like a charm.
In the debate, Biden cited their lies chapter and verse to claim the incriminating laptop was fake. A lying media damned Trump as a puppet of Vladimir Putin. Biden, little more than a week later, won the 2020 election.
The Biden administration deliberately destroyed the southern border and welcomed 12 million illegal aliens. And then it lied that Biden had no power to stop the influx.
The media fabricated the excuse that “comprehensive immigration reform” was needed to enforce federal immigration laws already on the books.
Upon inauguration, Trump, in a matter of days, stopped what Biden had deliberately engineered for years.
Biden’s handlers wanted new millions of poor illegal aliens, dependent on social services, to swarm the borders.
They saw them as future voters and constituents to fuel their victim/victimizer Marxist binaries.
And they now quietly see their efforts as a huge success — knowing that it will be near impossible to find the millions of illegal aliens they welcomed in.
All these lies have divided the country and permanently damaged the U.S.
The perpetrators have neither apologized for their lies nor tried to either deny or substantiate them.
No one involved has ever been held legally accountable.
The legacy media permanently ruined its reputation and will likely never be seen as credible again.
The Biden administration, overseer of many of these lies, will be regarded as the most duplicitous and dishonest presidency in modern history.
Chief Justice John Roberts was expected to be a conservative stalwart and a guardian of the Constitution, appointed by George W. Bush to guide the Supreme Court towards originalist principles. Instead, he has transformed into something completely different—a turncoat whose rulings have betrayed the values he vowed to uphold. For those of us who believed in a judiciary that honors the will of the people and the intent of our founders, Roberts has become the ultimate disappointment: a Judas in black robes, selling out the American Right for thirty pieces of silver from the progressive elite.
Let’s start with the Affordable Care Act. In 2012, conservatives held their breath as NFIB v. Sebelius threatened to unravel Obamacare, a bloated government overreach that symbolized everything we despise about the Left’s nanny-state agenda. Roberts had the chance to strike it down. Instead, he twisted logic into knots, declaring the individual mandate a “tax” rather than a penalty — a semantic trick that saved Obama’s signature legislation. Legal scholars still scratch their heads over that one, but the message was clear: Roberts wasn’t here to fight for principle. He was here to play it safe, cozying up to the Beltway cocktail circuit where progressivism is the currency of prestige.
Fast forward to 2020, when election integrity hung in the balance. After a chaotic presidential race marred by allegations of fraud—claims that millions of Americans still find credible—Roberts had another chance to prove his mettle. Texas brought a case challenging the election procedures in several swing states, and conservatives begged the Court to hear it. Roberts refused. He didn’t just avoid responsibility; he ensured the case was dead on arrival, reportedly pressuring his colleagues to sidestep any “political controversy.” Never mind that the Constitution’s survival sometimes requires tough choices. For Roberts, maintaining his reputation as a neutral arbiter outweighed any obligation to the republic. The result? A stolen election—or at least the perception of one—was left to fester while Roberts washed his hands like Pontius Pilate.
Then there’s his track record on cultural issues, where his betrayal cuts the deepest. In the 2020 case of Bostock v. Clayton County, Roberts joined the liberal bloc to redefine “sex” in Title VII, effectively rewriting federal law to include sexual orientation and gender identity. This wasn’t merely interpretation; it was legislation from the bench, a favor to the woke mob, an act that undermined religious liberty and common sense. Conservatives who had spent decades battling judicial activism looked on in horror as their “reliable” chief justice handed progressives a victory they couldn’t achieve at the ballot box. The man once celebrated as a textualist revealed himself as a weathervane, swaying to the winds of cultural pressure.
What drives this treachery? Some say it’s cowardice—an obsession with dodging the Left’s inevitable tantrums. Others suggest leverage: rumors of compromising secrets or backroom deals have swirled around Roberts for years, from his unusual handling of the FISA court to his adoption records from Ireland. We may never know the complete story, but the pattern is unmistakable. Time and again, when the stakes are highest, Roberts flinches. He’s not a warrior for the Constitution but a referee, more concerned with the game’s optics than its outcome.
Compare him to the justices whom conservatives admire. Clarence Thomas, a lion of originalism, never wavers, delivering opinions rooted in first principles regardless of the backlash. Samuel Alito, another Bush appointee, has consistently stood against the tide of progressive overreach. Even the Trump trio—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—have shown more backbone in their short tenures than Roberts has in two decades. Yet, it’s Roberts who holds the gavel, setting the Court’s agenda and casting decisive votes. His influence isn’t just disappointing—it’s disastrous.
The Right trusted Roberts to be our champion, but he has become our albatross. His tenure serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of establishment picks—those polished résumés and Ivy League backgrounds that mask a weak character. We don’t need more Roberts clones hiding their cowardice behind robes of respectability. We need justices who will stand their ground, confront the howling mobs, and say, “This is the law, and it doesn’t bend for your feelings.”
So, where do we go from here? Roberts isn’t going anywhere soon—he’s only 70, and justices cling to their positions like barnacles. But conservatives can send a message: demand accountability from our leaders. Advocate for nominees who will counter his weaknesses with unapologetic strength. And never forget: the judiciary isn’t a gentleman’s club—it’s a battlefield. Roberts may have surrendered, but the war for America’s soul rages on.
Ultimately, John Roberts will be remembered not as a conservative hero but as a traitor who exchanged principles for applause. His legacy stands as a warning etched in the rubble of rulings that could have saved us. Judas betrayed with a kiss; Roberts betrays with a gavel. The Right deserves better.
The President Bush gift that keeps on giving nothing worthwhile!
The point of all the injunctions and restraining orders is to preserve the supreme rule of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.
At this point it’s not too much to say that the federal judiciary has plunged us into a constitutional crisis. The fusillade of injunctions and temporary restraining orders issued by district court judges in recent weeks against the Trump administration — on everything from foreign aid to immigration enforcement to Defense Department enlistment policy to climate change grants for Citibank — boggles the mind.
More nationwide injunctions and restraining orders have been issued against Trump in the past month that were issued against the Biden administration in four years. On Wednesday alone, four different federal judges ordered Elon Musk to reinstate USAID workers (something he and DOGE have no authority to do), ordered President Trump to disclose sensitive operational details about the deportation flights of alleged terrorists, ordered the Department of Defense to admit individuals suffering from gender dysphoria to the military, and ordered the Department of Education to issue $600 million in DEI grants to schools.
On one level, what all this amounts to is an attempted takeover of the Executive Branch by the Judicial Branch — a judicial coup d’état. These judges are usurping President Trump’s valid exercise of his Executive Branch powers through sheer judicial fiat — a raw assertion of power by one branch of the federal government against another.
But on another, deeper level, this is an attempt by the judiciary to prevent the duly elected president from reclaiming control of the Executive Branch from the federal bureaucracy — the deep state, which has long functioned as an unelected and unaccountable fourth branch of the government. This unconstitutional fourth branch has always been controlled by Democrats and leftist ideologues who, under the guise of being nonpartisan experts neutrally administering the functions of government, have effectively supplanted the political branches.
Unfortunately, to large extent the political branches have acquiesced in the usurpation of their authority.
Trump, with a strong mandate from the American electorate, has resolved to wrest control of the government from the deep state. The deep state in turn has been forced to fall back on its last line of defense: the courts.
What we’re seeing, in other words, is the return of the political (in the classical sense) to American governance. The political never really went away, of course. The idea of a neutral, nonpartisan class of experts and bureaucrats was always a fiction, a thinly-veiled scheme for implementing the Democrats’ agenda and neutralizing the effect of elections on actual governance. The voters could elect whomever they liked, but it would not much change what the bureaucracy did. This scheme has been the greatest scandal of modern American government, and the crisis unfolding now is a direct result of Trump’s efforts to dismantle it.
Why are the courts willing to defend the deep state? One reason is simply the unabashed partisan hatred of Trump by specific federal judges, like U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of the D.C. circuit, who this week arrogated to himself the authority to command federal law enforcement and military personnel overseas in a failed attempt to halt the Trump administration’s deportation of hundreds of alleged foreign terrorists.
There is also the encouragement that judges like Boasberg have received not only from the Supreme Court’s refusal to step in and check these abuses of power but also from Chief Justice John Roberts’ unprecedented statement this week attacking the president for suggesting that Boasberg should be impeached (which he should).
The larger cause of this judicial insurrection, however, is structural and historical, going back more than a century to the emergence of the theory of the administrative state. As a practical matter, the modern administrative state was created by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which in the 1930s established a federal bureaucracy powerful enough to actually govern. But its intellectual and conceptual roots go back to Woodrow Wilson, an academic and unabashed progressive. Long before Wilson’s political career, he studied what he called “the science of administration” and looked to the imperial bureaucracy of Prussia in the 1880s as a template for how to transform American governance.
Wilson’s goal was to overcome what he saw as the needless inefficiencies and limitations of constitutional government. The role of government in society, according to Wilson (and contrary to the Founding Fathers), should adjust to meet the demands of the moment. At the turn of the 19th century, Wilson believed the moment demanded a government not bound by outdated concepts like rule of law or separation of powers. “Government,” he wrote in 1889, “does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.”
To accomplish this, Wilson (along with other pioneers in administrative law and politics at the time, like Frank Goodnow) believed it was necessary to create a realm of neutral administrative authority totally shielded from political influence and the vicissitudes of the ballot box.
Above all, Wilson wanted to separate the business of governing from public opinion. “Wherever regard for public opinion is a first principle of government, practical reform must be slow and all reform must be full of compromises,” he wrote in 1886. “For wherever public opinion exists it must rule.” The crucial thing, then, was to separate politics from governance.
But if you take politics out of governance, where does that leave public opinion? How do you maintain a democratic form of government in which the people are supposed to have a say in how they’re governed? You don’t, actually. It would be, and is, impossible. Indeed, the entire point of the administrative state is to render elections largely meaningless. Whether it’s a change of president in the White House or a shift in the congressional majority, the goal is to strip the authority of the political branches to adjudicate political questions and place that authority in the hands of so-called experts inside the bureaucracy.
After generations of this sort of rule, we can see what it produces: a bloated and unaccountable deep state controlled by partisan ideologues who wield massive policymaking power, answerable to neither the president nor the Congress. Whatever you call this system of government, it isn’t the republican constitutionalism that our Founders set up, and it isn’t accountable to the American people. Voters can twice elect a president like Trump, who openly ran on dismantling the deep state, only to find that the deep state is not controlled by the elected president. It is a power unto itself, indifferent to the wishes of the people.
All of this directly relates to the judicial coup now underway. The injunctions and restraining orders coming out of the federal courts are a result of the complete takeover of the administrative state. Indeed, they are one of the deep state’s last lines of defense against the reassertion of actual political power in the person of Trump.
Take for example something like immigration and asylum policy, which is inherently a political question that in a properly functioning republic should be decided by the elected representatives of the people. Instead of passing clear laws that settle the political question of who is allowed into the country and who isn’t, Congress created an elaborate immigration bureaucracy that purported to transcend the political nature of the question in favor of fake process neutralism.
This immigration bureaucracy was housed in the Executive Branch, but as we can see now it was only ceremonially under the control of the president, and only so long as the president did not interfere with the bureaucracy. Presidents and members of Congress would inveigh against illegal immigration and promise to secure the border. But this was just political theater. In practice, the immigration bureaucracy implemented mass immigration by flooding the country with millions of illegal immigrant “asylum-seekers” who had no valid claims to asylum but were nevertheless allowed to remain in the U.S. as their cases wended their way through the system, a process that takes years.
That is to say, a political question was answered with a political decision. But because Congress abdicated its duty to settle that political question, it was settled instead by the unelected bureaucrats of the deep state, who had their own policy preferences.
It wasn’t until Trump came along and attempted to reassert political governance that the reality of administrative rule became so obvious that anyone could see it. Trump wants to change how we run our immigration system, and he has a mandate from the voters to do so. He tried to change it but was immediately challenged by the deep state, which is now relying on the judiciary to uphold its authority over and against the president.
The good news is that by attacking the deep state, Trump has forced it to fight back and expose its true nature, which isn’t that of neutral experts but of politically and ideologically motivated actors. Trump has also exposed the collusion and corruption of the judiciary in upholding the authority of the deep state. Radically partisan judges (who are also supposed to be neutral arbiters of the law) are now resorting to increasingly outlandish injunctions and restraining orders to maintain the deep state’s hold on power.
This state of affairs cannot continue. Thus far, Trump has shown remarkable restraint in how he has responded to judicial usurpation of his legitimate executive authority. But he’s running out of ways to show deference to these federal judges, who have only been emboldened by his restraint.
The plain reality is that this fight with the federal courts is really a fight against the entire progressive scheme of administrative rule, and it’s one that Trump has to win if we ever want to restore the role of politics — that is, of public opinion and the consent of the governed — to its rightful place in America.
The first and last paragraphs are the condensed version of the entire article and right on target!
We choose to love, we do not choose to cease loving
President Trump and me much in common, both have many irons in the fire, granted, his is far more important than mine, I see mine as adding to the fabric.
Some background
VA Grand Rapids told Grampa he couldn’t have beer in his room, they took his 6 pack. As Grampa said, 2 days later he escaped on a greyhound bus, not bad for someone already in their 90’s, found him at the backdoor. Dad an couple of us boys help set him up in basement, fridge with beer, a bed, floor radio and an indoor commode. Seemed like 2 weeks before people from VA showed up. Grampa died there 103 years of age. Won’t mean nothin to nobody, I’m cleaning up those real 2x2s from the early 40’s, gonna make some corner ladder shelving. Even I can make those. Lookin at that crapper was thinkin, yaknow
if Elon would buy Harley Davidson, we’d all see how committed the left is to their cause. 🙂
Ever notice how science and religion are always at each other’s throat, maybe it be more like a competition
first one there wins!
I betcha you with children think much same as Grampa did, there was 13 in his family
I wanted to show you Weldon, 99 years old Veteran drinking moonshine like it’s Sweet Tea, I lost Weldon somewhere.
Stay in the game no matter how little. When the last day comes, it will come on its own and it will be time.
John Roberts’ Obsession With SCOTUS Legitimacy Has Severely Delegitimized It
BY: BEN WEINGARTEN for The Federalist
Ending universal injunctions once and for all is the least the chief justice can do to defend not only the judiciary, but our country.
The chief irony of Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure at the Supreme Court is that the man so doggedly devoted to defending the judiciary has done so much to undermine it. In so doing, he has threatened not only the court’s legitimacy but the republic itself.
His latest such act wasn’t an abomination of a ruling on the level of Obamacare, the census citizenship question, or DACA; a faulty probe into a devastating leak; or a defense of the indefensible censorship-industrial complex. It was a terse three-line statement that may prove the most consequential — and corrosive — move of them all.
“For more than two centuries,” the chief justice wrote, “it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
With that statement, the chief justice revealed not only that he suffers from the very self-aggrandizement plaguing the lower court judges but that he is either willfully blind to the brewing fire or lacks the will to put it out. Apparently, he is content to let it spread — digging in, defending courts acting lawlessly, and deferring to the “process.” At the same time, he attacks those who would dare notice the judiciary is self-immolating by subverting representative government and demand that something be done about it.
The chief justice’s statement came in direct response to a Truth Social post President Donald Trump published hours earlier. There, the president called for the impeachment of D.C. District Chief Judge James Boasberg — an unelected member of the federal judiciary, as Trump emphasized. Boasberg effectively usurped the president’s power and mandate to combat illegal immigration by thwarting his policy and micromanaging his operations to deport the terrorist illegal aliens of Tren de Aragua.
Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, introducedarticles of impeachment against the judge for imperiling the nation, overstepping, and creating a “constitutional crisis” as the Trump-Roberts kerfuffle unfolded.
The self-aggrandizement lies in the chief justice’s apparent belief that he has the right and obligation to opine on the expressly political act of impeachment when that is a question for the legislative branch and ultimately the public it represents. What is absolutely “not an appropriate response” is to issue statements like his from the chambers of the Supreme Court — effectively seeking to interfere in the legislative branch’s deliberations.
Further, if you wanted to politicize the court and undermine the perception of its impartiality, what more could Chief Justice Roberts have done than to rebuke President Trump over his post? Moreover, Roberts did so after having previously attacked Trumpfor his 2018 comments about biased judges — while remaining silent as former President Biden flouted the court’s rulings; Biden and other Democrat leaders lambasted the Supreme Court and attacked its members; some called for their impeachment; and their followers threatened judges’ lives and courthouses with destruction.
To add insult to injury, Roberts showed animus toward a president who is party to litigation pending in lower courts almost assuredly ticketed for his own, and in fact, to litigation already sitting at the Supreme Court today — concerning the very dangerous judicial overreach to which the president’s post is referring.
The broader context here makes Roberts’ statement even more outrageous. Trump’s post alluded to “crooked” judges who have effectively colluded in unprecedented lawfare with the blue states, left-wing NGOs, and administrative state actors that have filed more than 100 lawsuitsaimed at paralyzing the president. The plaintiffs have proven partially successful by bringing those cases to courts (like that of Boasberg’s D.C. District) populated with Democrat nominees who have prohibited the administration from implementing its agenda at mass scale and with reckless abandon.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller put it well, noting that district court judges have “assumed the mantle of Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security and Commander-in-Chief,” while dictating “the foreign policy, economic, staffing and national security policies of the Administration.”
The executive’s effort to reassert control over the executive branch — home of the unelected and unaccountable administrative state saboteurs of the Trump I agenda — and ensure it helps him fulfill the Trump II mandate, has now resulted in the unelected and unaccountable members of the judiciary resisting. There’s your assault on democracy, not to mention the republic.
Collectively in these cases, we have witnessed judges arguably rule on nonjusticiable issues, impose improper remedies, and ignore Supreme Court precedent — at times on behalf of plaintiffs arguably lacking in standing, with the judges themselves sometimes lacking in jurisdiction.
Most egregiously, as I recently reported at RealClearInvestigations, they have done so via universal injunctions issued at historic speed, scale, and of maximum potency.
This is a novel remedy, neither called for in the Constitution nor arguably in federal law, that exploded in usage under the first Trump administration. It faced nearly two-thirds of all injunctions issued this century, 92 percent of which were handed down by Democrat-nominated judges. Then, despite the urgings of Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues refused to rule on their legitimacy.
As a consequence of the court’s lack of urgency, in the single month of February 2025 alone, federal judges issued more universal injunctions against the Trump administration than they did during the first three years of the Biden administration.
The Trump administration noted in a recent court filing that federal judges “have issued not just universal injunctions, but universal TROs,” generally unappealable orders at times granted without even giving the administration a hearing.
“They have run their writ not just nationwide, but worldwide,” the administration added, “And they have awarded not just universal injunctive relief, but de facto universal damages.”
This was a reference in part to the freeze of the administration’s foreign aid pause and the demand that it pay out $2 billion in funds allegedly owed to non-parties to the case all over the world pursuant to a universal TRO issued by D.C. District Judge Amir Ali. The Supreme Court refused to rule on that order, drawing the ire of Justice Alito, who issued a scathing dissent joined by Thomas, Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh — but not Roberts.
As the rulings get more and more absurd in nature and reach, and as the ability of the administration to fulfill its basic constitutional duties becomes ever more imperiled, Roberts’ call for following “the normal appellate review process” — which the administration has done — is beyond alarming.
His unwillingness to rein in the lower courts is precisely why, as I further reported, members of Congress are mobilizing to halt universal injunctions by law and now to a lesser extent calling for impeaching judges. The chief justice’s willingness to let the lower courts that Congress created engage in such injustice has compelled the legislative branch to act.
That his inclination is evidently to defend the judges burning down the judiciary — and, to use another metaphor, to let cases sufficiently ripen while the entire institution rots — is remarkable.
Chief Justice Roberts self-evidently believes that the courts’ critics are a bigger problem than the lawless judges who have garnered such richly deserved criticism.
His statement is also an invitation for lower court judges to act and rule ever more brazenly. After all, the most they have to fear for egregiously political rulings is being smacked down in the “normal appellate review process.”
In near identical cases before the Supreme Court right now, the Trump administration has called for a stay of several universal injunctions upending its executive order curbing birthright citizenship. It has also called for the Supreme Court to “declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”
Ruling rightly on this fundamental issue by ending universal injunctions once and for all is the least the chief justice can do to defend not only the judiciary, but our country.
Of late, the word impeachment has been tossed around often. Unfortunately, it has not been used in conjunction with Roberts’ name.
SCOTUS’ Refusal To Rein In Rogue Lower Courts Has Become A Disturbing Pattern
Breccan F. Thies for The
Lower court federal judges across the country are standing athwart the American people’s will to allow the Trump administration’s to cut government programs and deport violent gang members from the country. But these unelected judges have a long-running pattern of clinging to their status quo, even in defiance of the Supreme Court, because the high court refuses to rein them in.
The Supreme Court has the responsibility to make sure its subsidiary courts follow its directives — often by taking more cases, and making their precedent unambiguous. Arrogant, active, and open defiance on some of the most important issues, however, has been the norm from these lower courts for years, and a majority on the high court has persistently refused to stop them.
The judicial coup is thwarting the American people, and the agenda they voted for, in two ways: By blocking actions from the Trump administration upon which they have no business weighing, and not enforcing Supreme Court precedent they believe to be inconvenient or controversial, but are important to Americans like abortion, affirmative action, and election integrity.
Recent uproar about the judiciary started when Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the deciding vote joining the liberal justices in declining to hear a case that saw a lower court ruling force the Trump administration to pay $2 billion in foreign aid that it had halted. Chief Justice John Roberts, to no one’s surprise, joined them as well, and the court failed to meet the five-vote threshold needed to hear the appeal.
Then, most recently, a U.S. District Court judge, James Boasberg, in an unprecedented move, attempted to halt the deportation of alleged terrorists and gang members. Roberts dutifully defended him after Trump called for Boasberg’s impeachment.
But the judiciary suffers from more than rogue low-court judges believing they have the power to stop the executive branch when it does something the American people voted for: The Supreme Court has decided that it won’t even force the lower courts to abide by its own rulings.
“The Court routinely declines to say ‘see, we really meant it.’ They issue their ruling and call it a day,” South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman told The Federalist. “The Supreme Court has issued many landmark rulings, but lower courts resist those rulings. Unless the Supreme Court intervenes the lower courts will continue to resist.”
The framework has left a weak web of tentative precedent, and at least two justices — Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — know it, too.
Take Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the case that overturned Roe v. Wade and returned regulation for abortion to elected officials — for instance. In a 2025 case, Coalition Life v. Carbondale, Thomas explicitly called out the court’s majority for refusing to take a case that could have finally overturned a 2000 precedent in Hill v. Colorado that is completely antithetical to the First Amendment, regarding abortion.
“Following our repudiation in Dobbs, I do not see what is left of Hill. Yet, lower courts continue to feel bound by it. The Court today declines an invitation to set the record straight on Hill’s defunct status,” Thomas wrote in a dissent. “Our latest word on Hill — expressed in a majority opinion joined by five Members of this Court — is that the decision ‘distorted [our] First Amendment doctrines.’ If Hill’s foundation was ‘deeply shaken’ before Dobbs, the Dobbs decision razed it.”
According to Thomas, the Court had spent years chipping away at Hill, which upheld a Colorado law restricting peaceful speech within 100 feet of an abortion facility, but despite that clear track record of undercutting that decision, which has been described by the Court on separate occasions as an “‘absurd,’ ‘defunct,’ ‘erroneous,’ and ‘long-discredited’ ‘aberration’ from the rest of our First Amendment jurisprudence,” lower courts are still using it to encroach on the speech rights of peaceful protesters and religious persons praying outside clinics.
Hill’s errors were numerous. Whether Colorado’s law applies to a given speaker undeniably turns on “what he intends to say.” “A speaker wishing to approach another for the purpose of communicating any message except one of protest, education, or counseling may do so without first securing the other’s consent.” Nevertheless, the Court deemed the law content neutral on the theory that it does not prohibit a particular viewpoint or a particular subject matter. But, this Court had never — and since Hill, has never — taken such a narrow view of content-based speech restrictions. Buffer zones like the one at issue in Hill are “obviously and undeniably content based.”
“This Court has not uttered the phrase ‘we overrule Hill.’ For that reason, some lower courts have felt compelled to uphold Hill-like buffer zones around abortion clinics,” Thomas wrote. “This case is another prime example of that trend, and ‘[o]ne can hardly blame [lower courts] for misunderstanding’ when ‘[w]e [have] created … confusion.’ We are responsible for resolving that confusion, and we should have done so here.”
Alito pointed out the issue in another case that would have given the Court a chance to double down on Dobbs, where lower courts were clearly not following its precedent.
The Court’s majority again refused to take a case wrongly decided by lower courts, when the Biden administration attempted to fine a Medicare-funded work-around for Dobbs, forcing hospitals in Idaho, which had outlawed almost all abortions, to perform them anyway.
“Shortly before Idaho’s law took effect, President Biden instructed members of his administration to find ways to limit Dobbs’s reach,” Alito wrote in a dissent for Moyle v. United States. “Apparently, the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents. That is regrettable.”
It’s not just abortion, it’s Second Amendment rights as well. Lower courts repeatedly waged war against DC v. Heller, the Supreme Court precedent that struck down a law that banned handgun ownership in Washington, D.C., and clarified that the Second Amendment does not just protect a right to self defense for militia purposes.
In a 2018 case that would have allowed the Court to enforce its own precedent, the Court ran away, and had done so for years, Thomas wrote in yet another dissent slamming lower courts for defying the high court.
“Our continued refusal to hear Second Amendment cases only enables this kind of defiance. We have not heard argument in a Second Amendment case for nearly eight years … If this case involved one of the Court’s more favored rights, I sincerely doubt we would have denied certiorari,” Thomas said before listing other rights that the Court would have taken cases on. “The Court would take these cases because abortion, speech, and the Fourth Amendment are three of its favored rights. The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this Court’s constitutional orphan. And the lower courts seem to have gotten the message.”
The Court used to enforce its precedent, like when lower courts attempted to defy Brown v. Board of Education and its mandate to racially integrate schools. It used to do it because it has always been part of the job — precedential decisions are not ‘one-and-done’ adventures. They will need clarification, parameters set, or clarity for lower courts to tell them the high court meant what it said.
At least one federal judge, James C. Ho of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, has publicly diagnosed at least part of the problem with the court refusing to take cases: A debilitating lack of fortitude among a vast array of federal judges.
In a 2023 speech at the Heritage Foundation, Ho said many federal judges are afraid to make tough decisions, or take tough cases, because they are afraid of public backlash for making the right decision:
If you plan to be faithful to the Constitution in every case, no matter how unpopular that may be, gold stars are not in the cards for you. But that’s the job. Judges don’t swear an oath to uphold the Constitution part of the time: We swear an oath to uphold the Constitution all of the time.
If you’re an originalist only when elites won’t be upset with you—if you’re an originalist only when it’s easy — that’s not principled judging. That’s fair-weather originalism. We’re not binding ourselves to the text if we only follow it when people like the result.
“When you look at the résumé of a typical federal judge, you often see a bunch of fancy credentials,” Ho added to the argument in a 2024 piece for the National Review. “People who have devoted their whole lives to collecting gold stars tend to be motivated by one overarching objective: getting more gold stars. If that’s what drives you, then the threat of public scolding can be a powerful motivator.”
The “booing of the crowd,” Ho said, “is not going away anytime soon,” and if judges cannot handle it, they should probably find other work.
“But whether you take the charitable or uncharitable view, the lesson for judges is the same: As judges, it’s our duty to do our jobs and ignore the booing of the crowd. If you’re looking for gold stars, you’re in the wrong business,” he said. “You should become a judge for public service, not public applause, because if you do the job faithfully, you should expect to be either hated or ignored.”
Trump Is Right To Push Back Against Judicial Supremacy
By: John Daniel Davidson for The Federalist
For too long, we have accepted without question the fallacious notion that the federal judiciary has the exclusive power of constitutional interpretation, and that the states and the other branches of the federal government are bound to accept whatever the courts decide. This myth of “judicial supremacy” has thrown the constitutional system devised by our Founders out of balance, and it needs to be rejected.
The current case, which concerns whether a federal judge can prevent the removal of foreigners whom the Executive Branch has determined are part of a terrorist organization, is the perfect opportunity to reassert the Founders’ view of the power of constitutional interpretation — a view that was shared, and acted upon, by presidents Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. It now seems the Trump administration is reviving this long-lost view, and it’s about time.
Here’s what happened. Over the weekend, the Department of Homeland Security deported scores of alleged members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration designated a terrorist organization in January. On Saturday, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) and declared an “invasion” by members of Tren de Aragua, ordering their immediate removal in accordance with the AEA. They were arrested, along with other alleged gang members in the country illegally, and flown to El Salvador, where El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has agreed to imprison them on behalf of the United States.
Judge Boasberg, a virulently anti-Trump judge with a long history of questionable judicial activism, acting on a request from the ACLU and the Marc Elias-led lawfare firm Democracy Forward, issued a temporary restraining order in hopes of stopping the deportations. There was no hearing, just a blunt command from Boasberg to halt these deportations for two weeks and prepare for a hearing — as if Executive Branch policy, even on sensitive matters of national security, can simply be dictated by an inferior court judge.
Unfortunately for Boasberg and the ACLU, two of the deportation flights had already taken off and were outside U.S. territory by the time the judge’s written order was issued on Saturday evening. (A third flight departed later that night but it carried foreign nationals that were deported on grounds other than Trump’s designation of Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization, so Boasberg’s order was irrelevant.)
Contrary to the false claims of the corporate press, the Trump administration didn’t defy Boasberg and ignore his order. It simply recognized that once the alleged terrorists had been removed from U.S. territory, the federal courts no longer had jurisdiction and could not issue orders concerning them. However, by asserting this much the Trump administration signaled that it doesn’t accept the judicial supremacist view that Boasberg can dictate White House policy from the federal bench, much less order U.S. military aircraft to turn around mid-flight.
In response, Boasberg called a hearing on Monday demanding to know exactly what time those planes took off, when they left U.S. airspace, and when they touched down in El Salvador — again, as if he, a lone federal judge, has authority to direct counter-terrorism operations that fall under the exclusive authority of the Executive Branch. The administration said simply that these were operational questions that it was not at liberty to discuss in a public setting. (In a jaw-dropping display of arrogance, Boasberg shot back that that his judicial powers “do not lapse at the airspace’s edge.”)
Just prior to that hearing, Attorney General Pam Bondi laid out the administration’s view of the larger question of whether the federal courts even have the power to intervene in this case. In a response and motion to vacate, Bondi argued that the plaintiffs in this case “cannot use these proceedings to interfere with the President’s national-security and foreign-affairs authority, and the Court lacks jurisdiction to do so.”
Bondi went on to explain that “just as a court assuredly could not enjoin the President from carrying out a foreign drone strike or an overseas military operation, or from negotiating with a foreign power to coordinate on such an operation, nor could a court lawfully restrict the President’s inherent Article II authority to work with a foreign nation to transfer terrorists and criminals who are already outside the United States.” The president’s invocation of the AEA, in other words, is non-justiciable and unreviewable.
What the administration is expressing here is a view of judicial and executive powers that more closely conforms to how the Founding Fathers understood them. Put simply, the Founders didn’t think the judiciary was the sole arbiter of what is and is not constitutional. While the courts, headed by the Supreme Court, indeed have an independent power to interpret and apply the Constitution, that doesn’t mean they are supreme over the other two branches, or the states for that matter.
(On the question of states’ authority to interpret the Constitution, there’s a strong case to be made that in the face of federal inaction or dereliction of duty in Washington, a state like Texas has a constitutional right to take matters into its own hands to protect its people in cases of invasion. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott partially made this case last January when he declared an invasion at the Texas-Mexico border and accused the Biden administration of having “broken the compact between the United States and the States.” Unfortunately, Abbott didn’t take his own reasoning far enough. He stopped short of ordering state law enforcement to arrest and expel to Mexico those caught illegal crossing the Rio Grande.)
James Madison stated plainly the reasoning behind this more expansive view of separation of powers clearly in Federalist No. 49: “The several departments being perfectly co-ordinate by the terms of their common commission, neither of them, it is evident, can pretend to an exclusive or superior right of settling the boundaries between their respective powers.”
That means the judiciary can’t simply dictate to the Congress or the president what they must or must not do according to the Constitution. As legal scholar Michael Paulsen has written, “the power of constitutional interpretation is a divided, shared power incident to the functions of each of the branches of the national government — and to instruments of state governments, and of juries, as well — with none of these actors literally bound by the views of any of the others.” According to this view, the Constitution itself, not the Supreme Court, is the supreme law of the land.
If that sounds like a radical view of the Constitution and the separation of powers, that’s only because we have strayed so far from how our constitutional system was first established, and have imported the alien concept of judicial supremacy that elevates the role of the courts over and above the political branches and the states.
It wasn’t always this way. Abraham Lincoln, for example, understood that the Executive Branch was not necessarily bound by the rulings issued by the Supreme Court but had its own inherent power to interpret the Constitution. Lincoln and the Congress both famously asserted what we might call constitutional supremacy in their defiance of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, by enacting and enforcing laws prohibiting slavery in federal territories — something Dred Scott expressly forbade. Lincoln also defied a Supreme Court decision purporting to limit his authority as commander-in-chief to hold enemy prisoners during the Civil War.
Indeed, if we adhere to modern notions of judicial supremacy, then much of what Lincoln did as president should be viewed as illegal and extra-constitutional. By contrast, the view of Stephen Douglas was that Dred Scott was the law of the land and must be obeyed. Many legal scholars today actually endorse Douglas’ view, even if they’re shy about admitting it and loathe to take the argument to its logical conclusion: that the South had a right to secede.
How all of this will play out in Boasberg’s courtroom, or perhaps even in the Supreme Court, remains to be seen. But so far the Trump administration is asserting an older and more grounded understanding of constitutional supremacy and the separation of powers, one from which we have strayed very far and to which we need to return.
If we don’t, expect radical anti-Trump judges like Boasberg to continue claiming the exclusive power of constitutional interpretation over and against the president and Congress, effectively gathering all federal power in one place — what Madison rightly called “the very definition of tyranny.”
I am sorely vexed by the current behavior of the courts. I find myself in a position of no longer being able to feel able to support the judiciary, even when I do not agree with a decision.
By attempting to be diplomatic, I will refrain from saying what I think of Chief Justice Robert’s missive on judicial impeachment.
The Pentagon Keeps Losing Equipment and Buying Stuff It Doesn’t Need
MatthewPetti February Issue of Reason Magazine
Summary
The article describes the U.S. military’s tendency to lose equipment and buy unnecessary items. It highlights the wasteful spending on the F-35 fighter jet spare parts and the 7.12 billion in equipment left behind in Afghanistan. The article also criticizes the military’s tendency to prioritize short-term gains over long-term strategic planning. Table of Contents
How the U.S. military busts its budget on wasteful, careless, and unnecessary ‘self-licking ice cream cones.’
(Illustrations: Mladjana P./Fiverr)
Keeping track of inventory is hard for any large organization. Workers misplace items, administrators fill out the wrong paperwork, and things just go missing. But losing $85 million in inventory? That’s a job for the U.S. military.
In 2023, the Government Accountability Office revealed that a government contractor had lost 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, together worth tens of millions of dollars, since 2018. The Department of Defense followed up on only 20,000 of those parts. Military officials don’t know how many F-35 spare parts exist in total, paid for by American taxpayers but spread out at contractor warehouses around the world.
The F-35 spare parts debacle is just one part of a budget-busting pattern of inventory failures. In 2018, the U.S. Navy found a warehouse in Jacksonville, Florida, full of parts for the F-14 Tomcat, the now-obsolete fighter jet made famous in Top Gun, and for the P-8 Poseidon and P-3 Orion, two submarine-hunting aircraft. The parts were worth $126 million. Had Navy auditors not found them, taxpayers might have ended up paying twice for the same part.
“Not only did we not know that the parts existed, we didn’t even know the warehouse existed,” then–Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly told reporters the following year. “When they brought those parts into the inventory system, within a couple of weeks there were like $20 million in requisitions on those parts for aircraft that were down because we didn’t know we had the parts of the inventory.”
The 1985 aircraft carrier scandal continued this pattern of failure to keep track of valuable materiel. After a group of smugglers was caught stealing F-14 parts to sell to Iran, the Pentagon ran an audit on the spare parts stored on aircraft carriers. Auditors found the Navy had lost track of $394 million in parts between 1984 and 1985. Not to worry! It turns out only about $7 million in parts had been stolen by the gunrunners, and the remaining $387 million were misidentified or misplaced.
Some of these losses are simple bureaucratic inefficiency. “It’s a good example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” says Scott Amey, a lawyer for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. In other cases, the government and contractors don’t seem to even want to keep good track of their inventory. “Sometimes it’s easier to just buy something, especially near the end of the fiscal year in August or September, to drive the budget up than to use something that you already have,” Amey adds.
Military Spending as a Stand-Alone Strategy
In addition to losing or misplacing expensive parts, the Army has been letting them go bad, according to a March 2024 report by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General. When inspectors visited warehouses for tanks and other armored vehicles in 2022 and 2023, they found $1.31 billion of equipment in “critical” condition. Tank treads were strewn about on the grass. Transmissions were sitting outside in the humid air. A group of engines was visibly rusted, and a manager was “unsure whether any of the engines were in a condition that they could still be repaired.”
“This world in arms is not spending money alone,” then–President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said in 1953. “It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” Some of that sweat doesn’t even turn into usable guns, warships, and rockets. Much of it flows into the pockets of military contractors, who overcharge and underdeliver. Or it disappears into thin air, left to rot in a warehouse until it is unceremoniously disposed of. Sometimes Congress even forces the armed services to keep maintaining gear they don’t want.
Between dysfunctional bureaucracy and bad incentives, a lot of military spending is simply wasted.
“We have a defense budget that is disconnected from a coherent grand strategy,” says Dan Caldwell, a public policy adviser at Defense Priorities, a nonprofit that advocates a more restrained military policy. “A lot of policymakers and a lot of individuals in the national security think tank community think that a topline spending number—whether it’s a total spending number or a percentage of GDP—they think that in and of itself is a strategy.”
Whether or not the United States needs more military power, you can’t count on getting that power just by throwing more money into the Pentagon. Manufacturers are facing bottlenecks in the production of key munitions, which are being burned up in Ukraine and the Middle East faster than they can be replaced. These bottlenecks are related to shortages of labor and physical resources that money can’t solve.
Pouring more cash into the military budget may be like pumping water into a clogged pipe. Instead of getting through, the fluid leaks out of places it shouldn’t. While the U.S. military runs short of weapons it would actually need to win a war, the Pentagon has found itself buying things it doesn’t need.
The Defense Department has infamously failed every single audit Congress has ever mandated for it. Nobody even knows where all of the money is going. All the while, officials continue to insist they’re making progress. “We keep getting better and better at it,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said at a 2023 news conference, after the sixth failed audit.
The Afghanistan Spending Quagmire
Perhaps the most infamous cases of waste occurred in Afghanistan, where the United States spent 20 years trying to prop up a friendly Afghan government only to have Taliban rebels sweep the capital in a lightning-quick August 2021 offensive. Although the U.S. military extracted all of its own gear, it left $7.12 billion of American-provided equipment with the doomed Afghan army; it soon fell into the Taliban’s hands. Images of Taliban fighters riding around with captured vehicles became a symbol of American failure.
But even before the Taliban takeover, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a watchdog created in 2008, had spent years documenting the incompetence and disorganization of the war effort. In February 2021, as U.S. forces were working on pulling out of the country, SIGAR released a damning summary of its findings.
Out of the $7.8 billion in U.S.-funded “capital assets” that SIGAR reviewed, $2.4 billion were either abandoned, misused, or falling apart. The majority of these projects had been funded by the Defense Department, with smaller contributions from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department, and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a government agency that encourages American investment in developing countries.
In other words, even if the United States had won the war, a huge portion of the money spent on the war would not have made any difference for victory.
For example, the military spent $25 million for a new headquarters in Helmand, Afghanistan—and kept construction going even after U.S. troops were leaving the province.
In 2009, then-President Barack Obama announced a surge of troops across Afghanistan, including 11,000 Marines sent to Helmand. Although the surge was supposed to be a temporary measure, with the Marines scheduled to leave Helmand in July 2011, “the military quietly assumed troop strengths would be maintained for five years and had master plans for 10,” ProPublica later reported.
Pentagon planners designed a state-of-the-art headquarters for U.S. forces in Helmand, nicknamed “64k” because it was 64,000 square feet. The completion date was set for January 2012, after the Marines were supposed to leave.
Commanders on the ground realized what a waste 64k would be. Two Army generals and a Marine general all requested permission to stop construction, arguing the current plywood headquarters in Helmand was just fine. They were rebuffed by Maj. Gen. Peter Vangjel, then the deputy commander of Army forces in the Middle East and Central Asia. He wasn’t thinking of military needs—just the military budget. Congress had budgeted money for 64k, and getting permission to do something else with the cash would require congressional approval, so “reprogramming it for a later year is not prudent,” Vangjel wrote in a memo, later published in a SIGAR report.
The military broke ground for 64k in May 2011, only a few months before the troops were scheduled to leave. Construction continued, over budget and behind schedule, as the Marine base emptied out. In April 2013, the building was completed—and the Marines decided not to use it. When SIGAR inspectors visited a few months later, they found a fancy, empty building. The furniture still had plastic wrap all over it.
“They did end up building a great building. It just wasn’t the right size and scope,” says a federal oversight official familiar with the project, who spoke to Reason on condition of anonymity.
The 64k building became a symbol of the war’s economic wastefulness. “A number of generals came up to me the last time I was in Afghanistan and said ‘Please, look at this,’” said SIGAR head John F. Sopko in a 2013 interview with C-SPAN. “This is indicative of the problem of military construction. Once it starts, it never stops.”
The worst return on investment came from aircraft. The Defense Department purchased 20 used Italian transport planes for the Afghan army in 2008, at a cost of $549 million. Soon after, Afghan air crews discovered severe issues with the aircrafts’ maintenance and performance. The U.S. military flew four of the planes back to Europe and sold the remaining 16 for scrap in Afghanistan, earning back just $40,257.
The problems with this deal should have been obvious from the beginning. Alenia, the company that sold the used planes, claimed to have warehouses full of spare parts, but no one was able to verify the contents, an official told SIGAR. The planes themselves had nasty-looking corrosion—or “exfoliation,” as the Air Force put it—on their wings.
An official from the State Department told the military to “run as far away from Alenia as you possibly can,” according to a SIGAR follow-up report. The military went ahead with the contract anyway. The problem, again, was the use-it-or-lose-it nature of the military budget. The fiscal year was ending in September 2008, and any funds for the planes that weren’t spent would expire. “Due to the compressed time schedule to get the contract awarded, a lot of details were ‘taken on faith’” from Alenia, an official later told SIGAR.
One of the Air Force officials involved in the debacle later went on to work for Alenia, which SIGAR called a “clear conflict of interest.” (The FBI worked with SIGAR and other agencies to investigate Alenia and the Air Force official. The Justice Department declined to prosecute the case.) The Defense Department denied SIGAR’s conclusions, claiming the planes were rushed to meet “an urgent operational requirement” for the Afghan army.
Another problem with military spending in Afghanistan was a tendency to ignore local needs. “A lot of times, it was not taking the local context into account,” the federal oversight official says. “You hear what you want to hear, not necessarily what was said.”
The Little Crappy Ship
Like foreign military advisers foisting equipment on Afghan troops the Afghans neither needed nor could use, Congress has pushed the U.S. military to take on more equipment than it asks for. For the past several years, the Navy has asked for funds for a certain number of ships—and Congress has budgeted an even larger number. In March 2024, the Senate Appropriations Committee bragged that it gave the Navy $732 million more in shipbuilding money than it requested.
Littoral combat ships have been a particular fiasco. In the early 2000s, the Navy promised to create small, fast-moving warships that could easily be retrofitted for different kinds of missions in coastal waters. Admiral Vernon Clark, the spiritual father of the project, compared his vision to a space fighter from Star Wars “that’s got R2-D2 in it.” Instead, the final results were nicknamed the “Little Crappy Ship.”
Originally estimated to cost $220 million each, the ships ended up costing half a billion dollars apiece—and couldn’t even sail right. The gears on the engine transmission were flawed, causing ships to stall in the water. (One of them, the USS Milwaukee, broke down on its way out of the shipyard in 2015.) Lockheed Martin, the ship’s manufacturer, spent years haggling over the cost of overhauling the transmission.
Nor was the littoral combat ship very good at fighting. Putting it more delicately, a Pentagon report said the ships would be “challenged in a contested environment.”
The Navy spent 15 years and $700 million trying to build a minisubmarine that could be towed behind the littoral combat ship to find naval mines, then abandoned the project. Similarly, the littoral combat ship was supposed to have a towed sonar probe to find submarines, but the ship’s engines were so loud it drowned out the sonar signals. That technology, too, was shelved.
Instead of a ship that could have its weapons swapped out like Lego bricks at a moment’s notice, as the admirals had imagined, the Navy ended up with a ship that wasn’t very good at anything. It decided to cut its losses. In 2017, the Pentagon requested funding for just one more littoral combat ship, after which the shipyards would be closed down. The Navy would begin developing a new frigate, the Constellation class, instead.
But there was too much contractor money—and too many contractor jobs—tied up in the Little Crappy Ship. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wis.) wrote a letter to President Donald Trump protesting that 1,850 shipyard workers in Wisconsin risked being laid off. She emphasized her and Trump’s “shared goals” to “revitalize American manufacturing, strengthen the defense industrial base, and preserve American jobs, especially in the Midwest.”
Those concerns swayed the Trump administration, which edited the Navy budget to add a second $500 million ship. “Maintaining the industrial base was really the sole consideration,” a source toldDefense News. It didn’t matter whether the money was buying usable equipment. What mattered was the factories kept running.
“That’s like saying you need to keep eating junk food so maybe one day you can eat vegetables. It’s an absurd argument,” argues Caldwell of Defense Priorities. “The people that work in shipyards, and the capacity, the tools, the equipment—there is high demand for all that stuff. If they weren’t building the LCS, there would still be work for them to do.”
In 2020, the Navy signed a contract with Fincantieri Marinette Marine, the manufacturer of the littoral combat ship, for a new Constellation-class frigate. Then the military brass started trying to retire the littoral combat ship, a decade ahead of schedule. Keeping the ships would have made the whole project even more wasteful. The Navy estimated in 2022 it would cost $4.3 billion to bring littoral combat ships up to speed, not counting the cost of a new antisubmarine system.
Admiral John Gumbleton asked reporters to think about the opportunity cost, since the resources for maintaining littoral combat ships could have gone into the new frigates. “We need a capable lethal-ready Navy more than we need a larger Navy that’s less capable, less lethal, and less ready,” then–Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday told a congressional committee.
Again, members of Congress from shipbuilding states wouldn’t have that. Rep. John Rutherford (R–Fla.) took calls from military contractors and meetings with Florida officials, then introduced an amendment forbidding the Navy from retiring any littoral combat ships early. After a bit of haggling, Congress reluctantly allowed the Navy to decommission four littoral combat ships out of the nine that were originally chosen for early retirement.
The USS Milwaukee was retired in September 2023, fewer than 10 years after its failed maiden voyage. It had deployed twice to patrol the Caribbean Sea. The Navy held a small ceremony to celebrate the Milwaukee‘s achievements over its life span: Seizing $30 million of “suspected cocaine” and arresting three suspected smugglers. That same month, the USS Little Rock was decommissioned after less than six years of service. That ship had seized $127 million of cocaine.
“Every problem with our defense budget ultimately flows from the fact that we are trying to pursue an American grand strategy of primacy in a world where we are facing increasing constraints,” says Caldwell. “That ultimately leads us to try and build weapon systems like the [littoral combat ship] that try to either do too much or too little and are not suited to the real threats that we face.”
He adds that the military contractors are the primary “political constituency in parts of the country,” leading to a “self-licking ice cream cone.”
In other words, one reason the United States government won’t give up trying to dominate the entire world is because cutting military contractor jobs is just bad politics. American politicians use preparations for war as a jobs program. Those goals have forced the military to act as jack of all trades, master of none. Those bad political incentives are hurting genuine military readiness.
No one begrudges our military having those things needed to meet a state of readiness. We should have a major issue with waste and management that is totally unable to pass a required audit.
