The Trump administration has placed most United States Agency for International Development (USAID) employees back on administrative leave from midnight on Sunday and laid off hundreds more.
In addition to some 4,200 staff who are being placed on leave, at least 1,600 employees are being fired.
The move comes weeks after President Donald Trump’s initial attempt to eliminate thousands of USAID employees was held up by a legal challenge.
Pierre Omidyar isn’t a champion of truth, but a deep state asset working to undermine Trump.
President Trump is under attack.
As I write this, a coalition of influential organizations and individuals is mobilizing to sabotage his second term in office. They are using a multi-pronged strategy of media manipulation and bureaucratic resistance to stall, discredit, and obstruct his presidency at every turn.
There’s something about being exposed that causes stupidity; a kneejerk reaction to push back against reality, no matter how obvious. As DOGE and President Donald Trump work to expose and fight government waste, fraud and abuse (how sad is it that they have to FIGHT Democrats to end those things?), more ways in which the federal government has been doing those things is coming to light.
The keepers of America’s secrets are scrambling. They have two weeks to “present a plan” to President Trump “for the full and complete release of all” records related to President Kennedy’s assassination. Expect intelligence agencies to clash with the White House and public skepticism to grow.
“All is riddle,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “and the key to a riddle is another riddle.” Americans have puzzled over Kennedy’s assassination ever since his death at Dallas in 1963. After his slaying, the myth of Camelot was created, and it grows to this day.
WAMU-FM, the NPR station airing news all day in D.C., has openly sided with the federal bureaucracy and against the Trump team’s effort to reform government. On Friday morning, their aired a story for four and a half minutes during Morning Edition that was devoted only to frustrated staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The “evil” Trump side wasn’t allowed to speak.
In 2006, after a Hezbollah invasion, Israel launched a military campaign against the Islamic terrorist group. After a month of fighting, the Bush administration forced a ceasefire under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that required the disarmament of Hezbollah and its replacement by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and a United Nations “peacekeeping” force.
How can Hezbollah claim victory, President George W. Bush wondered, when they were “going to be replaced by a Lebanese Army and an international force?”
Democrats have cast the Trump administration’s ouster of eight senior FBI leaders as a “purge” and act of “retribution” from a weaponized Justice Department, some likening it to President Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”
But former colleagues of the terminated “G-men” say this narrative is backward. FBI officials, past and present, have marshaled significant evidence via whistleblower complaints and testimony indicating that several terminated leaders routinely used their offices for partisan purposes.
With DOGE, the hits just keep coming.
Elon Musk has used his formidable communications reach to highlight DOGE’s discovery that Social Security, which is going broke, seems to be paying a whole lot of people who shouldn’t be drawing any money at all. With the agency’s solvency window shrinking every year, as fewer and fewer workers contribute while more and more draw benefits, that’s a critical mission.
WTF???
HOLY CR*P
WHISTLEBLOWER: They were incentivized to qualify illegals for LONG TERM DISABILITY to qualify illegals for Social Security FOR LIFE, “So they were set for life”
“They wanted us to try to identify them in such a way that they would qualify for long-term social… pic.twitter.com/woqYi3g6C4
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) February 18, 2025
H/T XC
USAID funded the vast majority of ‘independent’ media in Ukraine. What American taxpayers don’t realize is that their money went to suppressing the truth.
The camera was rolling when chaos erupted. It was January 21, 2024, and an independent Ukrainian journalist named Ostap Stakhiv was livestreaming a call with Vasyl Pleskach, a man claiming he was being illegally detained by Ukraine’s infamous military conscription unit, the TCC. The agency has been accused of kidnapping men from the street and forcing them to the front lines. Those who resist have sometimes been tortured—and in several well-documented cases—killed.
In the middle of the interview, Stakhiv called the police to see if they would free Pleskach from the clutches of the TCC. Just then, with the police still on the line, a burly figure entered Vasyl’s frame, walked over to Pleskach, and struck him hard in the face. His phone tumbled to the ground, landing sideways, but still recording. “They’re beating him right now,” Stakhiv told the police, as Vasyl’s picture went haywire. “People are watching it live. They’re beating him as we speak. Go to my YouTube channel and see it for yourself.” Off-screen, Pleskach’s screams were audible for another minute before the line was disconnected.
The Trump administration has directed defense agencies to turn over a list of their probationary employees by the end of Tuesday, with the expectation that many could be laid off as soon as this week, according to five people familiar with the matter.
The directive coincides with the arrival at the Pentagon of personnel from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, which has overseen the firing of thousands of probationary employees in other federal agencies and coordinated the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
With the Trump administration cutting off billions of US taxpayer funding for the USAID international slush fund, formerly flush NGOs are now begging woke EU nations for money to continue operations, according to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Asking the most obvious questions about the U.S. gold supply in Fort Knox: What’s there and how much is it worth?
Auric Goldfinger.
For James Bond fans, Goldfinger’s obsessed-with-gold villain in the Bond movie that bore his name way back in 1964 was, to say the least, memorable.
Life magazine memorably ran an immutable image from the film of a “Bond girl” (as such were called in the day) stretched out on a bed quite naked and dead, painted, from head to toe, in gold paint. Dead at the hands of Goldfinger, of course.
In 2022, the DAB Afghanistan Bank showed off photos of $40 million in stacks of hundred dollar bills sitting on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport. The Taliban-controlled central bank described this as one of three shipments of “humanitarian aid” amounting to over $100 million.
DAB, Afghanistan’s central bank, was headed by Noor Ahmad Agha, a “specially designated terrorist” who had been named as the “financier of bomb-making”, including the IEDs which had killed over 1,000 American soldiers, and sending money to a sanctioned figure was illegal.
Despite that, someone had sent a massive fortune in U.S. cash to the Taliban’s terror bank.
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration has quit after a disagreement with Elon Musk over the ‘First Buddy’ and DOGE attempting to access government records.
Musk, a ubiquitous presence beside President Trump early in his second term, has used DOGE in his quest to slash unnecessary waste, fraud and abuse from government.
Social security is no different, as Musk today shared staggering data claiming there are millions of dead Americans still eligible for social security payments.
According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!
Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security pic.twitter.com/ltb06VX98Z
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025
WTF??? Elon Musk’s DOGE finds $4.7 trillion in Treasury payments on untraceable budget line – and no one knows where the money went
h/t Mauser
Some 75,000 federal employees have accepted the Trump administration’s voluntary buyout offer and the Trump administration is ramping up the firings of various groups of federal workers as well, from ineffective inspectors general to partisan U.S. Attorneys, and possibly whole wasteful agencies whenever the case can be made and its legality confirmed.
The American Left is horrified by this sudden activity. Normally, it’s only Democrat presidents who move this quickly, and of course, they move in the opposite direction. This wasn’t expected; they thought they could keep President Trump on his heels, stymied from most of the actions that he was elected to do, as in his first term.
BREAKING: Democrats are dragging around an effigy of President Trump in prison clothes with a noose around his neck at an anti-DOGE protest in DC.
Inciting violence. Arrest them.
Sick a deranged people.
pic.twitter.com/qtLjq1YQie— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 17, 2025
