Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Summary of Savings From Headcount and Nondefense Agency Waste Reductions (FY 2029):

• 100% Elimination of Staffing at 16 Unnecessary Federal Agencies: $11 billion.
• 50% Staffing Cut at 9 Dubious Federal Agencies: $15 billion.
• 34% Staff Reduction at All Other Nondefense Departments: $59 billion.
• Indirect Overhead savings from nondefense staff reductions and agency eliminations: $45 billion.
• Total Nondefense Staff and Overhead Savings: $130 billion.

We begin with a summary of the 16 agencies to be shut down, along with the number of staff positions to be eliminated and the resulting direct employee compensation savings. These agencies are slated for complete elimination because in the context of a roaring fiscal crisis, they are either utterly unnecessary or inappropriate functions of government or comprise activities that are already being handled by other Federal agencies, state and local governments, or the private sector.

Self-evidently, these 16 agency closures would result in only a small down payment against the $2 trillion per year savings goal. Yet it is crucial to start here because each of these agencies represent cases of egregious regulatory excess or Washington-based enterprises that are not remotely the business of the central government in any season, but most especially not during a time when the Federal government is careening toward the fiscal shoals.

Stated differently, the list below comprises a kind of Litmus Test of fiscal resolve.

If these Federal bureaucrats and agencies can’t be eliminated, the prospect for reining in America’s unfolding fiscal calamity is dim indeed.
16 Agencies To Be Eliminated–Staff Cuts and Payroll Savings:

• National Endowment for the Arts: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
• National Endowment for the Humanities: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
• Legal Services Corporation: 800 staff and $128 million savings.
• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA): 600 staff and $96 million savings.
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): 1,125 staff and $180 million savings.
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
• OSHA: 2,200 staff and $352 million savings.
• Consumer Products Safety Commission: 600 staff and $96 million savings.
• Agency for Global Media: 1,125 staff and $180 million of savings.
• National Endowment for Democracy (NED): 162 staff and $26 million savings.
• Education Department: 4,245 staff and $680 million savings.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: 1,500 staff and $240 million savings.
• Agency for International Development (AID): 10,000 staff and $1.6 billion savings.
• FBI: 34,000 staff and $5.4 billion savings.
• BATF: 5,300 staff and $848 million savings.
• DEA: 9,315 staff and $1.49 billion savings.

Total 16 Agencies To Be Eliminated: 71,000 staff and $11.3 billion savings.

You’re just getting started…

#1 Joe Biden and his minions spent 15 million dollars to distribute “oral contraceptives and condoms” in Afghanistan…

The Biden administration sent $15 million of taxpayer money in distributing “oral contraceptives and condoms” into Afghanistan, according to a private congressional funding notice reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The award, earmarked by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) last July, transmitted the funds to Afghanistan.

The money was part of a whopping $100 million package for the Middle Eastern country to support the “basic rights and freedoms” of women and girls who were living under Taliban rule.

#2 Even more money was about to be spent on condoms for the Palestinians. It is being reported that the Biden administration “almost sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza”…

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also announced on Tuesday that Biden’s administration almost sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, which she called ‘a preposterous waste of taxpayer money!’

‘There was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza!’ Leavitt shockingly claimed.

#3 The Biden administration spent $10,000 for an “ice skating drag show” that was focused on climate change…

The 2024 Festivus Waste Report found that the Biden-Harris administration spent over $1 trillion this year, including giving a $10,000 grant to “Beards on Ice” — an ice skating drag show on climate change put on by the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, a self-described “queer cabaret arts organization.”

#4 20 million of our tax dollars were spent on a Sesame Street spin-off in Iraq that was designed to promote “inclusion”…

Additionally, the Agency for International Development (USAID) spent $20 million on a Sesame Street spin-off show in Iraq, titled “Ahlan Simsim,” in an effort to promote “inclusion” and “mutual respect.”

#5 This final example is the most sickening. 1.5 million dollars was spent to study how various species respond to motion sickness. In one of the experiments, holes were actually drilled into the skulls of young kittens. This is evil on a level that I don’t even know how to describe…

About $1.5 million was spent experimenting how different species, such as young female kittens, respond to motion sickness.

According to the report, researchers would strap kittens to a table, where they are spun around in several directions and have holes drilled into their skulls to keep them in place — “and it’s all being done with your money,” Paul writes in the report. “More than one and a half million dollars of it.”

The Democrats’ electoral problems have received a lot of attention—as they should! Whatever the commitments of a political party, they’ve got to be elected to pursue them. But that can distract attention from what they do when they are elected. Typically that underlies electoral problems that come to the fore and explains why it’s rarely enough for a party to tout their allegedly wonderful values or continually disparage their nefarious political opponents to fix their problems.

In other words, governance is key. You’ve got to run the government well and get things done voters care about if you want those voters to stick with you. And that’s where Democrats have been running into problems—big problems.

Think about it. If you wanted safe streets and public order would your first impulse be to turn to…a Democrat? Or if you wanted a secure, actually-enforced border? How about efficient, effective delivery of public services? Or rapid completion of public projects and infrastructure? Or nonideological public administration?

I don’t think on any of these fronts the reaction of a typical voter would be: “Democrats! Of course, I need Democrats to do all these things because they’re so good at them!” On the contrary, it seems like over time Democrats—both nationally and in many localities where they dominate—have become worse and worse at delivering in these areas. That’s a huge problem because why should voters take Democratic plans to improve their lives seriously if Democrats persist in running government so poorly? Democratic governance is their advertising and the advertising makes the Democratic “product” look pretty bad. So voters don’t want to buy it.

Let’s look at some specific areas. Take safe streets and public order. The Democratic-leaning commentator Noah Smith admits:

In the late 2010s, blue cities brought [a] problem on themselves: urban disorder. Crime rates began rising in 2015, fueled by national unrest. But blue cities didn’t respond by cracking down on crime as they did in the 90s and 00s. Progressives in the late 2010s reviled and rejected “stop-and-frisk”, “broken windows policing”, and other tools that blue cities had used to keep order in previous decades. Instead, they elected a bunch of progressive prosecutors, enacted more permissive policies toward public drug use, passed laws that made it hard to use violence against shoplifters, and sometimes even reduced penalties for minor crimes.

The result was entirely predictable. Blue cities became increasingly afflicted by pervasive, low-level urban disorder—drug needles in children’s parks, epidemics of car break-ins, and so on. Female friends of mine in San Francisco started to report being followed for blocks, harassed on the train, or even slapped in the head by street people on their way to work. The housing crunch made the disorder much worse, of course, by exacerbating homelessness.

Then the pandemic and the riots hit, and the trend got turbocharged. Without “eyes on the street” to deter crime, and with police cowed or disgruntled by the protests of summer 2020, progressive cities became increasingly lawless, chaotic zones. Violent crime soared in 2020-21, with waves of attacks on vulnerable populations like Asian elders….

Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder—restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on—represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.

Opinions vary about how much things have improved in blue cities since their nadir. But the fundamental problem is: this never should have happened in the first place. And the culprit is well-articulated by Smith in the last paragraph of the quote above. Blue city Democrats have adopted a philosophy that is antithetical to good governance—it is not surprising it does not produce good governance; it is not intended to. Public order is treated as optional, subordinate to ideological goals Democrats wish to pursue. Until that philosophy changes in a big way and Democrats unapologetically and aggressively enforce public order, voters will continue to view Democratic governance negatively in this area. And they’ll be right to do so.

Instead of helping the Democratic Party, the massive influx of Hispanic illegal aliens is dooming it:

Voters also see de facto open borders and uncontrolled immigration on Democrats’ watch as symptoms of public disorder and poor governance. In their view, illegal (Democrats cannot even bring themselves to use the word) immigrants are in fact breaking the law by making unauthorized entry to the United States and creating a chaotic situation at our nation’s border. And they were shocked that almost all candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsed decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

And then, even more astonishingly to the typical voter, these law-breakers were rewarded for their behavior on the Democrats’ watch. Consider what happened when Biden came into office in 2021. He immediately issued executive orders dramatically loosening the rules for handling illegal immigrants. His party’s left wing and various immigration advocacy groups rapturously applauded this. As The New York Times’ David Leonhardt summarized:

Biden tried to pause deportations. He changed the definition of asylum to include fear of gang violence. He used immigration parole—which the law says should be used “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons”—to admit hundreds of thousands of people. The parole programs alone amounted to “the largest expansion of legal immigration in modern U.S. history,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News wrote.

Would-be migrants, as well as the Mexican cartels that run transit networks, heard a clear message: Entering the United States had become easier. The number of people attempting to do so spiked almost immediately.

And continued to spike throughout the first three and a half years of the Biden administration until they finally took some steps to stanch the tide. But by that time the country had experienced truly mind-boggling levels of immigration. Indeed, the Biden immigration surge, driven heavily by illegals, was the largest in US history, surpassing even the immigration surges of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Predictably, this dramatic surge in illegal immigration and the diffusion of immigrants into overburdened cities countrywide caused a spike in the issue’s salience and negative sentiment toward Biden and the Democrats for letting the situation get out of control (where it remains to this day). In voters’ view, this was very poor governance indeed.

Leonhardt identifies the ideological roots of the Democrats’ cavalier attitude toward border security and tolerance of illegal immigration:

To many Democrats, support for immigration had come to feel like a moral imperative. Immigration lifted people out of poverty. It enhanced the country’s cultural diversity. It reflected a universalist belief in equality, regardless of a person’s country of origin…

In the 2000s, the Democratic Party…moved even closer to a universalist position. Democrats now speak more positively about immigration than any party has in the country’s history, according to an analysis of the Congressional Record. Many liberals have grown uncomfortable talking about restrictions and criticize both Clinton and Barack Obama for their positions. Obama combined full-throated support for immigrants, including legalization for many who were undocumented, with support for border security. When “an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers,” Obama said, it violates America’s promise.

Top Democrats would not make such an argument today. They are also unlikely to revere assimilation, as [Barbara] Jordan [black Texas Democrat, who chaired a 1990s commission on immigration policy] did. To universalists, glorifying American culture is jingoistic…

Today, immigration is the one issue on which even the left flank of the Democratic Party continues to support the neoliberal position. Democrats have grown more skeptical of deregulation and the free flow of trade than they were during the Clinton years. But they have grown even more supportive of the deregulated flow of people across borders. Many liberals are passionately universalist on the subject….

Because of this discomfort [with deciding who should be legally admitted to the country and who should not], the modern Democratic Party has struggled to articulate an immigration policy beyond what might be summarized as: More is better, and less is racist. The party has cast aside the legacies of Jordan and other progressives who made finer distinctions.

There you have it. Democrats have developed a philosophy about immigration that prizes ideological commitments over the mundane realities of a secure border, public order and enforcement of the law. Until Democrats decisively reject that philosophy and show by their actions that they are committed to stopping illegal immigration with every tool at government’s disposal and restoring order to the immigration system, voters will continue to regard Democratic governance in this area as very poor indeed. And who can blame them?

Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

According to a press release from the United States Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Florida, a 39-year-old Orlando man named Matthew A. Inman has been arrested and charged with “transportation of child sex abuse material.” If convicted, he’ll face between five and twenty years in jail. Though when you hear the details, you may agree with me that this doesn’t seem like nearly enough time behind bars for this guy.

The press release continues:

According to the complaint, between August and October of 2024, Inman received and saved several videos of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to his phone. These videos depicted adults sexually assaulting young children. In October 2024, Inman traveled to Las Vegas and began talking online with an undercover law enforcement officer posing as the father of a 9-year-old boy. During this conversation, Inman expressed interest in meeting and sexually assaulting the purported child. He also sent CSAM videos to the undercover officer.

The FBI obtained a search warrant for Inman’s electronic devices and residence. During the execution of the search warrant, Inman attempted to delete the evidence from his phone and hide in the attic of his house.

A criminal complaint is merely a formal charge that a defendant has committed one or more violations of federal criminal law, and every defendant is presumed innocent unless, and until, proven guilty.

This case was investigated by the FBI. It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Richard Varadan.

According to Spectrum News 13, “Inman was arrested by the U.S. Marshals, and he is currently in the Seminole County Jail with no bond.”

Fox 35 in Orlando reports that Inman worked for Visit Orlando, according to his LinkedIn profile. He served as the manager of business affairs. He’s also been the treasurer for the Orange County Democratic Party since July 2023 and president of the Rainbow Democrats since 2021.

(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Trump approval currently has NO racial demographic signal. Wild!

White – 55%
Black – 57%
Hisp/oth – 58%

— Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@Mark_R_Mitchell) January 23, 2025

What makes Bob Menendez a true legend of New Jersey politics is how he spent years fighting federal criminal charges, beat them, and then turned around and got right back to crimin' again the instant he did. The man was *committed* to his grift. It was in his heart all along.

— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) January 29, 2025

(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)