Two of Idaho’s ag men recently sat down on a podcast and laid out the whole case for keeping cheap slave labor flowing into this state. Worth listening to. Worth answering, too.

So here’s every argument in the Cheap Slave Labor Catechism™, and what’s wrong with each one.

“A federal problem that needs to be fixed federally, and it needs to pay attention to our industries.”

There it is, in one sentence.

Notice the order of the clauses. First, the nation has a problem. Second, the fix has to be tailored to the convenience of the men who profited from the problem.

For 40 years the American worker has been told the border needs a “comprehensive solution,” and every comprehensive solution shows up with the same two halves: amnesty now, enforcement later. Reagan tried that in 1986. Three million people who broke the law to get here were legalized, employer sanctions went into the law, and then the sanctions sat there for four decades doing nothing, because they were never meant to do anything, and we’re still paying the bill and so are our kids.

Anyone offering to run it again is either a fool or is counting on you being one.

“That’s what Trump did. Shut the gate. That’s all we had to do.”

Great. So why is the very next paragraph a request to prop it open for one privileged category of employer?

That’s a service entrance with a key that goes to whoever keeps a lobbyist in Washington.

And a border enforced by executive discretion expires with the administration that ordered it, which the men who want permanent access to cheap slave labor understand better than anybody. They’re happy to let the gate close for the evening news and then go negotiate their own door around back.

“Find me a first world country where you’re not going to find immigrants doing some of these jobs.”

Ooh, my turn...

Find me a first world country where the median man can buy a house on one income the way his grandfather did.

That comparison cuts harder the other way and everyone knows it.

The premise is wrong anyway. For decades (before 1965) this country ran the tightest immigration regime in its modern history, and that stretch produced the largest expansion of the American middle class ever recorded. A tight labor market is the only reliable friend the working man has ever had. And every person who tells you otherwise is buying labor rather than selling it.

“Our kids don’t want to do those jobs, because they have better opportunities.”

Americans won’t do the job at those wages, in those conditions, next to people who were brought in specifically to hold both down. Say the whole sentence out loud and the argument falls apart.

There’s no such thing as a job Americans won’t do.

But there are definitely wages and conditions Americans won’t accept, and keeping both exactly where they are is the entire point of importing the labor.

Ask what happened when Congress killed the Bracero program in 1964. The growers swore the tomatoes would rot in the fields. Instead the harvest got mechanized and California grew more tomatoes than before. Scarcity of labor is the mother of invention. And cheap slave labor in unlimited supply is the mother of doing it in 2026, which is exactly what the industries that have imported wage slaves for 60 years are still doing.

And follow their own logic out a few years. If cheap foreign labor is the entry ramp to a better life, and our own kids have already climbed off it, then we need another wave in 20 years. And another after that. Forever. It’s a supply chain with a constant drip of foreign wage slaves, and a country that has to import a permanent underclass every generation to protect its margins is eating itself.

“Calling it slave labor? Are you kidding me. They’re well taken care of.”

The objection was never that any individual employer is cruel. The objection is that labor tied to one employer by visa status can’t bargain and can’t quit without leaving the country, so it can’t do the one thing free labor does by its nature, which is push wages up.

That’s the whole point of the arrangement. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

And that’s just the legal half. Dairy doesn’t even get the legal half, because H-2A covers seasonal work and cows get milked in February, so the dairies are locked out of the program entirely.

But they’ll say the quiet part in our own Capitol if you sit through enough testimony. Bob Naerebout of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association told legislators that as much as 70% of the industry’s workforce might be here illegally. The IDA’s own commissioned report puts dairy at 90% foreign born with roughly half being illegal. Their economist warned that enforcing the law would cut dairy output 45%. Nobody’s denying that. They’re describing a dependency they built on purpose, on the record, and then asking us to protect it.

Ask anyone who works the borders (I did a few months back when I spent time with law enforcement in Arizona) and they’ll tell you that nobody crosses without the cartels allowing it and taking their cut. Not a single person.

So the foreign workforce that shows up here is already owned by somebody, with a debt attached, no papers, and no standing to complain to anyone about anything. Call that a labor market if you like. I call it a trafficking pipeline with a milking parlor at the end of it.

So when a man tells you those workers are “well taken care of,” understand you’re hearing an old southern slavery argument. George Fitzhugh, the Virginia lawyer who wrote the most thorough defense of slavery this country ever produced, made the same case in 1857:

“The slave is taken care of, whether employed or not.”

He wasn’t lying, either.

He was describing a real feature of the system and offering it as the reason you shouldn’t look too hard at the rest of it. That’s what “well taken care of” has always been for.

“The far right wants to hunt them all down, and that’s not Trump’s position.”

Correct. That’s the problem.

The gate got shut, and the part that actually mattered never showed up. Nobody indicted a dairy executive. There was no serious I-9 audit program. E-Verify still isn’t mandatory, and the ag and LEO lobby kills it in Boise every single time it’s introduced. And 287(g) still isn’t mandatory either.

You could end this in 18 months without one dramatic raid by making it a felony to profit from illegal labor, then convict somebody prominent enough that the rest of the industry reads the news and does the math.

People who broke the law to get here should go home.

All of them.

There’s no version of a country with borders where the penalty for crossing one illegally is a work permit, a benefits package, and free stuff. Removal is the ordinary operation of immigration law, and calling it an atrocity is how you get 20 more years of nothing.

But the man who hired them should be in worse trouble than the trafficked person he hired. He’s the citizen. He took the oath, he knew the law, and he broke it in his own country for profit. Here’s a video of Charlie Kirk unpacking this exact sentiment at a conference of roofers who admit that they hire illegals to prop up their industry:

The problem is that every enforcement regime since 1986 has pointed at the workers and left the employers alone. There are dairies in Idaho running the same arrangement they were running 30 years ago, and it lasts because the ag lobby pays for legislators who protect it. The lobby writes the talking points. Their legislators repeat them in committee and the enforcement bills die, often without a recorded vote. Cheap labor stays cheap. Everybody at that table knows the deal, and none of them ever have to say a word about it in public.

The Farm Bureau guy is right that Trump isn’t saying what the base is saying.

Trump didn’t go far enough, and the half he skipped is the half that would’ve worked. The base is the people who lost the plant and watched main street hollow out and voted for the one man who’d say build the wall without apologizing. They voted to get the country back, and a photo op at the Rio Grande with a carve-out for agriculture is, and I want to be precise here, not that.

America First means America First. It doesn’t come with an exemption for whoever keeps the best lobbyist in Boise or DC.

“Go back to Mitt Romney. That’s your adult in the room.”

Mitt Romney ran on self-deportation in 2012 and had abandoned it by 2013, when he joined the chorus for the Gang of Eight bill. He’s the mascot of the Conservative Inc. Republicanism that lost the country: fight to the death over the marginal tax rate, surrender without a shot on the border, the trade deficit, and the wars.

If he’s your standard for a statesman, the word doesn’t mean anything anymore.

“A state legislator making noise about immigration is looking out for their publicity, not your interests.”

Here’s the thing about the man who says that. The Farm Bureau guy on the podcast was publicly thanked, by name, alongside the lobbyist for the Dairymen’s Association, for his work on the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act. The President of the Farm Bureau even went on record backing it too. So the CEO telling Idaho legislators to stay in our lane has been working a federal legalization bill for the workforce his members employ.

He’s not against politicians getting involved in immigration.

He’s against the ones he can’t control (or, buy).

And it’s funny coming from a man sitting in a studio with a multi-millionaire commercial developer, recording an episode of the developer’s podcast, in the middle of a three-week guest-hosting run the developer announced in the intro, while the two of them wax eloquent about the new headquarters going up next to the Capitol, sited there because, as he puts it, “Boise is where the laws happen.”

Then they get to immigration, and the problem is that state legislators are seeking attention?

It isn’t even an original line.

The dairyman lobbyist says the same thing, word for word: “This is a federal issue, not a state issue.” Same script, same legislators repeating it, same bills dying.

The claim underneath is that Idaho has no legitimate voice on the one question that most reshapes our schools, our hospitals, our towns, our families, and what a working man in this state gets paid, because it’s a federal matter and we should leave it to the professionals. Yes, the same professionals who’ve refused to act for four decades. And the same ones his own federation lobbies to keep refusing.

So Idahoans get no representative anywhere. Convenient.

But 287(g) is a federal statute written so state and local agencies can act, and more than 1,400 of those agreements are live across 40 states, including the Idaho patriots who didn’t wait for permission: sheriffs in Kootenai, Franklin, Caribou, Washington, Bonneville, Bingham, and Owyhee counties, plus the city of Post Falls, whose police department signed on in June with Mayor Randy Westlund and Chief Mark Brantl backing it publicly.

Florida required its counties to sign, all 67 complied, and Florida now runs the most saturated enforcement footprint in the country. Georgia and Texas did this too.

So the idea that an Idaho legislator has no business having an opinion about this is laughable, and the people making that argument know it’s laughable. It’s a request that we sit down and be quiet.

I sat through hours of testimony on the immigration bills we brought a few months ago, so let me tell you how this actually works.

Everybody shows up. The Idaho Sheriffs’ Association came out hard against our 287(g) bill, put it in writing, an open letter to the whole Legislature saying they were unequivocally opposed. The police chiefs lined up the same way. Their reasons were the ones you’d expect: it costs money, it pulls deputies off patrol, they weren’t consulted, they don’t want to be bound to whatever the feds decide five years from now. Fine. That’s how it’s supposed to go, and I’ll argue with them (and I did) openly any time.

And The Idaho Dairymen’s Association shows up too. They’ve been testifying against these bills for years, not just this last session. E-Verify comes up, they’re there. Anything that touches their members’ workforce, they’re there. In February they held a press conference in the Capitol to roll out a report they paid for, warning that enforcement would cost the state $5.1 billion.

So this isn’t a smoke-filled room.

That’s the part people get wrong when they imagine how the sausage gets made.

Here’s what actually happens. A man walks into an Idaho committee room and tells elected officials, out loud, on the record, that a large share of his industry’s workforce is here illegally. His own commissioned report says half the dairy workforce is unauthorized. Their own guy told legislators years ago it might be 70%. And then, having said that, he asks us not to pass a bill that would check.

And we don’t. That’s the part you need to sit with. Not that anybody lied... but that nobody had to. The admission and the request go in the same breath, into a microphone, in a building full of Republicans who ran on the border, and the bill dies anyway. Sometimes without a recorded vote, so there’s nobody’s name to look up afterward.

That’s the game. It isn’t hidden. It’s just never punished.

“The right raises money off it, the left raises money off it.”

Half true, and the false half is the important one. The two parties aren’t opposites here. They fight about the paperwork and agree completely about the flow, because the donor class of both of them wants the flow.

The Chamber of Commerce and the immigration lawyers are two hands on the same body, and the fundraising theater exists to hide how much they agree.

The people aren’t divided on this one.

Washington is united against them.

“$20 milk. Lettuce from Mexico.”

The price on the carton is the smallest part of the price.

Add the schooling. Add the emergency rooms. Add the housing pressure in every Idaho town within driving distance of a big dairy. And add the wages held down across every trade that has to compete with subsidized labor.

Idahoans pay all of it, while the savings go on one set of books and the costs go on everybody else’s.

Then the argument eats itself.

Farm Bureau guy says he wants the food grown here, by people paid decently, so we aren’t at the mercy of Mexico for lettuce. Good. That’s economic nationalism and he’s right. But he wants it grown here using the same cheap foreign labor he’d be buying if the farm were in Mexico, so the deal hasn’t changed at all, he’s just moved the border so the cheap part happens on our side of it, with our schools and our hospitals absorbing the difference.

You can’t wave the flag to keep the farm and then dissolve the country’s labor market to keep the margin.

It’s a passive-aggressive threat: vote our way or your groceries get expensive.

A country is a people before it’s an economy. But once the people are an input cost, there’s nothing left worth defending.

A guy on X posted this week that the “experts are in shock,” that Micron is putting $50 billion into Boise, that it’ll produce 17,000 jobs, and that this is huge for Americans.

We’ve spent decades being trained to cheer at numbers. A random figure gets announced, a governor stands next to a hard hat with a golden shovel, and we’re all supposed to feel something.

I have a different take:

In 2008 the legislature passed House Bill 562 to lure Areva, a French nuclear company, into building an enrichment plant near Idaho Falls. It said if you put $1 billion into the state within seven years, your taxable property value gets capped at $400 million forever.

The French never showed (shocking). But Micron hit the threshold in 2011 and took the deal written for somebody else.

By 2019 Micron's Boise plant was assessed at $1.86 billion. Without the cap, that footprint would have owed $20.32 million in property tax the following year. Its actual bill in 2024 was $3.4 million. The new build sits under a separate entity, so it gets a second $400 million cap. Then House Bill 678 in 2022 killed the sales tax on construction materials, and Washington added $6.165 billion in CHIPS money too.

Micron passed a $1 trillion market cap this spring and has been above it since, on $90 billion of revenue at a 56% net margin. This week it announced a $10 billion AI research lab in Boise, funded out of pocket.

That's the company we decided needed "relief."

But wait, there’s more! In 2020 the legislature passed House Bill 521, exempting data centers from sales tax. The bar: $250 million invested within five years, and 30 permanent jobs.

That’s not a typo: 30.

Meta turned up almost immediately with an $800 million campus on farm ground outside Kuna, a town of 25,000. It has since crossed the $400 million threshold too (permanent headcount is around 100) and its record with kids is no mystery with headlines like:

• Instagram’s chatbot helped teen accounts plan suicide — and parents can’t disable it (Washington Post)

• Hawley opens probe into Meta after reports of AI romantic exchanges with minors (Fox News)

• Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info (Reuters)

What does it cost you?

A Boise homeowner pays about $300 a year more than he otherwise would, a Kuna homeowner about $160. Those are Ada County numbers and I represent Nampa, so here’s how it reaches us: the sales tax exemptions are statewide. Every dollar we forgive in Boise or Kuna is a dollar the general fund doesn’t have, and that fund pays for stuff in Nampa and Caldwell and Melba.

Call it what it is: this is a retired couple in Kuna sending money to Menlo Park, or a framer in Nampa sending money to shareholders in New York and Riyadh.

Chris Bruce and Lori Den Hartog tried to trim it back this session with House Bill 897. I voted yes. Micron objected to the part touching its property tax cap, and it died in the House.

Why these bills always die

Here’s a big part of it: dinners, receptions, drunken trips somewhere a lot nicer than Boise in January on somebody else’s plane. I get the invitations. Once in a while I’ll go to something if there’s an actual reason (but we’re talking single digits out of a hundred). Saying no to the other ninety-some is a large part of why I have time to sit here and write this.

A lobbyist isn’t a stranger to anybody in that building. He’s there every day of the session. He learns a member’s kids’ names, asks after the wife, buys dinner, drinks, and god only knows what else. There’s wine and shots and drunk legislators, and by March many legislators have eaten 40 meals with their lobbyist “friends” and maybe two with their own families.

Then a bill comes up and he says what he needs, and it doesn’t land on that member as a bribe.

It lands as a favor for a “friend.”

The filing burden falls on the lobbyist, not the legislator, and most of what he files is a lump sum by category. Entertainment. Travel. Lodging. A dollar number with nobody’s name attached to it.

Then at the end there’s a banquet where a lobbying group hands out awards for being a “friend of Idaho business.” None of this is the exception. It’s how that building works, and a big chunk of the legislature takes part in it. Nobody breaks a law but somehow men who consider themselves honest cast votes they couldn’t explain at home, because the man who asked was a “friend” who bought them drinks.

Nobody asked about the jobs

But I digress…

Go read House Bill 562 and find me the part that requires anybody to hire anybody.

It isn’t in there. Section 63-4502 defines a qualifying investment as a billion dollars of construction and equipment. That’s the whole test. No employment floor, no wage standard, no residency requirement, not one word about a human being.

Buy the machines, skip the taxes, forever.

Meanwhile Micron filed 573 labor condition applications last year. H-1B doesn’t spread evenly across a new build. It concentrates in exactly the roles a kid from Nampa with an engineering degree is aiming at. Process. Yield. Integration. Design. The construction and technician jobs mostly go local while the career goes to a guy from India.

And that Indian can’t quit. His status belongs to his employer, so he doesn’t push on wages, doesn’t jump to a competitor, and doesn’t file the complaint. That’s not a knock on him. It’s a knock on a company that would rather have a workforce it owns than one it has to bargain with, the same instinct that shipped our plants to China and called it efficiency.

So about those 17,000 jobs. Maybe Micron delivers every one of them. But nothing in Idaho law says they have to, nothing says the jobs go to Idahoans, and nothing happens if the number comes in at 6,000.

We held $50 billion worth of negotiating position and asked for nothing.

What to do

I’m bringing a bill to repeal all of it. Not sunset it. Not index it. Repeal.

Title 63, Chapter 45, the $400 million cap. Written for a company that never came, passed 41 to 27, no member’s name on the bill, and they declared an emergency to backdate it. Brad Little even voted no on it when he was a legislator.

Idaho Code 63-3622VV. The data centers. Thirty jobs.

Idaho Code 63-3622WW. Read subsection 4(e): to qualify you have to already be collecting CHIPS money and already be claiming the 2008 cap. We wrote the old giveaway into the new one as a prerequisite. It’s a corporate welfare ladder, and we built every rung ourselves.

Three sections need to go.

Because a tax break for one company is a tax increase on everybody else. And a business that has to be paid to come here is coming for the check, not for Idaho. It’ll leave for a bigger one.

America First isn’t a line for a mailer…

I’m tired of watching my own party act like the Chamber of Commerce with a flag pin on and what I actually want is harder to put in the tax code. I want a kid who grows up in Nampa to be able to stay in Nampa, own a house on one income, and bury his parents in the county he was born in.

That used to be ordinary here, and no press release with a big number in it is going to bring it back.

Last month the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare handed out $3.1 million of your money. No legislator voted on it and most of us didn’t know it was happening. We found out by email, after it was decided.

The way it happened bothers me more than the award does.

Let’s start with where the money came from, because almost nobody in Idaho knows. In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill. Buried in the final hours of negotiating it was something called the Rural Health Transformation Program. It wasn’t in the earlier drafts. It was created, and then doubled from $25 billion to $50 billion, to get one senator from Alaska to vote yes (we call this a bribe). Senator Lisa Murkowski doesn’t hide this. Her own office calls her one of the lead advocates for doubling that fund, and Alaska takes $272 million a year out of it. Idaho, with nearly twice Alaska’s population, gets $186 million.

I voted no on all of it.

On taking the money, and later on the committee that was supposed to watch it. Rural Idaho needs help, and I’d vote for real help tomorrow. But money that exists because it was the price of somebody else’s vote on a federal bill doesn’t belong to the state that spends it. It answers to Washington. It always was going to.

Now here’s the part that surprises people…

This money never went through the Legislature the way you’d assume. It goes from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services straight to a single state agency: the Department of Health and Welfare, run by Director Juliet Charron (who started in the job two months before the application went out the door). Her department wrote Idaho’s application in November 2025 and sent it to Washington. The feds approved it on December 29, 2025. By the time the Legislature convened in January, the plan was already written, already submitted, and already blessed by CMS.

So… we just showed up to a decision that had already been made.

We spent most of the 2026 session fighting about who would watch this money. Two oversight bills died. On the last day of session we passed a third and created something called the Rural Health Transformation Committee that was sold to Idahoans as “legislative oversight.”

But here’s what that committee actually does:

1. It receives a monthly summary of upcoming awards

2. Members get three business days to send questions to the co-chairs - that’s it

3. No vote on any award, no approval, no power to stop anything.

I voted against creating it because I didn’t think it would have teeth, and it doesn’t.

Instead, we built a committee whose job is to be “notified.”

In June, Health and Welfare started posting the first funding opportunities. Two of them were maternal health, which matters in a state where rural women drive hours to deliver a baby. One was called OB Readiness. The other was the Idaho Perinatal Quality Collaborative. Applications closed July 10, and both are going to Comagine Health, a woke consulting nonprofit in Portland, Oregon (about $3.1 million total).

Oh, and they believe men can get pregnant.

But Comagine wasn’t a stranger who saw a posting and applied. They were already running Idaho’s perinatal program, working alongside the same Health and Welfare office that ran this contract. So the office that already worked with Comagine decided what the contract would require, ran the “competition,” and gave it to Comagine.

If a school district did that with a superintendent’s brother-in-law, you’d hear about it on the news. But because it’s a state agency and the paperwork is boring… nobody says a word.

I don’t yet know who sat on the scoring panel. I don’t know what conflict of interest disclosures they signed, or whether anyone asked for them (those are documents, and documents can be requested).

Then there’s the question of who they picked. Comagine’s own Idaho perinatal materials describe their work as improving outcomes for “pregnant people.” Yes, we’re about to pay a Portland consulting firm $3.1 million to improve maternal care in rural Idaho, and that firm won’t say “mothers.” Their public resource library also includes health equity plan templates and a gender-affirming care guide for hospital staff. It was all sitting on their website, in public, months before anybody at Health and Welfare made this choice.

So somebody at IDHW looked at this organization and decided it was the right fit for Idaho mothers. I’d like to know who, and I’d like to know what standard they applied.

And as far I can tell, nobody asked whether a contractor’s published positions line up with the values of the state writing the check (they don’t).

But maybe there’s a boring answer. Maybe Comagine simply put in a stronger application and the department can produce the scoresheets to prove it. If so, produce them. That’d be a fine outcome and I’d say so publicly.

What I want isn’t complicated.

First, the documents: the scoring rubric, the individual evaluator scoresheets, the names and divisions of everyone who scored these applications, their conflict of interest disclosures, and every prior agreement between Health and Welfare and Comagine going back five years. If this was clean, the file will show it.

Second, contract terms with teeth. Whatever Idaho signs with an out-of-state contractor ought to bind that contractor to Idaho law and give the state approval over materials distributed to Idaho hospitals. If the current agreements don’t do that, we have a real problem, and it’s a fixable one.

Third, an oversight committee that oversees something: A committee that gets a summary and three days to comment is not a check on anything. Next session that statute should be rewritten so awards of this size require a vote before the money moves, not an email after it’s gone.

About $744 million of this money hasn’t been spent yet. Every dollar flows through one department, and every award is signed inside it. The Legislature appropriates, and then we read summaries.

Juliet Charron runs that department, and she answers to the Senate Health and Welfare Committee that I sit on. The contract starts in ten days.

Show us the scoresheets.

Idaho sent four Republicans to Congress. Crapo. Risch. Fulcher. Simpson. And all four voted yes on H.R. 6644.

Every single one.

This is a bill that lets HUD publish federal zoning guidelines telling your city council how to handle land use, doesn’t mention immigration once across 56 sections, and has banking deregulation provisions stapled to the back that couldn’t pass on their own.

And all four Idaho Republicans said “sure, sounds great.”

This thing passed the House 358-32 (41 not voting). Yikes. Because when has Washington agreeing on anything that hard ever worked out for you? For your neighborhood? Or for the town your grandpa built?

A prominent X account posted this video in response:

I think that nobody read this bill, I mean... look:

HUD publishes model guidelines encouraging duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods. Then it ties some Community Development Block Grant funding and competitive grants to demonstrated housing production and zoning reforms.

Manufactured homes are pushed into more subdivisions. Multifamily housing is incentivized in retail zones, and your quiet Idaho town with good schools gets a 200-unit apartment complex next to the elementary school.

And the bill’s own stated purpose says it’s about “increasing local flexibility over housing decisions.” It publishes federal zoning frameworks while tying money to communities that don’t build fast enough. That’s the opposite of flexibility and every single person who voted yes either didn’t read it or doesn’t care... which one is worse? I don’t know.

(Crapo, Risch, Fulcher, and Simpson apparently didn’t ask)

The Founders actually built a mechanism to prevent exactly this. Many folks don’t know that State legislatures used to pick senators. Before the 17th Amendment gutted that in 1913, Crapo and Risch would’ve had to walk into the Idaho statehouse and explain this vote. Face to face with state legislators who actually deal with zoning, who hear from county commissioners and city councils every week.

Try explaining to those people why you just handed their authority to HUD.

I bet they’d never have voted yes because the Idaho legislature would’ve yanked them.

But we don’t have that accountability anymore because senators answer to campaign donors and national party infrastructure now (not to their state governments, not to anyone who actually governs locally).

Two Idaho senators just voted for these federal zoning frameworks that the Idaho statehouse would probably reject if anyone bothered asking. The 17th Amendment didn’t “democratize the Senate” and bills like H.R. 6644 are what that looks like when it plays out over a century later.

The immigration silence is where this bill tells on itself completely though. 56 sections and the word immigration appears exactly zero times. We’ve got 50 million+ foreign-born people here. Net migration has been at historic levels in recent years, they’re still flooding the labor market and housing market simultaneously and then acting baffled that Americans can’t afford to live anywhere.

Idaho’s seen some of the fastest population growth in the country and our entire delegation just voted for a bill that treats supply like it exists in a vacuum.

Demand doesn’t matter apparently...

Where all these people are coming from doesn’t matter. Just build more units and don’t ask questions.

This is a big green light to developers and foreigners and a big middle finger to our young people. Both parties know why they won’t touch the demand side - the cheap-labor coalition funds both of them. Oh and they stapled a bunch of banking deregulation bills onto this thing too. All bills that couldn’t pass on their own merits so they got smuggled inside an emotional vehicle about families who can’t afford homes.

You want to deregulate community banks? Write a community banking bill. Go hold hearings on it. But nope, of course not... legislative laundering is easier (especially when parents are holding up pictures of their kids at the press conference).

The Opportunity Zones prioritization might actually be the worst part though. HUD gives additional weight to projects in “Opportunity Zones,” which (if you forgot) was Senator Tim Scott’s program that was supposed to lift distressed communities but mostly just became a way for connected investors to do luxury development in neighborhoods already gentrifying.

So now, if signed, we’re stacking MORE federal incentives on top of a proven failure. Your local contractor in Nampa or Twin Falls building ten affordable houses? He’s not getting those grants. Because he has no lobbyists, no federal grant writers, and really - no shot.

There’s also an FHA small-dollar mortgage pilot. Sounds cool, right? Federal government backstopping mortgages for people who couldn’t otherwise qualify. But oh wait, we tried this in 2008 and millions of families lost everything. But slap a “pilot program” label on it so it sounds cautious and here we go running it back like the 08’ crash never happened (I believe the kids call this “retard-maxing”).

Only five Republican senators voted no.

Not Crapo.

Not Risch.

Not Fulcher.

Not Simpson.

Kudos to Mike Lee though who got closest to actually saying the real thing when he argued the bill “does not do nearly enough to safeguard housing programs for American citizens only” and called for mass deportations as the actual housing fix.

But Idaho’s congressmen couldn’t be bothered to make that argument. Or any argument apparently.

The Senate vote was 85-5 (with 10 not voting). Both parties’ donor bases got fed and they wrapped it in compassion language so you’d feel weird opposing it.

Pat Buchanan warned about this his entire career (i.e. when both parties are clapping, check your wallet). Connected developers are eating off federal grants, banks got their deregulation smuggled through without a standalone vote, and HUD’s budget just got fatter.

Oh, and, your kid who can’t afford a starter home in Meridian? He gets a pilot program, a study, a framework, and a report.

Sincerely, your entire Idaho delegation.

Here’s what’s happening in Idaho.

And if you think it’s just Idaho, you’re not paying attention because this is playing out across the country.

Caldwell just rubber-stamped nearly 1,000 new homes on 280 acres near Lake Lowell. Three hundred apartments with retail mixed in.

In Boise they’re putting up a massive high-rise affordable housing facility so refugees and California’s homeless population get a walkable neighborhood while the people who’ve been here for decades get to watch their property values and their community change overnight.

Or, what about this massive project south of Boise?

They needed cheap labor so they imported a new population. That’s the whole story.

But here’s where it gets really ugly. Your tax dollars are funding relocation through NGOs that nobody audits. Just a few months ago I pushed a bill to force transparency on where that money goes and audit the orgs who do this. And Idaho legislative leadership (R) killed it. They looked at a bill that just said “show us the receipts” and buried it.

Ask yourself why a Republican leadership team would fight to keep NGO funding in the dark. Who benefits from that?

You know what happened to Virginia?

It was solid red for years before the developments went in, the demographics shifted, and fifteen years later it’s deep blue. Conservatives there still walk around confused about it (like it’s some mystery nobody could’ve predicted). Every person with a calculator saw it coming and nobody in leadership cared because the construction money was too good.

Many Idaho Republicans are running the same play right now by partnering with Democrats on “affordable housing bills” that let developers flood the state (while Idaho families who can’t get into a home are left holding the bag).

And the people moving in?

Well... they hate you.

They’re never pulling the lever for your values.

They don’t even like you.

That’s just the math of importing an electorate that has zero connection to what Idaho was built on. Assimilation isn’t what happens. What happens is the voter rolls change and suddenly your state doesn’t belong to you anymore.

Calvin Coolidge saw all of this a hundred years ago:

“We want no such additions to our population as those who prey upon our institutions or our property.”

Prey upon. He called it what it was.

And then he went further:

“The retroactive immigrant is a danger in our midst. His discontent gives him no time to seize a healthy opportunity to improve himself. His purpose is to tear down. There is no room for him here.”

A sitting Vice President published that in a national magazine and nobody flinched because everyone understood it was just the truth. Now you say that in Boise and your own Republican leadership acts like you’re the problem.

Coolidge’s solution?

“He needs to be deported, not as a substitute for, but as a part of his punishment.”

Meanwhile Idaho Republicans can’t even pass a simple audit bill for the NGOs relocating these people into your neighborhoods.

This is happening all over the country.

Virginia already fell. So did Colorado. Conservative voters had zero clue what they were signing off on. Your own guys sold you out and called it “economic development.” By the time the voter rolls shift in Idaho (and they will), the Republicans who made it happen will be retired somewhere cashing consulting checks from the companies that paid for all of it.

Your own party needs to stop telling you that demographic replacement is economic growth (because you know it isn’t and so do they).

Wake up, Idaho.

And then do something about it.

P.S. Here’s how it happens in Idaho >>

The Federation for American Immigration Reform put the trip together. I bought my own plane ticket and went with a few other Idaho legislators. Sheriffs and law enforcement officers from across the country were there with us, all for the same reason: somebody had to actually go see this rather than read about it in a press release.

Our shepherds for the trip were Sheriff Mark Dannels of Cochise County and his team, including Detective Cody Essary, who walked us through the desert personally and showed us what their surveillance network captures every single day. Sheriff Mark Lamb, formerly of Pinal County and now working with FAIR on border security full time, was there too, as well as Art Del Cueto (who spent decades working the border). Between these men you’re talking about decades of combined law enforcement experience and thousands of hours working this specific problem from ground level.

Every single one of them used the same words.

Modern day slavery.

That’s the operational reality as described by a 42-year law enforcement veteran who chairs border security for the National Sheriffs Association and sits on the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. Sheriff Dannels has personally briefed RFK Jr., Dr. Phil, Tom Homan. When he used those words it carried the weight of someone who’s been watching this happen from 83 miles of the most trafficked border terrain in the country for over a decade.

I filmed what gets left behind.

The debris field out there tells the story better than any press release ever could. Physical evidence of human beings moved through that landscape like freight, because to the cartels running this operation, that’s the accurate description of what they’re doing.

Cody told us how cartels charge $10,000 to $30,000 crossing fee for every single person who makes the trek.

He didn’t get that number from a government report. He got it from the people themselves, in the field, in real time. He’s worked that desert long enough to have seen this end every way it possibly can. He’s been at scenes where people didn’t make it out, where evidence of what they paid and what they still owed was scattered around them in the heat. When Cody describes what these crossings actually cost and what the debt does to people afterward, he’s pulling from conversations he’s personally had with human beings in the worst moments of their lives.

Here’s what that debt actually means in practice:

Can’t pay upfront? You cross on credit and that balance follows you into the interior. Now you’re here illegally and owe $15,000 to an organization that knows where your family lives back home, and surfacing to any authority risks everything.

What happens next is pedictable…

You do whatever the cartel needs done.

Sex trafficking. Prostitution. Running drugs. Labor. Whatever they need that week, that's your life now because the cartel owns you and everyone you love. Don't comply? They know your mother's address back home. Your kids' school. Noncompliance isn't a negotiation, it's a death sentence, and sometimes they make an example out of the people closest to you first just to make sure you understand how serious they are.

And the debt never quite clears either, because something new always gets tacked on. These guys have watched this play out enough times that they can finish the story before you ask him how it ends.

They walked us through the mechanics of the crossings too.

Cartel scouts sit on nearby mountains (pictured above) with binoculars guiding movement by radio. The crossers get outfitted in cartel-supplied camouflage with carpet shoes designed to wipe their tracks, and in some cases they drag blankets to erase the trail completely.

The Cochise County SABRE program (Southeastern Arizona Border Regional Enforcement) runs over 1,000 hidden cameras throughout that desert, solar-powered and built into fake rocks so smugglers can’t locate and destroy them. Dannels started this in 2017 with game cameras and rancher partnerships. Since then SABRE has detected over 116,000 illegal crossings and put roughly 437 drug smugglers in custody. All with only six deputies running the whole operation, fixing their own equipment in a garage because sending cameras to the manufacturer means weeks offline they simply can’t absorb.

People who make it through get ferried to cartel stash houses in Phoenix and moved north into the American interior. Whatever the local network needs that week, 25 to 30 percent of everything they earn goes back south to the cartel. Sometimes the business owner genuinely has no idea because the manager is the cartel’s person. In a lot of destination towns there’s a restaurant or a storefront functioning as a cash collection point where workers hand over their cut.

The children are the hardest part to sit with.

They’ve documented around 5,000 cases of children being drugged and cycled through fake family units specifically because families move through processing more easily. They get recycled back into Mexico and inserted into a new fake family for another run. The cartels have no regard for human life and children in this system are a rentable asset, nothing more.

Years of building the political and legal case against enforcement created the operating environment the cartels needed.

The court filings, the sanctuary policies, the sustained campaign to make federal immigration enforcement as difficult as possible at the local level, all of it fed a system the cartels were happy to exploit.

Biden’s autopen halted wall construction within an hour of taking office.

What followed was a dark and deliberate unwinding of everything that made that border functional (e.g. surveillance equipment going dark, processing centers absorbing the agents who should have been in the field), and Dannels standing there with six deputies and a camera network built from donated dollars because the federal government had functionally abandoned that desert.

So when you see a construction bid come in mysteriously low, undercutting every legitimate competitor, or produce on a shelf priced below what it honestly costs to grow, that gap has to come from somewhere.

Arizona has been trying to fight this for fifteen years.

SB 1070 passed in 2010.

Governor Brewer signed it and Obama’s DOJ filed suit almost immediately, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court. By 2012 three of the four main provisions were gone. One survived, a single requirement that officers check immigration status of people they’ve already lawfully arrested, out of everything the law originally contained.

Then in November 2024, Arizona voters passed Proposition 314 directly at the ballot, going around a governor who’d vetoed every enforcement measure her legislature sent her. More carefully drafted this time, written around people caught in the act of crossing rather than anyone present in the state (it’s contingent on a parallel Texas case surviving federal court and that fight isn’t resolved). Fifteen years of work, and people dressing cartel protection up as civil rights advocacy have litigated most of it into nothing.

Just this month, Idaho had a chance to look at that history and do something with it.

But it didn’t happen and this wasn’t the first time.

I carried the harboring bills on the Senate side. House Bill 764 this session, along with nearly every other immigration enforcement bill in 2026, was mine or a bill I was directly involved in pushing.

What these bills would have done is give Idaho law enforcement the same basic authority Arizona built its entire enforcement model around, making it a state crime to knowingly assist someone unlawfully present in the United States.

But the House Judiciary Committee killed HB 764 without a floor vote. In 2025, our almost identical bill died in that same committee. The 2026 session wrapped up this month and every single immigration enforcement bill either failed or never got a hearing. Every one in a Republican supermajority, in one of the reddest states in the country.

The Idaho Sheriffs Association lobbied against these bills. ISA went into the capitol and argued against giving their own members tools that Sheriff Dannels has spent fifteen years refining, tools that drew sheriffs and law enforcement from across the country to Arizona to study firsthand.

That needs a straight answer…

What exactly is ISA protecting here?

Dannels built SABRE with game cameras and rancher handshakes and it became a nationally recognized enforcement model that law enforcement from around the country fly in specifically to study. Lamb’s years running anti-smuggling operations in Pinal County gave him a ground-level view of this pipeline that nobody sitting in a statehouse committee room is ever going to get from a briefing document. We stood in that desert alongside sheriffs and LEOs who flew in from across the country, and the reason every single one of them made the trip was sitting right in front of us the whole time.

The Idaho’s Sheriffs Association spent this session making sure their own members couldn’t follow that lead. While I was carrying these bills in the Senate, ISA was in the building arguing the other direction:

Crazy, right?

Even still, it’s worth knowing that morale from those actually working the border is genuinely high right now. Sheriff Dannels and everyone we interacted with said it directly.

The agents feel like they’re finally being allowed to do the job they signed up for.

The cartels still own the Mexican side of that fence though. A cartel scout sat on a mountain watching us through binoculars, same way he watched when Trump visited during the 2024 campaign. The machine kept running at lower volume, and cartels have a patience for this work that outlasts any administration. They’re counting on the fact that legislatures don’t have that same patience.

Idaho just burned another session.

Sixty miles of terrain in Cochise County alone sits without a wall. Steel posts intended for Trump’s original build are stacked out in that desert right now. The window is open. Someone in our state needs to find the spine to do something permanent with it before the next cycle closes it again.

Anyone making the case for continued legislative inaction needs to explain, with some specificity, how their position differs from anyone who’s ever looked at a slave trade and decided the economics were worth defending.

Still waiting on that answer from ISA.

Last week we finished 81 days in Boise.

And I want to give you the real account of what happened, not the version that makes everyone look good.

So, a few wins first.

I personally carried the bill that stripped teachers’ union dues off the taxpayer dime. Got it passed (waiting on the Governor to sign it… still). American law for American courts (I pushed that through in the Senate) is now signed into law. And my voter affidavit reform that actually puts teeth into ID voter verification at the polls is now law. These weren’t wins that fell into my lap. I put my name on the legislation and dragged them through to the finish line.

We also landed some hits on the money side. Idaho’s sitting on a $1.6 billion surplus and the instinct in that building was to spend it. Every surplus is an invitation to grow government, and there are plenty of people in Boise who answered that invitation enthusiastically.

I didn’t.

We pushed through rescissions and budget cuts that clawed back agency spending (and gutted millions from the fed-funded Minnesota-style daycare program too). But I want to be straight with you about what all of this actually is. Cutting agencies and clawing back program dollars is treating symptoms.

The disease is a spending culture in Boise that assumes every surplus belongs to the government first.

I held the line where I could but I’m not in the majority the way I’d need to be to actually win that war. So we won some battles this session. But the war is still very much going. And nothing proves that more than the biggest fight we could have had this session, the one we didn’t have. Not really, anyway. I’m talking about illegal immigration. It’s not just a “federal issue.” It touches everyone in Idaho. Your neighbor who can’t find construction work. The school that can’t figure out who’s actually enrolled. The wage that won’t go up because someone will always undercut it with labor that doesn’t cost what labor should cost.

I personally went in with several enforcement bills and they ALL got killed or refused a hearing before most Idahoans ever heard they existed.

Not by Democrats. But by our own Republican supermajority.

That’s where we’re at as a state. And you know what I keep coming back to? Somebody profits from this. Somebody profits when enforcement is weak and workers are cheap and nobody asks questions. And those somebodies were in that building, quiet and patient and effective, the whole session.

The Idaho Sheriff’s Association showed up to help kill the ICE cooperation bill I co-sponsored (and there were several more bills they testified AGAINST). I saw committee chairmen make bills disappear into their desks. And I watched every single bill we had die or got no hearing. Yes, in “Republican Idaho.” So while most legislators from safe Republican districts will send you an end-of-session letter that lists all the wins and call it a day...

I’m not going to do that.

Because you deserve to know what the cheap labor lobby still has on the Idaho statehouse. Their stranglehold didn’t loosen this session (if anything, now I know exactly how tight it is).

What you get from having me in that building is simple.

Someone who names it. Someone whose name is actually on the enforcement bills (not just the press releases). And someone who isn’t going to tell you we had a “great session” when the most important lever we had didn’t get pulled.

That’s the report from Boise.

Most people in Idaho have no idea any of this happened. You do now. That matters more than you think.

That’s how long we’ve been fighting to end taxpayer-funded subsidies to teachers unions in Idaho. And tonight, we broke through.

Because Idaho taxpayers have been funding an organization that actively works against them (and most people have no idea).

Teachers unions collect dues and those dues flow to the NEA in Washington D.C. $4.4 million collected through Idaho school district payroll systems every year. About $1.1 million goes straight to NEA headquarters.

What does the NEA do with Idaho’s money?

They push radical curriculum and fight school choice (and they’re winning in a lot of states). They protect bad teachers from being fired, bankroll politicians who couldn’t survive a primary in rural Idaho, and they sued to keep schools closed during COVID while private schools stayed open and kids fell behind. Gender ideology in elementary classrooms? That’s them. And when parents ask what’s being taught to their own kids, the NEA treats them like threats.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the NEA “the ideological and institutional vanguard of progressive politics” and “a powerful wing of the Democratic Party.”

And Idaho taxpayers have been helping fund all of it.

Because when dues get pulled from a teacher’s paycheck, state employees on state time process that transaction. Which means that Idaho taxpayer dollars are doing administrative work for a political machine that hates everything most Idahoans believe in.

For example…

Boise School District has a “professional activities” stipend that matches IEA dues almost exactly (over $1 million per year in taxpayer-funded union membership laundered through payroll).

Or, did you know that fifty-one school district contracts pay teachers to leave classrooms and do union work on the clock. In Payette, the contract explicitly covers “testifying on legislative initiatives.” Yes, we’re paying teachers to lobby us at the capitol with our money!

H 516 ends all of it.

But here’s what should make you furious: we had a bill ready to address all of this and more. It passed the house and even though a senator promised a hearing (and sponsored the original bill himself), he stuck it in his desk drawer. That’s how you kill a bill without a vote.

All because he made some a deal with the unions!

So tonight, we went around him.

Took the teachers union language, radiator capped it onto a bill already moving through the Senate, and passed it out of amending order. Rare move. But it worked (Radiator capping is when you gut a bill that’s already in motion, replace the contents with your new language. Bill number stays the same. Same cap, new engine underneath.)

Now we’re just one vote away from ending this for good (it still needs to clear the full Senate, then the House needs to concur, then it lands on the governor’s desk).

As you know…

President Trump just came out swinging on education. Shutting down the federal Department of Education. Calling teachers unions the enemy of American parents. Trump calls teachers unions a cancer on American education every week (seems like the whole Republican Party is moving this direction).

If you live in Idaho, this is the moment.

Contact your Republican senators and Governor Little.

Tell them H 516 better pass. And it better get signed. No more taxpayer money funding people fighting against Idaho parents and kids.

We’re close. Don’t let up.

We have the exact same structural problem in Idaho.

Federal dollars flowing into a childcare subsidy program that’s been running since the 1990s, with absolutely nobody able to criminally prosecute fraud against it. So on December 31st, Representative Josh Tanner and I sent a letter to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare demanding they pause $14 million in new childcare appropriations until real fraud prevention got installed. I’d voted against Senate Bill 1206 during the 2025 session specifically because it dumped $14 million into new childcare subsidies with zero safeguards (e.g. money going out the door, kids unverified, fraud undetectable and unprosecutable).

We wanted enrollment verification, a review of past disbursements, inspection protocols, and a legislative briefing before another dollar moved. Pretty reasonable when you’re watching Minnesota burn, right?

DHW took three months to respond. And it wasn’t a fraud prevention plan.

It was a threat.

Because on March 9th, Director Juliet Charron wrote to the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee claiming ICCP had been operating without proper legal authority all along. No statutory basis, she said. Then the ultimatum: pass S1374 (a vendor-written expansion bill creating an AI fraud detection system and 600 new licensed childcare programs) or, she said, IDHW winds the whole thing down by end of fiscal year.

We asked them to stop the bleeding in December. And they handed us a bill to build 600 more places to bleed from, written by the contractor who’d profit from building them (just 3 months later).

What was actually in S1374? Provider-reported attendance verified by a fraud detection system that analyzes... provider-reported data. If providers are lying about attendance in the first place, analyzing their lies won’t catch them. Real enrollment verification didn’t make it in. Neither did spot checks or anything resembling actual inspection. Minnesota’s fraud happened because providers self-reported attendance with nobody checking. S1374 just automates the same broken process.

So on March 12th, Senator Josh Keyser and I went directly to Attorney General Raúl Labrador to ask basically: had the program actually been operating without legal authority for thirty years? And, do they have the legal authority to do this or not? Because Charron’s argument, if true, changes everything.

The AG responded March 19th (last week):

Chief Deputy Phil Skinner was clear: the program is legal.

Idaho Code 56-202 covers it because childcare assistance qualifies as both “public assistance” and “social services” under the statute’s own definitions. Federal grant authority provides a second independent basis. And the legislature’s repeated annual appropriation of ICCP funds constitutes ongoing affirmative endorsement of the program.

All that to say: IDHW’s “we have no authority” argument didn’t survive scrutiny.

The AG also noted the legislature could provide greater statutory clarity, putting the legal question fully to rest.

That’s exactly what the bill we passed out of the Senate H&W committee today does (SB 1419), among other things.

The program is legal. It’s not going anywhere. It existed before any of us got here and it’ll exist after we’re all gone. And even though IDHW tried to use legal uncertainty as leverage, the AG disagreed, and now we’re back to the question I was asking in December: who’s actually governing this thing?

Right now the answer is nobody. Not really.

Daycare providers have been billing the program for kids who never walked through the door. Real money going to fraudsters. And when that fraud gets caught? The Attorney General of Idaho cannot prosecute it criminally. At all (right now he has no authority to do anything about it except watch).

SB 1419 changes that. The AG gets concurrent prosecutorial authority the moment it passes. Fraud becomes a criminal matter instead of a paperwork error that gets filed away.

And something that isn’t anywhere in current law: providers who employ illegal aliens have been in this program the whole time (collecting from it). SB 1419 removes them permanently and says if you get caught with illegal labor, you’re out for good.

Future expansion of the program requires the legislature to approve it in statute first (right now IDHW can grow it on administrative rules nobody voted on). So the hard sunset (i.e. expiration date) in 2028 means it doesn’t roll forward on autopilot. And it’ll be the legislature, not some agency, who has to actively decide to keep it going.

None of that was in the vendor bill IDHW originally gave us. That one gave us an AI system and 600 new licensed facilities with no meaningful verification that any child being billed for actually exists. Bureaucratic theater dressed up as accountability.

But the bill we passed out of committee today is the actual enforcement.

A yes vote today didn’t create or fund a “new government daycare program.” It does neither. The ICCP has been running thirty years and funding decisions are in entirely separate appropriation bills we still have coming up (and I’ll be a no on those BTW).

Bottom-line is: if we voted no on SB 1419 today, it’d mean the fraud doesn’t stop.

The program would just keep running the same broken way, the AG would keep watching with nothing he can legally do about it, and we’d be waiting for the next Minnesota to happen here instead.

IDHW tried to use a legal threat to force through their vendor bill. The AG said no. So the legislature got to do what it should’ve done years ago: put real teeth in a program that’s been running on the honor system since 1990.

That’s SB 1419.

That’s why I voted yes today.

Because nobody wants Idaho to become Minnesota.

*** Update, March 26

Voted no on the floor today. After voting yes in committee yesterday.

The fraud enforcement piece was real and worth fighting for, and we got it into the bill. The AG opinion cleared the legal question IDHW tried to weaponize. Prosecutorial authority for the AG, the bar on providers employing illegal aliens, the sunset, legislative approval for future expansion... none of that existed before. That stuff matters.

But codifying ICCP as a statutory program is a different question than fixing its fraud problem. Bolting better guardrails onto something that shouldn’t exist doesn’t make it worth keeping. It just makes it harder to kill later.

Thirty years of administrative drift doesn’t earn a program permanent status. Running since 1990 on rules nobody voted on is the argument against locking it in, not for it. There are other ways to skin this cat. The legislature doesn’t have to bless the current structure just because the current structure exists.

Sometimes you work a bill through committee and get to the floor and just... can’t.

Check out this small clip from a hearing on Friday about Idaho schools secretly transing your kids. We passed a bill to say they can’t. Some leftists showed up in droves to oppose it:

This should not surprise anyone…

And it’s part of a several-decade-long trend to take away parenting from parents and outsource it to the schools, the state, even social media. Or how about a combo of all three?

Because yesterday, the House and Senate passed a bill to make billion-dollar social media companies AND the state of Idaho the new Mommy and Daddy.

H0542. The “Stop Harms from Addictive Social Media Act.”

Sounded great, right? Protect kids from Instagram and TikTok?!

Except I voted no, and here’s why (full debate, my part starts at 13 minutes):

We all want to protect kids…

I think to some extent, every single person in that chamber does (although, obviously we all define it differently and have different goalposts).

This bill (H542), to its credit, was aimed in the right direction. Because it didn’t go after app stores or device manufacturers. It targeted the platforms themselves. That was the right call. And Meta came out against it (they had five lobbyists running around the building trying to kill it, from what I heard).

So let’s look at who was lobbying against this bill:

1. The Washington Post reported in August 2025 that Instagram’s chatbot helped teen accounts plan suicide (and parents can’t disable it).

2. Court documents from last month showed an internal Meta researcher warned of 500,000 child sexual exploitation cases per day, English-speaking markets only, and their own employee wrote “we expect the true situation is worse.”

3. TIME Magazine reported that Meta had a 17-strike policy for sex trafficking. Sixteen violations before your account got suspended. Their former head of safety testified to this under oath.

That’s who was fighting this bill.

But here was my problem…

I’m also old enough to remember when conservatives said “we don’t co-parent with the government.”

And although I really wanted this to work, I couldn’t vote for it. Because it was presented as a bill that “put parents in the driver’s seat” and “protected kids” but the kids who needed this most got nothing!

Section 48-2103(2) said these platforms have no obligation to verify age on accounts that existed continuously for seven years.

Say your daughter lied about her age at ten and has been on Instagram ever since. The algorithm shaped her entire adolescence. Eating disorder content at midnight, comparison culture wrecking her self-image, all of it.

By seventeen this bill owes her nothing. But Meta got seven years of her data.

Why? Because verifying old accounts is expensive for Meta. For TikTok. For any of these companies. So this bill carved out the most damaged kids to protect their balance sheets and we’re calling it “child protection.”

Parents don’t need a bill to put them in the driver’s seat.

They’re already there.

But Section 48-2103 requires platforms to track cumulative usage. Twenty-five hours, fifty hours, every hundred hours after that. Detailed usage histories tied to identifiable users. That's a surveillance apparatus for your kid. Run by the same companies that connected groomers to two million minors. And now we're trusting them to protect your daughter?!

And this is where it got insulting to me…

Section 48-2106(3) says parents can’t waive the requirements. You understand the risks, you make an informed choice about your own child, and the state says nope. Your judgment doesn’t count.

So we mandated that billion-dollar social media companies monitor your children for you. While overriding your authority to make decisions about your own family.

Because apparently parenting is too hard and the government knows better.

That’s not conservative.

I don’t know what it is but it’s not that.

And then there’s the compliance theater aspect of all this..

Section 48-2105(2)(d) says platforms aren’t liable if they used “reasonable means” to comply.

Meta’s lawyers are going to camp out in those two words. So will TikTok’s. So will every platform with a legal team. Every violation will turn into a multiyear court fight about what “reasonable” means.

Meanwhile your kid keeps scrolling. Not protected.

They already know who these kids are. They target ads to thirteen-year-old girls interested in fitness with surgical precision. But now they have a legal excuse to play dumb.

The thirty-day loophole is almost “funny” too…

Section 48-2104(7)(b) says when a platform flags a child’s account, the kid gets thirty days to dispute. Infinite scroll stays on during that window. Autoplay too. The exact features we’re supposedly banning keep running while compliance happens on paper.

That’s what this bill does. We identified the harm. We just gave it a month to keep happening.

And the billion-dollar threshold? Discord walks. Tumblr walks. Roblox probably walks too (they make their money from Robux, not ads, and this bill only covers advertising revenue). The next TikTok walks. Any platform under a billion in ad revenue operates freely while Meta and Snapchat build compliance systems their competitors can’t afford.

So really, we just protected their market position and called it regulation.

All these billion-dollar corporations have to do is hire some compliance officers, build a dashboard, let the lawyers handle the edge cases. The ones who can’t afford it? Free pass.

Kids on Discord? Unprotected.

Kids on Roblox? Unprotected.

But Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat get a compliance shield and call it a win.

The bill passed by four votes in the Senate.

I wasn’t one of them.

Because I’ve been against these types of bills for years and I’ll keep being against them. But my reasons and Meta’s reasons are not the same.

They wanted this bill weaker. I wanted it to actually hurt them.

But, still, I can’t really blame anyone who voted yes. A billion-dollar organization that’s harming our kids hired five lobbyists to kill this thing. That says something. So I can understand why people voted the other way.

But I voted no because Idaho kids deserve a bill that actually kneecaps these companies. One that protects kids without offloading parenting to the same social media companies that are actively harming them.

This one didn’t get us there.

Protecting kids matters. But at the end of the day I just don’t think outsourcing parenting to Meta and the state of Idaho is how we do it.

Liberty is the road we travel. Not the destination.

That’s why I vote conservative instead of libertarian even though I agree with libertarians probably 60% (ish) of the time and genuinely like a lot of them personally, especially here in Idaho.

But here’s where I get off the highway.

The Big L Libertarian position on drugs is that legalization is the only logically consistent liberty position. And look, I understand the argument. But we don’t live in a philosophy seminar. We live in a community where meth destroyed entire family lines, where fentanyl is killing kids who thought they were taking a Xanax, and where the social wreckage of that stuff lands on neighbors, churches, grandparents raising grandchildren because their own kids are gone.

“Personal choice” sounds clean until you’re watching what’s left of a family at a funeral for a 24 year old. Liberty without cultural guardrails doesn’t set you free. It just moves the chaos somewhere else, usually onto the people least able to handle it, while the guy tweeting about the non-aggression principle never has to clean it up.

Smae with hookers. Consenting adults, victimless (they say). Except it’s not victimless. The communities where that gets normalized don’t get more free, they get coarser, more predatory, and harder on women and kids downstream. I’m not interested in optimizing for theoretical adult autonomy at the expense of what that does to the culture my kids grow up in.

Open borders is where they completely lose me and frankly, most Americans. Open borders is the logical endpoint of pure liberty philosophy. “Labor should flow freely like capital.” Except I’m not trying to optimize a global labor market. I live in a country with a particular history and particular people already in it who I actually owe something to. You can’t conserve anything with open borders. You just get demographic replacement and call it freedom.

And that word, conserve, that’s the whole point.

I’m a conservative. The job is to conserve things worth keeping. The family. The kids. The place you actually live. Liberty is a powerful tool for doing that. Limited government, free markets, personal responsibility.

But all of it only matters if there’s something worth protecting on the other end.

And when “muh liberty” is the answer to everything, including whether your community gets any say in what takes root inside it? Brother, you left conservatism about three exits back.

A lot of my libertarian-leaning friends here in Idaho get this instinctively even if they don’t frame it this way. They want liberty because they want to be left alone to raise their families, run their farms, live by their values. The liberty is in service of something. They’re not philosophically committed to a world where anything goes as long as nobody technically coerces anybody.

That’s the small L libertarian I can work with.

The Big L who follows the philosophy all the way to its logical endpoint, wherever that leads, open borders, legal everything, zero community standards because standards are coercion? That person is consistent. I’ll give them that. They’re just following the road all the way to the end.

I got off twenty miles back because there was actually somewhere I was trying to go.

Four days ago, Meta sent the Idaho Senate a letter with three specific requests. And today two of those amendments showed up on the floor.

One bought Meta six more months before the bill takes effect. Six more months of doing exactly what this bill is supposed to stop. The other gutted the $10k private right of action, which is the only way parents can actually take Meta to court. Gone. (Because Meta asked for it).

HB 542 is already a bad bill (I’ve written about why here).

But taking marching orders from the biggest, most calculating purveyor of harm to kids on what Idaho legislation should say? And then delivering it four days later?

That’s gross. There’s no other word for it.

I’m here to protect kids. Not Facebook’s bottom line.

Because Minnesota had just uncovered one of the largest welfare fraud schemes in U.S. history. Their childcare subsidy program. Hundreds of millions stolen with fake providers billing for fake children. The whole thing was systematic looting under the guise of “helping families.”

And Idaho’s program was/is structurally identical.

So we asked for temporary suspension of disbursements, a comprehensive fraud prevention plan (e.g. enrollment verification, financial transparency, inspection protocols), review of prior disbursements to identify existing fraud, and a legislative briefing.

Pretty reasonable when you’re watching Minnesota burn, right?

Three months later, DHW’s response arrived.

Not a briefing. Not a fraud prevention plan - a bill.

This bill doesn’t pause anything, review past disbursements, or address our concerns about enrollment verification and financial transparency.

What it does do though is create a massive new vendor contract for “fraud detection” using AI and machine learning. And it authorizes that same vendor to create 600 new licensed childcare programs.

So we asked them to stop the bleeding and they handed us a bill to hire a contractor to build 600 more places to bleed from.

But wait… it gets worse.

Buried in Director Charron’s March 9th letter to the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee is a confession that should terrify every taxpayer in Idaho:

According to here, the Idaho Child Care Program has been running… illegally.

Yes, IDHW has been administering a multimillion-dollar program with no statutory authority to do so.

Charron admits it plainly:

“DHW has determined that the authority in code we have historically relied upon for rulemaking is insufficient to sustain any of the ICCP rules.”

They’ve been operating on “general rulemaking authority” under a statute that doesn’t actually authorize childcare programs. Because the child care subsidy program isn’t found anywhere in Title 56 (or any other title in Idaho Code). No authority to promulgate rules.

So how long have they known this?

Charron doesn’t say. But she does threaten that if this legislation (or something substantially similar) isn’t enacted this session, DHW will have no choice but to eliminate the rules and wind down ICCP by the close of the fiscal year. Potentially earlier.

So wait… you’ve been running an “illegal” program. You know it’s “illegal.” And instead of pausing it immediately, you’re threatening to shut it down unless we pass your vendor-friendly bill?

That’s legislative hostage-taking.

And Charron’s legal logic creates some really awkward questions.

For instance, Idaho Code § 56-202 gives the DHW Director authority to “promulgate, adopt and enforce such rules and such methods of administration as may be necessary or proper to carry out the provisions of title 56, Idaho Code.”

Charron says this authority is insufficient for ICCP because childcare subsidies aren’t specifically mentioned in Title 56.

Okay. Taking her at her word.

But Title 56 is also the welfare code that contains public assistance programs like TANF, food stamps, and even Medicaid. A whole constellation of federal welfare programs that Idaho administers through administrative rules promulgated under that same general authority in § 56-202.

If ICCP rules are illegal because childcare subsidies aren’t explicitly enumerated in Title 56, then what about all the other federal welfare programs DHW administers through administrative rules?

Are those illegal too?

Either § 56-202 gives DHW authority to implement federal welfare programs through administrative rules (in which case ICCP is legal and this whole “we have no authority” argument is manufactured leverage), or it doesn’t (in which case DHW has been running multiple illegal programs for years).

Can’t have it both ways.

I’m not saying Charron is wrong about the law. I’m saying her legal conclusion creates questions about everything else DHW does. And the timing of this “legal discovery” is mighty convenient, right? We asked them to pause disbursements and prevent fraud. Three months later they suddenly discovered they’ve been operating “illegally” all along and oh by the way we need you to pass this bill that authorizes everything we’re already doing plus $30 million more.

So, let’s look at what they’re actually asking for in this new childcare bill S1374.

The bill creates a “fraud detection and remediation system” that must be implemented by July 1, 2027 (18 months from now). Meanwhile, the program keeps running. Money keeps flowing. No pause. No review of past fraud. Business as usual until the vendor’s AI system goes live.

Who writes sections like 56-2508 and 56-2509?

“The system shall assess relative risk using statistical and expert-defined analytical models to support the prioritization of cases.”

That’s a sales pitch. I bet the vendor wrote this bill and DHW carried it for them. The bill also prioritizes “child care services managed through vendors” for capacity-building funds. So the vendor gets paid to build the fraud detection system AND gets prioritized for grants to create new childcare programs.

Real convenient.

Remember what we asked for in December? Enrollment verification. Financial transparency. Inspection protocols.

They’re not in this bill.

The bill sets income eligibility at 155% of federal poverty guidelines (56-2504). The legislature originally approved 145%. Then DHW administratively raised it higher without legislative approval and the program went financially underwater. When Alex Adams was IDHW Director, he cut eligibility back to 130% and the program stabilized and costs became predictable.

Now S1374 proposes 155% - higher than what the legislature originally approved and way higher than the 130% that actually works. So in a bill supposedly about fraud prevention, they're expanding eligibility beyond levels that already proved financially unsustainable.

S1374 creates rules about “reasonable suspicion” and “intentional program violations” and gives DHW massive enforcement powers too. But it doesn’t require the basic anti-fraud measures that would have prevented Minnesota’s disaster in the first place.

Provider attestation isn't verification. And AI risk scoring? That's not inspection.

This bill is bureaucratic theater designed to look like fraud prevention while actually just creating new contracts.

Minnesota’s actual problem? They allowed providers to self-report attendance. No verification or spot checks. Just “trust us.” So of course fraudsters created fake childcare centers and enrolled fake children. Of course they billed for services they never provided. And billions disappeared because nobody was checking if the kids actually existed.

Idaho’s “solution” in S1374?

Provider-reported attendance verified through a fraud detection system that analyzes... provider-reported data.

Yes, the bill requires providers to document “proof of attendance each day with authentication” but that authentication is still coming from the provider.

But if providers are lying about attendance in the first place, analyzing their lies won’t catch them.

This is building Minnesota in Idaho.

We’re not just talking about fraud in an existing program. We’re talking about expanding a program DHW now claims is “illegal.” A program even its own administrators admit they have no authority to run.

And the finance commitee (JFAC) just appropriated $30 million in federal funds to expand childcare capacity. Charron’s letter complains the intent language is too restrictive. She’s upset that JFAC wants to exclude providers who have been investigated for fraud “even if the provider was subsequently cleared.” She’s upset that “publicly funded entities” might be excluded. Notes that “all ICCP providers receive public funds as a mere fact of being enrolled.”

Wait… you want us to give you $30 million to expand a program you’ve been running “illegally?” You want minimal restrictions on who can get that money? And you’re threatening to shut the whole thing down if we don’t pass your vendor-written bill?

How about… NO.

Instead, what if families raise their own children? Or how about private childcare businesses operate in a competitive market with minimal regulation and zero subsidies?

Because at the end of the day, the government shouldn’t be paying for childcare. And creating capacity for 600 NEW daycares (like 1374 does) through subsidies and vendor contracts just builds a fraud machine (any means-tested welfare program has the same problem).

Minnesota didn’t fail because they had insufficient fraud detection technology.

Minnesota failed because they created a massive pot of money with minimal oversight and incentivized fraudsters to steal it.

The fraud was inevitable given the program’s structure.

And Idaho is about to make the same mistake (just with AI this time).

Did you know that S1374 includes language about “relative child care” as a priority for capacity-building funds? Know what that is? It’s paying someone to watch their own grandchild, niece, nephew, or sibling.

We’re going to build 600 new licensed childcare programs and prioritize ones where Aunt Sally gets paid by the state to watch her sister’s kids:

This isn’t helping families.

This is subsidizing arrangements that would happen anyway and creating new opportunities for fraud.

Because once you start paying Aunt Sally, you need to verify she’s actually providing care. You need to verify the kids actually exist. You need to verify the hours being claimed. You need a fraud detection system. You need five employees to run the fraud detection system. And you need a vendor to build the technology platform.

Pretty soon you’ve spent $30 million in federal funds to create a jobs program for bureaucrats and contractors while Aunt Sally gets $21 an hour to do what she would have done for free.

Also, according to 1374, eligible children must be in the country legally, but there’s no such requirement for parents or providers. So we’d be paying illegal immigrant providers to watch their own relatives’ kids. The bill prioritizes relative care. The bill has no meaningful fraud prevention.

This is everything wrong with modern conservatism in one piece of legislation.

We talk about fiscal responsibility while appropriating $30 million for a program IDHW claims is “illegal.” We talk about fighting fraud while creating new vendor contracts instead of basic verification systems. We talk about family values while subsidizing arrangements that undermine family formation and community bonds.

Real conservatism?

Government shouldn’t be in the childcare business. Period.

If Idaho families need help affording childcare, the solution is economic growth that raises wages and lowers costs. Or reduce regulations that drive up provider costs. Remove barriers to entry for new small providers.

Welfare programs aren’t the answer. Government subsidies to providers just create more problems. And paying some vendor to create 600 licensed facilities?

That’s the opposite of what we need.

S1374 isn’t the answer. ICCP should be wound down properly if it’s actually illegal. And expanding childcare capacity through government spending? That’s how you get Minnesota.

Don’t build Minnesota in Idaho.

Charron says if we don’t pass this bill, DHW will wind down the ICCP program?

Fine. Do it.

If you genuinely believe you’ve been running it illegally anyway, shut it down properly. Review the disbursements for fraud. Prosecute anyone who stole taxpayer dollars. Come back with a clean bill that just provides statutory authority for whatever minimal program the legislature decides to maintain.

But don’t threaten us with program shutdown while simultaneously demanding we pass an expansion bill written by vendors.

That’s what we asked for in December.

That’s what we’re still asking for today.

It’s a strongly worded letter to Congress asking them to please stop spending so much money (yes, the same Congress that hasn’t balanced a budget in 25 years).

This is like sending a strongly worded letter to your alcoholic uncle asking him to please consider sobriety. He’ll read it, nod, and crack another one open. Probably while telling you he’s working on it.

$38 trillion in the hole… and we sent them a note.