The building is named for Frances Perkins, who ran the Department of Labor for twelve years, built Social Security, and considered the job a form of service.

Keep that name in mind.

It is the only thing in this story that behaves.

On September 3, the department’s inspector general released Report of Investigation No. 50-26-004-01-001, concerning former Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer — 44 pages, 53 witnesses, more than 500 documents, videos, hotel key records, travel files.

The report spells out six areas that apply to Chavez-DeRemer specifically — the OIG concluded her conduct was inconsistent with applicable standards in that she:

Failed to comply with DOL policy prohibiting harassment in the workplace (38 witnesses described the office as toxic, intimidating and humiliating).

She maintained an inappropriately close, unprofessional relationship with the security agent (”ASAIC 1”) while he held supervisory authority over her own protective detail — violating federal impartiality and preferential-treatment standards.

Notably, the OIG says the direct evidence was not sufficient to establish that the relationship was romantic or sexual — only that it was improper.

The report goes on to detail that the combined personal and official travel was in violation of DOL policy and the Federal Travel Regulation.

She possessed and consumed alcohol on federal property without authorization.

She directed government employees to perform personal tasks on official time (the closet, the ornaments, the picture frames, the wine).

She also failed to report gifts through required ethics channels (the alligator wallet, the rodeo tickets).

And then there are these jolly folks:

Jihun Han, Chief of Staff — administrative leave January 11, 2026; terminated March 2; declined to be interviewed.

Rebecca Wright, Deputy Chief of Staff — same dates as Han: leave January 11, terminated March 2; declined to be interviewed.

“Director 1”, Director of Advance (name withheld — a non-political appointee) — terminated March 24, 2026; the only subject of the five who actually sat for an OIG interview.

“ASAIC 1”, the Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge on her detail (name withheld) — placed on leave January 16, converted to unpaid investigative leave, resigned March 13; declined to be interviewed.

Han, Wright, and Director 1 were found to have committed overlapping violations — harassment, on-duty alcohol use, improper travel, misuse of government resources, and unreported gifts.

So four of five refused to talk to the inspector general at all, and the secretary timed her resignation to dodge the interview by exactly one day.

More than three dozen witnesses described the secretary’s office as “toxic, intimidating and humiliating.”

This from the department whose stated mission is the welfare of the American worker.

The details deserve their moment.

The taxpayer-funded “America at Work” tour — 48 states — routed itself with uncanny precision through cities containing the secretary’s friends and relatives, with official engagements capped by her own aides at 60 to 90 minutes; some trips managed less than two hours of work across two days, a labor-to-leisure ratio that would embarrass a house cat.

There was the unreported alligator-hide wallet, the unreported rodeo tickets.

There was the Oregon evening on which the Secretary of Labor directed her government driver into a strip club and instructed him to drop money from her purse onto a partially naked performer — a task, one notes, not found in any position description — while her security paramour told the hesitant man to follow orders and then to keep his mouth shut.

Somewhere in there is a joke about the dignity of work.

The IG declined to make it, opting instead to use hotel key records for cross-reference.

And the birthday party.

Sworn in March 11 as her department was being gutted; on April 7, her birthday, a “swearing-in celebration” at the Perkins Building — renamed because staff asked awkward questions about departmental funds — with wine, high-top tables, screens displaying pictures of her, and a cake whose candles she blew out while “Happy Birthday” was sung.

“I did not have a birthday party,” she later told the House Appropriations Committee, under the impression, apparently, that the cake had been sworn in too.

Here is the part that should actually frighten you: she is not an aberration.

She is one bad person among hundreds — an administration-wide ecology of untouchables in which the misconduct is ambient, and the only novelty is documentation.

Her chief of staff threatened criminal charges against employees who talked.

The department shed 14 percent of its staff; the office enforcing equal employment for federal contractors lost more than half its people.

The workers got the cuts.

The secretary got the wallet.

There is a genre of document that only a certain kind of government produces, and REG-119986-25 belongs to it: twenty-eight pages of immaculate legal citation deployed in service of something small and mean.

The Treasury Department and the IRS — agencies forbidden by law from being aimed at ideological targets — have been aimed, with exquisite care, at an ideological target: the roughly 18,000 private schools, colleges and trade schools that might dare to help a student because he or she is Black, or Hispanic, or belongs to any group this country spent centuries holding underwater.

The title is the first joke, and it is a dark one: “Racial Nondiscrimination in Private Schools.” The document quotes Brown v. Board of Education. It quotes the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It leans, without blushing, on Bob Jones University v. United States — the case in which a college that banned interracial dating was finally denied the public’s subsidy.

Precedents forged to break segregation are here recast as instruments for ending scholarships that reach an estimated 750,000 minority students.

The arsonists have arrived dressed as the fire brigade, and they are waving the fire code.

Note the reach.

Admissions, scholarships, loans, athletics, facilities, “every other school-administered program.”

The half-century-old IRS guidance that explicitly permitted programs favoring minority students — guidance written in the shadow of actual segregation academies — is to be rescinded.

Rebranding won’t save you, the Treasury Secretary warns; the government will look past your words and into your intentions.

An agency that cannot answer its phones in April will now adjudicate the racial arithmetic of every scholarship committee in America.

And here is the second joke: this is the party of small government.

The people who spent decades howling that Washington must get out of the classroom now propose that the tax collector sit in on it permanently — this from an administration that has taken the state into the shareholder registers of major corporations like some baroque holding company.

Small government, it turns out, was never the creed.

It was the alibi.

The creed is control, and every strongman of the last century — in Rome, in Madrid, in Berlin, in Moscow, in Beijing today — understood the sequence: the independent university is the enemy, because it is where a nation keeps its memory and its capacity to say no.

You do not need uniforms to run that playbook.

A docket number works fine.

There was a country, once, that believed otherwise.

It exempted its schools from taxation for more than a century on the antique theory that education was a public good — that the night-school student, the land-grant college, the scholarship kid were how a republic renewed itself.

That country wrote Brown.

It understood that opening doors long nailed shut was not discrimination but repair.

It is being replaced, one Federal Register notice at a time, by something that mistakes meanness for merit and calls the result restoration.

The comment period runs for 60 days; the rule would take effect after May 2027.

Write in.

Say, politely, what the record already shows: that a government which strip-mines its own civil-rights inheritance to punish generosity toward the historically excluded has told us exactly what it is.

The paperwork is neat.

That is the most chilling part.

There are governments that conduct foreign policy.

There are governments that conduct business.

And then there is the Trump administration, which increasingly resembles a casino operating out of the loading dock behind an abattoir.

Welcome to Venezuela, where America has apparently decided that liberating a country means getting 20 percent of the oil.

The administration’s celebrated Venezuela arrangement would give the White House majority control over 65 billion barrels — roughly one-fifth of Venezuela’s reserves.

Meanwhile, Alejandro Betancourt’s North American Blue Energy Partners gets access to 17 oil fields, U.S. military backing and concessions lasting 100 years.

One hundred years.

The Louisiana Purchase didn’t come with this much swagger.

At this point, why bother with diplomacy? Just send Marco Rubio into Caracas wearing a monocle, carrying a deed and asking whether the copper wiring is included.

And then there is Betancourt.

Here we encounter that wonderful Trumpian personnel policy: Why associate with merely controversial people when genuinely spectacular résumés are available?

Betancourt has faced money-laundering investigations in Spain, Switzerland and the United States, although he has never been formally charged.

A $1.2 billion U.S. investigation begun in 2016 resulted in the indictment of his cousin and others.

Betancourt was subsequently identified in reports as a co-conspirator and hired Rudy Giuliani, who argued to Justice Department officials that Betancourt knew nothing about the crime.

Then, there’s a castle.

There is always a castle.

Betancourt’s was a $30 million Spanish number called El Alamin, where Giuliani and associates reportedly met an aide to Volodymyr Zelensky while encouraging an investigation of Joe Biden.

Years later, Spanish authorities raided the castle in connection with a Swiss money-laundering investigation.

If Netflix rejected this script, it would be for excessive symbolism.

Even better, U.S. officials — including then-Attorney General Pam Bondi — contacted Swiss authorities seeking a delay in the investigation because it was preventing Betancourt from traveling to Washington to finish Trump’s oil deal.

There it is: government efficiency.

Don’t investigate the fellow.

We need him for a meeting.

And Betancourt’s earlier Venezuelan business history certainly doesn’t spoil the ambiance.

His associates received some $5 billion in state power-plant contracts despite lacking experience, while Transparency International estimated that his firm, Derwick Associates, overbilled Venezuela by $2.9 billion.

Critics accused the company of installing defective second-hand turbines; Derwick disputed responsibility, blaming Venezuela’s maintenance.

This is apparently what Washington now calls an energy résumé.

A U.S. official offered perhaps the administration’s perfect epitaph: “I’m not nominating anyone for sainthood here.” The official instead described Betancourt as a “proven operator” who had been helpful to the U.S. government.

Sainthood?

Nobody requested sainthood.

We’d settle for somebody whose biography doesn’t require an international flowchart.

This is the recurring Trump aesthetic: wealth as absolution, audacity as competence, controversy as seasoning.

Billionaires, fixers, castles, helicopters, oil fields, military backing and concessions that expire sometime around the tricentennial.

And who pays for the machinery surrounding all this magnificence?

The taxpayer — the lonely bastard forever standing outside the velvet rope.

Perhaps that’s the great achievement here.

America once exported constitutional government, free enterprise and the rule of law, at least in its better moments.

Now we’re apparently exporting the deal.

Trump has finally made American foreign policy indistinguishable from a casino junket conducted aboard a sewage barge.

Somewhere, a crude-flavored lollipop is being trademarked.

The first thing to do is laugh.

Not because this is funny. Because sometimes the universe delivers a punch line with such exquisite timing that refusing to laugh would constitute ingratitude.

A whistleblower inside the U.S. Postal Service alleges that the agency has been rushing a “secretive” and “haphazard” system to implement President Trump’s campaign against mail voting — even while courts have been telling the administration to knock it off.

The whistleblower warns of “catastrophic failure” and says millions of voters could receive ballots late or not at all.

Well, knock me over with a Forever Stamp.

The astonishing thing isn’t that this happened. The astonishing thing would have been if it didn’t.

Trump has spent years insisting mail voting is corrupt, horrible and cheating — while voting by mail himself.

This is like Al Capone denouncing cash because criminals sometimes use it.

But now comes the more ambitious proposition: the President of the United States apparently wishes to insert the executive branch into election administration with the delicacy of a Viking axe entering a wedding cake.

Someone get the man a used Constitution.

The First Circuit described Trump’s order as directing “unprecedented levels” of federal involvement in state election administration and warned it could sow confusion and disenfranchise eligible voters. More inconveniently, the Constitution assigns election authority to states and Congress — not the president.

Details, details.

Imagine Chicago, 1927. A smoky back room.

Three ward bosses, two bookmakers, a fellow named Fingers and somebody who hasn’t removed his homburg since Coolidge took office.

“Boss, what about the ballots?”

“Forget the ballots.”

“But they mailed them.”

“Exactly.”

Welcome to Among the Thugs: Federal Edition, where institutional guardrails are regarded as decorative shrubbery and every inconvenient statute is something the presidential motorcade can drive across.

The whistleblower’s most spectacular allegation concerns the new verification system.

According to the report, a single defective barcode could cause tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk mailing to be rejected.

That’s not election administration.

That’s building a guillotine out of Microsoft Excel.

And the Post Office deserves better.

America treats the USPS like an elderly relative whose usefulness is appreciated primarily when the birthday check doesn’t arrive.

Yet it is one of the few federal institutions citizens can literally touch every day.

For the price of a stamp, someone takes your envelope from Bangor to Bakersfield.

That’s almost miraculous.

We should want it magnificent.

Instead, we’re flirting with another ugly American tradition: turning postal machinery into political machinery.

A century ago, Postmaster General Albert Burleson’s Post Office helped suppress radical publications, while the Wilson-era government prosecuted dissenters such as Eugene V. Debs.

Later came loyalty panics, blacklists and McCarthyism—the recurring American conviction that liberty is safest when somebody in Washington is opening the mail.

And here we are again, riding backwards into the future.

The administration even kept moving after a federal judge blocked its plan, according to the whistleblower; the appeals court noted that the government’s own acknowledgment that implementation had begun weakened its argument that states hadn’t yet suffered harm.

This isn’t conservatism.

Conservatives traditionally distrusted concentrated federal power.

This is bossism.

Trump is the Big Boss; around him orbit the courtiers, bullies and professional genuflectors — the Pete Hegseths of the world — each apparently auditioning for Guys and Dolls: The Authoritarian Years.

And what is all this for?

An election.

That troublesome little ceremony in which Americans, rather than presidents, decide who governs them.

If the administration wants Republican control of the Senate and House, there’s an old-fashioned method available.

Get more votes.

Good luck, America.

The mailbox is watching.

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If Vince Gilligan pitched this story today, some network executive would send it back with a note: Too implausible.

Imagine the pilot.

Walter White is back in Albuquerque, standing in the desert beside Jesse Pinkman, staring at a truck containing enough fentanyl to qualify for its own ZIP code.

“Yo, Mr. White,” Jesse says. “Shouldn’t the DEA stop this?”

Walter adjusts his glasses.

“Apparently that would compromise the investigation.”

Opening credits.

Because the federal government has managed to devise a drug-enforcement strategy with the narrative logic of Breaking Bad, the bureaucracy of Catch-22 and the reassuring public-safety characteristics of leaving a loaded revolver in a kindergarten sandbox.

The Drug Enforcement Administration’s job is, presumably, drug enforcement.

Yet agents investigating fentanyl trafficking in New Mexico monitored significant shipments without seizing them while authorities attempted to build larger cases.

The strategy was essentially: find the drugs, follow the drugs, leave the drugs, catch the people distributing the drugs — after allowing them to distribute the drugs.

Hank Schrader would have needed another mineral collection.

Imagine him at the briefing.

“Wait. We know where the fentanyl is?”

Yes.

“We know who’s carrying it?”

Yes.

“We’re watching them?”

Yes.

“So we’re going to seize it?”

Don’t be ridiculous, Hank. We’re trying to catch drug dealers.

This is where Saul Goodman enters wearing the world’s loudest tie.

“Okay, lemme understand something. My client gets twenty years for possessing the drugs, but you guys can watch the drugs get delivered because you’re building a case against my client?”

Precisely.

“I’m gonna need a bigger billboard.”

The DEA disputes the suggestion that it knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities, calling the investigative decisions lawful and reasonable.

But whistleblower and DEA Special Agent David Howell described the situation rather differently: “We poisoned our community to make cases.”

Even Gustavo Fring might find this business model aggressive.

Gus built an underground laboratory, maintained distribution networks, murdered competitors and hid behind Los Pollos Hermanos.

All terribly labor-intensive.

Apparently he could have saved himself considerable trouble by becoming an investigative technique.

And Mike Ehrmantraut?

Mike would stare silently for eleven seconds before saying:

“You knew where the drugs were. You knew where they were going. And you let them go?”

Yes.

“That’s your plan?”

We’re pursuing the bigger fish.

Mike sighs.

“No more half measures.”

That is precisely the problem.

Federal policy originally instructed agents to seize or prevent distribution of fentanyl “as soon as practicable.”

In 2024 the rules gave investigators greater discretion, allowing them to balance public safety against the benefits of preserving an investigation.

Meanwhile, the DEA was telling Americans:

ONE PILL CAN KILL.

Which is magnificently Vonnegutian.

One pill can kill.

Seventy-four thousand pills are surveillance.

Hundreds of thousands are intelligence.

Millions are strategy.

Three million seized pills are a press conference.

And somewhere between those numbers are actual dead Americans who never knew they had supporting roles in Federal Investigation: Albuquerque.

The larger-case theory isn’t irrational.

Former U.S. Attorney Alex Uballez argued that limited resources required concentrating on major organizations: “The bigger fish are worth catching,” he said, because doing so saves more lives.

But fentanyl presents one awkward complication:

The fish food kills people.

A former DEA supervisor said the organization behind the eventual record seizure could have been dismantled six months earlier.

Howell reported that agents permitted delivery of at least 1.8 million pills during that investigation.

Forget Sam Houston. Forget the Alamo. Forget Pancho Villa and Zapata. Give New Mexico back and include Arizona as an apology.

Apparently Albuquerque’s greatest export is no longer green chile but plotlines.

And here comes the season finale.

Howell objected.

According to the report, he was relegated to desk duty for more than a year, had his performance evaluations docked and was barred by prosecutors from testifying in federal court, partly over his refusal to heed admonitions to allow drugs to go unseized during long-term investigations.

Walter White spent five seasons learning that every rationalization eventually demands another rationalization.

The federal government apparently learned something else:

Better Call Saul.

Florida has always possessed a special genius for converting sunshine into swamp gas.

Henry Flagler arrived in the Gilded Age and demonstrated that if you had enough money, enough railroad track and sufficient access to Tallahassee, the distinction between public policy and personal convenience could become wonderfully theoretical.

His Florida empire benefited from enormous public land grants, aggressive lobbying and labor practices that would make a robber baron ask whether everyone had perhaps gone a little far.

A century later, Florida appears to have improved the machinery.

The amount this time is $10 million.

Not a billion. Not even a respectable hundred million. Ten million dollars — the financial equivalent of a rounding error in modern government — has produced a grand-jury report describing what jurors called a “sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.”

The jury concluded the money was misappropriated, while also finding insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally.

This is important.

No indictments.

No criminal convictions.

But what a magnificent civic aroma.

The money originated in Florida’s settlement with health insurer Centene over prescription-drug overbilling. Florida was entitled to roughly $67 million.

Then, after years of inactivity, the settlement suddenly acquired the urgency of an alligator spotting a dachshund.

First, $5 million was designated for the Hope Florida Foundation, associated with an initiative championed by Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife.

The next day, magically, it became $10 million.

The grand jury said no reason was given for the doubling.

Then came the Florida disappearing act.

Centene wired $10 million to Hope Florida. Within 25 days, according to the report, it was gone.

Two organizations received $5 million apiece.

Millions then flowed to Keep Florida Clean, the political committee associated with James Uthmeier, who was DeSantis’s chief of staff at the time and is now Florida attorney general.

A forensic accountant told the grand jury that Keep Florida Clean received $8.5 million, sent $7 million to the Republican Party of Florida and another $1.23 million to another Uthmeier-linked PAC.

Behold philanthropy, Florida style: put taxpayer money into a charitable washing machine, select POLITICAL ACTION — HEAVY SOIL, and wait for the spin cycle.

The grand jury’s diagram is almost comic in its simplicity:

Centene → Hope Florida → two organizations → political committees and the Republican Party.

It resembles a children’s placemat explaining where milk comes from, except instead of cow-to-carton we have taxpayer-to-PAC.

And then occurs the miracle of collective amnesia.

The jury wrote that no one would take responsibility for deciding that the money should go to Hope Florida, and no one could remember who made the decision.

Ten million dollars apparently wandered into state government like an unattended golden retriever, and everybody assumed somebody else owned it.

DeSantis says he wasn’t involved in the settlement, calls the controversy a hoax and says the arrangement was legally sound.

But there is an awkward governing principle here: when you are governor, eventually the government becomes your problem.

The grand jury’s final observation is devastating precisely because it is so untheatrical: taxpayer money was misused for political purposes, but jurors could not establish who was responsible.

Flagler needed railroads, legislators and a fortune to bend Florida toward private ambition.

These people allegedly needed only $10 million, two hurricanes, several nonprofits, a PAC and a statewide outbreak of memory loss.

Progress.

Just when you think American politics has scraped bedrock, some grinning functionary rolls up with a backhoe and a full tank of diesel and starts digging toward the mantle.

This week the drill bit hit Georgia — where else? — and out of the hole climbed Preston Parra, twenty-four years old, self-described “political provocateur,” posing for the camera in a Ku Klux Klan robe, hood gripped in his fist like a trophy bass.

Let the record show what The Washington Post dug up: Parra interned for Representative Mike Collins, the meme-brained congressman now clawing toward Jon Ossoff’s Senate seat, then got himself hired as a contractor for Collins’s leadership PAC.

Over the summer, this rising star of the operative class posted a swastika assembled from the word “twink,” dropped racial slurs about Black people, typed out “White Power,” and modeled the Klan costume. Confronted, he executed the classic two-step of the modern American bigot: it was satire, it was AI, it was a private account — and then, mask barely off, told the Post: “I do think that the white race contributes more to the world.”

Satire! The Nuremberg rallies were just crowd work, apparently.

And here is the part that should make every Jewish, Black, Latino, and gay Georgian check the locks: Parra is not an outlier in Collins World.

He is a pattern.

Collins’s son-in-law surfaced in CNN reporting over white supremacist posts.

His former chief of staff turned up in a group chat with white nationalists.

More than fifty Black Georgia lawmakers have signed a statement condemning the whole traveling carnival.

Even Debbie Dooley, an original Tea Party organizer — no one’s idea of a squish — put it plainly: “You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Well, Mike Collins has got a lot of fleas on him.”

When the Tea Party is warning you about extremists, brother, you have lapped the field.

Where do these creatures come from?

Not from under rocks — rocks have standards.

They come from an incentive structure, a party ecosystem that discovered engagement is engagement, that the algorithm pays the same for a swastika as for a soybean subsidy, and that a kid in a Klan robe with an “elite influencer network” of seventy million followers is not a liability but a vendor.

Parra’s consulting site brags about his work as a 2024 Trump surrogate, photos with the man himself, the works.

What does his mother think when the phone lights up?

What do his friends tell themselves at dinner?

“He’s really more of a digital strategist“?

Collins could end this in one press conference.

He hasn’t.

Silence, as Ossoff correctly notes, is itself a disclosure — and what it discloses is that the candidate has run the math and decided the Klan-cosplay demographic polls better than decency.

That’s the true obscenity here: not one broken young man in a bedsheet, but a Senate hopeful who looked at him and saw a useful asset.

Pogo had it right, standing in his Okefenokee swamp — Georgia again, always Georgia: we have met the enemy, and he is us.

The hood was never the disguise.

The disguise was the campaign polo, the lanyard, the handshake.

At least the hood is honest about what it is.

Trump’s grand Washington auto race was supposed to advertise American excellence.

Instead, diplomats got revoked invitations, general-admission tickets, a spelling error and another demonstration that this administration could mismanage a two-car funeral.

Donald Trump wanted a race through Washington because apparently the presidency, two airplanes, military parades, gold ornamentation and having one’s name attached to practically anything incapable of running away are insufficient nourishment for one human ego.

So America got the “Freedom 250,” an IndyCar race roaring through downtown Washington with Trump’s personal imprimatur.

He ordered the event into existence, rode around the course in his limousine and provided precisely the sort of atmosphere one expects when government becomes a combination of Caesars Palace, NASCAR and a bankrupt wedding planner.

Naturally, foreign ambassadors were invited.

They were promised buses, free food and drinks, shaded seating, misting fans and a climate-controlled V.I.P. hospitality area.

The dress code was “summer chic/golf attire,” presumably because nothing says international statesmanship like dressing for cocktails at Mar-a-Lago.

Then, Saturday night, the administration essentially sent some of them a diplomatic version of: Never mind.

Some ambassadors were stripped of V.I.P. access and offered general-admission tickets instead.

One diplomat had actually cut short a vacation because attending seemed part of his official duty.

Another arrived at the State Department Sunday morning only to discover, alongside several colleagues standing in the lobby, that their invitations had evaporated overnight.

Beautiful.

The United States can put a spacecraft on Mars, split atoms and maintain nuclear submarines beneath polar ice, but apparently cannot organize a guest list.

Better still, the cancellation email informed ambassadors that the State Department could no longer provide “expediated entry.”

Expediated.

Diplomacy by people who cannot successfully negotiate with spell-check.

And the excuse?

Private event organizers had imposed the change.

Of course.

Nothing in Trumpworld is ever anybody’s responsibility.

The administration possesses the miraculous properties of Teflon dipped in axle grease.

When something succeeds, Trump personally invented it before breakfast.

When something collapses, catches fire or humiliates the republic, responsibility instantly belongs to contractors, bureaucrats, Democrats, foreigners, windmills or possibly Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The absurdity becomes almost operatic because there apparently was room.

Monaco’s ambassador, who remained invited, said roughly 20 diplomats attended and that the suite was hardly crowded.

Meanwhile, Penske was selling 78 V.I.P. suites, each capable of holding 30 to 40 people, for $200,000 apiece.

This is what passes for American prestige now: $200,000 hospitality boxes, “executive restrooms,” misting fans and ambassadors wondering whether they are still invited.

Meanwhile, Monica Crowley, the State Department’s chief of diplomatic protocol, celebrated this “historic display of American excellence” by climbing into a racecar for what she proudly called a “180mph spin.”

Perfect metaphor.

Diplomatic protocol strapped into a racing machine going 180 miles per hour while American diplomacy itself drives directly into a tire wall.

Ninety-eight ambassadorships remain vacant. Thousands of Foreign Service officers have left. More than 1,000 civil servants were laid off. A State Department official recently displayed a map of Africa identifying several countries incorrectly.

And now this.

The Trump administration wanted the Freedom 250 to display American speed, muscle and magnificence.

Mission accomplished.

Rarely has incompetence traveled so fast.

There was a quaint period in American history when the Environmental Protection Agency was thought to protect the environment.

Adorable.

The Trump administration has apparently discovered a more urgent endangered species: the uninterrupted construction schedule of the American data center.

The EPA is proposing to eliminate the federal requirement that states publicize applications and solicit public comment for certain air-pollution permits, including those involving data centers and the power plants needed to keep their servers humming.

In some states, that permitting process may be the only moment residents are even told what is coming.

Thus arrives the newest innovation in participatory democracy: don’t participate.

Why burden citizens with tedious details about what is being built next door?

They might ask questions.

They might object.

They might inquire about noise, water consumption, electricity prices, diesel generators, gas-fired power plants or pollutants.

Worse, they might organize.

And then where would Nvidia’s quarterly earnings be?

The EPA says the change merely gives state and local agencies discretion over whether, when and for how long the public may comment, while “responsibly” speeding permitting and promoting economic development and energy dominance.

Nothing says responsible government quite like making the people who actually live somewhere optional participants in decisions about what gets built there.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said a top priority is making America the “artificial intelligence capital of the world.”

Admirable ambition, although somewhere along the way an agency founded to protect public health and the environment seems to have developed the mission statement of a venture-capital fund.

The EPA has separately proposed allowing developers to begin construction before permits are approved and exempted gas plants powering many data centers from certain acid-rain pollution limits.

This is apparently environmental protection in the same sense that a getaway driver provides transportation services.

We are assured many of these facilities are merely “minor sources” of pollution.

How minor?

Up to 250 tons of hazardous pollutants annually.

In Virginia’s Data Center Alley, Amazon holds enough minor-source permits for backup generators to permit 4,200 tons of nitrogen-oxide emissions a year—roughly comparable to a medium-sized coal plant.

Amazon notes that permitted emissions are not necessarily actual emissions and that the generators do not operate continuously.

Comforting.

Your neighborhood may merely possess the legal capacity to wheeze.

The perversity is that opposition to data centers is hardly some left-wing quilting circle.

Polling shows bipartisan resistance over noise, pollution, electricity and water use.

Republican governors Spencer Cox and Greg Abbott have sought greater scrutiny; Democrat Josh Shapiro has demanded detailed community outreach plans.

Apparently Republicans and Democrats can still agree on one thing: people generally prefer knowing when someone intends to construct an industrial complex beside their house.

Public participation has even changed permits. Indiana regulators revised one for Google’s planned $832 million Project Maize data-center campus after environmental groups submitted comments.

Which may explain the temptation to eliminate the nuisance.

Citizens are inefficient.

They ask questions.

They hire lawyers.

They notice things.

Servers don’t.

And in Trump’s America, the ideal constituent is increasingly the server: an enormous appetite for electricity, no vote required, no public comment necessary, and absolutely no objection when the government pulls the plug on democracy.

First, the pommes frites.

France’s potato growers warn that heat and drought could cut production 23 percent this year, producing the lowest yields in more than three decades.

Farmers may not fulfill contracts.

Processors may have to rewrite them.

By autumn, the humble fry could arrive with a drought surcharge, which is one way civilization tells you the joke has stopped being funny.

Across the Atlantic, the Trump administration has developed its own agricultural innovation: removing the people who help farmers while farmers are drowning, except where they are literally drying out.

More than 20,000 employees left the Department of Agriculture in the first half of 2025.

The Farm Service Agency has no staff in dozens of counties. Rural Development has lost more than a third of its workforce; the Natural Resources Conservation Service nearly a quarter.

This is called “efficiency,” because “setting fire to the help desk during an emergency” tested poorly with focus groups.

The results are exquisitely efficient.

New Mexico farmers Mary and Zachariah Ben waited months for a USDA loan while only about six specialists remained statewide.

To save their land purchase, they turned to private lenders and absorbed more than $200,000 in interest.

A Nebraska farmer now watches a conservation technician shuttle between counties for signatures, burning mornings on basic paperwork.

A New Mexico food pantry waits for $300,000, while the delay has swelled its project cost from $475,000 to $600,000.

Nothing trims government quite like transferring its costs to citizens.

Meanwhile, many American crop farmers face a third straight losing year.

Debt and delinquencies are rising.

Farmland values, however, have climbed 47 percent since 2020, turning soil into a handsome investment even when growing food on it does not pay.

The land is thriving; agriculture is merely what happens to it.

Then there is water, an overrated bureaucratic fluid required only for cattle, corn, soybeans and over 40 million people. The Colorado River’s flow has fallen about 20 percent over two decades.

Lake Mead is roughly 27 percent full and Lake Powell 23 percent.

Yet the administration’s short-term plan largely postpones the seven-state reckoning.

Mother Nature, unlike Congress, does not accept continuing resolutions.

Now, the steak. America’s cattle herd is near a record low and beef prices are painfully high.

Trump’s answer has included expanding tariff-free imports of Argentine beef, then announcing a much larger temporary tariff-free import plan.

Ranchers and farm-state Republicans object that cheaper foreign meat could injure domestic producers.

The administration is thus helping farmers by thinning their support offices, helping ranchers by importing their competition, and helping consumers with a promise that exporters will somehow dictate supermarket prices.

It is farm policy as vaudeville, performed beside an empty reservoir.

And when a processing plant goes dark or food-safety capacity frays, we are invited to admire the savings.

Perhaps the next course will be lettuce, served with a recall notice and a side of thoughts and prayers.

In Washington, this passes for strategy: dismiss the mechanics, drain the toolbox, blame the weather, subsidize the wreckage and announce victory before anyone asks why the tractor is smoking again today.

The governing theory is simple: weather is somebody else’s problem, expertise is overhead, and consequences can be imported.

Unfortunately, drought, debt and bacteria remain stubbornly domestic.

The bill arrives anyway. This time, without fries.

It happened gently, the way a carnival rolls into town at 3 a.m. — calliope music, corporate logos, a sweetness in the air — and by morning the whole country smelled like asphalt and cotton candy and nobody could remember whether that was new.

The Secretary of Transportation climbed into a Toyota with his family, the cameras purred, and somewhere in a row house on Capitol Hill a nonprofit hummed to itself like a machine that runs on gratitude.

Understand the man before you understand the machine.

Duffy’s résumé, stripped of the varnish, is one long invoice to somebody else.

Two years at his father’s law practice.

A district attorney’s job he was handed by appointment, then held unopposed.

Nine years in Congress on the public dime, ended by resignation.

Then the two jobs that only exist for men fresh out of Congress — lobbyist, cable host — both of which amount to renting your government years back to the government at a markup.

Then a cabinet seat, plus NASA on the side, the way you’d hand a man a second parking spot.

The one verifiable achievement earned entirely on his own steam is climbing a tree faster than anyone else in Hayward, Wisconsin, in 1994.

That skill transferred beautifully.

The row house matters. There’s always an address the auditors miss — some brownstone where six names on a Delaware filing hold the whole scheme together, and when you knock, three of the directors turn out not to exist in any traceable way.

The executive director is a four-time Top Lobbyist who owns the building.

One board member lobbies for a company that just took a $1.5 billion air-traffic contract from the Secretary’s own department.

Another flacks for the Secretary’s son-in-law, who is running for the Secretary’s old House seat.

This is not a nonprofit; it’s a terrarium.

And here is the part with the beautiful, airtight logic.

The department’s ethics lawyers approved the Secretary starring in a show paid for by companies the Secretary regulates.

The proof that nothing improper occurred is a signed agreement in which the sponsors promise they expect nothing — a document whose entire function is to be pointed at when someone asks why it exists.

The sponsors give because they want nothing, and they want nothing because they give, and the giving proves the wanting-nothing, and anyone who questions the arrangement is questioning a cleared arrangement, and you can’t question a cleared arrangement, because it’s cleared.

The clearance clears itself.

Somewhere a major in charge of approving approvals is weeping with professional envy.

The human details, for the record.

The Secretary vaccinated a calf on camera and shouted “I’m vaxxing cows!” with the joy of a man discovering work for the first time.

He praised CRH asphalt, unprompted, like a prayer.

He warned his daughter, on a program underwritten by Boeing, that Harvard corrupts young minds — a sermon on corruption, brought to you by his regulatees, price undisclosed.

The whole production now sits on YouTube, six episodes, nearly three hours, free to anyone with a screen and a strong stomach. 7,700 people have watched. A grumpy cat once drew twenty-three million, and the cat never billed the taxpayer.

I will not be the seven thousand seven hundred and first.

Life is short, and the competition is stiff: there’s a screening of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” across town — three hours of certified lunatics tearing across the desert after buried loot, which is at least honest about its premise and was made by professionals.

So that’s where I’ll be, down front with the popcorn, hoping to catch Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin on their way in.

My chances of meeting those two gentlemen are, I admit, not good.

They are still better than my chances of finding an honest man in that minivan.

Start with the pen, because Texas always starts with the pen. August 14, 2012, Collin County courthouse: a lawyer leaves his $1,000 Montblanc — a gift from his wife — in the security bin, and State Representative Ken Paxton scoops it up on his way through the metal detector.

Took a sheriff’s deputy to get it back.

His campaign now calls that “a mix-up at security,” which is also, come to think of it, a fair description of his entire career.

The 2015 securities fraud indictment?

Paid restitution, admitted nothing.

The impeachment in 2023?

Acquitted by friends.

In Texas we don’t disqualify a man for that; we redistrict him toward the Senate.

But the pen is the joke, and the joke has stopped being funny.

Down in Waco, a defense attorney named Adam Dean Hoffman stood accused of raping a young boy, repeatedly, over years.

The boy — eight, nine, ten years old when it happened — sat in a room full of strangers, across from the man who did it, and told them the most horrible things that ever happened to him.

The jury hung, seven to five for guilt. And then the office of Ken Paxton, the loudest tough-on-crime voice this state has ever produced, offered the man two misdemeanors and one day in jail. Time served. No sex-offender registry.

The visiting judge, Roy Sparkman — a Republican, mind you — read the deal and asked, “Somebody want to explain this to me?”

Nobody could.

The boy’s mother stood up at sentencing and said the words that ought to be carved over the courthouse door: “It’s just not enough. He’s dangerous. This isn’t justice, and I can’t do it.” Sparkman pushed the sentence to sixty days.

Sixty. For that.

And here’s the part that curdles the blood: it’s a pattern, not an accident.

Sparkman himself said it wasn’t his first go-round with Paxton’s office.

There was the Waco lawyer charged with soliciting capital murder — hiring a hit man who turned out to be a cop — walked off with a misdemeanor and four days in jail.

There was Rakim Sharkey, charged with trafficking two girls and a woman, facing life; Paxton’s shop handed him probation after a former prosecutor says the office falsely told the court its witnesses were unavailable.

One had testified the week before.

Two years later Sharkey was rearrested for a string of felonies and is now serving twenty-two years — which tells you exactly what that probation was worth, and who paid for it. Three felony cases, three mistrials, three slaps on the wrist, three judges demanding more. Meanwhile his human-trafficking unit went a whole year without a single conviction, even as he thundered that local DAs were soft on crime and demanded power over them.

So when people ask how a man like this gets near the United States Senate, understand: Texans aren’t crazy or dumb or numb.

We’re being tested.

A mother in Waco told the truth in open court, and a Republican judge backed her up, which means the conscience of this state is alive and taking names.

The man who’d steal your pen has been caught stealing something bigger — justice itself, one plea deal at a time.

Election Day’s coming. Bring your own pen, and hold it tight.

For nearly half a century, inspectors general have occupied an odd but useful position inside Washington’s bureaucracy. They work within federal agencies but are expected to investigate them—the government’s house dogs, paid by the homeowner but trained to bark when they smell smoke, theft or the administrator’s brother-in-law.

President Trump had a simpler idea. Fire the dogs. Cut the kennel staff. Then bring in animals that recognize only one master.

At least twenty inspectors general were fired or demoted during the first six months of Trump’s second term. Some offices lost as much as 30 percent of their staff.

The results were measurable.

Cabinet-level inspectors general produced 15 percent fewer audits and 25 percent fewer investigative reports during the first half of fiscal 2026 than their five-year average.

Fraud, waste and abuse must have been relieved.

Now comes the second act.

Trump is filling some vacancies with political allies who appear less interested in inspecting their departments than in pursuing his enemies.

Anthony D’Esposito, a former Republican congressman installed as Labor Department inspector general, says he works “side by side” with the department’s administrator. He praises Trump, attacks California Governor Gavin Newsom and speaks at presidential events supporting Republican candidates. A watchdog working side by side with the man he watches is not a watchdog. He is a seeing-eye dog.

At Health and Human Services, Inspector General Thomas March Bell turned his attention toward New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of Trump’s favorite enemies. His accusations helped furnish the administration with a reason to suspend millions of dollars to New York.

Then there is Dennis Kirk, a Project 2025 co-author chosen to take over the Interior Department’s inspector general’s office just as lawmakers demanded an investigation into the administration’s renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

That project deserves inspection. Interior rushed the work, awarded no-bid contracts and produced a blue liner that peeled and purification equipment that failed. Algae turned the pool green. Trump blamed left-wing vandals. The Justice Department later dropped charges against one defendant after telling the court that the contractor—not the vandal—was responsible.

It is difficult to improve upon the symbolism: the administration botched the Reflecting Pool, blamed an enemy and then put a political ally in charge of the office that might investigate it. The pool was intended to reflect Lincoln. It now reflects Trump.

The White House says its appointees are “highly qualified” to pursue fraud. Perhaps they are. The question is why fraud always seems to live in a Democratic state and never in the office down the hall.

An inspector general does not need to oppose a president. He needs to be capable of displeasing one. That capacity is the job.

What Trump has created is oversight seen through the wrong end of the telescope: distant enemies become enormous; misconduct inside the building disappears.

The watchdog has not been abolished. It has been taught where not to look.

Welcome to the most exclusive club in Washington, membership fee $100 million, no working-class need apply.

According to a new tally from Public Citizen, 57 people in the Trump administration are worth at least nine figures, eight of them billionaires — a haul more than four times the combined total of the previous three administrations.

George W. Bush managed five.

Obama scraped by with three.

Biden had five.

Trump doubled down, tripled up, and built himself a cabinet that looks less like a government and more like the guest list at a hedge fund’s holiday party.

And that’s before you even count the man at the head of the table.

Trump’s own $6 billion doesn’t make the list, because the list is measuring everyone around him — the Commerce Secretary, the Education Secretary, the Treasury Secretary, the Deputy Defense Secretary, the SBA administrator, seventeen ambassadors — all comfortably wealthier than the country they’re supposedly serving.

Elon Musk, at $860 billion, didn’t even bother joining the administration formally; he just wandered through, took a chainsaw to the federal workforce, and wandered back out, richer for the trouble.

The average American he was cutting jobs from earns $65,000 a year.

Musk earns that roughly every half-second. Democracy, meet arithmetic.

Arithmetic wins.

This is the administration that swept into office on the backs of working people furious about the price of eggs, promising to fight for the guy clocking in at the plant, not the guy who owns twelve plants and a yacht named after himself.

And how did they say thank you?

By stacking the cabinet with more concentrated wealth than the country has ever seen inside a single administration, and calling it a meritocracy.

Trump’s own explanation was that these people have “incredible competence” — as if the ability to accumulate nine figures is a credential for running the Social Security Administration, rather than a very good reason to be suspicious of anyone who wants the job.

Historians love to reach for Andrew Mellon, the tycoon who ran Treasury for three presidents in the 1920s, as the cautionary tale of what happens when the ultra-rich run the government meant to regulate the ultra-rich.

Turns out Mellon wasn’t a warning.

He was a rough draft.

This administration didn’t read the footnote — it decided to remake the whole chapter, times fifty-seven.

Public Citizen’s researchers put it more politely than I will: sweeping financial conflicts, misplaced incentives, a government more likely to answer to its own portfolios than to the public.

Translate that out of think-tank English, and it reads like this — the people setting economic policy for a nation where wages haven’t kept pace with rent are, themselves, functionally immune to both.

You cannot feel the sting of inflation from a penthouse.

You cannot understand a $65,000 salary when your net worth requires a comma every three digits.

Only 32% of the country now approves of how this crowd handles the economy, down from 40% at the start.

Turns out ordinary Americans can smell a plutocracy even when it’s wearing a “for the people” T-shirt.

The pitchforks aren’t sharpening themselves.

They’re being sharpened by people watching the math and doing it correctly.

Is Donald Trump sabotaging the United States Navy?

There is no evidence he takes orders from a foreign power.

The more alarming possibility is that he takes orders from his own reflection — and that fellow never completed naval architecture school.

The Navy is reviewing whether to move the island on future Ford-class aircraft carriers toward the middle of the ship, reportedly to satisfy Trump’s preference for the silhouette of older warships.

The island is the carrier’s command tower, not a decorative rooftop cabana.

Its placement affects flight-deck operations, navigation, tactical command, aircraft movement, turbulence, weight and buoyancy.

Moving it is less like shifting a sofa and more like relocating the brain because the skull photographs better from port.

The current aft position was chosen for operational reasons.

It gives aircraft more room near the catapults, helps crews launch sorties faster and can reduce turbulence during landings.

In carrier warfare, sortie generation is combat power.

Trump sees the same arrangement and apparently thinks the ship’s profile lacks sufficient old-movie swagger.

Warships are not beauty-pageant contestants.

They do not need flattering angles, gilt faucets or a ballroom named after the owner.

They must launch aircraft, recover them, survive attack and keep thousands of sailors alive.

Yet naval engineers are now spending time studying a redesign that an earlier review reportedly found could cost billions and impose extraordinary delays.

This follows Trump’s order to replace electromagnetic catapults planned for later Ford-class ships with steam equipment, potentially requiring vast redesign work on vessels never built to accommodate the old machinery.

One technological retreat might be eccentricity.

Two begin to resemble a campaign: Make the Fleet 1945 Again, except with worse procurement and a television personality running the Pentagon.

Pete Hegseth served in the military, but his chief qualification for managing America’s defense bureaucracy appeared to be performing military certainty under studio lighting.

Now the administration behaves like a shipyard committee assembled in a casino steakhouse: one man chooses the exterior, another praises his vision, and everyone else quietly calculates the dry-dock bill.

Franklin Roosevelt had served as assistant secretary of the Navy and possessed an obsessive interest in ships.

Yet imagine Roosevelt interrupting Admiral Nimitz during the Pacific war: “Chester, Midway sounds fine, but have you considered moving the bridge? It would look tremendous in newsreels.”

Imagine him advising Patton to reposition tank turrets because the Shermans seemed visually unbalanced. The reply would have stripped paint from the bulkheads.

Trump’s meddling is not strategic leadership.

Leadership sets missions, weighs risks, selects capable officers and demands results.

It does not doodle over engineering drawings while acolytes salute the crayon.

Calling this presidency psychotic would misuse a clinical term and insult patients, who generally recognize that aircraft carriers are not mood boards.

The governing pathology is simpler: vanity without expertise, power without restraint and subordinates without enough backbone to say, “Sir, that is an island, not a hairpiece.”

That is command-by-tantrum, with admirals reduced to stagehands rearranging steel scenery for one man’s lonely applause.

Every hour engineers spend indulging presidential aesthetics is an hour not spent improving readiness, survivability or shipbuilding speed.

Every billion burned rearranging a carrier is a billion unavailable for maintenance, munitions, training or sailors.

The Navy’s job is to command the seas.

Under Trump, it is being ordered to coordinate the drapes.

Sound general quarters.

Batten every hatch.

Secure all rational thought.

The Commander in Chief has seized the conn and ordered the United States Navy to steam backwards because the twenty-first century was showing insufficient respect for his instincts.

President Trump has directed the Navy to replace the electromagnetic aircraft-launch system planned for future Gerald R. Ford-class carriers with steam catapults.

Not because naval engineers completed an analysis.

Not because test pilots demanded it.

Not because an enemy discovered some vulnerability.

He heard a sailor praise steam a decade ago and has been nursing that anecdote like it was carved onto tablets by Admiral Nelson.

This is how a superpower now designs warships: one man hears something during a shipboard visit, remembers half of it, adds “goddamn,” and turns it into a national-security memorandum.

Steam catapults are proven technology.

So are sextants, signal flags and wooden legs.

The question is not whether steam once worked; the question is whether tearing apart ships designed around electricity makes practical sense.

The answer: negative, Captain Bone Spurs.

The Ford class was built around electromagnetic launch gear.

Spaces that held steam machinery on Nimitz-class carriers were redesigned or eliminated.

Reversing course means new piping, new machinery, new maintenance burdens, new failure points and years of integration work inside one of the most complicated objects humanity constructs.

It is like ordering a nuclear submarine converted to coal because somebody once met a reliable chimney sweep.

The Navy says Ford’s newer launch and arresting systems support higher launch-and-recovery rates than the Nimitz class.

By March, Ford’s four catapults had launched nearly 37,000 aircraft.

The ship operates with roughly 500 fewer sailors, partly because fewer technicians are required for steam equipment, and early Navy figures indicate about $100 million in lower annual operating costs.

Nevertheless: full steam astern.

The fourth carrier, the USS Doris Miller, must now be redesigned, although the contractor says work on its electromagnetic launch and arresting equipment is nearly half complete.

Billions may be burned, schedules shoved overboard, and engineering plans fed through the scuppers because the president considers technical complexity a personal insult.

Apparently a machine should be understandable to a man who believes electricity is a suspicious rumor traveling through walls.

Steam also requires miles of piping and armies of maintainers hunting leaks, valves and mechanical tantrums below decks.

Every pipe is another opportunity for Murphy’s Law to report for watch, salute smartly and flood a compartment.

Senator Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) has launched from carriers hundreds of times, holds a graduate degree in aeronautical engineering, and has worked as a test pilot.

He says even he would not presume to dictate ship-system engineering to the Navy.

That is called judgment: knowing where your expertise ends before sailors, taxpayers and national defense go over the fantail with it.

Trump’s order is not toughness.

It is nostalgia wearing scrambled eggs on its cap.

A carrier is not a casino lobby to be remodeled whenever the owner dislikes the fixtures.

It is a fighting city whose systems must operate together under fire.

At this rate, the next directive will replace radar with a lookout named Earl, nuclear propulsion with rowing benches and fighter aircraft with kites.

All hands brace for impact. The fleet is advancing toward yesterday, flank speed, while common sense abandons ship without a navigator aboard.

The Department of Homeland Security has achieved what aviation experts once considered impossible: spending $464 million on ten used airplanes and transforming most of them into extremely expensive lawn ornaments.

Somewhere, a child has left a toy jet in the backyard.

The child has demonstrated better fleet management.

The planes were purchased through a no-bid contract because, officials said, they were urgently needed for deportation flights.

Urgently, in government dialect, apparently means: skip competition, open the national wallet with garden shears, buy first, and discover afterwards that you lack the people required to fly what you bought.

Seven older Boeing 737s have largely sat at an airport in Lake Charles, Louisiana, undergoing what the department calls maintenance checks.

An internal document offered a less aerodynamic explanation: the agency lacked the necessary staff to operate them.

This is like buying ten restaurants during a famine and then remembering you have no cooks.

The remaining three aircraft are luxury business jets, because nothing communicates the grim efficiency of mass deportation like polished wood veneer and a seat that reclines farther than congressional responsibility.

Mere months after acquiring them, Homeland Security reportedly explored lending or leasing two to other agencies, including one for FBI Director Kash Patel. The emergency fleet had become a federal aircraft swap meet before the new-car smell had surrendered.

Responsibility, naturally, has already boarded another flight.

Homeland Security says the contract was made and approved before Secretary Markwayne Mullin took office, pointing toward former Secretary Kristi Noem.

Noem’s spokeswoman points back toward Mullin, noting that the purchase was finalized under him.

Contract records say its value increased by $303 million on Mullin’s swearing-in day.

The contractor, Daedalus Aviation Corporation, is led by a chairman who had donated to a political committee supporting Noem.

Perhaps Daedalus was the perfect mythological name: fly too close to power, melt the procurement manual, and invoice the sun.

Meanwhile, ICE already paid private contractors to operate charter flights and could use military and Coast Guard aircraft.

Former acting ICE director John Sandweg said owning a fleet would not have been among his top 10 needs for increasing deportations.

But lists are cumbersome, and apparently nobody at Homeland Security reached item one: “Can anyone fly these things?”

The department invoked “unusual and compelling urgency,” an exemption intended for circumstances in which delay could cause serious injury.

It refused to reveal the injury, citing national security.

Evidently the secret threat was competitive bidding.

This was no isolated turbulence. Homeland Security has invoked urgency for more than $29 billion across roughly 500 contracts during Trump’s second term.

It also bought warehouses for more than $700 million, then began selling or giving seven away after reversing course.

The department is not administering policy; it is holding an estate sale before the furniture arrives.

Who will be held responsible?

Most likely gravity.

In Washington, every fiasco receives a runway, every explanation gets clearance, and every invoice lands directly in the public’s lap, waiting helplessly.

The planes may eventually fly.

The excuses already have — first class, nonstop, and fueled by the inexhaustible American taxpayer.

The University of Michigan has devised a courageous response to declining academic preparation, rampant grade inflation and student anxiety: put the thermometer in a drawer and declare the fever emotionally invalid.

Beginning in fall 2027, first-semester freshmen in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts—about half of Michigan’s incoming class—will receive Pass or No Credit on external transcripts.

Professors will still assign grades and feedback internally, partly for scholarships and academic awards, but those grades will not affect GPAs.

So Michigan is not abolishing measurement. It is measuring achievement, recording it behind the curtain and then showing the public a smiley face.

This is academic Spanx: the underlying figure remains exactly where it was, but everybody agrees not to mention the bulge.

The university says “grade covering” will help students acclimate, take risks, follow intrinsic motivation and survive a mental-health crisis.

Anxiety is real, and first semester can be disorienting. But education cannot cure every discomfort by removing the visible consequence.

Eventually the bridge must carry weight.

Michigan’s plan is to lower the river and issue the bridge a wellness certificate, a participation ribbon and an emotional-support pontoon for particularly turbulent syllabi.

What does “Pass” mean to a student who wants to know whether she mastered calculus brilliantly or barely escaped with eyebrows intact? She will still see her internal grade, Michigan says.

Fine — then the grade apparently possesses educational value. It simply becomes too dangerous for the transcript, where evidence goes when adulthood may inspect it.

The timing is exquisite.

At Michigan, 74 percent of undergraduate grades in 2022 were some variety of A, up from 57 percent a decade earlier.

Elsewhere, universities report freshmen needing remedial elementary and middle-school mathematics.

Harvard has responded by capping A’s.

Michigan looks at inflated grades and says: what if we conceal the balloon?

Even the student-body president supplied the punch line.

He earned all A’s and one B during his first semester and said he probably would not have worked as hard under pass/fail — although he believes he might have learned more.

Perhaps.

People also claim they would read Proust if Netflix stopped keeping records.

Supporters cite social media, economic insecurity and bleak employment prospects.

Yet a liberal-arts education was never supposed to be four years of vocational aromatherapy.

Its purpose is learning to read closely, reason honestly, write clearly and encounter ideas that do not care about your comfort.

Employment matters, but college is not LinkedIn with dormitories.

Students today are not inherently dumber or weaker.

They are responding rationally to institutions that confuse compassion with concealment and customer satisfaction with scholarship.

Charge families enormous tuition, admit students, promise transformation — then protect the institutional brand by ensuring the first report card contains almost no report.

MIT and Caltech have used similar introductory systems, so Michigan is not inventing this retreat.

But precedent does not transform evasion into rigor.

Elite institutions can survive pass/no-record policies partly because their names already function as grades.

Schools should support distressed students with counseling, tutoring, sane workloads and excellent classroom teaching.

It should also distinguish exceptional work from adequate work and honest failure from genuine academic success.

Otherwise, “head of the class” becomes a charming historical phrase, like “standards,” “mastery”, and “please submit evidence.”

Everybody passes through the door feeling affirmed.

Whether anybody learned anything remains safely covered.

You cannot make this up, although Taylor Farms appears determined to demonstrate that you can grow it, shred it, bag it, lobby over it and recall it only after everyone has lost their appetite.

Federal investigators linked iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico and recalled by Taylor Farms to a multistate cyclospora outbreak.

Thousands became ill; the parasite’s signature contribution to public life is prolonged, sometimes explosive diarrhea.

This is ordinarily when a produce company says, “Remove everything immediately.”

Taylor Farms reportedly said, in effect, “Before we do that, could somebody get the White House on the telephone?”

Company representatives contacted the administration seeking more proof and more time before officials publicly connected Taylor Farms to the outbreak.

The call was facilitated by Trent Morse, a lobbyist and former Trump White House personnel official working for the company. Nothing says independent scientific inquiry like routing the lettuce through political customer service.

Taylor Farms had reasons to challenge the government.

The FDA lacked a positive laboratory test initially, briefly announced one, then admitted it was false.

Tracing consumed food weeks later is difficult. Taylor says it removed potentially implicated products promptly and broadened its voluntary recall from caution.

The FDA nevertheless said overwhelming epidemiological and supply-chain evidence supported the recall.

That is the moment when protecting customers should outrank protecting the logo.

Instead, administration officials reportedly viewed the company as defensive and obfuscating. Taylor claimed the FDA apologized; the FDA said no official apology occurred.

The company later deleted a social-media post highlighting one. Apparently even the apology required a recall.

The political fertilizer was already thick.

Public filings cited in the reporting show Taylor Farms gave more than $2 million to conservative political groups in 2025, including $1 million to MAGA Inc., while spending $810,000 on lobbying since early 2025, including work concerning food-safety regulation.

HHS insists donations did not influence its response.

Perhaps not.

But when a major donor bypasses ordinary channels to ring the White House during a contamination dispute, suspicion sprouts faster than unrefrigerated spinach.

Then came a separate recall of prepared products containing jalapeños potentially contaminated with salmonella, originating with another supplier.

Taylor said it knew of no illnesses tied to its jalapeño products. Guacamole, pico de gallo and taco dip joined lettuce in America’s newest culinary category: appetizers requiring legal counsel.

As garnish, Taylor Farms is suing Brian Thure, the former chief of its Tennessee subsidiary, alleging he stole more than $32 million and financed a $5.5 million Hawaii mansion, a California ranch, gambling and personal staff — including an aquarium attendant allegedly costing the company roughly $452,000.

Thure’s alleged conduct is not Taylor Farms’ admitted conduct; the company says it uncovered and is pursuing it.

Still, a business that can allegedly fund half a million dollars of aquarium care while questionable invoices swim beneath approval thresholds may wish to stop lecturing regulators about clarity.

Taylor says it spends more than $200 million annually on food safety. Good.

Spend another dollar on a refrigerator magnet reading: When thousands get sick, call the recall desk before the White House.

Food companies sell trust disguised as salad.

Once contamination appears, delay becomes rot, lobbying smells like dressing, and every political donation looks like something unpleasant discovered at the bottom of the bag.

And absolutely nobody ordered the parasite vinaigrette.

Somewhere in Britain’s Ministry of Defence procurement chain, a form was filled out, initialed, filed, and forwarded, and at no point did a single human being ask the one question a curious eight-year-old would have asked within about four seconds: what’s actually inside the box?

The answer, it turns out, was £12 million worth of surveillance drones for the Royal Marines whose cameras came pre-loaded with a feature nobody ordered, nobody wanted, and nobody apparently noticed until it was already parked outside the Special Boat Service headquarters in Poole, on the coast in Dorset, quietly phoning Beijing to say hello.

Congratulations, Ministry of Defence.

You’ve unlocked China Global Tracking.

It wasn’t on the spec sheet. It came free with the components, like a toy in a cereal box, except the toy reports your military’s movements to a foreign intelligence service.

The technical term the investigators used was “heartbeat communications” — periodic pings confirming the cameras were alive and functioning, which is a genuinely poetic way of describing a spy device checking in with its handlers.

And here’s the detail that elevates this from merely embarrassing to genuinely, gloriously absurd: the cameras kept transmitting even when the drones themselves were switched off.

You turned it off.

It didn’t care. It doesn’t answer to you.

It answers to an IP address in China, which is a small but important distinction that apparently eluded everyone in the acquisition process, the security clearance process, and whatever process exists between those two processes to catch exactly this sort of thing.

This is the part that should make you laugh and then immediately stop laughing: the supplier, Kraken Technology Group, bought the cameras from a third party who gave “assurances” about security. Assurances.

Not an audit.

Not a teardown.

Not so much as a Google search.

Somebody said “it’s fine” and somebody else wrote that down as due diligence, and now there’s a national security review underway because the machinery of large institutions has a truly world-class talent for making sure everyone did their job on paper while nobody did the actual job in reality.

Every large bureaucracy eventually discovers this same truth: there is a form for everything and a person accountable for nothing.

The paperwork was immaculate.

The outcome was a Chinese listening device wandering the halls of Britain’s most secretive military unit with a Ministry of Defence lanyard on.

And this isn’t even a new lesson — Britain spent years and considerable political capital banning Huawei from the 5G network over precisely this kind of risk, MI5 has been warning MPs for a year that Chinese intelligence is trawling LinkedIn for recruits, and the SBS itself had already banned Chinese-made electric cars from its own car park.

Somehow, despite all that institutional muscle memory, nobody thought to run the same check on a drone camera before strapping it to a platform meant to protect operations in the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s not that nobody knew the risk existed.

It’s that knowing the risk exists and actually checking for it turned out to be two entirely different departments, neither of which apparently talks to the other.

Somewhere there’s a procurement officer who is, tonight, the most surprised person in Dorset.

And somewhere in Beijing, someone is filing away six months of very well-documented heartbeat data, wondering why it took the British this long to notice their own equipment had a pulse.