The full government cost of an active-duty service member is about $86,000 a year higher than what’s reflected in the Department of War’s budget.
That’s a cost that will ultimately be paid by taxpayers through VA’s budget decades from now, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate of future veterans’ benefits that aren’t captured in the military’s personnel-cost accounting.
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In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidential election partly on the basis of his campaign’s false accusation that George H. W. Bush had overseen “the worst economic performance since the Great Depression.” Or so claimed Clinton’s running mate Al Gore.
James Carville, chief campaign adviser to Clinton/Gore, amplified that message with the constant refrain: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to continue deporting illegal aliens to third countries while the case proceeds.
The court issued a one-page order without a vote count, permitting the administration to resume the practice, the New York Times reported. Oral arguments are set for December.
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Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Tex., sent a letter on Tuesday to President Donald Trump urging action on a centralized registry of guns and gun owners that, according to Gun Owners of America (GOA), violates multiple federal statutes.
“No one in their right mind can look at ATF’s digital, searchable 1.4 billion record database of firearm transactions and tell me that isn’t a gun registry. Several federal laws prohibit gun registration, so it’s truly shocking to see how ATF has disregarded the will of Congress here,” Aidan Johnston, GOA Federal Affairs Director told Just The News.
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The Trump administration on Tuesday highlighted data showing a 96% drop in legal immigration from Muslim-majority nations since 2024.
The administration’s Rapid Response 47 account shared a chart from the CATO Institute, a pro-immigration, libertarian-leaning think tank that used State Department data.
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Online pharmacies — including one from an e-commerce giant — are on the rise as health insurance premiums and prices skyrocket.
Amazon Corporation appears to be tapping into a shifting market as individuals increasingly abandon traditional health insurance for more cost-effective alternatives. RxPass — a benefit of Amazon Pharmacy — and other online platforms offering prescription subscription services are increasing in popularity, Reuters reported.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith’s sweeping investigation into President Donald Trump included the financial data of everyday supporters across 50 states who gave as little as $1 to the president and allied groups, new documents reveal.
Smith’s team obtained at least 4,782 checks from everyday Americans making mainly small-dollar donations. Smith’s sweep — though ostensibly focused on the events of Jan. 6, 2020 — hoovered up checks from September 2019 to August 2023.
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Top artificial intelligence and private equity firms are teaming up with building trades unions to stop states from freezing data center construction.
OpenAI, Blackstone, QTS and SoftBank joined seven union partners to form the American Infrastructure Alliance (AIA), a multimillion-dollar coalition that plans to work with officials in seven states on data center standards in 2027 to head off moratoriums, Axios first reported Monday.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday launched America.gov, a government chatbot powered by artificial intelligence. It will allow the public to research government services.
“This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence,” Trump said, the Washington Post reported.
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The second Trump administration increasingly resembles the Biden administration on two issues that played a major role in President Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, raising the question of how many foot soldiers Republicans can turn out in November midterms.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blew past its sibling Food and Drug Administration’s targeted approvals of updated COVID-19 vaccines for elderly and high-risk Americans, quietly issuing recommendations last week that all healthy adults and children starting at 6 months old take the non-sterilizing mRNA products off-label.
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The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly tracking a 600-person migrant caravan that is traveling from Honduras to the United States and is expected to arrive at the U.S. border ahead of the November midterms.
The caravan, which began with just 200–400 people, departed San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on Sept. 20 and traveled north toward Guatemala. As of Monday, the caravan known as “Fe y Esperanza,” or “Faith and Hope,” is in southern Mexico, in the city of Tapachula, and heading north toward the U.S., according to Newsweek.
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One of the philosopher William James’s most popular books is Varieties of Religious Experience. Published in 1902 and subtitled “A Study in Human Nature,” the book is based on James’s Gifford Lectures in natural theology at the University of Edinburgh. It is impressive how many states of mind James is willing to group under the category “religious.” I suspect some people might cavil at the proposition that the book was really an exercise in theology, natural, supernatural, or otherwise. That said, James’s catalogue of heightened, or at least altered, states of mind does have the virtue of reminding us of how wide the spectrum of human experience, not to say eccentricity, is. And it occurs to me that James’s distinction between “healthy-mindedness” and “morbid-mindedness,” set forth in a chapter on “The Sick Soul,” is of particular pertinence at a time, like ours, when the effort to normalize various pathologies seems to be, as we have been taught to say, trending.
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Nearly 1 million California students designated as English learners will no longer have to pass a set of tests and benchmarks to exit the program, under a new law signed Sunday by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In a story posted Sunday by The Los Angeles Times, the newspaper states that when a child enrolls in a California public school, families are asked what language is spoken at home and that as early as kindergarten, children who mainly speak a foreign language at home could be designated as an English learner and placed in language classes.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci privately sounded the alarm when he learned the U.S. Army had conducted an experiment a decade ago that aerosolized the lethal Ebola virus, which is not normally transmitted by air, and then shared the results publicly amid an ongoing outbreak in Africa, according to diary entries obtained by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul.
The then-top scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was particularly concerned in 2016 that the Army medical research arm’s experiment seemed to show that exposure to aerosolized Ebola caused more damaging effects in subjects that had been vaccinated. This was almost four years before he championed shutting down the U.S. economy and social life over the COVID-19 virus outbreak.
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Americans are increasingly turning to adjustable-rate mortgages to escape borrowing costs above 7%, reviving a type of home loan that played a prominent role in the housing collapse preceding the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
Adjustable-rate mortgages, or ARMs, accounted for 9.8% of mortgage applications during the week ending Sept. 18 as the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate surged to 7.12%, its highest level since May 2024, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The shift was notable because borrowers were accepting the risk of future rate increases for relatively modest savings compared with a traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
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Ten thousand U.S. households that earned over $1 million collected unemployment benefits in 2024, receiving nearly $100 million in taxpayer money, according to data shared with The Washington Times.
The data was given to the newspaper by Iowa GOP Sen. Joni Ernst, who received it from the IRS and who has tracked this issue for years.
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Relying too heavily on internet-connected commercial AI could introduce dangerous new vulnerabilities into warfare, a top executive told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an exclusive interview.
Artificial intelligence will inevitably become deeply embedded in military decision-making, but allowing general-purpose systems to replace human judgment rather than support warfighters could create serious risks, according to Tyler Saltsman, co-founder and CEO of EdgeRunner AI. Those risks have already surfaced as the Pentagon races to become an “AI-first” force, with an AI-assisted intelligence report this spring falsely flagging a Chinese vessel as carrying nuclear-weapons-related components and nearly triggering a U.S. operation to board the ship, according to the Department of War.
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The Department of Education on Monday finalized its repeal of a Biden-era Title IX rule reforming sexual misconduct investigations on campus.
The move restores Trump’s first-term rule and expands the protections a student accused of misconduct has in disciplinary proceedings, notably guaranteeing the right to call witnesses, have representation, and appear in a hearing, Politico reported.
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FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey announced Monday that he is stepping down from his role after one year on the job.
Bailey, who served as Missouri’s Republican attorney general from Jan. 2023 to Sept. 2025 — before joining the Bureau — said in an X post that he is resigning to spend more time with his family.
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The federal government loses as much as $304 billion a year to tax fraud, and the IRS has no agency-wide strategy for stopping it, congressional auditors said in a report Friday.
The Government Accountability Office estimated annual losses at $116 billion to $304 billion, the first comprehensive federal estimate of tax fraud losses. Auditors used a Monte Carlo simulation drawing on IRS data from 2018 through 2024, potential fraud inside the tax gap and tax evasion in the shadow economy.
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There is a reality we must acknowledge to begin moving toward national fiscal solvency and sanity — resources are finite. Accepting this fundamental fact is our Vince Lombardi moment to zero-in on the basics, just as his Green Bay Packers team did after he delivered his famous line, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” They then went on to win the NFL Championship that year.
Getting back-to-basics with our country’s finances means we first must deal with our unsustainable practice of borrowing $2 trillion each year to fill in the gap between spending $7 trillion while only bringing in $5 trillion. Adding $2 trillion to our debt annually over the last decade has quickly doubled our liability from $20 trillion in 2017 to $40 trillion now.
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District attorneys across the country are accused of providing illegal immigrants preferential treatment when they commit crimes, allowing them to remain free in the country and put U.S. citizens’ lives at risk. The related reports seem to indicate that when the arrested person is a U.S. citizen, they are denied much of the leniency shown to illegal immigrants accused of the same crime.
The House Judiciary Committee and its Immigration Subcommittee released a report this week detailing how Arlington County, Virginia’s Commonwealth’s Attorney, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, “obstructs the enforcement of federal immigration law and shields foreign national criminals from accountability.” Dehghani-Tafti’s campaign received $515,000 from George Soros-affiliated political entities, Fox News reported last October.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Friday that former Special Counsel Jack Smith will testify in front of the panel next week about his Arctic Frost investigation.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has led the Senate’s investigation into Smith and his alleged efforts to prosecute President Donald Trump and his allies, which included the revelation that Smith subpoenaed phone records of multiple GOP lawmakers during the Arctic Frost investigation.
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The House Republican behind Congress’ permitting overhaul warned lawmakers are running out of time as Senate negotiators signaled a vote will likely wait until November.
Republican Arkansas Rep. Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said “we’re running out of time” to pass permitting reform on the Republican Study Committee’s “Right to the Point” podcast, according to a transcript provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday. Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse — a lead upper chamber negotiator — said that day that a vote on the Senate’s package will likely wait until the lame-duck session after the November midterm elections.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping extended a formal invitation to American students, proposing that as many as 100,000 “young Americans” come to China to study in the coming years. But lawmakers have long warned that the country’s student program serves as a vector of Chinese influence.
“I am glad to announce an invitation for 100,000 young Americans to visit China for exchanges and study in the coming five years,” the Chinese president said in remarks at the White House on Thursday.
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A major Republican donor has scaled back his donations to the party this cycle, reportedly due to frustration with the GOP’s inability to pass a landmark voter ID bill.
Tim Mellon, who gave $200 million in 2024, is reportedly frustrated with the Senate for not passing the SAVE America Act, a national voter ID and election integrity bill that has the support of President Donald Trump, according to the New York Times.
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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton is pushing the intelligence community to conceal classified documents on gain-of-function research, Sen. Rand Paul said in a television interview.
Paul has investigated ties between the coronavirus lab in Wuhan and his longtime foe Anthony Fauci’s institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Recent evidence has revealed that some virology research at the NIH was undertaken on behalf of the intelligence community, bringing some relevant documents under the purview of Cotton’s Intelligence Committee.
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The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) could use an expanded database to remove illegal aliens and non-citizens from voter rolls.
The ruling allows DHS to use its expanded voter citizenship verification system, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), which allowed the administration to use Social Security records to verify voters’ citizenship. The ruling will likely not have a major impact on the midterm elections since most states are prohibited from removing voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, according to The Associated Press.
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A new congressional bill would restrict how many international student-athletes could be on a college sports team.
U.S. Senator Jon Husted (R-OH) and U.S. Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI) introduced the bill in their respective chambers last week: the Training and Education for American Members in University Sports and Athletics (TEAM USA) Act.
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When Bari Weiss was hired to lead CBS News last year, many of the network’s star reporters feared the centrist founder of The Free Press news site would turn the network into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration. Longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley was fired after he accused Weiss of “murdering the show.”
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Six years ago, the rise of the “Bernie bros” supporting avowed socialist candidate Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) raised the question of whether decades of soft indoctrination about the “horrors” of capitalism by the Democrat-media complex and the oft-promised but never delivered benefits of socialism had finally produced enough voters willing to elect their way out of free enterprise.
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Republican state attorneys general are asking federal regulators to scrutinize the big three credit rating agencies over allegations they continue relying on questionable climate assumptions when assessing financial risks
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Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) leads Democrat Troy Jackson in two consecutive public polls of Maine’s U.S. Senate race, narrowing Jackson’s advantage in recent polling averages as the contest enters its final weeks.
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Jim Copenhaver, 76, a spectator shot at the July 13, 2024 Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, reportedly died on Wednesday. Copenhaver was critically wounded on July 13, 2024, during the assassination attempt of President Donald Trump at the rally.
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This year’s PISA results show that the United States ranked 13th in reading and science and 27th in math. Reading scores fell by 14 points since the last test in 2022. It’s not just the U.S. that’s moving in the wrong direction. The decline is part of a broader global trend, with the OECD average across 23 countries down 16 points.
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House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday joined a growing chorus of Republican voices who are calling for an end to the conflict between the United States and Iran, claiming the U.S. has done its part in keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
Republicans, including Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, have largely cited the cost of the war, including its impact on the United States economy by causing fuel prices to rise, which Americans are feeling in their wallets.
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The midterm elections are six weeks away.
Suddenly, a debate has erupted over the existential dangers of artificial intelligence. Jacob Coxon, a little-known Silicon Valley researcher who worked at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and went public with a dire warning: AI now threatens the future of the world.
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Technology CEOs did not show up to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing Wednesday about mass surveillance concerns related to Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs).
Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who chairs the Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, invited CEOs Garrett Langley of Flock Safety, Rick Smith of Axon Enterprise, Greg Brown of Motorola Solutions and Filip Kaliszan of Verkada to testify about their products’ access to Americans’ data. Five witnesses, including alleged victims of automated surveillance and a cybersecurity engineer, testified before the committee.
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A former contractor who says he helped move more than 1,500 unaccompanied children out of a San Diego emergency site is speaking on the record by name for the first time, and he says the government kept releasing kids to adults they did not know.
Between 2021 and 2024, nearly half a million unaccompanied alien children entered the U.S. under former President Joe Biden’s administration, with thousands vanishing from federal view. Two people who were inside that system sat down with The California Courier to speak about what they saw from different parts of the process.
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The Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) passed another procedural hurdle, setting up a potential final vote later this week.
Senators voted 70-21 to invoke cloture on Tuesday on the Cruz-Cantwell substitute amendment to the PCSA.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday confirmed that President Donald Trump had invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to Miami, Fla., to attend the G20 summit in December.
Rubio confirmed the invitation in remarks to reporters after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Politico reported.
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The House Judiciary Committee concluded in a report released Wednesday that the Biden-Harris administration wielded the Justice Department as a weapon and “ran roughshod” over constitutional protections and the separation of powers in order to spy on Republican members of Congress.
The report, which the committee released on Wednesday, summarizes several years worth of investigation conducted by the committee into the tenure of Special Counsel Jack Smith, his investigations into President Donald Trump, and how he used those investigations to obtain privileged phone records from lawmakers.
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Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., blocked a plea deal offer from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s assistant for her testimony about destroying records at her boss’s request in exchange for immunity from possible criminal charges from the Department of Justice.
Before the vote, Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., told the Daily Signal that the plea offer provides an opportunity for “transparency” and to give the American people “the truth,” given that the unnamed former assistant would provide testimony to the committee regarding her involvement in destroying public records in order to protect former top officials of the National Institutes of Health.
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Dolly Parton’s longtime manager Danny Nozell filed a restraining order against Parton’s nephew Bryan Seaver on Tuesday, accusing the singer’s former head of security of threats, extortion and intimidation against the estate.
Seaver was the person who publicly announced his aunt’s death on social media last month, stating that she died after a brief battle with cancer. She died surrounded by her loved ones at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Tennessee.
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Diesel prices hit a record $6.53 a gallon Tuesday even as benchmark crude oil fell to a two-week low.
The national average for diesel stood at $6.52 on Wednesday after dipping by one cent overnight. This is compared with $3.69 a year earlier — several months before the Iran war broke out, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA).
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A federal agent assigned to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Donald Trump said prosecutors kept him in the dark that phone data he was gathering under grand jury subpoenas belonged to members of Congress and that he would have had reservations about doing so if he had been told, according to explosive testimony released Tuesday night by the House Judiciary Committee.
Retired Justice Department Inspector General Special Agent Brian Burnett was quoted in the transcript as saying that during his decades working at the DOJ’s watchdog, he never once was asked to collect congressional phone data and did not learn until after he retired in late 2024 that he had unwittingly done so as part of his work for Smith’s team prosecuting Trump in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot investigation code-named Arctic Frost.
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This past week, Democrats and the mainstream media had their daggers drawn at the Trump administration over high prices for new homes.
Unfortunately, their smear campaign is proving effective. Fewer than two months before the midterm elections, voters are telling pollsters that housing costs are among their top concerns. Voters also say that the administration is tone-deaf to their concerns because, as they put it, mortgages and rents continue to rise.
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Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan declined Tuesday to get involved in a custody battle over a baby in a case related to surrogacy and abortion.
Kagan, who oversees emergency cases that stem from California, declined to refer the case to the full Supreme Court and declined to block a lower court’s order that gave custody of the baby to his biological parents, despite their request that the surrogate have an abortion when the then-unborn baby was diagnosed with a serious heart problem, which she refused.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday endorsed a possible diesel export ban as tumult in the energy markets has rocked farmers and other industries ahead of the midterms.
“I’ve called for it within my people. I’ve been talking about it,” Trump told reporters during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
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As the midterm elections approach, Republican lawmakers are concerned that the Democratic fundraising giant ActBlue is failing to take fraud prevention seriously, even after their probe of the company uncovered lax security practices. Lawmakers allege that lack of oversight allowed foreign donations to flow to progressive causes.
“My concern from the beginning was that ActBlue did not have the fraud prevention standards that are needed to make sure that foreign money is not coming into U.S. elections, and what we reveal in the report … is clear indications that Act Blue is continuing to not make fraud, preventing fraud, a priority,” House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis, told the Just the News, No Noise TV show.
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