Free Republic

Just 16 percent of Americans have confidence in the federal government. No surprise. Looking back at this polling series by the Pew Research Center, we see that public confidence in the federal government peaked at 77 percent back in 1964; as recently as 2001, confidence stood at 54 percent. No need to rehash all the reasons for the decline, but if more than four in five Americans mistrust the federal edifice, the phenomenon is bipartisan and far-reaching.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the federal government was not notified about previous arrests by the suspect in the murder of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student. Partial transcript as follows: MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to ask you about a- a criminal case that has become a political rallying point. You heard Donald Trump use this phrase, “migrant crime”. A 22 year old nursing student—I know you’ve been following this—Laken Riley, in the state of Georgia, was murdered allegedly by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant. The suspect had been detained by...

The federal government forces states like Arizona to give federal ballots to potential noncitizens, but messy voter rolls make matters worse.A post from Elon Musk this week drew attention to the fact that no proof of citizenship is required to vote in federal elections in Arizona — but the real scandal is even more alarming.On the surface, Musk is correct is his assertion that “Arizona clearly states that no proof of citizenship is required for federal elections.” But that’s not necessarily by the Grand Canyon State’s design. Arizona clearly states that no proof of citizenship is required for federal elections...

More than two years after the Biden administration called on all federal agencies to create plans to bring employees who teleworked during the COVID pandemic back to the office, the vast majority of Washington, D.C.’s federal buildings are still sprawling expanses of empty, echoing hallways and offices. In fact, 17 of 24 federal agencies use an estimated 25% or less of their headquarters’ office capacity, according to an updated survey by the General Accounting Office, a government agency that provides auditing and investigative services for Congress. The survey showed that all federal buildings except the Treasury were operating at or...

The federal government has willfully abandoned its duty to defend the states – and the citizens who reside within them – from the ongoing invasion. However, states possess the authority, right now, to remedy Washington’s abrogation of its Guarantee Clause obligations. Executive Summary The United States is facing an unprecedented crisis along its southern border with Mexico. Violent transnational criminal organizations control large swaths of the border. Nearly two million illegal immigrants were apprehended by Border Patrol agents in the last year. Another estimated 400,000 individuals evaded authorities and disappeared inside the interior of the country. Federal agents have seized...

The biggest concern is what GEC paid Park Advisors to do: fund and coordinate the censorship of Americans’ speech and our supposedly free press. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center used a cutout corporation headed by a former intelligence officer to fund and promote the blacklisting of conservative media outlets and other censorship endeavors, research by The Federalist reveals. When Elon Musk gave a group of independent journalists access to internal Twitter communications, the resulting “Twitter Files” quickly revealed the existence of a Censorship-Industrial Complex that included an array of federal agencies colluding with social media companies to censor disfavored...

Nebraska officials say a pair of migrants shot and killed a North American bald eagle - a protected animal and the national emblem of the United States - with the intention of eating the bird. Two Honduran nationals, Ramiro Hernandez-Tziquin, 20 and Domingo Zetino-Hernandez, 20, both of Norfolk were cited for unlawful possession of the eagle. Hernandez-Tziquin was also cited for having No Drivers License," the Stanton County Sheriff’s Office said in a press release on Feb. 28. The sheriff’s office said officials responded to an area near the Wood Duck Recreation Area, which is about 100 miles northeast of...

At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Journal found that 'more than 200 senior officials… or nearly one in three, reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency. Some Americans still believe the federal government is working in the public’s best interest. If anything can disabuse these naive holdouts of this notion, it will be the bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation that just dropped—revealing runaway corruption among the federal bureaucracy. The Journal reviewed more than 31,000 financial disclosure forms and analyzed more than 850,000 financial assets and 315,000 trades to shed light...

Jack Posobiec 🍊 @JackPosobiec Trump 25: President Trump planning to fire thousands of federal bureaucrats if re-elected in 2024 axios.com Inside Trump '25: A radical plan for Trump’s second term 8:41 AM · Jul 22, 2022

The D.C. bureaucracy and specifically the intelligence agencies have long become powers unto themselves, and a threat to our democracy.The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s long history of abusing its power is once again prominent amid the continued expose by Special Counsel John Durham. His prosecution is demonstrating the FBI’s use of its power to deploy federal intelligence assets against political opponents of Democrats. The FBI routinely intervenes in politics, such as when the FBI assisted the Hillary Clinton campaign in painting former President Donald Trump as a Russian intelligence asset, as Durham’s investigation is emphasizing with more evidence. By getting...

We cannot believe this has happened. We sent business correspondence to our local U.S. Social Security Administration office two weeks ago by certified mail, return receipt requested. The documents were received by the Office, as we received the green Cert Mail card in return verifying same. Included in the envelope we had sent to SSA was an official SSA form whose instructions were to return the form to the local SSA office. Along with the SSA form was a detailed cover letter, and documentation SSA requested confirming legal status. Ten days later, we received an envelope in the mail from...

The federal government collected a record $2,121,987,000,000 in taxes for the first half of fiscal year 2022, according to the U.S. Treasury’s monthly statement. The $2.1 trillion collected from October 2021 to March 2022 is the most the federal government has collected in the first half of a fiscal year and the first time government tax collections surpassed $2 trillion for that period. Before the first half of fiscal year 2022, the highest taxes ever collected during the first six months of a fiscal year came in fiscal year 2021, when the government collected $1,849,508,090,000 in taxes.

Only recently has it been revealed that one of the "vaccines" for COVID-19, pushed by the federal government and pharmaceutical industry on Americans, many unwillingly, over the past two years can cause acute kidney injury, acute flaccid myelitis, anti-sperm antibody positive, brain stem embolism, brain stem thrombosis, cardiac arrest, cardiac failure and cardiogenic shock. And among the 1,291 adverse side effects listed in an appendix of one federal report also are central nervous system vasculitis, deep vein thrombosis, encephalitis brain stem, encephalitis hemorrhagic, frontal lobe epilepsy, foaming at mouth, epileptic psychosis, facial paralysis, fetal distress syndrome, gastrointestinal amyloidosis and generalized...

Although released a week or two ago, I've found myself several times returning to the federal employee vaccine compliance numbers released by the White House Briefing Room. Looking at those numbers, some things just aren't adding up as they should. When consideration is made the fact that the administration has paused and pushed back any "enforcement" actions against employees from the end of November until sometime in January, the numbers start to look a lot more suspicious...and so do the motives behind the numbers that were released.The White House compliance numbers are very high and seem to involve only two...

The federal government will run out of money on Friday amid a jammed Senate schedule in December that may further delay the passage of the $1.9 trillion reconciliation package into next year. Along with funding the government in December, the Democrat-controlled Senate must raise the debt ceiling before December 15 and pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a typically bipartisan piece of legislation for 60 years.

VIDEOThat is a question that MILLIONS of Americans are asking right now. I can't remember a time when tax refunds have been delayed so long on such a mass scale. The federal government is waaaaaay delayed on sending us our tax refunds yet they are already planning on passing multi-trillion dollar spending programs? Beam me up, Scotty!Oh, and finally, WHERE'S MY DAMN TAX REFUND?

Former White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx is now working in the private sector. Birx, who was a familiar face at White House coronavirus briefings under former President Donald Trump, is now working as chief medical and scientific adviser for ActivePure Technology in Texas, an air filtration company, Reuters reported. She has also joined the George W. Bush Institute as a global health fellow and the biopharmaceutical company Innoviva as a board member, she told Reuters. Birx announced her retirement late last year, after she was slammed for gathering with three generations of her own family after Thanksgiving...

The pandemic and current political environment might have you in the doldrums. Ups and downs are normal in life, but when you've been stuck inside on Zoom calls for months, it's easy to forget the ups. In "Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life," Martin Seligman provides a map to a more optimistic outlook. As a graduate student of experimental psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Seligman studied dogs and noticed that some would do nothing when they were shocked. Seligman determined that the dogs had felt the "shocks go on and off regardless of whether they...

We live in a test tube of democracy right now where the age-old adage “deficits don’t matter” is being examined. Back in 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney was reported to have said that phrase to Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill when he worried that budget deficits posted a threat to the economy. Cheney shot back, according to a Chicago Tribune story from 2004, "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms [congressional elections]. This is our due." Debt has become a threat to democracy, because elected politicians are spending us into a potential debt crisis.We are seeing record...

Once again, government intrusion into the health-care sector has proved disastrous. While New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo blames the president and the federal government for the lack of beds and ventilators in his state, the power to determine the number of these critical medical supplies in New York hospitals falls squarely upon the shoulders of the governor.During a Tuesday press conference, Cuomo lashed out at the federal government for not sending enough ventilators as the Wuhan coronavirus continues to rattle the state. “Four hundred ventilators? I need 30,000 ventilators,” Cuomo said. “You want a pat on the back for sending...