Authored by Paul D. Thacker via RealClearInvestigations,

The panic and outrage were palpable last February when President Trump announced plans to trim reimbursement rates for government-funded scientific research.

“This is going to decimate U.S. scientific biomedical research,” Northwestern University biologist Carole Labonne told Bloomberg. “The lights will go out, people will be let go, and these [medical] advances will not occur,” David Skorton, CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, told PBS. “The goal,” University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom warned on BlueSky, “is to destroy U.S. universities.”

The sky has not fallen on American research in the 10 months since. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is still paying the same 50% to 70% in indirect costs – the premium added on top of grants meant to reimburse universities for providing labs and other research infrastructure – because lawsuits have frozen the president’s proposed policy. One Trump official admits this is unlikely to change because the administration will almost certainly lose in court. The current system, which provides the lion’s share of billions of dollars each year for often-unspecified overhead costs to universities, has the backing of Congress. As it stands, there appears to be no momentum, even among Republicans, to reform the practice.

“It’s basically a slush fund,” one NIH official told RealClearInvestigations. “We just don’t like to call it that.”

A RealClearInvestigations analysis of these indirect payments reveals a long, largely forgotten history of concern about taxpayer-sponsored research. Although many researchers have cast Trump’s proposal as an attack on science, this issue isn’t the need to fund research activities that sometimes lead to beneficial discoveries, but whether some of the billions that support the necessary infrastructure and equipment are actually being shifted to purposes such as staffing and buildings that have little or no direct connection to the actual research. 

In the late ’80s, Stanford faculty revolted against the university’s high overhead charges for diverting research dollars to a bloated administration and a campus building frenzy. Those concerns are still voiced by some.

“If the universities truly believe that it takes 60-70% of a research grant to provide facilities, utilities, and other basic support, then that is easy to prove by opening the books,” said Sanjay Dhall, a research physician at the University of California, Los Angeles. “I suspect however, that opening the books would reveal that a significant chunk of these funds, or even the majority, are paying an army of unnecessary administrators.”

At a time when the value of college is being challenged because of exorbitant tuition and fees, and the federal government is struggling to rein in debt, the story of indirect funding offers a window into the history of runaway costs and the growing power of college officials. RCI has also learned that NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has been selling a new plan that makes the grant process more competitive for institutions that were overlooked in the past. 

Indirect Costs Hard To Define

Distributing over $37 billion in grants every year, NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet, far exceeding the European Commission, which spends around $12 billion, and dwarfing the Gates Foundation’s $1 billion. 

Every NIH grant a university researcher receives provides two categories of funding: direct and indirect costs. The direct costs include all items the researcher submitted as part of the project’s budget, from laboratory equipment to a percentage of salaries.

Indirect costs are harder to define. The funding goes to administrators, and how they use it is shrouded in mystery. What’s more, indirect rates vary from university to university for reasons that few understand and can explain. 

While institutions charge private foundations like Gates a mere 10% and Rockefeller 15% for indirect costs, they charge the NIH much higher rates – 69% for Harvard, 67.5% for Yale, and 63.7% for Johns Hopkins. 

“How do you think Harvard built all those buildings?” one NIH official, a graduate of Harvard Medical School who insisted on anonymity, told RCI. “NIH indirect costs paid for that.”

When Trump first proposed the 15% cap in 2016, Harvard president Drew G. Faust told the student newspaper in late 2017 that she flew to Washington, D.C., to lobby Republicans in both the House and the Senate to stop it. “We’re bringing in quite a bit of money through federal contracts which provide money for a lot of buildings and other infrastructure that makes possible what we do going forward,” a Harvard dean told the student newspaper. “So if that was to all go away, we’d have to sit down and look at that.”

The Trump administration’s proposal to cap overhead at 15% would cost university administrators billions of dollars that they control. Among the many critics was Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the flagship journal Science and a former university administrator. He wrote an editorial last February titled “A Direct Hit” that described the cap as a “ruthless takedown of academia.”

“The scientific community must unite in speaking out against this betrayal of a partnership that has enabled American innovation and progress,” he wrote.

In response to questions from RCI, Thorp said any change to NIH overhead funding should be done in partnership with the scientific community. “Indirect costs are used to secure debt on research facilities and were treated as very secure by banks and the rating agencies,” Thorp said. “Pulling all of that abruptly – without following processes with decades of precedent – is certainly betraying a partnership by putting the universities in difficulty with their lenders and bond ratings.” 

Inexorable Rise in Charges

It turns out that concerns over universities possibly misusing federal grant money date back more than half a century, according to Thorp’s own publication. In 1955, the federal government almost doubled the 8% premium paid for university overhead. A decade later, Science reported that Congress lifted the overhead ceiling to 20%, maintaining a flat rate to assure more taxpayer dollars were targeted at scientific research, and less spent on constructing new buildings. Some members of Congress believed that “the universities need not accept the grants if they can’t afford them.” Elected officials also worried that indirect costs would not go to research but to support other university efforts.

“You might be surprised if you read the list of money being spent for research in various universities,” one senator said in a 1963 Science news story. “Not only to pay the teachers, but also to construct buildings and facilities around the school.” 

Despite these concerns, lobbyists convinced the government in 1966 to remove all caps, empowering universities to negotiate directly with federal agencies to set their own overhead rates. In 1966, overhead consumed 14% of NIH grant expenditures. By the late 1970s, it consumed 36.4%. When the federal government attempted to backpedal in 1976 to bring “spiraling indirect cost rates under control,” it failed. 

Both Republicans and Democrats have long championed increasing NIH budgets, partly because grants for research land in congressional districts scattered across the nation. Republicans have often been the NIH’s biggest supporters. Fifteen years ago, Congress launched investigations into the NIH’s poor monitoring of grants that were awarded to research physicians with undisclosed ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Despite the unfolding scandal, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter pushed through a 34% increase in the NIH’s budget in 2009. During the 2013 government shutdown, the NIH was one of the few agencies that Republicans pushed President Obama to keep open. Two years later, Republicans cut many parts of Obama’s proposed 2015 budget, yet gave the president even more money than the increase he requested for the NIH.

Like some elected officials, academics have also long complained that high overhead harms academic scientists by diverting NIH funding to administrators. In 1981, a University of California researcher published a study in Science, which showed how “Funding has thus been markedly reduced, and this has become a critical factor limiting research support in the United States.”

By 1983, indirect costs accounted for 43% of the NIH grant budget. In response, then-NIH Director James B. Wyngaarden pushed to make more money available for scientists by paying administrators only 90% of what they claimed in overhead. 

“[L]egislators tend to sympathize with the investigators who are more interested in seeing federal money spent for equipment and researchers’ salaries in their labs than for light and heat and the services of typists and bookkeepers,” reported Science at the time. 

However, Science reported that Wyngaarden was met with stiff opposition from university officials and their allies in Congress.

When Wyngaarden tried to deal with the matter by sending a report to Congress, Science reported, officials from several university lobby groups shut the report down, calling it not “acceptable.”

One of Wyngaarden’s biggest critics was Stanford President Donald Kennedy, whose school was then charging one of the highest rates for indirect costs. Kennedy convened a group to attack cost-saving proposals, stating in a letter, “The NIH proposals to reduce reimbursement of those costs … will directly damage the research effort as a whole.” 

This effort appeared to succeed until Kennedy himself became ensnared in a scandal that showed Stanford’s indirect costs charged to the NIH paid for a bevy of personal goods and upkeep on a yacht. 

Stanford’s Taxpayer-Funded Yacht

Stanford’s yacht, the Victoria, was valued at $1.2 million and became a symbol of excess, with walnut and cherry paneling, brass lamps, marble counters, and lavish woodwork. Administrators used the yacht as a fundraising venue to wine and dine campus bigwigs. NIH money had paid for overhead to maintain it. 

As Congress and federal investigators dug into Stanford’s accounting, they discovered that administrators had also redirected NIH research overhead to pay $2,000 a month for flowers at President Kennedy’s home, $7,000 for his bed linens, and $6,000 to provide him with cedar-lined closets. Another college official had hosted Stanford football parties and charged the NIH $1,500 for booze.

Humiliated in the media, Stanford was forced to lower the indirect rate it charged the NIH from 78% to 55.5%, and federal agencies launched audits of overhead charges at dozens of other universities, resulting in millions of dollars returned to the NIH. 

With the politics and the media on his side, Michigan Congressman John Dingell launched reforms to indirect charges. Stanford and other institutions were forced to halt expensive building campaigns. President Clinton proposed a cap on indirect costs in a “concerted effort to shift national spending from overhead to funding research.” As in the past, universities opposed the change, and the White House buckled.

“One way or another, I’ve been involved in controversy about indirect cost rates for about 30 years,” a chancellor at the University of Maryland told The Baltimore Sun in 1994. 

Kennedy resigned from the Stanford presidency, as did several of his administrators. Kennedy later joined Science as editor-in-chief – a predecessor to Thorp – while universities’ charges for indirect costs to the NIH eventually snapped back to their former pricing, which continues to this day.

RCI spoke with several academic researchers at institutions scattered across the U.S., working at both private and public-funded universities. None wished to be named about their concerns about how their administrators spend NIH indirect funding, with one professor noting that administrators determine your career, so it makes no sense to criticize their spending habits.

While university presidents say administrators strictly account for NIH indirect funds, the reality appears to be different. Professors who bring in large sums of NIH money, sometimes referred to as heavy hitters, can complain and get some of the indirect costs back from the administrators for their own research and even personal use. At some institutions, department heads can get a cut of the indirect costs to set up slush funds, monies they can dole out to favored professors, or even divert to their own labs.

Professor Dhall said that after he published a March letter in the Wall Street Journal that supported Trump’s cap on indirect rates, he was contacted by colleagues across the country. “They congratulated me on going public and vehemently agreed, in private,” he said. 

A congressional staffer who has spent decades investigating problems at the NIH said that nobody truly understands how universities negotiate their NIH overhead rates. And once that money gets to the university, it disappears into a byzantine accounting system that seems designed to confuse government auditors, who rarely inspect university books.

“It’s a complete black box,” he said. “I wish someone could explain it to me.”

Trump’s Play To Change the Game

The Trump administration will lose the fight to cap indirect costs at 15%, a senior HHS official told RCI, because of the universities’ outsize influence. During the first Trump administration, universities caught wind that Trump planned to cap overhead rates. As they had done for over half a century, university lobbyists ran to Congress to complain, only now they sought an alliance with the pharmaceutical industry.

Responding to lobbying pressure, Republicans in the House and Senate inserted a provision into the appropriations bill in 2018 to block Trump’s attempt to change universities’ indirect cost rates. That provision has been included in every succeeding appropriations bill.

While it does not seem likely that Congress will strip the schools in their states and districts of billions of dollars in funding, NIH Director Bhattacharya has been floating his own proposal to revamp indirect payments to make them more equitable in private talks with members of Congress and university leaders. Shortly before Thanksgiving, Bhattacharya gave a dinner talk to the Republican Main Street Caucus, a group of 85 GOP members of Congress who are critical behind-the-scenes players among Republicans now running the House. 

A dinner participant recounted to RCI that Bhattacharya noted that more than half of the NIH’s money goes to 20 universities located on both coasts. These elite universities win a lion’s share of the grant money, including indirect costs, because they have the money to attract excellent scientists, in part because NIH money helped them build great infrastructure. 

This creates a vicious cycle that guarantees NIH will continue to fund institutions that have already won past NIH money – and which charge high indirect costs. To end this cycle, Bhattacharya wants to break off indirect costs into a separate category of infrastructure grants that universities can compete to win.

During the talk, Bhattacharya said that all the universities in the entire state of Florida now get as much money as Stanford. Yet, there’s no reason Florida could not become a hub for scientific research if the federal government invested in its scientific infrastructure. 

If Florida can provide lab space at a lower cost than Stanford, he said, they should get the money. Bhattacharya also wants to make it easier for academics to take their grant to different universities. If a Harvard researcher is offered more space or better facilities at a university in Kansas, because building costs there are cheaper, that professor should be able to transfer his grant. 

The NIH already provides specific grants for infrastructure, and the hope is that spreading the billions in indirect costs across the country will gain political support. 

“He wants to get this money out to the middle of the country, not just the coasts,” said Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Republican from Iowa. Dr. Miller-Meeks is one of the few physicians in Congress and said she was impressed with Bhattacharya’s talk at the Main Street Caucus dinner. However, she is uncertain whether Democrats would embrace the new proposal in today’s polarized environment.

“I would think there are members from the center of the country that would like to see more money in their district,” she said.

A spokesperson told RCI that NIH remains focused on ensuring that funding is used efficiently and that direct and indirect costs contribute to scientific productivity. “Bhattacharya’s proposal represents one of several ideas being discussed publicly about how to structure federal support for research infrastructure,” the spokesperson said. “NIH looks forward to continuing to work constructively with Congress on this issue.”

Already in violation of a statutory deadline and accused of engaging in rampant, unlawful redactions, it’s been revealed that the US Department of Justice has about 5.2 million pages of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that still need to be reviewed, according to a document reviewed by Reuters and inside sources cited by the New York Times. 

The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was enacted in November, gave the DOJ a Dec. 19 deadline for releasing “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” relating to Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. It released some 100,000 pages on the due date, but now we learn that first batch represented a tiny 1.9% of the total inventory — before accounting for duplicates. 

With Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna in discussions with other members of Congress about potentially holding Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt, the DOJ is scrambling to amass a legion of 400 lawyers to work on the enormous task. Those lawyers will come from the DOJ’s Criminal Division, the National Security Division, the FBI and the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan, according to Reuters, with a goal of hammering out the mass-review between January 5 and 23. Until now, the DOJ has had almost 200 lawyers from the National Security Division reviewing the files. 

Of course, these extra lawyers being recruited into the project have other responsibilities, so the expectation is that they’ll allocate three to five hours a day to the Epstein files. Volunteers will be enticed with time-off awards along with the option to work the Epstein project remotely. 

.@AGPamBondi’s most egregious violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is not that she ignores the deadline…

it’s that she’s redacting names of accused sex offenders AND internal communications about decisions, wrongly citing old rules that are overridden by new law. pic.twitter.com/LDOmC2emho

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 28, 2025

Last week, DOJ said it had discovered more than a million more documents with potential links to the Epstein cases. Seeking to fend off criticism, the DOJ said:   

“We have lawyers working around the clock to review and make the legally required redactions to protect victims, and we will release the documents as soon as possible. Due to the mass volume of material, this process may take a few more weeks.”  

The threat of contempt isn’t the only form of heat Bondi and the Trump administration are facing. On Christmas Eve, a group of 12 senators sent a letter to DOJ Acting Inspector General Don Berthiaume demanding an audit of the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files.

Beyond pointing to the failure to meet the Dec. 19 deadline, the senators said the huge number of redactions in the released documents have raised “serious questions as to whether the Department is properly applying the limited exceptions for redaction that are permitted under the Act. Any withholding or redaction beyond those specified circumstances is against the law.”

Does anyone really believe that Epstein and Maxwell were the only wrongdoers in this vast, sordid saga? 

Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong says everywhere you look there is big trouble bubbling out of control.  

Armstrong sees the perfect storm closing in from all sides.  Let’s start with the war in Ukraine.  It looks like peace was possible until Russia claimed Ukraine attacked Putin’s residence.  Also, just today, a fresh headline reads “More than 600,000 Russians plunged into darkness as Ukrainian drones strike Moscow.”  Armstrong says,

“I don’t see this turning into a real sustainable peace. 

What they are trying to do is get a ceasefire so NATO can send in their troops pretending to defend Ukraine, and what’s going to happen is a false flag. 

They are going to say, oh, they shot one of our guys in the foot, therefore, that’s World War III.”

The extreme unpayable debt situation is worst in Europe.  Armstrong points out,

“Europe is so concerned with this idea of social justice. 

You can go on the Fed website and look at Europe’s miniscule quarterly growth rate and compare it to the United States. 

It’s a tiny fraction compared to the US.  Europe is committing economic suicide.  That’s what this war is about. 

If they don’t get war with Russia, the people are going to rise up with their pitchforks and go after parliament. . .. 

The EU is not going to survive.  It’s going to collapse. 

The computer says we are going into a stark global recession between 2024 and 2028.  The US will be the least affected, where Europe will probably be the worst.”

When it comes to metal, Armstrong says, “People who know war and crisis are coming are buying metals…”

“We have creative destruction.  You have AI coming in and you have unemployment rising and you have GDP rising. . .. You have shortages in commodities on top of this. . ..  Then you have geopolitical nonsense. 

Anthony Blinken (Secretary of State in the Biden Administration) put sanctions on Russia.  Look at the metals.  What did it do?  It cut off the supply of gold, silver and platinum coming out of Russia.  Now, you have China putting in a ban on exporting silver as of January 1, 2026.  

This is rather important.  China controls about 60% of the supply of silver. . .. This is one of the reasons why silver jumped up dramatically. 

This is a perfect storm.  On top of all this, NATO is there only for war.  That is it. . ..

Socrates is still saying Europe will lose badly in a war with Russia.”

Armstrong sees a bull market for gold, silver and other metals for years ahead.  One big reason is shortages in the metals.  Armstrong says, “I don’t see these shortages going away.  The bull market is more likely to go into 2032.  It will be volatile, and then you’ve got war coming.  Once you get into war, prices are going to go up even more.  It’s all a mess.  This is a perfect storm.”
There is much more in the 55-minute interview.

Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog as he goes One-on-One with Martin Armstrong to talk about the perfect horrible storm coming for the world in 2026 for 12.30.25

The weird saga of the US-sought third tanker off Venezuela which was nearly boarded by US forces before fleeing into the Atlantic continues, after US officials have newly revealed more information.

US attempts to intercept the oil tanker Bella 1 in the Atlantic have been complicated after the ship’s crew painted a Russian flag on its hull. It has avoided and evaded the US Coast Guard for more than ten days after refusing to comply with an interception near Venezuela on December 21.

Reports based on US officials describe that the crew got creative in their evasion efforts, as they’ve added a Russian tricolor to the side of the vessel and so are now claiming it is operating under Russian jurisdiction.

This has created new complications, given Washington had secured a court order authorizing the ship’s seizure due to its alleged involvement in transporting Iranian crude. But now with the newly displayed flag Russian flag, this has made enforcement more difficult under international maritime law.

The tanker was traveling toward Venezuela without any cargo at the time that US Coast Guard forces tried to board it – and then it fled into open sea, after which US assets continued shadowing the ship.

Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, authorities are allowed to board vessels that are flying false flags or lack proper registration – but in the scenario that Russia has officially registered the Bella 1, a forced boarding could risk diplomatic fallout and an international incident.

The tanker in question has been under US Treasury sanctions since 2024, as it has long been accused of transporting Iranian oil on behalf of Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The vessel is owned by Louis Marine Shipholding Enterprises, which is based in Turkey, and most of the crew are believed to be Russian, Indian, and Ukrainian.

The now apparently stymied attempt to apprehend the vessel comes soon on the heels of President Trump having ordered the US military to enforce a two-month “quarantine” of Venezuelan oil, signaling an intensification of gunboat diplomacy aimed at fostering regime instability in Caracas, with potential spillover effects that could ripple across the Caribbean into Cuba.

“While military options still exist, the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking (for),” a US official told Reuters earlier this month.

The oil tanker Bella 1 is fleeing U.S. forces after the U.S. Coast Guard tried to intercept it in the Caribbean.

During the pursuit, the crew painted a Russian flag on the ship and now claim Russian status.

The tanker is under U.S. sanctions for carrying Iranian oil and was… pic.twitter.com/WOAMA35aRp

— Clash Report (@clashreport) December 30, 2025

“The efforts so far have put tremendous pressure on Maduro, and the belief is that by late January, Venezuela will be facing an economic calamity unless it agrees to make significant concessions to the U.S,” the U.S. official told Reuters.

According to analytics firm Kpler, Caracas has shipped nearly 900,000 barrels per day this year and relies on 400 dark-fleet tankers to transport the crude, much of which is bound for China. 

Authored by Isaac Orr & Tom Pyle via RealClearEnergy,

Americans are anxious about their utility bills – and with good reason. Three quarters of U.S. residents are concerned about their electricity and gas bills rising this year, and 80% feel powerless over how much they are charged for utilities. For nearly two-thirds of U.S. billpayers, simply keeping the lights on has become a growing source of financial stress.

Those concerns are grounded in reality. U.S. electricity prices rose 27% during the Biden administration and another 11% between January and September 2025. Yet despite a national narrative eager to blame President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), the real drivers of high electricity prices are far closer to home.

Electricity affordability is shaped primarily by state policy choices, and states choosing the most expensive path are overwhelmingly blue. So, blue-state residents are experiencing the pain much more than those in red states.

A new report from Always On Energy Research and the Institute for Energy Research finds that 86% of states with electricity prices above the national average voted for Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 and 2024. In contrast, 80% of the 10 states with the lowest electricity prices are reliably red. That’s not a coincidence. Those high prices reflect a consistent pattern of state-level energy policies that dictate emissions reduction targets at the expense of affordability, reliability, and physics. 

States have the exclusive power to decide which resources supply their grids under the Federal Power Act. Governors, legislatures, and public utility commissions – not the White House – decide whether to impose renewable portfolio standards (RPS), enforce Net-Zero mandates, or prematurely retire reliable power plants. Those decisions directly determine how much families and businesses pay for electricity.

Today, 28 states enforce an RPS, requiring a certain percentage of retail electricity sales to come from renewable sources, and 16 states have 100% clean energy standards (CES) or carbon-free mandates. Many of these policies compel utilities to overbuild intermittent generation, such as wind and solar, thereby requiring significant investments in transmission, grid-scale storage, and backup generation to maintain reliability. The result is a higher total system cost, which is passed onto ratepayers in the form of higher electricity rates.

Consider that the U.S. average electricity price between January 2025 and August 2025 was 13.54 cents per kilowatt-hour. Each of the five most expensive states mandates 100% of their electricity come from renewable or carbon-free sources in the coming decades. Eight of the 10 states with the lowest electricity prices voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 2020 and 2024, and seven of the 10 don’t have renewable or carbon-free mandates.  

New York is a prime blue state example, where electricity prices were 58% higher than the national average during the same period. The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) found that New York experienced the second-fastest increase in electricity prices nationwide, with residential customers suffering a 36% increase between 2019 and 2024. PPI points to “the immense capital investment required to transform the grid and specific policy choices that increase the cost of energy production,” as well as the closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant. 

It’s clear that Governor Kathy Hochul knows exactly which policy choices are driving up electricity costs — because she’s scrambling to roll them back. Ms. Hochul has delayed implementation of the state’s cap-and-tax mandates under the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which includes a substantial renewable energy mandate requiring 70% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% carbon-free energy by 2040.

The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation defended the delay, arguing in court that the regulations would impose “extraordinary and damaging costs upon New Yorkers.” Ms. Hochul has approved two major natural gas pipelines and delayed implementation of the state’s ban on gas stoves in new buildings – a tacit admission that reliability and affordability still matter in New York.

California, however, remains committed to the most expensive path in the country with the fastest rate increase, now double the national average. For years, Governor Gavin Newsom and the California legislature have imposed on ratepayers a carbon-emissions reduction mandate, renewable mandates, solar cost-shifting through net metering, nuclear reactor closures, and EV charging subsidies.

For all of his climate-friendly posturing, Mr. Newsom signed a bill to ramp up oil drilling in Kern County, and his Energy Commission has delayed its plan to penalize refinery profits for five years. These reversals underscore a central truth: ideology will take a back seat to cost and reliability.

There’s a silver lining, however. While states can choose to raise electricity costs for their residents through bad policies, they can also choose to lower costs through good policies. For instance, Florida is the second-largest electricity producer in the country, behind only Texas. Residents require air conditioning for its hot, humid summers and heating in its mild winters. However, Florida delivers electricity at prices 2% below the U.S. average—mainly because it generates 75% of its power from imported natural gas. It has avoided aggressive climate mandates and delivers below-average electricity prices despite frequent hurricanes that require ongoing investment in the grid. 

Louisiana and Kentucky have also invested in wise policies. Louisiana posted the third-lowest electricity rates in the U.S. in 2025, and Kentucky had the lowest rates east of the Mississippi River. Nearly three-quarters of Louisiana’s electricity is generated from natural gas, leveraging its abundant natural gas production and robust pipeline network. Kentucky, similarly, leverages its coal resources to generate 67% of the state’s electricity, with another 26% by natural gas. Neither has pursued aggressive carbon emissions reduction or renewable energy mandates.

Pinning the blame on the federal government and President Trump, as Democrats have been eager to do, ignores the vital role that states play in delivering affordable, reliable electricity. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright recognizes the same, stating on Fox News that “Electricity prices have risen very fast in blue states with restrictive renewable portfolio standards.” 

The Department of Energy and President Trump can set the tone, but they don’t dictate the composition of state grids or the bills consumers receive each month. Those decisions rest squarely with governors, legislators, and regulators. Ultimately, it’s up to the states to prioritize reliable, affordable, dispatchable generation and drive down electricity prices.

High electricity rates aren’t an unavoidable consequence of modern life or federal policy. They are the predictable outcome of state-level choices that ignore reliability, undervalue dispatchable generation, and impose rigid mandates regardless of cost. Americans deserve leaders who recognize that keeping the lights on at a modest price isn’t optional. The states keeping electricity affordable today offer a roadmap for those willing to learn.

Isaac Orr is vice president of research at Always On Energy Research, a nonprofit energy modeling firm.

Tom Pyle is President of the Institute for Energy Research, a nonprofit energy research organization.

Last month Reuters revealed that roughly 10% of Meta’s annual revenue, or $16 billion, comes from advertising scams and banned goods – as the company only bans advertisers when its systems detect a 95% probability of fraud, while charging higher ad fees to suspicious buyers – a system critics describe as “pay to play.”

Data from fraud-reporting firm SafelyHQ shows Facebook is cited in 85% of scam reports that identify a platform, with more than 50,000 verified complaints collected so far, which CEO Patrick Quade suggests an implied victim count in the “tens of millions.”

Now, internal documents reviewed by Reuters indicate that Meta developed tools to both reduce scam advertising, and to limit regulators’ visibility into said ads after governments threatened measures that could severely cripple advertising revenue by forcing the company to reveal the identity of advertisers.

The efforts began last year after Japanese regulators highlighted a surge of scam advertising on Facebook and Instagram. The fraudulent ads included fake investment opportunities and artificial-intelligence-generated celebrity endorsements. Fearing that Japanese authorities might impose strict verification and transparency requirements that would materially affect its advertising business, the company launched an enforcement push aimed at reducing the number of fraudulent ads. At the same time, the documents show, the company focused on how those ads appeared to regulators.

The Ad Library and “Prevalence Perception”

Meta’s remedy centered on its ‘Ad Library,’ a public database designed to allow users to search for ads running on Facebook and Instagram. Meta employees realized Japanese regulators were using keyword searches in the library as a simple measure of the company’s effectiveness at tackling scams.

To improve performance on that measure, Meta staff identified the keywords and celebrity names most frequently used by Japanese Ad Library users. They then repeatedly ran those searches themselves, deleting ads that appeared fraudulent from both the Ad Library and Meta’s platforms.

Internally, the documents describe this work as managing the “prevalence perception” of scams. The stated objective was to make problematic content “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”

The tactic produced rapid results. Within weeks, Meta staff reported finding fewer than 100 scam ads in a week, followed by several consecutive days in which searches returned none. A Japanese legislator publicly praised the apparent improvement, and Japan ultimately did not impose the advertiser-verification rules Meta had feared.

From Local Response to Global Strategy

Given their success in dealing with Japan, Meta incorporated the approach into what internal documents describe as a “general global playbook” for responding to regulatory scrutiny worldwide. The same techniques – scrubbing Ad Library search results and reducing the discoverability of scams – were later deployed in markets including the United States, Europe, India, Australia, Brazil and Thailand.

This was all part of a broader strategy for delaying or weakening regulatory action, according to the report – with the playbook guiding Meta officials to offer voluntary measures, requesting time to assess their impact, and resisting universal advertiser verification unless laws leave no alternative.

Former Meta fraud investigator Sandeep Abraham, who left the company in 2023, said the approach distorts the transparency the Ad Library was meant to provide. Rather than offering an accurate view of advertising on Meta’s platforms, he said, it presents a curated picture optimized for regulatory review. Abraham described the tactic as “regulatory theater.”

Meta disputes that characterization. Company spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that removing scam ads from the Ad Library is not misleading because the ads are removed from Meta’s systems overall. Fewer scams appearing in the library, he said, indicate fewer scams on the platform.

“To suggest otherwise is disingenuous,” Stone said. 

Yet, the best solution would be costly – as Meta has long recognized that universal advertiser verification would significantly reduce scam activity. Internal analyses indicate the company could implement such a system globally in less than six weeks – yet the company has repeatedly balked at the cost. Executives estimated that universal verification would require roughly $2 billion to implement and could eliminate up to 4.8% of total revenue by blocking unverified advertisers. Despite generating $164.5 billion in revenue last year, nearly all from advertising, the company chose not to proceed.

Internal data show that unverified advertisers account for a disproportionate share of harm. One 2022 analysis found that 70% of newly active advertisers were promoting scams, illicit goods or low-quality products.

Instead of adopting verification, Meta chose what documents describe as a “reactive only” stance, accepting universal verification only where mandated by law.

Whack-a-Mole

Despite Meta’s playbook, Taiwanese regulators dropped the hammer – threatening steep fines for unverified financial scam ads. Meta rushed to comply with new rules requiring advertiser verification, which authorities said coincided with dramatic reductions in investment and impersonation scams.

Meta’s own analyses, however, showed that much of the blocked fraudulent advertising was rerouted to users in other countries, displacing both revenue and consumer harm rather than eliminating it. Unless verification was enforced globally, staff warned, Meta would be relocating scams rather than eradicating them.

Even then, the documents show, the financial costs to Meta have remained small. Meta’s own tests showed verification immediately reduced scam ads in those countries by as much as 29%. But much of the lost revenue was recouped because the same blocked ads continued to run in other markets.

If an unverified advertiser is blocked from showing ads in Taiwan, for example, Meta will show those ads more frequently to users elsewhere, creating a whack-a-mole dynamic in which scam ads prohibited in one jurisdiction pop up in another. In the case of blocked ads in Taiwan, “revenue was redistributed/rerouted to the remaining target countries,” one March 2025 document said, adding that consumer injury gets displaced, too. “This would go for harm as well,” the document noted. -Reuters

Hong Kong is another example – where Meta lobbyists moved quickly in 2024 to blunt a proposal by financial regulators that would have required verification of advertisers promoting investment products. To preempt stricter rules, Meta staff helped regulators draft a voluntary “anti-scam charter” and coordinated with Google to present what one lobbyist described internally as a “united front.” The final language, the documents note, imposed no new verification requirements or product changes. In an internal message celebrating the outcome, a Meta lobbyist wrote that regulators had relaxed measures that would have forced identity checks for financial advertisers, adding that officials expressed “huge appreciation” for Meta’s participation. Hong Kong regulators later said advertiser verification was only one of several tools available to platforms and emphasized that they lacked authority to mandate such requirements, while urging social media companies to do more to detect and remove fraudulent content.

In a statement, Hong Kong financial regulators said that “advertiser verification is one of many ways social media platforms can protect the investment public.”

In light of these findings, Meta has assigned scam handling its highest internal risk rating for 2025, citing regulatory, legal, reputational and financial exposure. One internal estimate warned that potential liability in Europe and Britain alone could cost as much as $9.3 billion.

Meanwhile, regulatory scrutiny has intensified – with European authorities having formally requested information about Meta’s handling of scam ads, and two U.S. senators urging federal agencies to investigate the company. The attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands has sued Meta, alleging it knowingly profited from fraud. Meta has said it strongly disagrees with the allegations.

For now, the documents suggest Meta believes its approach is working.