Month: February 2026

As the Trump administration’s Department of Energy moves to wipe out over $83 billion in “Green New Scam” loans and conditional commitments approved in the final months of the Biden administration, a new analysis reveals that not only did the rush to spend accelerate right after Biden’s disastrous June 27, 2024 debate with now-President Donald Trump, senior Biden officials landed roles at organizations that received agency funding. In some cases, money was steered to NGOs that the officials worked for before joining the government – where they then returned following the cash bonanza. 

Following the debate where Biden revealed how cooked he is, nonprofit watchdog Democracy Restored found that billions of dollars began rushing out the door to over a dozen environmental and climate-focused NGOs, including that Alliance for Sustainable Energy, Climate United Fund, the Ocean Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy, and Rocky Mountain Institute, according to Just the News. 

Using data from USASpending.gov, Democracy Resorted found that federal agencies had obligated more than $600 million in taxpayer money to these organizations since July 1, 2024. The obligations began to drop the day after the election. Obligations to these same organizations since Nov. 5, 2024 fell to $246 million. 

While various agencies were providing millions in support to these organizations, high-level officials within the agencies either went to work for them after Trump took office, or they had previously worked for them prior to assuming key roles at the agencies under Biden. -JTN

Using data from USASpending.gov, Democracy Restored found that federal agencies obligated more than $600 million to environmental and climate-focused nonprofits beginning July 1, 2024 — including the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, Climate United Fund, Ocean Conservancy, Nature Conservancy, and Rocky Mountain Institute.

That flow of taxpayer cash slowed dramatically after the election. Since Nov. 5, 2024, obligations to the same organizations dropped to $246 million, according to the watchdog group.

At the same time, Democracy Restored identified a pattern that raised eyebrows: senior federal officials moving into roles at organizations that received agency funding — or having previously worked for them before holding key government posts.

I think the money being shoveled out after President Biden’s debate and the apparent revolving door of appointees going to recipients of these federal funds raises many questions about the timing of the money, the impact of special interests in the Biden administration and the general ethics surrounding this behavior,” said Houston Keene, director of Democracy Restored, in comments to Just the News.

Loan office under fire

Scrutiny has focused on the Department of Energy’s Loans Programs Office, now renamed the Office of Energy Dominancy Financing.

In August 2024, the DOE awarded the World Resources Institute a $1 million grant aimed at supporting school bus fleet electrification training and collaboration.

Two former senior DOE officials are now senior fellows at the institute: Jigar Shah, who served as director of the Loans Programs Office, and Jennifer Wilcox, who was principal deputy assistant secretary at the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

Shah’s tenure has drawn particular attention. The Washington Free Beacon reported in May that the Loans Programs Office approved a loan to Plug Power, a New York-based green hydrogen company, in May 2024.

According to the repoprt Shah’s private equity firm previously invested $100 million in Plug Power, and the company once described the firm as a “longstanding partner.” Shah told the Beacon that he did not work directly on Plug Power’s loan and said the company applied before he joined the office.

An Office of Inspector General audit released in December found that 20% of Loans Programs Office employees reviewed had a potential conflict of interest – or the appearance of impaired impartiality – while performing their duties.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright testified in May that the office issued roughly $40 billion in loans over the prior 15 years, but that figure ballooned to $100 billion in just the final 76 days of the Biden administration. Wright said those rushed loan agreements lacked safeguards traditionally required by the DOE.

The revolving door keeps spinning

Democracy Restored’s review identified other examples of officials cycling between government agencies and nonprofit recipients.

Renee Stone, formerly in senior leadership roles at NOAA, now serves as vice president of climate for the Audubon Society. During the Biden administration, Audubon received nearly $4 million across three grants for habitat restoration projects.

Monica Medina, another former NOAA official, is now a distinguished fellow at Conservation International, which received a $9 million grant in 2023 for an ecosystem restoration project in Hawaii.

Chetan Hebbale, once a policy adviser in the White House, later joined the Nature Conservancy as a climate and conservation finance policy adviser. The organization received more than $6 million in federal funding during Biden’s term.

Federal ethics law restricts certain post-government actions by former senior officials, but it does not prohibit them from accepting employment with private or nonprofit organizations — even those that received government funding.

Keene emphasized that there is no evidence any of these individuals directly worked on the grants in question, but said the relationships warrant closer examination.

Offshore wind ties raise questions

The Biden administration’s aggressive push for 30 gigawatts of offshore wind also drew scrutiny.

Oceans Conservancy, a vocal supporter of offshore wind expansion, received nearly $6 million in two grants from NOAA during the Biden years. The group has also received support from Orsted, a major offshore wind developer.

Susan Ruffo, who previously served as managing director of international initiatives at Oceans Conservancy, later worked for NOAA and other federal agencies.

“I think it says a lot about the stewardship of tax dollars under the Biden administration,” Keene said. “If you were an organization that agreed with the administration politically, they weren’t afraid to cut you a check. That’s a problem for the taxpayer.”

Just hours after Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) rebuffed Bill and Hillary Clinton’s attorney’s last-ditch conditional offer, the former president and former secretary of state appear to have acquiesced and agreed to key demands from the Republican-led House Oversight Committee to testify about Jeffrey Epstein in a closed-door deposition.

The initial correspondence, obtained by CNN, revealed that the Clintons’ team has been in search of an off-ramp for days.

Attorneys for Bill and Hillary have been in discussion with the Republican-led committee multiple times since lawmakers from both parties voted in January to hold the Clintons in contempt for refusing to appear for in-person depositions as part of the panel’s investigation into Epstein.

“It has been nearly six months since your clients first received the Committee’s subpoena, more than three months since the original date of their depositions, and nearly three weeks since they failed to appear for their depositions commensurate with the Committee’s lawful subpoenas,” Comer wrote.

“Your clients’ desire for special treatment is both frustrating and an affront to the American people’s desire for transparency.”

As CNN reports, according to the letter dated January 31, the Clintons’ lawyers laid out the terms under which the former president would sit for a voluntary, transcribed interview.

He would sit for four hours in New York City for an interview limited to the scope of the Epstein probe, they said.

Lawmakers from both parties and their staff could ask questions, and the lawyers said both the Clintons and the committee could have their own transcriber present, according to the letter.

Comer rejected the offer from the Clintons’ attorneys as “unreasonable” and said he could not accept such terms.

He could not agree, he said, to changing the interview from a sworn deposition to a voluntary interview, and rejected the way in which the attorneys sought to limit the interview’s scope. 

“But given that he has already failed to appear for a deposition and has refused for several months to provide the Committee with in-person testimony, the Committee cannot simply have faith that President Clinton will not refuse to answer questions at a transcribed interview, resulting in the Committee being right back where it is today,” the Kentucky Republican wrote.

By rejecting the Clintons’ initial offer, Comer had all but ensured that the House would hold a final vote this week on the contempt resolutions.

“Your clients’ desire for special treatment is both frustrating and an affront to the American people’s desire for transparency,” Mr. Comer wrote in a letter to the Clintons’ lawyers on Monday that was also obtained by The New York Times.

Indeed, as The NYTimes reports, after some Democrats on the panel joined Republicans in a vote to recommend charging them with criminal contempt, an extraordinary first step in referring them to the Justice Department for prosecution, the Clintons ultimately waved the white flag and agreed to fully comply with Mr. Comer’s demands.

In an email sent to Mr. Comer on Monday evening, attorneys for the Clintons said their clients would “appear for depositions on mutually agreeable dates” and asked that the House not move forward with a contempt vote, which had been slated for Wednesday.

However, it was not immediately clear Monday evening whether Comer would accept the Clintons’ terms and, subsequently, whether the contempt votes would still take place.

Comer said:

“The Clintons’ counsel has said they agree to terms, but those terms lack clarity yet again and they have provided no dates for their depositions. The only reason they have said they agree to terms is because the House has moved forward with contempt.”

“I will clarify the terms they are agreeing to and then discuss next steps with my committee members,” Comer said in a statement.

For Mr. Clinton to testify in the Epstein investigation would be nearly unprecedented.

No former president has appeared before Congress since 1983, when President Gerald R. Ford did so to discuss the celebration of the 1987 bicentennial of the enactment of the Constitution.

When Mr. Trump was subpoenaed in 2022 by the select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, after he had left office, he sued the panel to try to block it. The panel ultimately withdrew the subpoena.

It was a victory for the Republican chairman, shifting the focus of his panel’s Epstein investigation onto prominent Democrats who once associated with the disgraced financier and his longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Via Brian McGlinchey at Stark Realities

Throughout the Israel Defense Forces’ post-Oct 7 war on Gaza, the State of Israel and its collaborators and sympathizers around the world have ridiculed the alarming death toll maintained by Palestinian health authorities, dismissing the count as a gross exaggeration aimed at maliciously demonizing Israel. Now, after more than two years of casting doubts, the IDF has finally admitted its own estimates match the Gaza Health Ministry’s accounting of some 70,000 confirmed dead.

It’s a grand example of Israel’s long-running practice of vehemently denying accusations — and vilifying accusers — before eventually acknowledging their validity. Those acknowledgements usually come after overwhelming evidence has been produced, by which time the denials have provided some degree of protection for Israel’s standing. Where the Gaza death toll is concerned, the IDF’s capitulation seems to some extent preemptive, in anticipation of an eventual opening of Gaza to journalists from around the world. However, the long string of denials helped muddy the waters, giving Israel and its allies a degree of cover as the IDF’s astonishing death-and-destruction blitz was carried out.

The IDF’s admission came in a Thursday briefing given to reporters by a senior military official. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said approximately 70,000 people have died in Gaza since the Oct 7, 2023 invasion of Israel by Hamas militants. As of Sunday, Gaza health officials say 71,795 have died.

Importantly, both the IDF official and the Gaza Health Ministry says these numbers do not include bodies yet to be discovered under the incomprehensible volume of rubble across Gaza. The Gaza ministry says its numbers only reflect deaths directly resulting from military fire, excluding those who’ve died from disease and malnutrition.

Neither party has yet broken down the death toll into combatants and civilians. However, leading up to the October ceasefire, the IDF said it had killed at least 22,000 combatants in Gaza. Placed atop this week’s 70,000 denominator, that claim now suggests that civilians account for a significant majority of those killed by the IDF. Netanyahu has boasted that the Gaza campaign has achieved the “lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare.” However, an IDF report leaked in August concluded that 83% of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces were civilians.

The mere fact that the Gaza Health Ministry is part of a Hamas government was all that Israel’s and its proxies and supporters needed to promote the assumption that the ministry’s death tally was a lie — and to buy time for Israel to continue its shattering of Gaza, with financial, military and diplomatic backing of the the United States and other Western governments.

“The Biden administration, Congress, and the U.S. media played along with Israel’s lies and deception about the horrific death toll in Gaza — over 80 percent civilians; over half, women and children — so that they could gaslight Americans into continued support for Israel,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of human rights group DAWN, told the Intercept after the IDF’s capitulation on the death toll.

President Biden was among the first to who sought to discredit the fatality figures coming from Gaza. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden told a reporter 18 days after Oct 7, when Gaza authorities had already reported more than 6,000 dead from IDF fire. “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

Attacks on the Health Ministry’s fatality reporting came from every type of Israel supporter, from politicians to network-TV “analysts” to think tanks and individual social media users. The Intercept’s Jonah Valdez assembled a catalogue of such criticism; here’s a sampling:

• “Every day, Hamas churns out misinformation. They inflate casualty numbers and make false accusations to smear Israel’s reputation,” said Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer.

• “The data that we hear from Hamas is way, way exaggerated, the number of actually purely innocent civilians that have been killed are a tiny fraction,” said Alan Dershowitz, the Israel-promoting lawyer and law professor.

• “Validating the public health arm of Hamas is like validating the public health arms of Al Qaeda and ISIS or the public health arms of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan,” said New York Rep. Ritchie Torres.

• Decrying the media citations of Health Ministry data, the Anti-Defamation League said the Hamas-controlled ministry “distorts information about the casualties in Gaza.”

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a thinly-disguised component of the sprawling Israel lobby, criticized the Biden White House for eventually giving some credence to the Gaza Health Ministry’s reporting. “As a result of trusting numbers from a Hamas-controlled entity, the Biden administration has become more focused on the restraints it can put on Israeli forces than how it can help accelerate Hamas’s defeat,” said senior fellow David Adesnik.

Efforts to suppress the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll went far beyond pointed rhetoric. In 2024, Israel-catering Republicans and Democrats in the US House passed an amendment that would have barred the State Department from citing the numbers. While it didn’t become law, a similar measure in the defense bill enacted later that year made it illegal for the Pentagon to cite the Health Ministry’s fatality numbers as “authoritative.” It’s doubtful that, in the wake of the IDF’s admission, a repeal is now in the offing.

Throughout the war, many third parties — from new bureaus to the World Health Organization and researchers at Johns Hopkins — deemed the Gaza Health Ministry numbers legitimate, based on analysis of the ministry’s detailed reporting, and the ministry’s record of accuracy over previous Israeli military campaigns.

Last summer, a Pentagon insider quietly said that, despite public statements by spokespeople and top officials, the US government believed the Health Ministry’s reporting too. “Along with the World Health Organization and United Nations, we (Department of Defense, Department of State and the U.S. Intelligence Community) consider the Gaza Health Ministry figures to be generally reliable (though not precise),” wrote Army Col Nathan McCormack in a comment exchange on X, using a semi-anonymous, personal account.

In a 2023 reply to another X user, McCormack wrote, “Israel’s responses always (always—not hyperbole) disproportionately target Palestinian civilians.” In June 2025, after Jewish News Syndicate publicized these posts and others that were sharply critical of Israel, McCormack was forced out of his Israel-and-Levant-focused role supporting the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Beyond dismissing the top-line number of deaths reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, Israel has also denied credible accusations that IDF soldiers have frequently and deliberately targeted civilians. In addition to the accounts of Palestinians, accusations have also poured forth from American and European doctors who’ve voluntarily traveled to Gaza and worked in its bombed and blood-splattered hospitals.

“I have two children that I have photographs of, that were shot so perfectly in the chest I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately — and directly on the side of the head, in the same child,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish orthopedic surgeon in North Carolina and vice president of the International College of Surgeons, told CBS Sunday Morning. “No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the ‘world’s best sniper.’ And they’re dead-center shots.”

Surgeon, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, on what he witnessed in his first month in Gaza. On @CBSSunday

“No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world’s best sniper.” pic.twitter.com/wAoRWaNngo

— Samira Mohyeddin سمیرا (@SMohyeddin) July 22, 2024

Twenty other visiting doctors confirmed Perlmutter’s characterization of the IDF’s conduct. One, also an American, said he couldn’t believe what he was seeing on CT scans — “that this many children could be admitted to a single hospital with gunshot wounds to the head.” Other groups of doctors have given similar testimonies to other outlets. Israel has said the claim of IDF soldiers targeting civilians is “entirely unfounded and is categorically rejected.”

Israel has also denied widespread reports —substantiated by video — that soldiers shot at civilians gathering at aid distribution points set up last May as malnutrition surged in Gaza and global outrage mounted. By August, more than 1,300 Palestinians were reportedly killed as they sought aid. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called such claims an antisemitic “blood libel.” However, enlisted soldiers and officers told Haaretz that lethal fire was routinely used to control crowds. Said one:

“It’s a killing field. Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

Other whistleblowers said the IDF routinely killed civilians by dropping hand grenades from modified commercial drones on anyone who wandered into areas of Gaza that were declared off-limits by Israel — even though those forbidden areas weren’t marked on the ground. The IDF campaign has also been marked by attacks on hospitals and ambulances, including an incident where soldiers fired on Palestinian emergency vehicles without provocation, then crushed the vehicles and buried them with bulldozers. The IDF’s initial claim that the vehicles had acted suspiciously were belied by video captured by one of the men killed by Israeli fire.

Then there’s Israel’s relentless bombing that systematically rendered vast swaths of Gaza uninhabitable. The Israeli government condemned accusations that it was engaged in an ethnic cleansing campaign, but those denials fly in the face of explicit statements by senior members of Israel’s government.

“Within a few months…Gaza will be totally destroyed,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich assured a West Bank settlers conference last May. “The Gazan citizens will be concentrated in the south. They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

RAFAH, GAZA BEFORE & AFTER.

-TRT World pic.twitter.com/EusxcxEHdP

— International Defence Analysis (@Defence_IDA) July 3, 2025

After the Times of Israel and Haaretz reported the IDF senior official’s validation of Gaza’s death-toll numbers, an IDF spokesman attempted to deflect attention, using social media to say “the details published do not reflect official IDF data.” Stopping short of categorically refuting the official’s statements, the post seemed to reflect an IDF irked that an official prematurely spilled the beans without permission. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels,” the post concluded.

If and when the IDF finally lets foreign journalists roam in Gaza, we’ll likely see even more validation of war-crime accusations. As international criminal lawyer Jonathan Meta wrote in a weekend opinion piece at the Times of Israel, “If, for two years, a number was dismissed as propaganda, and then, suddenly, treated as a close approximation, what else was waved away not because it was false, but because it was inconvenient?”

Stark Realities: Invigoratingly unorthodox perspectives for intellectually honest readers. Join thousands of free subscribers at starkrealities.substack.com

* * *

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge

Confirming earlier reports, late on Monday Elon Musk said SpaceX has acquired xAI, a deal that combines his powerful rocket-and-satellite business with his artificial-intelligence startup that is facing steep competition. SpaceX confirmed the deal Monday, posting a memo Musk sent out about the arrangement on its website. 

The deal gives SpaceX a valuation of $1 trillion, and xAI a value of $250 billion, Bloomberg added citing sources. The combined company’s valuation of $1.25 trillion was announced to employees in a memo on Monday.

“SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform,

The deal brings together two of the largest closely held companies in the world. XAI raised funds at a $230 billion valuation in January, while SpaceX was set to go ahead with a share sale in December at a valuation of about $800 billion. Additionally, the combination will bring together a mature and dominant company in SpaceX, with one that is in a nascent stage. Musk’s xAI is also facing formidable competition from OpenAI, Anthropic and others to build large language models and big businesses around AI technology.

Terms of the offering including price and valuation weren’t disclosed in the statement on SpaceX’s website. 

The company is still expecting to hold an initial public offering later this year, one of the people said. SpaceX had been planning an IPO that could raise as much as $50 billion, Bloomberg News reported earlier.

In his memo, Musk also said global electricity demand for AI can’t be met with data centers on the ground, and that space-based technology will be the only way to scale up AI over the long term (something we discussed in December, sharing several stock picks which have since more than doubled). 

He pitched using solar power from space as a transformative option to ramp up computing resources needed for AI. The executive has been frequently discussing orbital data centers at events and on X.

Polymarket odds of a deal being formalized by June 30 initially came out around 20% on Jan 30 when the first reports of a combination emerged. They then spiked earlier today after the Bloomberg report, and are now trading at 100%. 

*ELON MUSK’S SPACEX CONFIRMS MERGER WITH XAI IN COMPANY MEMO

And we have lift off as odds hit 98%. Congrats to those who bought. https://t.co/k2lqtGyOAR pic.twitter.com/JK6uCEeZ8X

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 2, 2026

On Friday, SpaceX said in a regulatory filing that it wants to deploy an orbital AI network with up to one million satellites over time. The company will need to secure regulatory permission to deploy that fleet. Even if it gets it, which will be problematic to say the least under any Democratic regime, it is unclear just how SpaceX will provide physical service for the airborne data centers. 

It will also need to demonstrate further progress with Starship, a powerful two-stage rocket the company has been testing in flight since 2023. Starship hasn’t yet deployed an operational payload during the test missions, and SpaceX has grappled with setbacks during the development campaign. 

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported SpaceX and xAI were planning the tie-up, and other news organizations reported on discussions about the deal. 

The deal further entangles Musk’s various business ventures. The billionaire acquired Twitter in late 2022, renamed it X, then merged the site with his artificial intelligence startup xAI in a $33 billion deal. XAI, which also operates chatbot Grok, is an expensive operation, burning around $1 billion a month in service of its stated ambition to gain “a deeper understanding of our universe.” A merger with SpaceX will pool capital and talent, while providing access to computing power. 

SpaceX stands out as arguably Elon’s most successful and consistent business. The company, the only American one that can routinely send astronauts to and from the International Space Station, is a key rocket launch provider for both NASA and the US Department of Defense, which the White House has moved to rename the Department of War. The increasing revenue it’s generating from the Starlink network of more than 9,000 satellites is even more significant, now outpacing launch sales and presenting a potential source of funding for xAI’s capital-intensive business.

Authored by Amin Hagshanas via Cointelegraph,

A UAE-backed investment vehicle quietly agreed to buy nearly half of World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency startup linked to President Donald Trump, just days before he returned to the White House, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Aryam Investment 1, an Abu Dhabi entity backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, signed a deal in January 2025 to purchase a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial for $500 million, the Journal said, citing documents and people familiar with the matter.

Half of that amount was paid upfront, sending $187 million to Trump family-controlled entities, with additional tens of millions flowing to entities tied to co-founders, including relatives of US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, per the report.

The agreement was reportedly signed by Eric Trump. The Journal reported that the deal had not been publicly disclosed, despite World Liberty later revealing that the Trump family’s stake had fallen sharply.

Tahnoon’s ambitions grow after Trump election

Tahnoon, the brother of the United Arab Emirates president and the country’s national security adviser, has been central to Abu Dhabi’s push to become a global leader in artificial intelligence. Under the Biden administration, his efforts to secure advanced US-made AI chips were limited amid concerns that sensitive technology could reach China, particularly through companies such as G42.

Following Trump’s election, those efforts gained momentum. Tahnoon met multiple times with Trump and senior US officials, and within months the administration committed to granting the UAE access to hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips annually.

The Journal reported that executives from G42 helped manage Aryam Investment 1 and took board seats at World Liberty as part of the deal, making Aryam the startup’s largest outside shareholder. Weeks before the US-UAE chip framework was announced, another Tahnoon-led firm, MGX, used World Liberty’s stablecoin to complete a $2 billion investment into Binance.

World Liberty and the White House have reportedly denied any wrongdoing. Spokespeople told the Journal that President Trump was not involved in the deal and that it did not provide any influence over US policy.

World Liberty faces US probe calls

Last year, Democratic senators called on US authorities to investigate alleged links between World Liberty Financial’s token sales and sanctioned foreign actors. In a Nov. letter to the Justice Department and Treasury, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed cited claims that WLFI governance tokens were bought by blockchain addresses tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, as well as Russian- and Iranian-linked entities.

The controversy is heightened by WLFI’s ownership structure, which gives Trump family-linked entities control over the majority of token revenue. Lawmakers argue this creates a direct conflict of interest, as most proceeds from token sales flow to the president’s family.

Lawmakers in the California State Assembly have moved to direct the Transportation Commission to prepare a study on the effects of a road charge for delivery to the legislature.  A road charge is a program that imposes fees based on the number of miles each citizen drives over a specified period, and is designed to offset gas tax losses from the wider use of electric cars on California roads. 

In 2014, California passed Senate Bill 1077, authorizing a “Road Usage Charge Technical Advisory Committee” to explore whether the state could replace its gas tax with a mileage-driven tax.  The project was based on the assumption that “cleaner vehicles” and a potential zero-emission future would lead to dwindling gas tax revenues. 

The state has been running road charge pilot programs since 2016. Last year, a pilot project concluded where mileage rates were set at 2.5 cents per mile for light-duty vehicles, such as cars, and other vehicles weighing less than 10,000 pounds. The rate for heavy-duty vehicles is dependent on their weight.

Today, proponents complain that implementation is not going fast enough.  The latest bill is being called an “extension” of the pilot project and not a move to pass the actual tax.   Democrats assert that Republicans are interfering with the project and misrepresenting its intent.  However, taxes based on climate ideology are often kept on the shelf by exploratory committees, waiting for politically opportune moments to pass them quickly with minimal public opposition or debate.  The Democrats are simply biding their time.

It is not clear yet when the mileage tax will be made official or if it will replace the gas tax; it is far more likely that both taxes would ultimately exist in tandem.  Republicans argue that the tax is unfair to residents of rural counties where driving distances are much greater and gas vehicles are common.  The tax is useful, though, for climate “re-wilding”:  The globalist idea of forcing people to abandon rural areas and move into population centers so that large swaths of the nation can be “returned to nature.”   

California currently has the highest gas taxes in the country.  Total state taxes and environmental fees frequently exceeding .90 cents per gallon, contributing significantly to the nation’s highest pump prices ($4.30 per gallon compared to a national average of $2.87). 

Over the past few years Governor Gavin Newsom and Democrats have sought to deflect blame for the state’s exorbitant fuel costs by accusing oil companies of “price gouging” consumers; a claim which was ultimately proven false the government’s own investigations. State interference has led to multiple refinery closures and the loss of numerous small business gas stations; prices are expected to rise even further.  

The relentless (and baseless) hostility towards the oil industry in liberal states is forcing citizens into electric vehicles, but officials have no intention of letting the public escape taxation.  The concept goes well beyond the old school idea of toll roads.  A charge for mileage could require intrusive surveillance technology, including “black box” GPS devices in every vehicle to track miles driven.  Or, yearly inspections of odometers with arduous paperwork and bureaucratic red tape. 

If they can’t tax the gas, they will tax residents simply for driving.  Next comes a tax simply for breathing.          

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

U.S. authorities have located more than 145,000 illegal immigrant children who were previously unaccounted for under the Biden administration, border czar Tom Homan said on Jan. 30.

Homan said the findings came as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI, and the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement continue efforts to locate “more than 300,000 unaccompanied alien children” whom he said had been “turned over to unvetted sponsors, lost track of, and weren’t looking forward” under the Biden administration.

“Through their outstanding efforts, they have so far been able to locate more than 145,000,” the border czar said on X. Homan did not provide details on the status or condition of the children.

“President [Donald] Trump promised that we would find these children, and under his strong leadership and with his unwavering support, the patriots at these, and other partner, agencies have been—and will continue to do—just that,” he added.

The investigation followed an August 2024 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General, which showed that more than 323,000 illegal immigrant children were unaccounted for in the United States.

Of those, more than 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children had not been served court notices by ICE as of May 2024, while another 32,000 were served notices to appear in court but failed to do so, according to the report.

The Trump administration has launched efforts to find and track these children after taking office in January last year. In December, federal agencies located more than 129,143 illegal immigrant children, according to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

“Too many of these children were exploited, trafficked, and abused. We will continue to ramp up efforts and will not stop until every last child is found,” Noem said on Dec. 19, 2025.

DHS said last November that ICE launched an initiative with state and local law enforcement to conduct welfare checks on 450,000 illegal immigrant children who were placed with unvetted sponsors under the Biden administration. The initiative aims to ensure children’s safety and protect them from exploitation, the agency said.

DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the Trump administration has located more than 24,400 of those children through visits and door-to-door checks.

“Many of the children who came across the border unaccompanied were allowed to be placed with sponsors who were smugglers and sex traffickers,” McLaughlin said in a November 2025 statement.

“We’ve jump-started our efforts to rescue children who were victims of sex and labor trafficking by working with our state and local law enforcement partners to locate these children.”

“President Trump and Secretary Noem are laser-focused on protecting children and will continue to work with federal, state, and local law enforcement to reunite children with their families,” she added.