Just three months ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) touted the “tangible, immediate benefits” of the GOP’s policies.
“We
made promises, we’re keeping our promises by every conceivable metric,”
he said, pointing to lower inflation, interest rates, and gas prices.
“Americans are better off today under Republican governance than they
were under the Democrats. And these trends are only going to continue.”
While
the economy’s performance already didn’t justify Johnson’s exuberant
rhetoric at the time, and Americans had long soured on Donald Trump’s
job performance, especially with regard to his inability to lower their
cost of living, things then were merely bad for Republicans.
Now they are much, much worse.
On
Tuesday, the Department of Labor announced that the consumer price
index had soared to 3.8 percent in April, the highest level in nearly
three years, and that inflation outpaced real wage gains for the first
time since early 2023.
In addition, the price
of gasoline has skyrocketed 50 percent since Johnson proclaimed that
“the tangible, immediate benefits of our policies are indisputable.”
What
is indisputable is that the war in Iran and Trump’s tariffs are to
blame for higher prices, even though Republicans would love to pass the
buck to his predecessor Joe Biden.
Klaus is 100% correct. And the American people know it with most able to publicly admit it. Sarah Davis (THE HILL) notes, "A
majority of Americans blame President Trump for heightened consumer
costs, according to new polling. A new CNN survey released on Tuesday
found that 77 percent of U.S. adults believe the president’s policies
have increased the cost of living in their communities. Eight percent
said his administration has decreased costs, while 16 percent believe
these policies have had 'no effect'." Rebecca Schneid (TIME) reports:
The
war in Iran, a devastating drought, and President Donald Trump’s
sweeping tariff regime have combined to send the prices of basic goods
and staples soaring for Americans, according to new figures from the
Labor Department.
Inflation surged to a
three-year high of 3.8% by the end of April, according to the Consumer
Price Index on Tuesday, rising faster than wages, which grew by 3.6%.
Responding
to a question about rising inflation on Tuesday, President Donald Trump
told reporters that the “only thing” that matters when discussing Iran
is its potential for a nuclear weapon.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody,” he said.
Mary Whitfill Roeloffs (FORBES) notes Chump's words as well:
“Not
even a little bit‚” Trump said when asked how much “Americans’
financial situations” are motivating him to reach a deal to end the war
in Iran. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t
think about anybody.”
That's Donald's clear screw-you to American consumers.
MS NOW’s Morning Joe crew seized on remarks made by President Donald Trump on Tuesday that he “doesn’t think about” working Americans’ war-pinched financial woes when he pushes for a deal with Iran, as the hosts roundly trashed the president for being “obsessed” with “nonsense” vanity projects with ballooning costs.
[. . .]
“‘I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.’ President Trump, with that admission to a reporter yesterday,” co-host Mika Brzezinski said.
Host Joe Scarborough interrupted, stunned: “I mean, really? Come on. Like Democrats are now going, wait, is he –”
“Is he saying that openly?” Brzezinski finished.
Co-host Willie Geist weighed in, describing the moment as a “clip and save for Democrats throughout this campaign season.”
Geist continued: “He’s been showing that he doesn’t care about Americans financial situations since the beginning of this war, as gas prices and food prices have risen. Now he’s just saying it out loud – ‘I actually don’t care.’”
“I was thinking back to like, all those times where you had to interpret or spin a president being out of touch, George H.W. Bush misreading the grocery scanner or whatever. And now you have a president just saying, I don’t care about your financial situation,” he added.
Scarborough then jibed that the “financial situation” for Americans was “getting so bad” that Trump had “lost” Fox Business host Larry Kudlow.
“It’s just this is how Americans live, and an overwhelming polls like, man, this isn’t Democrats saying it, it’s not independent. It’s everybody saying it, man.” Scarborough said.
“Like 70% of Americans, 75% of Americans say everything costs too much. We’re in a terrible situation,” he continued, adding: “And the president picks that day to go out there while he’s worried about golden arches and he’s worried about golden ballrooms. And we find out about this Trump gold phone scam, well, you know, and he’s worried about crypto, and he’s worried about their family making billions and billions of dollars and says, ‘Yeah, well, you know, we’re doing great, but we don’t really care about how you and your family are doing.’”
All around the economy, everything is being impacted. Elijah Nicholson-Messmer (BARRON'S) notes:
Consumers
have reckoned with higher gasoline prices for months, but the impacts
of the Iran war have quietly begun rippling through other sectors of the
economy.
In March, prices for polyethylene,
the most commonly used plastic globally, rose to their highest point in
nearly four years. That’s a problem for companies that need the material
for their products, as they try to navigate what experts say is a
“historic” plastic market.
“This is different than
anything we’ve seen for the world, for the North American market,” said
Joel Morales, vice president of polyolefins Americas at Chemical Market
Analytics.
Plastic prices previously spiked
after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine drove oil past $100 a barrel. As
a rule of thumb, every $10 rise in oil adds about five cents per pound
to polyethylene, according to Morales. Put another way, a 10% increase
in oil prices typically lifts polyethylene prices by roughly 3.5%,
according to a Barron’s analysis of the past five years of price data.
The
largest parcel carrier in the United States just hit senders with a
surcharge — and it's not USPS. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), which delivered
6.7 billion packages last year (1), has announced a 3.5% fuel and
logistics-related surcharge starting on April 17.
The
stated cause for the surcharge is rising fuel prices from the Iran war,
and while this surcharge will directly impact sellers, consumers could
feel it, too, as price increases almost always flow downstream.
The
war in Iran is causing supply issues globally, with constrained gas and
oil supplies due to the closure of the strait of Hormuz being the ones
that hits home for most people. But we're also starting to see impacts
on the supply of different materials which, on top of a memory shortage,
aren't looking too good for the global technology supply chain.
I've
spoken to a few different technology supply chain experts to figure out
exactly which materials are affected and why. And perhaps more
importantly, I asked them what they think the prospects are for the
semiconductor and component manufacturing market, as well as for
end-consumers such as PC gamers like you and I.
Unfortunately,
the answer isn't the prettiest, as I discovered that the effects are
broad and wouldn't be resolved even if the strait re-opened right away,
as plenty of damage is already done. But it's not all hopeless, as I
learned what companies are already doing to deal with the supply issues
caused by the conflict in the Middle East.
Helium
is probably the most crucial material for PC tech that we've seen
affected by the conflict. It can get incredibly cold (up to -269 °C)
without turning into a liquid, which makes it very useful for keeping
things cool during different parts of manufacturing processes. Perhaps
most importantly, it keeps chips cool while they're having their
circuitry etched onto them during fabrication.
Exiger
SVP of Product Level Intelligence Derek Lemke tells me: "Helium is not
optional in semiconductor manufacturing. It is used in wafer cooling,
etching, and EUV lithography processes, and there is no substitute. That
makes it essential for GPU and CPU production and increasingly for
DRAM."
Qatar produces about a third of the world's
supply of helium, and in addition supplies being blocked by the closure
of the strait of Hormuz, Iranian attacks on Qatar energy sites have
effectively completely shut down helium production from the country.
"Clearly
the helium example coming out of Qatar is disastrous," Jonathan
Colehower, Managing Director, Global Operations & Supply Chain
Practice at UST, tells me bluntly. "And unfortunately there's not a
substitute."
US consumer beef prices surged to new all-time highs, adding urgency to the Trump administration’s efforts to tackle inflation.
Average
ground beef prices in April broke the $7 per pound threshold for the
first time, while steak surged past $13 a pound, according to data from
the US Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday.
And on food, Allie Canal (NBC NEWS) notes:
After
weeks of warnings that the Iran war would drive up U.S. food prices,
the numbers are finally in: According to data released Tuesday by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, the category it calls “food at home,”
otherwise known as your grocery store bill, rose 0.7% in April. That
increase marked the biggest one-month jump in grocery prices in nearly
four years.
Overall, grocery
store prices have risen 2.9% over the past year — an across-the-board
jump that continues to pressure everyday Americans.
But
that pressure increased significantly in recent weeks. In March, food
at home prices actually fell by 0.2%, making April’s stark reversal all
the more significant.
Driving that increase
were substantial price hikes for things like fresh veggies. On an
annualized basis, fresh vegetable prices are more than 44% higher today
than they were three months ago.
Paul Wiseman (AP) observes, "Prices
are rising at a time when Americans are already frustrated by the high
cost of living. Affordability is likely to be a key issue when voters go
to the polls Nov. 3 to determine whether President Donald Trump’s
Republican Party maintains control of the U.S. Senate and House of
Representatives." And this awareness comes after Chump and Republicans
in Congress gutted the safety net last year and have gutted funding for
public spaces as well. Economist Paul Krugman writes:
Other
problems with the US way of life — like our lack of walkable cities,
access to public transportation, and feasibility of living without a car
— are harder to summarize with simple numbers. But they are real
failings.
I don’t mean to suggest that
everything is worse in the U.S. We do, in fact, have substantially
higher GDP per capita than European nations, and this is reflected in
our material standard of living. For example, we live in bigger houses,
which is nothing to sneer at, and drive bigger cars. And as people who
have lived on both sides of the Atlantic can attest, “getting stuff
done” — everything from finding a place to live to finding a plumber on a
weekend — is often much easier in America.
But
there are many ways in which America’s quality of life is much worse
than one would expect given the nation’s wealth. And we should always
remember that economic growth is supposed to be the foundation of a
better life. A nation that has high GDP per capita but whose citizens
live worse than their counterparts in other countries is not a success
story.
And many Americans would, I believe, be
angry if they realized how much worse our lives are in many ways than
those of our counterparts abroad.
Why are
American lives so often nastier, more brutish, and shorter than those of
citizens of other advanced nations? That’s a complicated story, but
much of it comes down to the fact that US politics has for decades been
dominated by a party that is fiercely opposed to any concept of shared
responsibility, of caring for our fellow citizens, and that foments a
deep level of distrust that makes it ever harder to operate as a
society.
As a result, we don’t guarantee
healthcare. We underfund public services. We promote private consumption
— including driving — while neglecting the provision of public goods.
We don’t assure basic health and safety, including for children, which
in the long run will make us poorer. It’s not an accident that America
began to fall behind other rich countries in many ways around 1980, that
is, around the time the election of Ronald Reagan marked a sharp
rightward turn in U.S. politics and policy.
A war on immigrants is where Chump loves to throw money. Waste money. Bennito L. Kelty (RAW STORY) notes:
Immigration
and Customs Enforcement gave a $12.2 million no-bid contract to a
company that appears to have fabricated staff and was originally founded
to hold its founder's sailboat, according to a new report.
ICE
contracted with Edge Ops LLC for a program called Project SAFE HAVEN,
an AI surveillance tool that tracks immigrants' daily routines, habits,
and real-time locations and categorizes them as potential threats. But
reporting by The Lever found a series of fabrications on the company's
website.
On the company's website, the headshot for the lead computer scientist turned out to be a stock photo, according to The Lever.
"The original image is still on offer for royalty-free use on the Dreamstime website," The Lever reported.
What idiot fell for that? Who okayed that contract? Matthew Chapman (RAW STORY) reports:
The highly controversial tent detention facility for immigrants in Florida, known as "Alligator Alcatraz," will shut down, according to The New York Times, though the Department of Homeland Security has publicly denied seeking immediate closure of the site.
This comes after the state-run facility, which has been plagued with problems ranging from insect infestations to flooding risk, was found to be in severe financial difficulties, with DHS finding it too expensive to keep funding.
"Vendors
were told that detainees would be moved from the facility by the start
of June and that the center would be broken down over the following
weeks, the three people said. The three people and the federal official
all requested anonymity to discuss the closure, which has not yet been
made public," said the report. "It is unclear where the detainees would
go; the federal government runs many other detention centers, including
in Florida. The Everglades center, which is run by the state, held about
1,400 detainees as of last month, according to ICE data."
Florida
Gov. Ron DeSantis has boasted that the facility, which reportedly costs
$1 million a day to operate, takes the relief off the Trump
administration and houses the "worst of the worst." However, reporting
has shown that detainees have included DACA recipients, people with no criminal record, and individuals sent there after minor traffic stops. A Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times analysis found that over 250 detainees were being held solely on immigration violations with no criminal convictions or pending charges in the U.S.
It's a mess that has destroyed lives and ripped families apart. And it's wasted a ton of US tax dollars. Tom Latchem (DAILY BEAST) reports:
The
Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog has launched a probe into a
$38 billion warehouse-to-megajail scheme pushed by ousted Secretary
Kristi Noem and her alleged lover Corey Lewandowski.
Noem,
54, was unceremoniously turfed out of her Cabinet job in late March
after a string of catastrophic appearances on Capitol Hill and the
unmasking of a $220 million taxpayer-funded vanity ad campaign featuring
her on horseback that President Donald Trump, 79, publicly disavowed.
The DHS inspector general is now set to announce an “audit of ICE’s acquisition of detention space” on Wednesday—a
sweeping review of every property purchase made under the so-called ICE
Detention Reengineering Initiative, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The program, a plan to snap up vacant industrial buildings across the
country and retrofit them into vast immigration prisons holding up to
8,000 people at a time, was one of Noem and Lewandowski’s “signature”
policies, the outlet said. The New York Post has subsequently confirmed
the OIG action.
Of the $38 billion funded by
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, DHS has so far blown more than $1
billion on nine of the 11 warehouses it scooped up in just a couple of
months over the winter, the Journal reported. ICE paid between 11 and 13
percent above the market rate for comparable properties, according to
real-estate analytics firm CoStar, the newspaper said—and on several
deals, it paid eye-watering sums far above that.
This issue is not new. On March 3rd, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senator Cory Booker raised this issue:
Senator Cory Booker: I
want to talk to you about this incredible empire of for-profit
companies that are profiting at rates we've never seen and the way
you're using money. Let's -- let's drill down on the warehouses, the
DHS has been buying over the last several months, totaling hundreds of
millions of dollars. Are you familiar with the acquisition of a
warehouse DHS recently bought in Roxbury Township, New Jersey?
Secretary Kristi Noem: Yes.
Senator Cory Booker: You are familiar with that.
Secretary Kristi Noem: I'm familiar.
Senator Cory Booker: How much you spent of it?
Secretary Kristi Noem: No, sir. I do not.
Senator Cory Booker: $129.3 million. Do you know how much it was assessed for in New Jersey?
Secretary
Kristi Noem: Sir, we're purchasing centers across the country to build
efficiency into our detention system. Efficiency so that we can --
Senator
Cory Booker: As a person who's run tight budgets before and had
taxpayer dollars. You paid $129.3 million for a facility in my state
that was assessed at less than half of that at $62 million to work for a
president that says he's a great dealmaker. I can't believe he thinks
that you're a great dealmaker. But what's worse than that is that the
Roxbury Township Council comprised entirely of Republicans voted
unanimously early this year to oppose that facility. My office tried to
facilitate a meeting between DHS and local officials so that ICE could
hear their concerns. Yet DHS did not even respond. That is
unacceptable. That you all would enter a town, you wouldn't even follow
environmental reviews or have conversations with local officials about
the resources from emergency resources to fire resources and more that
you're going to pull down. You didn't even have a conversation. So,
you know, do you comply with court orders?
And then there's the money wasted on court costs and legal filings and lying to judges. Ewan Palmer (DAILY BEAST) reports:
Judges
across the country are overwhelmingly rejecting President Donald
Trump’s hopes to indefinitely detain immigrants as part of his mass
deportation plans.
Analysis from Politico
found that there have been more than 10,000 examples of federal judges
ruling against ICE’s controversial mandatory detention policy, compared
with just 1,200 cases in which they sided with the Trump administration.
Judges
are also routinely voicing their frustrations with the Trump
administration for continuing to detain people suspected of living in
the country illegally without the possibility of release on bond or an
opportunity to plead their case, even after being repeatedly rebuffed in
court.
The aggressive tactics of ICE agents
during immigration raids have also come under strong condemnation from
judges ruling against the mass-detention policy.
Dementia Donald has failed at the economy, has failed on human rights, has failed on oversight, has failed on any issue you want to consider. He's failing on the war on Iran. Sam Kiley (INDEPENDENT) reports:
Iran’s
missile arsenal is mostly intact and still capable of attacking
America’s allies beyond the Gulf states, two months into a joint
US-Israeli bombing campaign.
The White House
has repeatedly claimed that Iran’s military capacity has been
“decimated” and wiped out, but Nato sources have told The Independent
this is not true.
“Whatever anyone is saying in
public, we estimate that the Iranians have at least 60 per cent of their
missile capability. How else can you explain, for example, how they can
continue to attack Gulf nations with missiles and drones?” said a
senior Nato source in Europe.
This is the
latest blow to American claims to have somehow won a war that has
achieved none of its stated aims and shown the limits of US power at a
time when Donald Trump is heading to China, hoping to be perceived as
first among equals.
“Everybody knows that Trump
and Hegseth are talking nonsense when they make claims to have
destroyed Iran militarily,” the source continued.
Lying neither changes nor fixes anything. And how in the world did he end up with a budget crisis in the US Army? Steve Beynon (ABC NEWS) reports:
The
Army is grappling with a sudden budget crunch and scrambling to slash
training costs across broad swaths of the force, according to internal
documents reviewed by ABC News and multiple U.S. officials.
The
move is to make up for a shortfall of some $4 billion to $6 billion,
according to one of the officials, as the service has drastically
expanded its operational footprint at home and abroad.
The
cuts, which range from elite schools to unit-level training, have
triggered a wave of abrupt cancellations and unusually aggressive
spending scrutiny months before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30.
The
service's multibillion-dollar shortfall is the product of a widening
set of operational demands and rising costs across the force.
Major
drivers, a U.S. official noted, have been costs associated with the
Iran war and an expanding mission securing the southern U.S. border.
Additionally,
expansive National Guard missions, including the ongoing deployment in
Washington, D.C., which alone is projected to cost roughly $1.1 billion
this year, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional
Budget Office.
Turning to Chump's dead buddy Jeffrey Epstein. The two became roll dogs in the 80s. In 2002, Chump noted, "I’ve
known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It
is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of
them are on the younger side." Yes, he did like them underage. And
Chump knew about it. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were sexual
traffickers. In July of last year, Chump insisted he had kicked Epstein
out of Mar a Largo in October of 2007.
Last
week, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was 'interviewed' by the
House Oversight Committee. Committee chair and stooge James Comer did
not put Lutnick under oath and also did not tape the session. QUEERTY notes:
Lutnick
was open on a 2025 New York Post podcast episode about the fact that
Epstein taped massage sessions given to powerful men by girls he
trafficked to use as blackmail. But when pressed on the subject during
last week’s hearing, Lutnick told House Democrats that he “take[s] it
back.”
When asked why he took the blackmail claims back, Lutnick said, “I talked to administration officials.”
Democrats
pressed Lutnick on who exactly he spoke to in the Tr*mp administration,
at which point Lutnick completely reversed course. “I just learned
about this in public,” he said. “I didn’t talk to the administration
officials.”
So which is it, exactly?
Epstein
Files Transparency Act co-author Ro Khanna was not buying Lutnick’s
story. “I think he’s covering up for the administration,” he said during
the deposition. “Secretary Lutnick said on the podcast that there was
blackmail going on. Then he says to my inquiry, ‘well, no, no, no, I was
just speculating.’”
Lutnick may not know it,
but he’s opened a fresh can of worms for the Tr*mp administration by
waffling on his Epstein claims. Despite claiming that he cut contact
with his neighbor in 2005, we know that in addition to visiting Epstein
Island in 2012, he entered into a business partnership with Epstein in
2013, and that the relationship continued well into 2018.
In
the 2025 New York Post podcast interview, Lutnick mentions knowing
about Epstein’s penchant for “special” massages from the minute he meets
him, and claims that “his MO [for trapping powerful people] was… ‘get a
massage, get a massage.’ And what happened in that massage room, I
assume, was on video… This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever. He
blackmailed people. That’s how he had money.”
We
know that the primary source of Epstein’s wealth stems from his
management of other billionaires’ money, such as Victoria’s Secret CEO
Les Wexner. But considering Epstein’s ability to move in privileged
political and financial circles in the ’90s and 2000s, blackmail seems
quite plausible. It also lends an interesting flavor to the infamous
email where Epstein describes Tr*mp as “the dog that hasn’t barked.”
What
appears to have happened during Lutnick’s testimony is that Khanna
caught the Secretary of Commerce in a lie that leads directly back to
Tr*mp, who has his own Epstein problems to worry about. “In many ways,”
says former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki in a recent podcast,
“Lutnick is the perfect symbol of Trump’s Epstein problem: One day he’s
playing to the base, talking about how disgusting Epstein is, and the
next day he’s dodging questions about his own ties to Epstein and hoping
it all just goes away.”
Tuesday,
Democrats on the Oversight Committee went to Florida and held a hearing
with Epstein survivors as the witnesses. One of the witnesses was Roza
(first name only). Amy Walker (BBC NEWS) reports:
Roza,
who was recruited from Uzbekistan as a teenager by Epstein's associate
and modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, spoke publicly for the first time
alongside a number of victims in a field hearing that was organised by
House Democrats.
Roza, whose
first name was only given in the hearing, said she was 18 when she met
the late Brunel in 2008 and "promised a modelling career beyond my
dreams".
"Coming from a financially unstable background I was a perfect target for coercion," she added, during the tearful testimony.
By
May 2009, she was in New York City on a visa, and in July she met
Epstein at his house in West Palm Beach while he was under house arrest,
Roza said.
Epstein then offered her a role at
his Florida Science Foundation - where he had worked during an initial
arrangement that allowed him to leave custody for up to 16 hours a day,
six days a week, following his 2008 conviction.
"One
day his masseuse called me into his room where I was molested for the
first time by Jeffrey," Roza told the hearing. "For the following three
years I was subject to ongoing rape."
“Jeffrey was under house arrest for the molestation of underage girls at the exact time he was abusing me,” she said, in tears.
Florida
law enforcement investigated Epstein in 2005 after an underage girl who
had been hired to give him a massage at his home told her family he had
sexually abused her.
Investigators eventually
compiled a 53-page indictment using evidence from 34 victims, only for
the predator to be granted a non-prosecution agreement by federal
attorneys as part of a “sweetheart” plea deal that enabled him to
sidestep federal sex trafficking charges.
Instead,
Epstein pleaded guilty to the lesser state offense of soliciting a
minor under 18 for prostitution, registered as a sex offender, and paid
compensation to the victims.
She
also attacked the Department of Justice for leaving her name, and those
of other survivors, unredacted in the Epstein files released in
December and January, saying her’s appeared more than 500 times while
those of the pedophile’s alleged accomplices were blacked out, which she
claimed had been a “choice,” not a “mistake.”
During
the hearing, lawmakers asked survivors what justice looks like. Roza,
an Epstein victim trafficked from Uzbekistan under a fraudulent visa who
endured three years of abuse, gave a sobering response. “I appreciate
you asking that question, but I don’t know. It’s your job. You guys have
to figure out how to make justice, not me,” she said.
She’s right. It’s Congress’ job to deliver justice, not ask survivors to define it.
Epstein
survivor Courtney Wild, who has spent over a decade fighting the
federal government over a non-prosecution agreement, made a similar
point. “We did not fight so that this could turn into something
political, or so that our rights would be violated once again,” she
said.
"All of this raising very serious questions about why a convicted child sex offender was not only serving time at a minimum security facility but also allegedly receiving this kind of treatment." That's Erin Burnett in the video below.
Ghislaine Maxwell. Chump's friend. Convicted over her sex trafficking work with Epstein. Chump's friend spoke to Todd Blance last July. By August she had been moved to Club Fed in Bryan, Texas. And the benefits and extras she's receiving in prison make the whole thing a sick joke.
Let's wind down with this from Senator Elizabeth Warren:
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, released new answers from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Department of Defense (DoD), revealing the Pentagon’s financial support for the Trump administration’s cruel immigration agenda is far higher than initially reported by DoD.
Senator Warren and Representative Garamendi’s (D-Calif.) December 2025 investigation found that DoD had committed at least $2 billion to support immigration enforcement, including nearly $55 million to detain non-citizens at Guantanamo Bay.
"While the prices of groceries, rent, and health care skyrocket, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are wasting billions in taxpayer funds on a cruel immigration agenda,” said Senator Warren. “Congress must refuse to give this administration another penny for these political stunts."
“When President Trump diverts military resources to immigration enforcement, our armed forces suffer. Critical training is delayed, flight hours are lost, and funds are pulled from military family housing and readiness priorities,” said Representative John Garamendi. “These diversions weaken the training, modernization, and maintenance our forces need to stay prepared and mission-ready.”
In new answers to Questions for the Record, Secretary Hegseth revealed DoD’s projected support for Guantanamo Bay operations is now roughly $73 million — nearly $20 million more than initially reported by DoD — for a facility with a maximum capacity of just 50 detainees. Despite the limited capacity at the facility, Secretary Hegseth reported that DoD has deployed 522 department personnel to Guantanamo Bay.
New reporting from CBS reveals the Trump administration has detained a total of 832 people at Guantanamo Bay, and that government employees outnumber detainees 100 to 1, raising concerns about the Department’s massive spending on the Guantanamo Bay detention.
Meanwhile, DoD has revealed that some financial support for immigration enforcement is coming at the expense of updates to barracks, maintenance hangers, and military construction projects in the Pacific. Reporting from ABC today revealed the Army is making major training cuts to offset a budget deficit of $4-6 billion, partially due to the military’s support for immigration enforcement.
In the coming weeks, Congress will consider providing the Trump administration a further $72 billion to fund the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for four years.
Senator Warren has led the fight to hold the Trump administration accountable for mishandling military funds to pursue its cruel immigration agenda and political stunts:
- In April 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), along with Representative Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) and Representative Troy Carter (D-La.), urged the Inspectors General of the Departments of Homeland Security and State to open an investigation into the Trump administration’s attempts to deport people to countries they have no ties to. These deportations use the military to conduct the international deportation flights and detaining noncitizens on U.S. military bases within the United States and overseas.
- In March 2026, Senator Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) led 52 members of Congress in a new investigation into potential corruption in government contracts stemming from the White House’s fast-tracked expansion of inhumane warehouse-based immigration detention facilities using a Navy contracting vehicle.
- In January 2026, following a new report by the Congressional Budget Office revealing Trump’s domestic deployments of the National Guard and Marines have cost at least $589 million — more than double what Senator Warren’s bicameral investigation previously found — she called for the Trump administration to “answer for wasting more than half a billion taxpayer dollars.”
- In December 2025, at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed Trump’s nominee to be Army General Counsel, on the deployment of the National Guard and reports that senior Judge Advocate General (JAG) officers have been sidelined after raising legal concerns about military operations.
- In December 2025, Senator Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative John Garamendi (D-Calif.) co-led the release of a new report, along with 11 other members of Congress, revealing the Trump administration diverted more than $2 billions of military funds and resources from the Pentagon to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for immigration enforcement, and its impact on readiness and morale. The report also revealed that the diversion of funds was happening at the expense of updates to barracks, maintenance hangers, and military construction projects in the Pacific.
- In September 2025, Senator Warren (D-Mass.) led more than 60 members of Congress in opening a new investigation into the Trump administration’s practice of detaining and sending immigrants to countries where they have no citizenship or connections of any kind. These deportations use the military to conduct the international deportation flights and detaining noncitizens on U.S. military bases within the United States and overseas.
- In February 2025, Senators Warren (D-Mass.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) pressed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on the military’s deployment of active-duty forces to the southern border and Guantanamo, and the Department of Defense’s (DOD) new involvement in immigration detention and deportation.
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The following sites -- plus Ann's "Katie Phang has an important video," Stan's "Tom Cruise, Brooke Shields" and Elaine's "Publicity junkie Ka$h Patel" -- updated:
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Chump is out of step with the country6 hours ago
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They aren't hiding their hate7 hours ago
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Foo Fighters: Tiny Desk Concert1 day ago
