More of This Please

According to the California Post:

The US federal workforce has plunged to about 2.7 million employees under the Trump administration — the lowest level in 60 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The government has shed more than 300,000 workers since President Trump returned to office in January 2025, shrinking the federal workforce by about 11%, according to the latest analysis from the BLS.

The majority of the cuts occurred in the first year of Trump’s second term, with federal employment remaining at a consistent level through 2026.

Trump campaigned on a promise to shrink the federal government, with the president giving Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, free reign to purge employee payrolls to find savings under his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The cuts hit nearly every major federal agency, with the Departments of Education, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development.

The Department of Homeland Security was a notable exception, with headcount barely changing since Trump took office and rolled out his anti-immigration policies.

The biggest cuts occurred at the end of September 2025, when more than 150,000 federal employees accepted buyouts from the government, resulting in the largest single-year exodus of civil servants in nearly 80 years.

Despite the downsizing, the government has yet to see any notable savings.

Notice the last statement? There are no noticable savings? Does this mean this policy has failed to do what it intended to do?

No, not at all. What it shows is how enormous the government is and the tremendouse amount of money they spend. If you can cut 2.7 million jobs and it isn’t even a speck in the government spending, the government is spending too much.

This is a big win for Trump, whether the Democrats like it or not.

In fact, Trump has a lot of big wins that should be touted before the elections. Let’s go over some:

• The ending of several wars.
• The closing of the border.
  • Says it has deported 3M+ people, arrested 800K+ undocumented immigrants and cut border encounters by 96%.
• Signed the Laken Riley Act and halted refugee admissions.
• The lowering of inflation.
• Passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” tax cuts, including no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and tax relief for seniors on Social Security.
• Points to these figures:�
  • Median household income of $87,460, the highest on record after inflation
  • Poverty rate down to 10.2%
  • Record household wealth
  • S&P 500 up 31% this term
  • 159.1M jobs on payrolls
• Launched “Trump Accounts,” investment accounts for children.
• Revoked more than 250,000 visas.
• Says homicides fell 21% in 2025.
• Ended the Israel–Hamas war with a ceasefire and a Gaza peace plan, and secured hostage releases.
• Says military strikes destroyed Iran’s nuclear program, in Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Epic Fury.
• Captured Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and removed his government.
• Carried out military strikes on drug cartels.
• Moved forward on the Golden Dome missile defense system, raised military spending and pushed NATO allies to commit to more spending.
• Expanded oil drilling, backed coal and revived nuclear power.
• Required Big Tech companies to pay for their own data-center power needs, and set up a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”.
• Reformed SNAP (food stamps) and reset federal nutrition guidelines, under “Make America Healthy Again”.
• Revamped childhood vaccine recommendations.
• Lowered prescription drug prices.
• Says SNAP enrollment is down by 4.3M people.
• Ended DEI programs in the federal government.�
• Made federal policy recognize only two sexes.�
• Restricted transgender athletes in women’s sports.�
• Made English the official language.�
• Took on White House construction projects costing at least $900M.
• Launched America.gov which uses AI to streamline processes for citizens to access government services such as registering for a passport.
• Finally, believe it or not, we are winning the Iran war (economically and militarily). This will lead to a normalization of relations between Israel and the other Middle Eastern countries and will lower fuel prices.

There have been a lot of wins. Heck, some of the wins happened so quick (illegal immigration), no one thinks of them as great victory. Even “Conservative” outlets like Fox News kind of ignore all these accomplishments. No Republican politicians are touting these accomplishments (most of these accomplishments had nothing to do with Congress which explains why they are probably going to lose).

Here’s the reality, the economy is in really good shape. Add AI into the mix, the economy could boom. That doesn’t mean that things aren’t expensive, they are. Here’s the reality, the prices of certain things are going to stay high. The great lie of the Biden administration is that the high prices that occurred under his administration were transitory and prices would go down. They didn’t and won’t.

The only way to fix the economy and defeat the “affordability crisis” is to explode the economy. That means less government spending (including entitlements), less government interference against business (less taxes, fewer regulations, and, dare I say it, less tarifs), and an embrace to technology (AI and the space race).

https://nypost.com/2026/09/30/us-news/us-federal-workforce-drops-to-lowest-level-in-60-years-after-trump-purged-hundreds-of-thousands
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/74f115d7-fb29-4c37-bbf2-e1ff5245cd5a

F-ing California

According to the City Journal:

California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care, and other programs for the poor and downtrodden. To sustain the arrangement, the state imposes the nation’s highest tax rates.

In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones on the taxpayers’ dime.

We visited four public-services offices in Southern California, each of which admitted that illegal aliens can enroll in public-welfare programs or receive benefits on their children’s behalf. In total, California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year. The state’s shadow welfare system, it seems, shows no signs of slowing down.

Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.

“If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”

In Los Angeles, we heard more of the same. We asked another welfare officer about the benefits available to illegal immigrants and their children. While some state programs are closed to illegals, we learned, they are open to those aliens’ U.S.-born children.

“If you were born here and the child was born here, you get money for two,” the officer said of CalWORKs, the state’s version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. “Because she is not and the child is, she only gets money for the child, and not for her.”

These benefits add up. In California, illegal immigrants can qualify for CAPI, public health insurance, and various tax credits. Their children qualify for others, including CalWORKs and, as in other states, Section 8 rental subsidies. All told, a family of five in California with two illegal-alien parents, two U.S.-born children, and one illegal-alien grandparent can receive public services worth more than $100,000 per year.

State leaders are proud of it. In a recent podcast episode, Governor Gavin Newsom bragged about his “controversial” decision to extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, encouraged people to sign up for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a program whose promotional materials assure applicants that “no Social Security number” is “no problem.”

How is all this possible?

Federal law generally prohibits states from using federal dollars to serve illegal aliens. To dodge those restrictions, California created parallel state- and locally funded programs that allowed the state to extend benefits to illegal immigrants. Perhaps as a result, more than one in four California residents today is foreign-born.

Medicaid is a good example. Federal law prohibits states from using federal dollars to provide wraparound coverage to illegal immigrants. So, California used a state-funding “bucket” within its Medi-Cal program to extend “full-scope” coverage to illegal aliens. The expansions enrolled some 1.7 million people, costing the state an estimated $10 billion annually—more than twice what the state legislative analyst originally projected.

California also uses a distinct legal category that enables certain migrants to qualify for state programs. The state deems certain aliens to be “permanently residing under color of law”—living in California with the “knowledge and permission” of immigration enforcement—and allows them to use this designation to enroll in Medi-Cal, CAPI, and other government programs. In practice, because aged or disabled individuals are typically not deported, this means elderly foreign retirees can arrive in California and receive extensive benefits.

Another way that California shuffles cash to illegal immigrants is through those aliens’ children. CalWORKs allows illegal-immigrant parents to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born kids. BenefitsCal, the state’s welfare clearinghouse, even tells applicants that the program will accept a “statement” that the applicant “intend[s] to file or [is] taking steps to become federally eligible” to qualify for the program.

This model—permissive rules and large loopholes—costs the state billions per year. As benefits and eligibility continue to expand, that figure will only increase in the years ahead.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/california-illegal-immigrants-shadow-welfare