Featured

Trump: Iran asked me to be Supreme Leader, but I said no thanks

Trump’s “Iran asked me to be Supreme Leader” joke at an NRCC fundraiser uses a real, deadly leadership crisis in Iran to normalize assassination-as-policy and blur what’s confirmed about the war and succession.

Mar 26, 2026

Featured

‘Men need to be perp-walked’ after Epstein files release, Massie tells BBC

A GOP lawmaker says the Epstein document releases are still falling short—because redactions and withheld material may be blocking accountability and survivor-centered justice.

Mar 25, 2026

Buried.News

The stories buried under the noise

Primary focus

Trump fires Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary

A Cabinet secretary was forced out amid contracting and oversight scrutiny, signaling that executive control—not transparent accountability—can dictate leadership of the agency driving mass detention and deportation.

Mar 5, 2026

Featured

The Trump gold coin is not normal : Consider This from NPR

A federal design panel OK’d a Trump portrait for a commemorative gold coin, but the key question is whether Treasury can legally bypass long-standing limits meant to keep living politicians off U.S. money.

Mar 23, 2026

Featured

White House Confronted Over Huge Bets Made Minutes Before Trump’s Big War Move

A $580 million burst of oil-futures selling minutes before Trump’s Iran “talks” post raises a basic public-interest question: did anyone trade on advance knowledge of a market-moving national security decision?

Mar 24, 2026

Norms Impact

Trump’s plan in Iran not ‘regime change’ but ‘endless war,’ senator says

A war is being waged while Congress hears goals that contradict the public case—normalizing executive war-making without coherent, accountable objectives.

Iran War

Mar 11, 2026

Sources

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-plan-iran-regime-change-endless-war-murphy-b2936273.html

Summary

A senior U.S. senator says classified briefings indicate the administration’s Iran war goals do not include destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons program or pursuing regime change. The executive branch is advancing a military campaign while, in closed-door briefings, lawmakers are left describing objectives that do not match the public rationale. The practical consequence is a conflict trajectory defined by recurring strikes, rising casualties, and mounting costs without a stated end state.

Reality Check

When the executive branch conducts a major war effort while offering shifting or contradictory objectives, it weakens the democratic premise that force is used under transparent, accountable purposes. Normalizing open-ended bombing justified by one goal in public and described differently in closed briefings conditions our institutions to accept perpetual conflict without measurable end states. Over time, that precedent narrows Congress’s practical ability to oversee war powers and leaves the public funding and staffing a campaign whose endpoints are undefined.

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Detail

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said he attended a two-hour briefing on the White House’s aims for the conflict with Iran and later posted a thread on X describing what he said the briefings indicated, while noting he could not share classified information. Murphy wrote that the administration confirmed the war goals do not include destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons program and that regime change is not among the stated objectives. He said the administration’s continued aims were primarily destroying missiles, boats, and drone factories, and he said officials implied further bombing when asked what happens if Iran restarts production after strikes stop.

Murphy also said the administration had no plan to safely open the Strait of Hormuz, which he said Iran has effectively closed, halting Gulf oil flows and driving up prices globally. Separately, Senator Richard Blumenthal said he believes the administration is on a path toward deploying U.S. troops on the ground in Iran after a classified Senate Armed Services Committee briefing. Trump said he is keeping options open on “boots on the ground.”

Norms Impact

DOGE Wasted Tens of Billions While Chainsawing the Government in the Name of ‘Efficiency’: Senate Report | Common Dreams

An “efficiency” crusade paid hundreds of thousands of federal workers not to work, froze lawful programs, and reset governing capacity without delivering the claimed public savings.

Congress

Jul 31, 2025

Sources

https://www.commondreams.org/news/doge-wasted-tens-of-billions

Summary

A U.S. Senate investigations subcommittee staff report found the Department of Government Efficiency wasted more than $21 billion in six months. A private billionaire-led “efficiency” drive was operationalized through sweeping personnel and funding actions that reshaped core federal capacity while claiming fiscal discipline. The result is immediate taxpayer cost from paid non-work and severance, plus cascading losses from halted programs and weakened enforcement.

Reality Check

When executive power is used to hollow out the civil service and freeze public programs under a branding campaign of “efficiency,” we normalize governance by shock therapy—and our rights and services become bargaining chips in someone else’s narrative. The conduct described reads less like routine management and more like a deliberate dismantling that produced quantifiable public losses while the administration pursued sweeping cuts elsewhere, eroding the basic norm that government actions must be tethered to lawful purpose and truthful accounting. On this record alone, specific criminal exposure cannot be established, but the pattern implicates core federal constraints on misuse of appropriations and program administration—if the freezes and shutdown-related spoilage and foregone revenues stemmed from unlawful impoundment or unauthorized obstruction, the Impoundment Control Act framework and appropriations law violations become central. Even absent provable criminal intent, the institutional breach is stark: using mass layoffs, severance costs, and program paralysis while claiming savings weaponizes state capacity against the public and corrodes democratic accountability.

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Detail

A staff report released by the office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, quantified waste attributed to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) over six months at more than $21 billion.

The report’s largest component was the cost of mass workforce reductions. In January, Elon Musk announced a “Deferred Resignation Program” offering federal employees early exit with benefits and pay through September 30; about 200,000 accepted, which the report calculated as $14.8 billion paid for eight months without work. The report also calculated $6.1 billion in severance tied to roughly 100,000 involuntary terminations.

The report further identified losses from funding freezes and agency shutdown impacts, including $263 million in foregone interest payments and fees from paused energy utility project loans and $110 million in spoiled food and medicine linked to the shuttering of USAID.