Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
It seems that Trump got overconfident from the military’s dazzling success in Venezuela. That, combined with Trump gutting the bureaucracy that actually knew a lot about Iran, led to a war against Iran that’s harder to win than Trump expected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgHH_y8tceI
“USCIS currently has 11.3 million pending applications, “the largest immigration backlog in its history,” reported Newsweek in November. While officials say green card and visa processing are getting faster, “agency data from January through March shows that processing times for several key immigration forms have continued to rise, leaving applicants waiting months or even years longer than expected.” The “closure of consulates abroad” and “planned firing of State Department staff,” the MPI noted in April, were also “expected to lengthen visa wait times.””
https://reason.com/2026/02/03/trumps-bureaucratic-war-on-immigrants/
Because states run programs like Medicaid, but the federal government pays for over half of it, states have the incentive to come up with new programs and less incentive to properly police Medicaid spending.
“state and federal prosecutors have been trying to bust fraudulent preschools and other Medicaid fraud schemes in Minnesota for more than a decade. And yet, there are always more. Law enforcement is doing its best, but the problem seems to be that the state’s welfare bureaucracy is doing a terrible job of stopping the scammers in the first place.
…
This is not just a problem in Minnesota either. Medicaid fraud is remarkably common. The federal departments of Justice and Health and Human Services run a joint program to catch fraudsters, and in 2024 alone it accounted for 1,151 convictions that recovered almost $1.4 billion.
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Anyone who wants to stop Medicaid fraud should focus less on scoring partisan political points or demonizing immigrants and more on the boring work of fixing federal policy.
Telling states to pay for a larger share of their own Medicaid spending seems like an obvious step in the right direction. It would give state officials—from governors like Walz all the way down to the lowest-ranking bureaucrat—a stronger incentive to prevent waste and fraud in the first place. It would reduce the burden placed on out-of-state taxpayers when states with lax enforcement allow fraud like this to occur.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/30/the-minnesota-welfare-fraud-story-is-really-about-a-broken-medicaid-bureaucracy/
“some legal experts say that as a practical matter, the administration — emboldened by the justices — has already managed to eliminate job protections that have been on the books for nearly 150 years.
President Donald Trump’s drive to replace agency leaders and his mass firings across the federal government are all based on the same basic legal concept: the unitary executive theory. It holds that every employee of the executive branch is answerable to, and fireable at will by, the president.
The most extreme version of the unitary executive theory holds that the central premise of the civil service — that rank-and-file government employees shouldn’t be hired or fired for political reasons or simply on the president’s whim — is unconstitutional because it tramples on the president’s power to control the federal government.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/07/supreme-court-trump-firings-humphreys-executor-00679728
“A federal judge has indefinitely extended her order banning the Trump administration from mass firing federal employees during the government shutdown.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/28/government-shutdown-federal-workers-rifs-ruling-00626042
“A federal judge has paused the Trump administration’s plan to lay off more than 500 employees of the U.S. Agency for Global Media — most from Voice of America — while warning that senior officials there had repeatedly failed to comply with his orders to preserve the international broadcaster’s key operations.”
The Trump administration is defying the courts.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/29/judge-pauses-cuts-to-us-agency-for-global-media-00586081
Trump is forcing federal agencies and workers to attack Democrats.
Trump is threatening to cancel funding in Democratic states to attack Democratic leaders in response to the government shutdown.
This politicization of federal responsibilities is not good. Bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5ycvFottSE
“In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that President Franklin Roosevelt acted illegally when he tried to fire an anti-New Deal commissioner from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC “cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive,” declared the Court in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. “We think it plain under the Constitution that illimitable power of removal is not possessed by the President in respect of officers of the character of those just named.”
But that was then. More recently, the Supreme Court has all but announced that Humphrey’s Executor faces imminent judicial execution, an outcome that would allow President Donald Trump (and every president who succeeds him) to fire “independent” agency heads at will.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/25/scotus-is-now-poised-to-overrule-humphreys-executor-a-1935-precedent-limiting-presidential-power/
RFK is weakening the CDC’s ability to perform its basic functions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8sZBojJ6r4
“Chief Justice John Roberts is allowing President Donald Trump to put a Joe Biden-appointed member of the Federal Trade Commission out of her post while the Supreme Court considers a longer-term resolution of the legal battle over her firing.”
So, whether it’s legal or not, Trump gets to go ahead and do it, and even if it turns out to not be legal, much damage will be done and the law ineffective.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/08/john-roberts-rebecca-slaughter-trump-firing-00550758