“After spending millions of taxpayer dollars on a fleet of new vehicles with Donald Trump-inspired paint jobs, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents reportedly don’t want to drive them.
Last summer, a slick promotional video captured a Ford Raptor pickup truck and GMC Yukon SUV rolling around Washington, D.C., with music from DaBaby playing over close-up images of navy blue paint jobs with red-and-white racing stripes and a gold seal.
The words “defend the homeland” appear on the side, and “President Donald J. Trump” is printed in gold on a rear window.
Homeland Security’s preview of its new fleet — with paint jobs designed to look like the president’s private jet — cost more than $700,000. The government ultimately spent more than $2 million buying up hundreds of new cars with custom wraps, according to contracts reviewed by The Independent.
But officers don’t want them
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“ICE has never had marked vehicles,” one person familiar with the purchases told the outlet. “In talking to people, they’re like, ‘We don’t want to use these, we can’t.’”
Another said it’s “ridiculous” to drive marked cars because “you don’t want to advertise what you’re doing.”
“We’re just hiding them in a parking garage somewhere because we don’t want to drive them,” the person reportedly told the outlet. “Who wants to drive the marked vehicles?”
Roughly 25 newly delivered ICE vehicles are sitting at an immigration detention facility in California, unused, according to the Examiner.
ICE has denied any suggestion that its new vehicles aren’t being used.
“Any allegation that these ICE vehicles are not being used is FALSE. ICE is a law enforcement agency, and like all other law enforcement agencies, has a fleet of vehicles that includes those with ICE branding,” a spokesperson wrote”
“Don’t be fooled: The debt explosion is not driven by waste, fraud, or foreign aid. Nor is it the result of a lack of revenue. It’s the direct result of reckless promises to retirees, the cost of health care, and an unwillingness to pay the bills honestly. For most of American history, debt fell when wars ended and peace returned. Since 1980, we’ve managed the opposite: peace without prudence and prosperity without restraint.”
The Navy said they didn’t want any more littoral combat ships because they sucked, but Congress spent a bunch more money building more of them due to district politics.
“Flush with cash from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has spent millions of dollars on flashy custom SUVs and trucks the agency says are essential for public safety and recruitment efforts to meet President Donald Trump’s mass deportation goals.
Government contracts made public and reviewed by The Washington Post reveal that ICE has contracted more than $2.4 million for Chevrolet Tahoes, Ford Expeditions, and other vehicles, as well as custom graphic wraps. The gold-detailed wraps will include the words “DEFEND THE HOMELAND,” according to a social media post by the contractor, Maryland’s AP Tinting & Graphics, along with the words “INTEGRITY,” “COURAGE,” and “ENDURANCE.”
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The cost of the new ICE vehicles is in addition to the over $700,000 the agency spent on a pair of trucks designed to mimic Trump’s private jet and used in a Department of Homeland Security social media post on August 14. The wrapped GMC Yukon SUV and Ford Raptor pickup truck were pictured stationed in front of national monuments and government buildings around D.C., with the caption “We will have our country back.” The trucks were also showcased in a recruitment ad posted on social media featuring music by the rapper DaBaby, with the lyrics “My heart so cold I think I’m done with ice (Uh, brr)” and “Better not pull up with no knife (Okay)/’Cause I bring guns to fights.”
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The insistence that ICE must spend millions in taxpayer dollars on gaudy vehicles is ironic, considering the agency’s M.O. of using masked, plain-clothed agents in unmarked vehicles to target and arrest undocumented immigrants and violate Americans’ rights. But just as ICE’s immigration crackdown hasn’t really gotten dangerous people off the streets, neither will its marketing ploy protect public safety.”
People are dying because they are not getting medicines that U.S. Aid used to bring them. Many of these medicines were already donated, but they go expired because U.S. Aid, who would be delivering them, was gutted by Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE.
“The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that the federal government loses hundreds of billions of dollars each year due to fraud. Medicare-related fraud has permitted health care insurers to pocket $50 billion in reimbursements for diseases that doctors never treated. Fraudsters collected an estimated $135 billion in fraudulent COVID-19 unemployment payments, and unless Congress acts to extend the statute of limitations, this money will never be recouped by the government.
National security funds are routinely misspent or disappeared. The Pentagon has failed seven audits in a row and often can’t account for missing money; last year, the Defense Department admitted that it lost $8.2 billion in Ukraine. The federal government spent $61 billion rebuilding Iraq: 15 percent of the funds were misspent, and another 10 percent simply disappeared, according to government auditors. In Afghanistan, it’s much the same: The Taliban-controlled central bank is a recipient of U.S. funds.”
“Overcharging is a massive problem for the U.S. military budget. In 2015, the Pentagon found that it was severely overpaying for Patriot missiles, and negotiated a new contract that saved $550 million. In 2019, the inspector general found that the military was paying $4,300 for a half-inch metal drive pin that should have cost $46.
The similarly extreme markup on soap dispensers is what led to the audit of C-17 parts in the first place. The Office of the Inspector General says that it opened its investigation in June 2022 after a whistleblower told its anonymous tip line that Boeing was severely overcharging for airplane bathroom fixtures.
The inspector general found that the Air Force did not “validate the accuracy of the data used for contract negotiation, conduct contract surveillance to identify price increases during contract execution, or review invoices to determine fair and reasonable prices before payment.””
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“The inspector general found that the Pentagon had trouble catching overcharging because officials “would not question the costs if they matched what Boeing paid” its suppliers.”
“Judge James Ho is not a nuclear scientist, an expert in energy policy, an atomic engineer, or anyone else with any specialized knowledge whatsoever on how to store and dispose of nuclear waste.
Nevertheless, Ho and two of his far-right colleagues on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit just put themselves in charge of much of America’s nuclear safety regime — invalidating the power of actual nuclear policy regulators to decide how to deal with nuclear waste in the process.”
“If you were to guess America’s biggest source of water pollution, chemical factories or oil refineries might come to mind. But it’s actually farms — especially those raising cows, pigs, and chickens.
The billions of animals farmed each year in the US for food generate nearly 2.5 billion pounds of waste every day — around twice as much as people do — yet none of it is treated like human waste. It’s either stored in giant pits, piled high as enormous mounds on farms, or spread onto crop fields as fertilizer. And a lot of it washes away into rivers and streams, as does synthetic fertilizer from the farms growing corn and soy to feed all those animals.
“These factory farms operate like sewerless cities,” said Tarah Heinzen, legal director of environmental nonprofit Food and Water Watch. Animal waste is “running off into waterways, it’s leaching into people’s drinking water, it’s harming wildlife, and threatening public health.”
Yet in practice, the Environmental Protection Agency appears to be largely fine with all that.”
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“While the entire food sector benefits from agricultural exceptionalism, animal agriculture is especially privileged. Meat and dairy producers get far more subsidies than farmers growing more sustainable foods, like beans, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.”
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“Big Ag often argues its exceptional status is justified because farming is indeed exceptional, given the essential nature of its product: food. But Secchi argues this is the wrong way of thinking about it. Since the early days of American agriculture, farming has been a business like any other, focused on high output, which has led to excess supply and profitable exports around the world.
And we don’t apply exceptionalist logic to any other industry. Energy production, for example, is highly polluting but essential to human flourishing, just like food, so we push to make our laws and economy limit the industry’s externalities and scale renewable forms of energy.”
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“Jefferson’s vision never came to pass. Small farms have been squeezed out by big farms, due in part to American farm policy advocated for by the same elected officials who evoke the Jeffersonian ideal.
What’s left is a highly consolidated agricultural sector, with many farmers precariously employed as contractors for corporations, and a radically uneven distribution of farm wealth”