Tucker Carlson interviews the fulcrum between Wall Street and Main Street in the MAGAnomic policy world, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Secretary Bessent notes the goal of the tariff plan, and the accompanying economic policy is to give the working middle-class a boost in wealth and simultaneous relief from bad policy that has exclusively benefited the investment class. WATCH:

Chapters:

0:00 Trump’s Tariff Plan
5:42 The Current State of the Stock Market
8:22 Will Americans See Substantial Tax Cuts Because of Tariffs?
13:16 How Much Money Will America Make Through Tariffs?
14:33 Bringing Manufacturing Back to the US
20:14 Tariff Pushback From Foreign Countries

(more…)

As expected, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has caved on the continuing resolution bill from the House.  Schumer called the decision a “Hobsons choice,” supporting the Trump CR vs letting OMB Director Russ Vought control the government in shutdown mode.  Schumer doesn’t want to see Elon Musk, DOGE and OMB downsizing government by giving them the power within a ‘shutdown.’

WASHINGTON DC – […] In a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday night announcing he would support the House-passed stopgap, Schumer said he had little choice as the Friday shutdown deadline loomed.

“Musk has already said he wants a shutdown, and public reporting has shown he is already making plans to expedite his destruction of key government programs and services,” said Schumer. “A shutdown would give Donald Trump the keys to the city, the state and the country.”

(more…)

This is a big day for potential winnamins.  We may just reach the “too much winning” phase.

Democrats are threatening to shut down government by not supporting the Continuing Resolution (CR) measure that passed the House and is about to reach the floor of the Senate.  This threat is awesome, and we can only hope it happens.

Personally, I think Chuck Schumer will tell eight of his Senate members to vote cloture on the CR (they need 60 votes) and then tell them to vote against the underlying bill on the floor (where only 51 are needed for passage).  However, the looney leftists in the base are stomping their feet and telling Schumer not to support the Trump CR measure.

If the CR is not passed, the govt goes into “shutdown mode” at midnight tonight and all “nonessential” employees, as determined by the Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, are laid-off.

This is perfect for DOGE and the objectives of shrinking government very quickly.  Even Politico notes the Democrats are about to step on a rake.

WASHINGTON DC – […] There’s another reason the White House isn’t sweating a shutdown: Senior officials agree that when coffers run dry, the Trump administration — specifically Vought, the longtime cost-cutting conservative now running OMB — would have unprecedented flexibility to choose which agencies get to stay open and which don’t.

[…] It’s not hard to see Musk getting out his chainsaw and Vought finding a hammer.

“Musk in charge of furloughs in a shutdown? He’d be giddy. He’d be beside himself with joy,” the official joked.

(more…)

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought is also the interim Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB is under review by DOGE and on Monday morning Russ Vought told CFPB staff not to come to work. {Background Here}

Vought sent an email to employees this morning saying they should “not perform any work tasks.” They were directed to contact the top lawyer for the Office of Management and Budget “to get approval in writing before performing any work task.”

Vought is also serving as the bureau’s acting director. The previous director, Rohit Chopra, was fired by Trump, a Republican, on Feb. 1. Vought’s message followed one on Saturday evening that ordered the bureau to “cease all supervision and examination activity.”

(Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s newly installed chief of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau told all of the agency’s staff on Monday to stay away from the office and do no work, according to an email reviewed by Reuters.

The move followed a weekend decision to shutter the CFPB’s Washington headquarters, idling a federal agency of nearly 2,000 workers tasked with enforcing consumer financial laws.

(more…)

Before getting to the announcement, let me first answer a repeated question. “Why is it so easy for DOGE to identify wasteful spending?” ..in simple form.

When the trillion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was passed, those “shovel ready jobs” in fiscal year 2009, that was the last year of a full federal budget.  Every budget year thereafter has been a process of continuing resolutions and omnibus spending.  Within the CR process they use “baseline budgeting,” which essentially accepts all prior spending as the starting point for the next spending allotment within the Continuing Resolution process.

That means, the $1 trillion ARRA was not only spent in 2009 (Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on behalf of Barack Obama), but it was also spent again in ever year thereafter.  Without a formally followed federal budget process, every year there is an extra trillion dollars (that’s a thousand billion) injected into federal spending.  That accounts for $16 trillion of the current debt.  Make sense now?

Elon Musk and DOGE announce the following:

To be clear, what the DOGE team and U.S Treasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following:

– Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.

– All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale but simply requiring that SOME attempts be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!

(more…)

This is cool.  The U.S. Debt Clock tracking system is now also monitoring the savings generated through the Dept of Govt Efficiency (DOGE).

$68 Billion and growing.

[LINK HERE]

(more…)

Russell Vought, President-elect Trump’s choice to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), will testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee today at 1:00pm.

Russel Vought is on track to repeat his role as OMB director, which he helmed at the end of Trump’s first term. If confirmed, he’ll lead the office that oversees the implementation of the president’s vision across the executive branch, including the development and execution of the federal budget.

Vought was also a key author of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The Senate will go bananas over this point of contention. Vought penned a section that touches on the executive office of the president. Livestream Links Below.

.

(more…)

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has announced the U.S. debt ceiling is likely to be reached mid-January, while Joe Biden is still in office.  President Trump tells congress to deal with the issue now.

First, here’s Secretary Yellen:

WASHINGTON, Dec 27 (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury Department may need to take “extraordinary measures” by as early as Jan. 14 to prevent the United States from defaulting on its debt, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told lawmakers in a letter on Friday.

Yellen urged lawmakers in the U.S. Congress to act “to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”

U.S. debt is expected to decrease by about $54 billion on Jan. 2 “due to a scheduled redemption of nonmarketable securities held by a federal trust fund associated with Medicare payments,” she added.

She said: “Treasury currently expects to reach the new limit between January 14 and January 23, at which time it will be necessary for Treasury to start taking extraordinary measures.”

Under a 2023 budget deal, Congress suspended the debt ceiling until Jan. 1, 2025. The U.S. Treasury will be able to pay its bills for several more months, but Congress will have to address the issue at some point next year. (more)

The Biden spending is already baked into the proverbial cake. Congress will have to raise the debt ceiling limit and President Trump is urging them to do it now, before he takes office.

(more…)

Rand Paul is the newly appointed Chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In this interview with Maria Bartiromo, Senator Rand Paul gives his perspective on the looming issue of the debt ceiling needing to be raised.

As Senator Paul outlines, extending and making the Trump tax cuts permanent is a priority. If the congressional spending bill, which will include the need to extend the debt ceiling, is attached to true structural reform on government (the mission of DOGE), then it makes the issue of the debt ceiling much easier to support. This is the legislative position of President Trump.

Additionally, Rand Paul expresses full support for each of the cabinet nominations put forth by President-elect Trump. Chairman Paul will control the nomination process for Dept of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and OMB Director Russell Vaught, and promises quick committee work on those nominations. WATCH:

.

(more…)

For those who walk the deep weeds of internecine politics, we notice there is an influential component of the Sea Island group still at work within the GOP.

The same Republican “conservatives” who voted to suspend the debt ceiling issue for Joe Biden (Chip Roy, Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace et al), refused to stop the issue of the debt ceiling from surfacing during the Donald Trump administration.

At a certain point we must accept there are elements within the republican apparatus who intend to disrupt President Trump even though they present a false face.

The short-term spending bill has punted the issues of government funding into March 2025. The package passed 366-34, with the support of 196 Democrats and 170 Republicans.

The good news is that most of the hidden non-spending aspects were removed in the much shorter CR extension. The provisions which shielded the administrative state, approximately 1,000 pages of self-interested regulation, were removed. However, the debt ceiling conflict will rise again and could potentially present a problem because they will be attached to future legislative negotiations on Trump policy.

The House “Freedom Caucus” is essentially the voice and mechanism for the Sea Island group to disrupt MAGA plans and President Trump’s economic priorities. The Debt Ceiling is their legislative weapon, a false front technical issue to hide the Freedom Caucus intent. They justify standing against Trump by saying “fiscal conservatism”; but in reality, their history shows their vitriol only extends outwardly when Trump is in office.

The Sea Island multinational and banking group (traditional GOP control elements) are the financial backers of these anti-Trump schemes. The origin of their corporate opposition comes from the way they make money, which is not in alignment with the policy of President Trump.

(more…)