Make American Intelligence Great Again

 Eight years ago, after Donald Trump’s historic 2016 presidential election victory, I published an article with the same title above, listing urgent recommendations for President Trump to reform America’s then-17 intelligence agencies so they could revert to the great agencies they once were that helped our nation win the Cold War. I believed at the time that the growing politicization of U.S. intelligence, especially concerning the Russia collusion hoax during the 2016 campaign, and bloated intelligence bureaucracies had damaged the reputation of our intelligence agencies and undermined their ability to provide crucial intelligence support to the president.

After the extreme weaponization of U.S. intelligence against the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and his administration, as well as woke mismanagement of intelligence agencies by the Biden administration, intelligence reform is far more urgent today than when Mr. Trump assumed the Oval Office in January 2017.

This is because President Trump has lost confidence in America’s intelligence agencies. As a result, unless there are massive intelligence reforms, the $95 billion-plus that the U.S. is scheduled to spend on intelligence programs in 2025 will be a huge waste of tax dollars.

I have developed five critical steps the Trump administration should take to fix U.S. intelligence. These steps are based on my 25 years working in and with the Intelligence Community and are also drawn from Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton’s extraordinary opening remarks at this week’s confirmation hearing for CIA Director-nominee John Ratcliffe.

1.  Return U.S. intelligence agencies to their original purpose: providing the best possible intelligence support to the president to help him make national security policy decisions to keep our nation safe. This support includes intelligence collection, analysis, and covert action.

Today’s American intelligence agencies have lost sight of their primary mandate to serve the president and operate so independently and arrogantly that they have been accused of being an unelected layer of government. Our intelligence agencies have been called an “administrative state,” a “deep state,” and a “security state.” Many intelligence officials and their supporters actually believe U.S. intelligence agencies should oversee and adjudicate the President’s national security policies.

U.S. intelligence agencies also have meddled in U.S. politics. They have leaked intelligence to damage executive branch officials they dislike and to promote political agendas. They have tried to influence the outcome of several presidential elections. Senator Tom Cotton this week accused the CIA of distorting intelligence analysis over the last four years to justify President Biden’s foreign policy actions. Cotton also expressed his frustration that the CIA has wasted resources writing analysis on non-intelligence issues for the Biden administration, such as climate change and gay rights legislation in Africa.

As a result, the performance of our intelligence agencies has suffered. Distorting intelligence analysis for political reasons distracts intelligence agencies from focusing on the real, serious threats facing our nation, especially China. It also may have caused their failure to predict several recent major events and attacks, like the New Orleans terrorist attack, the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, and the fall of Syria’s Assad regime.

Concerning the CIA, politicization and mismanagement have caused it to neglect its most important mission: collecting clandestine intelligence. If the CIA won’t steal secrets for the president, it should be shut down, and the State Department should be tasked with providing him the information he needs about foreign threats.

Intelligence officers have drifted from their core mission. Careerism and risk aversion are growing problems. Their work has been politicized. This has happened because intelligence managers let this happen and, in many cases, encouraged it. Reforming America’s intelligence agencies and getting them back to their core mission will require strong and revamped leadership throughout each intelligence agency, starting at the top. The Trump administration should mandate that intelligence managers ensure that all intelligence officers abide by a new professional code to produce the best possible intelligence for the president and his administration and hold them accountable. Related to this code must be new initiatives to reward intelligence officers for their sacrifices, innovation, and original thinking.

In addition, intelligence agency heads named by President Trump must implement a zero-tolerance policy on the politicization of intelligence and meddling in U.S. politics. They also must aggressively investigate and punish intelligence officers who leak classified information.

2.  Dramatically Cut Back the Intelligence Bureaucracy. I agreed with Senator Cotton’s comment this week that the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy has grown too big and bureaucratic. Cotton is correct that many bureaucratic problems at the CIA stem from CIA Director John Brennan’s ill-advised organizational reforms, which blurred lines of authority, put managers with no field experience in operational roles, and caused a surge in the number of managers at the CIA headquarters. If he is confirmed as the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe should reverse the Brennan reorganization as soon as possible.

However, the U.S. Intelligence Community faces broader bureaucratic problems. The number of intelligence agencies grew to 18 in 2019 with the creation of the Space Force. This large number of agencies is highly inefficient and has significant overlap. Most of these bureaucracies have exploded in size. One reason is that it is common for multiple intelligence agencies to create new bureaucracies whenever new security challenges crop up so they can request additional funding from Congress. I hope that streamlining intelligence agencies—and reducing their number—will be a priority for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Part of this effort should be eliminating or significantly scaling back the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The ODNI was originally intended by the 9/11 Commission to be a small oversight office that would prevent future 9/11 attacks by ensuring that intelligence agencies share intelligence with each other. It has ballooned into a massive additional layer of bureaucracy that has impeded and politicized the intelligence community’s work. In addition, although the ODNI was supposed to be an oversight office, it now has duplicative offices that produce their own intelligence analysis.

In 2007, House Intelligence Committee members were so disturbed about the rapid growth of the ODNI bureaucracy that they approved, on a bipartisan basis, an amendment to the 2008 intelligence authorization bill to freeze the ODNI staff to the number working for it as of May 1, 2007. I drafted this amendment, co-sponsored by Congressmen Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) and Alcee Hastings (D., Fla.).

Hastings said at the time about this amendment:

“We will not give you a blank check with which you could continue to grow a new bureaucracy before we know what you are doing with what you already have. A bigger bureaucracy does not make better intelligence.”

Although Hastings was right, the Hastings/Rogers amendment was never implemented since Congress did not pass an intelligence authorization bill that year. I hate to think how many times the ODNI staff has doubled since the House Intelligence Committee attempted to halt its growth in 2007.

The ODNI now has thousands of employees who were not there before 9/11. Most are not needed. If the ODNI cannot be eliminated, the DOGE Commission should cut it back to a 200-person office that would perform its original mandate to ensure that our intelligence agencies cooperate with each other and share intelligence.

3.  End DEI and Restore Personnel Policies to Hire and Promote based on Merit and Achievement. My former CIA analyst colleague John Gentry wrote persuasively in his 2023 book, Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences, how the radical-left “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” ideology has seriously damaged the objectivity and quality of the Agency’s work. This includes elevating the goals of left-wing identity politics as paramount in the selection and promotion of officers. I wrote about this issue in American Greatness in December 2023 concerning a senior CIA officer who posted pro-Palestinian images on her Facebook page and a selfie photo with the caption “Free Palestine” just after the Hamas massacre against Israel on October 7, 2023.

Pete Hegseth, during his confirmation hearing to be the next Secretary of Defense, and Senator Cotton at this week’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, spoke powerfully about the urgency of reversing DEI and woke policies from U.S. national security organizations.

Hegseth said he will tear out DEI and critical race theory initiatives “root and branch” from the U.S. military because he believes these concepts seriously undermine the U.S. military’s mission, divide the workforce, and hurt morale. Hegseth pledged to promote equality, not equity, and to put in place Defense officials who would help him do this and promote the priorities of the president.  President Trump’s intelligence heads should take a similar approach.

Cotton made similar strong comments about DEI in the CIA:

“If you wonder why our intelligence agencies struggle to collect intelligence, consider this fact. The CIA offered to pay diversity consultants three times as much as a new case officer. I’m sorry, but if you feel like you need a diversity consultant or an affinity group or your pronouns in an email, maybe the CIA isn’t for you. This job is not about your identity or your feelings. It is about our nation’s security.”

President Trump’s appointees to U.S. intelligence agencies should not underestimate how deeply the Biden administration has embedded DEI policies into their organizations’ regulations, procedures, and training. For example, during a May 2024 U.S. government diversity conference, the CIA’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer discussed the agency’s extensive DEI initiatives and efforts to make it difficult for a new presidential administration to reverse them.

It must be a priority for all intelligence heads named by President Trump to rip out

DEI policies and procedures “root and branch” and ensure that these agencies hire, promote, and hand out assignments strictly on the basis of equality, merit, and achievement. This will ensure that our country has the most talented and capable intelligence workforce possible to produce the intelligence that the president and his administration need to protect our security and freedom.

4.  Improved and Bolder Covert Action. I agreed with Senator Cotton’s remarks this week that the CIA and other intelligence agencies must engage in bolder and more innovative covert action. Although I cannot get into this issue in an unclassified article, I believe growing risk aversion has been the main impediment to these operations. I also agreed with Cotton when he said, “The timid indecision of the Biden administration’s overt actions extends to its covert actions.”

5.  Keeping Pace with Technology and Innovation. Recent technological developments present significant challenges and opportunities for U.S. intelligence agencies. They are improving the capabilities of America’s adversaries to spy on us and deter our spying. In some cases, new technology has disrupted U.S. spycraft. China’s aggressive efforts to develop emergent technologies, cyber technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) for defense and intelligence purposes are among our nation’s most serious threats today.

Although emerging technologies are improving U.S. intelligence capabilities, keeping up with these innovations is difficult. We already collect far more electronic intelligence than our analysts can use. Harnessing and developing AI is crucial to U.S. national security and the future of America’s intelligence agencies. CIA is already exploiting AI for analytic tasks, but this technology is still in its infancy, and, like other organizations, intelligence agencies are still learning how to best exploit it.

Multiple intelligence agencies have invested billions of dollars to exploit new and emerging technologies to give the Intelligence Community and the U.S. government a competitive advantage. The new Trump administration must quickly evaluate these efforts to ensure they are properly targeted and funded. I believe it will also be necessary to streamline and promote collaboration among multiple efforts to exploit new and emerging technologies at the ODNI, CIA, NSA, and other organizations.

George Washington once said, “There is nothing more necessary than good intelligence to frustrate a designing enemy, and nothing requires greater pains to obtain.” We live in a very dangerous world, and providing the president and his administration with good intelligence has never been more critical.

However, producing quality intelligence is especially difficult today because our intelligence agencies have been politicized, lost sight of their core mission to support the president, and have grown too big and bureaucratic. Moreover, there is no sense in maintaining intelligence agencies that cost almost $100 billion per year if the president has no confidence in them. This is why it is vital that President Trump instruct his intelligence heads to immediately implement urgent and massive reforms like the above steps to salvage America’s intelligence agencies and make them great again.

***

— Fred Fleitz held national security jobs for 25 years with the CIA, the DIA, the Department of State, and the House Intelligence Committee staff.  Twitter @fredfleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/17/how-president-trump-can-make-american-intelligence-great-again/

You don’t have ADHD – you’re just annoying

 What a coincidence that it’s always the most irritating people who get diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Sue Perkins, Jamie Oliver, Owen Jones – the list of celebs who have this trendy malady reads like a roll-call of people you’d flee a pub to avoid. No offence to ‘the ADHD community’, but everyone I’ve met who claims to have this disorder has been a royal pain in the arse. Like the fuming student who accosted me at the Oxford Union to harangue me about something I’d written on mental health. ‘Look!’, he said, pulling a box of pills from his pocket. ‘These are for my ADHD!’ His face was flushed red and frozen into a seething grimace. ‘Well, they’re not fucking working’, I thought.

Hear me out: is it possible you don’t have ADHD and you’re just a bit of a twat? No judgement. We all have twat tendencies, me included. It’s just that most of us don’t doll up our maddening foibles as a neurodevelopmental disorder requiring medical treatment. Consider the ‘symptoms’ of ADHD: overtalking, interrupting others, fidgeting, mood swings, extreme impatience, being ‘unable to wait your turn’. I’m old enough to remember when we called such people rude. Or another four-letter word. Now we have to pretend they’re mentally disordered. I might try this next time I’m late for something, which is my most grating trait: chalk it up to my ‘Time Perception Disorder’.

Guess what? That disorder already exists. I Googled it after writing that sentence. It’s called Time Blindness, it’s a ‘time perception-related’ disorder, and the symptoms include ‘chronic lateness’, ‘procrastination’ and ‘missed deadlines’. Yay! I’m not a dawdling son-of-a-bitch who keeps his friends waiting because he just has to finish the latest episode of Severance – I’m ill! What a relief to know it’s not my fault I’m always 20 minutes late to the pub, just as it’s not Jamie Oliver’s fault that he’s the most irksome, vexing mockney in the land. We are unwell, people. We can’t help it. Give us the drugs and go away.

Whatever your bad habits are, whatever your worst personality traits, I guarantee you there will be a ‘disorder’ you can swaddle them in so that you come off as ill rather than irritating. You’re ‘spiteful and vindictive’ and you ‘deliberately annoy people’? Maybe you have Oppositional Defiant Disorder. You’re deceitful, impulsive and aggressive? You might have Antisocial Personality Disorder. Your kid’s a bully who plays truant from school and sometimes even starts fires? Maybe he has a Conduct Disorder and would benefit from ‘multisystemic therapy’. Or, I don’t know, maybe he’s a little wanker who would benefit from a slap.

We are living through a great pathologising of human behaviour. Everything from exam stress to being a nasty piece of work who is always ‘seeking revenge’ has been reimagined as a disorder. ‘One in four people will experience a mental-health problem of some kind each year in England’, says one charity, such as ‘low mood, anxiety or stress’ to an extent that it ‘impacts… daily life’. Only one in four?! Everyone I know feels ‘low’ at times, because they’re human beings, and that’s what happens to human beings. It’s not a ‘mental-health problem’ – it’s life. Just as talking over people and pushing to the front of the queue is not ADHD – it’s bad manners.

ADHD is the disorder du jour. It’s the most coveted diagnosis of our time. The middle classes in particular crave the ADHD label, because who wants to go to a dinner party these days without having some vogue ailment to boast about? There is now concern – finally! – that ADHD is being overdiagnosed. The Times reports that 278,000 people in England are on ‘central nervous system stimulants’ – yikes – to treat their ADHD. There was an 18 per cent hike in prescriptions for ADHD drugs between April 2023 and March 2024, and now nearly five in every thousand people in England are being treated for the condition. Man that’s a lot of annoying people.

The Economist is worried, too. Last year it got the fashionably disordered middle classes choking on their pills when it said ‘ADHD should not be treated as a disorder’. Its reasoning was solid: much of the stuff we bundle up as ‘ADHD’ is just ‘ordinary human traits’, it said. It’s so true. Who among us has not at some point felt impulsive, disorganised, agitated? We’re not sick, we’re having a bad week. No one benefits from the pathologisation of life’s ups and downs. Aside from Big Pharma, that is. As a writer for Scientific American said back in 2016, ADHD feels like a ‘manufactured epidemic’. Drug companies have ‘massive financial incentives’, he said, to convince people they’re unhinged and need drugs. One wonders if Scientific American would publish a piece like that today.

The ADHD epidemic, like all faux disorders, started in the US. They’ve been drugging kids there for years. Seven million American kids – that’s 11.4 per cent of them – are said to have ADHD. Many are being pumped with Ritalin and other calming drugs. The sedation of a generation – it’s crazy. As one sceptical psychiatrist wrote in the New York Times a few years back, this ‘drugging of children’ is the really scary ‘epidemic’. We are using stimulants to ‘[suppress] all spontaneous behavior in normal children’, he said. Aldous Huxley called – he wants his storyline back.

How striking that this explosion in the drugging of children coincided with the crisis of discipline in family and school life. It seems to me that medication was brought in to do what adults were increasingly reluctant to do: make kids sit still and shut up. And now these ill-disciplined brats have become ill-disciplined adults. As someone from Gen X (the last sane generation), I remember fidgeting and overtalking being severely reprimanded. At school, at the dinner table, at Mass, you twitched and chatted at your peril. Even random old men on the bus would tell us to shut the fuck up. No doubt millennials and Gen Z think this sounds tyrannical, but at least we don’t need drugs to get through a 20-minute work meeting. The West’s millions of ‘ADHD adults’ don’t need medication – they need a time machine so they can go back and beg their bourgeois parents to discipline them better.

Or – and I’m really putting my neck on the line here – maybe they just need to exercise some self-control. Here’s my advice for grown-ups who interrupt people and have temper tantrums – don’t. Stop using the luxury malady of ADHD to dress up your bad habits as a ‘disorder’. Stop seeking a diagnosis to avoid taking responsibility for your shitty behaviour. Stop being a stooge of Big Pharma and give adulthood a shot instead. How about it? In 2025 I’ll be on time for the pub and you’ll stop being a tosser – deal?

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/17/you-dont-have-adhd-youre-just-annoying/

The Politicization of Wind and Fire

The first time I’d ever heard of the Santa Ana wind was while reading an essay famed author Joan Didion wrote, “Los Angeles Notebook,” which is included in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Writing in 1968, Didion describes what had happened just a decade earlier.

The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957,” Didion writes, “and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day, 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles per hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale… On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour.

This conflagration, nearly 70 years ago, involved a weather event that was easily a match for what Angelenos are enduring today. That hasn’t stopped the climate crisis industry from pouncing on this tragedy to score political points. From the Sierra Club on January 8, “Time and again, we are witnessing climate change heighten extreme weather, making wildfires increasingly common and increasingly destructive.” From the BBC, “Climate ‘whiplash’ linked to raging LA fires.”

We will hear more of this agenda-driven, politically motivated hectoring, even though according to at least some climate experts, including John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama and originally a California native, over a century of climate data in California refutes the climate crisis narrative.

But what if the climate crisis narrative is valid? So what? If our climate is turning against us, doesn’t that mean we have to be even more prepared to cope with what nature’s going to throw at us, starting with the Santa Ana winds?

Rather than look in the mirror, environmentalists claim these fires are being exploited for political gain by their critics. For example, Steve Lopez, a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times, accuses president-elect Trump of “using the fires as a political piñata.” But it’s the people running California, the Democrats that Trump and other critics are now holding accountable, who have politicized the management of everything. Not just land use and climate science, but entire industries and every category of infrastructure. Nothing has escaped their reach.

After California’s devastating fires in the summer of 2020, Newsom issued an executive order to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035. After another round of fires in 2023, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against five major oil companies, accusing them of knowingly misleading the public regarding the harm that fossil fuels would inflict on the climate.

This is pure political theater. What California’s forests need, along with the chaparral currently being immolated in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains surrounding the Los Angeles Basin, is responsible land management. Before having any discussion, even of firefighting response, much less the “climate crisis,” California’s governor, supported by the state legislature, needs to enact sweeping reforms that, among other things, radically deregulate the activities of timber harvesting, mechanical thinning, grazing, and controlled burns.

As it is, the canyons between the neighborhoods on the hills and ridges surrounding Los Angeles are dangerously overgrown, along with the adjacent state parks and open space. There’s no way to completely stop a wildfire when the Santa Ana winds turn Los Angeles County into a blast furnace. But if the state and county had managed their open space, and private property owners had been not merely permitted but required to clear overgrown brush around their homes, these fires would not have had enough fuel to become the catastrophes we’re witnessing today.

When it comes to politics, exposing DEI-driven incompetence is also touted by defenders of the bureaucracy as another example of how this conflagration is being politicized by its critics. But there is nothing about DEI that is not political, so critics are politicizing something that is already explicitly political. To put this as delicately as possible, thanks to DEI, the chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, the assistant chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, the Los Angeles Fire Department’s first “Equity Bureau Chief,” and the CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power are all political appointees who check two diversity boxes.

Let’s be clear. Nobody wants to discriminate against anyone based on their sexuality or ethnicity. Those days are long gone. In California of all places, those days are ancient history. But were these people selected based on how many boxes they checked relating to their sex, sexuality, or ethnicity, instead of based on their qualifications? The laws of probability suggest that DEI was the prevailing criteria. Up and down the chain of command, from top to bottom, this is happening all the time, everywhere, in every institution that matters. Instead of merit, we are hiring people based on how many diversity boxes they check.

And if these women, the chief in particular, are not the most qualified individuals for the job, what are the consequences of that fact? At a time when leadership was desperately needed, LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley—who, according to Transparent California, made $654,951 in 2023—was scoring points in the liberal press for excluding white men from hiring and promotion opportunities in the name of diversity and irrespective of their qualifications. This sort of discrimination not only deprives fire teams of the most capable potential members, something that I’ve personally been told by current and retired California firefighters. Worse still, and most pertinent to the tragedies citizens are suffering today, Kristin Crowley was not using 100 percent of her leadership capital to demand the reforms to land management and upgrades to firefighting resources that could have prevented this disaster from getting out of control.

Every press conference and interview Kristin Crowley gave on “diversity”—for example, last winter—was time she should have spent publicly demanding the state, county, and cities immediately send crews into the canyons and finally engage in fuel reduction projects. Everyone knew this was a disaster waiting to happen. And more recently, once she knew the Santa Ana winds were forecast, she could have already been prepositioning tankers and engines and if the resources weren’t there, she could have already been urgently requesting help in advance from other jurisdictions. And why, in a city as big as Los Angeles, in a state as innovative and wealthy as California, wasn’t LAFD exploring and deploying new technologies, such as nontoxic fire retardants or, heck, machine learning chaparral robots to cut, clear and chip overgrown grass, brush, and fallen limbs? Why didn’t Crowley demand the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power trim the trees around power lines, or better yet, move them underground in fire-prone neighborhoods, and demand the state find the funds to help pay for it? And why, if we are to get to what everyone knows is the root of these policy failures, didn’t Crowley publicly expose the environmentalist extremists, the NGOs, and agency activists who have litigated and regulated practical land management to a standstill?

Why didn’t Kristin Crowley hold press conferences, over and over, to demand all of these steps immediately to avoid catastrophe, instead of grandstanding about diversity?

That would take a leader, not a placeholder.

There is so much that could have been done if there had been courageous leadership at the top of the LAFD hierarchy, focused on the department’s primary mission. And why, for that matter, aren’t the California Professional Firefighters, one of the most powerful unions in the state, joining with Crowley to demand all of the above? Why not? If anyone has the political clout to move Newsom and the state legislature to take preventive action that is more than symbolic blather about the “climate crisis,” it’s them.

Once the fires are out, the suffering will go on, because the aftermath of these fires will reveal still more of California’s dysfunction. Families burned out of their homes will face a hostile bureaucracy, populated with environmentalist fanatics who have been trained since kindergarten to resent the privilege and deplore the unsustainability of homes that not only commit the green crime of being detached single-family dwellings but are situated in what is charmingly referred to these days as the “wildland-urban interface.” According to these folks, when “wildland” and “urban” face off in California, “wildland” wins. Give the land back to the mountain lions. It’s their land. Go away.

And even if that bias weren’t present, even if their homes were down in the heart of Los Angeles in fully urbanized settings, they’d face an insurance nightmare. California’s FAIR plan, set up after insurance companies started pulling out of California one after another in response to financially ignorant regulators preventing them from charging rates sufficient to pay claims without going bankrupt, is itself on the brink of bankruptcy. According to a January 10 report in the San Francisco Chronicle, FAIR’s reserves are reportedly around $385 million. Estimated damages so far to residential and commercial property within the ZIP codes in and around the fire perimeters is already $24 billion. FAIR’s share of those claims is easily going to exceed their reserves. Federal bailout, here we come.

And let’s suppose these homeowners finally get the money to rebuild. They’ll have to get building permits. In Texas, that might take three days. In Los Angeles, California, if you’re very, very lucky and very, very diligent, you will have acquired the requisite stack of permits from a bewildering assortment of state, regional, county, city, and various other agencies in around three years. The cost for all these permits and fees will be equal to what construction costs would be in a normal state. Which brings us to California’s abnormal construction costs.

Thanks to absurd building codes baked into state law, new homes have to have solar panels, interior fire sprinklers, and an EV charger circuit. The “building envelope,” the water heater, HVAC, and lighting all have to comply with ridiculously detailed requirements that are set forth in California’s wonderful “Single Family Residential Compliance Manual,” courtesy of the California Energy Commission. And just around the corner, there are the state’s mandatory new building standards to limit water use. Ask anyone still trying to build new homes in California today about the code requirements they have to navigate, or else, and they will launch into a stupefying recitation of just how much BS the idiots in Sacramento are forcing down everyone’s throats. And none of these bureaucrats ever get their fingernails dirty doing real work in the real world. These same Sacramento bureaucrats killed California’s timber industry, which is not only a primary reason for superfires in the overgrown forests, but also the reason lumber costs so much. Victims of this fire may expect construction costs to rebuild—not including permits and fees—to top $500 per square foot.

Such is the disaster that’s befallen some of the wealthiest and most progressive households in America. Such is the nature of the multi-year train wreck they face going forward. Will it change their worldview? Will it change their politics? If it doesn’t, nothing will.

Edward Ring is the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/15/the-politicization-of-wind-and-fire/

Reverse Biden Administration's Illegal Student Loan Giveaway

 Even in the waning days of the Biden administration, they are circumventing Congress and the rule of law to illegally forgive billions of dollars in student loan debt through the collusive class action settlement of Sweet v. Cardona. As one of his first acts on January 20, President-elect Trump should shut down this travesty.

 The controversy stems from a class action lawsuit against the federal Department of Education initiated by borrowers in 2019. The Trump administration negotiated a legal settlement, but it was rejected by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 2020. Once the Biden administration took office, the parties negotiated a fresh settlement in what became Sweet v. Cardona. The 2022 settlement included something that had never been on the table: erasing $6 billion in student loan debt for roughly 200,000 borrowers.

 The settlement has no statutory or regulatory basis. In reaching the settlement, Biden’s Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, disregarded his duty to faithfully follow his statutory and regulatory responsibilities and, in doing so, he infringed on Congress’ power of the purse. Furthermore, by approving a settlement that, by design, undermines the Constitution’s separation of powers protections, the district court also abused its discretion.

 Also troubling are the procedural defects. The revised settlement fails to meet basic class certification requirements, creating three subclasses with divergent claims and relief. One blatant example of the settlement’s procedural flaws is its violation of Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires a unified class. The district court should have rejected this settlement outright, but it did not. But by approving this collusive settlement, the court allowed the Biden administration's unlawful actions to stand.

 And there were those who properly objected to the settlement as well. Four of the schools that were maligned in the case were initially allowed to intervene to object.  But though the district court found the schools had a legal interest in the case, it ignored their valid concerns and approved the settlement.

 The settlement was temporarily put on pause pending an appeal filed by the schools in 2023. Unfortunately, on November 5 of this year, the Ninth Circuit ruled 2-1 to uphold the Biden administration’s blatant abuse of executive power. The ruling thereby affirmed the district court’s approval of the underlying revised settlement that was struck between the Biden administration’s Department of Education and a plaintiff class of student borrowers seeking relief from federal student loan payments under the borrower-defense statute, 20 U.S.C. 1087e(h), and accompanying regulations.  It also disregarded the schools' objection, creating a novel test to keep them out of the case and avoid reaching the tough questions as to the legality of the settlement.  

 Judge Daniel Collins recognized these issues in his dissenting opinion. Collins rightly noted the settlement's lack of legal basis and failure to meet class certification standards. His dissent also provides a roadmap for further legal challenges.

 The settlement represents a dangerous erosion of the separation of powers. The Biden administration and Education Secretary Cardona have failed to faithfully execute the law, instead using clearly flawed settlements to achieve political aims. By disguising what amounts to legislation as a judicial settlement, the Biden administration’s class action settlement creates a backdoor for broader student debt relief, which has long been a major political goal of the Biden administration.  If allowed to stand, this precedent will open the door to further abuses.

 The incoming Trump administration must move swiftly to challenge and overturn this unconstitutional settlement. The Department of Education, under Trump’s watch, should admit error and work to correct this overreach. Congress should also investigate the Education Department’s misuse of settlement authority to circumvent the legislative process.

 Our system of government depends on each branch respecting constitutional limits. The Sweet v. Cardona settlement flagrantly violates those limits. It must not be allowed to stand. And it won't, if the incoming Trump administration makes it a priority.

Abhishek Kambli is a Deputy Attorney General at the Office of the Kansas Attorney General where he leads the Special Litigation Division. Erin Gaide is an Assistant Attorney General in the Special Litigation Division at the Office of the Kansas Attorney General.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2025/01/17/reverse_biden_administrations_illegal_student_loan_giveaway_1085347.html