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Thursday, August 7, 2025

Devine: Biden turned FEMA into a far-left political machine

 The Biden administration abused its power by turning the entire mechanism of the federal government into a Democratic voter mobilization campaign, according to newly unearthed White House documents viewed exclusively by The Post.

The worst offender was FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, under the Department of Homeland Security, which was controlled for four years by Biden’s Machiavellian border buster Alejandro Mayorkas.

When responding to an emergency or a natural disaster, FEMA employees were directed to make voter registration a “key priority.”

President Joe Biden responds to a question from the news media following a briefing from Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in the Oval Office of the White House, December 13, 2021.
President Joe Biden responds to a question from the news media following a briefing from Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in the Oval Office of the White House, December 13, 2021.Shawn Thew / Pool via CNP / Spla

They politically targeted vulnerable people in their hour of need instead of focusing on providing federal assistance.

Left-wing NGOs were brought in to “educate” FEMA staff about “equity and voter access for individuals affected by disaster,” says a Trump administration official.

“FEMA’s job is to make sure Americans who have suffered catastrophic loss due to some disaster in their community [can access] food, water and shelter … Under President Biden, FEMA, like every agency, produced a plan on how they would leverage these crisis situations for political [purposes]. I can’t think of anything more disgusting.”

FEMA snubbed GOP

FEMA employees were so fixated on voter outreach that, when they visited hurricane-ravaged Florida last October, they didn’t even bother knocking on the doors of houses that had Trump signs in the yard.

Instead of assisting Hurricane Milton survivors, they were instructed to “avoid homes advertising Trump,” according to an Office of Special Counsel complaint.

FEMA supervisor Marn’i Washington was fired as a scapegoat after Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called foul on the scam and the Daily Wire reported that at least 20 homes with Trump signs or flags had been skipped by FEMA and denied the opportunity of qualifying for federal assistance.

It stands to reason that if FEMA’s priority was getting out Democrats to vote, the last people they would want to visit were Trump supporters.

The Florida scandal came on the heels of the Biden administration’s sluggish response to Hurricane Helene in Trump-supporting rural areas of North Carolina and Tennessee.

Whether it was Hurricane Helene, the Maui wildfires, Hurricane Ian, or the East Palestine train derailment in Ohio, FEMA always came up short during the Biden years.

The agency’s inadequate performance is more understandable when you realize that providing actual disaster relief to victims had become simply a side dish to the partisan political priorities of the Democratic Party.

It began the minute Joe Biden came into office, when he concocted a fake voter registration crisis by leveraging the same racial discord that he had exploited during the George Floyd riots the previous summer, claiming that “many Americans, especially people of color, confront significant obstacles to exercising the fundamental right” to vote, including “difficulties with voter registration, lack of election information, and barriers to access at polling places.”

This was not true. In fact, voter turnout in the 2020 election of 67% was the highest recorded in the 21st century, according to the Census Bureau.

Voter registration likewise was at a record high in 2020.

“Equity” and “access” were euphemisms for policies designed simply to increase Democratic voter turnout by targeting demographics that traditionally vote Democratic.

Biden launched his federal government-wide voter recruitment program with an executive order on March 7, 2021, to “promote equity in voter access.”

The date was chosen deliberately to fall on the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday to invoke the civil rights legacy of fighting voter suppression against black Americans.

Biden announced the scheme at a breakfast in Selma, Ala., absurdly tying the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to what he claimed was a renewed struggle for voting rights.

Fed turnout machine

A federal lawsuit filed by nine states last August claimed that his order was drafted by progressive racial activist group Demos, which “monitors implementation and advocates that federal agencies do more.”

The EO was executed by Susan Rice, Biden’s assistant to the president for domestic policy, whose primary focus was making “equity” central to every arm of government.

In 2021, she commanded all federal agencies to dream up ways to re-engineer their activities to prioritize voter turnout, especially in “marginalized communities.”

The Department of Energy, for example, targeted low-income households that qualify for federal weatherization assistance with voter registration paraphernalia before the 2022 midterm elections.

The Department of Labor enlisted state workforce agencies to designate American Job Centers as voter registration agencies and coordinating exclusively with leftist “voting rights” groups.

The Department of Health and Human Services instructed federal health centers to engage in voter turnout, including “encouraging patients to register to vote, assisting patients with completing registration forms, sending completed forms to the election authorities.”

HHS also encouraged voter registration by ineligible illegal aliens who had access to health coverage through the Affordable Care Act, according to an expose by Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky.

DHS went above and beyond.

A FEMA “Strategic Plan for the Implementation of Executive Order 14019, Promoting Access to Voting,” dated Sept. 10, 2021, and sent to Rice by Katherine Culliton-González, DHS officer for civil rights and civil liberties, summarized what DHS was doing to comply with Biden’s EO by using disasters and emergencies to harvest voters: “DHS has planned and begun implementing a variety of internal and external activities to promote access to voting.”

The plan included “key messaging and … resources to promote equity in voter access through their training preparedness initiatives for individuals impacted by a disaster or emergency event.”

Also included were novel ways of harnessing “internal resources, and points of public interface to promote equity in voter access before, during, and after a disaster or emergency event.”

Registration drive

Another arm of Mayorkas’ empire, the Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), was enlisted for the turnout effort, with a plan to “build up its existing efforts to facilitate voter registration for new citizens at the end of naturalization ceremonies, in coordination with governmental and nongovernmental organizations.”

At 2,100 naturalization ceremonies for new Americans, DHS embedded “voter-registration outreach,” inserting 2 million voter registration forms in “welcome packets” and inviting only partisan left-leaning groups.

Another White House document covering “Partnerships and Outreach” showed that DHS signed “Memorandums of Understanding” with the League of Women Voters in October 2022 and NALEO Educational Fund in February 2023, for naturalization “ceremony support.”

Another DHS outfit, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, co-hosted Your Vote Your Voice “cyber-hygiene webinars” with another NGO, the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life.

Taxpayer resources allocated by DHS for voter turnout in 2022-2024 included 12 full-time USCIS employees, $1.9 million in print contracts, and “costs absorbed” for a dedicated five-person team from FEMA’s Individual and Community Preparedness Division.

President Trump issued a new executive order in March this year to reverse Biden’s subterfuge, calling on every federal agency to ensure the voter outreach schemes are dismantled.

The cost of this Sovietization of the federal government is incalculable.

But let’s hope FEMA and the other agencies can get back to their day jobs.

https://nypost.com/2025/08/06/opinion/miranda-devine-biden-abused-his-authority-by-turning-fema-into-a-far-left-political-machine/

NASA awards Firefly Aerospace $177 million for 1st multi-rover mission to moon's south pole

 NASA has awarded Firefly Aerospace a $176.7 million contract to deliver a pair of rovers and three scientific instruments to the moon's south pole.

Targeted for landing in 2029, the mission will be the first under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative to carry multiple rovers and instruments in a single flight. They will explore some of the moon's harshest environments for the presence of usable resources to support future lunar excursions, including crewed efforts.

The newly announced award marks Firefly's fifth CLPS task order and its fourth planned lunar mission. CLPS is NASA's program for purchasing robotic delivery services to the surface of the moon from commercial U.S. companies to enable more frequent, lower-cost access to the lunar surface.

CLPS is an integral part of NASA's Artemis program to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon, allowing the space agency to extensively study the environment that future astronauts will be exploring.

“Through CLPS, NASA is embracing a new era of lunar exploration, with commercial companies leading the way,” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.

Firefly's selection for this new CLPS task order contracts the company to provide complete service to the lunar surface "with a period of performance from [July 29, 2025] to March 29, 2030," the statement says.

Firefly successfully completed its first lunar landing and CLPS mission in March of this year , delivering 10 NASA payloads to the moon's near side. The Texas-based company's second mission is scheduled for 2026, and will attempt a far side landing after deploying a lunar orbiter. Another mission, scheduled for 2028, will study the volcanic terrain of the moon's Gruithuisen Domes region.

This newly assigned task order includes contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the University of Bern in Switzerland. The mission's science package combines mobile exploration, advanced imaging and regolith analysis to study the south pole's geology and environmental resources. Here's a brief rundown of what will fly on the mission:

  • MoonRanger — An autonomous microrover from NASA’s Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh company Astrobotic, equipped with a Neutron Spectrometer System for mapping hydrogen-bearing volatiles and characterizing regolith .
  • Stereo Plume Cameras — An advanced imaging system to observe how rocket exhaust interacts with the lunar surface during descent; developed by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.
  • Laser Retroreflector Array — Passive optically reflective markers to enable precision laser range measurements from orbit, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
  • CSA rover – Capable of exploring permanently shadowed craters, measuring radiation, and searching for water ice; equipped with multiple imagers and spectrometers.
  • Laser Ionization Mass Spectrometer – Analyzes regolith chemistry using a Firefly-built robotic arm and excavation system robotic arm excavation system (University of Bern).

The moon's south pole is home to permanently shadowed regions that are believed to contain large quantities of water ice — a critical resource that can be utilized for a wide range of applications from drinking water to rocket fuel. NASA hopes to use data gathered by the rovers and instruments to guide the best Artemis landing sites for future missions.

The mission will also study environmental hazards like radiation and surface erosion. In the NASA statement, Johnson Space Center CLPS manager Adam Schlesinger said, “As NASA sends both humans and robots to further explore the moon, CLPS deliveries to the lunar south pole region will provide a better understanding of the exploration environment, accelerating progress toward establishing a long-term human presence on the moon, as well as eventual human missions to Mars.”

https://www.space.com/astronomy/moon/nasa-awards-firefly-aerospace-usd177-million-for-1st-multi-rover-mission-to-moons-south-pole

Skywater Technology expanding with big acquisition even as it struggles with federal funding delays

 Skywater Technology closed its second quarter with a major acquisition expected to double annual revenue, even as it deals with federal defense funding delays that contributed to a sales decline in the spring months.

The $93 million deal for Fab 25, a semiconductor plant in Austin, Texas, increases Skywater’s U.S. semiconductor capacity as the U.S. looks to increase homegrown semiconductor manufacturing and lessen dependence on foreign sources.

The Bloomington-based company’s stock was up 40% in midday trading Thursday.

“Fab 25 adds a strategic sweet spot in capabilities,” and will be transformative for the company, Skywater Chief Executive Thomas Sonderman said on an analysts call Wednesday.

Skywater bought Fab 25 from Germany-based Infineon Technologies, one of the 10 largest semiconductor companies. The deal, which closed June 30, comes with a multi-year supply agreement with Infineon worth more than $1 billion.

But Sonderman told analysts there will be capacity to add new customers as well.

Tom Sonderman, CEO of SkyWater Technology, speaks as U.S. Sen. Amy Klobucharstands by his side when the company received $16 million in CHIPS Act funding. (Ayrton Breckenridge/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Meanwhile, the company continues to deal with Department of Defense funding delays because the 2025 federal budget remains under resolution.

Sonderman told analysts he believed the funding delays were temporary and were not affecting its partnership with the defense department.


“We are developing multiple new products and platforms that are of high strategic value for the U.S. government,” Sonderman said.


Skywater won $16 million in CHIPS Act passed under the Biden administration, plus about $19 million from the state’s Minnesota Forward Fund, to upgrade and expand its capabilities.

The company also said it expects to add another $320 million in funding from customer funded co-investments over the next few years.


Skywater’s losses widened in the second quarter, which ended June 30, but on the high end of its expectations. This year, its quarterly loss was $10 million, or 21 cents a share; it was $1.9 million, or 4 cents a share.

Revenue was $58 million, down 14% from the same period in 2024.

Highlights for the quarter including installation of new tooling at Skywater’s Florida facility and gains in the quantum computing market after adding capabilities in that growth area.


The addition of Fab25 means Skywater now expects 2026 revenue to be $600 million, up from $342 million.

The company’s shares hit their 52-week high of $16.06 a share in December after receiving the CHIPS Act funding.


https://www.startribune.com/skywater-technology-semiconductor-chips-acquisition-federal-funding-delays/601450960