Clarice F
For the Democrats, Trump's second week has been worse than they ever imagined. For the rest of us, it has been better than we ever hoped.In his second week of his second term in office, President Trump has asserted the right of the Chief Executive to effectively manage the Executive Branch. He has blindsided — even gelded — his detractors in the media and Congress, and issued an astonishing array of executive orders which reveal how tax funds have been flowing out of the Treasury to the benefit of the Deep State and its friends without regard (and often even being inimical) to the national interest. So much has happened that I cannot cover it all, but I will try to hit briefly and in no particular order some of the most significant developments this week.
Gaza
Trump has proposed that Gazans be relocated to Jordan and Egypt so that Gaza can be rebuilt and Hamas’ presence removed. Jordan and Egypt have balked at that notion but the President, who notes how financially dependent on us they are, insists it will happen. Amjad Taha of the United Arab Emirates details how this project makes sense. It would allow Gaza to be rebuilt more quickly, it would allow Gazans exposure to “different educational systems, ones that don’t glorify death and antisemitism.” He details the cost of providing for them and the history of Palestinians fomenting wars in the area. Taha concludes:
The solution must be approached logically, not emotionally. It has nothing to do with Israel itself. If you examine the situation, Israel wouldn’t take Gaza even for free under any condition; it just wants Gaza free of hostages and rocket launches targeting its schools and hospitals. The real question is whether all the corrupt Palestinian leaders genuinely want a state, or if they merely use the idea of statehood as a rhetorical tool to create obstacles, resist peace or normalization, and fill their pockets and bank accounts.
And per Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia are closer than ever to normalizing relations.
Bulldozers and heavy bombs which Israel had ordered and paid for and on which Biden held up delivery have been delivered at last.
California
The President tweeted that the U.S. military “turned on water flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest… The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER.” The claim was disputed, but it was true.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dramatically increased the amount of water flowing from two dams in Tulare County, sending massive flows down river channels toward farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley.
Federal records show that water releases from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success jumped early Friday morning.
The sudden increase occurred four days after President Trump said on social media that the U.S. military had “entered” California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” Trump also vowed during a visit to Los Angeles last week to “open up the valves and pumps” in California to deliver more water.
According to federal data, the flow from Terminus Dam into the Kaweah River near Visalia increased from 57 cubic feet per second to more than 1,500 on Friday morning. The flow from Lake Success near Porterville into the Tule River increased from 105 cubic feet per second to 990.
The Army Corps of Engineers is “conducting controlled water releases” from the two dams, said Tyler Stalker, a spokesperson for the Corps in Sacramento. “The action is being coordinated with local officials. The releases are within the capacity of the downstream waterways.”
Responding to questions about the reasons for the sudden increase in water flow, Gene Pawlik, a spokesperson at the Corps’ headquarters in Washington, said in an email that the action was “consistent with the direction” in Trump’s recent executive order to enact “emergency measures to provide water resources” in California.
The feckless governor Gavin Newsom finally got around to directing state agencies to maximize storage of water from rivers to recharge groundwater and boost reservoirs.
As the President showed up Newsom in California, he also showed up the Biden FEMA operation in western North Carolina which had been stalled for months. Flood victims were quickly moved from hotel rooms and tents to furnished apartments, and Trump ordered all the roads and bridges, including private bridges, quickly restored.
The Military
8,950 active-duty servicemen and 5,727 reserve troops who were transgendered have been removed from service and in their stead 8,000 military personnel who had been removed because they refused the vaccine mandate have been welcomed to return with back pay.
Foreign Students
Much of the chaos, disruption, and antisemitic activities on college campuses which the prior administration ignored involved foreign students here on temporary visas. The administration has begun identifying them, revoking their visas, and repatriating them home.
Freeze on Spending
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is taking a scalpel to outlandish and often anti-American foreign-aid grants.
[OMB] ordered a massive freeze on all federal aid programs outside of Social Security, Medicare and other assistance that goes directly to individuals. (Ed: $3 trillion worth of federal grants.) The freeze is because the agencies were just churning them out without review.
The two-page memo, which is set to take effect on Tuesday night, could impact lower-income households that rely on Medicaid, school breakfast and lunch programs; Section 8 rental assistance, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, according to Roll Call.
The memo also noted that the OMB can grant exceptions to the order on a case-by-case basis.
“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the office wrote in the memo.
“Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities,” the memo continued. “This memorandum requires Federal agencies to identify and review all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with the President’s policies and requirements.”
The federal programs impacted will each be assigned a “senior political appointee to ensure Federal financial assistance conforms to Administrative priorities.” Reports from those individuals will be due Feb. 10.
The most outlandish grants now frozen were the billions of dollars spent on non-government agencies like Catholic Charities to bring in people from the Third World to swamp our communities, drive down employment and housing opportunities for poorer Americans, increase our tax burden, and jeopardize our safety.
Scrutinizing the grants of the Biden regime, the new administration has come up with numerous other equally preposterous outflows, so absurd they can only be considered payoffs to friends and money laundering, Here are just a few:
In 2021, the Biden administration gave $540,000 to “Transgender Equity Consulting, Inc.” This firm is comprised of “six black and Latinx transgender and nonbinary individuals” — one of whom is apparently the “first BBW trans porn star.”
The Biden admin issued $850,000 in federal grants to a left-wing organization’s “LGBTQI+ family support program,” which some have characterized as promoting gender ideology for the children of military families.
The DOGE team has gained access to the U.S. Treasury’s computerized payment records and will be able to conduct an audit of expenditures.
Foreign Aid
The funding of projects overseas is just as full of ridiculous, if not suspicious, grants. <img alt captext="Clarice F” class=”post-image-right” src=”https://conservativenewsbriefing.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/trumps-second-week-a-turning-point-in-american-governance.jpg” width=”350″>By way of example, when Biden approved $100 million to support “basic rights and freedoms” of Afghan women, $15 million was to be spent on distributing condoms there. I consider it unlikely that the money went anywhere else than into the pockets of the Taliban and leftist agencies, and the title of the grant was to hide the real recipients and purpose.
Coffeeandcovid substack has a marvelous and lengthy review of some of this week’s actions, with an explanation of the reason and dynamics:
Chaos. Confusion. Epoch-making. What Trump has done was, until yesterday, unimaginable. When the Wall Street Journal called “the memo” “unexpected,” it was a masterpiece of understatement, kind of like describing the Hindenberg [sic] as an unscheduled travel delay.
It came in two parts (so far). Yesterday, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unleashed a two-page memo upon the entire federal government. It was nothing less than a multi-trillion-dollar, whole-of-government spending freeze, excepting only a small handful of essential items like Medicare, emergency relief, payrolls, and Social Security. Like that, Trump shut down the government.
You can be sure that nothing like this has ever happened before. It has completely flipped the script. Instead of Trump trying vainly to wrestle control over a vast bureaucracy, now the bureaucrats must come to Trump for permission to do anything.
Overnight, Trump has managed to turn the vast, out-of-control federal bureaucracy into a command-and-control system.
After four years of a virtual meat puppet in the White House where unnamed assistants allowed the bureaucrats to run wild and toss around federal funds like confetti, this certainly must be a shock and awe moment.
Starting at 5pm today, all government financial assistance (excluding the aforementioned categories) must be temporarily frozen until further notice, after Trump Administration officials can “review” all government expenses to “determine the best uses of the funding.”
Until yesterday, nobody would have believed such a pause for review was even possible. It’s too big. Trump isn’t asking the bureaucracy to follow orders; he’s forcing them to come to him for permission to function at all. It is totally unprecedented, and it raises all kinds of questions about separation of powers between the President and Congress, but it also resonates on a common-sense level.
If the President is the nation’s chief executive, shouldn’t everything be centralized in his office? And if it got out of control, shouldn’t some President get it back under control?
This must be especially the case in the USAID, a hidden financier of the CIA that funds many things antithetical to our interests and which is likely on the Trump chopping block:
One of the biggest sources of funding for NGO’s — especially foreign NGO’s — is the State Department’s USAID, which many have long suspected was a CIA front for destabilization operations. According to the Kiev Post, USAID has distributed over $30 billion dollars to Ukrainian NGOs and contractors, a vast uncharted ocean of misspent money.
USAID is the deep state’s ATM.
Yesterday, the AP ran a story related to the financial freeze orders, headlined “US places dozens of senior aid officials on leave, citing possible resistance to Trump orders.”
According to the AP, 56 senior USAID personnel and “hundreds of contractors” were placed on immediate administrative leave yesterday, pending review, which is the closest thing to getting fired career bureaucrats get.
The dramatic USAID purge seems related to malicious compliance inside the agency. Someone leaked an internal USAID memo sent late yesterday, which quoted new acting administrator Jason Gray, who said he had identified “several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people.”
Boom.
We can quibble over precise definitions, but nobody can argue that USAID isn’t a core component of the Deep State, however you want to define that term. It’s ironic that Chuck Schumer has become the Deep State’s poster boy, since Trump is attacking the Deep State “six ways from Sunday.” He’s cut off their money — the Deep State’s lifeblood — and now he’s ruthlessly making examples of employees who defy legal instructions. And not just a few employees, either.
This is the long-awaited deep state showdown — but on a scale nobody imagined. It’s like what we hoped would happen during Trump’s first term, except that it has been working out during its four-year hiatus and now it has roid rage.
If Trump succeeds in these agency purges, and gathers the money strings back under White House control, in one transparent database, then the deep state as we knew it is finished.
FBI and DoJ
Actions of personnel in these and other agencies are being scrutinized, and by firing, placing on leave pending investigation of their work, requiring them to report to work, attrition (refusing new hires) and reassignment, the federal work force is being streamlined and malicious compliance (like removing the story of the Tuskegee airmen from military education in an effort to tar the administration) are being forcefully and rapidly dealt with. The scrutiny and actions involving the corrupted FBI and DoJ are noteworthy for their thoroughness. Aides to Elon Musk have been ensconced in the Office of Personnel Management working round the clock (even bringing mattresses with them so they can sleep in the office). They have locked the door to the computer facility and are checking who’s on the payroll, where, what are their jobs, and when they were put on the civil service rolls. (Attorneys recently hired as probationers in the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. who were engaged to work on the now dropped J6 cases, were around election time transferred by Biden to permanent status. They are now out the door, the effort to burrow them in and hamper the operation of the new U.S. Attorney is over.)
Foreign Policy Achievements
Special envoy Richard Grenell flew to Venezuela and promptly returned with six Americans that Nicolás Maduro had been holding and a promise to accept those illegal entrants from his country who are being repatriated at Venezuela’s cost. Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro, who said he wouldn’t accept illegal aliens we are repatriating, turned on a dime. Not only will be accept them, but he sent his own plane to pick up the first batch. Respecting countries we do not rely on to keep repatriated criminals, the President has announced he will send these people to Guantanamo.
The Media and the Dems
The 51 former intelligence officials who misled the public about Hunter Bidens’ laptop likely being Russian disinformation (often in the same media which earlier pimped the lie that Russia was interfering in the 2016 election to aid Trump), have had their security clearances revoked and may not enter a secure federal facility without an escort who is responsible to assure that they see no classified information. In practical terms they are as up on current intel as your Aunt Agnes, which means fewer media appearances and even less influence and board of directors offers. Some legacy media have had their offices in the Pentagon cleared out in favor of new media.
So much, in fact, is going on that the Washington Post reports that Democrats are now more unpopular than the party has been in nearly two decades. They are leaderless and, as usual, spouting untruths in a vain attempt to stop what is happening. This week they largely misrepresented facts and gave speeches instead of questioning cabinet nominees, often looking particularly stupid, as in the case of Senator Maggie Hassan when she yelled at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that settled science might be wrong but we can’t question it because to do so would halt progress.
Propagandists Jim Acosta at CNN and Chuck Todd at NBC are out.
I anticipate judicial challenges and efforts to delay, but most of these changes, if not all, will remain largely undisturbed.
