From the right: DOGE’s War on the Gov’t Class
Most DOGE critics accuse Musk of “waging war on defenseless civil servants,” but recent government growth has created “a huge and expanding protected class” of “public workers whose pay, and pensions, well exceed those in the private sector,” explains Spiked’s Joel Kotkin. “Once, US government employment was modestly paid but well pensioned and secure. Now government workers tend to be more white-collar than blue” and “ever more clearly aligned with the Democratic Party.” Meanwhile, “people who work with their hands and small business owners . . . support the GOP by wide margins.” “The battle over DOGE is really about how much power and money the government class should have, and in whose interests it should operate.”
Conservative: Comey’s Creepy Sex-Spy Plot
The FBI is probing “the agency’s plan a decade ago to infiltrate the campaign of presidential candidate Donald Trump using two female undercover ‘honeypot’ agents,” reports The Washington Times’ Kerry Picket. This “off-the-books investigation,” launched in 2015 by James Comey but only revealed in 2024 by a whistleblower, seems a pure “fishing expedition to find anything incriminating against Mr. Trump.” After the op was shut down, “one of the undercovers agreed to be transferred to the CIA so she would not be available as a potential witness.” The other “is now a high-level FBI executive in a major field office.” No wonder FBI bigwigs demanded that the people involved “never discuss the operation with anyone ever again.”
Justice watch: Huge Breach, Tiny Penalty
Per the Biden Justice Department, Charles Littlejohn took a job at Booz Allen Hamilton, an IRS contractor, in 2017 with the intent to access and leak President Trump’s tax returns, notes the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. He proceeded to hand them to The New York Times (though it “did not become the huge, earthshaking scandal the anti-Trumpers had hoped”). Next, Littlejohn gave a trove of IRS data for “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people” to ProPublica. We now know he violated the privacy of 405,427 taxpayers, yet Biden prosecutors let him plead “guilty to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax information.” Hmm: Under Alvin Bragg rules, they could’ve “charged Littlejohn with 405,427 counts of disclosure.”
Oscars beat: Emilia Pérez Spells H’wood Doom
The Academy Award controversy over ‘Emilia Pérez’ reveals “everything wrong with the Oscars now,” argues Sasha Stone at Tablet. After getting 13 nominations, the film faced a PR storm over star Karla Sofia Gascón’s past “racist, bigoted tweets.” They “read more like MAGA trolling than the appropriately saintly thoughts of the first transgender person to be nominated in the Best Actress category.” The fallout? “Netflix refused to pay for her travel expenses” and went on to “strip her name and face from all of the advertising” for the awards, though it has toned down this scorched-earth strategy and Gascón will attend the ceremonies on the company’s dime. This classic cancel-culture story “would make a better movie than almost every movie Hollywood has put out in 10 years, but there are no filmmakers brave enough to tell it.”
Budget hawks: GOPers Aren’t Cutting Medicaid
Medicaid “has exploded far beyond its design and is in great need of reform,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. Democrats “expanded it” into a “broader entitlement for able-bodied, working age adults with lower incomes,” and “Democratic-run states have figured out how to scam” it. Now the press “claims Republicans want to gut Medicaid” when they’re actually “not even proposing a cut,” but merely slower growth. Unless Republicans act, “states will continue to milk Medicaid.” GOPers should frame their reforms as improvements to Medicaid services “for the truly needy while putting it on a fiscally sustainable trajectory,” via, say, per-capita spending caps. “Why should taxpayers in Allentown and Akron pay for the wasteful spending by Democrats in Albany and Sacramento?”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
