Trump Ally Confirms Primary Target in Radical Plan to Slash Budget

Incoming Department of Government Efficiency head and world’s richest man Elon Musk has proposed cutting $2 trillion in government spending—more than Congress’s entire discretionary budget. But some of Donald Trump’s key allies don’t see anything wrong with that picture.

In an interview with Fox Business on Friday, Virginia Representative Ben Cline claimed that it “absolutely is” possible to slash that much cash from the budget.

“We can do it, and make sure that we focus funding toward the American people and not toward bureaucracy in Washington,” Cline said.

Just a reminder: Congress’s discretionary budget funds practically the entire executive branch, doling out funding for the military, national security, and federal agencies.

And one cut in particular proved exceedingly uncontroversial for the Virginia congressman: public education.

“Give me one idea in terms of what’s significant that you think, ‘That’s got to go right away?’” asked Fox’s Maria Bartiromo.

“Well let’s just look at the Department of Education and how billions of dollars stay in Washington, funding bureaucrats whose simple goal is to interfere in the decisions about educational choice at local and state levels,” Cline responded.

But that’s not an accurate picture of the DOE. The federal government provides 13.6 percent of funding for public K-12 education across the nation. In Virginia specifically, it spends $2,020 per pupil per year, providing approximately 12 percent of the state’s education funding, according to the Education Data Initiative.

Trump himself has said that his Department of Education plan involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to parents, who famously have all the time in the world to oversee educational curricula while simultaneously working jobs and raising their children.

During a rally in Milwaukee in October, the MAGA leader promised that his vision for the nation’s educational system would involve very limited oversight from any government, including the states.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the soon-to-be forty-seventh president said at the time. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’”

He also openly admitted that it would, unfortunately, be to the detriment of a great swath of states—particularly poorer ones in the middle of the country.

“We’re going to have 35, like, different ones—Iowa will do good. A lot of the states will do very good. I can think of probably 30, 35 will be do—five will be OK, 10 will be OK. You’ll have four or five that will be terrible, but that’s OK, we have to control it,” Trump told 5,000 people in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in September. “But you’ll have, you’ll have Idaho, you’ll have Idaho will do a great job, no debt, they run a great state.”

But slashing the Department of Education was always part of the agenda. Despite attempts to distance the campaign from Project 2025, Trump allies have outright admitted in the wake of election night that the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto was actually the blueprint for Trump’s second administration all along.

And it’s not all political smoke and mirrors. When it comes to budget cuts and the economy, experts believe that Trump is more than likely to keep his promises.

“He’s not very movable on trade issues, and he does what he says he’s going to do,” William Alan Reinsch of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Yahoo! Finance in October, in an assessment of the Republican leader’s 2016 economic agenda.

“I think he means it, and I think he’ll do it,” Reinsch, a former trade lawyer and undersecretary of commerce, said of Trump’s tariff plan on Chinese goods. The outstanding question will be whether or not the courts attempt to block it.

A federal judge on Friday granted special counsel Jack Smith’s request to vacate the remaining deadlines in Donald Trump’s election interference case.

In a new filing earlier Friday, Smith requested that “the Court vacate the remaining deadlines in the pretrial schedule to afford the Government time to assess this unprecedented circumstance and determine the course going forward consistent with Department of Justice policy.”

Department of Justice policy prohibits the government from pursuing charges against a sitting president. Smith’s request cites that Trump is “expected to be certified as president-elect on Jan. 6, 2025, and inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.”

Prosecutors asked for the government to file “a status report or otherwise inform the court of the result of its deliberations” by December 2.

Judge Tanya Chutkan granted Smith’s unopposed request shortly after it was filed.

With this latest development, it seems Trump will escape all culpability for his role in interfering with the certification of the 2020 presidential election and allegedly inciting the January 6 riot at the U.S Capitol.

The same fate is likely for Smith’s other case against Trump, which concerns the president-elect’s alleged mishandling of classified documents during and after his first administration. That case landed in the lap of a pro-Trump judge who dismissed the case—landing her on the short list for Trump’s next attorney general.

As Smith scrambles to wind down his two cases against Trump, it’s worth noting that the former president has promised to fire Smith on his first day in office, and even threatened to have him deported.

This story has been updated.

Reports of a Latino Democratic exodus may be slightly exaggerated.

Anxiety was high after exit polls showed that 46 percent of Latinos, and 55 percent of Latino men, voted for Donald Trump. While it is a significant blow—Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton won Latinos at 65 and 66 percent respectively—a more detailed breakdown by heritage offered some pushback to the generalized narrative.

The Americas Society Council of the Americas research showed that of the largest Latino groups in the United States, Cuban Americans were the only one in which over half of voters chose Trump, as they went for him by a decisive 58 percent. Mexican Americans—by far the largest Latino community in the country—only went 33 percent for Trump, with Puerto Ricans at 37 percent and Central Americans at 36 percent.

This poll reminds us that, like any group, Latinos are not a monolith. And the “new coalition” that Republicans are celebrating may not be as solid as they think. Democrats just need to sift through the rubble and reevaluate how they message to Latino voters.

Donald Trump plans to enact the largest deportation in U.S. history, and private prisons are already sniffing the air at the “unprecedented opportunity” for moneymaking that a second Trump administration will offer. 

It seems that investors are betting big on Trump’s plans to detain and then forcibly deport millions of both undocumented and legal immigrants—a move that could send the U.S. economy tumbling while making those who profit off of human suffering rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Geo Group, the country’s largest private prison company, was the biggest winner in the stock market after Trump’s victory was announced Wednesday, according to economic outlet Sherwood. The company saw a 40 percent jump in shares Wednesday alone, and its share price went from $14.18 the day before the election to $24.43 on Thursday.

In 2023, 43 percent of Geo Group’s top-line revenue, more than $2.4 billion, came from contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  

George Zoley, the founder and executive chairman, could barely contain his excitement during an earnings call Thursday. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement, and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals,” Zoley said, according to Bloomberg.

“This is to us an unprecedented opportunity,” he added.

Private prison executives also talked about expanding their services to meet the demand of the government’s plans. Zoley said that GEO Group was “well-positioned” to more than double its number of ICE detention beds, from 13,500 to “over 31,000 beds,” according to HuffPost. 

They also discussed expanding their prisoner transport services, as well as their Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP, which presents surveillance programs as “alternatives to detention.”

CEO Brian Evans said that the GEO Group’s ISAP programs currently had around 182,000 participants but could be scaled way, way up, to “several hundreds of thousands of participants, and up to several million if necessary.”

Signs indicate that ICE is already looking to expand this program in anticipation of Trump’s administration. HuffPost reported that CoreCivic, another private prison group, said that ICE had posted a request for information about ISAPs on Thursday, a precursor for contract proposals down the road. 

It’s already begun: On Thursday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a vital Biden-era immigration policy that provided a pathway to citizenship for the thousands of undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.

The policy, which the Biden administration called “Keep Families Together,” applied to those who have been in the country for 10 years or more, were not a security threat, and were safe from deportation under the “parole in place” program. They just needed to be married to U.S. citizens and complete an application for permanent residency. The Department of Homeland Security estimated that the policy would help 500,000 spouses and 50,000 stepchildren.

“Without this process, hundreds of thousands of noncitizen spouses of U.S. citizens are likely to instead remain in the United States without lawful status, causing these families to live in fear and with uncertainty about their futures,” DHS wrote in an August statement.

Trump-appointed Texas-based U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker struck down the policy on the grounds that the Biden administration was abusing its power by circumventing Congress to enact the policy.

“The rule focuses on the wrong thing in identifying ‘significant public benefits’—the benefits of aliens’ new legal status, rather than their presence in this country,” Barker said in his decision. “The rule exceeds statutory authority and is not in accordance with law for this reason as well.”

This development is a grim precursor to an administration that has promised to break up more families in the “largest deportation program in American history.”

The Biden administration still has time to appeal the ruling.