“The [New York City] Rent Guidelines Board has stopped being a fact-finding body. It has become a body that starts with an answer and vibe codes its way backward to justify it.” That quote was from the resignation letter of Christina Smyth, a now-former member of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board who left the body hours before it signed off on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s extensive rent freeze in the city. The proposal passed by a 7-1 vote Thursday and will allow a rent freeze on about one million rent-stabilized apartments in New York City. This new policy delivers on one of Mamdani’s big campaign promises, but Smyth wrote that the decision was made on the “campaign trail” and not by compelling facts that it would be a successful policy for renters or landlords. She further wrote that the board “stopped being a fact-finding body” and was reconstructed by Mamdani to deliver a rent freeze that he wanted no matter what. The board chair responded to Smyth’s resignation by writing that it remained independent. However, Smyth insisted that the board’s own research revealed major warning signs for the rent freeze policy. “Here is what the board’s own research shows: Operating costs for rent-stabilized buildings have risen faster than inflation,” she wrote. “Property taxes are up. Fuel, water, and labor are up. The NYC Water Board, just last week, voted for a 6% increase for Fiscal Year 2027, right when the freeze will be in full swing. Net operating income is falling. Buildings are running out of room to absorb these costs.” Smyth wrote that the rising cost of running buildings and suppressed rents will mean that landlords will avoid the costs of maintenance with increasing frequency. “When these buildings fail, it is not the people who cast these votes who pay the price,” she wrote. “It is a building with a broken boiler. It is the family in the building no one is maintaining. They are the ones with the most to lose, and they are the ones I am most worried about.” She’s essentially saying that the policy will incentivize landlords to become slum lords. And she wasn’t alone in her criticism of the process and the result. Ann Korchak, board president of the Small Property Owners of New York, called the decision an “absolute farce,” CBS News reported. She said that while the vote had a quorum, only half the members of the board—nearly all Mamdani allies—were present. “The resignation of the only principled RGB member and the board’s only meaningful advocate for small owners validated our greatest fear, that the majority Mamdani-appointed RGB would cave to the political demands of City Hall,” Korchak said. The lone dissenting vote, Arpit Gupta, wrote in City Journal Thursday that the policy threatens “the long-term viability of a large share of the city’s rental housing.” That’s because such rent freezes have proven to create “severe” long-term costs. Gupta, an appointee of former mayor Eric Adams, pointed to some historical examples of the unintended consequences of rent freezes. “Mumbai, for instance, froze rents in 1947 as a temporary relief measure; the consequences are still visible today in dilapidated buildings so starved of maintenance that many have fallen down. New York City has experienced a version of this dynamic, too, in the form of the nickel subway fare. Held at 5 cents from 1904 to 1948, the fare slowly bankrupted the private transit companies that had built out the system, until they collapsed into public ownership and the system entered a long decline that took decades to reverse,” Gupta wrote. He added that the rent freeze may provide temporary relief for some renters, but that it ultimately “produces deteriorating assets and, eventually, public bailouts and takeovers.” I’d suggest that Mamdani and his socialist friends don’t care. In fact, ruining the market before a public takeover might be the point. After all, Mamdani’s communist housing czar, Cea Weaver, has said that she’s in favor of moving away from the idea of private property ownership. She hoped that this policy would hurt white property owners in particular. The ultimate effect of the policy will be to spread misery to people of all racial and religious backgrounds: quite progressive. Smyth and Gupta are almost certainly correct that the rent freeze is bad, that it’s unsupported by history and data, and that there are other policies that would produce better outcomes. But those facts are going to get steamrolled by the feelings of Mamdani’s democratic socialist army that this time it’s all going to work out, the kulaks must pay, the proletariat (well, actually the young, downwardly mobile upper middle-class elites) will triumph. If it wasn’t clear before it should be obvious now: Mamdani may make some concessions to reality, but he does plan to govern like a socialist as he promised. But the voters of New York City made this choice; they’ll have to suffer the little children.

In Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” the men and women who keep the world running finally get fed up and walk away. The factories go dark, the trains stop, and the people who spent their lives building things vanish into a hidden valley to let the looters discover what life looks like without them. It’s a satisfying fantasy. It is also a luxury that almost no one in the real economy actually has. When Washington comes for your livelihood, you cannot disappear into the mountains. You either stay and fight, or you fold. For eight years, Atlas Energy Solutions, one of America’s most important energy companies, chose to fight. Atlas didn’t shrug. Atlas controls the largest position of high-quality frac sand in the Permian Basin, mined from the Kermit and Monahans dunes of West Texas. That sand is the unglamorous, indispensable input that makes the American shale revolution possible—the proppant that holds fractures open so oil and gas can flow. It also happens to sit on the same shinnery oak dunelands that are home to a three-inch reptile called the dunes sagebrush lizard. In 2018, the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife petitioned to have that lizard listed as endangered. In May 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service obliged, naming oil and gas development and frac sand mining as the primary threats to the species. The listing was a direct shot at companies like Atlas, and at the broader Permian—the most productive oil field on the planet, responsible for a staggering share of the energy that powers American life. Here is what an endangered listing means in practice. It becomes a federal crime to “harm” the species, a term that agencies have stretched to cover ordinary land use. New projects and project renewals trigger mandatory analyses that grind permitting to a halt. Acreage becomes locked. Investment dries up. The lizard becomes a legal lever to do what activists could never accomplish at the ballot box: shut down production across a 4% sliver of the Permian that happens to overlap some of its richest reserves. The easy move would have been to retreat. Relocate operations, settle quietly, write off the West Texas dunes as too politically radioactive to develop. Atlas did the opposite. Years before the listing, after being rejected from an existing state-managed conservation plan drafted primarily for major oil company operators, Atlas led an effort to create a new voluntary conservation agreement. That effort was successful, and the 2020 CCAA for the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard in West Texas was created.  As a result, Atlas set aside substantial lands for lizard habitat, more than any other company, and invested in innovative electrified dredge mining technologies that disturb less surface area per ton of sand than conventional methods. It demonstrated, in the field and on the balance sheet, that responsible production and species conservation are not enemies requiring government regulations to break up the fight. Ben “Bud” Brigham, John Turner, Rick Fletcher and the entire Atlas team treated the lizard not as a nuisance to be litigated around but as a problem to be solved—and then they refused to be punished for solving it. That refusal is why the story has the ending it does. This month, the federal government moved to settle the State of Texas’ challenge to the listing by conceding a fundamental error. The Service had assumed that destroyed habitat was, for all practical purposes, gone forever—that once a dune was disturbed, it could not be restored within any meaningful timeframe. That single mistaken assumption was the load-bearing wall of the entire “endangered” determination. The government now admits it ignored promising habitat restoration efforts, including work done by the private sector on oil and gas well pads, and that it discounted the very conservation programs that companies like Atlas had been funding for years. The rule has been vacated and sent back for reconsideration. Let me be clear about what this victory is and what it is not. The rule is remanded, not buried. The Service must issue a new finding, and the activists who started this will be back. The fight is not over; it has simply moved to the next round. But that is precisely the point. Standing in a courtroom requires members willing to stand. Associational challenges to regulatory overreach live or die on whether real companies with real operations are willing to put their names on the line and stay there for the long haul—through the petitions, the comment periods, the litigation, the stays, and the settlements that take the better part of a decade to resolve. American energy dominance is not an abstraction handed down from Washington. It is built, ton by ton and well by well, by people who refuse to walk away when the regulatory state decides their work is inconvenient. The looters were counting on the producers to shrug. Atlas didn’t. Neither should the rest of us. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

As the administration seeks a boost in defense funding, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill are trying to figure out how to overcome opposition from Democrats and cover the cost of the Iran War. The funding debate could be a prelude to a larger a government shutdown battle ahead of the midterm elections. On Wednesday, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget officially requested over $67 billion in Pentagon funding as part of a nearly $88 billion supplemental funding package. OMB Director Russ Vought explained in a letter that the package is meant to address “operational costs” of the war, “including funding for military personnel and readiness expenses, operational costs to rebuild stocks expended by DOW, classified programs, and other key expenses.” The White House is also seeking funding for national parks, Ebola prevention, and agricultural priorities. Congress’ upcoming fight over supplemental funding is part of a larger debate over how Capitol Hill should interact with the Pentagon. The supplemental is distinct from the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, which is an annual defense policy bill, as well as from the annual defense funding bill. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told Punchbowl News on Thursday that Republicans in the Senate will try to find the bipartisan support necessary to fund the military, with a partisan bill as the backup measure. “We need to let [the supplemental] play out and find out if there’s a path there,” Thune told the outlet. “And then if there isn’t, we’ll go to Plan B—which, like I said, I’m not ruling out. I think [Reconciliation] 3.0 is an option, but I think we have to exhaust all the other options first.” Budget reconciliation is a type of bill that allows Congress to enact major budgetary changes without needing 60 votes in the Senate. Congressional Republicans recently used the procedure to fund immigration enforcement agencies for the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term without any Democrat support. Democrats have already indicated they aren’t eager to expand the Pentagon’s budget. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote in a statement on X in response to the supplemental, “After dragging America into a reckless war, [Trump] now wants Congress to hand him tens of billions more to paper over the damage—while families are still paying higher prices.” Schumer added that Democrats should not write “another blank check for Trump.” Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate subcommittee that handles Pentagon funding, also expressed opposition on Wednesday. “Our nation’s military has real needs, from filling munitions backlogs to protecting our troops and bases from modern drone warfare,” Coons wrote. “But the administration’s supplemental accomplishes few of those goals,” he continued. “If brought to the floor, my Democratic colleagues and I would oppose it.” This longstanding partisan rift on defense funding and other funding areas has resulted in prominent Republicans floating the idea of sidestepping the usual bipartisan process and pursuing reconciliation. “Here’s the bottom line, and everybody knows this: if we want to get more money to defense—and I do—the only way we’re going to do it in the foreseeable future is through reconciliation,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said Wednesday as he discussed the overall defense funding picture. “Some don’t like doing it though reconciliation. They think resorting to reconciliation too often bastardizes the appropriations process,” he continued. “They’re right, but this whole political environment right now is bastardized.” In the House, a group of Republicans is attempting to craft one last ambitious reconciliation bill before the midterms, although they have yet to release a plan for such legislation. This effort, backed by the chamber’s Republican leadership, comes as the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee have urged the Republican Congress to harness the full force of its majorities ahead of the midterms. There is some overlap between the House’s ambitious reconciliation goals and the more modest ideas being floated in the Senate. The board of the House Freedom Caucus—a fiscally conservative faction in the chamber—recently released a proposal to use reconciliation to bypass the bipartisan appropriations process. “Republicans should also use reconciliation to deny Democrats the ability to weaponize government shutdown threats for political leverage ahead of the midterm elections by providing responsible short-term funding for key government personnel and services,” reads the board’s proposal for Reconciliation 3.0. Related PostsSenator Promises to ‘Figure Out’ How to Keep Planned Parenthood From Getting Massive Payout on July 4On America’s 250th anniversary, Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortions, will once again be eligible for federal funding after a yearlong ban that coincided with the closure of dozens of abortion clinics. Some members of Congress, like Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, have promised to do everything they can to prevent the…The GOP’s Last-Ditch Effort Behind Closed Doors of Reconciliation 3.0 MeetingSpeaker of the House Mike Johnson on Wednesday called the House Budget Committee to his office for an impromptu closed-door meeting to plan the must-pass “Reconciliation 3.0.” With their deadline approaching, this could be the GOP’s last chance to eliminate fraud and wasteful spending, permanently defund Planned Parenthood, and pass the SAVE America Act. Rep….‘NATIONAL EMERGENCY’: Trump Cancels Housing Bill Signing Until Congress Passes Voter ID LawPresident Donald Trump said he will not move forward with a housing bill signing, which was scheduled for noon Wednesday, until Congress passes the SAVE America Act. “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National…

The Drug Enforcement Administration chief requested an investigation into a Biden administration operation that allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to flood New Mexico. In a letter Thursday to Justice Department Assistant Inspector General M. Sean O’Neill, DEA Administrator Terry Cole requested a probe to assess how DEA supervisors responded to a whistleblower complaint by Special Agent David Howell, who first reported to supervisors and Justice Department officials that the agency was allowing fentanyl into New Mexico. Starting during the Biden administration, the DEA allowed allowed the shipments of drugs into the United States because Justice Department prosecutors wanted to build a larger criminal case against traffickers, the Associated Press first reported. Cole, in his letter, also asked whether the DEA’s tracking of fentanyl, rather than seizures, was conducted in accordance with applicable Justice Department and agency guidelines. DEA-OIG MemoDownload “The alleged conduct occurred under the Biden administration’s disastrous open border policies,” a Justice Department spokesperson told the Daily Signal in an email. “The Trump administration has closed the border and is aggressively pursuing drug traffickers. DEA Administrator Cole has requested an independent DOJ-OIG review of DEA’s actions in light of this reporting to reaffirm the public’s confidence in our law enforcement agencies. Should that review identify areas of improvement, the DEA will of course implement changes to better their practices.” The operation allowed drug shipments to pass through the U.S.-Mexico border for the purpose of gathering intelligence. The operation primarily affected the Albuquerque area. The drug shipments included a single load of 74,000 fentanyl pills that was delivered to a mobile home park in Albuquerque, under the DEA’s oversight. The DEA chief’s request for an investigation marks a seeming departure from the agency’s initial response to the allegations earlier this week, when a DEA spokesperson said, “Public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts.” Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, a whistleblower advocacy group that is representing Howell, said he is encouraged by the call for an investigation but added the Justice Department can act now. “It’s encouraging to see the DEA administrator calling for an inspector general investigation,” Leavitt told the Daily Signal. “Embracing independent oversight is smarter than circling the wagons to defend disastrous decisions pushed by the Biden U.S. Attorney’s Office before he led the agency,” Leavitt continued. “But IG investigations take time, so the Justice Department shouldn’t wait for that report before fixing the fentanyl wiretap protocols that the Biden DOJ gutted.” Former U.S. attorney Alex Uballez, who was appointed by President Joe Biden and who oversaw the program, told The Associated Press it was justified for intelligence gathering and added, “The bigger fish are worth catching.” The Associated Press reported the program began in 2023 and ended in 2025. In a statement posted on the DEA website, Cole said the allegations should be determined by an independent investigation, “not debated through speculation or incomplete information.” He added, “This request should not be interpreted as a lack of confidence in the men and women of DEA.” “If the review confirms that DEA personnel acted appropriately, it will provide an independent assessment that reinforces confidence in the professionalism of this agency and its workforce,” Cole said. “If improvements are identified, DEA will implement them. Strong institutions are sustained—not diminished—by objective oversight and a willingness to continuously assess and improve.” Inspectors general have a quasi-independent oversight role within federal departments, but with limitations, lacking the power to issue subpoenas and prosecute cases. On the state front, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham asked the state’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez, to open a criminal investigation into federal agents or other federal officials who were involved in allowing the fentanyl to come into the state. The DEA operation is reminiscent of a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives program under President Barack Obama’s administration dubbed “Operation Fast and Furious,” which allowed illegal guns to flow from the United States into Mexico for the purpose of tracking them to build a case against drug cartels. However, the government lost track of some of the guns, one of which was used in the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

Virginia was at the forefront of American history back in 1776, and it remains ahead of the curve as Independence Day approaches next week. This weekend, the Virginia Museum of History & Culture is hosting a block party to honor the upcoming anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The celebration centers around “IllumiNATION,” a specially created video art project that will be beamed onto the surface of the building itself. “At 9 p.m. each night, we’ll use the entire front of the building as the canvas to project an illuminative trip through the first 250 years of the country’s history,” Anne Culbertson, director of events at the museum, told the Daily Signal. “Virginians played a major role in that history.” The 20-minute presentation isn’t a straightforward documentary. It is a celebratory series of illuminations designed to bring history to life. It highlights famous Virginians such as George Washington, but it also introduces some of the everyday people who helped write our country’s history. “This is not just your middle-school textbook,” Sam Florer, the museum’s director of public programs, told WWBT. “We’re including social history, cultural history, so no matter who you are, where you are from, what your background is, our goal is that something from this show will speak to you.” Richmond is the ideal location for a semiquincentennial bash. “Much of the nation’s founding story happened here. The people, places, and ideas that shaped the United States are woven throughout Virginia’s landscape,” R. Anthony Harris wrote in RVA Magazine after seeing a preview of IllumiNATION. “The projection captures that sense of scale. It moves between intimate moments and larger historical narratives, blending artwork, imagery, music, and pyrotechnics into something that feels less like a museum exhibit and more like a civic spectacle.” There will be plenty of other attractions, both before and after the presentation of IllumiNATION. The four-day celebration on the grounds of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture will also include Richmond-area bands on stage and food and drinks for sale. Its art and cultural displays will include Virginia Salt Glaze Pottery, African American Quilting, Blue Ridge Mountain Instrument Making, and Mattaponi Pottery, depending upon the day. There will also be attractions for the kids, including a bounce house and petting zoo. The museum promises that the free community event “will invite every viewer to see themselves within the fabric of American history—deepening understanding, sparking reflection, and inspiring a lasting appreciation for our shared past.” IllumiNATION will set the stage for the larger birthday party that’s planned a couple of hours north on I-95 next week. The presentation will run through Sunday evening.