Citing the “network” of liberal activists funded by President Joe Biden’s administration, 34 Republican lawmakers are urging the Office of Management and Budget to finalize a proposed rule they say would bring greater transparency to the federal grant-making process and give taxpayers more insight into how government funds are spent. The lawmakers—including Reps. August Pfluger of Texas, Michael Cloud of Texas, Byron Donalds of Florida, and Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana—penned the letter last week as part of a larger effort to protect taxpayer dollars from mismanagement or fraud, waste, and abuse. “Every dollar the federal government awards in grants should serve the American people and uphold the Constitution. That has not been happening,” Cloud told the Daily Signal. “Federal grants have been funding discrimination, gender ideology, and open border advocacy. These are not organizations serving the American people.” “They are organizations that have used taxpayer dollars to violate federal law. This rule puts a stop to that. We are glad Director [Russell] Vought is moving forward on this,” Cloud added. In the letter, the conservative coalition argued that “it is vital that recipients of government assistance comply with federal law” because “each year, the federal government distributes trillions of dollars in grants and financial assistance.” The lawmakers argued that Congress has a responsibility to ensure federal funding does not support activities that conflict with laws passed by Congress or constitutional provisions ratified by the states. “We have an interest in stopping these funds from advancing peripheral and experimental ideologies that seek to destabilize the American project and harm the American people,” the letter continues. “For years, taxpayer dollars have supported unlawful activities.” The coalition also contended that increased transparency is especially important given what members described as inconsistent enforcement of federal law across presidential administrations. The letter specifically raises concerns about federal funding for organizations involved in immigration-related services. The lawmakers cited what they described as a “network of over 200 non-governmental organizations” that allegedly helped facilitate the entry of illegal immigrants and received funding during the Biden administration. According to the letter, some organizations used taxpayer funds to provide assistance such as housing, cash support, and transportation. The lawmakers further alleged that some groups encouraged fraudulent asylum claims or engaged in anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement activism. “OMB has clear legal authority to deny federal funding in support of these projects,” the letter states. The proposal has received support from conservative advocacy groups. Daniel West, Heritage Action’s director of government relations, said the rule could increase accountability in the federal grants system and help ensure taxpayer dollars are spent in accordance with federal law. “OMB’s proposed rule restructures our nation’s inefficient grants system and puts power back in the hands of American taxpayers,” West told The Daily Signal. “Under this proposed rule, there will finally be accountability and an end to taxpayer dollars supporting these destructive practices.” West praised Banks, Cloud, and the other lawmakers who signed the letter, saying they are fulfilling their constitutional duty to oversee federal spending. “Congress has expressed no intent to fund discrimination, to sponsor the mutilation of children and elimination of women’s sports, or to support groups that believe the United States should not have a border,” the letter concludes.

Kaley Chiles, the counselor who prevailed at the Supreme Court against a Colorado law restricting therapy for unwanted same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria, told the Daily Signal that the medical sector bypasses the rightful course of treatment when it comes to transgender issues. “We’re treating this issue in some special way that we don’t treat any other issues,” Chiles said in an interview Thursday. The Supreme Court in March ruled, 8-1, that Colorado’s law aiming to ban “conversion therapy” violated the Constitution by discriminating against Chiles’ viewpoint. Colorado’s Legislature responded by passing House Bill 26-1322 to allow survivors of “conversion therapy” to sue providers. Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed the bill on June 1. Chiles emphasized to the Daily Signal that psychotherapy is not merely about “affirming” a person’s feelings. Moving Beyond ‘Affirmation’ Artificial intelligence “has shown us that it’s not helpful to be constantly affirmed and validated,” Chiles told the Daily Signal. “Good counseling does not simply affirm and validate.” It involves “helping us stretch our perspective.” Speaking as a trauma therapist, she explained, “People have all kinds of beliefs that aren’t serving them. Like, ‘I’m not worthy.’ ‘Nobody cares about me.’ ‘My life is meaningless.’ ‘Why not just kill myself?'” “If we were to affirm those things, that would feel odd,” the therapist said. “That’s not what we do.” While therapists don’t “impose our values,” to some degree, “all counseling is philosophical,” she said. “Ethically and existentially, we impose the value that, don’t kill yourself—and let’s help you do that. Let’s help you live a life worth living. Let’s help you find meaning. Let’s help you tolerate distress,” she explained. “We do that with trauma, addictions, all the things—and we just don’t do it with this one singular thing,” Chiles argued. A Contrast With ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ While many medical institutions have championed experimental medical interventions to make men appear female and vice versa—often euphemistically described as “gender-affirming care”—Chiles noted that “there is very weak—if not no—evidence that ‘gender-affirming care’ works.” The Department of Health and Human Services conducted a peer-reviewed study finding little evidence for positive impacts from sex-rejecting procedures for minors. Studies have suggested these interventions cause harm, from increased cancer risks to higher risk of suicidal thoughts. A jury awarded a detransitioner $2 million in a medical malpractice lawsuit in February, and psychiatrists reportedly agreed to settle another detransitioner’s medical malpractice claim in January. Hospitals have distanced themselves from the Human Rights Campaign, a major transgender activist group that rates medical entities. Chiles warned that when doctors prescribe cross-sex hormones, “we’re playing with the entire endocrine system as though we are God, as though we have a comprehension of exactly how the endocrine system works, which is quite prideful.” She presented therapy as the better solution to address gender dysphoria—the painful and persistent condition of identifying with the gender opposite one’s sex. “I think there’s a conflation of feelings and reality,” she said. “When someone says, ‘I feel like I am the opposite sex,’ they’re expressing a feeling, an experience. They’re not expressing a biological reality—and for us to conflate the two is naturally disastrous.” “We treat eating disorders, addictions, even trauma—trauma treatment is essentially the process of invalidating your feelings,” the therapist explained. “Because your feelings are that ‘because I was in a car wreck, I shouldn’t drive again,’ ‘because I was molested by a male, men are bad,’ ‘because something bad happened in an enclosed space, I should never go into enclosed spaces.'” “Over the course of therapy, what you want is actually a full invalidation in thought, in feeling, in sensation, in experience, that the trauma response is true,” she explained. A Christian Motivation to Address Transgender Identity When asked about her motivation to help people address gender confusion, the therapist emphasized the importance of knowing our own limits. “My heart is to help people accept the reality that we’re living in—we all have limits,” Chiles said. “We see in parenting, kids who have parents who set limits are less anxious,” she noted. “God is a gracious God, that he gives us parameters and boundaries and limits. We are not here to create our own meaning, we’re not here to be our own savior.” “We don’t have to bear the weight of the questions we’re not meant to bear,” the therapist explained. “Things like, ‘What is my identity?’ or ‘What sex am I?’ Those are just questions that we don’t have to bear, because the answer is given in our own bodies.” Chiles concluded by urging Christians to educate their children about biological sex. “We would start at age 2 or 3, not with what sex is, but that you are a sex, that you are a boy or you are a girl, you are made in the image of God, who doesn’t make mistakes,” she explained. She urged Christians to be “more proactive,” rather than reactive to the threat of transgender ideology in the world. “If we don’t sex educate our children, then it’s very clear that someone else will,” she warned.

Border czar Tom Homan promised Tuesday that the pause on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement performing vehicle stops will not lower the rate of deportations. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin temporarily ordered ICE to cease conducting vehicle stops, causing some members of the MAGA movement to fear the Trump administration is taking its foot off the gas on deportations. When asked by the Daily Signal if the pause would slow down the rate of deportations, Homan responded with an emphatic “no.” “Let me address that: I’m sick and tired of reading about how the administration has lost their guts with mass deportations,” Homan said. NEW: I asked @RealTomHoman if the pause on vehicle stops will lower the rate of deportations, and he gave an emphatic "NO.""Let me address that: I'm sick and tired of reading about how the administration has lost their their guts with mass deportations," he told @DailySignal… pic.twitter.com/N7TBP9ZZjM— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) July 14, 2026 Homan said that ICE arrested a record number of illegal aliens in June. “So, you know, people say ICE is not serious about this job. Last month, [we had] the most aliens arrested in the history of the agency—more than last year, more than when you had the FBI, ATF, DEA, Border Patrol, and ICE all out there.” He said deportation numbers dropped temporarily due to the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, which lasted from mid-February until the end of April. “Bottom line is, once we got the funding, numbers are going through the ceiling, like President Trump promised Americans,” Homan said. The temporary pause on vehicle stops resulted from two ICE-involved shootings in Maine and Texas. ICE officers fatally shot a 26-year-old Colombian as they were trying to pull over his vehicle in Biddeford, Maine. Last Tuesday, an ICE officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, during a vehicle stop in Houston, Texas. Homan said he is reviewing the “extensive” training curriculum for vehicle stops. “I think what they’re doing is taking a pause to make sure that ICE officers have everything they need to stay safe, because vehicle attacks are up 3,400%,” he said. “And they’re going to make sure if the training is sufficient.”

As the Trump administration considers new rules governing in vitro fertilization (IVF), the pro-life movement is grappling with a new ethical challenge. For more than five decades, the pro-life movement has focused on abortion and consistently upheld the scientific principle that life begins at conception. But if that principle is true, it cannot stop at the doors of an IVF clinic. We grieve the loss of roughly 1 million unborn children killed through abortion each year. We advocate, vote, donate, and pray for an end to abortion, just as we did to end Roe v. Wade.  Many people who are otherwise pro-life support IVF. Their logic is simple: Abortion destroys life, while IVF makes it. Thus, IVF is said to be “pro-life.”  Except nearly all forms of IVF involve the destruction of fertilized embryos. IVF is responsible for the destruction of millions of embryos each year. Hundreds of thousands of patients undergo IVF annually in the U.S.. The latest available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that in 2022 more than 435,000 cycles of IVF were performed, resulting in 98,289 live births. This means that more than 75% of IVF cycles failed to produce a live birth. Estimating that a single IVF cycle produces about seven embryos, that equates to more than 3 million embryos produced through IVF for that year. Other estimates place the annual number even higher. After fertilization, these embryos are graded, screened, and selected. Usually, one embryo is transferred and implanted at a time.  If a typical IVF cycle produces seven embryos and only one is transferred, then approximately 85% are not given the opportunity to survive. Since no reliable tracking systems exist, we can only presume that these remaining embryos are intentionally destroyed, discarded, frozen, or used for experimentation. While some couples go on to have a second child, often using frozen embryos from an earlier cycle, the number of children born remains a fraction of the embryos created. Some researchers estimate that at least 1.2 million to 1.5 million embryos are currently frozen and stored in the U.S., which suggests that most “excess embryos” are simply discarded and not frozen. In any case, the majority of these frozen embryos will never be thawed and implanted, and those that are unfrozen face tough odds of survival. In its early years, IVF was largely presented as a last resort for married couples facing infertility. That remains part of the picture, but it is no longer the whole story. Today, the IVF market is expanding. What was once a rare medical intervention is now a lucrative industry projected to exceed $15 billion annually in the U.S. within the next decade. With that growth has come a shift: IVF is not just being driven by medical necessity, but by manufactured consumer demand. Some of that demand is coming from same-sex couples purchasing gametes and hiring surrogates to carry their IVF babies. Unlike adoption, which typically involves extensive screening and background checks, IVF (and surrogacy) operates under a very different framework. There is no national standard that determines who can commission IVF arrangements, how embryos are made, or how many are produced in the process. There are also very few state regulations on the IVF industry. Unlike many areas of medicine that involve human life, the IVF industry operates with almost no oversight. Clinics are largely free to write their own rules. Those standards are heavily influenced by a financial structure that rewards volume. Each cycle can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Additional services like genetic testing, embryo selection, and long-term storage create additional revenue streams. “Wild West” is most often the phrase used to describe the U.S. IVF industry. Whereas some countries limit IVF to married couples, the U.S. does not. Whereas many countries impose legal age limits on IVF usage, the U.S. does not. Whereas some countries highly regulate the storage and freezing of embryos, the U.S. does not. The result is a system where access is largely determined by the ability to pay, not by consistent guardrails designed to protect human life. Higher success rates attract more clients. More clients mean more cycles. More cycles mean more embryos created—and more embryos destroyed, discarded, or frozen. Being largely unregulated, the IVF industry frequently takes a casual approach to the “products” it produces. Between 2009 and 2019 alone, over 100 lawsuits were filed involving the negligent destruction or mishandling of embryos. In 2018, a single storage failure in Cleveland rendered more than 4,000 embryos “nonviable.” To be clear, these are “conceived” embryos. These are fertilized eggs. And we pro-lifers have always argued that life begins with conception. Not at implantation, but at fertilization.  “It is a scientific certainty that life begins at fertilization,” says popular pro-life activist Lila Rose. “At the moment the sperm fuses with an egg … a new unique human being … comes into existence.” Her statement is corroborated by many other pro-life activists, legislators and scientists. The modern pro-life position has always been clear: every fertilized egg should be protected—not discarded, destroyed or frozen. Life begins at conception, regardless of whether that conception occurs within the womb or within a test tube. Being committed to a pro-life ethic requires defending life at every stage, in every place—whether in the womb or in the lab. Every embryo is a human life with inherent dignity, not raw material for selection or disposal. Anything less is an abandonment of the founding principles of the pro-life movement. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The White House responded after a Senate Democrat said part of President Donald Trump’s preferred election law, the SAVE America Act, would “rig our democracy” and make it hard for any Democrat to win an election. In a recently resurfaced video of her remarks at the Indiana Democrat Party’s state convention on June 6, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., bragged about blocking the SAVE Act. “The other thing that we blocked yesterday was the SAVE Act, right?” she said to loud cheers. She claimed that act “would liberally allow this administration to rig our democracy so that it would be hard for any Democrat in any state to win any election.” She also claimed it would “disenfranchise all married women in the meantime.” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, condemned Slotkin’s comments. “If securing America’s elections – through commonsense methods like voter ID and proof of citizenship – will make it impossible for Democrats to win elections, perhaps they should reconsider the methods they’re using to ‘win,’” she told the Daily Signal. Slotkin’s office did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time. SLOTKIN suggests Dems can't win with voter IDSen. Elissa Slotkin claimed that the SAVE Act would "rig our democracy so that it would be hard for any Democrat in any state to win any election."Now, the @WhiteHouse is responding.1/5https://t.co/WtQvG0m9Ik pic.twitter.com/MBUjCSBb0s— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) July 14, 2026 The SAVE Act and SAVE America Act Slotkin had celebrated the failure of the SAVE Act, a bill amending the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to vote. While that bill, H.R. 22, passed the House of Representatives, 220-208, in April, the Senate vote to add the bill to an immigration package failed, 48-50, in early June. President Trump has advocated H.R. 7296, the SAVE America Act, which includes the SAVE Act provisions but also includes other election integrity measures, such as requiring states to use federal databases to verify voter rolls. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has called on Congress to honor Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who passed away Saturday night, by passing the SAVE America Act. Supporters say the bills are necessary to ensure that only legal citizens vote, especially following President Joe Biden’s tenure, in which approximately 10 million illegal aliens entered the country. Opponents say the legislation aims to make it more difficult for people to vote, to give Republicans an edge in the 2026 midterm elections. While a 2024 Pew Research Center survey suggested women overall lean Democrat, it found a majority of married women identify as Republican. ‘False and Irresponsible’ Donald Palmer, senior legal fellow for election integrity at the Heritage Foundation, condemned Slotkin’s comments. “To say that confirming citizenship of voters is ‘rigging elections’ is false and irresponsible,” Palmer told the Daily Signal. “Senator Slotkin is desperately trying to stoke the fears of potential supporters by throwing out these false claims.” “More importantly, she is simply ignoring the opinions of voters of all races and party preference who universally support photo ID and citizenship verification in polling across the country,” he added. “She knows she is on the wrong side of an 85-15 issue and that’s not a great place for a politician.”