The Education Department announced Thursday it will be moving some employees to the Department of Labor as it looks to integrate some postsecondary education and workforce development programs with the other agency. Starting next week, employees with the Higher Education Programs division of the department's Office of Postsecondary Education will head to the Labor Department to begin the transition of the programs...

The Department of Education opened investigations into 15 K-12 schools over allegedly allowing transgender athletes to participate in girls' and women's sports. The department announced the investigations on Wednesday, along with investigations into one university and New York and Hawaii's education departments. The K-12 investigations target school districts in California, Connecticut, Maine, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington...

The Trump administration is telling Head Start providers to avoid dozens of terms in federal grant applications, including "race," "belonging" and "pregnant people" — a directive that could reshape the early education program. A coalition of organizations representing Head Start providers and parents said in court filings last month that the Department of Health and Human Services told a Head Start director in Wisconsin to cut those and over a dozen other terms from her application. She later received a list with nearly 200 words the department discouraged her from using in her application, including "Black," "Native American," "disability" and "women."...

President Trump said Thursday he might invoke a centuries-old law known as the Insurrection Act to send troops into Minnesota, threatening a major escalation between the federal government and state officials. "If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don't obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State," the president wrote on Truth Social...

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt shut down a reporter on Thursday for asking whether President Donald Trump believes the idea of "canceling elections" is "funny." At a fiery press conference, Leavitt clashed with multiple reporters, including The Independent's White House Correspondent Andrew Feinberg, who followed up on Leavitt saying the president was "joking" when he told Reuters in an interview that "we shouldn't even have an election" in reference to the midterms...

One thing that is fairly clear following Thursday’s announcement by the White House of the proposal of what they’re calling The Great Healthcare Plan is that the Trump administration, and assumedly the GOP on Capitol Hill, have decided to fight the 2026 midterm elections on the question of which side has policies to address the affordability crisis in America. The administration is certainly busy messaging the positive effects of things they’ve already done on that score, and there are some victories to announce. Gas prices, for example, are lower now than they were a year ago, a function of regulatory pullback and a pro-oil and gas agenda. Rents are down in all of America’s major markets with the exception of Seattle, Philadelphia, and Chicago, three of the worst sanctuary cities for illegal aliens — that’s a win directly tied to the administration’s efforts at enforcing immigration laws and squeezing illegal aliens out of the country. (RELATED: Trump’s Economy Grows 4.3 Percent, Dashing Economists’ Lower Expectations) But what’s really driving the affordability issues in this country, more than anything else, is insurance — car, home, and health. (RELATED: Is Healthcare ‘Burning’ Yet?) Car insurance is often a state-level issue. It’s a function of car wrecks, of uninsured drivers who get in car wrecks with insured drivers, of stolen cars. Crime is down, including car theft, and with illegals going home, the volume of uninsured drivers is also down. That hasn’t yet bent rates downward; they’re still expected to increase between one and four percent this year, but that’s at least a stabilization of rates. Home insurance, likewise, is stabilizing. While we’re not quite in a place where rates are declining, it’s projected that we’ll see three-to-five percent increases this year. Gone are the double-digit increases we’ve had crushing us as ratepayers over the last several years. That we went without a hurricane hitting the mainland U.S. last year is helpful, to be sure, but construction costs are big drivers of the cost of home insurance, and those have yet to abate. Ahhh, but then there is health insurance, and that’s a disaster. It’s not a disaster of President Trump’s making, though it sure would have been helpful had the U.S. Senate voted back in 2017 to repeal Obamacare. There are multiple reasons one might believe John McCain is burning in hell; his cackling deathbed vote against that repeal simply to spite the president has to rank atop them. (RELATED: Trump’s Pivot Could Make Health Care Affordable Again) Democrat insistence on continuing to throw taxpayer money into the smoking hole that Obamacare turned the individual health insurance market into, though, is the proximate cause for the out-of-control, busted centrifuge the country faces. Which brings us to Thursday. Trump called on Congress to “enact the Great Healthcare Plan, a comprehensive plan to lower drug prices, lower insurance premiums, hold big insurance companies accountable, and maximize price transparency.” Here are the elements, courtesy of the White House’s press release Thursday… LOWERING DRUG PRICES: The Great Healthcare Plan lowers prescription drug prices for all Americans by building on President Trump’s historic actions to reduce costs for American patients. The Great Healthcare Plan calls for codifying the Trump Administration’s Most-Favored-Nation deals to get Americans the same low prices for prescription drugs that people in other countries pay. This would build off President Trump’s landmark actions that made insulin more affordable in his first term and the successful voluntary negotiations following his recent Executive Order to lower drug prices. Voluntarily negotiated deals with HHS/CMS will be grandfathered in. The Great Healthcare Plan makes more verified safe pharmaceutical drugs available for over-the-counter purchase. This will lower healthcare costs and increase consumer choice by strengthening price transparency, increasing competition, and reducing the need for costly and time-consuming doctor’s visits. There are a ton of moving parts to this, and I’m not dragging the reader into the weeds on them. I’ll say that for a very long time, it’s been problematic that American consumers have been subsidizing drug purchasers around the world, and Most Favored Nation is essentially a writ-large version of the demand-side correction that drug reimportation advocacy sought. The drug companies might not like it, and they’re going to argue that without the status quo pricing structure, it won’t be economic to bring new drugs to market. And maybe that’s true, but when you consider that all of these fabulous pharmaceuticals, which cover the TV airtime like a blanket of snow, are the current foundation of American medicine, and yet we’re seeing a declining life expectancy as a country, maybe it’s more important to make the stuff we have cheaper and more available than to boost R&D. LOWERING INSURANCE PREMIUMS: The Great Healthcare Plan would execute the President’s vision to send money directly to the American people, lower health insurance premiums, and cut kickbacks that raise insurance premiums. The Great Healthcare Plan stops sending big insurance companies billions in extra taxpayer-funded subsidy payments and instead send that money directly to eligible Americans to allow them to buy the health insurance of their choice. The Great Healthcare Plan funds a cost-sharing reduction program for healthcare plans which would save taxpayers at least $36 billion and reduce the most common Obamacare plan premiums by over 10 percent according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Great Healthcare Plan will end the kickbacks paid by pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to the large brokerage middlemen that deceptively raise the cost of health insurance. All of this stuff should be politically popular, and I haven’t quite figured out how the Democrats would attack it. Big Insurance won’t really like any of this part (though what else is coming, they’ll hate more), but it definitely should find purchase with people stuck in the Obamacare exchanges and getting crushed with sky-high rates. I still think reforming the non-employer health insurer market with a focus on health savings accounts and creating association health plans — meaning, letting people buy health insurance through their school’s alumni association or their church or men’s club or whatever other organization they’re members of — would go a long way toward fixing this problem, but apparently we’re not there yet. HOLDING BIG INSURANCE COMPANIES ACCOUNTABLE: The Great Healthcare Plan ends the days of insurance companies using complexity to make it difficult for Americans to hold them to account by creating the “Plain English” insurance standard and requiring insurance companies to prominently post the profits they take out of premiums as well as information on the frequency with which they deny care. The Great Healthcare Plan creates the “Plain English” insurance standard by requiring health insurance companies to publish rate and coverage comparisons upfront on their websites in plain English — not industry jargon — so consumers can make better insurance purchasing decisions. The Great Healthcare Plan will require health insurance companies to publish the percentage of their revenues that are paid out to claims versus overhead costs and profits on their websites. The Great Healthcare Plan will require health insurance companies to publish the percentage of insurance claims they reject and average wait times for routine care on their websites. Most of this is self-explanatory, but one does notice how strange it is that you need a presidential proposal to get what seem like pretty basic considerations out of the insurance industry. Rate and coverage comparisons in plain English on insurance company websites don’t seem like all that big an ask. MAXIMIZING PRICE TRANSPARENCY: The Great Healthcare Plan requires any healthcare provider or insurer who accepts Medicare or Medicaid to prominently post their pricing and fees in their place of business and ensure insurance companies are complying with price transparency requirements. In President Trump’s first term, he issued historic regulations requiring hospitals and insurance companies to post prices in various forms. The Biden Administration failed to enforce these requirements and took no actions to help patients access actual prices. The Great Healthcare Plan requires all healthcare providers and insurers to answer to their patients up front on the prices they will be charged—restoring accountability, transparency, and rightly giving power back to patients. Same observation as above, though this has an even greater import given the rolling revelations of just how much fraud there is in these systems. There is a desperate need for sunlight to disinfect them, if for no other reason than if you can smoke the waste and theft out of them, you might find that healthcare isn’t actually as expensive a commodity as you think it is. (RELATED: The Bureaucracy Has Become the Mission) Not to mention, you might uncover a greater supply of people willing to get into medicine, which is an otherwise unaddressed issue in this plan. It’s a good start. One gets the impression this was presented as a least-common-denominator proposal that the Left and the Democrats can’t really oppose, so that when they oppose it anyway, their intractability can be used against them politically. As for making policy? Let’s not pretend here. Chuck Schumer and his minions will filibuster literally anything Trump or the Republicans bring to the Senate floor. It doesn’t matter whether the Great Healthcare Plan is really great, or good, or lousy. They will filibuster it. So the real question is whether John Thune and the GOP Senate majority have the sand to blow up the filibuster. Would this be the bill to do that with? On a first reading of the plan, I’d say no. I’d say it needs beefing up in the House first. The bill that breaks the filibuster had better be a massive political triumph, or what’s the point? Nevertheless, Trump is making a real effort at getting in front of affordability. His critics owe the American people an honest response rather than reflexive Trump Derangement Syndrome criticisms of the Great Healthcare Plan. READ MORE from Scott McKay: There Is No Virtue Left to Signal White Girl George Floyd Isn’t Working Five Quick Things: Minnesota Goes to Hell (Again)

It has long been ignored that the Biden administration de facto guaranteed legal abortion in all 50 states just 15 days after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The administration, anticipating that the court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, announced that mifepristone, the drug that kills an unborn child, could be dispensed without an in-person visit. Practically, this meant that networks of abortionists could ship abortion pills to women living in red states where abortion is illegal. Abortionists’ drug pipeline would be, for all intents and purposes, legal under federal law. (RELATED: Want to Crack Down on Drug Trafficking? Target the Abortion Drug Cartel) Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician himself, made this point emphatically at a press conference Wednesday following a hearing on the safety of mifepristone. (RELATED: The Nation Must Face the Abortion Pill Legal Monster) “The Supreme Court ended Roe,” Cassidy said, “but the FDA is allowing mifepristone to override state pro-life laws.” Cassidy noted that at least 76,310 babies were killed in red states through telehealth prescriptions enabled by the FDA’s mifepristone policies in 2024. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham echoed Cassidy’s point, arguing that state laws on abortion are practically nullified by the federal government’s policy of allowing mifepristone to be dispensed via telemedicine. “The federal government is allowing a chemical abortion pill to be sent through the mail that wipes out every state unborn protection law in the land,” Graham said. “You can’t say it should be a state issue and sit on the sidelines while the federal government … is sending the pill that undercuts everything people at the state have worked for.” “You can’t have it both ways,” Graham continued. “You can’t say it should be a state issue and sit on the sidelines while the federal government, through an agency, is sending the pill that undercuts everything people at the state have worked for.” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who recently sought the extradition of a California doctor who dispensed abortion pills in Louisiana, explained how the Biden administration’s FDA rules on mifepristone were created for the express purpose of allowing abortion pills to be dispensed to pro-life states. “They did that specifically with the avowed purpose of facilitating and encouraging people to send those pills by mail even to states where it is illegal,” she explained. All of this raises the question of why, under the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services and its subordinate agency, the Food and Drug Administration, have kept in place the very Biden policy that was intended to guarantee nationwide access to abortion. This question is made even more baffling when considering the dangers of allowing mifepristone to be dispensed over the internet (simply when accounting for the health and safety of the mother). A study published last year by the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that 11 percent of women who took mifepristone experienced at least one “serious adverse event.” These included sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, and other events that were deemed to be “life-threatening.” Additionally, the previous guidelines put in place by the FDA for mifepristone required a doctor to date a pregnancy and diagnose whether there was an ectopic pregnancy. Practically, this meant that an in-person ultrasound was necessary. This was for two very specific reasons. First, if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy, taking an abortion pill can be incredibly dangerous because it could cause a woman to believe the bleeding she is experiencing from an ectopic pregnancy results from the abortion pill. Therefore, she could fail to seek treatment for the life-threatening emergency she is facing. Second, mifepristone can be extremely dangerous if a woman is further along in her pregnancy than she thinks, or if she falsely claims not to be as far along as she is. Significant bleeding, hemorrhage, shock, incomplete abortion, infection, sepsis, uterine rupture, or a continued pregnancy with severe complications could occur. Sepsis could happen because at 15 weeks gestation, for example, the baby is nearly 7 inches long, and some of the baby’s body parts may remain in a woman’s uterus after she takes abortion medications. This could cause bacteria to flourish and then enter her bloodstream. The Biden administration’s 2021 decision to require zero in-person doctor’s visits for the prescription of mifepristone is not the first time Democrats have played the game of making abortions more dangerous so that they are more accessible. In 2016, as Barack Obama’s presidency reached its end, his administration removed the second of the previously required doctor’s visits for mifepristone, despite the fact that follow-up visits had frequently been used to monitor and treat infection, hemorrhaging, and sepsis that had occurred because of the medication. Obama also increased the age of babies that could be killed by mifepristone from 7 weeks gestation to 10 weeks gestation. (At 10 weeks, a baby’s vital organs are mostly formed.) His administration also took an action that would conceal the real dangers of mifepristone: no longer requiring doctors to report non-fatal adverse events. All of these dangers, put on top of the reality that these Biden-era FDA rules negate any state pro-life laws, make the FDA and HHS’s decision to keep these rules in place inexplicable. Further illustrating the ideological rather than scientific nature of these FDA rules was the testimony of Dr. Nisha Verma. Verma refused to tell Sen. Josh Hawley whether men can get pregnant. “I do take care of patients with different identities,” she said, before going on to say that “some” of her patients “don’t identify as women.” That certainly made Vera’s claim that the safety of mifepristone “is not a matter of opinion or debate” less believable. So, why isn’t Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health, rolling back the Biden rules? One possibility is simply his own pro-abortion history, which worried pro-lifers when President Donald Trump nominated him for his position. During his presidential campaign, Kennedy at one point said that women should be able to obtain abortions of their children up to the point when the child is born. He shortly thereafter clarified that he supported the “emerging consensus” that abortion should be unrestricted “up until a certain point,” but that there should be “appropriate restrictions” during the final months of a woman’s pregnancy. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said with regard to abortion, “I serve at the pleasure of the president. I’m going to implement his policies.” He also said on mifepristone that Trump “has not yet taken a stand on how to regulate it.” Kennedy said that he would implement Trump’s policies when the president took a stand. A spokesman for HHS, Andrew Nixon, told ABC News Wednesday that the agency is currently conducting a study on adverse effects related to mifepristone in order to “assess whether the FDA’s risk mitigation program continues to provide appropriate protections for women.” But for some Republican members of Congress, that wasn’t enough. They wanted to know why FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary had not testified about the abortion pill at the hearing. As for Kennedy, he has not testified since his confirmation hearing, but Cassidy said Wednesday that he would testify later this year. During the press conference following the hearing, Sen. James Lankford subtly pointed out the absurdity of HHS changing recommendations on Tylenol during pregnancy while doing nothing to protect pregnant women from the dangerous effects that can result from mifepristone. “This drug, contrary to how the abortionists talk about it, is not as safe as Tylenol…. If you use mifepristone according to label and use Tylenol according to label, there is an 8,000 percent chance difference that you will end up in the emergency room using mifepristone.” Lankford was very clear about the effect of the FDA’s policies on his state. “What’s happening right now on the national level is abortion drugs are being mailed into my state to go around state law to facilitate the death of children in my state,” he said. Republican lawmakers urged the Trump administration to simply go back to the FDA policies that were in place prior to the Biden administration’s ideological transformation of them. “You could fix this by going back to the first Trump policy,” asserted Graham Wednesday. “The pro-life community is not asking too much of a Republican administration and Congress to repeal the Biden policy. I think that’s why we got elected. So it’s time now, folks, to repeal the Biden policy, a Biden policy that undercuts the states’ rights approach.” He then spoke to Trump directly: “You’ve been a great pro-life president, Mr. President. It’s now time to deal with this issue.” READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: College Fine Arts and Theater Programs Are About to Be In Trouble Gavin Newsom, ‘King of Fraud’ ‘Experts’ Warn US Is on Brink of ‘Trans Genocide’

On Wednesday, Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) chaired a joint hearing focused on failures in screening Afghan refugees across federal agencies, including the State Department and Department of Defense, during Operation Allies Welcome. Operation Allies Welcome (OAW) was a resettlement program started under the Biden administration following the collapse of the Afghan central government in August 2021. Following the shoddy retreat from Kabul in August 2021, President Biden designated the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the lead agency in charge of resettling Afghan evacuees. (RELATED: Importing Chaos: The Paradox of Nation-building) During the initial evacuation, about 97,000 Afghan evacuees were brought to the U.S. to “resettle in American communities,” according to a report from the DHS inspector general. The majority of evacuees, about 77,000, were granted two-year humanitarian parole. The Biden administration chose speed over safety, at times disregarding the security concerns of its own officials to prioritize the swift absorption of Afghan refugees into American society. One through line from the hearing: The Biden administration chose speed over safety, at times disregarding the security concerns of its own officials to prioritize the swift absorption of Afghan refugees into American society. Humanitarian parole grants Afghans a temporary legal presence in the U.S., but it doesn’t provide immigration status or a path to permanent residency. However, OAW parolees are eligible for refugee-like benefits and assistance. To qualify for humanitarian parole, applicants must submit to extensive screenings and remain in contact with respective agencies. As part of its responsibilities within the larger resettlement of evacuees, the State Department established the Afghan Placement and Assistance (APA) Program to resettle Afghan nationals granted parole, working with “nine resettlement agencies and their 385 local partners.” Resettlement agencies provided “initial relocation support, material needs, and services for 30 to 90 days after the Afghans arrived at their final resettlement location.” However, once parole was issued, DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were “chiefly responsible for their final resettlement,” according to a report by the State Department’s inspector general. Three witnesses representing the respective inspectors general of DHS, the Department of Defense (DoD), and the State Department spoke at length about the concurrent deficiencies within the vetting process that raised concerns with lawmakers. Michael J. Roark, the deputy inspector general for evaluations at the Department of Defense, testified that there were “significant challenges in the interagency effort to enroll, screen, and vet displaced Afghans for possible security threats before they were granted access to the U.S.” Roark also testified that DoD had failed to implement all of the IG’s recommendations, leaving open the possibility of recurring security issues in the case of another influx of refugees.  Failure to communicate across agencies was a recurring theme of the hearings, as detailed by Craig Adelman, the deputy inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, and Arne B. Baker, a senior official from the State Department currently performing the duties of an inspector general. DHS was clueless about who was in the country, where they were, and what they were doing. In one instance, Baker said that the State Department “was unable to confirm the reliability of the number of individuals reported by the State Department as having been evacuated from Afghanistan during the evacuation.” As for DHS, Adelman testified that “In several cases, DHS could not demonstrate that it accurately knew who individuals were, where they were located, whether parole conditions were being met, or whether individuals had unresolved risk indicators.”  These deficiencies are not simply bureaucratic shortcomings or about degrees of efficiency; they represent serious gaps that have direct bearing on public safety, national security, and the public trust in our immigration system,” he added. In other words, DHS was clueless about who was in the country, where they were, and what they were doing. Notably, the CIA was absent from the witness list, despite its role in creating the “Zero Units” — Afghan intelligence and paramilitary forces — that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the suspect in the November shooting of two National Guardsmen, belonged to.  There were also no witnesses from several federal agencies under DHS’s umbrella — such as Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — that are responsible for screening, vetting, and inspecting each evacuee before issuing humanitarian parole. While most of the Afghan evacuees brought into the country received humanitarian parole, some entered through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program. To be eligible for the SIV program, evacuees had to have taken “significant risks to support our military and civilian personnel in Afghanistan,” be “employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government in Afghanistan, or our coalition forces,” or be a family member of someone who served. Since 2009, the U.S. government has issued 156,000 SIVs to Afghans. State Department officials issued half of those SIVs in the 45 months after suspending Embassy Kabul’s operations. In 2024, the department issued 33,119 Afghan SIVs (7,208 to principal applicants and 25,911 to family), nearly double that of 2023’s total.  By June of 2025, the department had used over 80 percent of the available 50,500 SIV slots for principal Afghan applicants. In December 2025, following the November shooting by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, President Donald Trump issued an executive order suspending the SIV program. Despite the number of agencies involved, the reports issued by the Inspectors General of DoD, the State Department, and DHS paint a sordid picture of a federal apparatus ill-equipped to handle the number of refugees accepted into the country. To wit, in 2023, the State Department’s OIG noted that the resettlement agencies working with the APA found the “large number of eligible Afghans and their simultaneous arrival raised substantial implementing challenges for the APA Program.” Additionally, resettlement agency officials “told OIG that the APA Program involved some of the most significant challenges that they had ever faced.” The issues faced by resettlement agencies ran the gamut from “housing and documentation” to “cultural orientation, staffing, program guidance, tracking systems, and medical care.” Baker confirmed this in his testimony, stating, “[R]esettlement agencies reported difficulty meeting the mental health care needs of Afghan evacuees and recommended that evacuees receive mental health screenings earlier in the process.” Before his attack in the nation’s capital in November, Lakanwal had reportedly been “struggling with his mental health — often isolating himself in a dark room — in the years after he left Afghanistan and entered the U.S,” according to CBS News. Organizations receiving resettlement funds were also a topic of conversation for the hearing. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was a specific target of Sen. Hawley’s. Julie Marzouk, founder of Marzouk Evolve Advocacy Consulting, testified that as one of the organizations contracted to resettle Afghan refugees, CAIR received tens of millions of federal dollars with little oversight on how it spent the money.  Marzouk claims that “CAIR, an organization with a thirty-year association with Hamas, was entrusted to vet Afghan applicants for terrorism.” In response, CAIR released a statement, a part of which reads, “Calling in an anti-Muslim bigot and acolyte of the Israeli government to serve as a witness is bad enough. Letting such an individual spew hate without any pushback is unacceptable. “We stand in solidarity with the Afghan American community and the Afghan refugee committee, and we applaud CAIR California for the work it has done to serve the people of California, including new Californians establishing a better life for their families.” Since 2021, “over 190,000 Afghans have settled in the United States through the EW program and its predecessor, Operation Allies Welcome,” according to the State Department. READ MORE from Tosin Akintola: California Union Behind State Billionaire Tax Has $68 Million in Assets

The tenure of General Motors’ CEO Mary Barra may soon be ending, but not before billions of additional losses are booked for her disastrous commitment to an all-electric future for the mass market automobile manufacturer. As the great American automobile manufacturer tries to assess the damage and clean up the wreckage from its EV detour, it might be expected that GM would now refocus on selling the vehicles that consumers want to buy, and which dealers excel at selling. Unfortunately, that expectation would be incorrect.  General Motors is once again distracted by the next shiny thing — self-driving vehicles. The likely successor to Mary Barra as CEO, Sterling Anderson, is a recent hire from the tech industry, and his resume is narrowly specialized in autonomous vehicles. GM cannot afford any more costly gimmicks or distractions. Unfortunately, its leadership seems congenitally attracted to boutique segments of the auto industry which excite coastal trend-chasers, but which have little appeal to the people buying pickup trucks and sport utilities, the bread-and-butter vehicles of retail auto sales. (RELATED: What’s an ‘EREV’?) Only Tesla has been successful in establishing a U.S. customer base for EVs, developing a profitable niche as a boutique commuter product for an affluent customer base. Upon Joe Biden’s election in 2020, Ms. Barra famously pledged to eliminate gasoline-powered, internal combustion vehicles by 2035, producing only EVs by that date. While the Biden administration was heavy-handed in trying to compel an all-EV future, other mass-market auto companies such as Ford and Toyota did not make similar commitments. The Trump administration subsequently reversed its predecessor’s coercive regulations, and Congress defunded EV subsidies with the One Big Beautiful Bill in 2025. But even when subsidies were in place, consumers emphatically rejected electric vehicles manufactured by legacy auto makers. Only Tesla has been successful in establishing a U.S. customer base for EVs, developing a profitable niche as a boutique commuter product for an affluent customer base. (RELATED: Celebrating the End of EVs) The EV distraction has been financially devastating for GM, with announcements of major losses and multi-billion-dollar charge-offs coming rapidly. In the 4th quarter of 2025 alone, GM booked two separate EV-related charge-offs totaling $7.6 billion. To put that loss into context, GM’s full-year 2024 profit was about $6 billion. Despite all this, General Motors has still not officially backed away from its all-EV commitment. To this day, its website reads “We are pursuing our vision of a zero-emissions future and driving value for our business, our customers, and our communities.” As reported by a GM Authority piece from September titled “GM Still Focused On EV-Only Future,” Ms. Barra “reaffirmed that the goal is to make GM an all-EV automaker.” Fortunately for General Motors, and despite the EV distraction, GM’s legacy customers are still loyal to the company’s gasoline-powered pickups and SUVs.  So, GM is finally going to re-focus on those loyal customers and the products they prefer, right? Of course not. GM is once again pursuing the Tesla niche, this time with a focus on self-driving cars. Sterling Anderson, GM’s heir apparent to the CEO office, was hired just eight months ago from Aurora Innovation, a tech start-up he cofounded to develop autonomous vehicles. Prior to that, he was involved with Tesla’s autonomous vehicle unit. Since Mr. Anderson’s hiring, several prominent executives have departed the company, presumably because they don’t share his vision for prioritizing self-driving cars. As reported by CNBC a few weeks ago, Mr. Anderson “has consolidated power to oversee ‘the end-to-end product lifecycle’ of GM vehicles, including manufacturing, engineering, battery, software and services product management, and engineering teams, according to GM.” Despite the massive EV losses that GM has incurred, the company is apparently casting its lot with a tech executive whose profit-and-loss experience is with cash burn rather than cash flow. Mr. Anderson’s startup lost about $4 billion over the past four years on nominal revenue. Aurora has about half a dozen driverless trucks running routes on Texas interstates. GM sells millions of vehicles per year. What is perhaps most peculiar about General Motors’ pivot toward autonomous vehicles is that it has already had one very expensive failure in that market segment. GM first invested in Cruise, LLC in 2016, ultimately investing $12 billion as it obtained total control of the robotaxi company.  Back in 2017, Mary Barra stated that GM would be testing fully autonomous vehicles “in quarters, not years.” While Cruise initially retrofitted other manufacturers’ electric cars to be self-driving, GM ultimately did build its own Cruise vehicle, called the “Origin.” However, only a few hundred self-driving Cruise Origin robotaxis were built before GM stopped production and surrendered that market space to Waymo. From an AP article dated Dec. 10, 2024, “Since GM bought a controlling stake in Cruise for $581 million in 2016, the robotaxi service piled up more than $10 billion in operating losses while bringing in less than $500 million in revenue…”  Some futuristic products just don’t have market traction, or can’t reconcile their cost and functionality with what the market will bear. The Concorde supersonic jetliner received its certificate of airworthiness in 1975 and started carrying passengers in 1976, but ultimately only 14 planes were ever flown commercially. Five decades later, none are in service. Supersonic planes served a niche, but had little mass-market utility.   Human-driven, gasoline-powered vehicles have been the choice of consumers and commercial vehicle buyers for over a century. There is little reason to see that changing any time soon, if ever. Auto manufacturers who focus on that mass market can prosper. Those that don’t will either fail or be relegated to being a niche manufacturer. General Motors is too big to be niche; therefore, it cannot afford to keep booking multi-billion dollar losses in pursuit of flashy trends such as EVs and autonomous vehicles. READ MORE from Buck Throckmorton: The War on Labor Expense is Renormalizing Slavery, Just in a 21st Century Form Banks Are Racially Profiling Mortgage Applicants — The Government Requires It Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

Greenland has been much in the news with President Trump’s attempt to acquire the island from former colonial power Denmark. Trump’s bid has helped to expose a long-suppressed Danish campaign that could now incline Greenlanders to opt for a deal. From 1966 to 1970, in an attempt to reduce the population of Greenland, Danish doctors forced intrauterine devices (IUDs) on 4,500 women and girls as young as 12. The forced procedure left many women sterile, and the practice continued on a reduced scale until 1992, when Greenland gained control of its healthcare system. The Spiralkampagnen — “coil campaign” — continued well into the 2000s. In 2022, Greenland and Denmark launched an investigation, but no apology emerged until August of 2025. (RELATED: The Smart Way to Get Greenland) “We cannot change what has happened. But we can take responsibility,” said Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. “On behalf of Denmark, I would like to say sorry.” For University of Connecticut professor Barry Scott Zellen, senior fellow in Arctic Security at the Institute of the North, “‘sorry’ seems to grossly understate the gravity of the offense,” similar to what a misbehaving child would say to a parent. “Offenses of this magnitude need much more than a ‘sorry,’” Zellen contends. “They need generational healing. They deserve generous compensation. They need repeated acts of contrition, resignations, imprisonments. They need justice.” (RELATED: Trump Sends a Cajun to Press the Message to Greenland) Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen apologized “for the harm and abuse that may have been inflicted on several women after we took over responsibility for our healthcare system.” (emphasis added) Zeller found that response “woefully insufficient.” Naaja H. Nathanielsen, Greenland’s minister for justice and gender equality, said she was “very pleased by the apology” but “couldn’t see any way around it.” Zellen pronounced her “the minister of platitudes and contradiction.” For those who believe that harm and abuse “may have” been inflicted, consider the experience of Henrietta Berthelsen, only 13 years old when Danish doctors forcibly implanted an IUD designed for mature women. She remembers the “terrible pain” and that “none of the grown-ups paid any attention to me.” Berthelsen and many others received “no psychological support of any kind from the state. If we seek help, we have to pay part of it ourselves.” As the Spiralkampagnen confirms, government medical care can force procedures the people don’t want to have, and which the government wants to keep secret. According to Copenhagen attorney Mads Pramming,  the Spiralkampagnen was part of government policy to limit population, and in some places, there were “zero births.” Four years later, the government considered the coil campaign a “big success,” so no need for any apology. French photographer Juliette Pavy found that discussion of the subject was taboo in Denmark. Pavy interviewed Naja Lyberth and Bula Larsen, whose IUD produced a serious infection. Doctors removed then replaced it, and Larsen remained infertile, a common legacy of the campaign. Pavy shows a photo of a coil in the womb and pictures of the victims at the time of the forced insertion. By all indications, Danish doctors seldom, if ever, objected to the procedure, which also bypassed the victims’ parents. In government-monopoly health care, the people get only the medical care the government wants them to have. As the Spiralkampagnen confirms, government medical care can force procedures the people don’t want to have, and which the government wants to keep secret. Aaja Chemnitz, who has represented Greenland in the Danish parliament for 10 years, told reporters the Danish apology was a direct result of “the external pressure, especially from the United States.” As the people should know, President Trump’s campaign to acquire Greenland is not the first. American attempts to acquire Greenland go back to the mid-1800s. During WWII, more than 10,000 Allied aircraft refueled in Greenland for bombing runs on Nazi Germany. In 1946, the USA sought to purchase Greenland for $100 million, but the Danes didn’t go for it. In 1951, the USA signed a treaty with Denmark giving the American military access to Greenland.  During the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration sought to acquire the territory, but failed to put forth an offer. While Trump makes his bid, there’s a back story here that the people should know. (RELATED: What if Greenland Isn’t Denmark’s to Sell?) At the end of WWII, Canada’s First Parachute Battalion blocked Stalin’s forces from occupying Denmark. That would have trapped Denmark in the Eastern Bloc and handed Stalin control of Greenland.  Potential suitors for that territory now include Russia, an autocracy led by former KGB man Vladimir Putin, and Communist China. The PRC’s dictatorship is now forcing women to be sterilized or fitted with contraceptive devices in an effort to reduce the population of Muslim Uighurs. That may recall Denmark’s Spiralkampagnen to limit Greenland’s “inuit” population, which Denmark considered a “big success.” Their former colony of Greenland is hardly the only strategic territory in the region. During WWII, the Allies also flew out of Newfoundland, a former British colony woefully neglected by the homeland. In 1949, Newfoundlanders voted to join Canada, in a contest some believe was rigged. See Greg Malone’s  Don’t Tell the Newfoundlanders: The True Story of Newfoundland’s Confederation with Canada, based on documents kept secret for many years. President Trump’s offer for Greenland should include justice for the Spiralkampagnen victims. Denmark could outline a counter-offer and both sides could let the people of Greenland decide. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens. READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley: Gridlocked by Ideology Is Minnesota or California the Fraud Capital of America? Christmas for California Parents Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.