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It was hardly necessary to read the headlines Sunday morning to know that the corporate media, like Minnesota’s irresponsible governor Tim Walz, would effectively accuse federal immigration officers of brutally executing Alex Pretti. For example, a New York Times “analysis” fails to mention that Pretti was an anti-ICE activist who had just interfered with the apprehension of a criminal suspect, and was violently resisting arrest when the officers realized he was armed. The Times falsely claims, “An agent had already removed Mr. Pretti’s gun when two other agents opened fire, shooting him in the back as he lay on the ground.” No honest analysis of this episode could lead to this conclusion. All of which brings us to the root cause of the Minneapolis insurrection — the desperate attempt by Tim Walz to distract the public from what may be the worst welfare fraud scandal in the nation’s history. There were several videos taken of the altercation from various vantage points and they tell a far different story than the Gray Lady gives its readers. This clip, for example, belies the claim that Pretti was lying on the ground when he was shot. He was, in fact, on his knees and struggling to stand while reaching around toward a belt holster. At that point one of the officers shouted, “gun,” and he was shot. All of this happened within a few short seconds. One of the most moronic claims made by the Times is that Pretti had already been disarmed before “agents opened fire.” If true, it would have happened only a second or two earlier and the other officers couldn’t have known if the still struggling activist possessed other weapons. Nonetheless, the usual media suspects echoed similar nonsense. NPR, for example, advises its gullible readers that “Bystander videos contradict the accounts of federal officials about the shooting of a man in Minneapolis on Saturday.” The videos shown on NPR’s site are deceptively edited to remove what happened just before the federal agents tried to arrest him. They followed Pretti from across the street where he had interfered with officers who were questioning the target of the DHS operation, Jose Huerta Chuma, an illegal alien with numerous outstanding criminal warrants. In other words, NPR deliberately created the impression that the DPB agents initiated the confrontation. In reality, Pretti had already accosted the officers. Oddly, the crack reporters at NPR have no interest in why Alex Pretti would appear at a “peaceful protest” armed with a SIG Sauer P320 AXG, a high-capacity 9mm semi-automatic pistol equipped with a SIG Romeo optic. The optic, by the way, is a line of high-performance red dot sight engineered for rapid target acquisition. This device, in addition to at least one magazine full of extra ammunition, suggests that Mr. Pretti was not planning to remain peaceful for long. It’s passing strange that NPR has no interest in the fact that Pretti was carrying this weapon. It is, of course, exactly the kind of firearm that all good “progressives” want to ban. Here’s a photo of the gun and Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino’s statement: At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here. The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted … Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID — this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement. It’s impossible to discuss this debacle without noting that it’s author — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — continues to bray about the depredations of DHS. As legal scholar Jonathan Turley writes, “Gov. Walz is again inflaming the mob. He is effectively declaring this to be the murder of a citizen who had a permit to carry this weapon. He is saying that the state not the federal government will control the investigation.  He does not have that authority.” Meanwhile, Walz has instructed his remaining supporters, “Quit referring to these people as law enforcement. They are not law enforcement. We have law enforcement who do an incredible job.” How would he know? Neither he nor the Mayor of Minneapolis will allow them to do their jobs. All of which brings us to the root cause of the Minneapolis insurrection — the desperate attempt by Tim Walz to distract the public from what may be the worst welfare fraud scandal in the nation’s history. It had already caused Walz to drop his reelection campaign and it was about to result in his resignation when he decided to exploit the death of Renee Good, and now Alex Pretti, to change the subject. In a very real sense, these misguided people had to die in order to save Walz’s skin. Now he’s encouraging more naifs to do the same. The truly terrifying thing is that, absent the wisdom of the voters, this creature would now be Vice President. READ MORE from David Catron: Minnesota and the New Nullification Crisis The Media Are Agents of Propaganda Yes, Trump’s Action Against Maduro Was Legal

President Trump reentered the healthcare debate with The Great Healthcare Plan (GHP), as families confront another year of rising insurance costs. After expiration of pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies, millions of Americans are seeing premiums and out-of-pocket costs rising sharply. The immediate response in Washington has been to debate whether those subsidies should be restored. Lawmakers can either double down on failed policies that raise but hide prices and ration care, or they can pursue reforms that give Americans control over the money. That debate misses the fundamental question of why health insurance costs keep rising with no end in sight?  Why are Americans paying more while getting less (care)? Trump’s proposal builds on his argument to stop routing taxpayer dollars through insurers and give the money directly to people. That instinct is sound. Whether it leads to effective use of limited healthcare dollars depends on whether policymakers are willing to tackle politically sensitive structural inefficiencies. To understand why or how this works (or actually doesn’t), it helps to explain how Obamacare subsidies are determined and who is subsidized. Under current law, premium assistance is tied to the cost of a government-defined benchmark plan. Consumers never receive these dollars. Instead, the federal government sends subsidy payments straight to insurance companies every month, automatically increasing payments as premiums rise. This structure shields consumers from the true cost of coverage and allows insurers to increase prices without limit. During the pandemic, Democrats expanded federal ACA subsidies by removing the income cap and reducing the share of income households were expected to pay. People with incomes up to $220,000 received subsidies. More than 20 million Americans, most healthy, often wealthy, were added to subsidy lists. Thus, when insurers increased prices and subsidy payments automatically rose, billions of taxpayer dollars were added to insurance coffers. When those enhancements expired (December 2025), families were suddenly exposed to the real price of coverage. In many states, average exchange premiums increased by roughly 26 percent. Affected households saw out-of-pocket costs more than double. And what do people get when paying more? Nothing, except longer wait times for care! Sticker shock has fueled renewed pressure to restore the subsidies, even as Democrats openly discuss a second government shutdown to force Republicans to renew and extend the enhanced subsidies. But reviving subsidies leaves untouched a financing structure that allows payments to rise indefinitely. Trump’s GHP proposes to redirect subsidy dollars from insurers to individuals. For current exchange enrollees, those subsidies average $550 per month, or about $6,600 per year, depending on income and location. The question is whether ACA subsidies are the most effective or even a proper use of limited health care dollars intended for the medically vulnerable. The employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) is the regulatory machinery that diverts healthcare dollars from care to insurance bureaucracy. The ESI is based on a tax exclusion dating back to a World War II wage freeze accommodation. In 2025, the average ESI payment to insurance companies for family coverage reached nearly $27,000. That is not employer generosity. Those dollars are wages earned by workers they never received because Congress repealed all elements of the WW II Stabilization Act of 1942, except the ESI. Workers never received ESI funds. Therefore, they had no control over how their money was spent. If policymakers are serious about giving money to the people instead of insurance companies, the ESI is the place to start. By offering $6,600, Trump’s GHP may help at the margins. Redirecting hidden and denied compensation, averaging nearly $27,000 per person to each of 165 million American workers would fundamentally change incentives across the system, returning market power of money where it belongs — in consumers’ hands. Access is inseparable from affordability. Across the country, physician appointment wait times are getting longer, particularly for primary care. In extreme cases, patients die while waiting for treatment, a phenomenon increasingly described as death by queue in those with Medicaid or Tricare coverage. These outcomes are not anomalies. They are predictable, indeed proven, consequences of a system, where federal and state insurance regulations, not patient needs, drive decisions. Trump’s GHP correctly identifies financial diversion as a core problem. His plan’s limitation is that it stops short of truly effective system reform. Real reform means aligning incentives with the desired outcome: timely care. Returning control of their health care dollars to patients will allow competition to discipline prices and improve service. Americans can then get the care they need when they need it at prices they can afford. That framework is outlined in our Empower Patients approach, described in the book Empower PATIENTS: Two Doctors’ Cure for Health Care. Empowering patients would lower costs, improve access, and restore the patient-doctor relationship that has been eroded by third-party control. Congress already allowed the enhanced Obamacare subsidies to expire. That decision created political pressure, which also created an opportunity. Lawmakers can either double down on failed policies that raise but hide prices and ration care, or they can pursue reforms that give Americans control over the money that already belongs to them. Finally, as original, pre-Biden ACA subsidies are unaffected by expiration of the enhanced subsidies, more dollars will be available to pay for truly needy, medically vulnerable Americans. READ MORE: How Medicaid Made a Billion-Dollar Crime Inevitable Is Healthcare ‘Burning’ Yet?‘ A Thanksgiving ‘What-If’ for American Healthcare Deane Waldman, M.D., MBA, is professor emeritus of pediatrics, pathology, and decision science; former director of the Center for Healthcare Policy at Texas Public Policy Foundation; former director of the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange; and author of 14 books. His latest is Empower PATIENTS – Two Doctors’ Cure for Healthcare. Follow him on X.com@DrDeaneW and visit website, www.empowerpatients.info. Vance Ginn, Ph.D., is president of Ginn Economic Consulting, and previously served as chief economist of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration. He co-authored Empower PATIENTS with Dr. Waldman. Follow him on X @VanceGinn and visit vanceginn.com or www.empowerpatients.info.  

Last week this column chastised President Trump for demanding ownership of Greenland and for threatening tariffs on any nation — including the NATO members that didn’t support him in his ambition to own Greenland — and for damaging NATO. The president can and should calm himself. As Winston Churchill once said, it’s better to fight with allies than without them. What a difference a week makes. It’s not as if the president took my advice, but in short order he dropped his demand to own Greenland, dropped the tariff threats and — while he’s still justifiably critical of NATO — his actions are more in support of it than not. Trump also disavowed military force to acquire Greenland. Perhaps the president and his team realized that the Cold War-era 1950 Defense of Greenland agreement with Denmark gave pretty much everything that Mr. Trump wanted. It guarantees us basing rights in support of the NATO Treaty. Last week, President Trump announced his U-turn on Greenland, saying that his talks with NATO leaders left him close to an agreement. We don’t know how the agreement with Denmark and Greenland will turn out, but it may reportedly include not only basing rights but also a NATO agreement to bolster defenses in the Arctic and possibly a right of first refusal in the U.S. to Greenland’s minerals which are believed to include many of the rare earth metals that China has stopped exporting to the U.S. I have never read Trump’s “Art of the Deal,” but his international strategy on Greenland apparently stems from its ideas. The book reportedly maintains that going into a negotiation, Trump’s idea is to make outrageous demands and then retreat to the position he really wants to achieve. He certainly did so on Greenland. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (who at an earlier summit called Trump “daddy”) was much in evidence at Davos. (Rutte has taken a lot of abuse by other NATO leaders for that remark.) He and Trump on Wednesday “discussed the critical significance of security in the Arctic region” thus beginning negotiations on both U.S. missile defenses in Greenland and denying China and Russia any economic influence in the Arctic. California Governor Gavin Nuisance was also in Davos. He claimed that his speech was prevented by the Trump team. If you had any doubt that the 2028 presidential race has already started, Nuisance’s appearance at Davos should end that doubt. He must have planned to castigate Trump and make a play on climate change as Al Gore did in 2024. (Gore, also present, booed a speech by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at this year’s Davos conclave.) But Trump continues to bash our NATO allies. In remarks to Maria Bartiromo of Fox News, Trump said that he wasn’t sure that NATO would stand by us if we were attacked. He added, “We’ve never needed them [NATO] … We have never really asked anything of them. They’ll say, they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that, and they did. They stayed a little back, little off the front lines.” Most NATO nations suffered troops’ deaths in backing us in Afghanistan where there were no front lines. The United Kingdom suffered the most — 457 dead — while nations from Canada to Estonia all had troops killed there. One of my British pals said Trump’s remarks were, “outrageous, insensitive and cruel to the many, living and dead, and their families who suffered working alongside and in support of the U.S.” Trump later sort of apologized. He wrote on Truth Social that, “The GREAT and very BRAVE soldiers of the United Kingdom will always be with the United States of America! In Afghanistan, 457 died, many were badly injured, and they were among the greatest of all warriors,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It’s a bond too strong to ever be broken. The U.K. Military, with tremendous Heart and Soul, is second to none (except for the U.S.A.!). We love you all, and always will!” I visited Baghdad in December 2005 and the Brits were very much in evidence. About 179 British troops were killed in the Iraq war. They didn’t hang back in that war either. So what does Trump gain by insulting our allies, especially the Brits? It’s natural for him to dislike UK Prime Minister Sir Keith Starmer who is a quasi-socialist. It’s also natural for him to dislike French President Macron who is also a quasi-socialist. Macron’s government of France is failing, causing even the very liberal The Economist magazine to have a story titled “The Merde Show” in a recent issue. But Trump’s remarks go beyond negotiations. They go beyond diplomacy and venture into damage to our relations with NATO nations. It may all be part of Trump’s “Art of the Deal,” but the remarks don’t appear to have any positive effect. The president can and should calm himself. As Winston Churchill once said, it’s better to fight with allies than without them. READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Trump and Greenland: A NATO Test A Dying Regime With a Loaded Gun In 2026, All Bets Are Off

Unlike some other conservatives, I can’t help feeling saddened by rumors of imminent mass layoffs at the already deflated Washington Post — including the entire sports department. Even though the people running the paper helped guarantee that fate. The Post was always liberal but not until this century, a liberal rag. Today, the entire newspaper is the width of the ad supplement I used to stuff in it every Sunday morning as a DC suburb paperboy. For a hundred years before then and decades after, it was the shining star for news, entertainment, and education. The Washington Post improved my mind and changed the course of my life. Yet too many of my ideological allies celebrating its demise fail to see the epic tragedy. Everybody else was liberal from Bradlee down to my fellow copy-aides —  including the only girl I’d ever loved, a beautiful radical feminist. The Post made a major cultural splash with great fanfare, literally, in 1889, inspiring a classic tune by the great John Philip Sousa, The Washington Post March. Yet the paper struggled until the mid-1940s, when owner Eugene Meyer hired a brilliant lawyer, Philip Graham, to work for it. With his marriage to Meyer’s daughter, Katharine, Philip took control of the paper, making it a Washington — and national — powerhouse. In 1963, the mentally disturbed (now known as bipolar disorder) Graham shot himself in the head with his shotgun. His widow Katharine took over the Post, becoming one of the first women to run a newspaper. Her wisest move was hiring Ben Bradlee, a true Hemingwayesque hero, as Managing Editor. Bradlee had joined the Navy right after Pearl Harbor, serving as a destroyer communications officer in the Pacific. After the war, he became a beat reporter, then a Newsweek foreign correspondent during the most turbulent decade of the Cold War. Newsweek promoted him to Washington Bureau Chief in 1957. As such, he befriended young Senator John F. Kennedy, who gave Bradlee unprecedented access to his inner circle pre and post Election 1960. This caught the notice of Katharine Graham, who eventually elevated Bradlee to Executive Editor of her paper. Under Bradlee’s reign, the Post became as powerful and influential as the “paper of record,” the New York Times — more so after Watergate. The investigative journalism of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that led to the resignation of the Left-despised President Nixon — and the bestselling book and superb movie, All the President’s Men — became the gold standard for every young aspiring reporter. They didn’t know the whole thing was a liberal fabrication to get Nixon. Neither did I as a kid right out of college and new Washington Post copyboy in 1983. It was the media Camelot at the time, and the legends were still there — Graham, Bradlee, Woodward (now Head of Investigative), Howard Simons (played by Martin Balsam in the film), a few others but not Bernstein (being ripped by ex-wife Nora Ephron in her bestselling novel, Heartburn) — and we awestruck youth darted in and out among them. We all wanted the same thing — to be the next Woodward. Or Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously. That’s how crazy we kids were — vying to cover a violent revolution in some Third World hellhole as a good career move. The Post editors wouldn’t send us to Nicaragua but they did let us write local stories the staff reporters didn’t want — Boy Scout jamborees, vintage theater closings, etcetera — and to be on the lookout for fast-breaking ones. We strutted around Washington with our green press badges ready to pounce on anything of interest. And what we wrote was read all over town, mine with the byline by Lou Aguilar, Special to the Washington Post. I turned out to be one of the best writers among my peers. So various editors would drop into the copy-aide station where we slung mail and assign me to cover more events. Bob Woodward liked me, enough to take an interest in my stories and kid around with me. But Ben Bradlee was inaccessible. He radiated power like Jason Robards did portraying him so wonderfully. I once rode up the elevator with Bradlee and three bigshot editors. He made a semi-joke about the elevator lights and the editors chortled like it had been a Don Rickles line. I discovered something at the Post. Everybody else was liberal from Bradlee down to my fellow copy-aides —  including the only girl I’d ever loved, a beautiful radical feminist (I fictionalized and updated that story in my semiautobiographical novel, Paper Tigers). I was the only Reaganite there. I remember Election Night 1984. We were ordered to work late supporting the editors and reporters. My good, now late, friend Bob grimaced. “Who wants to go to the Wake,” he said, meaning for Walter Mondale. Yet we were all friends and lovers before the Left went nuts — and destroyed the Washington Post. Today it’s a woke madhouse. In 2022, Post owner Jeff Bezos, himself a liberal yet a good businessman, hired political centrist Robert Winnett of the UK Daily Telegraph as Executive Editor to save his sinking ship. The Post staffers went ape, lashing out on social media and threatening to quit, as if the British were coming again. Winnett naturally withdrew rather than hose down the lunatics like Bezos should have. But that was nothing compared to the rebellion that followed Bezos’ decision that the Post not endorse Kamala Harris in the last election. Resignations actually ensued. Some unknown Post columnist named Karen Attiah called it “a stab in the back.” She’ll probably be one of the many layoffs. But the Post will never be what it was. And I get no joy from that. READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Starfleet Academy: To Boldly Go Nowhere The Harpy Syndrome Exit the Hollywood Women, Part 2 — Kathleen Kennedy

The New York Times investigation into “organ transplant tourism” exposes something more than merely deeply unsettling. Wealthy foreign patients are receiving organs in American hospitals faster than Americans who have waited for months or years. Hospitals collect millions of dollars from this source while half of U.S. patients die on the waitlist. President Trump could act now through an Executive Order authorizing compensation for living kidney donors who donate to strangers. This is not just an ethics failure. It is a predictable consequence of a government policy failure. When lifesaving goods are scarce, markets emerge. When desperation meets money, rules bend. That dynamic drives the underground organ trade abroad. It is also now playing out in broad daylight in the United States, where wealthy individuals effectively outbid Americans for access to scarce organs. Ordinarily, we accept that the rich outbid those with low incomes. The former gets the Rolex, the latter the Timex. But all bets are off when half of the 90,000 waiting on the kidney waitlist die due to stultifying policies. Wealthy foreign patients are cutting to the front of the line. This is not conjecture. International patients are being prioritized by some transplant centers because they bring in millions of dollars in revenue. When supply is artificially constrained, those with money find ways around the rules. This has created a version of a black market operating openly and legally. This raises the fundamental question: why are organs like kidneys so scarce in the first place? The answer is simple and uncomfortable. Donating a kidney is real work. It requires extraordinary health, time, physical risk, and recovery. Yet we have insisted on relying entirely on benevolence to supply this life-saving resource. We do not rely on benevolence to feed, clothe, or transport ourselves. The people who provide those essential goods are compensated for their labor. As Adam Smith, the father of economics, observed: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.” If we want to end preventable deaths from kidney failure, we must apply the same logic here. The brave and compassionate Americans who donate kidneys to strangers should be recognized for their life-saving public service by compensating the work required to save another human life. A person who donates a kidney to a stranger performs an act of public service equivalent to a compensated firefighter rescuing someone from a burning building. The only difference is speed. One act is immediate; the other unfolds over time. Both save a life. More than 100,000 Americans need an organ transplant today. Nearly 95,000 are waiting for a kidney.  Half of the 550,000 Americans on dialysis would benefit from a kidney transplant. Over the past several decades, policy choices that preserved the profitable kidney shortage have condemned more than one million Americans to needless suffering and death.  Dialysis keeps people alive, but it does not allow them to live fully. It comes with profound physical limits, shortened life expectancy, and an enormous public cost. Roughly one percent of all federal spending, about $50 billion a year, goes to dialysis. A kidney transplant, by contrast, saves lives and allows people to return to work. Each transplant saves taxpayers roughly $500,000 over time. Yet the number of living kidney donors in the United States has been essentially flat for 25 years. Nothing the experts have enacted has changed that.   Those who donate kidneys to strangers can start a kidney chain; the longest provided 35 kidneys. Living donation is safe and is already among the most tightly regulated medical procedures in the country. Only about 2 percent of people who express interest in donating are ultimately approved and complete the process. Individuals with addiction risk, medical instability, or signs of coercion are screened out. The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687) does not change any of these safety or screening standards. It simply removes financial barriers for people who already qualify. It is transformative. And it works.  But it is also demanding. Only those in top mental and physical health are approved. Donors often face lost wages, travel costs, and lingering financial harm. For many Americans, those burdens make donation impossible, even when the desire to help is strong. The End Kidney Deaths Act offers a solution equal to the scale of the problem. A 2026 nationally representative NORC poll further underscores the strength of this proposal: 57 percent of Americans support this policy approach, while only 12 percent oppose it. This is unusually strong public backing for a major health care reform proposal and underscores that this is not only good policy, but politically safe policy. The bill would provide financial support to people who donate a kidney to a stranger, recognizing the real costs of participation. By doing so, it would finally increase living donation at scale. The results would be profound. Up to 10,000 American lives could be saved each year. This would amount to billions in federal savings. And an end to the moral contortions created by shortages, including the quiet acceptance of transplant tourism in American hospitals.  Other countries show what is possible. Israel began incentivizing living kidney donation in 2008 and has seen a dramatic increase. The United States, despite its wealth and medical leadership, continues to allow 10,000 Americans to needlessly die annually due to the preventable kidney shortage. Some argue that future technologies like those that would allow the use of pig kidneys will solve the problem. These innovations may help some patients temporarily, much like dialysis does. They will be short-term bridges, not cures. Only human kidneys, donated by human beings, can, given present levels of medical technology, end the shortage. Meanwhile, the shortage worsens. Newsweek recently reported a “mass exodus” of Americans from donor registries, a trend that will only deepen the crisis. How can this best be addressed? The answer is not to police shortages more tightly. It is to end  shortages themselves. And this can only be done with monetary compensation for hard work, a la Adam Smith, precisely the effect of our proposed bill. President Trump could act now through an Executive Order authorizing compensation for living kidney donors who donate to strangers. Congress could make passing the End Kidney Deaths Act, that has bipartisan support and dozens of cosponsors, a top priority for 2026. Either path would save lives, reduce wasteful spending, and restore fairness to a system that has drifted far from its moral foundation. A country as wealthy as ours should not tolerate a system where Americans die waiting for life-saving care that provides decades of health instead of suffering and death. The kidney shortage is solvable. What we lack is not innovation. It is urgency.  READ MORE: The Lee Proposal: Restoring Stewardship in America The War on Labor Expense is Renormalizing Slavery, Just in a 21st Century Form How Medicaid Made a Billion-Dollar Crime Inevitable Elaine Perlman is a living kidney donor who initiated a multi-state kidney chain that saved four lives. Her son Abraham also donated a kidney to a stranger. She works with the Coalition to Modify the National Organ Transplant Act and Waitlist Zero, organizations founded and led by kidney donors to address the national kidney shortage and reduce preventable deaths among patients on the transplant waitlist. Walter E. Block is Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics Loyola University New Orleans and a supporter of free enterprise.

As the Indiana Hoosiers are still trying to figure out where to display their most unlikely but well-deserved national championship trophy, the eleven honchoes who comprise the College Football Playoff committee announced what the majority of college football insiders knew: a 12‑team bracket, unchanged, unexpanded will greet the 2026 season. Friday marked the official deadline for the CFP management committee — the 10 FBS commissioners plus Notre Dame Athletic Director Pete Bevacqua — to inform ESPN of any format shake‑ups for next season. So no, the playoff won’t expand in 2026. But the politics, the money, and the maneuvering behind the scenes are only getting louder. Despite the rumors and incessant talk, no such shake‑up materialized. CFP executive director Rich Clark, a retired Air Force Lt. General, delivered the expected confirmation in a statement so neutral it could referee its own press conference, explained that months of “ongoing discussion” had produced precisely zero consensus. The decision to stand pat, he said, will give the committee “additional time” to evaluate the 12‑team model. In other words, let’s all watch another season play out and pretend we might do something bold later. Clark emphasized that everyone agrees the current format has brought more excitement and broader access.  However, there is not enough agreement to actually change anything — at the present. That harmony evaporated the moment the conversation turned to the future. The commissioners met Sunday in Miami, where the two power brokers who must jointly approve any format change — Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey — once again found themselves on opposite sides of the expansion canyon. Neither blinked. The SEC continues to champion a 16‑team playoff with five automatic qualifiers and 11 at‑large bids, a setup that would give the selection committee even more influence. The Big Ten, never one to be out‑ambitioned, has floated a field as large as 24 teams with multiple automatic bids for the sport’s top leagues. With visions that far apart, the 2026 bracket never stood a chance of growing. Still, the expansion debate is not going anywhere. Under the CFP’s media contract, commissioners face a Dec. 1 deadline each year to notify ESPN of any changes for the following season. That leaves roughly 10 months for more posturing, more proposals, and more meetings that end exactly where they began. This year’s deadline was already pushed back nearly two months in a desperate attempt to find common ground in an effort that predictably fizzled out. Even without expansion, the CFP is undergoing significant changes. Automatic bids will now go to the champions of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC, regardless of ranking, plus the highest‑ranked Group of 6 champion. Notre Dame, if ranked inside the top 12, will also receive an automatic bid, potentially bumping a higher‑ranked at‑large team. It’s a reshuffling that reflects the sport’s new power map more than any philosophical shift. The money is being rearranged, too. The CFP is ditching its performance‑based bonus model that handed Miami and Notre Dame $20 million apiece in recent seasons in favor of fixed revenue shares. The Big Ten and SEC will each receive about 29 percent of total CFP revenue, the ACC 17 percent, the Big 12 15 percent, and the Group of 6 conferences a collective 10 percent. So no, the playoff won’t expand in 2026. But the politics, the money, and the maneuvering behind the scenes are only getting louder. Expansion is far from dead. It is just taking the scenic route while enjoying the off season. READ MORE from Greg Maresca: America’s Cultural Chasm: Family v. Individualism Student-Athlete or Free Agent? Eligibility, International Intrigue and NCAA Drama