The Biden administration issued billions in taxpayer-funded green grants–many to large multinational corporations. Now the Trump administration’s Energy Secretary Christopher Wright ordered a review of 179 recipients to save $15 billion. Meanwhile, some recipients of the Biden-era green grants told The Daily Signal they plan to proceed with the projects.  One of the biggest sources of green grants under the Biden administration was the Energy Department’s Industrial Demonstrations Program. The program was slated to dole out $6.3 billion to 29 taxpayer-funded projects.  Projects listed include spending up to $331.9 million for an ExxonMobil project in Texas; up to $375 million for an Eastman Chemical decarbonization project in Texas; up to $95 million to the Dow Chemical project on the Gulf Coast; and up to $75 million to a BASF project in Texas.  “What we can share is that, as of October 2024, BASF has entered into a cooperative agreement with the DOE for our proposed low-carbon syngas project at our Freeport, Texas site,” Julia Arns, external communications manager for BASF, told The Daily Signal. “With this, we have started Phase 1 of our project: initial planning and analysis. Throughout the entire process BASF will collaborate with the DOE to develop the appropriate deliverables necessary to progress to the following phases.” Notably on the list, a $500 million subsidy for a project in Vice President J.D. Vance’s Ohio hometown. The Cleveland Cliffs company announced in March 2024 that it would get about $575 million in federal funding for two projects, a $500 million grant for a project in Middletown, Ohio, and another $75 million  grant for a Lyndora, Pennsylvania project. Both projects were canceled, CNN first reported. However, a spokesperson from Cleveland Cliff did not respond to inquiries on voicemail and online for this story.  Orsted, a Denmark-based energy company, is on the list to get an Energy Department grant of up to $99 million for a Texas Gulf Coast project that involves capturing carbon dioxide to reduce emissions from sectors such as shipping. “The DOE award is proceeding to schedule as we continue to develop the project,” Jakob Goetzsche Vesterager, senior media relations advisor for Orsted, told The Daily Signal in a statement. “We’re aware that the program is currently under review, but there have been no changes to the award for Project Star at this time.” The energy secretary’s memorandum said the department will require recipients of money to “provide written responses and supporting documentation to its information requests within communicated timeframes, and to cooperate with program personnel on any follow up requests, including verbal requests, in a timely manner, to facilitate this review.”  Most of the grants were funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, two major bills passed during the Biden administration. The Industrial Demonstrations Program itself was established in 2020 to boost manufacturing during the last year of the first Trump administration.  “The Biden administration spent money we didn’t have to pay for things we didn’t need,” James Carter, a former deputy assistant secretary of treasury and former deputy undersecretary of labor in the George W. Bush administration, told The Daily Signal.   Regarding the administration cutting an expensive project in the vice president’s home turf, Carter said the administration has shown leadership in putting the national interest ahead of parochial or short-term political interest.  “There are exceptions, but anything enacted during the Biden administration has a bullseye on it,” Carter told The Daily Signal.  The energy secretary’s memo Thursday, titled “Ensuring Responsibility for Financial Assistance,” comes after the White House budget proposal called for cancelling $15 billion in what it calls “Green New Scam” funds.  “Over the past 110 days, the Energy Department has been hard at work reviewing the billions of dollars that were rushed out the door, particularly in the final days of the Biden administration, and what we have found is concerning,” Wright said in a public statement.  “With this process, the department will ensure we are doing our due diligence, utilizing taxpayer dollars to generate the largest possible benefit to the American people and safeguarding our national security,” Wright continued. “Any reputable business would have a process in place for evaluating spending and investments before money goes out the door, and the American people deserve no less from their federal government.” This year, Cleveland Cliffs–the firm slated to get $500 million for a project in the vice president’s hometown, reportedly laid off 1,200 workers in Minnesota and Michigan, and was reportedly set to layoff another 950 employees in Illinois and Pennsylvania.  Job losses shouldn’t be blamed on canceled government subsidies, said Vance Ginn, a former associate director for economic policy for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration.  “These jobs from government subsidies are temporary jobs,” Ginn, now a senior economic fellow with the Pelican Institute, a Louisiana think tank, told The Daily Signal. “During the Biden years, and the Inflation Reduction Act, we saw this green new scheme grow and grow.” Government subsidies don’t have the strongest track record.  A 2016 Energy Information Administration report said more than 70% of energy-related physical science grants went to solar energy research.  A 2012 report by the Government Accountability Office found 679 renewable energy initiatives across 23 federal agencies.  Meanwhile, 29 states require utilities to generate or obtain specific amounts of electricity from renewable energy sources, according to Just Facts, a conservative-leaning fact checking organizationStill, despite heavy subsidies since 1978, wind supplied about 3.9% of U.S. energy in 2024, while solar provided 2.7%, according to Just Facts, citing the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Office of Energy statistics from March. The post How Trump Energy Department is Clawing Back $15 Billion from Biden ‘Green New Scam’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

For years now, children across our country have been systematically duped by predators into exposing themselves sexually online. The next step is often blackmail. This is what drove 16-year-old Carter Bremseth to take his life one night in 2021, after volunteering as an altar server at his church.  His mother Jaime—a licensed mental health counselor—went searching for answers, when she discovered the horrible truth. Her kind and caring son had become a victim of sextortion.  Jaime had been proactive in protecting her son online, even educating him about the threat of online predators. Nevertheless, within six months of creating a Snapchat account, he was victimized to death.  Stories like Carter’s should be unthinkable. Instead, they are becoming routine. Given the easy access to children that social media and smartphones provide, there appears to be no way to put a stop to it. Unless, that is, tech companies are held accountable, and parents are better empowered to protect their kids online.  Currently, no parental involvement is required whatsoever for a child to download any app or create a social media account. This is not right. Minors are legally treated as digital adults at age 13, when in the real world adulthood is 18. To make matters worse, digital adulthood is never enforced. It’s no wonder then that, according to one study, a full quarter of boys 9 to 12 have used an online dating app. Where legislators and litigants have tried to hold Big Tech companies accountable for such egregious violations of norms, courts have protected them, placing economic concerns and the free speech rights of corporations above child welfare. The dark secret is that the systematic grooming and exploiting of America’s children is made possible because media companies have been protected from legal liability by Congress and the courts since the 1990s (when smartphones and social media didn’t even exist). Through Section 230 immunity—which was meant to protect online platforms from any liability for harms caused by third-party content they host—Big Tech has been shielded from practically any liability whatsoever, even for their own role and product design in facilitating harms to minors online. These sweeping protections have allowed digital technology to be weaponized against America’s kids, turning the online world into a wasteland of revenge porn via deepfakes and algorithms promoting everything from anorexia to suicide to beheading videos. This is an environment ripe for predators, where adult strangers can easily connect with minors en masse. The smartphone-app ecosystem has created what Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, recently called a “child-to-stranger pipeline.”   But a movement of parents, advocates, and legislators has arisen in recent years to stop it. More than two dozen states have now passed laws requiring age verification to access pornographic content, and as many as ten states have enacted legislation age gating social media platforms and requiring parental consent before minors can open an account. A new piece of federal legislation, introduced by Lee and Rep. John James, R-Mich., addresses a critical aspect of the problem. The App Store Accountability Act puts parents in control of what apps their child downloads and uses. The bill requires app stores to provide age ratings and content descriptions that accurately reflect the risks that an app poses for kids and requires app stores to perform age verification and acquire parental permission before a child downloads or purchases any app. The crux of the bill is based on the common and long-standing practices of contract law. In the real world, kids are not allowed to enter into complex contracts without parental consent, nor can they purchase age-restricted products without parental involvement. In the app stores, however, children are free to accept on their own an app’s labyrinthine Terms of Service. This occurs potentially millions of times an hour. There are myriad laws that hold brick-and-mortar establishments accountable when they circumvent these standards. The App Store Accountability Act simply applies these same common-sense laws to the digital world. Libertarian critics worry that the Act is not privacy preserving and would require app stores and apps to widely share sensitive information about child users. But the bill does nothing of the sort. App stores already undergo informal forms of age verification during startup and by collecting credit card information for purchases. Moreover, as Google and Apple have recently revealed, app stores already have the capability to reliably estimate a user’s age as well as to anonymously share a user’s age category with apps. The proposed law simply goes one step further by requiring app stores to leverage their existing capabilities to verify a users’ age—and holds them accountable if they don’t. According to a national poll commissioned by the Digital Childhood Alliance, 88% of parents support requiring app stores to get parental approval before minors can download an app. Parents want the App Store Accountability Act. Congress should give it to them. The post App Stores Are Enabling Online Abuse of Kids—Time to End It appeared first on The Daily Signal.

House Democrat leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries suggested at a Thursday press conference that he would vigorously oppose Republicans’ reform proposals for Medicaid and other welfare benefits, with the hope that their budget reconciliation bill fails and the GOP leadership has to seek Democrats’ votes. Jeffries, D-N.Y.—who spoke at a press briefing at the same time that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., was struggling to find a deal with fiscal hawks and blue state Republicans lobbying for tax deductions—has sought to fan the flames of disagreements within the GOP over the budget in order to call for the bill’s rejection. “House Republicans have voted to take food out of the mouths of children, families, seniors, and veterans as part of their toxic scheme to enact massive tax cuts for their billionaire donors like Elon Musk,” said Jeffries. The GOP budget would fulfill a number of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises such as extending his signature first-term 2017 tax cuts and fully funding border security. In order to afford some of those promises, Republicans are proposing a number of reforms to programs such as Medicaid. Some of those are intended to prevent illegal immigrants and other noncitizens from receiving benefits, such as requiring citizenship verification for Medicaid enrollees, and requiring a Social Security number from anyone who wants to receive a child tax credit. I asked @RepJeffries if he supports two Republican proposals meant to prevent non-citizens from receiving benefits: Medicaid citizenship verification and social security number requirement for parents to get a child tax credit.He dismissed claims that Republicans want to… pic.twitter.com/nF1oXg7QNG— George Caldwell (@GCaldwell_news) May 15, 2025 Asked whether those measures made sense and if he would support them, Jeffries told The Daily Signal he wasn’t planning on backing Republicans’ measures. “We support Medicaid as it currently exists,” said Jeffries. “And the efforts to enact the largest Medicaid cut in American history is unacceptable, and it’s unnecessary.” He continued, “If my Republican colleagues want to have a conversation about how we can make health care delivery in the United States of America more affordable and more effective, and more efficient … Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee are more than willing to have that conversation.” “But we believe that in America, access to high quality health care is not a privilege, it’s a right … . This is not an effort that we can support, and House Democrats are unified in our strong and principled opposition.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images) But Jeffries’ position is actually not an easy one. If Republicans’ budget fails to pass, then the child tax credit increase under Trump’s 2017 tax plan would expire, dropping from $2,000 to $1,000. The Daily Signal asked Jeffries which party he thought would suffer in the midterms if the bill failed and parents lost their child tax credits. “We’re going to resolve this issue at some point, by December 31st of 2025 [when the credit expires],” said Jeffries. He then laid out his hope that the bill would fail, forcing Republicans to seek Democrat votes.  “The one big, ugly bill will hurt the American people … . And if it falls—which it should, in the best interests of the American people—then we’ll actually have an opportunity to have a bipartisan conversation about what makes sense for everyday Americans,” he said. “Republicans own anything that happens, because they’ve chosen to go down this road of reconciliation to cut Democrats out of the legislative process,” he said. The post Jeffries Rejects Republicans’ Welfare Reform Proposals appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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President Donald Trump is no stranger to criticism from the left, but even Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut admits that his foreign policy is praiseworthy. Trump has spent the last few days meeting with foreign dignitaries in the Middle East, including President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Trump even announced he would be lifting sanctions on Syria, inching closer and closer to a peace deal.'Himes admits that he is optimistic about Trump's handling of the Middle East this week.'RELATED: Trump pledges to lift 'brutal and crippling' sanctions on Syria, pushes for Middle East peace talks Photo by Win McNamee/Getty ImagesTrump's dovish approach to foreign policy has been praised by some political allies in the Republican Party, but Himes chimed in with a rare message of support from across the aisle. "I'm not in the habit of praising Donald Trump," Himes said in an interview Thursday. "But I got to tell you ... I think the president has, in this last week or so, played the Middle East pretty darn well." Himes said he went into the week concerned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was "hell-bent" on going to war with Iran. He also expressed skepticism about Trump's negotiations with the new Syrian leadership. But so far, Himes admits that he is optimistic about Trump's handling of the Middle East this week. RELATED: Vance tells Glenn Beck Congress needs to 'get serious' about codifying DOGE cuts Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images"My guess is that the prime minister of Israel is cooling his heels a little bit on planning for Iran," Himes said. "My guess is that he's probably thinking through a better situation than he otherwise might want for Gaza, and look, it appears we're going to give al-Sharaa a chance in Syria. That's pretty good stuff." "Again, not in the habit of praising this president, but I got to give him some kudos there," Himes added. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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