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Sen. John Kennedy slams FCC over hurried approval of Soros massive radio station takeover

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From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

U.S. Sen. John Kennedy took to the Senate floor Tuesday to renew questions about the Biden Federal Communications Commission’s approval of a deal for far-left activist financier George Soros to acquire more than 200 stations at once

Republican U.S. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana took to the Senate floor Tuesday to renew questions about the Biden Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) approval of a deal for far-left activist financier George Soros to acquire more than 200 stations at once, declaring something “weird” expedited the review.

In February 2024, Soros purchased $400 million of debt for Audacy, the second largest radio station owner (behind iHeartMedia) in the nation. Soros invested in the company after it filed for bankruptcy the month before with nearly $2 billion in debts. The investment comes with a yield of 50 cents on the dollar after the company emerges from bankruptcy, pending approval by a bankruptcy court of the company’s restructuring plan. Audacy stations carry the top names in conservative punditry, including Sean Hannity, Dana Loesch, Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, and Erick Erickson.

In September, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr testified before the House Oversight Committee that “the FCC is not following its normal process for reviewing transactions that it has established over a number of years. It seems to me the FCC is poised, for the first time, to create an entirely new shortcut.”

The New York Post added at the time that Carr told them “the Democrats in FCC leadership cut a secret, backroom deal – one that kept the Republican FCC Commissioners and perhaps others completely in the dark – and then hustled it out the door on a Friday afternoon” in a 3-2 party-line vote. The FCC approved the deal in October, with congressional Republicans vowing to investigate.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Kennedy began by recalling former President Joe Biden’s Farewell Address warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

Kennedy said he did not know which “oligarchs” Biden had in mind, but that Soros fit the description. He went on to detail how Soros took advantage of Audacy filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and became the majority shareholder, which triggered an FCC review process.

Approval of the deal, he said in his trademark style, “went through the FCC like green grass through a goose,” and Democrat commissioners “short-circuited” the normal review process.

“I’m not an FCC expert. I’m not a communications law expert,” Kennedy said. “But I’ve read, this has been widely reported and I’ve read about it in many reports. Normally on a deal of this size, when 220 radio stations are being transferred, their licenses, using airwaves that belong to the American people, and there’s a substantial percentage of foreign owners, it would take about a year to get through the FCC. FCC would do a complete investigation. Not this time! Noooo. This time was special.”

“Pass me the sick bucket,” Kennedy said after reviewing past commentary by Carr and others about the deal. “This isn’t right! But they did it. Now, this is America. You’re entitled to believe what you want. If it’s legal, you’re entitled to do what you want. And Mr. Soros is certainly entitled to his opinion. He is. I don’t agree with him, but he is certainly entitled to it in America. I’m not much into this cancel culture. And hopefully we’ve seen the end of it.”

“I am not saying it wasn’t done legally,” Kennedy concluded. “I am saying it looks funny. Not funny ha-ha. It looks weird the way this was done. It has the aroma of politics. And I hope the new FCC revisits this issue.”

Soros’ takeover of so many stations is alarming as the latest display of his willingness to use his vast wealth to influence American politics. A small sampling of the causes the billionaire has financed includes promoting legal abortion-on-demand worldwide under the guise of “reproductive health care;” supporting the election of district attorneys friendly to his politics in localities across the United States; pushing a “racial justice” agenda, including the narrative that America is systemically racist and promoting policies such as reparations for slavery; subsidizing “fact-checking” enterprises that attempt to discredit conservative media outlets under false pretenses, and funding Democrat political candidates.

In 2023, local news outlet Maine Public reported that the Soros-backed National Trust had gained control of Maine’s largest network of newspapers, acquiring five daily papers and 17 weekly publications. The National Trust received funding from Soros’ Open Society Foundation and left-wing Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss for the purchase of the media network.

Carr, who has since been appointed FCC chairman by President Donald Trump, is expected to investigate the deal.

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Labor Department cancels “America Last” spending spree spanning five continents

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Quick Hit:

The U.S. Department of Labor has scrapped nearly $600 million in foreign aid grants, including $10 million aimed at promoting “gender equity in the Mexican workplace.”

Key Details:

  • Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling were credited with delivering $237 million in savings through the latest round of canceled programs.

  • Among the defunded initiatives: $12.2 million for “worker empowerment” efforts in South America, $6.25 million to improve labor rights in Central American agriculture, and $5 million to promote women’s workplace participation in West Africa.

  • The Department of Government Efficiency described the cuts as necessary to realign U.S. labor policy with national interests and applauded the elimination of all 69 international grants managed by the Bureau of International Labor Affairs.

 

Diving Deeper:

The U.S. Department of Labor on Wednesday canceled $577 million in foreign aid grants, including a controversial $10 million program aimed at promoting “gender equity in the Mexican workplace,” according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The sweeping decision to terminate all 69 active international labor grants comes as part of a larger restructuring effort led by John Clark, a senior DOL official appointed during the Trump administration.

Clark directed the department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) to shut down its entire grant portfolio, citing a “lack of alignment with agency priorities and national interest.” The memo explaining the cancellations was first reported by The Washington Post and highlights a broader shift in federal labor policy toward domestic-focused initiatives.

Among the eliminated grants were high-dollar projects that had drawn criticism from watchdog groups for years. These included $12.2 million designated for “worker empowerment in South America,” $6.25 million targeting labor conditions in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and $5 million to elevate women’s workplace participation in West Africa. Other defunded programs involved $4.3 million to support foreign migrant workers in Malaysia, $3 million to improve social protections for internal migrants in Bangladesh, and $3 million to promote “safe and inclusive work environments” in Lesotho.

The Department of Government Efficiency, also involved in the review, labeled the grants as “America Last” initiatives, and pointed to the lack of measurable outcomes and limited benefits to American workers. The agency commended the leadership of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling for securing $237 million in savings during this round alone.

The cuts mark the second major cost-saving move under Chavez-DeRemer’s leadership in as many weeks. Just days earlier, she canceled an additional $33 million in funding, including a $1.5 million grant focused on increasing transparency in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector. Chavez-DeRemer, a former Republican congresswoman from Oregon, was confirmed as Labor Secretary on March 11th by a bipartisan Senate vote of 67-32.

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Elon Musk, DOGE officials reveal ‘astonishing’ government waste, fraud in viral interview

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Elon Musk said that ‘the sheer amount of waste and fraud’ in federal agencies, is ‘astonishing’ and that DOGE is cutting ‘$4 billion a day’ in misused taxpayer funds.

In a remarkable Fox News interview, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) founder Elon Musk and top officials of the DOGE team offered stunning, often infuriating, insights into how the federal government functions.

The interview, which has garnered well over 10 million online views on X in less than 24 hours, provided one extreme example after another of government mismanagement, excess, waste, and fraud while simultaneously promising a future where the D.C. Leviathan is tamed and restored to its proper, efficient role.

The new Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), former U.S. House Rep. Dan Bishop, averred that the DOGE A-Team interview was the “most amazing and significant half-hour in TV history.” 

Musk was joined by DOGE team members Steve Davis, Joe Gebbia, Aram Moghaddassi, Brad Smith, Anthony Armstrong, Tom Krause, and Tyler Hassen – all successful businessmen and entrepreneurs in their own rights – to describe the widespread systemic weaknesses and failures at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and more.  

Fox host Bret Baier described the group as “Silicon Valley colliding with government.”

“This is a revolution. And I think it might be the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution,” said Musk during the discussion.  

“But at the end of the day, America’s going to be in much better shape,” he promised.

“America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work, and it’s going to be a fantastic future.” 

Musk said that the most stunning thing he’s discovered during the early phases of DOGE is “the sheer amount of waste and fraud in government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing.”

Musk cited the example of a simple 10-question National Park online survey for which the government was charged nearly $1 billion and which in the end served no purpose.

“I think we will accomplish most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within [130 days],” he predicted. “Our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far, we are succeeding.”

Billionaire Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, is working to digitize the retirement process for government employees, which is currently stuck using 1950s technology, housed in a Pennsylvania cave.

“It’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching the show tonight,” said Gebbia. “We really believe that the government can have an Apple store-like experience, beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.”  

“The retirement process is all by paper, literally, with people carrying paper and manila envelopes into this gigantic mine,” added Musk, limiting the number of federal employees who can retire to no more than 8,000 per month.

Gebbia expects to have the antiquated system updated and overhauled in a matter of months.  

“The two improvements that we’re trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis and also make the experience better,” said DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi.

He offered an amazing statistic: “When you want to change your (direct deposit) bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters” who are attempting to commandeer retired seniors’ benefit payments.

“What we’re doing will help their benefits,” assured Musk. “As a result of the work of DOGE, legitimate recipients of social security will receive more money, not less money.” 

“There are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the Social Security system,” said Steve Davis, who has previously worked alongside Musk at SpaceX, the Boring Company, and X

He explained that despite this being discovered by hardworking personnel at the SSA back in 2008, nothing was done. As a result, 15-20 million social security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were just floating around, susceptible to being used for “bad intentions.”

Health care entrepreneur Brad Smith, who has taken charge of auditing HHS and NIH, also cited stunning, troubling statistics displaying the extreme inefficiencies of the nation’s top federal health organizations.

Smith said that at NIH, “Today they have 27 different centers” created by Congress over the years and there are “700 different IT systems,” each using their own IT software.

“They have 27 different CIOs (Chief Information Officers),” added Smith, “so when you think about making great medical discoveries, you have to connect the data.”  

Those discoveries are likely severely hampered by NIH’s communications disconnect.

Anthony Armstrong, a Morgan Stanley banker now working for DOGE at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) talked about “duplicative functions” and “overstaffing” at government agencies. He said that money is “sloshing out the door.”

As an example, he cited the IRS, which has 1,400 employees whose only job is to provision laptops and cell phones to IRS workers.  

“As an ex-CFO of a big public tech company, really what we’re doing is, we’re applying public company standards to the federal government, and it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today,” said Tom Krause, CEO of Cloud Software Group.  

He explained that there is virtually no accountability or verification protections when it comes to the Treasury Department disbursing funds to various government agencies.

A 94-year-old grandmother is no longer “going to be robbed by forces like she’s getting robbed today, and the solvency of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those social security checks,” added Musk.

“The reason we’re doing this is because if we don’t do it, America is going to go insolvent and go bankrupt, and nobody’s going to get anything,” said Musk.

Tyler Hassen, a former oil executive working at the Interior Department for DOGE ​​alleged that there was no departmental oversight at the Interior Department “whatsoever” under the Biden administration.  

Steve Davis talked about the out-of-control issuance and use of federal credit cards. 

“There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn’t make sense. So, one of the things all of the teams have worked on is we’ve worked for the agencies and said, ‘Do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used? Can you tell us physically where they are?’” recounted Davis.

“Clearly there should not be more credit cards than there are people,” interjected Musk.

Musk later described how the Small Business Administration (SBA) has given out $300 million in loans to people “under the age of 11.” An additional $300 million in loans has been handed out to people “over the age of 120.”

Musk said that these government loans are clearly “fraudulent.”  

“Terrible things are being done,” he exclaimed. “We’re stopping it.” 

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