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Daily Caller

Trump Calls Biden’s Drilling Ban ‘Worst Abuse Of Power I’ve Ever Seen’

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Kish characterized Biden’s move as “a petulant act of a Hard Left Establishment out to punish 340 million Americans who rejected their calls to bow to their Climate Religion and its vows of poverty.”

The Biden White House said early Monday that outgoing President Joe Biden has ordered huge swaths  of U.S. federal waters off-limits to future leasing and drilling for oil and natural gas. The ban includes  the entire offshore Atlantic, offshore Pacific, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Northern Bering Sea.

All told, the regions impacted by the ban encompass 625 million acres, an area bigger than the states of Texas and Alaska combined. It is also significantly larger in scope than the Louisiana Purchase, which spanned 530 million acres.

“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks.”

Ironically, the Biden ban includes the Atlantic areas where his administration has spent billions of dollars subsidizing the construction of massive industrial wind power facilities. Those developments are currently the source of rising concerns related to impacts on sea mammals, seabirds and the once-thriving commercial fishing industry. All are concerns the administration has refused to adequately address in any real way.

Dan Kish, senior fellow at the D.C.-based Institute for Energy Research think tank, pointed to the “irony of his proposed windfarms in the same waters he is closing to American oil and gas is they are not going to be built. The electricity they produce is so expensive it is deindustrializing Europe and beginning to topple governments. The only question is whether the governments or the windmills will topple first.”

Kish characterized Biden’s move as “a petulant act of a Hard Left Establishment out to punish 340 million Americans who rejected their calls to bow to their Climate Religion and its vows of poverty.” Kish added that Biden and his White House “couldn’t care less about the national security implications, as witnessed by their feckless record that has lit fires around the world while they try to extinguish our gas stoves at home.”

In an interview with Salem Radio national talk show host Hugh Hewitt Monday, incoming President Donald Trump said he would reverse Biden’s order on his first day in office.

“I see that it has just come across that Biden has banned oil and gas drilling across 625 million acres of U.S. coastal territory,” Trump began, adding: “It’s ridiculous. I’ll un-ban it immediately. I have the right to un-ban it immediately.”

Trump acknowledge that the same climate-alarm groups behind the Biden ban will challenge any attempt to rescind it in court, saying, “They’ll do everything they can to make it as difficult as possible. They talk about a transition — they always say they want to have a smooth transition from party to party. Well, they’re making it really difficult. They’re throwing everything they can in the way.”

Trump concluded by telling Hewitt that Biden’s order amounts to “the worst abuse of power I’ve ever seen.”

The White House invoked the drilling ban under Section 12 of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA). It is a section of that law that previous presidents — including Barack Obama and Trump himself — have used to authorize similar drilling bans.

A reading of that provision makes it clear that Congress intended it to be used solely for reasons of national security and during national emergencies. Unfortunately, for the prospects of a Trump reversal, the law does not include any provision for revoking such bans.

Previous presidential bans have never been challenged all the way up through the Supreme Court, though a challenge by the Trump Justice Department to Obama’s ban in 2017 resulted in the set-aside being upheld by an Obama-appointed district judge in 2019. Trump’s Department of Justice chose not to challenge the decision.

This is clearly a political power move by the Biden White House, another payoff to the Democratic Party’s big climate-alarm funders. Whether Trump and his appointees can come up with an effective strategy to challenge it remains to be seen, but if Trump’s comments to Hewitt are any indication, the incoming president is fully prepared to take on the fight.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan Ramp Up Pressure On Google Parent Company To Deal With ‘Censorship’

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Andi Shae Napier

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan are turning their attention to Google over concerns that the tech giant is censoring users and infringing on Americans’ free speech rights.

Google’s parent company Alphabet, which also owns YouTube, appears to be the GOP’s next Big Tech target. Lawmakers seem to be turning their attention to Alphabet after Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta ended its controversial fact-checking program in favor of a Community Notes system similar to the one used by Elon Musk’s X.

Cruz recently informed reporters of his and fellow senators’ plans to protect free speech. 

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“Stopping online censorship is a major priority for the Commerce Committee,” Cruz said, as reported by Politico. “And we are going to utilize every point of leverage we have to protect free speech online.”

Following his meeting with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai last month, Cruz told the outlet, “Big Tech censorship was the single most important topic.”

Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent subpoenas to Alphabet and other tech giants such as RumbleTikTok and Apple in February regarding “compliance with foreign censorship laws, regulations, judicial orders, or other government-initiated efforts” with the intent to discover how foreign governments, or the Biden administration, have limited Americans’ access to free speech.

“Throughout the previous Congress, the Committee expressed concern over YouTube’s censorship of conservatives and political speech,” Jordan wrote in a letter to Pichai in March. “To develop effective legislation, such as the possible enactment of new statutory limits on the executive branch’s ability to work with Big Tech to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users, the Committee must first understand how and to what extent the executive branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”

Jordan subpoenaed tech CEOs in 2023 as well, including Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Tim Cook of Apple and Pichai, among others.

Despite the recent action against the tech giant, the battle stretches back to President Donald Trump’s first administration. Cruz began his investigation of Google in 2019 when he questioned Karan Bhatia, the company’s Vice President for Government Affairs & Public Policy at the time, in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Cruz brought forth a presentation suggesting tech companies, including Google, were straying from free speech and leaning towards censorship.

Even during Congress’ recess, pressure on Google continues to mount as a federal court ruled Thursday that Google’s ad-tech unit violates U.S. antitrust laws and creates an illegal monopoly. This marks the second antitrust ruling against the tech giant as a different court ruled in 2024 that Google abused its dominance of the online search market.

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Daily Caller EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s Broad Ban On Risky Gain-Of-Function Research Nears Completion

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Emily Kopp

President Donald Trump could sign a sweeping executive order banning gain-of-function research — research that makes viruses more dangerous in the lab — as soon as May 6, according to a source who has worked with the National Security Council on the issue.

The executive order will take a broad strokes approach, banning research amplifying the infectivity or pathogenicity of any virulent and replicable pathogen, according to the source, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the anticipated executive action. But significant unresolved issues remain, according to the source, including whether violators will be subject to criminal penalties as bioweaponeers.

The executive order is being steered by Gerald Parker, head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which has been incorporated into the NSC. Parker did not respond to requests for comment.

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In the process of drafting the executive order, Parker has frozen out the federal agencies that have for years championed gain-of-function research and staved off regulation — chiefly Anthony Fauci’s former institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

The latest policy guidance on gain-of-function research, unveiled under the Biden administration in 2024, was previously expected to go into effect May 6. According to a March 25 letter cosigned by the American Society for Microbiology, the Association for Biosafety and Biosecurity International, and Council on Governmental Relations, organizations that conduct pathogen research have not received direction from the NIH on that guidance — suggesting the executive order would supersede the May 6 deadline.

The 2024 guidance altered the scope of experiments subject to more rigorous review, but charged researchers, universities and funding agencies like NIH with its implementation, which critics say disincentivizes reporting. Many scientists say that researchers and NIH should not be the primary entities conducting cost–benefit analyses of pandemic virus studies. 

Parker previously served as the head of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), a group of outside experts that advises NIH on biosecurity matters, and in that role recommended that Congress stand up a new government agency to advise on gain-of-function research. Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield has also endorsed moving gain-of-function research decision making out of the NIH to an independent commission.

“Given the well documented lapses in the NIH review process, policymakers should … remove final approval of any gain-of function research grants from NIH,” Redfield said in a February op-ed.

It remains to be seen whether the executive order will articulate carveouts for gain-of-function research without risks of harm such as research on non-replicative pseudoviruses, which can be used to study viral evolution without generating pandemic viruses.

It also remains to be seen whether the executive order will define “gain-of-function research” tightly enough to stand up to legal scrutiny should a violator be charged with a crime.

Risky research on coronaviruses funded by the NIH at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through the U.S. nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance typifies the loopholes in NIH’s existing regulatory framework, some biosecurity experts say.

Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 2023 indicated that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak submitted a proposal to the Pentagon in 2018 called “DEFUSE” describing gain-of-function experiments on viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 but downplayed to his intended funder the fact that many of the tests would occur in Wuhan, China.

Daszak and EcoHealth were both debarred from federal funding in January 2025 but have faced no criminal charges.

“I don’t know that criminal penalties are necessary. But we do need more sticks in biosafety as well as carrots,” said a biosecurity expert who requested anonymity to avoid retribution from his employer for weighing in on the expected policy. “For instance, biosafety should be a part of tenure review and whether you get funding for future work.”

Some experts say that it is likely that the COVID-19 crisis was a lab-generated pandemic, and that without major policy changes it might not be the last one.

“Gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens caused the COVID-19 pandemic, killing 20 million and costing $25 trillion,” said Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and longtime critic of high-risk virology, to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “If not stopped, gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens likely will cause future lab-generated pandemics.”

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