Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for
your support. Literally moments ago, the Executive Office of the President,
Office of Management and Budget sent out another memorandum M
DASH twenty five DASH fourteen. Subject line Recision of m
DASH twenty five DASH thirteen states thusly one sentence omb
Memorandum M twenty five thirteen is rescinded. Oh and then
there's a second sentence. If you have questions about implementing
the presidence executive orders, please contact your agency general counsel. Okay,
I suspect there's gonna be ano another memo coming on
this because the first one just covered too much for them,
I think, to just abandon what the intent was. So
let's just pretend the recision hasn't occurred yet. Okay, because
I did all the show prep people. I did all
of this work, I read all of this stuff. I'm
not gonna let it go to waste. I should have
done it in the first hour. I should have just
stuck to my plan, done it in the first hour,
and then the recision could have come and it wouldn't
have mattered. But then we wouldn't have heard Bernie Sanders
demanding RFK Junior disavowal Onesie. So yah, life is trade offs,
you know. Alrighty, so let us start with Yeah, we'll
start with the CNN story. I have some well actually,
you know it. No, I'm gonna do what I set
out to do. I'm going to start with the freak
out because before we find out what exactly is and
is not in this memorandum that got everybody's dander up,
prompting lawsuits from Baby Jesus and his fellow attorneys general
Democrat attorneys general from around the around the country. Baby
Jesus is Jeff Jackson. He got that name from his
fellow Democrats while he was a state legislator, but they
didn't really call him that anymore because now he's actually
done stuff. That's why they called him it was that
he was like he was held up as this you know,
godlike figure even though he didn't do anything yet. He
was like, yes, he like he's godlike and all, but
he's just the baby, so he hasn't done anything yet. Anyway,
here is here was some of the freak out. This
came from our governor Josh Stein, our Attorney Uner Jeff Jackson,
both Democrats, and the North Carolina Department of Health and
Human Services. So the memo comes out and it says, hey,
we're going to suspend the funding for a whole bunch
of federal grants so we can, you know, figure out
what's going on with all of them. And we want you, guys,
all of these agencies that are distributing these grants to
review to make sure that they are in line with
the president's executive orders. And then they list the executive
orders and I'm going to go deeper on that, but
just that's sort of the setting of the table here.
So Democrats see this and of course like now, this
is an existential threat to their permanent managerial class because
the people who go to work for the government to
hand out these these grants, generally speaking, are Democrats and
the NGOs non governmental organizations that literally survive off of
the federal money. They are run generally by Democrats, and
this is an existential threat because if the government is
now going to suspend these grants and you have built
your entire business model or nonprofit model on funding from
gov CO, you need the funding from GOVC to continue,
and so any threat to that is a threat to you. So,
responding to their donors and voters, Democrats pounced, dare I say,
seized on the issue, sprung into action, and began the
fear mongering. Everyone is going to die, Okay, I mean
it is like everything. It's yep. You're going to have
you know, Grandma thrown off the cliff. You're going to
have kids not getting getting educated. You're going to have
kids starving to death, old people starving to death, people
dying in the streets, homeless people not getting homes, like
all sorts of the everything in the parade of horribles. Okay,
Josh Stein quote, Like many of you, I am concerned
that freezing federal funding will hurt North Carolinians, especially those
recovering in western North Carolina. My office is currently reviewing
and seeking clarity about what Omb's order to freeze federal
grants means for our state. We are also working with
federal partners to ensure people in western North Carolina get
the support that they need. By the way, former Speaker
of the House now Congressman Tim Moore, he put out
a statement and it says, the White House has assured
me that disaster relief and direct assistance to families through
FEMA will continue uninterrupted. So just be aware that is
not impacted. There are a lot of things actually that
are not impacted that had Democrats, I guess read the
memo they would see are not impacted. But causing the
confusion is the play This is part of the playbook.
This is the exact same playbook as the quote don't
say gay Bill and all of it. Where there was
just another example of it the other day where with
the DEI prohibition that Trump put in place for federal
agencies and Pete haig Seth endorsed in the Department of Defense,
and they were like, well, now we can't teach about
the Tuskegee Airmen or Tuskegee Airmen, And hag Seth was like,
don't be ridiculous, that's stupid. Yes, of course we can
still teach about that. It's a piece of history. And
that's the same playbook, which is take a law that
has popular support, twist it and make the most absurd
enforcement action that you can find, and then say that's
because of this law, when in fact, it was your
decision to do that. So in the Don't Say Gay book,
ban stuff out of Florida, which did not ban any books.
If you wanted to read you know, Charlie has seventeen Dads,
you could read that book. You could buy the book right,
you can go to a bookstore and see it. In fact,
if you go to bookstores, that's generally what they offer,
like front End Center all the time, like this, there's
a heavy promotion of this kind of content. You can
find it, you can order it online, they'll deliver to
your house. All that. What the law was saying is
that you don't get to talk to kids about sex
when they are under a certain age. In other words,
age appropriate restrictions, which in our society we have had
my entire life. We still have it. In movies, if
you are under a certain age, you don't get to
go to any movie you want to see. You have
to have a parent with you. You have to be
over the age of what's seventeen or something like. We
have long recognized that certain content is not appropriate for
people under certain ages, right, Like TikTok videos not appropriate
for anybody over the age of like, you know, fifty. Like,
that's the same thing. So that's what the state of
Florida look to do with it with the public school system.
Mind you, the system that the government runs. The government
runs that airgo gov Code gets to set those rules.
Much like the funding of these grants for your nonprofits.
I have said this for decades, okay, well, like to
when you get hooked whether it's at a personal level
with government pro like a federal assistance programs and that
sort of thing, or state assistance, when you get hooked
on those, or if you are a business or nonprofit
or something and you get hooked onto government grants, right,
it makes you lazy. It makes you less likely to
go out and do things and respond to market signals
and stuff because you have this pad. I learned this
when I actually worked for an NPR affiliate here in town.
I was in the membership department, so I knew what
was going on with the donations going up, you know,
everybody said, Oh my gosh, Ronald Reagan, he cut the
funding for NPR and all this stuff, and it's going
to go away. Public broadcasting is going to die without this. No,
it's not people supported it. They donated money to it.
That's what happens. If people want the content. Content is king.
If it's good content, which we that is debatable, but
there's a market for it, people will buy it. People
will support it, and if it does, if people don't,
that is not an indication that government needs to step
in seize money from somebody and give it to you,
even though you're making content nobody wants. That's the point, right,
that's the point. All right. So the memo comes out.
Josh Stein, Oh my gosh, this is terrible. Jeff Jackson,
he says, oh my gosh, this is terrible. The sudden
freeze in federal funding is so sweeping that it could
cause widespread and immediate harm across our state. Delaying disaster recovery, no,
undercutting law enforcement, No, affecting children and veterans. No, it
violates constitutional power over federal spending. And I'm taking legal
action to stop it. Oh fantastic. So we're gonna pay
to sue the federal government basically ourselves. That's awesome, thank you,
baby Jesus, we appreciate that. And then the Apartment of
Health and Human Services says for a period of time
today and this is what sent the shockwaves. NC Medicaid
was not able to access the Payment Management Services portal,
but is now able to get into the system. Now
that there is access to the portal, we are confirming
that requested funding will be received. No impact to beneficiaries.
So they went around for the last like twenty four
hours screaming that the Medicaid portal is shut down and
now people won't be able to get reimbursements submitted so
they can get paid for their healthcare services they are providing.
We don't know why that portal went down. We don't
know did somebody, did somebody flip a switch. Did it
get overwhelmed with traffic when everybody was like, oh my gosh,
does this mean I can't submit a payment? And then
everybody logged on at the same time and crash the service.
I don't know. Nobody knows but to the left and
the media. But I repeat myself, this was a clear
signal that Medicaid shut it down because Trump told them to.
Here's an idea. Could it be just like we saw
with the book band quote unquote down in Florida and
the ban on teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen. Could it
be that some leftist bureaucrat said, well, if that's where
he's going to write it, I'm gonna go ahead and
shut it down. See how they like it. Or maybe
like the closing of the parks, like putting up like
big tarps over monuments so you can't look at them
from the street during the shutdown. Right, stuff like that.
People working in the federal government going to great lengths
in order to hurt you unnecessarily so in order to
protect their own gigs. Tell me again why this isn't
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make memories that'll last a lifetime. I find the Federal
funding free memo. I get the sense that it is
in part, not totally, but maybe, but I think it
is at least in part due to some recent news
events James O'Keeffe formerly of Project Veritas now O'Keeffe Media Group,
and he did he did another one of these undercover
stings on some federal worker who talked about how they
were just shoveling money out the door before Biden's exit,
right in the last week or two before they were
turning over power. They were just like getting all the
green funding grants out the door. And then there was
this the other day I saw from Liz McDonald over
at Fox News, the new controversy of Biden's Energy Secretary
Jennifer Granholm at the last minute on Thursday. This was
right before the inauguration, sending more than fifteen billion dollars
in Biden's green energy loans to utilities in her home
state of Michigan. It's a major wake up call to
the significant taxpayer abuses in the Biden White House. Many
of them are her donors to her gubernatorial campaign. Graham
Hoolm approved Grand Sorry, Grand Home approved a massive twenty
two point nine billion dollars in these eleventh hour green loans,
sending nearly seventy percent of them to Michigan. That's according
to The Beacon. Maybe that's the free beacon, but I'm
not sure either feathering her political nest or her future
in the private sector. Democrats hammered President Trump when he
campaigned on draining the swamp in twenty sixteen. Nancy Pelosi
and Democrats pushed back hard to impeach him on one
of eighty five targets that they launched. This also defies
the Energy Department Inspector General who told Grandholm to stop
the conflicts of interest in these for four hundred billion
dollars slush funds. This highlights to a government abuse of power,
sending hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money out
the door that gets recycled as campaign donations. This is
one of the most underreported stories out there whose back
is getting scratched, and for how much. Limball used to
talk about this all the time. It's why I referred
to it as a money laundering operation. Right, you seize
through the power and force of gov CO. You take
the money from people's paycheck right, and sales taxes and
the like, but mainly income taxes. You take that money, right,
then you wash it through the administrative state. The employees
there get a cut, then the money gets pushed out
the door in the form of grants to these nonprofit
groups that then make campaign contributions to Democrats. So the
original source of the money is from all taxpayers who
may not agree with Democrats. But that's that's the operation,
and that's what the Inspector General warned Granholm again doing
all right, I hope you had a happy holiday season.
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in the living room, You're laughing, swapping stories, reminiscing, and
then somebody says, hey, Dad, remember those old VHS tapes?
Did you ever get them transferred? And then the room
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you know, well, I've been meaning to but I just
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create a video dot com. You know me, I am
a giver, and so I read through the memo that
came from the federal government on the funding freeze, so
you don't have to, although now it's been rescinded, but
I think another one is going to be coming. But
what's amazing is the reaction to all of this from
the left. And part of it is, as I mentioned
the other day, the shotgun aw campaign that Trump has
been employing. Right, They've had a lot of time to
think about what they want to do to write it
all up, and it's just a steady barrage of executive orders, announcements,
personnel changes, all of this stuff that the left is
so scattered on where to direct their focus, and so
they're vying with one another to try to get headlines
from a media that is also chasing the red dot
all over the room. You know. So here is what
the memo actually said in fiscal year I'm not going
to read the whole thing because it's two pages, but
I'm going to give you the highlights here. Trust me,
these are the highlights. In fiscal year twenty twenty four,
of the nearly ten trillion dollars that the federal government spent,
more than three trillion was federal financial assistance, such as
grants and loans. Career and political appointees in the executive
branch have a duty to align federal spending and action
with the will of the American people, as expressed through
presidential priorities. Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing administration priorities,
focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America,
eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American
energy and manufacturing, ending wokeness and the weaponization of government,
promoting efficiency in government, and making America healthy again. The
use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and
Green New Deal social engineering policies is a waste of
taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day to day
lives of those we serve. This memo requires federal agencies
to identify and review all federal financial assistants Bookmark one.
I'll come back to that. So all federal financial assistants
programs and supporting activities consistent with the President's policies and requirements.
Footnote two. I think I said bookmarks a footnote, all right,
So when it talks about all federal financial assistants, it
has a footnote number one. And if you read that footnote,
I know I'm crazy. I read the footnote, but I
felt like it was important to see what they're talking about.
It says t CFR two hundred and one defines federal
financial assistance to mean quote, assistance that recipients or sub
recipients receive or administer in various forms. But this term
does not include assistance provided directly to individuals. For the
purposes of this memorandum, federal financial assistance includes number one,
all forms of assistants listed in these other paragraphs of
the definition of the term, and assistance received or administered
by recipients of sub or sub recipients of any type,
except for assistance received directly by individuals. That's how you
know that this is official law because it is ridiculously confusing.
But the key here is that if it's going to
an individual, then it's not part of this Read the
freaking footnotes. And just in case that wasn't clear, footnote
number two, which came at the end of that sentence, says,
nothing in this memo should be construed to impact Medicare
or Social Security benefits. But you left out Medicaid, and
so that was why they freaked out over the Medicaid.
And then of course somebody shut down the portal, either
accidentally or on purpose. And honestly, I like, maybe I'm
now cynical, but I'm guessing probably somebody shut it down.
Somebody did it on purpose to prove a point their sake.
We can't do this, so nobody's gonna get paid off show.
Then boom, I guess they meant we have to shut
down Medicaid. To implement these orders, the memo goes on
to say, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of
all of their federal financial assistance programs to identify programs
and projects and activities that may be implicated by any
of the President's executive orders. So that is a limit
on what it is they're telling you to review. So
why would medicaid fall under the list of things, which,
by the way, they list in all of that, they're
saying Trump issued a series of executive orders, and then
they list all of them. So these are the eos
that you're supposed to refer to. But if none of
those eos apply to what you're doing, like medicaid, that
it doesn't affect you. In the interim, to the extent
permissible under applicable law, federal agencies must temporarily pause all
activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial
assistance and other relevant agency activities. Here again, that may
be implicated by the executive orders. Once again, there is
the limiting principle put in place right there in the language.
It says it right there, that may be implicated by
the executive orders. If you are doing federal funding, if
you are in an agency, you're doing something and it
doesn't have anything to do with these other executive orders,
it doesn't apply to you. But nobody could read past
that because Orange Man bad, including but not limited to
financial assistance for Foreign aid NGOs, DEI, woke gender ideology,
and the Green New deal. They even spell it out
for you idiots. Here are the things we are talking about.
No more funds, no more grants flying out the door.
If it's not lining up with this administration's priorities, we
want you to identify it. We're suspending it, we're pausing it.
We're not saying no, we're saying put a pause. We
want an accounting. Oh my gosh, how dare you Orange
man asking us to show you where the money's going,
even before completing their comprehensive analysis. The memo goes on
to say federal agencies must immediately identify any legally mandated
actions or deadlines for assistance programs arising while the pause
remains in effect. So they're telling these agencies right there
in the memo says it right there. It says, if
you've got funding that has to go out, identify it.
Federal agencies must report this information to the Office of
Management Budget along with an analysis of the requirement. So
if you have to spend the money, like say the
Medicaid portal has to stay open, then you would go
to OMB and be like, hey, we got to keep
this open. This is required, this is mandated. This doesn't
cover us and then omb could say, Okay, yeah, no problem,
Like this is willfully this is being willfully obtuse. It's
pretending that you don't know what the plain language means.
Uh Like, if you cannot understand what this memo is
telling you to do, you do not belong on the
payroll of my agency. The White House then put out
an FAQ because Democrats sabotage and the media aided them
and they're stupid like, so they had to put out
an FAQ specifically explaining what is already in the memo.
Any program that provides direct benefits to individuals is not
subject to the pause. Any payment required by law to
be paid will be paid without interruption or delay. It
says it right in the memo. But in case you
can't read that, I'm going to write this, which you
obviously won't read either, because narratives. That's the point, all right.
If you're listening to this show, you know I try
to keep up with all sorts of current events, and
I know you do too, And you've probably heard me
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only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News
as they make the media landscape more transparent. We're going
over this memo that went out to federal agencies, the
funding freeze, which about an hour ago the White House
rescinded it because Democrats and media, but I repeat myself,
they were so confewsed by all of this, I don't
know what to make of anything. And then, of course
the Medicaid portal shuts down where the providers you know,
go to get reimbursements and stuff. I'd like to know
who did that. No, no, no, let me rephrase that.
I demand to know what happened there. And maybe it
was overloading of the system. Maybe it was just an outage, unrelated, coincidental, whatever.
But I suspect if passed his prologue in any indication.
I suspect somebody pulled the plug on it. Somebody flipped
that switch. Somebody did it, just like the librarians took,
you know, books off the shelf, like classics. You know,
we got to take Huckleberry. Actually know they took that
one off the shelf before the book band we got
to take to Kill a mocking Bird. Oh, you know,
they took that one off the shelf for woke reasons.
So I think they're like, oh, I guess we got
to take Doctor Seuss. Oh wait, no, that one too. Anyway,
so they like they're like, oh, I guess we have
no books on our son. They would take all these pictures,
no books on the shelves. Look at that. Thanks a lot, Republicans.
You want everybody stupid like, no, no, no, The people
runn K twelve education. They've obviously wanted to make everybody stupid.
That's mission accomplished. Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, put
out a tweet he said, I spoke to senior officials
at the White House and confirmed the temporary pause by
omb does not impact individual assistance and will not interrupt
disaster recovery efforts, school and childcare, funding, health care for
seniors or low income families, funding for our roads, meals
and lunches, or any other or any of the other
misinformation that has been spread. The partisan stunt to seminate
knowingly misleading information is dangerous, fearmongering, and completely wrong. President
Trump is doing what an executive should do at the
beginning of a term, which is find out where the
money is and where it's going. Not unlike what we
did at the beginning of our term here in Virginia
when we identified one point four billion dollars in appropriated
but unspent taxpayer money. And that is exactly right. Pat
McCrory talked about this. I remember when he became governor
and he went and he started touring the various state
agencies and he would go in there and he talked
about that there were employees who literally hid under desks
because they did not want to be seen because of
who they were getting a job that was like just
a job in name only. There were people on the
payroll drawing a salary that didn't actually do anything. This
occurs all the time. This is not something specific to
the public sector. This happens in the private sector as well,
but there are far fewer controls in the public sector.
There is a fellow on Twitter. He goes by the
name of Lafayette Lee, and he said the bureaucracy had
already become a distinct political class with attitudes, interests, and
motivations of its own. A powerful political bureaucracy completely out
of step with the rest of the country and immune
to the political process was and is a serious problem.
So just a quick question, what did you think people
meant on the right when they said we want to
reduce the size of government. What do you think that meant.
Do you think that meant like nobody is going to
be let go? Do you think that meant nobody is
going to like, no agencies are going to have budgets slash?
Do you think none of then gets pulled back? Because
that's actually exactly what that means. When the right talks
about reducing the size and scope and reach of the
federal government, particularly, that's what it means. It has always
meant that. So when you come andre like, oh my gosh,
these people are going to get laid off, like, we
are aware, Yes, we are aware, and we don't believe
that all of those jobs are necessary. There is a
view on the right that a lot of the federal workers,
not all of them. There are a lot of good
people doing necessary work. I am not an anarchist, but
there are a lot of people that are in those jobs.
As essentially a UBI a universal basic income right, it's
a jobs program for a lot of employees, and then
they vote to keep the party in power, so it's
sort of like a like a transfer of the money
to them, so it's more like a TBI, which makes sense.
All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
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them too and tell them you heard it here. You
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go to vpetecleanershow dot com again, thank you so much
for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.