The arguably least transparent administration in history continues to stonewall lawmakers trying to get answers about “Bidenbucks,” President Joe Biden’s unprecedented use of federal agencies to drive a massive get-out-the-vote campaign targeting Democrats. 

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, ranking member on the Senate’s Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, said it was “beyond disturbing” that Biden’s Small Business Administration (SBA) is using untold amounts of taxpayer money to register voters and participate in politically motivated travel.

“I came to Washington to make bureaucrats squeal, and I won’t sit idly by as Biden officials shirk their responsibilities and hide their misdoings from Congress,” Ernst said in a statement to The Federalist. “As Ranking Member of the Senate Small Business Committee, I will continue fighting tooth and nail to hold the SBA accountable.”

Ernst and Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Small Business, have demanded answers about the SBA’s involvement in a voter registration effort in Michigan, one of several swing states expected to play a significant role in electing the next president. As The Federalist reported in March, the Michigan Department of State signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the SBA “to promote civic engagement and voter registration in Michigan.” The agreement, according to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and SBA Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman, is a “first-of-its-kind collaboration” for the federal agency. 

The partnership is expected to run through Jan. 1, 2036. That is if legal challenges can’t stop the apparently unconstitutional “understanding.” 

Guzman insists that weaponizing

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced this month that it has stopped using diversity statements for faculty hiring. While several public universities in red states have already done the same, MIT was the first elite private college in a blue state to make such a move. However, it may be too little too late to salvage elite universities’ reputation as one of the most illiberal places in America. 

In recent years, American colleges and universities have fully embraced the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) ideology. They have spent enormous resources to build up DEI bureaucracy on campuses, often at the expense of academic excellence, and embedded DEI in many aspects of the college administration, including hiring. One of the most controversial DEI initiatives requires a DEI statement from anyone applying for a faculty position. The DEI statement typically includes three elements: affirming their belief in DEI, demonstrating their past commitment to DEI through examples, and pledging to do more for DEI in the future. If this sounds bad, it is because it reminds many people of the compelled loyalty pledge in totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union or Communist China. 

DEI statements have become litmus tests for employment in higher education. All of the University of California’s campuses even developed their own scoring systems, called “rubrics,” to evaluate candidates’ DEI statements. According to Abigail Thompson, chair of the mathematics department at the University of California, Davis, “To score well [on a diversity statement], candidates must subscribe to a particular political ideology, one based

For a league that seems to run on hype, Wednesday’s annual release of the NFL schedule seems like one of the biggest non-events in sports history.

Since the end of the football regular season in January, fans have known which opponents their teams would play in the season that starts in September, and which of those would occur at home or on the road. The concept that the release of the specific days and times of said games deserves days of selective leaks, along with a prime-time special on the day of the official schedule release, brings to mind the phrase “over the top.”

And yet one element of the schedule release hype hints at a broader theme: The NFL, like other major sports leagues, is taking very deliberate steps to make it harder, and more expensive, for fans to watch their games. At first, the statement seems counterintuitive, until one realizes that, as with most things in sports (and life, unfortunately), the answer is about money.

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The announcement of two NFL games on Christmas Day stands out, but not for the reason one might think. It illustrates the extent of the money grab that the league would schedule games on Dec. 25 even when that day occurs on Wednesday this year — not a day normally scheduled for games. Playing a physically intense game on only a few days’ rest potentially raises the risk of player injury, in a league that purports to care about