(End of the American Dream)—How much power would you have if you had a giant money machine that showered your political allies and political causes that you favor with tens of billions of dollars every year? The corruption that is being uncovered at USAID is truly historic. USAID has a budget that is larger than the CIA and the State Department combined, and much of that money was funding a vast network of liberal activists and liberal causes all over the globe. When Laura Ingraham of Fox News asked U.S. Senator Josh Hawley about this, Hawley explained that Democrats “are just losing their minds” because “liberal supply chains” are being cut off…
“They’re panicking big time, Laura, because their power base is being threatened,” Hawley replied. “That’s what’s really going on here. I mean, look at what they’re doing over USAID. This is because they’ve used that as their personal plaything, and that includes billions and billions of taxpayer dollars that have gone, yes, to fund outrageous stuff overseas, like trans-affirming projects in Zimbabwe or whatever. But also, let’s not forget to fund their preferred media outlets like Politico and who knows what other Left-wing rags have been getting money. Federal government money from this agency, and there’s been no accountability.”
“So yes — what’s happening is Trump is exposing all of this. He is cutting off the liberal supply chains, as it were, and the liberals are just losing their minds. They’re totally losing their minds. We need more of it. You mentioned the IRS. I love it. I love Trump’s idea to get rid of the Internal Revenue Service. Let’s make it the External Revenue Service. Let’s start making these agencies work for the American people.
Leftists have been in charge at USAID for a very long time, and they just kept hiring other leftists underneath them. Ultimately, it became one enormous tangled web of left-wing activists that were overtly advancing the interests of the Democratic Party.
One of the primary ways that USAID was doing this was by funding thousands of “non-governmental organizations”.
According to the State Department, there are approximately 1.5 million “non-governmental organizations” in the U.S. today…
Approximately 1.5 million NGOs operate in the United States. These NGOs undertake a wide array of activities, including political advocacy on issues such as foreign policy, elections, the environment, healthcare, women’s rights, economic development, and many other issues.
“Non-governmental organizations” are not supposed to make a profit. But those that run them, those that sit on their boards, and those that are employed by them often make exceedingly large salaries.
This is one of the ways that Democratic operatives and campaign donors are rewarded. They are often given cushy high-paid jobs with NGOs that are funded lavishly by our tax dollars. In turn, those operatives and donors keep giving big money to Democratic candidates because they want to keep the gravy train rolling.
It is being reported that the majority of all USAID programs were being implemented by NGOs…
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) implement the majority (52%) of USAID programs, while public international organizations administer 34%, the U.S. government is responsible for about 10% and foreign governments implement about 4%, according to a CRS study of USAID non-military funding between fiscal years 2013-2022.
But when you try to track down many of these NGOs, you literally cannot find them.
In fact, Natalie Winters says that if you look up the addresses of some of these NGOs on Google, “you’ll find shacks or empty land”…
The secrecy of the USAID grant database is by design.
Look up the addresses of entities receiving millions of dollars on Google maps and you’ll find shacks or empty land.
It’s pure money laundering.
There are some NGOs that do legitimate work, while there are others that apparently either do next to nothing or nothing at all.
It is one of the greatest scams out there.
But you have to be deeply connected in order to take advantage of it.
We are also learning that USAID was financially supporting “more than six thousand journalists, around seven hundred independent newsrooms, and nearly three hundred media-focused civil society groups in thirty or so countries”…
Already, though, the new administration’s approach to USAID has had sharp consequences all over the world—after taking office, Trump signed an order freezing virtually all American aid spending for ninety days, grinding dependent humanitarian operations to an immediate halt across a dizzying array of different project areas. Journalists have been among those affected: according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the aid freeze appears to have put a hold on $268 million that was earmarked to fund “independent media and the free flow of information” this year. In the recent past, USAID had boasted of supporting more than six thousand journalists, around seven hundred independent newsrooms, and nearly three hundred media-focused civil society groups in thirty or so countries—and yet, RSF notes, the full impact of the freeze is hard to measure, since many recipients are “hesitant to draw attention for fear of risking long-term funding or coming under political attacks.”
This is why so many “news outlets” all over the world sound the same.
It is because they were all being funded by the same source.
The level of corruption that is being revealed is absolutely staggering.
When members of the DOGE team first arrived at USAID, workers started freaking out and tried to hide evidence that might be “incriminating”…
Contractor Kristina Drye, who is employed at USAID described to ABC News a scene reminiscent of the kind of mad scramble historically witnessed when a corrupt government has fallen and officials are desperately trying to get rid of evidence of wrongdoing.
Drye described USAID employees taking down pride flags and removing books that she felt might be “incriminating” as well as how “no one was talking” as DOGE team members began their review of the operations of the agency that sends billions of taxpayer dollars abroad for a variety of reasons ranging from disaster relief to funding regime change.
Thankfully, the giant money laundering operation at USAID has now been shut down.
And Democrats are absolutely furious about this.
Their multi-billion dollar money machine is gone, and they aren’t going to be able to replace it any time soon.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.