(End of the American Dream)—The largest and most bloated bureaucracy in the history of the world has been thrown into a state of complete and utter chaos. I have no idea how all of this is going to end, but it sure is entertaining to watch. President Trump is firing people left and right, and Elon Musk is storming around Washington D.C. like a bull in a china shop. I think that the words “shock and awe” don’t even begin to describe what we are witnessing. Nobody has ever dared to go into these ultra-powerful government agencies and start turning the tables over.
When I decided to write this article, I was feeling quite overwhelmed, because there is just so much going on right now. This is going to be a very long article, and I will take it one step at a time. With all that being said, let’s take a look at some of the highlights…
The U.S. Treasury
If you want to understand what is really going on in any organization, you need to follow the flow of money.
So Elon Musk has been wanting access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted him that access on Friday…
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to three people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.
After getting in, Musk discovered that payment approval officers at the U.S. Treasury were simply rubber-stamping all payment requests that were submitted to them…
The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.
They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.
Not even once.
Can you imagine having that job?
You get paid six figures to simply approve every single payment request that comes to you.
That literally sounds like one of the cushiest jobs in America.
Every single year, more than 6 trillion dollars is disbursed through the U.S. Treasury’s payment system…
The sensitive systems, run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually. Tens of millions of people across the country rely on the systems. They are responsible for paying Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
Typically, only a small group of career employees control the payment systems, and former officials have said it is extremely unusual for anyone connected to political appointees to access them.
In a typical year, over one billion payments are made by the U.S. Treasury, and not a single one was ever being denied.
Hopefully Musk and his team will be able to set up a system that will filter out fraud, theft and corruption.
If they are able to do so, I imagine that the savings will be substantial.
OPM
The Office of Personnel Management is the largest HR department on the entire globe.
For a moment, I would like for you to imagine a bureaucratic nightmare in which thousands of “Karens” are running around making insane workforce policies for the entire government.
That is essentially what the Office of Personnel Management is.
Literally one of the very first things that Musk and his team did on January 20th was to take command of the Office of Personnel Management…
“A team including current and former employees of Musk assumed command of OPM on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office. They have moved sofa beds onto the fifth floor of the agency’s headquarters, which contains the director’s office and can only be accessed with a security badge or a security escort, one of the OPM employees said…. The sofa beds have been installed so the team can work around the clock, the employee said.”
This was a brilliant move.
The employee data that the Office of Personnel Management has in their systems will be extremely helpful as Trump and Musk decide who they want to keep and who they want to terminate.
In order to keep current OPM employees from sabotaging those efforts, Musk and his team have decided to lock those employees out of those systems…
Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
We are being told that workers at OPM look like they have seen a ghost, and now it appears that Trump is preparing to dramatically reduce the size of their workforce…
Trump administration officials are taking major steps to cut down the size of the workforce and federal programs at the Office of Personnel Management.
During an internal meeting Friday morning, Trump administration officials directed OPM senior career staff to begin making plans to cut the agency’s workforce and programs by 70%. Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting confirmed the details of the meeting to Federal News Network.
Sources who provided information to Federal News Network on the condition of anonymity said the political leadership at the agency also directed OPM leaders to stop work on anything that is not statutorily required.
USAID
There are very few government agencies that are more corrupt than USAID.
And that is saying a lot.
When officials from Musk’s team went over to USAID headquarters, they were physically prevented from entering.
In response, the representatives from Musk’s team “threatened to call US Marshals to be allowed access”…
Two top security officials at the US Agency for International Development were put on administrative leave Saturday night after attempting to refuse officials from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access systems at the agency, even after DOGE personnel threatened to call law enforcement, multiple sources familiar told CNN.
According to sources, personnel from the Musk-created office physically tried to access the USAID headquarters in Washington, DC, and were stopped. The DOGE personnel demanded to be let in and threatened to call US Marshals to be allowed access, two of the sources said.
The DOGE personnel wanted to gain access to USAID security systems and personnel files, three sources said. Two of those sources also said the DOGE personnel wanted access to classified information, which only those with security clearances and a specific need to know are able to access.
In the end, Musk’s team won. If you go to USAID’s website now, you will find that it has been shut down…
The website of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) went offline Saturday evening amid reports that the Trump administration was preparing to curtail USAID’s independence by placing it under the direct oversight of the State Department.
An error message on USAID’s website read: “This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in www.usaid.gov. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN.”
USAID’s X account was also taken offline.
Many of the worst examples of government waste come from USAID.
They have been getting tens of billions of dollars of government funding per year, and that has allowed them to “play Santa Claus to the world”…
Not only is USAID paying for stupidity like sending condoms to the Taliban, along with all manner of money poured out overseas, but their 2025 budget request is asking for $42.8 billion. That’s a “B” followed by an “illion.” That’s a lot of American taxpayers’ dollars to let USAID play Santa Claus to the world. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, we can’t afford it. We’re broke. Our national debt situation is untenable, we may well be past the point of no return, and we can’t keep paying for things like condoms for terrorists anymore.
In addition, lavishing USAID with so much money has also been very good for the Democratic Party.
On his Twitter account, Robby Starbuck detailed how this works…
USAID essentially functions as one of many money laundering machines for Democrats in DC. Here’s how it works:
• Activists create obscure NGO
• Dems fund it lavishly
• NGO does bare minimum (or actively hurts the United States)
• Activists get paid and donate to DemsNot only that but USAID helped spread their gender ideology nonsense and brought millions of illegals into our country.
That’s why Democrats are freaking out about the possibility that USAID’s being shut down by President Trump. It needs to be done.
There are rumors that President Trump has decided to bring USAID under the authority of the State Department and that it will no longer be independent.
I think that is a great idea.
The EPA
It appears that the EPA could soon be getting a lot smaller.
Last week, over 1,000 EPA employees were notified that “they were deemed to be on probationary status” and could soon be fired…
More than 1,100 employees at the Environmental Protection Agency received notice this week that they were deemed to be on probationary status and warning they could be fired immediately, according to an email obtained by CNN.
Probationary employees receiving the email have been working at the agency for less than a year. The emails began to go out late on Wednesday afternoon, according to an EPA union official.
The same message will be sent to other agency workforces, a White House official said. Across the US government, the latest data shows there are more than 220,000 employees on probation.
The FBI
Everyone knew that big changes were going to happen at the FBI.
And now those changes have begun.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that “at least eight senior FBI executives” were being terminated…
A top Justice Department official on Friday ordered the firing of at least eight senior FBI executives and a sweeping examination of the work of thousands of other bureau employees, including all those who worked on investigations tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.
The directive from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said those field agents and FBI support staff could face “additional personnel action,” suggesting that the number of firings could swell in the coming weeks.
I was stunned to hear that, but the purge at the FBI certainly didn’t stop there.
An NBC News reporter named Ken Dilanian later reported that “more than 20 heads of FBI field offices” were being let go…
Ken Dilanian with NBC News reported that a number of the FBI’s “top executives” were told they would be out of a job by Monday. Friday, Dilanian reported a “purge” was underway that could see the heads of up to 20 of the FBI’s 55 field offices relieved.
Dilanian reported, “The purge is bigger than first understood, we are told, and includes more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including the ones in Miami and Washington, DC.”
But that wasn’t the end of it.
Apparently a total of 88 agents and managers were literally “walked out of their offices” on Friday…
88 is the number of FBI agents and top managers who ACTUALLY were walked out of their offices today, including those at the Washington Field Office, Palm Beach, and Miami FBI offices. That number also includes special agents in charge of various field offices around the country.
Of course what we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
Vast numbers of federal workers that have been working at home since the pandemic began are going to have to start showing up at the office each day.
If they choose not to report, they will gladly be given their walking papers…
President Trump on Wednesday warned that federal workers will have to show up to the office “or be terminated,” framing his administration’s so-called buyout offers to 2 million employees as an effort to shrink the government.
“We’re requiring them to show up to work or be terminated,” Trump said in remarks from the East Room before signing an immigration bill into law.
“We think a very substantial number of people will not show up to work, and therefore our government will get smaller and more efficient,” Trump added. “And that’s what we’ve been looking to do for many, many decades, frankly.”
Ultimately, how far will the federal workforce be slimmed down?
Will it be a 10 percent reduction?
Will it be a 20 percent reduction?
Could it be more?
I guess we will just have to wait and see.
In the entire history of the United States, we have never seen anything quite like this, and there is widespread panic among federal employees right now…
“The most common refrain I’m hearing from people who have left but are still talking to people on the inside is: ‘I knew it was going to be bad but I didn’t think it was going to be this bad,’” longtime Democratic lawyer Mark Bergman told the Guardian.
All the way back in 2017, I proposed cutting the size of the federal government in half.
After all these years, it is good to see someone finally taking some action.
But let there be no doubt about one thing.
This purge is going to be extremely disruptive to our society, and it is going to have very serious economic implications.
Since 2009, approximately 26 trillion dollars has been added to the national debt. By borrowing and spending trillions upon trillions of dollars that we did not have, that allowed us to live a far higher standard of living than we actually deserved.
If we reduce government spending and dramatically slash the size of the federal government, there will be enormous consequences.
I hope that you are ready for that.
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.