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- Senate DOGE leader moves to force ‘receipt’ for every tax dollar after Minne...
FIRST ON FOX: A top senator involved in slashing red tape will tout a plan requiring line-item proof of every federal tax dollar from entities that receive federal funding.Sen. Joni Ernst said her move would guard against rampant fraud such as the slew of allegedly fake Minneapolis daycares, adding the measure could have helped prevent wasted taxpayer funds.Ernst’s bill coincides with the White House announcing a state-federal anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance, which White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News is a "whole of government effort to fight fraud at the state and federal level" and fulfills another campaign promise.CRUZ TARGETS MINNESOTA-STYLE FRAUD WITH BILL FORCING PROOF BEFORE FEDERAL CHILDCARE PAYOUTSThe COST (Cost Openness and Spending Transparency) Act will ensure every government agency lists every project it uses taxpayer money for, as Ernst prepares to lead a Senate Small Business Committee hearing featuring watchdogs like White Coat Waste and Open The Books."As I always say, if you can’t find waste in Washington, there can only be one reason - you didn’t look," Ernst told Fox News Digital."But after years of fighting to hold Washington accountable, I’ve also learned that you can’t stop what you can’t see. That’s why this Sunshine Week, I’m leading the COST ACT to post the price on every single project the American public is footing the bill for," she said.FEDERAL FRAUD FACES SENATE SHOWDOWN AS THUNE TAPS ERNST TO LEAD REFORMS AFTER MINNESOTA SCANDALUnder the COST Act, allegedly fraudulent businesses like Minneapolis daycares would be required to list all of their federal funding.Such transparency would have exposed Minnesota fraudsters earlier, helping authorities catch scofflaws and alleged tax-dollar thieves.The COST Act’s official purpose is "to put a public price tag on all projects supported with taxpayer dollars," according to a copy obtained by Fox News Digital.Any agency, individual or entity — including those within state and local governments and federal research grant recipients — must clearly report through a press release or other approved documentation any program or project carried out using federal funds, whether fully or in part.The recipient of taxpayer funds must report the percentage of total costs covered by federal funds, the dollar amount, and the portion financed privately.It then instructs the Office of Management and Budget — currently led by Director Russell Vought — to review a random sample of such recipients to enforce compliance and publicly… [TheTopNews] Read More.9 mins ago - Top conservative group takes parents’ rights fight to Capitol Hill, expect...FIRST ON FOX: A top conservative organization advocating parents' rights is descending on Capitol Hill Wednesday to meet with both Republicans and Democrats on the subject of transgender issues and other agenda items.Moms For Liberty is taking its "parents pledge" to Congress, with group members expected to sit down with Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and others in a bid to grow support for its movement to define what rights parents have over their children while in school and other places outside their immediate control."Moms for Liberty brought 100 members from across 20 states to Capitol Hill," the group's co-founder and CEO Tina Descovich told Fox News Digital.CHLOE COLE ACT AIMED AT BLOCKING MINORS FROM UNDERGOING LIFE-ALTERING TRANSGENDER SURGERIES, GOP LAWMAKER SAYSShe said members of Congress would join President Donald Trump in signing their pledge, which Descovich called "a commonsense promise to the American people that you support their rights."The pledge states, "I pledge to honor the fundamental rights of parents, including, but not limited to the right to direct the education, medical care, and moral upbringing of their children. I pledge to advance policies that strengthen parental involvement and decision-making, increase transparency, defend against government overreach, and secure parental rights at all levels of government."Among the group's legislative priorities, Fox News Digital was told, are to eliminate school-based health clinics, oppose any policy that circumvents parental authority in schools, and require schools to give parents full access to curriculum, lesson plans, evaluations, and learning standards.On the issue of transgender policies, Moms for Liberty is pushing to maintain sex-specific spaces like school sports and restrooms, as well as the biological definition of sex and promoting pronoun usage consistent with students and staff members' sex.Moms for Liberty was established in 2021 to fight COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on students.Since then, it's ballooned into a nationwide group with multiple chapters across the country.And their meeting with Johnson on Wednesday is notable in that it's a sign of their influence and Republicans' focus on culture war issues like parental rights, even as they fight an uphill battle to keep control during the November midterms. [TheTopNews] Read More.46 mins ago
- Kash Patel set to tout crucial FBI reforms that many Americans may not know abou...FIRST ON FOX: FBI Director Kash Patel is expected to tout a list of his agency's top reforms and accomplishments under President Donald Trump's second term during a Senate hearing Wednesday on worldwide threats impacting the United States.Patel is set to address several reforms during the hearing, which is being held by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, including expanded biometric collection overseas, sending more agents into the field from D.C., doubling the size and funding for drone utilization, a new first-of-its-kind training center meant to assist local law enforcement with counter-drone training, new artifical intelligence initiatives to support intelligence collection, among several other reforms, Fox News Digital has learned ahead of his planned remarks.Alongside Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is also slated to testify at the hearing Wednesday, as well as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe, Director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency James Adams, and acting commander of U.S. Cyber Command, William Hartman. FBI SPOX UNLEASHES ON MEDIA'S ‘TRANSPARENT SPIN JOB’ THAT RECENT FIRINGS WERE 'DEVASTATING' TO IRAN WORK"Under President Trump’s leadership, this FBI has been rebuilt into a faster, more accountable force focused on protecting Americans and crushing violent crime. We’ve surged agents out of Washington and into the field, expanded biometric screening overseas to stop threats before they reach our homeland, overhauled our intelligence and operations systems, and strengthened partnerships and technology to move at the speed of today’s threats," Patel exclusively told Fox News Digital. "This is a results-driven FBI delivering real security for the American people."Patel is also expected to tout a laundry list of accomplishments that the FBI has racked up over the last year, including disrupting 1,800 gangs and criminal enterprises, seizing over 2,250 kilos of fentanyl, and several statistics highlighting major arrests, including a 112% increase in violent crime arrests, almost 350 cyber indictments, 6,000 child victims located, 1,700 child predators arrested, among many other accomplishments.Democrats have charged Patel with politicizing the FBI, but Patel and Republicans have argued that the current efforts are aimed at doing just the opposite. "You’ve begun the important work of returning the FBI to its law enforcement mission," Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told Patel during a September Senate hearing. "It’s well-understood that your predecessor left you an FBI infected with politics." "As I've committed to you during my confirmation hearing and my conversations with you, this FBI will not be weaponized anymore… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 hour ago
- Global Heating Accelerated Rapidly Over the Past Decade, a New Study Claims
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For years, scientists have been keeping a wary eye on the massive system of currents that carry water and nutrients across the ocean from Greenland to Antarctica. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation plays a large part in stabilizing the global climate, but it appears to have been weakening in recent years as the Earth warms. Should it collapse, drought would spread across the Southern Hemisphere and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States would see catastrophic sea level rise. It could also trigger a series of other tipping points, from which the Earth would likely not recover. “We are basically moving faster into high risk territory now.” To avoid this scenario, 195 countries signed onto the Paris Agreement in 2015—a landmark treaty that aimed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times. Beyond that threshold, scientists say, the Earth’s climate could begin to deteriorate in unpredictable and irreversible ways. The past few years have been the warmest on record, and the importance of staying within this limit has been driven home as deadly heatwaves and rampant wildfires have become routine. A recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters claims that warming has accelerated rapidly over the past decade, with temperatures rising almost twice as fast as they did between 1970 and 2015. The study echoes the findings of a report published last year, authored by the scientist James Hansen, who famously testified about the dangers of global warming in front of the US Congress in 1988. Should warming continue on this trajectory, the latest study says, the planet could cross the 1.5 degree threshold before 2030. The authors arrived at this conclusion after isolating the “noise” from the climate system—controlling for the El Niño weather pattern, which warms the earth, as well as for volcanic eruptions and solar flares. What they found was that while the Earth warmed by 0.2 degrees each decade between 1970 and 2015, it has warmed by 0.35 degrees in the decade since—a 75 percent spike. This puts us on a collision course with the climate’s tipping points, said Stefan Rahmstorf, an author of the study and head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said, “has concluded that the risk of crossing such tipping points increases from moderate to high between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees of warming.… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 hour ago - This Is Your Kid’s Brain on AI SlopThis story was co-published with The 74, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on education in America. Sign up for their early learning Substack. In a video that has been played almost 50,000 times since it was posted five months ago, two cartoon children sing along as they guide viewers through the experience of riding in a car amid a vividly colored, utopian backdrop. At first, the video seems harmless. The song is upbeat and informative. The animation aligns with the promised subject. Except, hold on a second, did those lyrics just say, “Red means stop, and green means right”? And why are the characters changing in every frame—different hairstyles and colors, slightly different outfits for the girl and boy? Worst of all, for a video that purports to be “educational,” the visuals are sending precisely the wrong message about riding in a car. The video opens with the children riding, without seatbelts, in the front row of a moving vehicle. The next scene shows the girl defying physics, floating alongside a moving car, while the boy is seated in what appears to be the hood of the vehicle as it travels backward down a busy street. The third and fourth scenes show the children walking in the middle of the road with moving cars behind them. In a video called “Vroom Vroom! Car Ride Song,” the cartoon children sing, “Red means stop, and green means right.” YouTube It’s not hard to imagine how the video could have gotten so many views. Maybe a parent needs to complete a task—fold some laundry, get dinner ready, hop in the shower—and is searching for an age-appropriate video on YouTube to entertain their toddler during that short time. Perhaps that toddler, increasingly independent and prone to running off, needs a better grasp of road safety. “Vroom Vroom! Car Ride Song | Educational Nursery Rhyme for Kids” presents itself as a win-win solution. But children’s media experts say this is AI-generated “slop,” and that it has infiltrated the internet, preying on young children and their unsuspecting caregivers. “We’re at the beginning of a monster problem, and we have to get hold of it quickly,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University and senior fellow at Brookings Institution who studies child development. “We’re at the beginning of a monster problem, and we have to get hold of it quickly.” She and… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 hour ago
- Republicans signal no retreat on SAVE Act as marathon Senate debate kicks offSenate Republicans dug in for the long haul as they embarked on their floor takeover and signaled that the hours of debate that crept well beyond the upper chamber's usual twilight business hours were just the beginning.The GOP launched its plan to control the Senate floor earlier Tuesday and spent the ensuing hours lauding and defending the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act as Senate Democrats hammered the bill as a tool of voter suppression.But without Democratic support, the bill is destined to fail. And the vote to open the marathon debate session, which lawmakers predict could last days if not weeks, was an indicator that the support did not exist in the upper chamber to pass the SAVE America Act.GOP TRIGGERS MARATHON SENATE FIGHT TO EXPOSE DEMS' OPPOSITION TO TRUMP-BACKED VOTER ID BILLStill, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, the bill’s sponsor in the upper chamber and the lawmaker who led lobbying efforts with Senate Republican leadership to get the bill on the floor, argued late Tuesday night that Senate Republicans would be remiss to waste the opportunity ahead of them."This is our moment," Lee said. "Stand for a simple principle; let the American people see who is willing to defend their sacred right to vote and who is not."Several other lawmakers took to the floor throughout the late afternoon and evening, with debate often weaving in and out of the topic at hand and stretching into other matters of the day, like President Donald Trump’s war in Iran or honoring the Ohio service members who died in a midair refueling mission in the Middle East.Democrats charged that the bill went far beyond just voter ID and was designed to suppress a plethora of groups from voting.TRUMP VOTER ID PUSH FACES SENATE TEST AS GOP REBELS THREATEN TO SINK BILLSen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., accused Republicans of using the floor exercise to distract from other pressing issues."Instead of focusing on the affordability crisis or trying to save us from endless wars, Senate Republicans are once again doing Donald Trump’s bidding," Padilla said. "This time, they’re making his conspiracy-fueled election takeover bill their top priority."Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said that repeated probes and investigations found that "you are more likely to get struck by lightning than for a noncitizen to vote." Republicans argue the bill is explicitly designed to end that practice.Merkley countered that the legislation was about "rigging the November election.""And… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 hours ago
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