RFK Jr.’s Enhanced Security Was Funded With Money From Minority Health Office
What Happened: HHS took about $12 million from the Office of Minority Health to help pay for RFK Jr.’s security as his protection costs jumped from roughly $10 million to $17 million a year. HHS also canceled 16 grants for programs including maternal care, chronic disease screenings, and access to fresh food.
Why It Matters: Money meant to provide health care and services to low-income communities was used to help pay for Kennedy’s increasingly expensive security.
Russell Vought and His Budgeting Cronies Are Using This Sketchy Loophole to Control Government Spending
Why the hell are Republican senators letting it happen?By Charles P. PiercePublished: Oct 02, 2026 5:00 PM EDT
Senator Ron (Shreds of Freedom) Johnson has been eclipsed on the calendar of Republican senatorial foolishness by the likes of Tommy Tuberville and, most recently, Eric Schmitt. But there’s life in the old fella yet. He personally intervened to allow the odious Office of Management and Budget to use a strategy of dubious legality to impound nearly a billion dollars in appropriations that already had been passed by the Congress. Emine Yücel has been bulldogging these shenanigans for Talking Points Memo.
A congressional watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), published a post Wednesday morning reaffirming that “pocket rescissions”—a supposed loophole that the Trump White House thinks it can use to seize Congress’ power of the purse—are illegal.
“A pocket rescission is illegal as we explained in our most recent decision on pocket rescissions,” GAO wrote in its WatchBlog, referring to a 2018 report the agency put out that states, “amounts proposed for rescission must be made available for prudent obligation before the amounts expire, even where the 45-day period for congressional consideration provided in the ICA approaches or spans the date on which funds would expire.”
[OMB head Russell] Vought and his allies believe they have found a loophole in the budgeting process that, they claim, allows them to declare congressionally approved funding rescinded if a rescissions package is sent to Congress close to the end of the fiscal year when funds will expire. Normally, a formal rescissions request starts a 45-day clock in which the executive branch is allowed to withhold the cash in question that it is asking to claw back. But if the request comes in 45 days before the new fiscal year is set to begin on October 1, Vought contends, the White House could withhold the money for that timeframe, regardless of whether Congress takes action on the package, and then claim that the funding is expired when the fiscal year ends.
Vought is trying this Mickey Mouse finagling again. Last week, Senate Democrats tried to force a vote on a bill that would block these so-called pocket rescissions now and in the future. On Wednesday night, however, Johnson rose up and objected to the bill, effectively killing it.
So, around 7 p.m., we got our answer: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) objected to the bill. He did not directly address the way in which Vought’s maneuvering has run roughshod over one of Congress’ most important duties: dictating federal spending. He shrugged that all government spending should be reduced, and then said the law around impoundments was vague. “It’ll probably have to be all sorted out by the Supreme Court,” he said. That much is right, and the Court has already shown an openness to what Vought is trying to do.
President Donald Trump personally ordered OBM director Russell Vought to find taxpayer money for TV ads promoting his presidency, triggering a $20 million government contract funded through Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to a new report.
The New York Timesreported Friday that Trump instructed Vought, who runs the Office of Budget Management, to come up with the money from inside the federal government after expressing enthusiasm for ads about himself and his administration.
The money, according to the Times, was ultimately drawn from funds available to CBP and shifted on September 19 into a Department of Homeland Security budget category for “commemorative events.” One day later, CBP awarded a $20 million “national media campaign” contract to Maryland marketing firm LMD.
The Times, citing 12 people familiar with the process, reported that Trump had been eager to get the promotional spots on television and personally approached Vought about financing them. White House Counsel Will Scharf and OMB counsel Mark Paoletta concluded that DHS money could legally be used, according to the report.
The $170 billion price tag for immigration enforcement eclipses other law enforcement expenditures at the federal, state, and local level. It is more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined.
Even the slice that goes just to ICE this year – nearly $29 billion – exceeds the budgets for all other non-immigration federal law enforcement functions put together, eclipsing funding to agencies whose law enforcement missions involve pursuing terrorists, violent criminals, sex offenders, fentanyl and other drug traffickers, and gun traffickers.
In the October 27, 2025, issue of The New Yorker, Andy Kroll wrote a long profile of Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. I read it then and wondered why we heard so little about a man with so much power over the money Congress appropriates.
Nearly a year later, I had the same question: What has he done lately?
On September 25, the White House sent Congress a request to cancel roughly $810 million that Congress had already appropriated for health, education, housing, and other programs. Most of it—$567 million—comes from funds for services to refugees, asylum seekers, and other noncitizens. The request arrived only days before the September 30 end of the fiscal year.
This is what is called a pocket rescission.
Ordinarily, a president can ask Congress to cancel previously approved funding, and Congress has time to decide. By making the request just before the money expires, the administration seeks to keep the money from being used even if Congress never agrees to cancel it. The White House says the spending should end. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office put it plainly in its explanation of the tactic: “Unlike pocket vetoes, pocket rescissions aren’t allowed.” They are illegal. On September 29, GAO told lawmakers and Vice President Vance that the administration cannot lawfully withhold these funds past the September 30 expiration date. That is GAO’s legal conclusion; a court has not ruled on this particular $810 million request. In a similar foreign-aid dispute last year, the Supreme Court temporarily paused an order requiring funds to be committed before they expired. The Court expressly said its decision was not a final ruling on the merits; that case also involved foreign affairs, unlike the domestic programs targeted now.
Republican Senator Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, objected, saying OMB cannot decide for itself which programs are worth funding. Democratic Senator Patty Murray and Representative Brendan Boyle condemned the move as well. Their objections are about more than any one program: Who gets the final say when Congress has passed a spending law?
Trump $5000 Dividend Check: President Donald Trump stood before a roaring crowd at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on Wednesday night, September 9, 2026, and made a promise that instantly became the biggest political story of the week: a $5,000 dividend check for every adult American citizen. The announcement came during the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention, and Trump tied the payout directly to the outcome of the November midterm elections. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them,” he told the crowd, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” He compared the idea to a company handing out cash distributions to its shareholders, framing ordinary Americans as stakeholders in the nation’s economic performance. We’ll be updating this article monthly as new details, legislation, or official guidance emerge.
Within hours, the Trump dividend pledge had triggered a wave of fact-checking, cost estimates, and political pushback. Independent analysts quickly pegged the price tag of the proposal at somewhere between $1.2 trillion and $1.35 trillion, based on Census Bureau estimates of roughly 240 to 270 million adult U.S. citizens. That figure alone makes this one of the largest single cash-payment proposals ever floated by a sitting U.S. president, dwarfing even the COVID-era stimulus checks sent out under both the Trump and Biden administrations in 2020 and 2021. Yet, as of this writing, there is no legislation, no funding mechanism, no confirmed eligibility criteria, and no payment date. What exists is a campaign-style pledge made from a convention stage, and this article breaks down everything currently known, everything that remains unconfirmed, and what would have to happen before a single check goes out.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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