• Trump signs EO ending benefits to illegal aliens: With the flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border screeching to a halt, Donald Trump is now turning his focus to disincentivizing the millions of illegals who are already here — those who streamed across the border during the Biden years. Yesterday, Trump signed an executive order ending all taxpayer-funded benefits that may be going to illegals. According to the EO, all federal departments and agencies must identify all programs “currently providing financial benefits to illegal aliens and take corrective action,” including those which might support local “sanctuary” policies. It should never have come to this, of course. The American taxpayer would much rather see their hard-earned money going toward better roads, better schools, and a stronger military rather than incentivizing illegal border crossings.

• Trump’s birthright citizenship EO hits another wall: It didn’t take long for the Democrats to file multiple lawsuits against Donald Trump’s executive order ending the constitutionally dubious notion of birthright citizenship, and a decision yesterday by a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals only increased the likelihood that the issue will make its way to the Supreme Court. The panel denied the DOJ’s emergency request to reinstate Trump’s repeal of birthright citizenship after a Seattle-based judge had originally blocked it. The panel said the government hadn’t put forth a “strong showing that they are likely to succeed on the merits of this appeal.” We’ll see about that. As we noted recently, the constitutional law professor who literally wrote the book on the original meaning of the 14th Amendment makes clear that the law isn’t as settled as the open-borders Left would have us believe.

• IRS job cuts are coming: A portion of those 87,000 new IRS staffers that Joe Biden funded will likely have to find other employment, as roughly 6,000 IRS staff are being laid off by the Trump administration as part of its effort to shrink the federal workforce. According to The New York Times, the pink slips will go to relatively recent hires, which is largely in keeping with the sorts of cuts the Trump administration has been making. Apparently, IRS managers have asked their people to report to the office along with their government-issued gear and wait for further instruction. Still, we needn’t shed any tears for the 100,000-employee agency, which is notorious for having targeted conservatives. A cut of 6,000 still leaves the IRS with plenty of teeth.

• Inflation grabs Trump’s attention: In his recent interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Donald Trump acknowledged that “inflation is back.” He attributed it to massive government spending under the Biden administration. With headline inflation ticking up in January, combined with the Avian flu sending egg prices through the roof, Trump recognizes that he must get inflation moving down soon or risk losing support. Meanwhile, the head of DOGE, Elon Musk, recently floated the idea of giving Americans a “dividend” of up to $5,000 per household from the savings DOGE garners from cutting government waste. However, if massive government spending spiked inflation in the first place, would this not produce the same result?

• Trump pauses EV charging station program: The Biden administration’s $7.5 billion program to construct a national grid of electric vehicle charging stations has been put on hold by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in response to Donald Trump’s executive order pausing its funding. The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program was part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which the Biden administration touted as a way to get more Americans to buy EVs by delivering 500,000 charging stations across the U.S. by 2030. Yet three years in and $3.3 billion later, the program has completed just 201 charging stations. The “major flaw,” according to analytics analyst Loren McDonald, is that NEVI “is based on the states stepping up to the plate and executing it, and that was very inconsistent.” The FHWA is now working on updating the NEVI guidelines.

• Trump HHS says sex is “immutable”: When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed last week as health secretary, one of the things he promised was to make decisions based on “gold-standard research.” We don’t know of any “gold-standard” studies that have been done to establish that there are more sexual classifications out there beyond male and female, and this might have something to do with the HHS decree yesterday that it would heretofore define sex as an “immutable biological classification” and thereby recognize only males and females. Hallelujah. Predictably, The Washington Post calls this announcement an escalation of the Trump administration’s “campaign against transgender protections.” What it really is, though, is part of a campaign in favor of common sense and scientific sanity.

• NYC congestion pricing axed: On Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy notified New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority that his department had rescinded approval of Manhattan’s dubious congestion pricing system. The program charged most drivers a $9 toll to enter the city during peak hours. Duffy pointed to the lack of any toll-free option for accessing Lower Manhattan as part of the rationale for the decision. He also surmised that the program appeared focused on generating revenue for NYC’s public transportation system rather than limiting congestion, calling it a “slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners.” While NY Governor Kathy Hochul objected, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy praised the decision.

• LA Mayor Bass passes the buck: When parts of Los Angeles caught fire last month, burning entire neighborhoods to the ground, Democrat Mayor Karen Bass was not in the city. Indeed, she wasn’t even in the country but rather in Ghana. In a recent interview with a local news network, she was pressed on her “thought process” for travel given that “we know that there was warnings about the weather before you went and you still went.” Bass claimed that she was unaware of these weather warnings but also said, “I think our preparation, it wasn’t what it typically is.” She appeared to blame the fire chief. “We have warnings of Santa Ana winds a lot,” she said, but the “level of preparation” didn’t say to her that “something terrible could happen.” Oh.

Headlines

• Senate confirms Kelly Loeffler to lead Small Business Administration (Fox News)

• DOGE finds $2 billion in taxpayer funds earmarked for Stacey Abrams-linked group (Washington Free Beacon)

• Energy Department cancels more than $124 million in wasteful spending (Fox Business)

• Hegseth directs Pentagon to find $50 billion in cuts this year (AP)

• Trump admin formally designates eight cartels, gangs as terrorist organizations (Daily Wire)

• Hamas holds deranged rally to celebrate handover of Bibas family bodies (National Review)

• Humor: The Trump admin says Department of Education should be dis mantled. This is why their mistaken. (Babylon Bee)

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