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Scarsdale Village in the state of New York is the wealthiest suburb in the U.S., but it now finds itself on the frontline of the fight against mass surveillance. Average household income in the New York hamlet is $569,000 and typical home value is $1.4 million. Town meetings typically revolve around discussions of tree placement and after school programs. But, since the village’s board of trustees surreptitiously voted on April 8 to adopt a $2.1 million contract with Flock to “aid public safety,” mass surveillance has been the main subject of public comment.

After residents found out about the contract that had already been inked, they began showing up to speak their mind at the next Village Board on April 22. The issue has become the main topic of contention in subsequent meetings since. One of the more poignant public comment speeches came from a former NSA employee and Scarsdale resident, Charles Seife, at the June 10 village board meeting. “The system that Scarsdale wishes to implement is extremely dangerous.… The records are kept for several weeks. At the very least, they allow retroactive surveillance,” Seife said, adding, “These systems are immensely popular with politicians and law enforcement, even though they do real and palpable damage to the citizenry.”

Flock is a $7.5 billion surveillance technology company, operating in over 5,000 communities across 49 states. Flock has a proven playbook to expand through securing local government contracts, often behind closed doors.

Flock’s technology has been used to assist with everything from ICE investigations in Illinois to abortion investigations in Texas. “Local police around the country are performing lookups in Flock’s AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system for ‘immigration’” related searches and as part of other ICE investigations, giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for,” 404 Media reported in May. A Johnson county sheriff searched over 83,000 cameras to prosecute a woman traveling over state lines to obtain an abortion, including searches of thousands of cameras in Washington and Illinois where abortion is legal, according to data obtained by 404 Media.

The technology brings into question the presumption of innocence, the legal principle that people are innocent until proven guilty. Charles Siefe, the former NSA employee who spoke at the June 10th meeting in Scarsdale, explained to Drop Site how Flock provides a system of "persistent severance” through interconnected Live View Cameras (LVCs) and License Plate Readers (LPRs). “You can actually go into the database and look for stuff to see if you can tag that person with a crime.” He compares this to traffic stops, saying, “police officers know if you follow someone in a car for a couple of miles, the likelihood is you'll be able to pull them over for something.”

Siefe, an expert in general surveillance, explained what systems like Flock are doing in the U.S., “we're creating that database so that we can always do that for anyone, that you're constantly tracking people's movements. You have that system in place so that you don't need to articulate the suspicion before you're gathering that on someone, before you're actually trying to tag someone with wrongdoing. When you have that system there, all someone has to do is say, I don't like that person. And then you've got that surveillance already established.” As Scarsdale resident Josh Frankel put it to Drop Site, “The way I see it, it is not a matter of if this data will be abused and misused, only a matter of when and by whom.”

“Freedoms don't come back and privacy doesn't come back, and we are taking these irreversible steps so blithely for no real reason.” Siefe told Drop Site. Some residents take issue with any mass surveillance in Scarsdale, others are specifically concerned with the lack of guardrails against misuse of the system, but most residents who spoke out against the Flock contract are outraged with how the board adopted this contract in secret.

On the evening of April 8th, the Scarsdale village board met to discuss “public safety equipment,” according to the work session agenda. “I don't think that anybody who looked at the agenda in advance would have thought that public safety equipment involved live cameras, license plate readers, drone technology, basically a mass surveillance system.” Frankel told Drop Site. He continued, “maybe you're thinking public safety equipment is a traffic light, a crosswalk, a yield sign, something along those lines, but not mass surveillance.”

Shortly after the 6pm meeting started, Scarsdale Police Chief Steven Delbene took the floor and gave a powerpoint presentation. Chief Delbene provided an overview of Scarsdale’s future application of Flock’s surveillance technologies, or as he called it, “an ecosystem of interconnected tools: LPRs (license plate readers), live-view cameras, and DFR (drone as a first responder) technology.” This meeting was the first time Flock was mentioned by officials in a public setting in Scarsdale. After the presentation ended, the Mayor held a vote on a motion to enter into executive session, it passed, and the village board met privately until 8pm.

That same night, during the village board of trustees meeting scheduled for 8pm, Mayor Arrest entertained a motion to amend the agenda and add a resolution to authorize the execution of the Flock contract, it passed 6-1. The entire process took 35 seconds total. Typically, voting on a motion without prior notice is reserved for urgent matters. Frankel told Drop Site, “Why was it so time sensitive? Why did it need to happen without proper notice all in one night? And I don't have a good answer for that.” The lack of answers aren’t for not trying, Frankel has, “corresponded with the mayor and the board and the village manager. Most of my questions, very specific questions, straightforward questions, most of them have gone unanswered,” he told Drop Site.

In addition to public comment before adopting a major resolution, Scarsdale residents expect a competitive bidding process for any major public contract. Public officials, despite demands from the public, have not produced evidence of any contact with vendors other than Flock. Frankel told Drop Site that “there should be” a request for proposal, as it is “part of New York State law.” He continued, “Typically what you want to see is a competitive bidding process, requests for proposals, that type of thing.”

When asked why there was not a request for proposal, Village Manager Alexandra Marshall told Drop Site News, “the Police Department arranged several demonstrations with vendors including Flock, Motorola, Midl, and Hanwha. There was a fifth vendor, Verdaka, who did not respond to the Village's request for demonstration.” Drop Site News has asked for any documentation of those demonstrations, but has yet to hear back.

A FOIL request for “Any market research, vendor analysis, or documentation evaluating alternative providers of similar technology or services” only rendered a Sole Source Justification Letter signed by Flock’s CEO. “The board took the police chief's word that Flock is the one that we need, the Flock is the one that we want… I don't know that the law really allows for the board to take the police chief's word,” Frankel told Drop Site.

Attorney Robert Berg, a Scarsdale resident, told Drop Site, “Chief DelBene is not qualified to determine that Flock’s services/products are so unique that Flock meets the standard of a sole source vendor under New York law and Scarsdale Village policy.” Berg has addressed the Village Board regarding the Flock contract adoption. Berg explained, in a statement to Drop Site, “four members of the Board, including the Mayor, are attorneys.” Berg was incredulous that four lawyers “would vote to approve an illegal no-bid, sole source contract with Flock, that plainly violates State law and the Village’s own formal policy, and to do so secretly when the company is already embroiled nationally in lawsuits and controversy over its violations of privacy laws.” He told Drop Site.

After doing some research, Frankel found that “Flock produces its own document to give to municipalities to justify sole sourcing with Flock.” Different versions of the same sole sourcing justification letter, signed by Flock CEO Garret Langley, can be found on the official government websites of the State of California, Sussex County Virginia, Woodburn Oregon, and the State of Mississippi.

The April 8th meeting was not highly attended, but one key villager was present, Joanne Wallenstein. She runs an online blog, Scarsdale 10583, covering local events. Wallenstein’s articles on the April 8th meeting are how Scarsdale residents like Josh Frankel first heard about the Flock contract.

“The board had a work session on April 8th where they discussed it. Then an hour later they went into the official board meeting and approved it,” Wallenstein recalled to Drop Site. “To be honest in the beginning I didn’t really think there was anything interesting about it. But they did everything so fast, with no public comment. And the agenda, where's the agenda item?” She’s produced countless articles since April 8th, covering her own correspondence with the board, press releases, and board meetings.

“Village officials blamed the lack of notice on the demise of the Scarsdale Inquirer,” Wallenstein told Drop Site. “However, Scarsdale 10583 has been covering the news and published weekly since 2009. In this case, the reason no one knew about the Flock contract was because no advance notice was given. The resolution was not included in the agenda and there was no public hearing. It had nothing to do with the loss of the local newspaper.”

Since 1901, village meetings had been covered by the local paper, the Scarsdale Inquirer. But, on January 16, 2024, it went out of business. The void of local news coverage is not unique to Scarsdale; over the past two decades, over 3,300 local newspapers have vanished. 5,600 newspapers remain, 80% of which are weeklies, according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern Medill.

While mass surveillance is a nationwide concern, achieving a national network requires local authorities’ approval. In the case of Scarsdale’s Flock contract, it weren't for one independent journalist’s local reporting, it’s likely the Flock contract adoption would have been buried in meeting minutes, largely unknown to Scarsdale residents.

When Drop Site news reached out to village officials for comment, the Mayor deferred to the Village Manager, who sent along a link to an FAQ. The unauthored document, dated June 12th, says, “the Village Manager, Police Chief, Mayor and Village Board always have communication and transparency in mind and recognize we can always do better…”

According to communications obtained by Drop Site News, the earliest contact between Scarsdale officials and Flock dates back to January 15, 2025—meaning village officials had been discussing the contract with Flock for nearly three months behind closed doors.

Steven Delbene was selected to serve as police chief by the Scarsdale Village Board on January 14, 2025. The documents obtained via FOIL show Delbene was invited to a meeting with Flock the very next day, January 15, 2025. However, he did not officially assume office until February 1.

Chief Delbene, Mayor Arrest, and Flock Sales Representative Joe Rosenberg coordinated the placement of cameras before ever discussing the Flock contract in a public setting. Chief Delbene sent an email to Flock, saying “the map is approved” to Flock sales representative Joe Rosenberg, on March 31, 2025. The locations where Flock cameras would go was decided by Flock and Scarsdale officials before the village board ever brought Flock up as an official matter in a public meeting.

Scarsdale isn’t the only town where officials quietly signed a Flock contract without public input. The description of how Flock secured a contract in Sedona, Arizona, is eerily similar to the story in Scarsdale. Red Rock News reported on June 20: “The city never agendized the installation of the cameras for discussion by City Council and the public and instead mentioned an indefinite plan to acquire such cameras only briefly during the city’s most recent budget work sessions on April 30 and May 1, without providing either written or verbal specifics.”

Contracts being signed without much community oversight has seemingly been Flock’s hallmark for years. In Washington state, four jurisdictions quietly signed contracts with Flock – Kennewick, Pasco, Richland, and West Richland – in 2022. One year later, the Tri-Cities Observer reported that only two of the four jurisdictions “publicly approved the grants.” Scarsdale is unique in requiring requests for proposals and honoring a tradition of public comment for all major resolutions. In the two Washington towns where the Flock contract did appear in meeting minutes, public comment was neither expected nor required, “the matter was on the consent calendar with other items that received no discussion and one vote,” per the Tri-Cities Observer. In municipalities across the country, there are laws that allow councils and boards to pre-approve agendas, and vote for a series of resolutions all with one vote. This is typically called a consent agenda, and is intended to pass non-controversial or routine agenda items.

As a result of passing resolutions in bulk, on at least one occasion, local officials voted for a Flock contract by accident. Last week, in Lucas County, Ohio, commissioners moved to adopt a $250,000, four-year contract with Flock. On July 15. President Pete Gerkin introduced the motion, and it passed unanimously without debate or question. On Tuesday, July 22, Gerkin moved to rescind the resolution, acknowledging he previously voted yes. Gerkin voiced his concern with how Flock operates, “They are indiscriminate in their gathering of data… even if drivers haven’t committed any offense or are suspected of committing any offense.”

After introducing and voting yes on a motion to adopt a contract with Flock just a week prior, Gerkin took time to explain why he was introducing a motion to rescind approval of the resolution. “We’re living in a time where mass surveillance has now become a federal policy, it has had chilling effects on our population, especially the minority population in our community. People may avoid visiting here because they don’t want their license plates recorded,” he said. Gerkin’s motion to rescind the contract passed—he noted it was "inappropriate for the sheriff, under a time of budget constraints on all of us, to spend $250,000 to mass surveil our community without any intended outcome.”

A representative from Flock, when asked if the consistently furtive approval of their contracts was a company strategy, told Drop Site News, “there’s no specific strategy around how we work with cities on contracts because it’s very dependent on the city.” After reaching out to the sales representative who sold the Flock contract in Scarsdale, Joe Rosenberg, Drop Site News was referred to Holly Beilin, Director of Communications at Flock.

When asked about the Scarsdale contract, Beilin told Drop Site News, “We were working with the mayor and the PD, they were able to get the funding and then it was passed by the board, I believe unanimously. So I don't think this was particularly controversial.” The vote was not unanimous, Scarsdale does not have the funding, and the vote was followed by weeks of backlash from the public.

The vote was 6-1, Trustee Jeremy A. Gans cast the lone no vote. He explained why during the April 8 meeting: “I have questions on privacy and surveillance that were expressed earlier. I don't need to go into detail, and I appreciate the money from the federal government, but I wish they would spend it on places other than surveilling their own citizens.”

As for the funding, Scarsdale applied for a grant through Senator Gillibrand's office, and at the time of the contract signing there was no response. During a meeting on July 8, Mayor Arrest announced the grant intended to fund the Flock contract was denied. Mayor Arrest explained that the “agreement with Flock Safety has not been canceled, but no further steps will be taken until all options for public safety upgrades are reviewed at a public meeting in September.”

“We also don't categorize Flock as mass surveillance,” Beilin told Drop Site News. “We're a system of public safety technology,” she said. When asked about the integration of Flock’s cameras across communities, Beilin told Drop Site: “that is a capability on the Flock system. But it's all opt in.” Surveillance cameras can be bought anywhere, but Flock offers a network of cameras in 5,000 communities across 49 states – if you opt-in. When asked, “it seems that the main argument in the sole source contract is that no one else makes what Flock makes. Would you say that's an accurate read?” Bellein answered, “Yes, I would say that's an accurate read.”

Whether or not Flock contracts are intentionally approved in a surreptitious fashion, the company has kept a low profile relative to its scale. Implementing a national network of surveillance cameras in the United States sounds like an endeavor that would involve high-profile debate on national news, and would necessitate legislation passing through Congress with the president’s signature. The reality is Flock’s network is expanding one community at a time, it only takes the police chief’s signature, and the village board’s blessing. It’s not the work of an authoritarian dictator and his army, either. It’s the Mayor of your town, and a corporation that emailed him. This is how mass surveillance takes hold: cameras installed in every community, as a service to the public, in the name of safety.

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Nathan Sage is the only Democratic hopeful able to beat the Republican Iowa Senator, Joni Ernst, in a head-to-head matchup, according to new polling from Data for Progress. Senator Ernst “initially leads each hypothetical Democratic challenger by 5 to 6 points.” But after likely voters read a short introduction to each potential challenger, Sage was the only candidate who beat Ernst, 47-45 percent.

An outsider candidate, 40-year-old Sage grew up in a trailer park in Mason City. He told Drop Site, “I think there's a lot of people that are just stuck right now that don't have representation,” adding that “98% of Washington, DC is generational wealth. They don't give a crap about us.” Sage’s populist, anti-corporate politics have informed his tenure as executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, arguing that big companies are making it not just difficult for working people, but for small businesses, too. Even beyond Iowa, Sage is currently the only working-class candidate currently running for U.S. Senate in the country.

Sage is not the first breakthrough candidate with a populist message and working class roots. In Nebraska in the 2024 cycle, Republicans faced a challenge from independent Dan Osborn, a mechanic whose straight talk nearly knocked off incumbent Deb Fischer. Out of every Senate race expected to be won by a Republican, Dan Osborn had the tightest margin, outperforming every other Senate candidate nationwide, Democrats included.

In a forced effort to reconnect with the common man, Democrats in Washington have begun sprinkling profanity into their vocabulary. A longtime mechanic, first in an auto shop and then while serving in the Army, Sage’s first campaign video was blunt and animated by a few choice curse words—uncommon among more staid DC politicians. The colorful language caught the attention of National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) spokesperson, Nick Puglia, who told The Hill that Democrats “seem obsessed with saying ‘f—ing’ and ‘a–’ as the strategy to win back the voters that rejected them in 2024.“ When asked about the NRSC’s observation, Sage simply told MSNBC in an April 20th interview, “I live in the real world. This is how we talk. This is who we are.”

Sage has a potential progressive challenger in the field, J.D. Scholten, a former minor league pitcher who returned home to Sioux City and nearly beat Iowa’s hard-right mainstay Steve King in a 2018 House race. Scholten turned his surprising overperformance into a state House seat, where he has sponsored bills safeguarding workers compensation benefits, protecting marriage equality, addressing housing and healthcare affordability, and appropriating funds to mental health care.

Another potential opponent, state Sen. Zach Wahls of Iowa City, rose to prominence in a different era with a mega-viral speech in the Iowa legislature at 19 years old, speaking on behalf of marriage equality and his two moms. Wahls is the author of My Two Moms and was a Hilary Clinton delegate at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Wahls holds a master’s degree from Princeton. A third potential opponent, Jackie Norris, is President and Owner of Horizon Group, a management consulting firm in West Des Moines. Norris is most known for her time as chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama, 2009-2011.

“Make our lives better now, not five years from now, not ten years [from] now—but actually better now.” said Sage when he sat down for an interview with Drop Site. He discussed his background, decision to run, and the new brand of populist politics taking hold in the U.S. after his viral announcement video. Sage told Drop Site that the U.S. economy “might be going well for the upper 1%,” but “the money they're making is off the backs of us... They're doing everything they can to keep us down.” He continued, “they're not here for us. They're here for their own self-interest. But the question is: how do we get out of that?” According to Sage, the answer lies in electing candidates who come from the working class, and who will fight for policies like “raising wages, lowering cost of healthcare, lowering cost of childcare, which is outrageous.”

What is it about Nathan Sage that stands out? In the May 7-12 poll, Sage was described to respondents as “a lifelong independent… a different kind of Democrat, one who actually cares about working people.” His potential competitors in the primary, by contrast, are longtime Democrats.

Sage is unafraid to speak on the class divide within the potential Democratic primary field. He told Drop Site that “you get the same cookie cutter candidate that comes out there, doctor's kid with soft hands… they're going to check the box, say they talked to us, and that's it. And nothing's ever going to change.”

For Sage, this election is bigger than beating Ernst; it’s about working-class power in America. “The only way that we're ever going to get things changed—the only way we're ever going to get anything anywhere for the working class—is to actually have working class people there,” he told Drop Site.

As Democrats struggle to reshape their public image as a party led by coastal elites, Iowa has become tough political turf. Once considered a purple state, Trump won Iowa by 13 points in 2024. The state previously swung for Obama in 2008, when he won the state by 9 points. In recent years, the consistent thread in winning in Iowa has less to do with right or left, and more to do with embracing populist ideals.

The Sage brand of populism is already spreading. In his announcement video, Sage made clear that his political alliance is not to the party establishment, but to the American working class, saying “we built the damn table. We should have a seat at it.” A sentiment that was echoed hundreds of times in the comment section. He told Drop Site he believes this message resonates with so many people because “they’re just fed up with listening to rich-ass people say what they're saying. And nothing is helping us. Nothing is getting to us.”

As home to the Democrats’ first primary contest in the presidential nomination process, Iowa turns into an electoral capital every four years. Politicians on both sides of the aisle come to the hawkeye state hoping to perfect a folksy turn of phrase, hone their midwestern humor, and put together a stump-speech that’s formal enough to be taken seriously but laid-back enough to be neighborly. It takes a lot to impress an Iowa voter, who is regularly inundated with campaign fanfare more than anyone else in the country.

Sage ticks a lot of boxes for Iowans, according to how he was described to poll respondents:

Sage is a patriot, not a politician. He enlisted in the Marines, served two tours in Iraq, then re-enlisted in the Army and served a third tour in Iraq. Back home, he put himself through college with the GI Bill and worked as a mechanic, a sports radio host, and eventually became Director of the Knoxville chamber of commerce, working closely with local businesses as a voice for Iowa small businesses and working people.

Though Sage is popular among likely voters, Democrats have long been committed to quashing any anti-establishment movement within the party. From condemning DNC Vice Chair David Hogg’s strategy of primarying “asleep at the wheel” Democrats to catering to conservatives like Liz Cheney instead of the Uncommitted National Movement, the party elites are quick to cast outsiders aside—no matter their popularity.

This year in Iowa that same pattern could return: with a crowded Democratic primary, it’s possible this well-positioned candidate could be outspent by party elites who would then lose a U.S. senate seat for the minority party.

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Thursday, May 15, 2025, at 2:00pm EST, the new acting director of FEMA, David Richardson, held a “town hall” with staff. Drop Site obtained 30 minutes of leaked audio from today’s meeting, as well as 10 minutes of leaked audio from Richardson’s introductory meeting on Friday, May 9, 2025. Both are transcribed in full below.,

The former acting director, Cameron Hamilton, was fired just one day after giving Congressional testimony, where he stated: “I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Many have credited this statement for his ouster, including one FEMA employee who told Drop Site, “since Cam said he didn’t think getting rid of FEMA was good for the country, Trump fired him.”

During today’s town hall, when Richardson was asked “which is more important, the President's will or the interests of the American people?” Richardson told staff “to me, they're the same thing.” Rambling at times, Richardson spoke about putting “a large part of response and recovery down to the states,” and conducting “mission analysis,” which involves identifying “all of the laws that govern FEMA,” and limiting operations only to what is required by law. Richardson calls the new mission and direction for the federal agency “FEMA 2.” When asked about DOGE’s involvement in FEMA, Richardson told staff that he wrote a memo to DOGE today, saying, “you don't make any decisions” for FEMA.

At one point during the town hall, Richardson told FEMA staff that just “the other day” he learned from his “girlfriend” that “Texas is bigger than Spain.” He continued, “I didn't know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up.”

Town Hall Meeting: May 15, 2025

Richardson: Although I normally speak extemporaneously, I've got some information that I do have to ask—either verbatim or near verbatim. So, I want to make sure that I was in the atmosphere where I could do that. This will take me probably 10, maybe 15 minutes, and then we'll turn to whatever the questions that we can answer in the last 15 minutes are. Okay. So I know, I know there's folks out there that wanna ask questions. That's probably the main reason folks tuned in. So I promise we will get to that.

What I want to talk about is where we've been the last week, regarding two things. The mission analysis which I directed to happen last week via this memo and I asked everyone to read it, and also the initial determination of the FY25 preparedness for disaster season. The first thing I want to go over is a complex problem solving session we did so that we could make sure that by getting ready for this season. We were tackling the main problems that would be in our way to get ready for disaster season, and there is a tool for that. As I just mentioned, it's called complex problem solving. And essentially what complex problem solving consists of is making sure that you understand the background of a problem that you're facing. But you don’t know what the problem is yet, so you have to understand the background of the issue. And, this year, it was hurricane season or disaster season ‘25. And then what you do is you identify whatever problem it is that you're trying to provide a course of action to solve. I'm going to get to both those in a second.

So, we spent quite a bit of time talking about the background and where we were right now for disaster season ‘25. And I'm not going to go all into the background with you. But, in the end, we began to ask the question: what is our biggest challenge in the form of a question for getting ready for disaster season 25? And I asked and I stated the question, I think it was the first one. And I said essentially we're not ready for disaster season ‘25, which we found out was not necessarily the case.

Indeed, we are to some degree, and to a great degree ready for disaster season 25. In the end, after about 15 iterations of the problem statement, okay, we came to a final problem statement that sounded like this: FEMA and their partners do not understand the administration's intent for impending disaster operations to meet expectations while evolving towards the future of FEMA. And that is the problem that we had to solve. And that came down to a couple of courses of action, which were essentially we would define what the intent, the administration's intent, for FEMA for this disaster season and the future work. And this is how the intent worked out. Listen closely.

The intent for disaster season 2025: safeguard the American people, return primacy to the states, strengthen their capability to respond and recover and coordinate federal assistance when deemed necessary while transforming to the future of FEMA. So that's where we are right now. And this morning we began, for about 90 minutes, a section of the staff and I, to develop a plan to address disaster season 2025. We've got quite a long way because we've already got a lot of information on that. We've done things in the past that uh, lead right into what we're doing now. Obviously, if we hadn't done things in the past more relevant to the future to now, we'd be in great trouble, but we're not, and I would say we're about 80 or 85% there.

The next week we will close that gap and get to probably 97, 98% of a plan. We'll never have 100% of a plan. Even if we did have 100% of a plan, a plan never survives first contact. However, we will do our best to make sure that the plan is all-encompassing. What does the plan include? It includes things like tabletop exercises at the cabinet, state and then of course within– at the regional levels as well. It includes things like pre positioning information on that. It includes drills and what do I know? Who needs to know it, and have I told them yet? So, that is the plan and that is how we will write it and play out.

I intend to be done with the plan, not in July, not in June, but very likely next Friday. I would like to lay the plan on the table in its glossiest form to Secretary Noam, so she can take a look at it. I will likely have already signed it. If there's sections of this she doesn't like, that's okay. But we are going to start passing information on how to implement the plan as early as next Monday or Tuesday, guidance on pre positioning, some guidance for the regional ministers and administrators and that type of thing.

So that's where we are on getting ready for disaster season. Now, that essentially addressed the initial determination of FY25 preparedness. I know that the staff still has information to pass to me. I think it's on day– May 15th and May 22nd and that will be incoming and that was to help inform the plan for disaster season 2025.

The other issue, the other memorandum which was outlining FEMA's mission analysis for 2025 FY25, there will be an action plan associated with it. So we can address things in the mission analysis that we need to address. Now real quickly, what mission analysis does is mission analysis design identifies all of the laws that govern FEMA, because within those laws are specified tasks. And I think there's probably 6 or 7 laws or acts that guide FEMA. Within those laws or acts wherever they are, Stafford Act, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and there's others, the post Katrina, I think it was a bill or an act, I can't remember.

There are specified tasks and I assume there's roughly somewhere between 150 and 175 specified tasks. And each one of those tests specified tasks can be binned into categories. So we'll make sure we capture all of the tasks which I know that folks are doing that today and then we will bin them. And by bin them, I mean some of those, some of those tasks will be kind of orange-like tasks. And by orange, I mean the fruit orange, but they might be tangerines, they might be blood oranges, it just might be maybe a little bit of grapefruit. All those will go in one bin.

Then you have all of the banana type things, whether they're plantains or they're big bananas or small bananas, they go all go into another pile. Okay, so you get about 7 or 8 piles of similar but not the exact same things. And they will constitute our mission essential tasks. So we'll have our specified tasks, our mission essential task, and from those we will also make sure that we state our mission very, very clearly if it's not already, alright.

And then, instead of matching those to the current organization, we will make sure the current organization is matched to the mission essential tasks. And where the current, the current organization doesn't fit with the mission of such task, that is where we will make changes. So, I don't want to call it a surgical method because doesn't really apply here, but there is a method to—and it's orderly how we will make sure that our organization is matched to our mission, essential tasks, which is matched to our mission.

Here's the key thing about this whole exercise. In the end, we will know that the things we are doing are only things that we have to be doing, okay. We will not do anything that's not in statute. If we are doing things that are not in statute, we are wasting the American people's money, okay? Somebody else might be available to do it, but we are not going to do it.

So, we're only going to do those things that are in statute, and that is how FEMA 2 is going to operate. We will only do things that are in statute. “FEMA 2” will also, as I call it FEMA 2, might just call it new version of FEMA. We will begin in our plan, as alluded to, in the intent, we will return promising to the states for emergency or what I call crisis action. Okay.

Strengthen the capability to respond, recover and coordinate federal assistance when deemed necessary while transforming to the future of FEMA. So, FEMA 2 will look different than FEMA 1. There'll be much more emphasis on the states to do response and recovery, and to some degree preparedness as well, of course. So, that is what we have in mind.

So now that I've said that, did I miss anything? (I don't think so.) I think you'll have an opportunity to, I guess. Did I miss anything? (I don't think so.) Done this so many times. It's kind of getting to be old hat. Okay, so now the moment everybody's been waiting for and we're not all crowded in the basement, it's not hot and I've been able to actually read things clearly.

We can go ahead and open the floor to questions. I know there's some prepared, if they're not prepared questions because I have not seen the questions for the most part. I saw one of them. It was a particular hard one to answer, but I had the answer immediately, so it really wasn't that bad. Let's go.

FEMA Employee: Sure. So Sir, people have been posting questions in the chat. I will read their questions verbatim from the chat. And as you said, you've not seen them before. So first, you've previously stated “I will achieve the President's intent.” What is the President's intent for FEMA?

Richardson: The President’s intent for FEMA is to ensure that FEMA is only doing the things in law that it should be doing. That's number one. Okay, so that's what we're doing with the mission analysis. It's also for FEMA, is to push a large part of response and recovery down to the state level. Okay, So that you can imagine that makes FEMA look very, very different. What it's going to look like in the end, we'll find out. Remember, the President is a bold man, President has a bold vision, and he makes bold statements and I will go back or the secretary will go back with a, a vision or, or a version of FEMA that we feel that fits his vision. That's what I just said. Okay.

We will do only things that are in the statutes and we'll put a large part of response and recovery down to the states. In fact, that's how we used to do Emergency Management, as I've been told in the last week, over the last 10 years in particular, we've taken on a lot of the burden of what used to be done at the state level. Does that answer the question? (Believe it does.) Okay

FEMA Employee: The next question, can we please discuss downsizing? Are there plans for it and if the president and the secretary feel the organization should be abolished?

Richardson: So, uh, look, FEMA has a statutory mission, so if we're going to completely abolish FEMA, okay, we will either have to find a different FEMA to do those missions, or we will have to change the law. And downsizing, look, I can say that there's not going to be any downsizing, and things are going to be– look just like they are 6 months from now. But think about it, that the president's vision is indeed to push elements of preparedness, response and recovery down to the state level. There will very, very likely be reductions in force at FEMA because the states will take on those functions. Does that answer the question?

FEMA Employee: Yes. Next question, what role, if any, will you have in the activities of the FEMA Review Council?

Richardson: Um. Since I'm the, looking for that title, the what's– call me the acting administrator preparing the duty, performing the duties out art is formerly known as. I don't know very little likely OK, I'll be aware of what they do. Remember they're making decisions about FEMA. OK, they might approach me for information on FEMA, but since I'm in the chair now, I will likely very likely not be making the decisions. I will very likely be the executor of the decisions. Does that make sense? Okay. So, I'm the guy that's going to do the labor. I've been there before. Next.

FEMA Employee: Right. The next question: which is more important, the President's will or the interests of the American people?

Richardson: Well, to me, they're the same thing. Okay. What you're implying is there are two different things. I don't think they are. I think that he's the, he's the president of the United States and he has the best interest of the American people in mind. So I think those two things are essentially the same. I think President Trump supports say, say that, say the two categories again?

FEMA Employee: The president's will or the interests of the American people?

Richardson: Yes, I think through his will the president will maintain and ensure the best interest of the American people.

FEMA Employee: Okay, the next question, some of us live more than 50 miles from our duty stations. Will we all be given the opportunity to transfer to a FEMA facility that is closer to our homes?

Richardson: So I don't know. And I just, I know this topic in detail and I know in detail because every time it comes up, a, uh, attorney, has to sit me down and he'll say something like ‘these are the parameters.’ And this has changed here and there. Oay. I do know that CWMD folks, when I was over there as a, some secretary, were given an opportunity to go to an alternate facility. Alright. That may or may not be the case, but it's something that we should put on the calendar that I need to take a look at and what that's coming because we do, we do owe an answer for folks. Yes, I don't know the exact answer, but we will find out because that that changes a little bit as we move forward.

FEMA Employee: With the upcoming hurricane season looming, will we have job security with the uncertainty of the FEMA being dissolved? If not, will there be a heads up provided?

Richardson: I'll give you the heads up as soon as I can. So, we do need– many, many of us. I'm not going to say all, I'm not going to say the majority, but we will– I think addressing this hurricane season, this disaster season, we're in a transition phase. It's not going to look entirely different of how we did in 2024, but it's not necessarily going to look like how we're going to do it in 2026. So there's a transition period, and normally a transition period, there's going to be, we'll take some risk, but I don't want to take too much risk because remember, the president's will and the American people's interests I believe are the same. And I'm here to make sure that is the case so that we can respond to the disaster season. Answered the question?

FEMA Employee: Yes, as we focus on our disaster efforts, when will we plan for non disaster programs and actions?

Richardson: That will have to be once we get, once we get our plan in place, we've got to get the 2025 disaster plan in place. That should be next week, and then we'll start passing information on it, affecting the plan, making sure it's rolling down the road, and then we'll start doing steady state operations. But I can give you a peek into something. We are going to write, and I don't know if you've ever done this before. We are going to write essentially a 2026 to 2030 strategy that covers that, so that we can have some consistency across time. That in particular, I think is what helps an organization, if you can write a strategy for that far out. Of course, at CWMD, we're going to write one for 2040, but it's a little bit different because we have to develop capability and that type of thing. This is essentially how we would see the organization evolving and getting better over time. Have you done that before? Written a– okay. So you've done that before. So there's already a template in place. Like most things, it's not a new idea, so we'll just keep moving that direction.

FEMA Employee: Okay. If states haven't budgeted, hired or trained staff to handle the response and recovery, what timeline do you expect to make this a reality?

Richardson: Well. Um. That's a great question. So how, how, how are we going to essentially effect the transition? It's interesting because I just had a talk with someone today because there was a fire, I think it was in Minnesota, or there's also one in New Mexico. And I asked the folks, I said, hey, we talked to the governor, give them a heads up. 50/50 might be coming, 75/25 right now, but 50/50 is coming. So part of it is giving, letting people know as we transition, okay, that if it doesn't happen this year, it will very, very likely happen next year. Uh, we will transition this summer to something else, so I'm not sure if we can completely overcome the budget challenges, but we will at least be uncovering and discovering ways to do that.

You know, some states are pretty good at this. The other day I was chatting with my girlfriend, she's from Texas. She's got like huge red hair. Like, she's from Texas. And I said something and she said, well, you know, oh, I know what it was. I said, how come it takes so long to drive 10 hours from Galveston to Amarillo? And she said, well, you know, Texas is bigger than Spain. I didn't know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up. However, they do disaster recovery very, very well, and so does Florida, okay. So, we should be able to take some lessons learned on how Florida and Texas do their disaster recovery, we’ve got to spread that around and get other folks do it some way. And there should be some budgeting things that they have, I bet. I bet Governor Abbott has a rainy day fund for fires and tornadoes and disasters such as hurricanes, and he doesn't spend it on something else. What else?

FEMA Employee: Okay. So, you've spoken about FEMA 2. How does the administration plan to ensure continuity of FEMA's statutory national training and education *inaudible* responsibilities, especially those outlined in six US Code 748 and 313?

Richardson: That's my job. That's why we're doing mission analysis. So I know exactly what's in statute and what's not in statute. If you ever take over this organization, I would advise everybody on this phone call to simply do a mission analysis. Okay, what most people do, I’m not criticizing them because they just don't know. Is they go in an organization, they look at it and they say, I'm going to change this organization. So what they do is they, they, they stir up, they stir the pot, they change the organization around, hoping for different outcomes. But that's like moving the furniture around in your living room and looking for a different seat to sit on. It's just not going to work. You know, you move the furniture around, you might have a slightly different view, but it's the same furniture. You want to do a you want to get a decorator in there which to get rid of and which to keep. That's what Mission Analysis does. What else?

FEMA Employee: What are your intentions for mitigation? You have only mentioned preparedness, response and recovery.

Richardson: Um, save that for the next time we talk, but I will, I will, I will look, I think mitigation, I think mitigation, I am going to answer that. I think mitigation should be tied to the grants processes. For example, we have a, I call it an inspections function. I think, I think the polite word for it is audit. I think mitigation should be tied to how well a state does when they're audited for how well they prepare. Does that make sense? Okay.

FEMA Employee: Okay. What role will DOGE have in approving your plans?

Richardson: Doge doesn't approve anything back. I wrote a memo today to make sure that Doge had, you know, the freedom to ask any questions they needed. And I believe the second paragraph, second sentence of the second paragraph said to Doge, and you don't make any decisions. I'm, I'm the decider. Remember that old thing I had? I and I alone speak for FEMA. I know not everybody liked it. It's part of the reason I said it, because Doge doesn't speak for FEMA either. That's me. What else?

FEMA Employee: Okay. Is FEMA going to combine regional offices?

Richardson: There's no plan for that. However, once we've done the mission analysis, we–if it drives that decision, then we could change it. But once again, that's why we're going to the mission analysis. But I– I haven't run across any reason for that. But when you do mission analysis, sometimes you– you discover things that you didn't know. They're essentially opening up all the closets and arranging them. Make sure you don't want to take any of your old shoes to the clothes bin. Next.

FEMA Employee: Okay. What are your primary objectives over the next three months?

Richardson: Well, number one, just to make sure that we are prepared for disaster season, okay? And that means having the disaster plan written, Okay. I know how folks write plans. They usually take a long time to do it. We don't have a long time to get it done. I like a lot of the plans that are already in place at FEMA. But we need one specific to this disaster season. We will do the mission analysis, okay? And we will also begin looking at what FEMA 2 is going to be– going to– going to look like. And if FEMA 2 is going to look radically different from FEMA one, we will start figuring out how we are going to make those changes, because at some time in the next six or seven months, we have to know what it looks like. But the number one priority is to make sure that the– that the American people are well served in this disaster season.

I will be traveling some because I need to get eyes on target, figure out what's going on down range. I need to get with the regional administrators. I want to go to the state level. I particularly want to see how Texas and Florida have their disaster plans and their disaster preparedness set up. But I also want to go to other states to find out how they don't have it set up. But I'm not going to name those states. But yes, I'll be doing some travelling as well.

I also have a team, two teams that are going to travel around to see how well we are prepared for disaster season. Once again, my initial look is, we're pretty well prepared. This was the big thing to make sure that we understood what the intent was. I got a phone call the other day. I think it was from, I'm not sure he said his name, on accident. Not on accident, but I kind of absent mindedly hit the green button on my phone. This guy, from some cable news station.

They were starting to ask me about complex problem solving. At first I was kind of confused. I had no idea what it was, But he told me like you've got a leaker out there and I can get anything I want from the leaker. I said that's fine with me. Nothing, none, of it's classified and all of it I can support. But he said, you know, I don't really want to talk about the leaker and I don't really want to talk about, you know, the details of your complex problem solving because I don't really care about the the floods and the Hurricanes and the all that other kind of stuff. I got a problem here at this news station. I need you to help me with our ratings are falling and I hope you can apply your complex problem solving to it. But I told him I was busy. I said, because my number one priority right now is planning for hurricane season. I'm not even going to use the complex problem solving methodology to root out who's the leaker. So be it. What else?

FEMA Employee: Okay. I think this is the last question we have time for. What if the states don't have the capacity or ability to absorb those tasks that you think should be pushed to the states?

Richardson: Back to the intent, we did a pretty good job on this, by the way. So I'm able to answer a bunch of questions from the intent. [reading] ‘and coordinate federal assistance when deemed necessary.’ OK? So if they need it, we're going to help them out, but we're going to try to hold them to 75/25, OK? But where they need it, obviously we're going to have to deem it necessary to help out. I think we have time for one more.

FEMA Employee: Okay.

Richardson: How many is that by the way?

FEMA Employee: We're–I've asked about 15 of the 18 questions that we've had here.

Richardson: Oh, let's just go to the end. Come on.

FEMA Employee: Okay. What programs are you targeting for reduction?

Richardson: Uh. [shuffling papers] Where's it, where's my, where's my mission? I've got to do the mission analysis first, okay. And that's going to tell me what's inside the statutory and outside the statutory. If you're outside the statutory, you will become a target. I don't know that yet.

FEMA Employee: Okay. When is the reduction in force supposed to start?

Richardson: Uh. I don't know. I need to ask that question. I don't even know. That's going back and forth from it's happening, it's not happening, it's happening, it's not happening. I have an attorney that's going to give me some advice on that. The answer: I don't know. And you say, well, you should know that. I said, well, I knew it a month ago, but I don't think it's the same now as it was a month ago. Okay? I've heard there's actually not going to be a rift, but I don't want to say that officially because somebody will repeat it, but I'll find out.

FEMA Employee: Okay. Last question, Administrator Richardson, what is your personal stance on FEMA?

Richardson: My personal stance on FEMA, listen very, very closely, is that I will make sure that the President's intent is done for FEMA.

All-staff Meeting: May 9, 2025

On Friday, May 9, 2025, FEMA employees were invited to an all-staff meeting with the instruction: “do not bring phones or devices to this meeting.” One employee told Drop Site, “In all my time in FEMA I’ve never received a message that said don’t bring phones or devices to this meeting.”

One employee told Drop Site that staff have been “threatened with polygraph testing” if suspected of leaking to the press. However, that hasn’t stopped FEMA employees from sharing the contents of Richardson’s unhinged monologue, where he infamously tells FEMA staff, “don't get in my way.” The full ten minute audio obtained by Drop Site from Richardson’s introductory speech is transcribed below.

Richardson: Now, once again, I can't recall the full title, but essentially, I'm acting. I've seen people that are not acting, that have the full title or something, that don't get anything done. Okay, I don't need very much authority to get everything done I need to do. I don't need the full title. All I need is the authority from the President to put me in here as some degree of acting, and I will make sure that his intent gets completed. I don't stop at yield signs, in other words.

I've already talked about the two memos. Once again, I'll send the memos out today. Everybody will see them after I discuss them with the staff. Normally what I would do is I would draft the memo, legal would look at it, the staff would get a day or two to help me with bottom up refinement, and then I would release it. However, I started yesterday and I already consider myself behind schedule because I didn't issue the memos yesterday but I didn't start till 2:00 so if I can issue them today by 9:30 I think I will have caught up.

Now, this is the tough part. Most of you know this by intuition, but nobody's ever told you this. When somebody comes to an organization, and there's going to be change, it's recognized that everybody's somewhat nervous or somewhat concerned. Understandable. What's not known is that between 10 and 20% of personnel will embrace change. They'll welcome it. And they understand that change handled right is progress and they understand that it's necessary and they see that needs to be made. That's somewhere between 10 and 20%. Something like 60%, they don't care, right, they go along, to get along and I completely understand that. I've been in a situation before where I went along to get along.

However, there's somewhere south of 20% that decide that they are going to get in the way of change. You can ask anybody, that those 20% of the people are a problem. And they have to be sidelined. So, don't get in my way, if you're those 20% of the people. I know all the tricks, Okay? I know them from last corporals. I know them from staff sergeants, lieutenants, federal employees, my own employees, and indeed myself. Okay, I played the games too. Obfuscation, delay, undermining. If you're one of those 20% of the people and you think those tactics and techniques are going to help you, they will not because I will run right over you.

I will achieve the president's intent. I am as bent on achieving the president's intent as I was on making sure that I did my duty. When I took my Marines to Iraq, 11 of them, and fought alongside people that didn't speak my language, that didn't have my customs, that I couldn't understand anything. And they yelled on the radio that I was determined to carry out that mission the same way as I am determined to carry out the president's mission. There was one person on my team that I had to send away and I sent them home and they explained to the Second Marine Division, while they didn't – why they didn't complete the deployment. I never asked them what they said. I didn't need to because the rest of the Second Marine Division knew that they must have not been on my sheet of music. So, I sent them away, because I had too important of a mission for anybody to undermine me or to make things difficult.

It's the mission of FEMA. We're going to know our mission. We're going to do our mission. We are going to find out how to do things better and we are going to find out how to push things down to the states that should be done at the state level. We're also going to find out how we can do more cost sharing with the states. There's a program out there called Securing the Cities. Securing the cities is a there's 13 cities across the country that counter weapons of mass destruction, has cooperative cooperative agreements with, where the state, mostly the cities like New York, they receive grants from DHS, but there are strings attached to those grants.

For example, they have to run exercises twice a year and the assistant secretary, it's CWMD, has to observe the exercises and make sure that the exercises *inaudible* the problem we are trying to solve. Recently I went to New York City and I watched one of the tabletop exercises and indeed, they did a very, very good job with their exercise. But that's a string that is attached to the money that the federal government or the grant that the federal government gives New York City. Those are some of the things on the president's agenda. There are more.

There is a FEMA council being stood up that I will work with closely. It includes folks like Governor Noam, Governor Abbott or not, Governor, Secretary Noam, Governor Abbott, Governor Yonkin and some other folks. We will work with them to see how we can hone and refine FEMA's mission.

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Last thing, I won't take questions today. I'm great at playing stump the chump. OK. When I taught at the first, when I taught at the field artillery school, I was kind of a hapless captain that had just been promoted, came out of a firing battery, which is kind of a rough and tumble existence. And I landed at the field artillery school. They taught me how to get on stage, through murder boards, and teach the classes about artillery tactics, calling in artillery fire, and advising the infantry. And it was just my luck that I got a class full of West Point graduates. I graduated from a school that didn't even have a cardinal direction, and there I was teaching West Point graduates, some of the smartest kids in the country. And we played Stump the Chump for six months. I probably could only answer, in the beginning, one out of every five questions they asked me, but by the end I got adept at it.

So, it's not that I'm afraid of questions, but I want you to read the memos. Everybody will get a copy of the memos, work with your sections, divisions, offices, whatever you call them. And then, next week we will have a town hall, where we will ask questions. I'm not sure how you do it here, but I don't take filtered questions. Okay? I don't read the questions beforehand, and decide I'm going to answer them or I don't say that, you know, I don't want to take that question. Obviously, there's some filtering that has to be done because people may ask outlandish questions about something that has nothing to do with FEMA, okay. But, as long as there are questions that have to do about FEMA and the direction we are going, particularly in light of the two action memos that I– were released today, I will answer the questions, OK. But most of the questions that would be asked today would be questions mostly garnered from concern about the future. Read the memos first and then we will have a session where you can ask and I will answer questions.

Okay, even if they are stump the chump. Was that 15 minutes? 12? I was hoping for 10. Okay. I will tell you, I don't usually start things out with it's an honor or anything like that. I've laid brick, and while I didn't really lay the brick, I mixed the mortar. I wasn't good enough to lay the brick, and I carried the brick to the dudes on the scaffolding who are usually screaming for more brick and more scaffolding. I've washed dishes before. Me and Hobart, we spend a lot of late nights together. Hobart is the washing machine, by the way, in a restaurant. Um, I built houses. I have my own company. Bottom line, is it's a job for me. It is an honor to be here. This is a large organization. This is unwieldy beast. This is a challenge. And I do appreciate that both President Trump and Secretary Noam and Corey Lewandowski had the confidence in me to send me here to lead this organization. Thank you.

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The Oregonian/OregonLive reported on an internal email from SAIF CEO and President Chip Terhune confirming the shooting at his home in Lake Oswego. “At around 4 a.m., I heard what I thought were rocks thrown at my house, but discovered they were gunshots,” he reportedly wrote in the email. “An investigation is underway, and we don’t know if this was specifically targeted to me.”

Police provided Drop Site News with an image of the suspect, who is still at large. “The image below is believed to be the suspect, seen wearing all dark clothes with a possible hoodie or ski mask, and carrying a light-colored object in his hand,” the police said in a statement.

The shooting comes weeks after United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in Manhattan. It is unclear whether this incident is a copycat. SAIF did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but told local news it was aware of the incident.

SAIF is a state-chartered not-for-profit and the largest workers’ compensation agency in Oregon. Terhune has been CEO of SAIF since 2021, when his base salary was $500,000. While his exact salary is not reported, he has he regularly received raises and “incentive payments” of 35-40%, according to SAIF’s annual reports. In 2024, according to calculations from the 2021 base salary, Terhune’s salary was around $562,323 and his bonus amounted to something like $216,000.

Got tips? Reach Jessica Burbank on Signal at Kaburbank.77

According to SAIF’s website, Terhune previously worked for Medicision, a healthcare technology company, and was chief of staff for former Oregon governor Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat.

KGW8, a local news station in Oregon, reported Monday that SAIF received threatening emails from the purported gunman ahead of the shooting.

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Drop Site News has partnered with Jolt Films to offer our paid subscribers free access to The Bibi Files, a 2024 documentary from filmmaker, Alexis Bloom and producer, Alex Gibney.

Using never-seen-before interrogation footage, this investigation of Benjamin Netanyahu and his inner circle provides an unflinching gaze into the private world behind the headlines. Petty vanity and a sense of entitlement leads to corruption, and the unwillingness of the Netanyahus to give up power. The extreme right senses opportunity in Bibi’s weakness, and the dominos fall.

Access to this film is a benefit offered to our paid subscribers. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, click the link below to become one today and we’ll send you a link to the film.

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DOGE has gained access to FEMA’s core financial management system, according to sources within FEMA, and “has been embedded for days now.” On February 10, a representative of DOGE, Kyle Schutt, gained access to FEMA’s proprietary software that runs FEMA Grant Outcomes (FEMA GO), according to FEMA staff and communications reviewed by Drop Site. FEMA GO is the system that “controls disaster grants as well as non-disaster grants throughout the country and territories.” Schutt also asked for the source code to FEMA’s Integrated Financial Management and Information System (IFMIS), which all approved FEMA grant payments go through.

Though unconfirmed, sleuths on X found some evidence that Kyle Schutt is the programmer behind the DOGE application website for prospective employees. Sources within FEMA identified Kyle Schutt as the same person pictured in this GitHub profile, which is now a broken link.

In a meeting, Schutt asked employees about making deobligations in the FEMA system. Once funds are appropriated to a federal agency by Congress, deobligating them would effectively terminate them. The only way to get the money back, once deobligated, would be to go through the Treasury, sources within FEMA told Drop Site.

Now that the Trump administration and DOGE have been blocked by the courts from accessing the Treasury payment system, deobligating funds would be a new workaround—rendering appropriated funds unusable from within federal agencies.

At least four FEMA employees have been fired with letters that cite Article II of the Constitution, “executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” and “this termination is an exercise of that power.” A source within FEMA told Drop Site: “the four people fired were just following instructions as required by Congress.”

FEMA staff asked their bosses how employees were notified they were fired. “I don’t know,” an administrator replied. This led FEMA workers to wonder: if administrators are not responsible for the firings, who is? When asked, union representatives told FEMA employees they “didn’t think it was appropriate to mention” who fired the employees and how.

DOGE currently has FEMA employees tasked with combing through grants for DEI-related keywords for all grants dating back to 2021. DOGE’s list of “problematic" keywords include: Disadvantaged, Marginalized, Underserved, Environmental Justice, Climate, Equity, Equitable, Inclusion, Diversity, and Culture.

One source within FEMA confirmed to Drop Site that the funds being reviewed were appropriated by Congress. FEMA does not have discretion over how funds are used. Their job is to guarantee recipients—the most vulnerable populations in America—meet the requirements outlined by Congress.

As a consequence of DOGE gaining access to IFMIS, it now has access to personally identifiable information on migrants and disaster relief grant applicants. DOGE has access to Alien Numbers—called A-numbers within FEMA—for any migrants in the Shelter and Services Program (SSP). A-numbers help the agency track services allocated to migrants. A-numbers are like the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) version of a social security number. They can be used to trace any funds allocated by FEMA to migrants, pull personally identifiable information, and access final destination information in the CBP system.

The Disaster Relief Fund portion of FEMA has migrated their financial management to FEMA GO as well, meaning DOGE has the names, addresses, and social security numbers for anyone who has applied for disaster relief, according to sources within FEMA.

DOGE claims to be auditing FEMA. But sources within FEMA report that the DOGE employees are primarily “computer science guys” and do not understand the basics of financial management. In one instance, a coder brought in by DOGE confronted a FEMA staffer about mismanagement of funds. The FEMA staffer clarified that no funds were allocated during the time period in question and that the DOGE representative simply misunderstood the data.

FEMA official Stacey Street on Monday told employees to pause grants on Monday in apparent opposition to a federal judge. DOGE is also working with a FEMA IT Specialist and a grant director, according to Drop Site’s reporting. “Everyone is complying. Everyone is afraid to lose their jobs,” sources within FEMA told Drop Site. They describe the situation as FEMA employees following a “chain of command and that leads to DOGE even though they’re not part of it.”

Correction, February 13: The story previously said that FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund had migrated to IFMIS; it has been migrated to FEMA GO, which manages all grants.

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The issue is not that the 2024 election results show signs of being rigged, or illegitimate in any way. The issue is that some cybersecurity experts believe interference in the electronic voting system would be possible without detection—unless a simple audit is completed. It’s not an unreasonable ask: Such audits were conducted after the contested 2020 election and, after 2024, both North Carolina and Wisconsin launched them, though the results are not public.

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Dominion and ES&S software is used to count 70% of votes nationwide—including Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, all important swing states. The experts call for audits in swing states with paper ballots: Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The concern is this: We know through court documents that copies of the Dominion voting system in Georgia were made by technicians hired by attorneys representing Donald Trump in his quest to question the 2020 election. A similar probe took place in Michigan; those court proceedings, concerning security breaches of ES&S systems, are expected in 2025.

CISA, also known as America’s cyber defense agency, is one of the many agencies under threat of defunding by the Trump administration. CISA is housed within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). During Kristi Noem’s Homeland Security Secretary confirmation hearing, she expressed, “CISA needs to be much more effective, smaller, much more nimble.”

On November 13, 2024, a small team of computer scientists and election security experts sent a letter to Kamala Harris describing the serious security gaps that may have threatened the integrity of the election—and have the potential to affect future national elections if they are not addressed. Copies of the voting system software—like those made by the team of Trump operatives in 2021–could be used to determine vulnerabilities and “develop malware designed to be installed with minimal physical access to voting equipment by unskilled accomplices to manipulate vote counts.” Again, there is no actual evidence this happened during the 2024 election—but the point is that “under the current circumstances when massive software breaches are known and documented, recounts are necessary and appropriate to remove all potential doubt and to set an example for security best practices in all elections.”

This group of experts has no part in a duty to warn letter sent to Kamala Harris and later debunked by Snopes. That first letter fueled conspiracy theories surrounding the 2024 election results. This November 13th letter, by contrast, explicitly states there is no evidence of fraud; the issue is that “massive software breaches are known and documented,” the experts argue. That is why the group insists “recounts are necessary and appropriate.”

Unless the electronic vote is cross checked with paper ballots, it would be easy for an attack to go undetected, Duncan Buell Ph.D. told Drop Site News. “If they were to insert a hack, they would also insert the code that would delete the hack on the way out the door and we would never, ever see it.” he said. Buell, an author on the letter and Chair Emeritus in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, continued: “I'm thinking of, you know, nation state actors, the Koreans, possibly even a couple of Russian companies that do this kind of thing.”

The letter builds off the recommendation by CISA to conduct post-election audits of physical ballots. On June 3, 2022, CISA released an advisory detailing Dominion’s security vulnerabilities and what election officials can do to “reduce the risk of exploitation of these vulnerabilities.” The advisory concludes with the following recommendation:

Specifically, for each election, election officials should… Conduct rigorous post-election tabulation audits of the human-readable portions of physical ballots and paper records, to include reviewing ballot chain of custody and conducting voter/ballot reconciliation procedures. These activities are especially crucial to detect attacks where the listed vulnerabilities are exploited such that a barcode is manipulated to be tabulated inconsistently with the human-readable portion of the paper ballot.

Cait Conley, a senior advisor at CISA, told Drop Site that "CISA releases dozens of advisories each year regarding software vulnerabilities in all kinds of products. We have no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited and no evidence that they have affected election results in any election, including 2022 or 2024. We develop security guidance for election systems and these recommendations and practices include physical security measures, proper chain of custody, rigorous post-election audits, and pre-and-post-election validation procedures. These measures help identify vulnerabilities in voter registration and election processes that mitigate the associated risks in both the physical and cyber space."

The relationship between CISA and election administrators varies across states. In Georgia, Chief Operating Officer at the Secretary of State office, Gabriel Sterling, spoke to this in his Curling v. Raffensperger testimony.

Q: Do you or do you not — as the most senior official here in the Secretary’s office, do you or do you not rely on CISA to any degree to help you determine appropriate cybersecurity protocols as one of the key factors you identified in election security?

Sterling: Do we rely on them? Rely implies that whatever they say you do. We do not rely on them that way. They inform our decision-making by their own suggestions and basic information of cybersecurity for systems across the country, which vary greatly.

Following the 2020 election, Trump and his lawyers began a rogue probe into whether there had been voter fraud in Georgia and Michigan. To be clear, cyber security experts, including some of the authors on the November 13th letter, see the 2020 election as the most secure election we have had. The 2020 “Big Lie” conspiracies actually led to widespread post-election audits, which confirmed the accuracy of the election outcome.

But, on January 7, 2021—two months after Trump’s loss and the day after the storming of the Capitol on January 6—Trump operatives gained access to Dominion Voting Systems software in a move that has since been scrutinized by Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis. Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s attorneys who was indicted alongside the former and current president, hired a team of data experts to copy voting system software in Georgia.

Court records of emails between Powell and the firm, Sullivan Strickler, show they were hired to collect what they could from “Election/Voting machines and systems.” Video surveillance captured the team at the Coffee County Elections Office. Sullivan Strickler reported their work was successful, and everyone was helpful. Court documents show Sullivan Strickler then shared copies of EMS servers, Tabulation Systems, a “Dominion supplied laptop,” ballot images, and more. (More details are further down in the piece for people who want the extremely detailed backstory here.)

“The threat posed by the theft of voting system software is a serious one, yet it has been conspicuously under-acknowledged by both parties,” Marilyn Marks explained to Drop Site. The lack of action has “left voters in the dark about the shocking vulnerabilities in the system, left wide-open for exploitation.”

Marks spearheaded the Curling v. Kemp lawsuits against Georgia’s election officials to remove unreliable touch screen voting systems, and is the Executive Director of Coalition for Good Governance, a non-partisan non-profit dedicated to evidence-based elections and government transparency.

“We know the entire system was taken. I won't use the word stolen. That's a little litigious, but taken from Coffee County by supporters of the losing candidate in 2020. And everything was put up on the web and they don’t even really know who downloaded it,” Buell said. “My concern with both the ES&S and Dominion leaks is that the bad actors that we have to assume have access to this code are probably pretty good.”

The team of experts, which also includes David Jefferson Ph.D., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Election Integrity Foundation; Susan Greenhalgh, Senior Advisor for Election Security at Free Speech For People; Chris Klaus, Chief Executive Officer of Fusen World; William John Malik, Malik Consulting, LLC; Peter G. Neumann Ph.D., Chief Scientist, SRI International Computer Science Lab; and Professor John E. Savage, Ph.D, An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Brown University, calls on Kamala Harris to initiate a hand recount of physical ballots in Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Marks told Drop Site the goal of the recount is “to ensure the outcome accurately reflects the will of the people.”

The copied software from Georgia is not only still being used -- it is the same software voting systems rely on across the country. Dominion systems are used in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. While there is no evidence the ES&S software was copied or manipulated, there is evidence voting tabulators manufactured by ES&S were accessed by unauthorized personnel. It is unknown what, if any, security updates have been made to voting systems since the breaches. Drop Site reached out to both ES&S and Dominion for comment. ES&S did not answer whether the software in Michigan is identical across other states relying on ES&S voting systems. Dominion did not respond.

In fact, the majority of ballots cast in the U.S. are counted by Dominion and ES&S machines.

These figures were outlined in the letter by Free Speech for People to Harris, and are the result of Verified Voting’s regular election data analysis.

On September 30, 2024, cybersecurity expert Clay Parikh went through a step-by-step demonstration on how to obtain and decrypt Dominion voting systems’ passwords during court testimony in the DeKalb GOP v Raffensperger case. Parikh revealed that Dominion has a hard-coded administrator password that is the same on every Dominion system he has looked at, and has not been changed since at least 2010. When asked what could be done with an admin password, Parikh replied “You could basically do anything you wanted to.”

Marilyn Marks points out that “Democrats have been reluctant to draw attention to the issue, fearing it might suppress voter turnout.” On the other side of the aisle, “Republicans have avoided addressing the troubling reality that senior allies of Trump authorized access to and distribution of this software in 2021 as part of a coordinated effort leading up to the 2024 election.”

Drop Site reached out to Secretaries of State offices for comment on whether the steps to mitigate identified security vulnerabilities outlined by CISA in 2022 were addressed prior to voting in the 2024 election, and whether or not the recommended audit of physical ballots recommended by CISA is underway. They have yet to hear back from officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada.

Even in Wisconsin, where state law requires the completion of a post-election audit of all voting systems, the results have not been published. The city of Kenosha put out a press release that simply reports their audit was complete as of November 25, 2024, and no discrepancies have been found. It finishes with a link labeled “Information about audits generally can be found here” which renders a 404 error.

The North Carolina State Board of elections responded with the following link, saying, “our canvass documents, including the post-election audit reports, are available here.” However, the page is not publicly accessible. Clicking on the link brings up a window prompting a login. When asked about how the potential ES&S software was accessed during the breach, and if any related security vulnerabilities had been addressed prior to early voting in 2024, NCSBE told Drop Site: “We are looking into this and will get back to you.”

That’s the story if you have time. But we have more details—including the tick-tock of how the Trump team acquired copies of Dominion software—below.

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The Breach: A Timeline

Georgia and Dominion

On January 7, 2021, according to evidence presented in court, a team of computer scientists from Sullivan Strickler data solutions was hired by attorneys for Trump to make forensic copies of Georgia’s statewide voting system after Trump made claims that the vote in Georgia had been rigged. That morning, Chief Operating Officer of Sullivan|Strickler Paul Maggio emailed Sidney Powell, “Per Jim Penrose’s request, we are on our way to Coffee County Georgia to collect what we can from the Election/Voting machines and systems.” Jim Penrose is a cybersecurity expert with 27 years of experience, including at the NSA and CIA.

Security footage of the Coffee County Elections Office reveals that at 12:37 p.m., Cathy Latham, then chair of the County Republican Party, was with Maggio and two other people at the office. The court documents include photo stills of the surveillance footage, which show Coffee County’s election official Eric B. Chaney was present at the field office also on January 7, 2021. The latest timestamp on the surveillance footage stills is 6:19PM.

On January 8, 2021, Maggio wrote in an email, “Everything went smoothly yesterday with the Coffee County collection. Everyone involved was extremely helpful,” he informed Powell. “We are consolidating all of the data collected and will be uploading it to our secure site for access by your team.”

Maggio’s hard drive contained “forensic images of an election management system server.” The court obtained a list of IP Addresses that have downloaded and email addresses that have accessed what Sullivan and Strickler obtained from the Coffee County office. The contents include: ballot images, EMS servers, a folder named ‘Dominion-supplied laptop’, Tabulation System, and flash drives from the election office. Court exhibits also include photos of a precinct tabulator, compact flash cards, thumb drives used to program tabulators, touchscreen voting machines, a computer used to check in voters and a laptop computer supplied by Dominion.

The voting security expert, Kevin Skoglund, told the court, “after a review of the documentary evidence” he concluded that in “2021, the security of Georgia’s voting system was breached in Coffee County on at least three occasions: January 7, January 18-19, January 25-29.” He described this as, “by any measure a consequential breach of Georgia’s election security.” Skoglund explained that the copied software from the Coffee County election office “includes protected software from almost every component of Georgia’s election system.”

On January 19, 2021, two men hired by President Trump’s attorneys discussed what to do with the data and software. “Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close,” former NSA official Jim Penrose texted Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan. The texts obtained by CNN go on to reference the Georgia runoff. Penrose said, “We only have until Saturday to decide if we are going to use this report to try to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we hold it for a bigger moment…”

Sullivan|Strickler claimed its work was done under the direction of attorneys, and did not deny their work making copies of the Dominion voting system in Georgia. In August 2022, the attorney for Sullivan|Strickler, Amanda Clark Palmer, made the following statement: “Sullivan|Strickler was retained by and took direction from licensed, practicing attorneys to preserve and forensically copy the Dominion Voting Machines used in the 2020 election … The firm had no reason to believe that, as officers of the court, these attorneys would ask or direct Sullivan|Strickler to do anything either improper or illegal.”

Michigan and ES&S

Jim Penrose and Doug Logan are implicated in a similar scheme that unfolded in Michigan between January and June 2021. Paul Maggio of Sullivan|Strickler was hired to help again, and the work in Michigan was referenced in the same email chain entered into evidence in Georgia. In coordination with former state Rep. Daire Rendon, and attorneys Matt DePerno and Stephanie Lambert Juantila, Maggio’s team took ES&S equipment—breaking open the security seals on voting tabulators—according to an investigation conducted by the Michigan Attorney General’s office.

Two letters, both dated August 5, 2022, detail some of the findings. One was sent to Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson by Deputy Chief Attorney General, Christina M. Grossi. The other letter was a petition to appoint a special prosecutor, sent by Danielle Hagaman-Clark, the Criminal Trials and Appeals Division Chief.

Grossi’s letter reveals the investigation found unauthorized access to ES&S voting systems that “occurred between the dates of March 11, 2021, and late June of 2021.” Hagman-Clark’s petition details the following: “5 tabulators were taken to hotels and/or AIRBNB’s in Oakland County where Lenberg, Cotton, Penrose and Logan broke into the tabulators and performed ‘tests’ on the equipment. It was determined during the investigation that DePerno was present at a hotel room during such ‘testing.’”

On April 7, 2021, a subpoena was issued to Verizon “to produce detailed information concerning specific devices.” Verizon produced the modem ID numbers on the devices, revealing they were ES&S tabulators. Deputy Attorney General Grossi wrote: “These ID numbers are those of voting tabulators manufactured by ES&S.”

Deputy Attorney General Grossi wrote that in March 2022, “ES&S subject matter experts confirmed that there was an attempt to access the internal components by unauthorized personnel.” ES&S then conducted an analysis on their equipment and “found no evidence” of “any software or firmware manipulation of the device” nor “that any of the secure, encrypted USB thumb drives were subject to any unauthorized access or any software/firmware manipulation.”

ES&S told Drop Site: “To our knowledge, there is no evidence that any ES&S proprietary election software from Michigan has been acquired or shared illegally”—though, as Buell pointed out, such evidence wouldn’t necessarily exist.

ES&S told Drop Site about changes made since 2021. “All seven ES&S customer counties in Michigan, along with many other U.S. customers, have upgraded their election management software since 2022 as part of a normal upgrade process,” they said. ES&S did not specify which customers upgraded their software, nor what has been changed. “ES&S systems are also paper-based systems, with a voter-verified paper record which allows jurisdictions to perform tangible and statistically valid post-election audits.”

While the legality of accessing voting systems has been a litigious topic, the alleged unauthorized tampering with ES&S tabulators in 2021 is expected to be explored in court.

How to Hack a Voting Machine

In 2017, a cybersecurity and voting system expert demonstrated during court testimony how to take control of one of the Georgia voting machines without violating any security protocols, or damaging the “tamper evident security seals.” Dr. Alex Halderman used a ballpoint pen to reach a button within the screen, a fake voter card, and a USB device connected to a printer. He was able to rewrite the touchscreen’s code with "Super User Access.” The civil case, Curling v. Raffensperger, focused on vulnerabilities with Georgia’s voting touchscreen systems. In September 2018, the court required that Georgia replace 27,000 voting machines. They were replaced with Dominion touchscreen systems with similar vulnerabilities, which led to the case being revisited in a 17-day bench trial January-February 2024.

Dr. Halderman provided a report detailing issues with the voting systems in Georgia. The redacted version is public, but the full version does not sound different from what Halderman shared in court. An individual familiar with the report shared the following with Drop Site: “the unredacted report basically said, here are the 10 or 12 vulnerabilities that a reasonable senior undergraduate computer science student would ask about in a computer security class… and here's how we attack each one of them successfully without really much effort.”

In a deposition for Curling v. Raffensperger on February 11, 2022, Michael Barnes, the Director of the Election Center for the Georgia Secretary of State, was asked the following: “Can you identify one cybersecurity election expert that has endorsed the current Georgia system as a reliable voting system?” Barnes's response was straightforward: “I cannot.”

On September 30, 2024, Clay Parikh demonstrated how to hack into Georgia’s voting systems during testimony in the DeKalb GOP v. Raffensperger case. Parikh, a witness for the Dekalb county GOP, provided a tutorial before the court that was live streamed on YouTube. It is still available to replay on Judge Scott McAfee’s page.

Parikh accessed the system with an AES decryption tool on a public website. Parikh testified, “The massive amounts of vulnerabilities on this system, the poor configuration of the database itself, even if you encrypted that database, somebody mid-level could take over.” He called this an “egregious violation of the basic security principles.”

Simple vulnerabilities in Dominion and ES&S systems have gone unaddressed, Buell said—“both Dominion and ES&S have not bulletproofed their software, in my opinion, to make it hard to make mistakes.” In many states, a paper ballot is filled out by coloring in a bubble next to the name of the candidate the voter choses. When the ballot is scanned, the machine is not reading the ballot as a human would. Professor Buell explained, “The barcode is not ‘candidate and contest name,’ it is the XY coordinates of where the bubble would be for that candidate and contest on a hand marked paper ballot.” If the location of candidates on a paper ballot were misplaced, that would create a false read—an issue that has been known to happen at least once, including in Antrim County, Michigan in 2020. Currently, it is not a regular practice for the paper ballots to be checked against a county-level “cheat sheet” to ensure the layout of candidates is consistent across all precincts, and therefore that the machines read the ballots accurately.

Prior to the 2024 election, issues with systems from ES&S and a third company, iVotronics, have produced double-counting in South Carolina and New Jersey. “The data, the tallies come back on a flash drive. A flash drive is inserted in the county headquarters central computer and the tallies are uploaded.” But there is no official log of the serial number from a flash drive already counted. “So when you insert it a second time, it's happy to upload the tallies again,” Buell explained. When a flash drive already counted is inserted, “there should be a table of serial numbers and when you upload something already there, there should be a pop up window that says ‘Are you sure?’ And apparently that doesn't happen either with ES&S or with Dominion.”

Recount or Post-Election Audit?

While recounts can be both long and costly, every vote does not need to be counted by hand to provide assurance to voters. A statistically significant random sample of ballots can assure voters the results are reliable, by showing the voting systems’ count matches the physical ballots.

An audit would require a hand count of less than one-third the number of votes counted in the 2020 Maricopa County recount. Focusing on swing states recommended in the letter, a reasonable audit would rely on a hand count of 698,777 total votes—a random sample of 175,402 ballots in Wisconsin, 179,030 in Michigan, 164,182 ballots in Nevada, and 180,163 in Pennsylvania. An audit of this size would provide a high level of statistical significance (p<0.01), or a 99% confidence-level, with a margin of error of less than half a percent (+/-0.3%).

The group behind the letter views post-election audits as something that should be standard practice “binding risk-limiting audits (RLAs) or hand recounts should be routine for all elections, especially when the stakes are high and the results are close.”

Regular post-election audits not only deter bad actors, they identify any unusual results in the event of vote count manipulation. Machines that counted the ballots could be assessed for flaws, investigations completed, and election security strengthened for future elections. Hand counts could then be completed to confirm the true results. Wanting votes counted fast is fine, but ensuring the count is accurate is necessary to ensure every election in the United States reflects the will of the people.

Finally, how did Dominion and ES&S come to dominate the voting systems market? ES&S lobbied public officials to invest. So did Dominion. ES&S gave sales pitches across the country; Duncan Buell happened to be in attendance at a presentation in Greensboro, North Carolina. “There were lobbyists who were saying that the paper ballots would cost more than buying the equipment,” he said. Buell did the math; the data showed otherwise. It would take “6 elections countywide for 10 years before the costs meet… Paper is just so much cheaper. That’s not what you hear from the vendors.” Not only are the electronic vote machines vulnerable to cyberattacks and present new opportunities for miscounting, they are more costly than alternatives.

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Yet the wildly popular social media app’s future remains unclear. The Biden administration won’t force Tik Tok to go offline before the Sunday deadline, leaving its fate in the hands of Donald Trump, who will have unilateral power to take down social media sites thanks to the law. On Friday, Trump said via Truth Social that he had spoken to Xi Jinping, the leader of China, about a range of issues, including Tik Tok. Shou Chew, the platform’s CEO, also reportedly plans to attend Trump’s inauguration.

Since Tik Tok’s not getting nuked yet, follow Jessica Burbank and Ryan Grim for more news. And be sure to follow Drop Site on Twitter for the fast-moving developments on the Gaza-ceasefire negotiations

Protecting youths from having their precious data harvested by China and being manipulated by CCP operatives, Congress moved to prohibit Americans from visiting the number one site in the world, Tik Tok. But the “Tik Tok ban” bill goes much further than prohibiting Bytedance, Tik Tok’s parent company, from controlling the app in the United States. The measure gives new power to the president to determine which social media platforms from around the world are permitted in the United States.

Signed into law in April of last year and upheld by the Supreme Court on January 17, H.R.7521, not only prohibits Tik Tok starting January 19, 2025—it gives the president authority to prohibit any foreign-owned social networking app through a simple two-step process.

First, the president must submit a public report to Congress “describing the specific national security concern involved,” along with a classified annex of “what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.” Then, at least 30 days later, the president will issue “a public notice” declaring the application is owned by a foreign adversary, and that it presents “a significant threat to the national security of the United States.”

Ahead of the ban, Tik Tok’s U.S. based competitors actively lobbied for the bill. The strategy for large tech firms and social media companies has been to rid the market of competition, known as “catch and kill.” Facebook’s parent company, Meta, paid a consulting firm, Targeted Victory, to run a nationwide media campaign bashing Tik Tok. According to internal emails, leaked to the Washington Post in March of 2022, the firm was hired to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using.”

Tik Tok was only the bill’s first target. H.R.7521, the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” specifically determines “ByteDance, Ltd.; TikTok” is a “foreign adversary controlled application.” In accordance with the bill, it will be unlawful to “distribute, maintain, or update” Tik Tok in the United States 180 days after the bill’s enactment. Unless, of course, Tik Tok is under new ownership and determined by “the President… through an interagency process” to no longer be controlled by a foreign adversary.

The bill goes on to describe what other “foreign adversary controlled applications” will be prohibited in the United States. The bill is sweeping, prohibiting any “covered company" that is “controlled by a foreign adversary” and is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States.”

As for what constitutes a “covered company,” H.R.7521’s language makes clear that the intention is to allow the government to target social media platforms. Under H.R.7521, a covered company is “an entity that operates”—even through a parent company—“a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application,” with the following criteria:

1. In which users can “create an account or profile to generate, share, and view text, images, videos, real-time communications, or similar content”;

2. Has over “1,000,000 monthly active users”;

3. It “enables 1 or more users to generate or distribute content” and;

4. The application or website “enables 1 or more users to view content generated by other users…”

Essentially, the bill describes a social media platform. The criteria is easily met by any platform where users can interact: live video gaming, a single-video stream with a comment section, or applications for group messaging.

Days away from the Tik Tok ban, users are desperate for a new platform to replace it. The massive influx of new users on the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, commonly called “Red Note,” has vaulted it to the number one spot among trending social media platforms in the App store. Ironically, Red Note may be bringing to the U.S. the exact kind of Chinese foreign influence legislators feared Tik Tok would.

The cultural exchange on Red Note between users in China and the U.S. has been lively. Much of the conversation has revolved around debunking propaganda from both sides. One user, Tiakatriina, posted: “Chinese people, can you tell me what’s something western media tell us about China, what’s totally incorrect in reality?”

A conversation about the validity of reports in the U.S. on the social credit system in China went viral. One user based in China, 天天想提前退休, posted “Who spread the rumor of social credit thing in China?” Another user commented: “3 letter agencies.”

An exchange over ambulance costs also went viral. One user in Shanghai posted a video breaking down the cost of an ambulance ride in the city: about $50. An American user commented that her ambulance ride in the U.S. cost her roughly $9,000.

The conversation carried over to Tik Tok, where one post garnered over 1.5 million views and over 400,000 likes, saying: “Someone in the comments of Red Note asked me if we really had to pay for an ambulance in America, or if that was just their government’s propaganda.”

Unlike Tik Tok US, which is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Red Note is headquartered in Shanghai, China, and owned by Xingyin Information Technology. Given Red Note’s location and ownership, it is possible an incoming president determines Red Note to be a threat to national security, subjecting the platform to the same fate as Tik Tok.

Donald Trump, who supported the ban as president, reversed that stance and campaigned on saving Tik Tok. Trump’s pick for national security advisor, Mike Waltz, told Fox News: “We will put measures in place to keep TikTok from going dark,” with the goal of buying Trump “time to keep Tik Tok going.”

There is a process to challenge “any action, finding, or determination under this act,” within 165 days of presidential determination. A petition can be filed exclusively with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This is the main appellate court at the federal level, and is regarded as the second highest court in the land, directly below the U.S. Supreme Court.

H.R.7521 places a shocking amount of power in the hands of the President, allowing them full power to determine which foreign-owned social media platforms live or die in the United States. The hyperfocus on Tik Tok may be a red herring, distracting from the sweeping impact of the measure: Ushering in a new era where the commander-in-chief decides who Americans are able to connect with around the world—potentially sowing deeper divisions among the U.S. and its foreign adversaries.

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The Los Angeles Fire Department knew it was severely underfunded long before this fire. “We don't have enough firefighters and medics, we don't have enough fire engines, we don't have enough trucks and ambulances in the field,” Freddy Escobar, an LAFD Captain II told the city during his testimony at a budget hearing on May 1, 2024. “And we don't have the equipment and staffing that we need to respond to half a million emergency calls for service every year,” added Escobar, who is union president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles City (UFLAC).

The captain explained that demand for fire and rescue had doubled while resources dwindled. “The LAFD has fewer firefighters and medics today than we had 15 years ago, but our emergency calls for service has increased by more than 50% during that same time,” testified Escobar.

As of May 2, 2024, 86 emergency vehicles were out of commission in Los Angeles because funds had not been allocated to hire sheet metal workers and mechanics to fix them. This includes: 40 fire engines (which carry water and are used to fight fires), 36 ambulances, and 10 fire trucks (which carry equipment, like ladders and rescue supplies). As Captain Chuong Ho testified during a budget hearing, “It just makes no sense to have million dollar fire trucks and engines taken out of service and sidelined because we don't have enough mechanics to keep them running.”

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As multiple fires engulfed entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles this week, a debate over the Los Angeles Fire Department budget has unfolded on social media. All things told, a larger LAFD budget would have made little if any difference in the enormous scale of the fires – at least four of them at once – which have been driven so far and so quickly by the famous Santa Ana winds. But the ability of the Fire Department to act as first responders, to evacuate and rescue people quickly, has a direct connection to the budget.

“We're at the breaking point where our firefighters can no longer do more with less,” testified Fire Chief Kristin M. Crowley, in a budget hearing at city hall concerning the 2024-25 fiscal year. She made clear the LAFD was struggling: “This service delivery model is no longer sustainable.”

“Stations are outdated and ill-equipped, technology meant to protect our first responders like PFAS extractors sit waiting to be installed, and critical fire response equipment goes without maintenance,” testified Councilmember Traci Park, during the May 2, 2024 budget hearing.

Focusing on the topline budget numbers tends to overlook the granular issues. The online debate about the LAFD budget took off when Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the LA Times, tweeted that LA Mayor Karen Bass had cut the department’s budget. “Fires in LA are sadly no surprise, yet the Mayor cut LA Fire Department’s budget by $23M,” he posted. “Competence matters… Follow @latimes for live coverage.”

A debate over the numbers flared up. City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who serves as chair of the budget committee, was cited by Politico, saying, “In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle.” It is hard to know what Blumenfeld’s office was referring to, as no budget documents reflect this figure.

The LAFD will likely go over budget this year, with an estimated $920 million total expenditure in fiscal year 2024-25. However, this is nowhere near a $50 million increase compared to the 2023-24 total expenditure at $903.8 million — they had to spend $66 million more than the city budgeted for.

City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s office confirmed to Drop Site News, “LAFD’s operating budget did get reduced by $17.6M.” Despite the LAFD’s appeal to the city for more staff, “part of that reduction included 61 total positions (civilian) being eliminated,” according to Mejia’s office. Drop Site News reached out to Councilmember Bob Blumenfield for comment but has yet to hear back.

The Fire Chief mentioned the $17.6 million year-over-year budget cut in July and December. The approved LAFD 2024-25 budget, authored by Bass, is $819.6 million, compared to $837.2 million in 2023-24.

That also means this year’s LAFD budget is $84.3 million less than last year’s total expenditure. As a result, Chief Crowley expects the department will be forced to spend over budget again to meet needs for staffing, fleet maintenance, and purchase new vehicles — all while sacrificing when it comes to responding to large-scale emergencies.

Chuong Ho, LAFD Captain II and UFLAC Vice President, testified against the proposed budget cuts on May 2, 2024, and asked city council to “add back $5.8 million” for overtime. The department currently relies on overtime hours because it is short-staffed. “Until we can finally and properly staff our fire department, we need to utilize these v-staffed [variably staffed] hours to provide coverage for these resources,” Ho said. Whatever was budgeted for overtime, this crisis will push it far beyond that figure.

The proposed budget deleted “73 vacant non-firefighter civilian positions in the Department” and transferred funding from salary accounts to the overtime pay accounts. These non-firefighter civilian positions include sheet metal workers, welders, and mechanics, who keep the fleet of LAFD vehicles operational. In May, Captain Ho reiterated how important these vacant non-fire fighter positions are: “Members of this committee need to know that fire trucks, engines, and ambulances are consistently in need of repairs and services.”

While the overtime pay account is underfunded, pulling funds from critical supply and maintenance positions may mean the firefighters working overtime lack enough trucks to drive in times of high demand.

Some online users interpreted the transfer of funds from staffing accounts to overtime pay as a good sign: “The budget changes to firefighter salaries and overtime reflect ACTUAL the staffing: Firefighters like overtime pay!” The reality is, critical staff positions were cut, and while firefighters may ”like“ overtime pay, the reliance on overtime hours was a major concern for the LAFD during the budget hearings.

Councilmember Park clarified: “While this budget makes investments in recruitment, we are still nowhere near a sustainable level of sworn personnel to be able to respond to any emergency at a moment's notice,” the district 11 representative continued, “the already existing staffing crisis is why, sadly, LAFD has to rely in part on variable overtime to plug operational and coverage gaps necessary to keeping all of Los Angeles safe.”

Notably, the account for overtime pay was not just a concern for the LAFD. The City Clerk’s Chief Legislative Analyst, Sharon Tso, flagged the issue in a memo sent to city hall on April 30, 2024 – before budget hearings began. In the report, the fire department made up four of the twelve “potentially underfunded” accounts:

Tso noted the LAFD spent an estimated $52.9 million in 2023-24 on sick leave, overtime pay, field equipment repair, and operating supplies. The 2024-25 proposed budget from Mayor Bass only allocated $18.8 million for those same accounts. If expenditure patterns remain the same this fiscal year, the LAFD would be short an estimated $34.1 million.

The city council’s modification of the proposed budget met some, but certainly not all, of the LAFD’s critical needs outlined in the May hearings. The LAFD reduced their asks to: $5.8 million for overtime accounts to pay current staff, and 149 sworn and 16 civilian positions to be reinstated. The LAFD managed to claw back only $5.3 million from the proposed $23 million cut. In the end, councilman Tim McOsker told Drop Site News, four of the requested 11 positions to rehabilitate the old rigs were restored.

The LAFD is feeling the effects of underfunding. Less than a month ago, on December 17, 2024, Crowley’s office sent a memo to Mayor Bass, warning of “unprecedented operational challenges due to the elimination of critical civilian positions and a $7 million reduction in Overtime Variable Staffing Hours (V-Hours).”

On December 4, 2024, the Los Angeles Board of Fire Commissioners warned that the cuts have “severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires, earthquakes, hazardous material incidents, and large public events.”

Still, confusion around the previous year’s one-time expenses led one X user to conclude this year’s budget cut was negligible. In fiscal year 2023-24, “the department spent $12 million on new SCBAs because the old set expired. This was not a recurring expense!” suggesting the LAFD simply would not have additional equipment purchases to make in the following year. This is not the case.

In reality, the $12 million budgeted for the Self Contained Breathing Apparatuses (SCBAs) did not even cover half of the required SCBAs in 2023-24. In total, the LAFD used $30 million for 2,500 new SCBAs. They had to spend $18 million over-budget to cover the purchase, dipping into the city-wide Unappropriated Balance (UB) account – a prime example of the LAFD’s chronic underfunding.

With emergency calls on the rise and equipment outdated, the department has more large one-time purchases to make in 2024-25. The LAFD will again have to spend over budget to meet their needs. In a July memo, Chief Crowley addressed the likely overspending, with total expenditure estimated at $920 million in 2024-25. The chief emphasized that this year’s budget cut deleted, “onetime funding in various spending accounts.” As a result, the over budget spending will include, “new fleet purchases,” a one-time expense that is likely to exceed $50 million.

Politico wrote, citing Blumenfield, that the fire budget was cut because, “The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November.”

Mejia’s office explained that the out-of-budget spending would come from a city-wide “Unappropriated Balance (UB)” account for payroll reconciliation—almost $105 million in funds intended to cover payroll changes and are not specific to any department.

And, Mejia’s office said, the Fire Department has not actually been given those funds yet. “Our City’s accounting system shows no indication that funds have been transferred to cover the raises in the LAFD MOU/labor agreement recently approved on November 5, 2024.” Mejia’s office explained that as of “January 9, 2025, only $35M has been transferred.” That money was transferred “mainly to cover the city’s liability payouts, litigation, and outside counsel expenses.” Mejia’s office concluded: “We do not see funds transferred for the Fire Department’s raises.”

The fire department's resources and personnel are spread thin partially because of the homeless crisis in Los Angeles. “We are on the frontlines of this homeless crisis,” said Captain Freddy Escobar. “Fifty percent of the fires we respond to come from our homeless population. And the city reportedly spends $1.3 billion each year on homeless programs, but the LAFD is scheduled to receive a $23 million cut? This makes absolutely no sense,” he told the budget committee back in May.

While the LAFD is strapped for cash as fires burn throughout Los Angeles county, the city has spent less than half of their homeless budget, with $701 million unspent as of November 14, 2024. So far, the city spent $599 million of the $1.3 billion budgeted. City Controller Mejia's office is the first-ever to formally track City homeless spending.

This week, Mayor Karen Bass was given the opportunity to address the controversy surrounding the LAFD budget. Bass was questioned by SkyNews on the subject, while traveling home from Ghana. Bass responded with palpably awkward silence.

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In September 2023, California passed a law to bring fast food workers’ minimum wage up from $16 to $20 an hour. A flurry of reports predictably followed from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, Employment Policies Institute, and the Hoover Institution claiming that restaurants and other businesses were already laying off workers based on the new law.

The Hoover Institution, a think tank with $879.8 million in total assets, continued to dig in against AB 1228, publishing multiple articles over the past year attempting to pin “lost jobs” on rising wages. At the heart of the research are three major claims made by Lee Ohanian, an economist at UCLA and senior fellow at The Hoover Institution:

1. Government jobs account for 96.5% of job growth in California over 2.5 years,

2. California lost 410,000 jobs from February 2020-February 2024, and

3. California lost 10,000 jobs in the fast food sector since the minimum wage law was signed in September 2023.

All three claims are false, and the Hoover Institution has now had to retract six articles based on faulty research by Ohanian. The claims were first debunked by Invictus, an anonymous poster—using the same publicly available data that Ohanian used as source for his analysis. In reality,

1. Between January 2022 and June 2024, private-sector jobs accounted for the majority of job growth in California, at 77.8%

2. California did not lose any jobs between February 2020 and Feburary 2024; it actually gained 290,000 jobs

3. California’s fast food sector has seen consistent growth, both in terms of jobs and the total number of establishments, outpacing national averages.

Why is the Hoover Institution so committed to publishing articles they end up needing to retract? The think tank, which is part of Stanford University and is headed by former Secretary of State under George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, describes its economic research as, “aimed at developing solutions that foster economic freedom”—a euphemism for unbridled capitalism that leaves workers underpaid and overworked. Being part of the university shields the Hoover Institution from needing to reveal the amounts given by individual donors, but its board of overseers includes some of the biggest names in corporate America, including Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Mercer, and Harlan Crow—known for his relationship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

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Notably, the Hoover Institution has received grants from the Rescue California Education Foundation, headed by John Cox. Cox ran in California’s 2018 gubernatorial race against Gavin Newsom, who signed AB 1228 into law. Notably, Prager University received the same grant from Cox’s foundation in 2021. During his bid for governor in 2018, Cox said, “The real, true minimum wage ... should be zero. It should be set between the employer and the employee.”

Long before AB 1228 was introduced, the Hoover Institution regularly published articles insisting minimum wage increases cause job losses. And for years, Ohanian, who is also on the board of America First Policy, has been at the forefront of the narrative insisting minimum wage increases cause job losses in California, dating back to his 2008 article, “The Implications Of a Minimum Wage.” In 2019 he wrote, “Minimum Wage Laws Hurt Those They Claim to Help” and in 2022, “New California Law Will Cripple Its $20 Billion Fast-Food Industry.” While analysis shows that the fast-food industry growth in California has outpaced the rest of the country, Ohanian’s articles over the past year have attempted to argue the opposite, based on mixing apples and oranges of datasets.

In its 2024 fiscal year, “total operating expenditures were $113.1 million,” at The Hoover Institution. “Compensation for scholars and staff represents the largest portion of the operating budget, accounting for more than 70 percent of total expenses,” they noted in their annual report.

Drop Site News asked Invictus how much money is behind his operation, “As for my compensation, it has a lot of zeros in it. In fact, every number is a zero. It’s nil.” Invictus, who is known for debunking the claim that over 1 million jobs were added in a month under Reagan, sees himself as a kind of David to the goliath of conservative economic lobbyists. He regularly publishes analysis for The Big Picture, a finance blog run by Wealth Manager Barry Ritholtz, and his work has led to corrections being issued on analysis published by The Washington Post.

“I do it because the truth still matters to me and I believe there’s a tendency–much more on one side than the other–to see what misinformation can be successfully peddled without consequences or accountability,” said Invictus.

Indeed, looking at the repeated mistakes by Ohanian in detail, it appears the Hoover Institution is dedicated to publishing analyses that support its ideological goals, regardless of their integrity. Neither the Hoover Institution nor Ohanian replied to a request for comment.

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Claim 1: Government Jobs Account for 96.5% of Job Growth in California Over 2.5 Years

Ohanian published this claim in a study funded by the Hoover Institution in August: “Between January 2022 and June 2024, total California jobs grew by about 156,000, with government jobs accounting for 96.5 percent of that growth.” Bloomberg ran a story shortly after that reporting on his claims. In late November, this claim went viral. Posts on X, citing the Hoover Institution and repeating the 96.5% figure, have over 135,000 views. Other posts have echoed the false claim, unsourced, garnering over 735,000 views.

Bloomberg first ran a story reporting on the claims in Ohanian’s study on August 8, 2024. On November 26th, Katy Grimes, Editor for the California Globe, ran an article titled, “96.5% of New Jobs in California This Year Were Government Jobs,” with the accompanying subtitle, “Apparently California is already a Socialist state.”

Three days later, on November 29th, Invictus published his breakdown of Ohanian’s analysis, in which he corrected the record on California job numbers: California, he wrote, actually “added 523,700 private sector jobs over the period that Professor Ohanian claims they added only 5,400,” he wrote.

His numbers are consistent with data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), while Lee Ohanian’s are not. In his analysis, Ohanian made a very basic error: “The calculation for California private-sector jobs is derived from total jobs minus California government jobs,” he writes. For “total jobs,” he uses Current Population Statistics (CPS) data, while for “government jobs,” he uses Current Employment Statistics (CES) data.

The problem is that these two numbers come from completely different surveys and measure different things. CPS data are widely used to measure employment levels (how many people are working). By contrast, CES data are relied on to measure the total number of jobs in an economy. There are major differences between CPS and CES data. CPS counts unpaid family workers, while CES does not. CPS counts workers on leave without pay, while CES does not. CPS counts agricultural workers, but CES only captures non-farm payroll employees. CPS counts private household workers like nannies and teachers, CES does not. In one key difference, those holding multiple jobs are counted once by CPS, while CES counts each job individually.

Mixing CPS and CES data will not produce a result representative of reality. It’s the mathematical equivalent of a grocery store manager asking how many oranges are in stock, and the cashier deciding to subtract the amount of apples sold that day from the number of oranges in stock at the beginning of the day. Yet the computer system already has a clear count of oranges currently in stock that could have easily been used.

This December, Ohanian retracted his claim from August 7, 2024, that government jobs account for 96.5% of job growth in California over 2.5 years, from January 2022-June 2024.

Following Ohanian’s retraction, Bloomberg updated their story on December 12:

“Corrects article that ran Aug. 8, 2024, after the Hoover report cited in the story was corrected and updated by its author, who said he incorrectly interpreted employment data for the state. This version corrects the headline, the second paragraph and removes all references to the erroneous analysis, including a chart.”

One would expect that an economist working with BLS to be able to make this distinction. “I discuss innumeracy, incompetence, and bad faith all the time. Hard to know exactly what’s at play,” Invictus said.

Replicating Ohanian’s calculation with BLS data, as Invictus did, produces the same wrong answer.

First, take the CPS total employment level for January 2022. Subtract the CES count of government jobs from January 2022. That is how Ohanian got his number for total “private jobs” in California for January 2022. He repeated this again for June 2024. To assess how many “private jobs” California added over the 2.5 years, he subtracted the total “private jobs” in January 2022 from June 2024, to arrive at 5,416. Rounding this yields Ohanian’s exact number, 5,400.

This calculation is not only wrong – it is unnecessary; BLS directly releases numbers on total private sector jobs as a part of the CES data set. In January 2022, there were 14,867,500 total private jobs in California. The total for June 2024 is 15,390,500—an increase of 523,000 private sector jobs over 2.5 years.

Going a bit farther than Invictus, now: To get to 96.5% figure, it appears Ohanian subtracted the 5,416 “private jobs” from the total employment level change from January 2022 to June 2024 from the CPS dataset. The California employment level in January 2022 was 18,190,526, and 18,346,242 in June 2024, a difference of 155,716. It appears Ohanian then subtracted his false count of 5,416 private jobs, to arrive at 150,300. He treated this as government job growth. Then, he divided this by “total job growth,” or the total employees increase from the CPS data, 155,716. This produces an identical result: 0.965218, or 96.5%.

In reality, according to the CES data, private sector jobs accounted for 77.8% of job growth in California over 2.5 years, representing 523,000 of the 672,300 jobs added. No small error. “He was only off by a factor ~100x,” Invictus remarked.

Claim 2: California Lost 410,000 Jobs from February 2020-2024

On April 9, 2024, The Hoover Institution published another article by Lee Ohanian: “California Has Lost 410,000 Jobs. With a New Bill, More Could Be on the Way Out.” Again, Ohanian used the total employment figure from the CPS dataset and treated it as a measure of total jobs.

In February 2020, the California employment level was 18,732,265, and 18,321,648 in February 2024, a difference of 410,617. Again, the CPS data is not measuring actual jobs, so it should never be used for this calculation. The CES data shows a gain of 290,000 jobs from February 2020 to 2024.

After Invictus pointed out Ohanian’s misuse of BLS data from August, the Hoover Institution retracted this article as well, with the note that the data included, “was incorrectly identified and interpreted by the author and the original publication has been retracted to avoid any misinformation that can be attributed to the article.” Yet, the claim remains in circulation. The Independent Institute, a public policy research organization that, “adheres to the highest standards of independent scholarly inquiry,” also published Ohanian’s article, where it remains available under the original headline. The Independent Institute has not replied to a request for comment.

In this instance, Ohanian blamed the source data for his mistake. The body of the article now includes the following statement:

“This piece includes data from two Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) surveys, one based on a household survey that measures total job growth for California, and one based on a survey of non-farm establishments, which omits the self-employed and some other categories of employment, and which was mistakenly used to measure total national job growth. While the household survey data can be used to correct this error, the author’s post-publication opinion is that the household survey data are almost certainly understating job growth, both nationally and in California.”

Claim 3: California Lost 10,000 Jobs in the Fast Food Sector Since the Minimum Wage Law Was Signed In September

On March, 25, 2024, Wall Street Journal restaurant correspondent Heather Haddon reported that “California had 726,600 people working in fast-food and other limited-service eateries in January, down 1.3% from last September, when the state backed a deal for the increased wages.” In the months following the publication of Haddon’s article, Lee Ohanian based three separate articles on her reporting in April, June, and October.

But a decrease in jobs between September and January is not unusual—it’s expected. It happens every single year. Haddon failed to consider that employment levels fluctuate because of seasonal work on an annual basis. Using the same data source as Haddon, looking at the job numbers over a decade, it becomes clear that a decrease in the employment level is very typical between September and January:

But comparing the employment level year over year, in January 2023 (before the minimum wage law passed) to January 2024 (after), shows that the California fast food sector actually gained 10,021 jobs.

Invictus identified the error in June. While Ohanian’s publications based on Haddon’s claim have been retracted, the Wall Street Journal has not yet issued a retraction and the narrative is still spreading.

On October 2, 2024, the California Business and Industrial Alliance (CABIA) took out a full-page ad in USA today, “In Memoriam: Victims of Gavin Newsom’s Minimum Wage,” claiming California lost 10,000 jobs after the new minimum wage law passed. Jot Condie, the President of the California Restaurant Association, repeated the false claim during a TV news appearance. The Independent Institute, Fox Baltimore, the National Review, and Washington Examiner all repeated the claim, too.

The Employment Policy Institute: Another Version of the Fast Food Job Loss Claim

AB 1228 passed in September 2023, but it did not go into effect until at least April 1, 2024. Even today, for many fast food restaurants, the $20 minimum wage is still not in effect. Per the law, for any establishment that makes minimum wage changes on an annual basis, the new wage does not take effect until January 1, 2025.

The conservative press explains the “job losses” before the $20 minimum wage was implemented as a response to the law being signed. The Daily Caller’s Ireland Owens had one suggestion, “California restaurants began bracing for the minimum wage increase before the law took effect,” she wrote, this time citing the Employment Policy Institute (EPI).

The EPI report, from December 5, 2024, claimed California’s fast food sector lost 6,166 jobs this year, attributing the decline to the new law. But the BLS data actually show that California’s fast food sector saw record high job numbers this summer, with year-over-year gains of 1,900 jobs this July.

(Source Data: BLS)

Employment levels are actually up 1,900 jobs compared to July 2023 – before the minimum wage law went into effect. June 2024 was the only month this year in which California saw lower job numbers than any month 2023. The California fast food industry saw their highest job numbers ever this July, at over 748,000 jobs. Employment levels are higher than pre-pandemic numbers, up 38,000 from 2019.

That these numbers would come out of EPI, essentially an anti-minimum wage increase think tank, is no surprise. Its founder, Richard Berman, was known as, “The Wage Warrior,” for his fierce opposition to increasing the minimum wage. EPI’s current director is Michael Saltsman, is also an owner of Berman and Company, a Washington D.C. based PR and lobbying firm founded by Richard Berman.

If fast food restaurants were hurting in California, we would likely see slowed growth in the industry. Instead, the number of fast food establishments is on the rise in the golden state.

(Source Data: North American Industry Classification System Code 722513, Limited Service Restaurants, BLS)

In his most recent analysis, Invictus reports that California grew their fast food sector over the past ten years, while raising the minimum wage. Today, at $16 an hour, California’s minimum wage started “at $8/hour through 2013,” Invictus writes.

Invictus analyzed the 10-year period from 2014 to 2023, and found that California’s fast food workforce has grown by 31.5%, outpacing the rest of the country at 19.5%. The number of fast food establishments in California increased by 40.8%, outperforming the rest of the U.S. two-fold—at just 18.8%.

Not only is California’s fast food sector not suffering job losses with the nation’s second highest minimum wage, it has been outperforming the rest of the country.

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A nationwide strike is set to take place at ten Amazon warehouses across the country if Amazon does not begin negotiating with unionized workers by December 15, according to Chris Smalls, the first president of the Amazon Labor Union.

The union has spent years working to turn its victory in a Staten Island election into a negotiated contract, and Amazon has spent just as long trying to destroy the fledgling union. In the meantime, ALU has become part of the Teamsters. The combined union’s new holiday strategy is ambitious but straightforward: get Amazon to negotiate for workers at all unionized facilities, all at once, across the country. “This is a moment for workers in America, not just those that are poised to strike at Amazon,” said Smalls told Drop Site in a text message.

A strike during the holiday season, the busiest time of year for Amazon, would hit them where it hurts. The scale of the strike would be unprecedented, including the major hubs of New York and San Bernadino, California.

Amazon now has a workforce of over 700,000, making it the largest employer of warehouse workers in the nation. If a contract is won at these initial 20 bargaining units, it has the potential to impact working conditions for thousands of workers, and inspire union organizing efforts at Amazon facilities across the country.

For Amazon workers who voted to unionize their warehouses in March of 2022, this has been a long time coming. “Thousands of Amazon workers courageously cast their ballots to form a union at JFK8 in Staten Island,” Smalls said in a text. “We shocked the world, we had won against a corporate giant and hoped that step would propel us forward to help create a better workplace.” For years, Amazon stalled on recognizing the union, and has not yet met union representatives at the negotiating table.

Smalls said, “I’m excited to see workers take control, take the next step and move even further down the path to victory when they exercise their right to strike.” He continued, “We celebrated as we inspired thousands of others to hope for the same.”

The December 15th deadline, set by the Teamsters, has been sent to Amazon directly from the union. Smalls told Drop Site News, “The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has issued a deadline to Amazon to bargain with more than 20 bargaining units, including JFK8.”

The worker-led and worker-organized Amazon Labor Union (ALU) has grown as a result of the partnership with the Teamsters. A strike of this scale requires extensive resources and large-scale organizing. Smalls reflected on the decision to affiliate with an international union: “Now, thousands of other workers at Amazon are taking direct action with the Teamsters proving that our affiliation under the Teamsters banner was a smart move.”

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Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien hinted at the potential strike in a post on Twitter: “Amazon is pushing its workers closer to the picket line by failing to show them the respect they have earned.” O’Brien continued, “We’ve been clear: Amazon has until December 15 to come to the table and bargain for a contract. If these white-collar criminals want to keep breaking the law, they better get ready for a fight.”

The end-goal for Amazon workers is a contract, Smalls said, “We all know the working conditions at Amazon and we all know only a Teamster contract is going to hold them accountable.”

Amazon warehouse workers have the highest injury rate of all warehouse workers, the latest report on injuries shows 51% of workers at the company for more than three years have been injured. Of those injured, 69% have had to take unpaid time off due to pain or exhaustion from working at the company in the past month.

Smalls spoke to the issue of unsafe working conditions. “It’s time for Amazon to be held accountable for their actions. It’s time the workers [to] take the first step in withholding their labor so that American Consumers can see that their goods that they have ordered come at [a] price, a heavy price, our backs, our knees, feet and minds while honoring a picket line.”

“Join me, join them, join the Teamsters,” Smalls said.

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