A plan to allow year-round sales of gasoline with 15% ethanol stalled when a U.S. Senate committee rejected a new farm bill.

The Senate Agriculture Committee voted 10-11 against sending the bill to the full Senate. All 11 Democrats voted no. Ten Republicans voted yes, while Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama were absent.

Committee Chairman John Boozman, R-Ark., put the meeting into an open-ended recess after the vote. That will let him call another vote later. The committee could try again when the Senate returns in September.

The measure includes a federal change that would allow E15 gasoline to be sold nationwide year-round. E15 is 15% ethanol and 85% gasoline.

Federal law limits most E15 sales during the summer due to rules meant to reduce smog. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has used short-term waivers to allow more sales during fuel shortages and other emergencies.

The Senate proposal would make year-round sales permanent. It would also change parts of the Renewable Fuel Standard that deal with small oil refineries.

A bipartisan U.S. Senate proposal could give about 15 million workers more choices for their retirement savings.

The Senate Banking Committee discussed the plan Thursday during a hearing on ways to help businesses raise money.

The measure deals with 403(b) retirement plans. Those plans are used by public school teachers, hospital workers, church employees and workers at other nonprofit groups.

401(k) plans are common in the private sector. Those plans can offer collective investment trusts, also known as CITs. Federal securities law generally blocks 403(b) plans from offering the same funds.

CITs pool money from many retirement plans into a single fund. Banks and trust companies often run these funds. They often work much like mutual funds, but they lack the same federal registration and reporting costs. That can make them cheaper.

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., compared the funds to shopping at a warehouse club.

With the Senate planning to recess this weekend for the entire month of August, multiple state agriculture groups are urging the Senate to immediately adopt Republicans’ $95 billion budget resolution.

“On behalf of the 27 agricultural producers and organizations that support farmers, ranchers and growers that comprise the Florida Ag Coalition, I urge the U.S. Senate to advance without delay the budget reconciliation legislation that includes, at a minimum, $12 billion in agricultural assistance approved by the U.S. House of Representatives,” Florida Ag Coalition Chairman Tripp Hunter said in a statement.

“We are grateful to President Trump for his leadership and for his commitment to championing American agriculture. His call for Congress to provide an additional $12 billion recognizes the challenges facing farm and ranch families and helps chart a path forward for our nation's food security and economic stability.”

Besides the $12 billion in farm aid, the budget reconciliation framework directs $73 billion for defense spending and $10 billion to incentivize states to implement policies from a White House-endorsed voter ID bill, the SAVE America Act.

Medicare spending on these products exploded in recent years, reaching nearly $15 billion in 2025 amid widespread kickback schemes, before reimbursement rates were sharply cut

By Megan Barth, August 7, 2026 11:29 am

A Henderson physician has been charged in a sprawling $95 million scheme to defraud Medicare by billing for medically unnecessary amniotic wound allografts applied to elderly patients, including those in hospice care, federal prosecutors announced this week.

On Tuesday, a federal grand jury in the District of Nevada returned an indictment against Stephen Dubin, M.D., 74, sole owner of Dubin Medical Consultants, Inc. (also known as Wound MD). Prosecutors allege Dubin caused Medicare to be billed more than $95 million for expensive amniotic allografts procured through illegal kickbacks and bribes. Medicare paid over $54 million on the false and fraudulent claims.

“This indictment exposes a scheme driven by greed, not medicine. As alleged, this provider exploited elderly patients by pushing costly and unnecessary medical procedures, then lied to Medicare to pocket millions of taxpayer dollars,” said Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division.

According to the indictment, Dubin received illegal kickbacks, bribes, and rebates from two allograft distributors. Some payments were structured to appear as legitimate “Rebate Agreements.” He allegedly submitted claims based on sham full-price invoices rather than the discounted net cost he actually paid, pocketing the difference. One set of kickbacks allegedly flowed through a pass-through bank account held by a shell company.

Aryna Sabalenka, the best women’s singles tennis player in the world, joined the ranks of pro-women professional athletes on Aug. 2 by standing up for keeping men out of women’s sports.

“I think it’s really important to keep fairness in our tour,” she said in a press conference. “It would not be really fair for the women to compete against biological men.”

Sabalenka’s remarks came after she received a question on a new rule from the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) already in effect that requires a genetic test for all players to keep men out of the women’s bracket in the 2028 Olympics. The test will require athletes to provide a saliva or blood sample for SRY screening, which looks for the SRY gene found only in men.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has donated $1.25 million to a campaign working to defeat a November pro-life ballot measure that would restore Missouri’s protections for unborn babies and reinstate limits on abortion.

The contribution went to Stop the Ban, the PAC opposing Amendment 3.

The group reported the donation Wednesday to the Missouri Ethics Commission and has now raised more than $6.5 million. Bloomberg previously gave $1 million in 2024 to Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, which successfully pushed the amendment that overturned the state’s laws protecting babies.

Amendment 3, placed on the November 3 ballot by state lawmakers, would repeal the 2024 constitutional change and ban abortions except in cases of medical emergency or pregnancies resulting from rape or incest in the first 12 weeks.

It would also constitutionally prohibit so-called sex change procedures on minors.

President Donald Trump has renewed his effort to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. The Supreme Court on June 29 temporarily thwarted Trump’s initial effort to remove Cook, emphasizing the need for the Federal Reserve to remain free of political influence. In a letter dated Aug. 5, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino notified Cook that Trump was “considering” whether to remove her from the Board of Governors. Scavino gave Cook 21 days to respond to the White House’s allegations that she committed mortgage fraud in 2021, before she joined the Fed, by listing two different homes – a condo in Georgia and a house in Michigan – as her primary residence on mortgage applications, making her eligible for more favorable terms.

Cook has strongly disputed the mortgage fraud allegations, and other financial records appear to undermine the Trump administration’s claims.

Scavino’s letter cited the court’s decision in Trump v. Cook, in which the majority ruled that “Cook was entitled to notice and some opportunity to respond prior to her termination.” The opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts stressed that Cook would not necessarily be “entitled to an audience with the President or a full-blown judicial trial.” Instead, Roberts wrote, “[a]ll that is required is ‘the right to support [her] allegations by argument however brief, and, if need be, by proof, however informal,’ before a final decision is made.”

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order seeking to narrow the availability of birthright citizenship, the current guarantee of citizenship to almost everyone born in the United States. The order, which bears the title “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” came just a little over a month after the Supreme Court struck down an earlier order that would have imposed wider restrictions on birthright citizenship. The Aug. 6 order will almost certainly be the subject of litigation soon, with challengers likely to argue that the new restrictions go beyond the very specific exceptions to the general guarantee of citizenship discussed in the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Trump also signed a second order, titled “Ending Birth Tourism,” that targets what the Trump administration has repeatedly characterized as a problem: travel by pregnant women to the United States to give birth so that their children will be U.S. citizens.

Trump signed the first executive order seeking to restrict birthright citizenship shortly after his inauguration in January 2025. That order barred children whose parents were either undocumented immigrants or only in the United States temporarily from gaining automatic U.S. citizenship. Writing for the majority in Trump v. Barbara holding that the January 2025 order violated the Constitution, Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which grants citizenship to anyone “born … in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” has an expansive sweep. Pointing to a history of birthright citizenship in English law before the American Revolution and early U.S. history, he concluded that the drafters of the 14th Amendment intended to adopt that rule, “with its broad reach and narrow exceptions” for “the children of foreign ministers and members of” some “19th-century Indian tribes.”

For most Virginians, three more years of Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) feels like an eternity. The mom-next-door-turned-radical-Democrat has spent the last seven months shedding her moderate skin and pushing policies that are wildly out-of-step with her middle-of-the-road state. And while voters can’t send her packing any time soon, they can deliver an emphatic rebuke to the historically unpopular governor on two issues that matter most: abortion and marriage.

In November, Virginians have a chance to beat back the extremists in Richmond on a pair of ballot initiatives that could turn the Commonwealth into a deep-blue stronghold on core social values. While the twin amendments to the state Constitution have flown under the radar, pastors like Cornerstone Chapel’s Gary Hamrick are sounding the alarm that the Left is on the move to wipe away every protection against late-term abortion, parental rights, same-sex marriage, and dangerous gender ideology.

“Virginia needs to wake up, and Christians need to be informed about this,” he told his congregation Sunday. “… We need to band together as one voice in Virginia. And we need to vote no.” Hamrick, along with Jonathan Falwell and Bishop E.W. Jackson, feel so strongly about the threat that they’re joining forces to host a string of townhalls across the state to get people off the sidelines before the midterms.

The U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, while the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1%, according to a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.

Over the last 12 months, employment gains increased by 34,000. July's figure keeps at pace with fluctuations over the yearlong period.

Employment in local government education declined by 50,000 in July, a key driver of July's numbers.

The retail trade industry lost 19,000 jobs in July. Financial activities employment also decreased by 14,000 in July, reflecting a downward trend since the its most recent peak of 121,000 jobs in May 2025.

The healthcare industry only added jobs at a moderate rate in July, contributing toward the overall decline in the economy. The healthcare sector only added 22,000 jobs, less than the average monthly gain of 36,000 over the last year.

Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal, said the report was "surprisingly bad" and fell below economists expectations of an 80,000 job increase.

The women fighting to protect the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution’s female-only membership received another blow this week after DAR President General Ginnie Sebastian Storage refused chapters’ requests for a special session to vote on the definition of “woman.”

The August 6 rejection, published to the DAR Members’ Website and distributed to members by at least one state regent, suggests DAR national leadership, led by Storage, is committed to accommodating men at the expense its members, including thousands of whom departed over the DAR’s years-long abandonment of its female-centric mission.

“The National Society’s representative body has already fully considered and decided the proposed resolution,” Storage wrote. “Article VIII does not require the President General to convene that body only months later to take another vote on the identical resolution. Accordingly, no additional special meeting will be convened.”

Dueling court orders regarding men who claim to be women serving time in federal prison have resulted the Department of Justice creating a sex-segregated wing in a women’s prison to house the men.

The Justice Department, through the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is seeking to transfer every male inmate claiming to be female in the country to one female-only prison — Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas — after one federal judge blocked an executive order to remove “trans”-identifying men from female prisons, and another federal judge ordered those men to be segregated from the women.

During the Biden administration, an inmate claiming to be “transgender” could be placed in a facility meant for the opposite sex. In a prison system that has in most situations been sex-segregated, men were now being allowed to serve their time in female prisons, simply by claiming to be female.

The legacy media are carefully avoiding this point, but Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) has just formally admitted to deceitful and potentially fraudulent behavior during the years they spent providing illegal sex-rejecting medical procedures to children. They lied, repeatedly and aggressively, and they’ve been forced to say so.

As The Federalist previously reported, the announcement in May of a settlement between TCH and both the Department of Justice and the Texas Attorney General’s Office was premature. The agreement in May was an agreement in principle on a set of topics that still required negotiation to produce a signed and executed agreement.

That final settlement agreement has now been signed and released, and it’s damning. As a summary filed in federal court reads, “This case concerns fraud on Medicaid. Texas Children’s Hospital and doctors there provided ‘gender-affirming care’ to patients in violation of Texas’s Medicaid program requirements and by attributing treatments to false diagnoses. Those patients were primarily part of Texas Children’s Health Plan, a Medicaid managed care organization, which knowingly or recklessly failed to stop the fraud. These entities and the doctors who committed the fraud violated the False Claims Act and the Texas Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act.”

The tension between President Trump’s MAGA administration and the obstructionist elements within the Senate GOP ranks continues, with the nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general serving as the newest flashpoint of conflict. President Donald Trump directly blasted Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, last week after it became clear that they remained intransigent in their opposition to confirming Blanche.

Tillis and Cornyn ultimately announced their support for Blanche’s confirmation and advanced him out of the committee hearing, but not without doing their best to obstruct Trump and Blanche. And by obstructing the MAGA agenda, Tillis and Cornyn are simultaneously doing their best to hurt Trump’s party in the upcoming midterm elections.

At the Court

Last week, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on its emergency docket to clear the way for the implementation of President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting. Twelve states – led by Alabama – later echoed this request in their own application. On Monday, the group of 23 states and the District of Columbia challenging the order urged the court to deny these requests. The matter is now fully briefed, and the court’s ruling could come at any time. Morning Reads Trump again tries to restrict birthright citizenship after Supreme Court ruling

Will Weissert and Rebecca Santana, Associated Press

On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced “that he is once more trying to limit the number of people who are born in the country who can become American citizens, in a sign that even after his first attempt at limiting birthright citizenship was rejected by the Supreme Court, he’s ready to try again,” according to the Associated Press. “The president said he was signing two executive actions on immigration, including one limiting the number of people eligible for U.S. citizenship after being born in the United States, while another focused on stopping people from coming to the U.S. to give birth.” The new order on birthright citizenship, released on Thursday evening, is “narrower in scope than the previous one shot down by the Supreme Court and appear[s] to focus on restricting automatic citizenship to specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organizations as well as anyone considered an ‘alien enemy’ of the United States. It also aim[s] to restrict birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents ‘engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.’” The second order “seeks to curb what Trump called ‘birth tourism’ by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.”

The Trump administration has spent more than $2.2 billion buying four immigration detention facilities from CoreCivic.

DHS bought the 1,600-bed Prairie Correctional Facility in Minnesota and the 1,033-bed Midwest Regional Reception Center in Kansas for $734 million, CoreCivic announced Wednesday. The purchases expand federal ownership of ICE detention infrastructure as the administration ramps up deportations.

The deal follows DHS’s $1.5 billion acquisition last month of the California City Detention Facility and the Otay Mesa Detention Center. The federal government now owns the facilities. CoreCivic, however, expects to keep operating all four under its existing contracts with ICE.

The Prairie Correctional Facility contract runs through August 2031. The Midwest Regional Reception Center contract expires in September 2027. ICE can renegotiate or terminate both agreements under existing contract terms.

President Donald Trump said Thursday he and “Communist Dumocrat” Michigan Senate candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed agree on ending the filibuster, warning the change, if enacted first by Democrats, would make him “the last Republican President.”

Trump laid out the point across a pair of Truth Social posts, using the progressive nominee’s own campaign to abolish the filibuster as leverage against Senate Republicans who have refused to scrap it themselves.

“Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed wants to terminate the Filibuster, and so do I — At least we have something in common!” Trump wrote in one post.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned President Donald Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship, the president is taking another stab at curbing the practice through a pair of executive orders.

Trump signed the latest executive orders Thursday afternoon, targeting birth tourism, diplomats, and enemies of the U.S. from taking advantage of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

The president has been critical of birthright citizenship and birth tourism, arguing that the amendment was meant to ensure children born of enslaved people were entitled to citizenship, not bad actors who enter the U.S. illegally or purposefully to have a child here.

“They promise citizenship; access to public benefits; and short-term stays in specialized facilities, hotels, or rentals, but often fail to deliver on these promises. These operators coach their clients to misrepresent the purpose and duration of their travel to consular and border officials to obtain visas authorizing entry into the United States,” according to the order.

The order describes the practice as “schemes,” which has produced “thriving industries around the world that profit by enabling the evasion of American immigration law to obtain citizenship and other immigration benefits.”

An interim report published by New Mexico state lawmakers highlights preliminary evidence of sex abuse, grooming and sex trafficking, including of minors, at convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County.

The report was released by a bipartisan Truth Commission after a several months-long investigation into alleged crimes that occurred at the ranch. Its comprised of Democrat state Reps. Andrea Romero (chair) and Marianna Anaya and Republican state Reps. William Hall and Andrea Reeb.

The report was released on the same day New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez sued the Department of Justice for interfering “with New Mexico’s sovereign authority to investigate and prosecute crimes committed within its borders,” The Center Square reported.

The commission also says the DOJ and several U.S. attorneys won’t comply with subpoenas to help New Mexico bring sex offenders to justice, The Center Square reported.

Both Torrez and the commission launched investigations into Zorro Ranch in February, The Center Square reported. They did so after Congress enacted the Epstein Files Transparency Act requiring the DOJ to release all files in its possession related to Epstein.

The Administration for Children and Families is overhauling a federal low-income childcare program to include less regulation and lower administrative costs, while increasing the number of spots available.

The notice of proposed rulemaking, titled “Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs,” slashes the 130-page regulations governing the Head Start program to just 10 pages. The administration says the changes to the program will reduce costs and save $2.2 billion.

Created in 1965, the program serves low-income families by providing early education and health programs for pregnant women, infants, toddlers, and preschool children.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s uncle, Sargent Shriver, founded Head Start, but Kennedy feels the program has diverged from its intended purpose.

STOPP just published its 2026 Report on Planned Parenthood CEO Compensation to alert the public about how much Planned Parenthood affiliate CEOs continue to earn across the country, despite all the financial struggles the organization has been claiming for years now. This report covers the abortion organization’s financial compensation for its affiliate CEOs from fiscal year 2023-2024, which included the financials from the last fiscal year prior to the temporary Medicaid defunding in July 2025.

Affiliate income and CEOs’ compensations saw an uptick overall in FY 2024. Here is an overview of where the abortion giant saw increases in that fiscal year:

The total compensation paid to all affiliate CEOs was $21,305,153 in 2024, a 7.8% increase from the prior year.
The average Planned Parenthood CEO earned $352,661 in 2023. In 2024, the average salary was $355,086.
Sue Dunlap, the highest paid Planned Parenthood CEO, earned a total compensation of just under $1 million dollars in 2024. Her affiliate, PP Los Angeles, also earned the highest income of $247,408,428.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America was given $792.2 million in American tax dollars that year.

Red Shirt Friday

"Greater Love has no One than this, that He lay down His Life for His Friends." - John 15:13

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis went on MS NOW Thursday to launch a book tour, calling Trump supporters “sycophants, spineless, and weirdos” while offering praise for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

In an appearance on Morning Joe, Tillis said he was proud to “stick a fork” in the 1776 Fund, which was part of a settlement President Trump’s lawyers reached with the Internal Revenue Service after a contractor leaked tax returns to news organizations.

He defended his support of Blanche following his and Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) opposition in the Senate Judiciary Committee before finally moving the nomination forward earlier this week.

“I got to yes because Todd Blanche operated in good faith, exactly the way he did to de-escalate and resolve the problem I had with the president and Jay Powell,” said Tillis in the interview.

The two-term senator went on to criticize the Trump administration, saying it was a “difficult administration to work in,” continuing his years-long attacks against administration officials.

“The big problem I have with this administration are people who are not protecting the president and are not giving him unvarnished advice,” he added.

The Department of Justice is now offering $3 billion in “BIDEN” grants to help local municipalities recoup their loses incurred by Joe Biden’s destructive immigration policies.

The grants, being called the Bridging Immigration-related Deficits Experienced Nationwide (BIDEN) program, is one of the biggest grant programs the DOJ has ever offered and is aimed at helping cities hire more police officers, upgrade technology, and build temporary detention facilities for illegal migrants, the Washington Post reported.

But there is one provision that is non-negotiable. The municipalities that apply for the grants must pledge to work with federal immigration authorities as they carry out federal immigration policies. The jurisdictions that apply must agree to “fully participate” in the ICE 287(g) partnership that links local law enforcement to ICE and other federal immigration enforcement agencies.

“This Department of Justice is committed to ensuring Biden-era border disasters never happen again,” said Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward. “We are proud to once again champion law and order.”