The Texas State Board of Education has voted to allow Bible-infused curriculum in elementary schools.
Schools districts that choose to adopt the new curriculum are expected to begin using it at the start of the 2025-26 school year. This vote allows schools in Texas to begin using the material in kindergarten through fifth grade. Schools are not required to use the curriculum, but those who do will receive extra funding from the state. Texas will be the first state to introduce Bible lessons in public school curriculums.
“In my view, the biblical stories are on the education side and are establishing cultural literacy,” Houston Republican Will Hickman said. “And there’s religious concepts like the Good Samaritan and the Golden Rule and Moses that all students should be exposed to.”
The curriculum would be for students 1-5 grades. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick celebrated the vote and a pledged legislative vote next year to follow Louisiana’s lead in requiring schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms.
The ‘Outnumbered’ panel lists discuss the Department of Government Efficiency’s decision to slim down the government and overhaul USAID.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and has gained access to payment and contracting systems in search for potential fraud, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Trump’s DOGE has already gutted USAID, but Musk argued on X that Medicare and Medicaid are where the “big money fraud” is happening.
CMS oversees Medicare, the health coverage program for older and disabled Americans, and Medicaid, for lower-income enrollees, which provides insurance for over 140 million U.S. citizens.
The CMS regularly deals with improper payments that represent fraud or abuse but might also be due to a state, contractor, or provider missing an administrative step.
WSJ reported, citing one of the people familiar with DOGE’s work at CMS, that Musk’s allies have not been given access to databases that include identifiable personal health information of Medicare or Medicaid enrollees.
The new campaign comes just days after DOGE targeted USAID, leading to the firing of 50 top officials and the organization being folded into the State Department.
Signs were also removed from USAID’s headquarters in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., and the DOGE team took over the computer systems, sources said. USAID is responsible for distributing civilian foreign aid and development assistance to countries around the globe.
Elon Musk, the chair of DOGE, has been leading an investigation into USAID’s spending practices as the agency comes to a standstill. (Getty Images)
The actions came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio, acting on Trump’s executive order, paused all U.S. foreign assistance funded by or through the State Department and USAID.
Employees and supporters gather to protest outside of USAID headquarters on Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The 90-day pause has halted thousands of U.S.-funded humanitarian, development and security programs worldwide and forced aid organizations to lay off hundreds of employees because they can’t make payroll.
Fox News Digital’s Greg Wehner, Chris Pandolfo, the Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Do the Democrats require a Lobotomy to join their ranks? He is in the wrong “pew.” He is not a serious thinker. He is holding hands with Kamala Harris and her word salads, too.
What gives?
*Senator – for emphasis. Cory’s constituents need better representation. He is misrepresenting the Constitution.
****
News Hill
Senator Cory Booker Pushes INSANE DEI Theory
Senator Cory Booker defends diversity initiatives as essential for hiring top talent, sparking debate on merit-based recruitment.
He doesn’t seem to understand how DEI works.
At a Glance
Sen. Cory Booker advocates for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in government hiring
Booker argues DEI practices help identify the best candidates by expanding applicant pools
DEI undermines merit-based hiring and promotes discrimination
Several major companies and states have rolled back DEI initiatives
Debate continues over the effectiveness and fairness of DEI practices in recruitment
Booker’s Defense of DEI Practices
Senator Cory Booker has taken a stand in defense of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, particularly in government hiring practices – and in doing so, he’s revealed how he simply doesn’t understand what DEI is and how is works.
During a recent CNN interview, Booker articulated that DEI strategies are crucial for securing the most capable candidates for employment. The New Jersey Democrat countered criticisms that DEI compromises hiring quality, instead arguing that these practices enhance recruitment effectiveness.
(He knows better – he is just going along with the Democrats’ progressive party.)
Booker emphasized that DEI practices help in “hiring the best of the best” by expanding the applicant pool to include diverse institutions such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving organizations.
What he doesn’t understand is that those people are already in the hiring pool – DEI is just the process of prioritizing those people.
Do you think he knows this and is being deliberately disingenuous?
He stressed that this inclusivity highlights candidates from traditionally underrepresented groups, including women and minorities, who might otherwise be overlooked due to narrow search criteria. Despite Booker’s advocacy, DEI programs have faced significant criticism and rollback in recent months. President Donald Trump signed Executive Orders to end DEI in the federal government, placing DEI employees on leave, closing DEI offices, and reinstating what he termed as merit-based opportunities. Several major companies, including Meta, Walmart, and Toyota, have also scaled back their DEI practices, ceasing to make hiring decisions based on identity.
Critics of DEI, including those at the Heritage Foundation, argue that such programs undermine recruitment, efficiency, and morale, particularly in institutions like the State Department. They advocate for a return to purely merit-based hiring and promotion processes, suggesting that DEI initiatives are inherently discriminatory.
The debate over DEI has extended to state-level politics, with governors in West Virginia, Florida, and Oklahoma enacting anti-DEI measures similar to the federal actions. More states are considering comparable steps, reflecting a growing political divide on the issue of diversity in hiring practices.
Booker has criticized these rollbacks, particularly Trump’s actions, as undermining government safety and fairness. He argues that such moves lack legal justification and may have negative consequences for the quality of government services and representation.
Will Democrats ever simply admit they got this wrong?
****
Time for a new rep who is a THINKER not a STINKER.
“We were told the most number of people that could retire [from the federal government] possibly in a month is 10,000,” Musk said. “We’re like, well, why is that?”
“Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It’s manually calculated. They’re written down on a piece of paper, then it goes down a mine… Yeah, there’s a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork.”
“You know what? Instead of working in a mineshaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine, you could do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way.”
ELON MUSK: So, you know, there are crazy things like just a cursory examination of Social Security, and we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old now. Do you know anyone who’s 150? I don’t. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. They’re missing out.
That’s a case where, like, I think they’re probably dead. It’s my guess. Or they should be very famous — one of the two.
And then there are a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there’s no identifiable information. Why is there no identifying information? Obviously, we want to make sure that people who deserve to receive Social Security do receive it, and that they receive it quickly and accurately.
I’ll tell you another crazy thing. So, you know, one of the things is like we are trying to sort of rightsize the federal bureaucracy — just make sure that obviously there needs to be a lot of people working for the federal government, but not as many as currently.
So we’re saying, “Well, okay, if people can retire with full benefits and everything, that would be good. They can retire, get their retirement payments, everything.”
And then we were told—this is actually, I think, a great anecdote—because we were told, “No, the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000.”
We’re like, “Well, why? Why is that?”
“Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It’s manually calculated. They’re written down on a piece of paper, then it goes down a mine.”
And I’m like, “What do you mean a mine?”
Like, “Yeah, there’s a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork.”
And you look at a picture of this mine—we’ll post some pictures afterwards—and this mine looks like something out of the ’50s because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it’s a time warp.
And then the speed—the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move—determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down sometimes. And then you can’t—nobody can retire.
Doesn’t that sound crazy?
There’s like a thousand people that work on this.
So I think if we can take those people and say, “You know what? Instead of working in a mineshaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine, you could do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way.”
So anyway, I think, you know, that’s an example.
At a high level, if you say, “How do we increase prosperity?”—we get people to shift from roles that are low to negative productivity to high productivity roles. And so you increase the total output of goods and services, which means that there is a higher standard of living available for everyone. That’s the actual goal.
****
It looks like the government is still living in the stone age.
kommonsentsjane 