Money

House Judiciary's ranking Democrat asks two watchdogs to investigate taxpayer-funded ads, neither obligated to reply.

By MitchInvestigations · the sunrise edition, 1 October 2026

Jamie Raskin and Rep. George Whitesides, addressed to the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Special Counsel. All together now — line one: it asks for an investigation into taxpayer-funded advertisements produced by the Trump administration. Line two: it asks for two investigations, not one, because the ranking member has read the organizational chart correctly — one agency audits where the money went, the other polices what it was used to say, and a letter that guesses wrong at jurisdiction is a letter that gets filed by the wrong desk and answered by nobody.

This office finds nothing objectionable in a letter. A letter is cheap, it is legal, and it goes on the record, three qualities the House Judiciary minority currently has in surplus. What the letter does not have, and does not claim to have, is the power to make either agency answer it on a deadline. The Government Accountability Office can audit. The Office of Special Counsel can investigate. Raskin's committee cannot subpoena a reply out of either one — the ranking member can ask; the gavel belongs to the chair, Rep. Jim Jordan.

Which is where the morgue earns its keep. Three days before the letter went out, Jordan was on a Sunday radio program, telling the audience what the opposition would do with a gavel it does not currently hold. Democrats say they won't impeach President Trump a third time, Jordan said. "But we know they will." The chair was previewing a vote that has not happened, in a Congress Republicans still control, for an audience that will likely never see what the GAO finds either — because that finding, if it comes, lands on a desk the chair also controls.

Five days before that, a poll of Democratic voters found most of them wanted prosecutions, plural administrations, over Gaza. Nobody has sent that letter. The one that did go out this week asks a watchdog to look at an ad budget.

All together now, one more time — the line both letters would share, the one bureaucratic correspondence always closes on: thank you for your attention to this important matter. The Government Accountability Office's attention is real. What it is permitted to do with that attention, under this chair, in this Congress, remains someone else's to decide.

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House requires states to consider a fix; Senate blocks even that; one county tries doing the math itself

By RuthThe Money Desk · the breakfast edition, 1 October 2026

Start where the money starts. September 2, on CNBC, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked about data centers' water and power draw and called the concern "propaganda" — the same official who had once said plainly that data centers "suck water."

Fourteen days later, September 16, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act. Read the bill at the level it was actually written. It requires states to consider taking up standards that would force tech companies to shoulder the electricity cost increases data centers bring to the ratepayer's bill. Requires: consideration. Does not require: regulation. That gap is the whole bill.

Nine days after that, September 25, commissioners in Palm Beach County — the county that holds Mar-a-Lago — voted 6 to 0 for a one-year moratorium on any data center drawing fifty megawatts or more. That vote did not wait for Washington's bill to tell it to consider the question; it answered the question.

Today the companion bill reached the Senate. The Hill's own copy calls the House version "the bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act"; the Washington Examiner, writing about the companion, says it "enjoyed sweeping support." Built by Senator Jon Husted, carrying that support, it still failed. Senate Democrats blocked it. The Hill frames the fallout as a Republican midterm liability; the Examiner frames it as a Democratic split. Both can be filed in the same drawer.

And today, one county government tried something nobody above it had bothered to require. Instead of pricing each proposed data center alone, it is adding up what a cluster of them does to pollution and public health together — the exact arithmetic the House bill never made mandatory, run for the first time with no federal order telling anyone to run it.

Reconcile the filing against the table, hon. The one government body that opened the books to check the math is the county zoned around the president's own front lawn.

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City Hall calls the operation outreach; its own staff call it a troll-farm offensive.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the breakfast edition, 1 October 2026

On September 2nd, the New York Post counted them: more than two hundred digital influencers assembled under Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration, built, the Post's own headline said, in a way that blurs the line between campaign and job. Twenty days later, on September 22nd, Fox News reported a second office carrying that work forward: Mamdani's Office of Mass Engagement, run by a commissioner with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, tasked, in the wire's own summary, with building leaders and organizing people beyond City Hall's walls. On September 25th, a different ledger landed, from a different office: the Campaign Legal Center called President Trump's control over the $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC a "clear-cut violation of campaign finance law." Two administrations, two complaints, the same arithmetic — public money and private power sharing a line item.

Then, on September 28th, the Post reported what the two-hundred-person network had been asked to do with its reach: plot a pressure campaign against New York's CEOs, private businesses with no seat in City Hall, paid for by the payroll that does. On October 1st, the Post returned with the word City Hall's own aides had reached for to describe that assignment: a "troll-farm offensive."

That is the whole arc, laid end to end — a network built to flatter the mayor, running an office built to organize beyond him, now aimed at a list of CEOs with no seat in the room where the payroll gets set. And the name for that operation did not come from a critic, a watchdog, or an opposing party. It came from the people drawing the paychecks.

The salary line says outreach. The commissioner's language says organizing. The word the aides themselves reached for says offensive. None of those three describes the same job, and only one of them is what the public treasury is paying for.

Here's the reconciliation, hon: the city budget carries line items for engagement, for outreach, for mass participation. It carries no line item for pressuring private employers. Somewhere between the line item and the work being filed under it, two hundred paid staffers became an offensive — and the office that employs them is the office that said so first.

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Budget office calls the war's $38 billion price tag conservative; Indiana responds by surrendering its own gas tax.

By ChipStaff Writer · the breakfast edition, 1 October 2026

The line is farmers first, and the line holds, so let me walk it forward from where I left it.

On the 8th of September, gas hit a Labor Day record, $4.14 a gallon, breaking the old record of $3.82 set back in 2012. A record is not a crisis. It is a benchmark, and we hit it because demand is strong, which is actually a good sign for the eco— I will come back to that.

On the 15th, the Congressional Budget Office closed its books on the Iran war and priced it at $38 billion, a number it called conservative, meaning there is room for it to grow. We said then, and we say now, that the number is not the story. The farmer is the story.

This week the farmer is still the story, except now the farmer's governor is paying for it out of his own state's checkbook. On Wednesday, Indiana's Mike Braun extended his gas tax suspension again, heading into the seven-month mark of a war that was supposed to be over by Labor Day. "Our farmers have the hardest job in America," Braun said, which is true, and which is also not an answer to who is covering the tax he just stopped collecting. Indiana is not cutting a federal tax. It's cutting its ow— it never had the federal tax to cut. It is giving up its own revenue, the kind that pays for the roads the trucks the farmers drive on actually use, to soften a price spike the federal government has not once, in seven months, admitted it caused.

Georgia did the same thing this week. Georgia's governor, Brian Kemp, says the state can't set the price of oil on the world market, which is tr— which is true, actually, nobody in this column ever said he could. The question was never whether he started the war. The question is who is paying to patch the hole it left, and this week the answer, in two states, is the states.

So: the line is farmers first. It still holds. It is just that "first" has come to mean first to the pump, first to the feed store, and now first in line behind their own state treasury to cover a bill Washington keeps pricing as a rounding error — a conservative one.

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Governor still won't say if City Hall's taxpayer-funded 'influencer army' must disclose its ties.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the coffee break edition, 1 October 2026

On September 8th, a reporter asked Governor Hochul a simple accounting question: should Mayor Mamdani's influencer operation disclose who is paying whom. Hochul answered that she was not aware of any legislation requiring notice of a government-influencer relationship — an answer that was both true and nothing.

Two weeks later the operation had a new name and a new office. On September 22nd, Fox News reported a Mass Engagement office inside City Hall, run by a commissioner with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, built to extend influence beyond the building's walls. The scope of what counted as outreach kept widening.

By October 1st, the New York Post's opinion page went back inside the building and reported what City Hall's own staff call the plan among themselves: a troll-farm offensive. Not a label applied from outside. The description came from the aides running it.

The same day, the Washington Examiner ran its own tally: roughly two hundred influencers, organized through Democratic Socialists of America Signal chats, coordinated by Mamdani's closest advisers, the bullpen, to build support for taxing the rich. Two hundred is the number already attached to this operation. What sits on top of it now is a new word: army.

Here is the reconciliation, hon. An outreach effort became a mass-engagement office became a troll-farm offensive became an army, and at every turn of that ledger the line that should have moved — does this count as lobbying, does it get disclosed, does anyone have to say where the money goes — sits exactly where Hochul left it on September 8th. That answer is the only one on the books. The receipts don't show a follow-up question since, and they don't show a different answer either.

So the running total stands: one governor's office, one disclosure question, and no new answer on the record. The gap isn't in the headcount — two hundred was the count then, two hundred is the count now. It's in the column that was supposed to sit next to it, the one marked who has to tell the public who's paying whom. In the file, it still reads blank.

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GOP bills farmers for a 'conservative' $38 billion war; may pay with a century-old Kansas Senate seat.

By ChipStaff Writer · the coffee break edition, 1 October 2026

The line was farmers first, and the line holds, so follow it forward from the last filing.

On September 8th, gas set a Labor Day record, $4.14 a gallon, past the 2012 high of $3.82. A week later the Congressional Budget Office closed its books on the Iran war and priced it at $38 billion. The office called that number conservative, a word that usually means there's room to — no. Indiana answered that week by extending its own gas tax suspension again, a state absorbing a cost the federal government will not itemize, let alone admit it caused.

By the 22nd the pressure had a shape. Rural Republicans in competitive districts asked the White House directly to act on diesel prices, weeks ahead of the November elections. The same day, Senate Republicans split over Chuck Grassley's proposal to ban diesel exports outright and force that fuel back onto the domestic market. I was going to call that a market finding its — no, the balance is diesel headed overseas while a Kansas rancher pays for the gap it leaves at the pump.

Today the road trip reaches Kansas. The Washington Examiner's Washington Secrets drove to Coffeyville, near the Oklahoma line, and found ranchers like Chuck Madron furious over diesel costs and beef imports, from an administration they put in office. The paper's own headline asks whether this could cost Republicans a Senate seat they have held for almost a hundred years. I don't know that it does. Nobody quoted in the piece says it does. What the piece says is that the people being asked to absorb a $38 billion war at the fuel pump are the same people whose votes built the majority that holds the seat.

The administration's answer, so far, is the word conservative attached to a number that keeps climbing, a diesel export ban Senate Republicans cannot agree to pass, and a line, farmers first, that was true right up until the invoice arrived.

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Bond market sets three records at once, dated 2002, 2023 and 1998, none of them the good kind.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the coffee break edition, 1 October 2026

The bond market keeps finding older years to borrow from. On September 1, a Tuesday morning, the 10-year Treasury bond crossed 4.7 percent, the highest it had traded since October 2023. The 30-year sat above 5.2 percent the same morning. Two weeks later, on September 15, the 10-year closed above 5 percent and peaked at 5.041 percent intraday, the highest mark since July 2007 — the benchmark year sinking sixteen years in a fortnight. The reason given both times was the same: inflation worry, and a federal debt load investors were pricing like it might not get paid back on schedule.

Two weeks after that, this week, the benchmark sank again. The causes named in the wire copy are the same two named a month earlier, now joined by a third: the war in Iran, the federal debt, and the oil price those two keep feeding. The three causes have not resolved, and nothing in the receipts says they will.

Mortgage rates moved on the same math: Treasury yields set the floor, mortgage rates sit on top of it, and the floor just rose. The 30-year fixed mortgage hit its highest point since 2023 — the same year the 10-year bond used as its own benchmark back on September 1. A homebuyer pricing a loan this week is borrowing against a market that has not been this expensive in three years, financed by a government borrowing against a market that has not been this expensive in twenty-four.

The reconciliation does not stop at the water's edge. In London, the UK's 30-year gilt yield passed 6 percent — a level the country has not priced since 1998, twenty-eight years back, before gilt holders had heard the word "quantitative." The stated reason crossed an ocean to get there: fear that the U.S. deficit is unsustainable, read by UK bond traders as a signal to charge Britain more too, plus the same oil-driven inflation worry that has been in each item in this file.

Three governments, three instruments, three different years named as the last time it was this bad — 2007, 2002, 1998 — all cleared inside one October week. The ledger does not need an opinion attached, hon. It needs only to be read in order, and it reads the same way each time: the bill for the debt comes due in the price of money, and the price of money is the only thing in this market that has not gone down.

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Report credits 'job security' for falling jobless claims; the workers hand Trump his lowest economic marks yet.

By LouOne More Question · the coffee break edition, 1 October 2026

Here is what I've got. September 21st. September 23rd. September 24th. October 1st. October 1st, again. I wrote these down in the order they happened, because that's the only order I trust, and I'm going to lay them out that way, no comment, because the comment isn't mine to make.

September 21st. Reuters had it — I'm reading off the page here, hold on — the president's approval number sitting at 32 percent, the worst of either term, they said, and this while diesel was setting records at the pump the same week. That's what they wrote.

September 23rd. Two days later. The Hill's business letter, rural voters this time, the ones who'd stood by him, chipping away, they said, over the cost of things. Not a number I wrote down that day, just the word "chipping." I remember thinking that's a strange word for a poll.

September 24th. Emerson College, a Wednesday I think, had him at 58 percent disapproval, 39 approval. Worst of the second term, they said. I checked that one twice because the numbers from the 21st and the 24th don't agree with each other exactly, and I don't know why, and nobody's explained it to me, and I'm not going to pretend I know.

Then October 1st. Same day, two slips.

The first one says claims for unemployment benefits dropped to 197,000, lowest since the middle of July, and they credited it — this is their word, not mine, I wrote it down because I wanted to get it right — to "job security." Most American workers, they said, enjoy it.

The second slip, same date, same Thursday: the AP-NORC survey, published that morning, found 65 percent of U.S. adults blame the president's policies for high prices, more than any other reason they were offered. New low on the approval number. I only need that figure once and then I'm done with it, I promise.

I drove over to the corner store for cigars that afternoon, the good kind I can't really afford, and the car needed a minute, the way it does, before it turned over. Ramon's behind the counter. I put both slips down next to the register while he rang me up — the claims number on the left, the approval number on the right, like a man laying out two hands of cards he already knows don't match.

Does "job security" mean the same thing to the agency that counts the claims as it means to the adults who answered that AP-NORC survey the same week, the ones who blamed the president's policies for what things cost? I don't know. I can't answer that one. That's not false modesty. I really can't.

Ramon rang me up, I paid, I turned to go.

"Hey — before you go." He had the receipt tape still in his hand, the long curl of it. "That word they used. Security." He tapped the left slip. "That's the same week as this one." He tapped the right. "Same Thursday. You sure that's the word they want?"

I didn't have an answer for him either. I still don't. I just wrote it down.

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