MAGA Report Cards — Military

Mike Rogers Told Donors He Saw Osama bin Laden's Body 'With My Own Eyes.' He Was at Home in Washington, and What He Saw Was a Photograph.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:06:29 +0000

Osama bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011, by American special operators who raided his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small number of people were physically present. A slightly larger group followed it in real time from the White House Situation Room — President Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and a handful of senior officials.

Mike Rogers (MI) was in neither place. He was at his home in Washington, D.C., where — as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — he got a phone call about the raid from CIA Director Leon Panetta. He told reporters as much the next day, and he tells the same story in a campaign video.

Fifteen years later, he is running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, and he sent supporters a fundraising email that says something different.

What the email said

The email walks through his biography — Army officer, FBI special agent, "working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of our national security." Then comes a line the email puts in bold:

"I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America."

The email was first reported by Azi Paybarah, a former Washington Post reporter now at Straight Arrow News, who posted a screenshot of it. The Rogers campaign did not respond to requests to explain what he meant.

There is a plain explanation, and Rogers has known it since 2011. He was one of a small number of U.S. officials shown a photograph of bin Laden's body.

He knows the difference, because he argued about it in public

This is not a case of a candidate misremembering a blurry moment from a long time ago. In the days after the raid, Rogers was one of the loudest voices in Congress arguing that the government should not release the images — and the whole reason his opinion carried weight was that he had seen one.

Speaking as Intelligence Committee chairman on May 4, 2011, he told CBS News that releasing the photos would be a mistake:

"To treat Osama bin Laden like he's some trophy of the United States for public gloating I think is wrong."

He added that it would make it harder for "an average soldier, a sergeant in the Army in Ghazni province in Afghanistan" to win cooperation from villagers, and that "there's no gain by doing it. The conspiracy theorists aren't going to believe the photos ... they're going to be doubting Thomases forever."

In a statement at the time he made the same case: the risks of release outweighed the benefits, conspiracy theorists would say the photos were doctored anyway, and publishing them risked inflaming opinion in the Middle East.

Photos. Images. Doctored. That was his own vocabulary, in public, on the record, in the same week. The man writing fundraising emails in 2026 about seeing a body "with my own eyes" is the same man who in 2011 spent that week talking to reporters about a picture.

A pattern, not a slip

Rogers has built this Senate campaign on his national security résumé, and he has stretched it before — repeatedly describing his work funding intelligence agencies as a congressman in terms that made his role sound larger than it was.

He has leaned on it hardest since Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official, won the Democratic nomination. On the night El-Sayed won, Rogers said: "I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11."

The second half of that sentence was false, and PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire. El-Sayed never said it. A New York Times factcheck traced the line to a Twitch streamer who endorsed him — a statement that streamer had retracted and apologized for seven years before the endorsement. El-Sayed, for his part, wrote in 2021 about watching "terrorists with names like mine attack my country in the name of my faith," and called the attacks devastating.

We have documented the same habit on Iran, where Rogers spent two decades insisting Iran was building a nuclear weapon while U.S. intelligence kept concluding it wasn't — and Michigan drivers are paying for the war he wanted.

The through-line is that Rogers keeps making his national security record bigger than the record. Sometimes that means inflating what he did. Sometimes it means inventing what his opponent said. Here it means telling donors he saw the body himself when he was at home in Washington waiting on a phone call.

What the record shows

Mike Rogers (MI) told donors in a fundraising email, in bold type, that he saw Osama bin Laden's dead body with his own eyes. He was not in Abbottabad and not in the Situation Room. He was at home in Washington, and learned about the raid in a phone call from the CIA director. What he actually saw, days later, was a photograph — the same photograph he spent that week publicly arguing the government should not release, in his own words, because conspiracy theorists "aren't going to believe the photos." His campaign would not explain the discrepancy.

Source

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers says he saw Bin Laden's body with his 'own eyes'. He did not — Robert Mackey, The Guardian, August 29, 2026. Photo: Paul Sancya / AP.

Congress Never Voted to Authorize Trump's Iran War. A Group That Helps Troops Leave the Military Says Applications Are Running at Six Times Its Normal Rate.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:48:36 +0000

American service members are asking to be let out of the military because they believe they are being ordered to break the law.

Not a handful of them. MS NOW reported on August 26 that the number of service members applying to leave the armed forces as conscientious objectors has spiked since the war with Iran started in late February, according to the two organizations that help them file. One of those groups says its applications are running at six times their normal rate — higher, it says, than at any point in the past 25 years.

That is the group we send to do the fighting telling us, in the one formal way the military allows, that something has gone badly wrong.

And in nearly six months of this war, Congress has never held a vote to authorize it.

What the troops say they were ordered to do

A conscientious objector application is not a resignation letter. To get out this way, the Pentagon requires a service member to prove a "firm, fixed, sincere and deeply held" moral or religious objection to war. You fill out a written form, you can add supporting letters, and then you sit for round after round of interviews — your chain of command, a chaplain, a mental health evaluator — before the secretary of your service branch signs off. It can take a year.

People do not go through that for fun. Five of them told MS NOW why they started.

One was assigned to support the air campaign against Iran and came to believe the United States was bombing civilian infrastructure, which the Geneva Conventions forbid:

"I realized there's no way that you could interpret the international laws as saying that you're allowed to strike civilian bridges, but in reality, if the president wants to blow up bridges, the lawyers will find a way to say that it is OK to do it, and nobody anywhere up or down the chain of command ever stops and says no."

They raised it with their superiors. They were told most of the targets were "dual-use" — military and civilian at the same time — which, if true, can make a strike legal. It did not settle the question for them.

Another loaded weapons onto planes flying off an aircraft carrier in the Caribbean and watched the planes come back empty, never learning who had been hit.

"You can tell yourself what you want at night and say they were all precision strikes and they were all planned, but there's at least one innocent person that I feel like I indirectly hurt."

These are not protesters. These are the people doing the work.

The boats

The Caribbean flights are part of Operation Southern Spear, the campaign President Trump launched in September 2025 against boats the administration says are carrying drugs. The military has struck at least 60 of them and killed more than 210 people.

One service member told MS NOW they raised concerns about it with their peers but not with their superiors, because they were afraid of retaliation.

Congress had one real chance to look at how those strikes are run, and it dropped it. After the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had verbally ordered a crew to "kill everybody" — including two men found clinging to the wreckage of a boat the U.S. had already blown up — the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee promised a "full accounting." Eleven days later he watched a classified video and declared the case closed. The public has still never seen that video.

The school in Minab

The single event that comes up most often on these calls is a school.

On the first day of the war, a girls' school in Minab, Iran was bombed. NPR reported that at least 165 civilians were killed, many of them children, and that a preliminary assessment found the United States was at fault. The building may have appeared on an outdated American target list as a military site, left over from when the grounds were part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base.

Bill Galvin, who counsels service members at the Center on Conscience and War, told NPR the strike comes up on nearly every call:

"It comes up almost always. It's like, 'I can't be a part of something that's doing that.'"

Mike Prysner, who runs the same organization's hotline, told MS NOW that his group normally works with about 50 conscientious objectors in a year. Since the war started, it has taken on roughly 140. A second organization, the GI Rights Hotline at Quaker House, is now walking about 30 people through the application process at once, compared with five to 10 before the war.

Prysner's clients are not who you would expect, either. He said many have served more than a decade, span every rank up to major, and some went to service academies.

"The Iran War was really the breaking point for them when they realized that they had to take action to make sure that they did not participate in something that they were going to regret for the rest of their lives."

Nobody in Congress ever voted for this

Here is the part that belongs to the people we elect.

The war started in late February 2026. Congress has never voted to authorize it. The Constitution gives that power to Congress and to nobody else, and the men and women now filing paperwork to get out are fighting a war their own representatives never approved.

It is not that the question never came up. It came up constantly, and Republicans voted it down.

On July 23, the House voted 214 to 208 to order U.S. forces out of the fighting. It passed anyway — but 182 Republicans we track voted no, and only four Republicans in the entire House voted yes.

One week later the Senate would not even agree to debate it. A motion to pull a war powers resolution out of committee failed 49 to 50. According to Roll Call, that was the 13th time the Senate had voted on ending this war. Thirteen senators we track voted no — and the margin was a single vote.

The committee that exists to ask a president why we are at war has not held a single public oversight hearing on it. Its chairman decided the public didn't need to hear the answers.

Meanwhile 624 American service members have been wounded in this war, according to the Pentagon's own count — a number that appeared in a database with no announcement. The same casualty page quietly dropped four dead soldiers from its total overnight in July.

"Zero retention concerns"

While all of this was happening, Hegseth has been boasting that the military is hitting recruiting highs.

Asked about retention, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told NPR flatly: "There are zero retention concerns for Fiscal Year 2026. Every service is meeting its targets, and any suggestion otherwise is completely false."

That answer is built to be technically survivable. Experts told NPR that service members trying to leave right now wouldn't show up in any hard data for months or even years. Someone who files an application and waits a year for a decision is not missing from anybody's recruiting target yet.

The Defense Department did not respond to MS NOW's requests for comment before its story published.

What the record shows

Two organizations that help service members leave the military say conscientious objector applications have spiked since the Iran war began — one is running at six times its normal rate, the highest in 25 years, and has taken about 140 cases since February against roughly 50 in a typical year. The troops filing them point to an air campaign that killed at least 165 civilians at a girls' school, and to boat strikes that have killed more than 210 people. Congress has never voted to authorize any of it. When the House voted in July to order U.S. forces out, 207 Republicans voted to keep the war going; a week later the Senate refused, by one vote, even to debate the question.

Source

"Troops fighting against Iran and alleged drug smugglers say they are being asked to violate international law," by Priya Sridhar and Peggy Helman, MS NOW, August 26, 2026. Photo via MS NOW: U.S. sea drones strike a submarine and a ship maintenance facility on July 13, 2026, in an undisclosed area of Iran.

Asked Whether America Has an Interest in Taiwan, Sen. Darline Graham Said 'National Security Is Not My Thing.' She Has Been in the Senate Since July.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:03:08 +0000

South Carolina has two U.S. Senate seats. One of them is currently held by a woman nobody elected, who was handed the job in July, and who was asked on a debate stage this week whether the United States has a national security interest in Taiwan and the South China Sea.

She asked the moderator to repeat the question. Then she answered it.

"I'm just going to be honest here. I'm not that informed on national security, so — but I do support our military."

She added that national security "is not my thing, not my area of expertise."

Darline Graham has been a United States Senator since July 14. The runoff that decides whether she is on the November ballot is Tuesday, August 25.

How she got there

Graham was not elected to anything. Governor Henry McMaster appointed her to the seat left vacant by the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham, on July 11 — on President Trump's public recommendation. She had never held elected office and had never run for anything. Six days after being sworn in, she announced she was running for the full six-year term.

The debate in Newberry on August 18, co-moderated by Greta Van Susteren, was the only one scheduled before the runoff. Her opponent is U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman.

Why the Taiwan question isn't a gotcha

It's worth being precise about what she was asked, because "national security" can sound like a trick topic full of classified detail. It isn't what happened here.

Whether the United States has an interest in Taiwan and the South China Sea has been the stated position of every administration of both parties for decades. Taiwan makes most of the world's advanced computer chips. There is no version of this question that a senator gets to be surprised by.

Norman, standing next to her, answered it in a sentence: "What the president is doing right is he's enabling Taiwan to defend themselves against China, but it's peace through strength that he's showing." Agree with it or don't — he had an answer.

And this is not a hypothetical part of the job. A senator votes on arms sales, on defense authorization, on sanctions, on whether to keep funding a war. Graham has had a vote on every one of those since July 14.

What she has found time to be informed about

Graham says national security isn't her area. Here is what has been.

Her first bill was the SAVE Act — legislation that would make it harder for millions of American citizens to vote by requiring documentary proof of citizenship. She cosponsored it within days of arriving.

Her first big procedural move was to say she'd blow up the filibuster to pass it — the opposite of her late brother's long-held position, in the seat she was appointed to honor his legacy in.

Her first votes cut against the community she spent her career serving. Graham led South Carolina's Commission for the Blind and worked in state disability and workforce services. Then she got to the Senate and voted the other way on disability programs.

And within two weeks of launching her campaign, it had taken $24,000 more than federal law allows — the FEC told her so on August 17. She has also inherited her brother's leadership PAC along with his seat.

So the areas of expertise developed quickly. Voting restrictions: within days. Campaign money: within two weeks. Taiwan: not her thing.

The honest part is the problem

Give Graham this much — she did not bluff. Plenty of politicians would have produced forty seconds of "peace through strength" and moved on. She said out loud that she didn't know.

But a senator is not a candidate for a job she might grow into. She already has the job. She has had a vote on the Senate floor since July 14, and she will keep having one through January whatever happens on Tuesday. Saying "that's not my area" is a thing a nominee says at a hearing. It is not available to someone already casting the votes.

South Carolina Republicans go to the polls Tuesday, August 25. Trump held a rally for her in Myrtle Beach, Gov. McMaster endorsed her, and former Gov. Mark Sanford endorsed Norman instead.

Sources

Darline Graham says she's "not that informed on national security" at debate — CBS News. Photo: AP.
Graham, Norman clash in only scheduled debate before Senate primary runoff — WIS-TV
Sen. Darline Graham avoids giving direct answer to national security question in S.C. debate: 'Not my thing' — PBS News

Zach Nunn Brought Gold Star Families Onstage at His Campaign Fundraiser. The Defense Secretary Headlining It Broke His Own Department's Rule Against Speaking at One.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:52:53 +0000

On Monday, August 17, Zach Nunn held his annual campaign fundraiser at JR's Southpork Ranch at the Iowa State Fair. It's called "Operation Top Nunn: Salute to the Troops."

Onstage, Nunn brought up the families of two Iowa soldiers killed in Syria last December — Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard of Marshalltown and Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar of Des Moines.

"That's what the days like this are about," Nunn said. "Recognizing how we can help those who survive with us and honor those who've given the ultimate sacrifice."

The headline guest was Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And Hegseth did not stop at talking about the troops.

What the Rules Say

The Defense Department wrote guidance in February 2026 covering political activity by Senate-confirmed officials — people like the Secretary of Defense. Under the heading "Fundraising," it asks whether such an official may "help organize a political fundraiser or speak at a fundraiser." The answer is "No." They are:

"prohibited from… organizing a political fundraiser or speaking at an event on behalf of a political party or candidate for partisan political office."

Even at a partisan event where an official speech is allowed — one that isn't a fundraiser — the guidance says the speech "should be limited to DoW issues," and the official "must refrain from advocating for or against a candidate for partisan political office, or commenting on any campaign related issues."

Here is what Hegseth actually did at Nunn's fundraiser, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch reporter who was there: he called on Iowans to reelect Nunn to the House, describing him as a needed ally for the administration.

"President Trump needs the type of leaders who understand why a $1.5 trillion dollar budget, a one-time generational investment, is what is necessary…" Hegseth told the crowd.

A political fundraiser: the event was Nunn's campaign fundraiser. Speaking at one: he spoke. Advocating for a candidate: he asked people to vote for one.

Iowa Starting Line, which first reported the conflict with the department's own rules, notes this is the second time this year Hegseth's conduct has run into guidance his own department wrote. In May he headlined a Kentucky rally for a primary challenger to Republican Rep. Thomas Massie.

The Pentagon's position is that Hegseth attended in his personal capacity.

The Part Nunn Owns

Hegseth broke the rule. But it was Nunn's event, Nunn's campaign account, and Nunn's decision about what the evening would look like.

This fundraiser was originally scheduled for March. It was called off after two Iowa soldiers — Major Jeffrey O'Brien, 45, of Waukee, and Sgt. Declan J. Coady, just 20, of West Des Moines — were killed on March 1 in an Iranian strike on a facility in Kuwait. They were among six Americans killed in that attack, all assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command, based in Des Moines.

Nunn rescheduled it for the State Fair, kept the "Salute to the Troops" name, invited two Gold Star families to the stage, and booked the Secretary of Defense as the draw.

The money raised goes to Nunn's campaign, and the event also benefits veterans support organizations.

His opponent, Democratic state Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, put it this way:

"It's disgraceful that Zach Nunn and Pete Hegseth are partying together at a campaign stop in Iowa while our service members are under threat and facing poor conditions overseas. Our leaders should be focused on ending this war and keeping Americans deployed overseas safe, not fundraising for Zach Nunn's campaign."

What Else Was Said From That Stage

Hegseth also used the fundraiser to talk about the Pentagon's rollback of diversity policies, and he used a slur for transgender people to do it. Describing the department, which the administration has renamed the Department of War, he said: "at the Department of War, we do training, not tr——es."

"It is a day and night difference," he continued. "Training, lethality, accountability, discipline, readiness — the bedrock of what it means to be an American warrior — is the only focus of our department."

That was the speech at an event honoring dead Iowa soldiers, whose families Nunn had brought onstage.

A Pattern of Borrowed Credibility

Nunn's campaign has leaned on this kind of staging before.

In July, he accepted a "badge of honor" for cancer research funding at an event where a stage-four cancer patient described being kicked off Iowa Medicaid. He promised to protect Medicaid and SNAP, then voted for the bill that cut both. When a Democratic campaign tracker asked him about rural hospitals, he swatted the phone away rather than answer.

And this campaign has already shown it will bend the rules to hold this seat. Nunn's campaign worked to knock a Libertarian challenger off his own ballot, and he has taken to calling his opponent, a Lutheran pastor, a Satanist.

Nunn is one of the most vulnerable House Republicans in the country this year. A "Salute to the Troops" that doubles as a fundraiser, with a Cabinet secretary breaking his own department's ethics guidance to headline it, is what that looks like.

Nunn's campaign did not respond to Iowa Starting Line's request for comment.

Source

Zachary Oren Smith, "Pete Hegseth broke his own department's rule to fundraise for Zach Nunn", Iowa Starting Line, August 18, 2026.

Robin Opsahl, "US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth joins Rep. Zach Nunn at Iowa State Fair", Iowa Capital Dispatch, August 17, 2026. Photo by Robin Opsahl / Iowa Capital Dispatch.

Scott Franklin Flew Combat Missions for 26 Years. He Voted Twice Against the Burn Pits Bill — Then Joined the Veterans' Affairs Committee.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:26:05 +0000

For twenty years, the American military burned its garbage in open pits on bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Plastic, batteries, paint, medical waste, human waste — doused in jet fuel and set on fire, sometimes a few hundred yards from where troops slept. People came home with cancers and lung diseases. When they filed for care, the VA made them prove, claim by claim, that the smoke had caused it.

The Honoring our PACT Act ended that argument. It says if you served near those hazards and you got one of the listed illnesses, the VA presumes the two are connected. You get treated. You stop fighting your own government while you're sick. The VA calls it "perhaps the largest health care and benefit expansion in VA history," and lists the places that trigger the presumption: Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen and a dozen more.

On July 13, 2022, the House sent it to the president. The vote was 342 to 88. 123 Republicans voted yes.

Scott Franklin voted no.

Who was voting

This is the part that's hard to get past.

Franklin's own congressional biography describes a first career as a Naval Aviator who "flew jets from the decks of 13 aircraft carriers during 26 years of service, including 14 years on active duty, followed by 12 years in the reserves." It lists deployments to the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and the North Atlantic, and combat operations in the Gulf, Bosnia and Kosovo. And this line: "He was recalled to active duty twice after 9/11 with U.S. Central Command."

Central Command is the combatant command that ran the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the same theater on the VA's presumption list.

Franklin came home. Then he voted against the bill that pays for the medical care of the people who came home sicker than he did.

He voted no twice

That July vote was the second one.

On March 3, 2022, the House passed the same legislation in its original form as H.R. 3967. It carried 256 to 174. Franklin voted no then too.

Four months later, the Senate sent the package back on a different bill number — S. 3373, a shell that still carried the title "Protecting Our Gold Star Families Education Act" on the House roll call. That was the final vote, the one that put the PACT Act on the president's desk. Franklin voted no again.

Two chances. Two no votes.

Eleven Florida Republicans voted yes

The March vote split along party lines — 174 Republicans opposed it, only 34 in favor. Nothing distinguishes Franklin there.

July is different. By July, most of his party had moved. Of the 211 Republicans who voted, 123 were for the bill and 88 were against it. Franklin picked the smaller side.

He also picked the smaller side of his own state. Twenty-one members of Florida's House delegation voted yes, including eleven Florida Republicans — Gus Bilirakis, Kat Cammack, Mario Diaz-Balart, Byron Donalds, Matt Gaetz, Carlos Gimenez, Brian Mast, Bill Posey, John Rutherford, Maria Elvira Salazar and Michael Waltz.

Five Florida Republicans voted no: Vern Buchanan, Neal Dunn, Franklin, Greg Steube and Daniel Webster.

Brian Mast, whose official biography describes the roadside bomb in Afghanistan that cost him both of his legs, voted yes.

The next Congress, he joined the Veterans' Affairs Committee

In the Congress that began weeks after that vote, Franklin took a seat on the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs — the committee that writes veterans' health and benefits law. The committee's own membership page from 2023 lists him among its Republican members as "Scott Franklin, FL-18."

He is not on that committee now. He has something more powerful. His committees page lists him as Vice Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, sitting on its Military Construction and Veterans Affairs subcommittee — the panel that decides how much money the VA actually gets each year.

That includes the Toxic Exposures Fund, the account the PACT Act created to pay for all of this. It runs through the MilCon-VA bill his subcommittee writes; when the committee approved the 2026 version, one of the adopted amendments was specifically about keeping that fund whole.

So the sequence is: vote against creating the benefit, then help decide what it's worth.

What he says about veterans' health care

In February 2025, Franklin reintroduced a bill on veterans' community care with Senator Tommy Tuberville. Here is how he opened his statement:

"Those who bravely served our nation deserve a healthcare system that provides timely access to quality care."

That's his own press release, February 12, 2025.

Nobody would argue with the sentence. The problem is that the expansion the VA itself calls perhaps the largest in its history came up for a vote twice while he was in the room, and he was against it both times.

50,903 people

Florida's 18th District is not a place where this is abstract. Census data counts 50,903 veterans living there — 7.3% of the population, higher than Florida's rate and about 25% above the national rate.

Some of them are the people the PACT Act was written for: the ones who breathed the smoke, got sick years later, and would otherwise be filing paperwork trying to prove a burn pit in Balad gave them a rare cancer.

They have a congressman who flew combat missions, who was recalled to CENTCOM after 9/11, who sits on the subcommittee that funds the VA — and who voted no.

He's not the only one, and that's the point

This wasn't a fluke of one member's judgment. Oregon's Cliff Bentz was the only member of his state's delegation to vote against the PACT Act, twice. In the Senate, Idaho's Jim Risch voted against it at every single stage — five separate roll calls, including the July 2022 blockade that left veterans camped on the Capitol steps.

What's different about Franklin is the résumé, and the seat he holds now.

There is also the question of who gets to ask him about it. In March 2025, more than 100 constituents protested outside his Lakeland office and handed out flyers with his face under the word "MISSING" — because he doesn't hold in-person town halls. He holds telephone ones, where his office decides which questions get through.

A veteran in Lakeland with a burn-pit claim cannot walk into a room and ask him why he voted no. That is by design.

We deserve better.

Sources

The votes are public record: Roll Call 57, March 3, 2022 (H.R. 3967, Honoring our PACT Act, 256–174), and Roll Call 309, July 13, 2022 (S. 3373, the Senate vehicle that sent the PACT Act to the president, 342–88). Biography, committee assignments and the February 2025 statement are from Franklin's own House website; his 2023 Veterans' Affairs Committee membership is from the committee's archived roster. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Jack Bergman Is the Highest-Ranking Combat Veteran Ever Elected to Congress. He Wrote the Bill That Lets Companies Charge Veterans for Filing VA Claims.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:53:32 +0000

On August 5, 2026, a federal judge in North Carolina ruled that a company called Veterans Guardian VA Claim Consulting had been running an illegal, predatory business against disabled veterans.

Chief District Judge Catherine Eagles found the company violated North Carolina's Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act by charging veterans big fees to prepare and file VA disability claims without the federal accreditation the law requires. As Public Radio East reported, the judge found the company deliberately collected its payments in a way designed to hide its involvement from the VA — and kept going after it got cease-and-desist letters. Because it's an unfair trade practice, any damages get automatically tripled.

Here is why northern Michigan should care.

The bill sitting in Congress right now that would make that exact business legal in all 50 states was written by Jack Bergman.

What the law says today, and what his bill would change

Federal law says you cannot charge a veteran to help them file an initial VA disability claim unless you're accredited by the VA. That's the law Judge Eagles just found Veterans Guardian broke.

The reason the rule exists is simple: filing that claim is already free. The Disabled American Veterans, the VFW, the American Legion, and county veterans service officers are accredited, and they do it for nothing. That is the entire point of the accreditation system.

Bergman's bill, the CHOICE for Veterans Act (H.R. 3132), would let employees of for-profit claims companies get accredited and legally charge veterans fees nationwide. He introduced it on May 1, 2025. Five days later his committee voted it out, 12–11, on party lines.

The War Horse reported on the bill in June 2025. It was the first time a bill legalizing for-profit claims consultants had ever made it out of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee. It comes with guardrails — a $12,500 fee cap and a ban on overseas call centers.

The veterans groups whose job this actually is are against it.

"I think it is egregious, and no veteran should have to pay ever. It's the wrong answer for veterans."

— Scott Hope, deputy national service director for training, Disabled American Veterans

That $12,500 cap is worth holding onto for a second. Task & Purpose reported the case of a former Army intelligence analyst who used Veterans Guardian to file his first claim. He won a 100% rating worth $4,272.80 a month. The company billed him $21,360 — five times the monthly increase he'd won. He paid more than $19,000 of it. Another accredited organization would have filed the identical claim for free.

The money, and the dates

Bergman's office has an answer ready for this. His communications director told The War Horse:

"Let's be clear: General Bergman's priorities are driven by one thing—delivering results for America's Veterans. As a retired Three-Star General and the highest-ranking combat Veteran ever elected to Congress, his legislative agenda is shaped by the men and women who've served this country, not by campaign donations."

So look at the donations.

Federal Election Commission records for Bergman's campaign committee show:

Date	Amount	From
Feb 10, 2023	$2,500	Veterans Guardian's political action committee
Apr 20, 2023	$500	Mark Christensen, listing Veterans Guardian as his employer
Jun 29–30, 2023	$6,600	Scott Greenblatt, CEO — the maximum for the cycle
Jun 30, 2023	$6,600	William Taylor, co-owner — the maximum for the cycle
Feb 6, 2025	$7,000	Scott Greenblatt, CEO — the maximum for the cycle
Feb 7, 2025	$7,000	Bill Taylor, COO — the maximum for the cycle

Read the last two rows again. The chief executive and the chief operating officer of the company each gave Bergman every dollar the law allows, on consecutive days in early February 2025.

Twelve weeks later, on May 1, he introduced the bill that would legalize their business model nationwide.

And that wasn't his first bill for this industry. On February 27, 2025 — three weeks after those checks — Bergman also introduced the PLUS for Veterans Act, a second measure aimed at the same accreditation rules.

The bill that would stop them can't get a hearing

There is a competing bill. Rep. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire wrote the GUARD VA Benefits Act, which would put actual penalties on charging veterans unauthorized fees. It has 135 cosponsors. It has never been marked up. Its only action in nearly a year and a half was a hearing in March 2026.

Pappas called Bergman's bill "deeply concerning legislation" that lets claims consulting companies "continue to be able to expand the profit center that they've developed on the backs of our veterans." He told The War Horse he thinks there's "a connection between the way that these for-profit companies have been organizing and communicating with policymakers." Those companies have spent more than $4 million lobbying federal and state lawmakers over two years.

At the same May 2025 markup where Bergman's bill advanced, committee Democrats offered 36 amendments — including one to protect veterans from claim sharks and make sure "these illegal businesses face legal consequences." Republicans voted down all 36.

The committee's own press release that week, announcing the 18 bills it advanced, listed "holding claim sharks accountable" among its accomplishments. Bergman's bill is on that same list.

Why it's Bergman

Plenty of Republicans voted for this. Only one wrote it, and his résumé is exactly why it matters.

By his own office's description, Bergman is a retired three-star general and the highest-ranking combat veteran ever elected to Congress. He sits on the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs — specifically on the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, the panel whose entire job is the disability claims system. He is not a freshman who got lobbied into something. He is the member with the most standing to say no to this, and he sponsored it instead.

We've written about another Republican who cosponsored the same bill while the company's executives were his biggest donors. Bergman is the reason there was a bill for him to cosponsor.

There's one more piece. On July 1, 2026 — five weeks before the judge's ruling — Bergman co-signed a letter with committee chairman Mike Bost asking the VA to review whether the VFW should keep its accreditation, after the VFW publicly opposed a different veterans bill. The VFW is one of the organizations that files these claims for free.

So the record reads like this: the accredited nonprofit that helps veterans for nothing gets its accreditation questioned. The unaccredited company a federal judge just called predatory gets a bill written for it.

What happens next

The class action against Veterans Guardian is still going — the August ruling settled that the company broke the law, not what it owes. The CHOICE for Veterans Act is still pending, eligible for a vote on the House floor.

If it passes, conduct a federal judge just described as illegal and predatory becomes legal in every state.

The veterans most likely to pay $21,000 for a form somebody would have filled out for free are the ones with the fewest options — the ones far from a VA office, far from a county service officer, worn down by a claims process The War Horse's own reporting describes as a bureaucratic maze.

Bergman knows that system better than almost anyone in Congress. He wrote the bill anyway.

Sources

Annette Weston, "Federal judge rules North Carolina consulting firm ran predatory business model targeting veterans" — Public Radio East, August 5, 2026.

Leah Rosenbaum, "Congress advances bill for firms to charge veterans for VA help" — The War Horse, June 12, 2025. Image courtesy of The War Horse.

Ronny Jackson Says He'll Put Servicemembers First. The Pentagon Found He Bullied, Belittled and Humiliated His Own.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:41:54 +0000

On July 13, 2026, Ronny Jackson announced he wants to run the House Armed Services Committee.

That committee writes the defense bill every year. It sets pay, benefits, housing and health care for more than two million Americans in uniform. It also writes the rules that are supposed to protect junior servicemembers from the officers above them.

Here is how Jackson pitched himself for the job, in his own announcement:

"Through more than 25 years in the U.S. Navy and throughout my service in Congress, I have remained committed to ensuring our military remains the strongest, most capable fighting force in the world. As Chairman, I will fight to advance military readiness, make critical investments in our national defense, and always put our servicemembers and their families first."

Always put our servicemembers first.

We have a 37-page federal report about how Ronny Jackson treated the servicemembers who worked directly for him. It is not a rumor and it is not a campaign attack. It is an official investigation by the Defense Department's own Inspector General, and the Navy acted on it.

What the Pentagon actually found

The Inspector General opened the investigation in 2018 after a dozen complaints about Jackson's conduct running the White House Medical Unit — a Defense Department unit, staffed by military personnel, that he led. Investigators interviewed dozens of people who had worked for him.

The report came out in March 2021. NPR read the whole thing and reported what it says. The Inspector General concluded that Jackson:

"disparaged, belittled, bullied, and humiliated" the people who worked under him
made "sexual and denigrating" statements about a female medical subordinate
"engaged in inappropriate conduct involving the use of alcohol" on two presidential trips — Manila in 2014 and Bariloche, Argentina in 2016
took Ambien, a prescription sleeping pill, on official travel, which worried his own staff about whether he could care for the president if called

Of 60 former White House Medical Unit staff who dealt with him and were interviewed, the report says, "Only four witnesses told us that they did not experience, see, or hear about RDML Jackson yelling, screaming, cursing, or belittling subordinates."

Four out of sixty.

The word "alcohol" appears 56 times in the report.

The night in Manila

The single worst episode in the report happened on a presidential trip to the Philippines. Jackson had been drinking with junior staff. At one or two in the morning, visibly drunk and with bloodshot eyes, he pounded on a female subordinate's hotel room door — loudly enough that witnesses worried he would wake the president.

When she opened the door, he told her, "I need you."

Here is what she told federal investigators, in her own words:

"when a drunk man comes to your room and they say, 'I need you,' your mind goes to the worst. I really felt it was a sexually inappropriate comment."

A male colleague came into the hallway to see what the pounding was and tried to steer Jackson back to his own room. Jackson insisted: "No, no. We need her. We need her. Get her. We need her."

She changed out of her pajamas, picked up her medical bag because she did not know what the emergency was, and went to her boss's hotel room. There was no emergency. Jackson wanted to film himself eating balut — a fertilized duck egg — as a stunt. She described what she walked into:

"Dr. Jackson was in [the room] holding this ... grocery bag of ... balut. [RDML Jackson] said, 'Take my phone. Take my phone. We need to take pictures. I want to film this. I want to film myself eating these eggs.' And he's screaming. I kind of describe this is like frat boy type behavior."

She left. That woman was a servicemember. Jackson was her commanding officer.

The Navy demoted him. Then Trump's Navy secretary undid it.

The Inspector General recommended the Navy "take appropriate action." In July 2022, the Navy demoted Jackson from rear admiral to captain — a rank reduction that, as reported at the time, costs an officer with his service record more than $15,000 a year in retirement pay.

He didn't tell anyone. He kept calling himself a "retired Rear Admiral" — on his congressional website and in public — for nearly two years, until reporters uncovered the demotion in March 2024.

Then, in June 2025, Trump's Navy Secretary John Phelan simply reversed it. Phelan's letter restored Jackson's one-star rank after a "review of all applicable reports and references." No new investigation. No new findings. The Inspector General's conclusions were never withdrawn — a political appointee just decided they shouldn't cost Jackson anything.

Jackson's response, posted online: "I was, and still am, a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral, and Joe Biden is a retired old FOOL."

That is the record of the man asking his colleagues to hand him the gavel of the Armed Services Committee.

This isn't the first time a Senate committee looked at this

In 2018, Trump nominated Jackson to run the Department of Veterans Affairs. It fell apart in a month.

The Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee talked to nearly two dozen of Jackson's current and former colleagues. CNN reported that the committee's top Democrat, Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, said around 20 people brought concerns to the panel — that Jackson handed out prescription drugs "like candy," that he was drunk on overseas trips with the president, and this:

"We were told time and time again the people above him he treated like gold, the people below him, he belittled, screamed at them, really created a very toxic environment to the point where the people who worked around him felt like they had to walk on eggshells because of his lack of respect for his job."

Jackson withdrew on April 26, 2018, calling the allegations "completely false and fabricated."

Three years later the Pentagon's own investigators substantiated much of it anyway.

And the veterans' vote he actually cast

Jackson runs on 25 years in uniform. So look at what he did with the biggest veterans' bill of his time in Congress.

The PACT Act extended VA health care and benefits to veterans poisoned by burn pits and other toxic exposures overseas. It came to the House floor twice, and Jackson voted against it both times.

On March 3, 2022, the House passed H.R. 3967, the Honoring our PACT Act, 256 to 174. Jackson voted no.

Four months later the bill came back in the form that actually became law. On July 13, 2022, the House passed it 342 to 88 — a lopsided, bipartisan vote, with 123 Republicans in favor. Jackson was one of the 88 who voted no.

He is entitled to vote however he wants. But "always put our servicemembers and their families first" is his sentence, not ours, and burn-pit veterans were the servicemembers and families in front of him both times.

Why the gavel matters

Jackson isn't the only Texas Republican with an ethics file trying to collect a gavel this year — Pat Fallon is running for the Oversight Committee on an explicit promise to use Congress's watchdog committee to defend the president. This is what the next Congress's committee chairs may look like.

But Armed Services is a specific job. Among the things it handles are the military's rules on harassment, command climate, and how the chain of command treats junior enlisted personnel — the exact areas where a federal investigation found Jackson failed, and where the Navy stripped a star off his shoulder because of it.

The young sailor or airman who reports that a senior officer screamed at them, or made comments about their body, or showed up drunk, is supposed to be able to trust that the system takes it seriously.

Ronny Jackson is the case study in what happens when it doesn't. The report was written. The findings were substantiated. The Navy acted. And then a political appointee handed the rank back, and the congressman went looking for a promotion.

We deserve better.

Sources

Rep. Ronny Jackson Announces Candidacy for Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee — Jackson's own office, July 13, 2026
Ronny Jackson 'Bullied' Subordinates And Broke Alcohol Rules, Pentagon Report Finds — NPR, March 3, 2021
Navy demoted Ronny Jackson after probe — The Texas Tribune, March 7, 2024
Ronny Jackson withdraws as VA secretary nominee — CNN, April 26, 2018
Navy restores Rep. Ronny Jackson's rank, overturning demotion — CNN/AP, September 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images

Cory Mills Got a Bronze Star for Saving Two Soldiers Under Fire. Both of Them Say He Wasn't There.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:03:06 +0000

On August 6, at a Republican debate in New Smyrna Beach, a veteran running against Cory Mills for Florida's 7th Congressional District spent the night going after him over one thing. Michael Don Johnson, one of the challengers on stage, repeatedly clashed with Mills over accusations of stolen valor and his military service.

That was twelve days before the primary. It was not a new accusation, and it is not one Mills has been able to make go away — because the people making it are the soldiers he says he saved.

What the paperwork says he did

Mills served in the Army from 1999 to 2003 with the 82nd Airborne Division, and deployed to Iraq in 2003. In 2021 — eighteen years later, and one year before he first ran for Congress — he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.

The award paperwork, a Department of the Army Form 638, lists four achievements. The centerpiece is the one Mills built a political identity on: that under intense enemy fire he rushed to two wounded soldiers, gave them life-saving care "at great risk to his own life," helped get them evacuated, and saved their lives. A second claim says he pulled a sergeant away from an enemy insurgent who had grabbed him. A third says he "routinely exposed himself to enemy fire" with "extraordinary heroism."

It is the kind of citation a campaign is built on. Mills has used it that way.

The people who were there don't remember him

In 2025, NOTUS reporters Reese Gorman and John T. Seward tracked down the men named on that form. What they found is that five people who served with Mills dispute the account — including both men the form credits him with personally saving.

Private First Class Joe Heit is one of the two soldiers. He is the person the paperwork says Mills kept alive. Asked about it, Heit said:

"He didn't save my life. I don't recall him being there either."

Heit also said his wounds were not life-threatening — a bullet shattered his glasses and drove fragments into his eye — and that he was shot by friendly fire, not the enemy fire the form describes.

Sergeant First Class Chris Painter, the platoon sergeant, was blunter in a text message: "I can pretty much confirm 100% Cory Mills was not up at the bridges at the location of the everything." Painter named two other soldiers who helped with the medical evacuation. Mills was not one of them.

Hank Barbe, the medic, said the same thing about the evacuation of the other wounded soldier: "From what I understand about Mills is he might have been in the unit. I don't remember him being involved in the medevac."

And Sergeant First Class Joe Ferrand — the man the form says Mills rescued from an insurgent's grip — put it in writing. He called the account a "fabrication" and said the act "never took place." His words are quoted in a resolution now before the House: he "was not involved in any claims that Cory Mills makes about me."

A fifth soldier who was on the ground that day, speaking anonymously, backed up Heit and Painter.

The general whose signature is on it says he never read it

Mills's defense has been that he didn't write the form. "No soldier writes their own DA Form 638," he said. "It is a recommendation for award and soldiers cannot recommend themselves. The form must be reviewed and signed by commanding officers."

That defense rests entirely on the officer whose name is on the paperwork — retired Brigadier General Arnold N. Gordon-Bray. So it matters what he says about it.

Gordon-Bray told NOTUS he "approved his 638 as a complete the record" and that he didn't "care about" the listed achievements before signing, describing awards that came through in batches at a time when operations were constant. He was not directly involved with Mills during the deployment.

The House resolution puts it more starkly. It states that Gordon-Bray "has stated he did not personally write, read, or sign" the form recommending Mills for the Bronze Star.

So Mills's answer — the officers reviewed it — collapses into the officer saying he didn't review it.

Mills has conceded ground on the facts themselves. He acknowledged it was "true" that Heit "did not have life threatening injuries." On the rest, he says: "I was on the ground. It was a chaotic day and understandable that others may have different recollections of events." On Ferrand's flat denial: "Again, I was on the ground, but I'm not in position to dispute different recollections during chaotic wartime events."

Five people. One chaotic day. Every one of them remembering it the same way, and none of them remembering him.

It isn't just the Bronze Star

The same House resolution documents a second problem with how Mills has described his service. It states that his employment application to the military contractor DynCorp International said he served in the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment and attended Army Sniper School — "claims which are not corroborated by his military records."

The Ranger Regiment and Sniper School are not vague résumé padding. They are specific, verifiable schools and units, and the records don't back them up.

This is now a formal investigation

None of this is being litigated only in the press. In November 2025 the House Ethics Committee empaneled an Investigative Subcommittee to examine six categories of alleged misconduct by Mills. By May 2026 that subcommittee had "authorized more than 20 subpoenas" and collected thousands of documents, calling the allegations "serious and complex."

A complaint over the Bronze Star claims went further than Congress. NOTUS reported it was filed with the Office of Congressional Ethics, the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida, and the FBI — and that a source said the Army's Criminal Investigation Division and the FBI came asking questions. Mills said he was not aware of any investigation regarding his Bronze Star.

Separately, the Justice Department is now criminally investigating Mills, NBC News reported in July. He denies that too.

Why this one is different

Plenty of politicians embellish. This is a narrower and uglier thing.

A Bronze Star with valor is awarded for what someone did for the people next to them. When the paperwork says a soldier's life was saved, the story belongs to that soldier too — and Joe Heit has spent years being told he was rescued in a way he says never happened. Joe Ferrand had to write out a statement calling an account of his own near-capture a fabrication.

Compare it to how another Republican in this House talks about the same medal. Pat Harrigan of North Carolina lists two Bronze Star Medals in his official biography — and we've written about how quickly he abandoned the accountability those medals are supposed to stand for. The point isn't that the award makes anyone good. It's that the award is supposed to mean something specific happened, and the men who were there are the ones who know.

The bottom line

Cory Mills is asking Florida's 7th District to send him back to Washington on August 18. He is doing it while under a House Ethics investigation, a reported federal criminal investigation, and a challenge from members of his own party — two fellow Florida Republicans have endorsed his primary opponent, and former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, now running for governor, has said Mills "is a disgrace to the Republican brand and should call his campaign quits."

And he is doing it on a war story that five of the men who were there say isn't his.

Real soldiers earned those medals. Voters in Florida's 7th deserve a representative whose record holds up when the people who lived it are asked about it.

Source

"He Didn't Save My Life": Veterans Question Rep. Cory Mills' Bronze Star — Reese Gorman and John T. Seward, NOTUS. Photo: AP, via NOTUS.
H.Res. 893 — Censuring Representative Cory Mills of Florida — 119th Congress
Cory Mills Says He'll Vote for Donalds, Ryan Elijah Noncommittal in Governor's Race — The Floridian, August 2026 (District 7 debate coverage)

One in Ten of Greg Murphy's Constituents Is a Veteran. Asked If VA Cuts Would Hurt Them, He Said: "No, I Can't Guarantee Anything."

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:48:36 +0000

On March 3, 2025, CNN's Brianna Keilar asked Greg Murphy a simple question: could he guarantee that veterans' benefits and care would not be affected by the cuts the Trump administration was making at the Department of Veterans Affairs?

His answer, as The Hill reported, was four words long.

"No, I can't guarantee anything."

He then explained why that was acceptable:

"But the whole purpose, again, of restructuring is to make sure that that agency is efficient."

Murphy is not a random backbencher on this subject. He sits on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee. And he told Keilar exactly what his district looks like:

"Look, I care for our veterans. One out of 10 constituents of mine are veterans. It's a real issue in eastern North Carolina."

He's right about the district. North Carolina's 3rd takes in Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune and the Marine Corps Air Stations at Cherry Point and New River. It is one of the most military-dependent districts in the country.

So a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, representing Camp Lejeune, was asked whether the people who live around those bases would be hurt. He said he couldn't promise they wouldn't. And he said the cuts should go ahead.

"Short-term pain"

Keilar asked what he was hearing from constituents. Murphy acknowledged the calls were coming in:

"Sure, sure. I mean, we're hearing voters. A lot are calling our offices, of course. They're calling all Republican offices, voicing concerns."

And then:

"Is there going to be short-term pain? Is there going to be some issues? Absolutely, and this is what happens with restructuring. But we have to get government back to doing what it's supposed to be doing, and that's working for the people."

At the moment he said that, the VA had cut about 1,400 employees the previous Monday, after roughly 1,000 in February. VA Secretary Doug Collins had also announced the cancellation of up to 875 contracts, then paused that effort a day later after an outcry from veterans' groups.

Collins's position at the time was firmer than Murphy's. "These moves will not hurt VA health care, benefits or beneficiaries," he said. "In fact, Veterans are going to notice a change for the better."

The Secretary guaranteed it. The congressman on the oversight committee wouldn't.

What actually happened

On July 7, 2025, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it was on track to shed nearly 30,000 employees by the end of the fiscal year — about 17,000 gone between January and June, and another 12,000 expected by September 30. The department got there through a governmentwide hiring freeze, deferred resignations, early retirements and ordinary attrition.

Collins had originally floated cutting around 80,000. The 30,000 figure was the walk-back.

Thirty thousand people is not a restructuring. It is tens of thousands of workers gone in nine months, at an agency whose central problem — the one Murphy himself named in that CNN interview — is that veterans wait too long for appointments.

Here is what Murphy said the real failure was:

"But the real issue is also when somebody can't get benefits and they've put off their doctor's appointments for eight or 10 months when they can't get care. That is where an agency has failed."

He is describing a staffing problem. His answer was to cut staff.

This is not hypothetical anymore

What a shrunken VA looks like in practice is already on the record elsewhere. In March 2026 the VA announced it was closing the only clinic in McMinnville, Tennessee, because a contractor couldn't keep it staffed — leaving about 1,840 veterans facing a 45-minute drive each way. We wrote about what the congressman there did about it, which was to say he'd had no warning, and then to announce the clinic had been saved.

That is the model. Nobody votes to close a clinic. The staff just stop being there, and one day the doors don't open.

Murphy has a real advantage over most of his colleagues here: he is the only member of Congress who still practices medicine, and he knows what happens to a patient who can't get an appointment. He said so on television. Then he called the consequences short-term pain.

The parts he does show up for

To be fair to the record, Murphy does constituent work on veterans. He has hosted a North Carolina constituent to testify before the VA Committee, and he runs an annual Veterans History Project event in the district.

None of that is the same as oversight. Oversight is what a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee does when an administration announces it is removing tens of thousands of people from the agency he's supposed to be watching. On March 3, 2025, Murphy was handed the microphone and asked to hold the line for the one in ten of his own constituents he'd just described as veterans.

He said he couldn't guarantee anything, and moved on.

Sources

House Republican says he 'can't guarantee' staff cuts won't impact veterans, The Hill, March 3, 2025
Republican 'Can't Guarantee' Trump-Backed Budget Cuts Won't Hurt Veterans, Newsweek
VA to reduce staff by nearly 30K by end of FY2025, Department of Veterans Affairs, July 7, 2025

Scott DesJarlais Writes America's Nuclear Weapons Budget. Eleven Companies That Build the Weapons Gave Him $94,000.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:22:14 +0000

On June 4, 2026, Scott DesJarlais stood up at a House Armed Services Committee markup and read a short statement into the record. Almost nobody covered it. It is one of the most valuable pieces of paper in Washington.

DesJarlais chairs the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. That subcommittee holds the pen on nuclear weapons, strategic missiles, nuclear command and control, missile defense, military space systems, and the Energy Department programs that keep the nuclear stockpile running. He took the gavel in January 2025.

What that means in practice is simple. Once a year, DesJarlais decides which of these programs get more money and which ones don't. Then the full committee votes on what he wrote.

What he put in the bill

Here is what DesJarlais said his subcommittee's piece of the 2027 defense bill does, in his own words:

"The subcommittee's Fiscal Year 2027 mark is the product of bipartisan cooperation and continues many of our longstanding efforts, such as advancing nuclear modernization, reforming the national security space enterprise, and enhancing missile defense."

Then he got specific. The bill, he said, "authorizes full funding to keep modernizing the nation's nuclear forces," supports "significant increase in funding" for the Energy Department's nuclear production capabilities, and improves "acquisition flexibility for the Air Force's ICBM programs."

On missile defense, he named four things by name:

space-based sensing
development of the Next-Generation Interceptor
Standard Missile 3 – Block II-B procurement
accelerating the Glide Phase Interceptor program

And he closed by saying he was "happy to support the historic increase in funding for the Space Force specifically."

Those aren't abstractions. Every single one of them is a contract. And every single one of those contracts belongs to a company that writes checks to Scott DesJarlais.

Line by line, program to donor

Let's take his list in order.

The Next-Generation Interceptor — the missile meant to replace America's homeland missile-defense interceptors — belongs to Lockheed Martin, which beat Northrop Grumman for the job in 2024. Lockheed Martin's PAC has given DesJarlais $10,000 this election cycle, including a $5,000 check on February 25, 2026 — while he was writing this bill.

Standard Missile-3 is built by Raytheon, a division of RTX. RTX's PAC has given DesJarlais $10,000 this cycle. Its $5,000 check landed the same day Lockheed's did.

The Glide Phase Interceptor — the one DesJarlais wrote extra money into the bill to speed up — belongs to Northrop Grumman. Northrop's PAC has given him $10,000 this cycle, $5,000 of it on February 9, 2026. Northrop is also the prime contractor on the Air Force's Sentinel ICBM — the program whose "acquisition flexibility" DesJarlais wrote a legislative fix for in the very same bill.

Space-based sensing means missile-tracking satellites. L3Harris won an $843 million contract in December 2025 to build eighteen of them. L3Harris's PAC has given DesJarlais $8,000 this cycle, with its most recent check dated June 29 — twenty-five days after he read that statement.

The Energy Department's "production capabilities" he boosted are the nuclear weapons plants. The largest of them, the Kansas City National Security Campus, is run by Honeywell and makes about 80% of the non-nuclear parts in every American nuclear warhead. Honeywell's PAC has given DesJarlais $10,000 this cycle.

The "historic increase" for the Space Force flows to the companies that launch and build for it. SpaceX's PAC has given him $5,000. Blue Origin's has given him $10,000.

Add in General Atomics ($10,000), Leidos ($10,000), Boeing ($8,500) and BWX Technologies ($2,500) — all of them Pentagon and nuclear contractors — and eleven weapons and aerospace companies have put $94,000 into DesJarlais's campaign account this cycle.

Why $94,000 is a lot of money to this particular congressman

For most members of Congress, $94,000 is a rounding error. For DesJarlais it isn't.

He has raised about $1.19 million for this election — one of the smaller war chests in the House. More than half of it, $610,849, came from PACs rather than people. Just $8,659 came from small grassroots donors. That's seven-tenths of one percent. He ranks 224th out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

So the arithmetic is this: eleven companies whose programs he personally funds in his own bill have given him roughly eleven times what every small donor in Tennessee's 4th District gave him combined.

This is a pattern, not an accident

DesJarlais isn't alone in this. It's how the defense budget gets written.

Ken Calvert, who chairs the subcommittee that drafts the entire Pentagon budget, took more than $200,000 from weapons makers in three months while Americans were dying in Trump's Iran war. John Carter, who writes the military construction budget, has eleven Pentagon contractors among his twenty biggest PAC donors. Brian Babin, who chairs the committee that writes NASA's marching orders, has taken $261,250 from six space and defense contractors.

The gavel is the product. The money follows the gavel.

What this costs the rest of us

While DesJarlais was authorizing "full funding" for nuclear modernization and a "historic increase" for the Space Force, the veterans in his own district were being told the VA was closing the only clinic in McMinnville — the one more than 2,000 of them used. He said his office got no warning.

That is the trade DesJarlais makes, and he has made it for fifteen years. Nothing in the record says he is wrong about the threats from China or Russia. But there is no version of this where a congressman writes a bill enriching eleven companies, takes $94,000 from those same eleven companies while he's writing it, and asks us to believe the two facts are unrelated.

He didn't disclose the overlap. He didn't recuse himself from anything. He just read the statement and moved on, because in Washington this isn't a scandal. It's the job.

It should be a scandal.

Sources

DesJarlais Opening Statement on the Strategic Forces Print of the FY27 NDAA, House Armed Services Committee, June 4, 2026
Friends of Scott DesJarlais receipts, Federal Election Commission
DesJarlais to chair House panel overseeing military space, nuclear programs, SpaceNews

The VFW Drew a Cartoon Against Mike Bost's Bill. He Asked the VA to Review Whether the VFW Should Still Be Allowed to Represent Veterans.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:17:33 +0000

The Veterans of Foreign Wars has been drawing the same cartoon since the 1930s. Two men in suits, labeled "bureaucrats" and "media," pointing rifles at two veterans in fatigues. Underneath: Honor the Contract. The VFW says the modern version is based on illustrations it published in its magazines in 1933 and 1956, both times while veterans were fighting benefit cuts.

On June 30, 2026, the VFW put it on a T-shirt, sold through the Grunt Style apparel company, with proceeds going to veterans' mental health and suicide prevention.

The next day, Mike Bost wrote to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

What the letter asked for

Bost chairs the House Veterans' Affairs Committee and has represented Illinois's 12th District since 2015. On July 1, 2026, he and Rep. Jack Bergman of Michigan wrote to VA Secretary Doug Collins about the shirt.

They didn't just object to the image. Per CNN, which obtained the letter, they asked the VA to:

"review whether VFW's accreditation, and the good standing of its representatives, remain consistent with the responsibilities imposed upon accredited organizations and their representatives"

They also asked the VA to obtain the VFW's financial information about the merchandise.

Understand what "accreditation" means here. VA recognition is what lets the VFW — 1.3 million members, founded in 1899 — help veterans file and argue benefits claims. It is the legal basis for one of the organization's core functions. Bost asked the agency to look at whether the group should still have it, one day after it criticized his bill.

Their stated reason was that the imagery "can reasonably be interpreted as glorifying or normalizing political violence."

What Bost said in 2021

At an October 2021 hearing on violent extremism, Bost drew the line himself. Military.com pulled the quote:

"The First Amendment gives us the freedom to hold and express beliefs and opinions regardless of how extreme others may find them. It is every veteran's right to have an opinion — even one I find radical. However, if that opinion is acted on with violence, it is another thing altogether."

He went on to say free speech is foundational to democracy and that he'd oppose efforts to restrict it.

Five years later, a veterans organization expressed an opinion he found radical. It was not acted on with violence. He asked a federal agency to review its legal standing.

The VFW's answer

VFW general counsel John Muckelbauer laid out what the letter did and didn't contain:

"They never asked for our side of the story, never questioned whether we had violated any accreditation requirement, and never identified a single basis for questioning the VFW's accreditation or the standing of any of our accredited representatives."

The VFW's national commander, Carol Whitmore, was plainer:

"The VFW has never apologized for forcefully defending veterans, and we are not about to start now. Political cartoons have long been part of American public discourse because they communicate difficult truths in memorable ways."

There's a detail that undercuts the "this imagery is dangerous" framing. The VFW says this illustration has been in circulation since fall 2025 — it appeared in Senate testimony in October, on buttons worn at joint congressional testimony in March 2026, and VFW members wore an earlier version while posing for photos with Bost's own staff. Muckelbauer says neither Bost nor Bergman raised any concern any of those times.

The image only became dangerous once it was attached to opposing his bill.

Mark Takano, the ranking Democrat on Bost's committee, put it this way to CNN: "these actions look less like oversight and more like retaliation against a veterans' organization for opposing his bill." Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, with about 450,000 members, said it was "disturbed" by the request.

What the VFW was actually protesting

This is the part that matters most to veterans in southern Illinois.

The bill is the Take Care of America's Veterans Act, introduced by Bost and Senate Veterans' Affairs Chairman Jerry Moran — a package rolling together more than 60 veterans bills. Most of it is uncontroversial.

Section 108 is not. It pays for the rest of the package by reducing future disability compensation for tinnitus and sleep apnea — two of the most common service-connected conditions there are. Ringing in the ears is what you get from a career around engines, rotors, and gunfire.

The savings would fund the Major Richard Star Act, a genuinely good bipartisan bill letting combat-injured retirees collect both their retirement pay and their disability pay instead of having to choose. The VFW's objection isn't to the Star Act. It's that Congress shouldn't pay for one group of veterans by cutting another.

The bill didn't survive contact with the House. On July 16, 2026, leaders pulled it from the floor rather than hold a final vote on it.

The pattern on Bost's committee

This is not the first time. Takano compared the VFW letter to the committee's earlier scrutiny of Disabled American Veterans after a policy disagreement, arguing Bost has used committee authority against veterans organizations that cross him.

And it fits how he has handled the department itself. In February 2025, when veterans groups came before a joint House-Senate hearing worried about VA layoffs and a hiring freeze, Bost told them the cuts amounted to "less than 1% of the workforce" and added, "I take Doug Collins at his word who said there will be no impact to services." He asked the groups to bring him specific examples of harm.

That July, the VA itself announced it was on pace to shed roughly 30,000 employees by the end of the fiscal year — it had already dropped from about 484,000 staff on January 1, 2025 to about 467,000 by June 1.

Aggressive scrutiny of a veterans group that drew a cartoon. Deference to the agency shedding tens of thousands of jobs. That's a chairman pointing his power in a strange direction.

Where it stands

The VA had not responded to the letter as of mid-July, and a committee spokesperson said Bost is not seeking to pull the VFW's charter. "This is not about silencing any organization or discouraging debate," spokesperson Kathleen McCarthy said.

Muckelbauer's response to that is the whole point:

"If veterans' service organizations begin wondering whether opposing legislation could result in official scrutiny of the authority that enables them to represent veterans, then the chilling effect has already begun."

Bost is a Marine Corps veteran. The organization he asked the VA to scrutinize is the one that helps veterans in his own district file their claims.

Source

Brian Todd, "VFW cartoon showing veterans facing a firing squad sparks calls for an investigation", CNN, July 13, 2026, and Haley Fuller, "Bost, Who Defended 'Radical' Speech, Wants VFW Scrutinized for TCAVA Stance", Military.com, July 13, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta.

Jen Kiggans Voted Against Capping 299% Loans in the Most Military-Heavy District in America. Asked Why 11 Times, She Wouldn't Say.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:57:44 +0000

Before she went to Congress, Jen Kiggans was a state senator from Virginia Beach. On February 10, 2020, her chamber took up the Virginia Fairness in Lending Act.

The bill did one main thing: it stopped payday and car title lenders in Virginia from charging whatever they wanted. Before it passed, the Pew Charitable Trusts found, many Virginia lenders were writing "open-end" loans at annual rates of 299% or more, using a patchwork of four different state statutes so that closing one loophole just pushed them into another. The Act closed all of them at once, banned balloon payments, and set a 36% cap.

Pew's estimate of what that saved Virginians: more than $100 million a year.

The bill passed the Senate 23 to 16. Kiggans voted no.

The district makes this worse, not better

Virginia's 2nd is one of the most military-dense congressional districts in the country — Naval Station Norfolk, Oceana, Little Creek, Dam Neck, plus the retirees and veterans who stay in Hampton Roads after they get out.

Federal law already protects the active-duty part of that population. Under the Military Lending Act, an active-duty servicemember or covered dependent cannot be charged more than a 36% Military Annual Percentage Rate. Congress set that cap because triple-digit loans were wrecking troops' finances and their security clearances.

But the MLA covers you based on your status when you sign. Retire, separate, or get out — and the protection goes with the uniform. A veteran in Virginia Beach walking into the same storefront as the sailor ahead of him had no federal rate cap at all.

The Virginia Fairness in Lending Act was the law that would have covered him. Kiggans voted against it.

Dogwood, which reported on the vote in 2024, noted that payday lenders have long clustered around military bases, and cited an estimate that 44% of active-duty military had used a payday loan in 2017.

This wasn't a party-line vote she got swept into

It would be one thing if every Republican voted no. They didn't.

Pew describes the Act as bipartisan legislation, and the roll call shows why: Republicans are in both columns. Republican Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel was a chief co-patron of the bill and voted for it. So did other Republicans who looked at 299% loans and decided that was too much.

Kiggans was in the 16 who said no. Republicans in her own caucus gave her cover to vote yes, and she didn't take it.

The money

Dogwood also traced where some of her campaign money came from. Kiggans's state Senate campaign took $2,500 from GOPAC in June 2019 and $15,000 in October 2019 — $17,500 in the months before the vote. GOPAC, the Republican candidate-training group, had taken $50,000 from Advance America, one of the country's largest payday lenders, in May 2019.

That is not a receipt for a bribe, and we're not saying it is. It's a sequence: payday lender money into GOPAC, GOPAC money into her campaign, her vote against the payday lending cap five months later.

The reason a sequence like that matters is that the alternative explanation is easy to give. All she had to do was explain the vote.

She wouldn't explain it

She was asked. Repeatedly.

In October 2022, during her first congressional race, a reporter pressed her on why she voted against the Virginia Fairness in Lending Act. She was asked eleven times. She refused all eleven times, and walked out of the interview with her microphone still clipped to her.

The one thing she has offered, years later, is a general reassurance: "I wouldn't do anything to harm our veteran population."

That is a statement about her intentions. The roll call is a statement about her vote. When the two conflict, only one of them is in the record at the Virginia General Assembly.

Why it still matters

Kiggans's whole public identity is military. She flew Navy helicopters. She's married to a retired F-18 pilot. She chairs the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Every campaign she has ever run has been built on it.

So it's fair to check the one time she had a clean, recorded chance to protect military families from 299% loans, with money on one side and her own constituents on the other.

She voted no. Then she wouldn't say why — eleven times.

That pattern shows up again in her time in Congress. When DOGE cancelled contracts with 70 veteran-owned businesses in her own district, what her constituents got was a sympathetic statement issued after a reporter did the counting.

Ask her about the 2020 vote. See if the count gets past eleven this time.

Source

The Virginia General Assembly's official roll call on SB 421 (February 10, 2020), the Pew Charitable Trusts' analysis of the Fairness in Lending Act, and Michael O'Connor's May 20, 2024 report for Dogwood.

123 House Republicans Voted for the Burn Pits Bill. Cliff Bentz Voted No — the Only Member of Oregon's Delegation, Twice.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:47:17 +0000

There are about 48,800 veterans living in Oregon's 2nd Congressional District. That's who this is about.

On July 13, 2022, the U.S. House gave final approval to the Honoring our PACT Act — the law that presumes a long list of cancers and respiratory illnesses were caused by military service, so veterans poisoned by burn pits and other toxic exposures no longer have to prove it one claim at a time to get VA health care.

It wasn't close, and it wasn't partisan. The vote was 342 to 88. 123 Republicans voted yes. Every Democrat present voted yes.

Cliff Bentz voted no.

He was the only member of Oregon's House delegation — of either party — to do it. Every other Oregon representative voted yes.

He'd already voted no once

That July vote was the second time. On March 3, 2022, the House passed the same legislation in its original form, H.R. 3967, by 256 to 174. Bentz voted no then too — again, the only member of Oregon's delegation to do so.

Two chances. Two no votes. Both times, alone among Oregon's six House members.

The bill became law on August 10, 2022. It is the mechanism by which a veteran from Klamath Falls or Pendleton or Grants Pass who came home from Iraq with a lung disease gets treated without spending years arguing with the VA about whether a burn pit overseas caused it.

And a third vote, six months earlier

On January 12, 2022, the House passed the Guard and Reserve GI Bill Parity Act, H.R. 1836, which extends the same GI Bill education benefits to National Guard members and reservists that active-duty service members already get. It passed 287 to 135.

Bentz voted no on that too.

Three votes on veterans' benefits in seven months. Three no votes.

What his district actually looks like

Bentz's district is most of Oregon east of the Cascades plus Jackson and Josephine counties in the southwest — a huge, rural, working district. Census data puts the veteran population at 48,812, about 8.7% of everyone living there.

These are also the constituents least able to absorb a denied claim. Nearly 58,000 households in the district — one in five — use SNAP to buy groceries. An estimated 37,946 people in the district are projected to lose health coverage because of the health care cuts he voted for in 2025. A VA presumption is not an abstraction to a household like that. It is the difference between treatment and a bill.

"Everybody has to step up"

The reason these votes land differently than an ordinary policy disagreement is the standard Bentz applies out loud to everyone else.

In February 2025, he told CNN's Jake Tapper he'd support cutting his own congressional staff to help shrink the budget: "I think everybody has to step up." The month before that, his office had outspent every other office in the House of Representatives on travel over Trump's inauguration weekend — $20,750 for four staffers over one long weekend.

Everybody has to step up, except the four staffers who billed $16,300 in hotel rooms. Fiscal discipline that arrives at the VA and stops at the Coeur d'Alene Resort isn't fiscal discipline. It's a preference about who deserves the money.

The company he kept

The 88 votes against the PACT Act were the smallest bloc in the House on that day, and being in it was a choice. A majority of House Republicans — 123 of them — went the other way. So did every single Democrat who voted.

Bentz has been in Congress since 2021 and is Oregon's only Republican in Washington. He talks often about the military, and about veterans.

But the two moments when the House was asked, directly, to pay for the medical consequences of sending people to war, he said no. And the moment it was asked to give the National Guard the same education benefit as everyone else in uniform, he said no to that too.

Every other member of Oregon's delegation, Republican and Democrat, said yes.

Sources

The votes are public record: Roll Call 57, March 3, 2022 (H.R. 3967, Honoring our PACT Act, 256–174); Roll Call 309, July 13, 2022 (S. 3373, the Senate vehicle the House used to send the PACT Act to the president, 342–88); and Roll Call 6, January 12, 2022 (H.R. 1836, Guard and Reserve GI Bill Parity Act, 287–135). Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Two-Thirds of Active-Duty Suicides Involve a Firearm. Jeff Crank Wrote a Bill to Make It Easier to Bring Guns onto Base.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:43:22 +0000

In 2023, the Pentagon's own suicide-prevention committee looked at why so many service members were killing themselves and came back with a number that framed everything else.

66% of active-duty suicides involve a firearm. For reservists it's 72%. For the National Guard, 78%.

Those figures come from the Defense Department's Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, which delivered its findings on February 24, 2023. Its recommendations followed directly from them: waiting periods on guns and ammunition bought at military exchanges, raising the minimum age for buying a firearm on Defense Department property to 25, and restricting privately owned firearms in barracks and dorms.

The committee's stated goal was simple: slow down access to firearms.

On May 7, 2026, Jeff Crank introduced a bill to speed it up.

What the Bill Does

Crank's Armed Forces Carry Rights Protection Act of 2026 (H.R. 8680) amends the 2016 defense authorization law, which currently tells the Secretary of Defense to set up a process for deciding when a service member may carry a personal firearm on an installation.

Crank's bill adds this:

"there shall be a rebuttable presumption in favor of authorizing a member to carry a firearm owned by such member while the member — (1) is on the installation, center, or facility; and (2) is not performing duty."

And if a commander says no, the bill requires the denial to be "in writing" with "an objective, clearly describable, and individualized basis."

Flip that around and read it from a base commander's chair. Today, if you have concerns about a soldier carrying a personal weapon, you decline. Under Crank's bill, the default is yes, and saying no means putting your reasoning about a specific individual on paper — a document that soldier can then contest, and that will exist forever if you're wrong in either direction.

The bill doesn't ban commanders from saying no. It makes saying no cost something, every single time, in a system where the safest calls are often the quiet ones.

He Is Making a Temporary Policy Permanent

The bill didn't come out of nowhere. On April 3, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo telling base commanders to allow personal firearms on installations "with the presumption that it is necessary for personal protection," with denials required in writing.

Before that, service members generally could not carry personal weapons on base without permission from a senior commander, and firearms were stored securely — typically checked out only for hunting or an authorized range.

A memo can be reversed by the next Secretary of Defense. A statute can't. Crank's bill takes Hegseth's month-old directive and welds it into permanent law.

Tanya Schardt of Brady, the gun violence prevention group, said of the change: "most active duty service members who die by suicide do so with a weapon they own personally, not one military-issued." She predicted "undoubtedly … an increase in gun suicide and other gun violence."

He Sits on the Subcommittee That Handles This

Crank isn't a bystander to military suicide policy. He serves on the House Armed Services Committee, and specifically on its Subcommittee on Military Personnel — the panel with jurisdiction over service member health, welfare, and morale.

That's the subcommittee where the Pentagon's suicide report lands. It's where the recommendations either become law or don't.

Three years after the Defense Department's own experts recommended slowing access to firearms on base, the bill this member of that subcommittee chose to write does the reverse.

What This Means at Home

Crank represents Colorado Springs, a military town. The Pikes Peak region is home to roughly 45,000 active-duty, Guard, and Reserve members plus about 90,000 veterans and retirees, and the defense sector makes up more than 40% of the local economy.

Those are the people this bill is about. The 66% figure isn't a national abstraction to CO-05 — it's a description of the risk profile of tens of thousands of Crank's own constituents.

Colorado already has a gun death rate of about 15.3 per 100,000 people, 19% above the national average, with roughly 1,000 Coloradans dying from gun violence every year.

Why "Slow It Down" Is the Whole Strategy

The reason the Pentagon's committee focused on waiting periods and storage instead of counseling alone is that suicide is often a decision made in a very short window. Put time and a locked container between the impulse and the weapon, and a meaningful share of people never reach the second step.

That's not a political theory. It's why the Defense Department's own review — produced by outside experts the Pentagon brought in specifically to solve this problem — put access to firearms at the center of the answer.

You can support the Second Amendment and still think a barracks at 2 a.m. is a place where the default should be "secure the weapon." Those aren't in tension. Storage rules on a military installation aren't gun confiscation; they're the same logic as taking someone's keys.

Crank's bill sets the default the other way, permanently, and tells the officer who wants to intervene to write up his reasons first.

The Question He Won't Take in Person

If a Gold Star parent in Colorado Springs wanted to ask Crank why he wrote this bill, they'd have to find him first.

Crank held his first town hall online rather than in a room with constituents, dismissing the people who wanted an in-person event by asking, "Why do they want to have an in-person town hall meeting? So they can stand there and wave a cane in my face like Al Green did last night and steal the show?" When Colorado Springs residents held one anyway, they set a cardboard cutout of him on the stage.

The families who would have the most to say about this bill are exactly the ones who never get the microphone.

Sources

The text of H.R. 8680, the Armed Forces Carry Rights Protection Act of 2026, and CBS News, "Slowing down access to firearms could prevent more suicides in the military, panel finds".

John Joyce Voted to Let the Ukraine Aid Bill Reach the Floor. Then He Voted Against It — and Against the Defense Jobs in His Own District.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:40:35 +0000

There is a move in Congress that lets a member have it both ways, and John Joyce ran it perfectly in April 2024.

On April 19, 2024, the House voted on the rule — the procedural step that decides whether a bill even gets to the floor. Without it, Speaker Mike Johnson could not have brought the Ukraine aid package up at all. Joyce voted yes. It passed 316–94.

The next day, the House voted on the actual bill: H.R. 8035, the Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act — about $60 billion. Joyce voted no. It passed anyway, 311–112.

So the aid got through — with his help on the vote that mattered procedurally — and his name sits on the record as a no. He got the outcome and the press release at the same time.

The Washington Post put him on a list of seven

This wasn't a subtle observation. Five days after the vote, the Washington Post's editorial page mapped which congressional districts were actually receiving the Ukraine money — because most of it is spent in the United States, replenishing American stockpiles and paying American manufacturing workers — and then listed the members who voted against aid flowing into their own districts.

Sixteen House members were on that list. And there was a footnote:

"Seven House Republicans who voted against Ukraine aid going to their districts did vote for the rule that allowed Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) to bring the bill to the floor — without which aid could not have moved forward."

John Joyce is named in that group of seven.

What's in PA-13

Pennsylvania's 13th District covers most of south central Pennsylvania, including Altoona, Gettysburg and Chambersburg.

Just northwest of Chambersburg sits Letterkenny Army Depot — nearly 18,000 acres, the Army's Center of Industrial and Technical Excellence for Air Defense and Tactical Missile Systems. Letterkenny does the maintenance and recertification work on the MIM-104 Patriot missile system and its ground support and radar equipment. It is the largest employer in Franklin County, and Wikipedia's account of the depot notes it adds more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year to the regional economy.

Air defense interceptors were exactly what the Ukraine package was buying. As the Post put it, the bill would "enable the arrival of American-made weapons — including air defense interceptors to protect Ukrainian cities from Russian bombs and missiles."

That is the industrial base Joyce voted against funding, in the county where it employs the most people.

Having it both ways

Opposing military aid to Ukraine is a position a member of Congress can hold honestly, and plenty do. What isn't honest is holding it while quietly casting the procedural vote that lets the aid pass anyway — so that the defense workers in Franklin County and the anti-aid voters in a Republican primary can each come away believing he was on their side.

The pattern with Joyce is the dodge

This is the instinct that runs through the rest of his record: take the position that costs nothing, and stay out of the room where somebody can ask a follow-up question. His answer to the biggest consumer privacy fight in Congress was to write the bill industry asked for — one that wipes out more than 20 states' privacy laws, and he told a reporter as much.

A vote for the rule and against the bill is the legislative version of the same move. It's a way to be on the record without being accountable for the outcome.

Joyce has been in Congress since 2019 and represents one of the safest Republican seats in Pennsylvania. He was not in danger. He could have simply voted his conscience on the bill and defended it in public. He decided he'd rather have the cover.

We deserve better.

Sources

These legislators opposed Ukraine aid and their own states' interests — Washington Post Opinion, April 25, 2024. Vote records: House Roll Call 142 (the rule, April 19, 2024) and House Roll Call 151 (H.R. 8035, April 20, 2024). Photo: ATACMS recertification at Letterkenny Army Depot, U.S. Army.

John Carter Writes the Military Construction Budget. Eleven of His Twenty Biggest PAC Donors Build Things for the Pentagon.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:35:25 +0000

John Carter has one of the most valuable gavels in Congress and almost nobody outside Washington knows he has it.

He is the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies. That subcommittee writes the annual bill that decides which bases get new barracks, which hangars get built, which family housing gets replaced, and how much money the VA has to work with. He also sits on the Defense subcommittee, which writes the Pentagon's operating budget.

Now look at who funds him.

Eleven of his top twenty PAC donors are defense and aerospace contractors

According to Who Bought My Rep, which builds its totals from federal campaign filings, Carter has raised $6.2 million since 2020. Here are the defense and aerospace companies sitting in his top twenty PAC donors, with what each has given:

Rank	PAC	Total
4	SpaceX	$40,000
5	BAE Systems	$40,000
6	General Dynamics	$40,000
7	Lockheed Martin	$39,000
9	RTX (Raytheon)	$35,000
10	Boeing	$35,000
12	Northrop Grumman	$33,000
17	L3Harris	$29,000
18	Leonardo DRS	$29,000
19	Leidos	$27,000
20	Cubic Corporation	$26,000

Eleven of the twenty. More than half of the biggest PACs backing this member of Congress are companies whose federal revenue he helps decide.

The money isn't coming from home

The other half of the picture is who isn't paying for his campaigns.

Small donors — the kind of money that comes from a district — account for 6% of Carter's funding. PACs and super PACs account for 43%. He ranks #281 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding, and #165 out of 275 Republicans. In a chamber where nearly everyone takes corporate PAC money, he is in the bottom half of his own party at raising money from actual people.

Texas's 31st District contains Fort Hood. The servicemembers and veterans there have a genuine interest in a well-funded military construction bill. So do BAE, Lockheed and General Dynamics. The problem isn't that those interests never overlap. The problem is what happens when they don't — and who has the chairman's ear when that day comes.

Why this arrangement is the point

It is worth being clear about what is and isn't alleged here. There is no evidence that Carter has broken a law. Corporate PAC money to appropriators is legal, routine, and disclosed — that's how we know about it.

That's also the indictment. The system doesn't require anyone to be bribed. It just requires that the person who writes the check gets a phone call answered, a meeting scheduled, and a line item read sympathetically, while the constituent who gave nothing gets a district office that hasn't held an in-person town hall since 2013.

This is the same pattern we found one committee over: Brian Babin chairs the committee that writes NASA's marching orders, and six space and defense contractors have given him $261,250. Different agency, identical structure — the chairman's biggest backers are the firms his gavel pays.

What he does with it

In May 2026, the House passed Carter's Fiscal Year 2027 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs bill 400 to 15. A near-unanimous vote is not a scandal — it means the bill was mostly uncontroversial.

But a near-unanimous vote is also exactly the kind of vote where the interesting decisions happened months earlier, in a subcommittee markup, out of the news, on line items nobody outside the industry can read. That is where a chairman's judgment matters most, and it is the part of his job Carter is least often asked about — because he doesn't take questions in person.

Carter is 84 and has been in Congress for 23 years. He was put in charge of this subcommittee in 2018. Voters in the 31st District have had no in-person forum to ask him a single question about any of it.

We deserve better.

Sources

PAC and grassroots funding figures: Who Bought My Rep — Carter, John R., compiled from Federal Election Commission filings, 2020–present. Committee roles: House Appropriations Committee. Photo: official U.S. House portrait.

"It's Done": Mike Rogers Promised Rigorous Oversight of a Strike That Killed Shipwreck Survivors. It Lasted 11 Days.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:34:54 +0000

On September 2, 2025, the U.S. military blew up a boat in the Caribbean it said was carrying drugs.

Two people survived that first strike. They were in the water, clinging to the smoldering wreck of their boat.

A second strike killed them.

Almost three months later, the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had verbally ordered the crew to "kill everybody." The story landed on November 28, 2025.

The next day, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee put out a statement promising to find out what happened.

Eleven days after that, he said he was done.

The promise

Mike Rogers has represented Alabama's 3rd District since 2003, and he chairs the House Armed Services Committee — the panel with jurisdiction over the entire Department of Defense. If Congress is going to ask the Pentagon a hard question, his committee is where that happens.

On November 29, 2025, Rogers and the committee's ranking Democrat, Adam Smith, issued a joint statement:

"This committee is committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense's military operations in the Caribbean. We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question."

A full accounting. Bipartisan action. Rigorous oversight.

The ending

In early December, Rogers and other committee leaders sat through a classified briefing from Adm. Frank Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command — the officer who oversaw the strike. They watched the video.

On December 10, as ABC News reported, Rogers ended his side of the investigation. He told reporters:

"It's done."

"I've got all the answers I needed."

His spokesperson put it this way: "The video and classified briefings from the Pentagon were sufficient to convince Chairman Rogers that this was a legal action."

Bradley told lawmakers there had been no "kill them all" order from Hegseth — contradicting the Post's reporting. Rogers took that answer, from the officer who ran the operation, and closed the file.

Nobody outside that briefing room has seen the video.

What the law actually says about this

The thing Rogers declared legal in eleven days is not a close call in the legal literature. It is one of the oldest bright lines there is.

TIME reported on December 1, 2025 that legal scholars were unequivocal about orders to leave no survivors:

"It is absolutely unlawful to order that there will be no survivors." — Rebecca Ingber, Cardozo School of Law

"Intentional killing of a protected person... is a war crime." — Laura Dickinson, George Washington University Law School

The Defense Department's own Law of War Manual, TIME noted, treats an order to kill shipwrecked people as so clearly illegal that service members have a duty to disobey it.

Legal experts differed on whether the U.S. is in an armed conflict at all in the Caribbean, which changes which body of law applies. That's a genuinely hard question. It is also exactly the kind of hard question a congressional investigation exists to work through in public — not the kind you settle by watching a video once and announcing the answer.

The senator who saw it differently

Rogers wasn't the only member of Congress with access. Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been pushing for the footage to be declassified and released. His assessment, per ABC:

"I think anybody who saw that video would be quite disturbed about it."

Same country, same footage, opposite conclusions. One of them wants you to see it. The other says it's done.

Congress ultimately had so little confidence in voluntary disclosure that the defense policy bill tied Hegseth's travel budget to releasing the video. That's what oversight looks like when the committee chairman won't do it: other members reaching for the only lever left.

This is the second chairman to do this

Rogers is not an outlier. He's a pattern.

The Senate has its own version: Jim Risch chairs the Foreign Relations Committee and refused to hold a single public hearing on Trump's war with Iran. Same structure — the one person with the gavel decides the public doesn't need to hear the answers, and there is no appeal.

That's the whole design failure. Committee oversight isn't a right the public holds. It's a favor the chairman grants.

Who pays for the gavel

There's one more thing worth knowing about the man who decided the Pentagon had answered enough questions.

The weapons industry funds him. FEC records compiled by Who Bought My Rep show $40,000 each from the PACs of RTX, BAE Systems, L3Harris and General Atomics — four contractors whose business runs through his committee — and they're not alone on the list.

Of the $8.2 million Rogers has raised, about $41,700 came from small grassroots donors. That's half of one percent.

None of that proves anything about the boat. It does describe a chairman whose career depends on a good working relationship with the institution he is supposed to be checking.

He also won't take the question at home

If you live in Alabama's 3rd District and want to ask him about any of this in person, you can't. Rogers has not held a public, in-person town hall since 2017. When constituents in Opelika organized their own in April 2025 and invited him, he didn't come.

Two men were killed in the water after their boat was already destroyed. The committee chairman who promised America a full accounting gave it eleven days and a closed door.

Sources

House Republican drops his inquiry into Sept. 2 boat strikes — ABC News, December 10, 2025. Photo: Getty Images via ABC News.
Rogers and Smith Issue Joint Statement on Recent Reports of Follow-Up Strike Ordered in SOUTHCOM AOR — House Armed Services Committee, November 29, 2025.
Could Hegseth Face Prosecution For the Alleged Boat Strike Order? — TIME, December 1, 2025.

Dale Strong Voted to Let the Ukraine Aid Bill Reach the Floor — Then Voted Against It. Huntsville Workers Were Building the Rockets It Paid For.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:43:59 +0000

On April 20, 2024, the House passed the Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 311–112. Dale Strong voted no. You can see it on the House Clerk's roll call — H.R. 8035, roll call 151, Strong: Nay.

Two things make that vote worth a closer look.

The first: he voted for the bill to get a vote

Before a bill can be voted on, the House has to adopt a "rule" allowing it to the floor. Without the rule, the bill never comes up and never passes.

Strong voted for the rule that let Speaker Mike Johnson bring the Ukraine package to the floor. Then he voted against the package itself.

A Washington Post opinion column mapping where the aid money actually goes flagged exactly this, naming Strong as one of seven House Republicans who "voted against Ukraine aid going to their districts did vote for the rule that allowed Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) to bring the bill to the floor — without which aid could not have moved forward."

That's a member getting it both ways. The aid passes, the district keeps the work, and his public record still shows a no vote he can point to.

The second: the money was coming to Huntsville

The column's whole point is that most Ukraine military aid is spent in the United States, replenishing American stockpiles at American plants. It listed where in Alabama:

Anniston — Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and Hercules recovery vehicles
Huntsville — Hydra 70 rockets
Troy — HIMARS and Javelin missiles

Huntsville is Strong's district. He was one of 16 House members the column identified as voting against aid money that supports defense jobs where they live.

Why this matters more for him than for most members

Strong is not a backbencher on this subject. He sits on the House Appropriations Committee, where he is vice chair of the subcommittee funding NASA, the Justice Department, and the Commerce Department, and he chairs a Homeland Security subcommittee. His district contains Redstone Arsenal, one of the largest military installations in the country.

And the defense industry is, by a wide margin, his financial base. OpenSecrets' benchmarking of his PAC money shows he takes $239,500 from the defense sector against an average House member's $29,408 — more than eight times the norm, and about 40% of every PAC dollar he raises.

The names on the list are the ones you'd expect: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Leidos, L3Harris, Parsons, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Plus Huntsville's own contractors — Torch Technologies and Verity Integrated Systems, whose employees rank among his largest individual donors. Overall, 89% of his money comes from PACs, super PACs, and large donors, and about 1% from small grassroots donors.

So the man who takes eight times the average defense money, from an Appropriations seat, in a district built around a federal arsenal, cast the safe symbolic vote against the defense bill — after quietly making sure it could pass.

The rest of the ledger

That instinct — take the credit, dodge the blame — shows up in the rest of his record too.

He told a Huntsville audience in February 2025 that the DOGE cuts would work out for the city because Space Command and the Iron Dome were coming: "These jobs, while we may lose a couple, we will gain many of them in the end." Then 279 senior Marshall Space Flight Center employees went on the list to leave.

He voted for the budget bill that is projected to cost 22,103 people in his district their health coverage, according to the Joint Economic Committee's district-level analysis — while 28,867 households in AL-05, about 9% of the district, rely on SNAP for groceries.

And he has never held a public in-person town hall where a constituent could ask him to explain any of it. When his opponent invited him to four public forums in writing this July, his office didn't reply.

The bottom line

A vote for the rule and against the bill is a vote that only makes sense if you want the outcome and not the record.

Strong got the outcome. Huntsville built the rockets. And the roll call still says Nay.

Sources

House Clerk, Roll Call 151, 118th Congress, 2nd Session — April 20, 2024.

"These legislators opposed Ukraine aid and their own states' interests" — The Washington Post, April 25, 2024. Photo: U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Harris Wants to Repeal the One Rule That Keeps For-Profit Colleges From Living Entirely Off Your Tax Dollars

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:36:24 +0000

On July 2, 2026, Mark Harris introduced a bill with a friendly name and a very short job description.

The Promoting Access and Revenue Integrity Through Institutional Transparency Act — the PARITY Act — does two things, both of them deletions. It repeals Section 487(a)(24) of the Higher Education Act, and it repeals Section 487(d), which is how that first section gets enforced.

Section 487(a)(24) is the 90/10 rule.

What the rule actually does

The 90/10 rule says that a for-profit college can't get more than 90% of its revenue from federal money. It has to find at least a tenth of its income somewhere else — real students paying with real dollars that didn't come from the U.S. Treasury.

That's the entire rule. It doesn't cap enrollment. It doesn't ban anything. It's a market test: if literally nobody will pay for your program except the federal government, that's evidence your program isn't worth what you're charging.

Harris's argument is that it's unfair, because it applies only to for-profit schools and not to public or nonprofit ones.

"Washington should not pick winners and losers in higher education," he said in his announcement. "By repealing the outdated 90/10 rule, the PARITY Act ends a double standard that singles out career schools and ensures every institution is treated fairly."

House Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg called the rule "outdated" too. Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana, who is carrying the Senate version, said it's "time to level the playing field."

Here's the part none of those three statements mention: how the 90/10 rule got its teeth back, and who it got them back from.

The loophole was a machine for recruiting veterans

For years, the 90/10 rule had a hole in it. GI Bill benefits and Defense Department Tuition Assistance are federal money — but they weren't counted on the federal side of the 90/10 ledger. They counted as the other 10%.

Think about what that does to a for-profit school's incentives. Every veteran you enroll doesn't just bring tuition. Each one lets you enroll roughly nine more students on federal student aid without breaking the rule. A veteran wasn't a student. A veteran was a key.

The result was documented over and over: aggressive, deceptive recruiting aimed straight at service members and veterans, at schools that then failed to deliver the jobs they'd promised. In 2014 alone, an estimated $2 billion in GI Bill funding and $248 million in Defense Department tuition assistance went uncounted in the federal revenue calculation for for-profit colleges.

Congress closed that loophole in 2021 with votes from both parties. The Education Department's rule implementing it took effect January 1, 2023.

So when Harris says the 90/10 rule is "outdated," he is describing a guardrail that has been fully functional for three years, after Congress spent a decade fighting to fix it.

"Pure corporate welfare for subpar schools preying on students"

Harris's bill is not the first attempt. House Republicans put a full 90/10 repeal into the tax and spending package that moved in 2025. Harris's own press release says so: "In the House-passed version, House Republicans repealed 90/10 completely, but the repeal was not included in the Senate's version that became law."

When that push was live, veterans' groups did not treat it as a paperwork cleanup.

Barmak Nassirian of Veterans Education Success told Military.com:

"The 90/10 rule is a modest market-viability requirement that ensures that the federal government isn't the only source of a college's revenues. Repealing it is nothing short of pure corporate welfare for subpar schools preying on students."

Allison Jaslow, the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, called the repeal language an "assault on veterans education," demanded it be pulled, and said members who kept it "should feel the wrath of the veterans community."

The Congressional Budget Office scored repealing the rule at roughly $1.6 billion in additional federal cost over ten years. That's not a savings measure. It's a transfer — from taxpayers to the schools that couldn't clear a 10% test.

The Senate stripped the repeal out. Harris reintroduced it as a standalone bill anyway.

North Carolina has 615,440 veterans

This is not an abstract policy fight for the state Harris represents.

North Carolina is home to 615,440 veterans — about 7.3% of everyone in the state, according to VA data. Thirty-seven percent of them have a service-connected disability. Nearly eight percent live below the poverty line.

And the market Harris says is being unfairly singled out is not large in his state. As the Carolina Journal reported, North Carolina has roughly 44 for-profit institutions enrolling about 10,900 students total — Strayer's North Carolina campus, MyComputerCareer in Raleigh, NASCAR Technical Institute in Mooresville, Miller-Motte, and a long list of cosmetology and barber programs.

So the bill protects a sector serving about eleven thousand North Carolinians from a rule that only bites when a school can't attract a single non-federal dollar for more than nine out of ten enrollments — in a state with more than 600,000 veterans whose benefits are exactly what made that sector worth farming in the first place.

The fair version of his argument

To be straight about it: Harris is right that the rule applies unevenly. Public and nonprofit colleges take federal student aid and face no 90/10 test. That's a real inconsistency, and plenty of people who defend the rule concede it.

There are two ways to fix an inconsistency. You can extend the standard to everyone, or you can delete it for the people who don't like it.

Harris's bill deletes it. There is no replacement guardrail in the PARITY Act — no new limit, no new disclosure, nothing that would stop a school from running on 100% federal money again. Harris and Banks argue a separate earnings-and-return-on-investment standard passed in the Working Families Tax Cuts Act makes 90/10 redundant. Nassirian's answer to that argument was that the replacement framework is "high-risk, complicated and untested" and "contains no safety net" if it doesn't work.

Harris sits on the Education and Workforce Committee, and this is his first term. A week after the PARITY Act, he introduced two more bills — one for K-12, one for higher education — to move the Education Department's two biggest program offices over to the Labor Department. Both are part of the ten-bill package that committee advanced in July to break up the Department of Education and scatter its work across other agencies.

For a member who says Washington shouldn't pick winners and losers, he has been remarkably consistent about which side keeps winning.

We deserve better.

Source

Harris takes aim at federal rule career schools call unfair — Carolina Journal, July 2, 2026. Photo: U.S. Air Force via Military.com.

A Judge Just Ruled This Company Preyed on Veterans. Its Executives Are Addison McDowell's Biggest Donors — and He Cosponsored the Bill to Legalize What They Do.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:35:09 +0000

On August 5, 2026, a federal judge in North Carolina ruled that a company in Pinehurst had been running an illegal, predatory business against disabled veterans.

Chief District Judge Catherine Eagles found that Veterans Guardian VA Claim Consulting violated North Carolina's Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act by charging veterans big fees to prepare and file VA disability claims — while lacking the federal accreditation the law requires to charge anything at all. As Public Radio East reported, the judge found the company collected payments in a way designed to hide its involvement from the VA, and kept doing it after getting cease-and-desist letters.

Because it was ruled an unfair trade practice, any damages the veterans win get automatically tripled.

Now here is the part that concerns North Carolina's 6th District.

The company's leadership is his biggest source of money

Addison McDowell has been in Congress since January 2025. Federal Election Commission records for his campaign committee show $35,600 in contributions from people who list Veterans Guardian as their employer:

Date	Amount	Donor
Feb 20, 2024	$3,300	William Taylor, business owner
Feb 23, 2024	$3,300	Scott Greenblatt, CEO
Mar 11, 2024	$3,300	Scott Greenblatt, CEO
Mar 12, 2024	$3,300	William Taylor, business owner
Mar 21, 2024	$6,600	Brian Johnson, vice president (two contributions)
Dec 2, 2024	$3,300	Brian Johnson, vice president
Jan 21, 2025	$3,300	Scott Greenblatt, CEO
Jan 21, 2025	$3,300	William Taylor, business owner
Jun 30, 2025	$1,000	Brian Johnson, vice president
Nov 3, 2025	$1,000	Brian Johnson, EVP government & public affairs
Feb 17, 2026	$400	William Taylor, owner
Mar 6, 2026	$3,500	Scott Greenblatt, CEO

That's the CEO, the co-founder, and the executive whose actual job title is government and public affairs. You can pull the same records yourself from the FEC's contribution database.

Veterans Guardian sits at or near the top of the list of employers giving to McDowell, and it isn't a company in his district — Pinehurst is roughly two hours away, in someone else's seat.

Look at the date in bold

On October 31, 2025, McDowell signed on as a cosponsor of H.R. 3132, the CHOICE for Veterans Act. Congress.gov records the date.

On November 3, 2025 — three days later — Veterans Guardian's executive vice president for government and public affairs wrote his campaign a check.

And that wasn't his first move for this industry. On February 27, 2025, in his second month in office, McDowell was an original cosponsor of H.R. 1656, the PLUS for Veterans Act — signed on the day it was introduced. Five weeks earlier, on January 21, 2025, the company's CEO and co-founder had each given him $3,300.

What those bills actually do

Right now, federal law says you cannot charge a veteran to help them file an initial VA disability claim unless you are accredited by the VA. That is the exact law Judge Eagles found Veterans Guardian broke.

The CHOICE for Veterans Act would change the law so companies like it can charge legally in all 50 states. The War Horse reported on the bill in June 2025: it would let people at for-profit claims companies get accredited and charge fees nationwide, with a $12,500 cap and a ban on overseas call centers as guardrails.

Veterans groups hate it. Scott Hope, deputy national service director for training at Disabled American Veterans, told The War Horse:

"I think it is egregious, and no veteran should have to pay ever."

He's right that they don't have to. Accredited veterans service organizations — the DAV, the VFW, the American Legion, and county veterans service officers — file these claims for free. That is the whole point of the accreditation system.

The War Horse also reported that Veterans Guardian spent over $4 million lobbying across two years, and that its PAC gave $26,200 to the bill's lead sponsor, Rep. Jack Bergman.

What it costs an actual veteran

Task & Purpose reported the case that put numbers on it. A former Army intelligence analyst used Veterans Guardian to file his first disability claim. He came out with a 100% disability rating and $4,272.80 a month.

The company billed him $21,360 — five times the monthly increase he'd won. He paid more than $19,000 of it and still owed over $2,100.

The judge's finding, quoted by Task & Purpose, was blunt:

"Guardian acts as an agent on behalf of class members in the preparation of VA disability claims...Guardian is not accredited, as federal law requires."

He could have had the same claim filed for nothing.

This is what buying a congressman looks like

McDowell is not a veteran and does not sit on the Veterans' Affairs Committee. He sits on Natural Resources, Budget, and Transportation. There is no committee assignment, no constituency, and no district interest that explains why the claims-consulting industry would be the single biggest business backer of a freshman from the Triad.

There is one thing that explains it, and it's written in the dates.

Only about 1% of McDowell's money comes from small grassroots donors — $28,800 out of more than $2.1 million raised, according to the FEC-derived totals compiled by Who Bought My Rep. The rest is large checks and PACs, and this is what large checks buy.

It fits a pattern for him. Before running for Congress, McDowell was a registered lobbyist for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. He resigned as a lobbyist on December 13, 2023 — the same day he announced his campaign with Trump's endorsement — and weeks later held a fundraiser in Raleigh, outside his district, hosted by state legislators and lobbyists. His former employer's political action committee has since given his campaign $9,500, with another $5,000 from the national Blue Cross Blue Shield Association's PAC.

What to watch

The class action against Veterans Guardian is still live; the August ruling settled liability, not damages. The CHOICE for Veterans Act is still pending in Congress.

If it passes, the conduct a federal judge just called illegal and predatory becomes legal. McDowell's name is on it, and the people who profit from it are paying his bills.

Sources

Annette Weston, "Federal judge rules North Carolina consulting firm ran predatory business model targeting veterans" — Public Radio East, August 5, 2026.

Patty Nieberg, "Unaccredited VA claims company charged veteran $21,000 in violation of federal law, judge rules" — Task & Purpose, May 22, 2026. Photo: U.S. Army.

Leah Rosenbaum, "Congress advances bill for firms to charge veterans for VA help" — The War Horse, June 12, 2025.

Paul Gosar Used His Taxpayer-Funded Newsletter to Say the Nation's Top General "Would Be Hung"

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:12 +0000

Members of Congress send weekly newsletters. They are official communications, produced by official staff, distributed through official channels, paid for by the public. They are usually about a water project or a veterans' benefits deadline.

In September 2023, Paul Gosar used his — a newsletter called This Week with Gosar — to say that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be hanged.

The exact words

Writing about a House hearing into the security failures of January 6, Gosar blamed Gen. Mark Milley, then the nation's highest-ranking military officer, for the delay in getting National Guard troops to the Capitol.

Then, as Cronkite News reported, he wrote:

"In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung."

He had already described Milley in the same newsletter as "the homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist Chairman of the military joint chiefs," and branded him a "traitor."

A quisling is a traitor who collaborates with an occupying enemy. The word exists because of Vidkun Quisling, who was executed by firing squad in 1945.

The accusation was made up

This is the part that gets lost, and it shouldn't.

Gosar's newsletter blamed Milley specifically, and cited the testimony of former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund as his source.

Sund's testimony did not mention Milley. Not once. Cronkite News checked: Gosar laid the blame on Milley "citing Sund's testimony, even though Sund made no mention of Milley and said he dealt directly with a different lieutenant general."

What Sund actually testified was that he requested National Guard assistance on January 3 and was turned down by Congress's two sergeants-at-arms over concerns about "the politics and optics" of troops at the Capitol. On January 6 itself, he said it took more than an hour to get approval from the sergeant-at-arms, and nearly five more hours in which he "had to beg" the Pentagon before Guard troops arrived.

So there is a real, documented story about a delay on January 6. Gosar took that story, attached the name of a man the source never named, called him a traitor, and said he should be hanged.

That is not heated rhetoric about a disagreement. It is a fabricated charge with a death penalty appended.

What people said at the time

Kyle Kondik, editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, on where Gosar sits in the House: "There are a lot of rhetorical bomb throwers in Washington, and I don't know if anyone surpasses Gosar in that group. Gosar may be the leading one."

Mike Noble, a Phoenix-based pollster, was blunter:

"When you're getting to the level of basically making threats, death threats, and especially in this day and age, it's incredibly irresponsible and frankly, the congressman should be ashamed of himself."

Neither Milley's office nor Gosar's responded to requests for comment.

Nothing happened

Two years earlier, the House had censured Gosar and stripped his committees for posting a video of himself killing a colleague. That happened because Democrats controlled the chamber and forced a floor vote.

By September 2023, Republicans held the House. Cronkite News noted the obvious consequence: it was "unlikely that Gosar will be censured for his latest comments."

He wasn't. There was no censure, no ethics referral, no rebuke from leadership that anyone recorded. Noble's assessment of why: "There's really no consequence for doing it, at least electorally. He's got a ton of MAGA-type supporters and this type of rhetoric has kind of been accepted already."

That is what changed between 2021 and 2023. Not Gosar. The majority.

Why the newsletter part matters most

Anyone can say something ugly online. There is a whole industry of it.

This was different in a specific way: it was an official congressional communication. Not a campaign email, not a personal account, not a rally. A publication produced by his congressional office, with congressional staff, distributed to constituents at public expense — the same channel used for town hall notices and casework updates.

The taxpayers of Arizona's 9th District paid to send out a document calling for the execution of an American general.

And it was not the first time an official channel carried this kind of content from him. The anime video that got him censured was posted to his official House social media accounts too.

The record

Paul Gosar's uses of official congressional resources include:

An official social media post depicting himself killing a member of Congress and lunging at the President — 3.3 million views before he took it down.
A letter on congressional letterhead to the FBI defending the white nationalist Nick Fuentes over his no-fly-list placement, as Talking Points Memo documented.
An official newsletter saying the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be hanged, on a charge the cited testimony did not support.

He has been in Congress since 2011. He is on the ballot again this year.

Source

Gosar back in spotlight with call for general to "be hung" over Jan. 6 — Cronkite News, September 25, 2023. Photo: Cronkite News.

Idaho Has 126,000 Veterans. Jim Risch Voted Against Their Toxic Exposure Bill Five Times.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:41:00 +0000

For decades, veterans came home from Iraq and Afghanistan sick from burning trash pits the military lit on their own bases — pits full of plastic, batteries, medical waste and jet fuel. Vietnam veterans came home sick from Agent Orange. When they filed for care, the VA told them to prove the illness came from the service.

The PACT Act ended that. It says that if you served near those hazards and you got one of the listed illnesses, the VA presumes it's connected. You get care. You stop fighting your own government while you're dying.

It passed the Senate 86 to 11.

Jim Risch was one of the 11.

And that final vote was not a one-time slip. Risch voted against the PACT Act at every stage it moved through the Senate — five separate roll calls over two months.

The five votes

Every one of these is a public record on senate.gov. Every one of them is a Nay from Idaho's senior senator.

Date	Vote	Result	Risch
June 13, 2022	Cloture on the PACT Act amendment	78–17	Nay
June 15, 2022	Cloture on the bill itself	76–23	Nay
June 16, 2022	Passage of H.R. 3967, as amended	84–14	Nay
July 27, 2022	Cloture — the vote that blocked it	55–42, failed	Nay
August 2, 2022	Final passage	86–11	Nay

In between, on August 2, he twice voted for alternative versions that would have changed the bill and kicked it back to the House instead of sending it to the president's desk. Both failed. Then he voted no on the real thing.

If you want to know what a senator actually thinks about a bill, this is the cleanest possible answer. There was no stage at which Jim Risch was for it.

The July 27 vote is the one people remember

The bill had already passed the Senate in June. It came back for a routine final vote after a technical fix — the kind of vote that is usually a formality.

Then 41 Senate Republicans blocked it. Cloture needed 60. It got 55.

Veterans and their families had been camped outside the Capitol waiting to celebrate. Many watched the vote from the gallery. What they saw instead was the bill die on the floor, and some senators celebrating.

Jon Stewart, who had spent years pushing the bill, was outside within the hour:

"I'm used to the hypocrisy…I'm used to the lies…I'm used to the cowardice…but I am not used to the cruelty."

"Your stomach drops. I mean, to be honest, the vote itself was a gut punch."

The blockade held for six days. Then, under pressure from more than 60 veterans organizations and a week of national coverage, most of the Republicans who blocked it switched.

Risch didn't. On August 2, when the bill finally passed 86 to 11, he was still voting no.

Who this was for

Look at what the law has actually done in his state.

Idaho is home to about 126,000 veterans. Since the PACT Act took effect, veterans living in Idaho have filed more than 11,500 claims under it. More than 9,500 of those had been fully processed as of August 2024, and more than 7,500 were granted.

Seventy-five hundred Idaho veterans got benefits from a law their own senator voted against five times.

Nationally, more than a million veterans and over 10,000 survivors of veterans who died had begun receiving disability benefits under the law by that point — about $6.8 billion in earned benefits.

That is what "no" meant. Not an abstraction about spending levels. Care for people who got sick doing what the country asked them to do.

He is not shy about veterans otherwise

Risch's public record is full of veterans' causes. He co-sponsored a bill in March 2026 to correct veteran burial benefits. His office issues statements on Veterans Day and Memorial Day like every other senator's.

The gap between that and this is the point. When honoring veterans costs nothing, he is there. When it required a vote that spent money on their health care, he voted no — first, last, and every time in between.

It fits a wider pattern in how he treats the machinery of accountability. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he refused to hold public hearings on the Iran war for more than three months, insisting classified briefings were enough. The common thread is a senator who is comfortable with the parts of the job that happen out of view and reluctant about the parts where he has to put his name on something in public.

He has not held a public town hall since 2020, by the Idaho Democratic Party's count. So Idaho veterans who want to ask him why he voted against their toxic exposure bill five times have nowhere to do it.

Risch has been in the Senate since 2009. He is on the ballot again this year.

We deserve better.

Sources

Jon Stewart blasts Senate Republicans for blocking veterans PACT Act — Task & Purpose, August 1, 2022.
More than 1 million veterans receiving benefits via PACT Act ahead of anniversary — Jennifer Shutt, Idaho Capital Sun, August 9, 2024.
Roll call votes: U.S. Senate roll call vote index, 117th Congress, 2nd session.

Eli Crane, a Former Navy SEAL, Helped Host Russian Officials Inside the Capitol. Then He Refused to Explain Why.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:43:00 +0000

In late March 2026, five members of the Russian Duma walked into the United States Capitol as guests. They were shown the Speaker's office. They were taken through the building. Then they visited the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center.

Five members of Congress hosted them. One of those five was Eli Crane, the Republican who represents Arizona's 2nd Congressional District.

The day before that visit, the European Union's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said publicly that Russia had been feeding intelligence to Iran to help it kill Americans — along with drones to attack U.S. bases and neighboring countries. The day after the visit, Ukraine's president said Russia was handing Iran satellite imagery to help target American forces in the Persian Gulf.

Crane is a former Navy SEAL.

And when reporters asked him to explain why he'd spent an afternoon escorting officials of the government accused of helping kill American service members, he said nothing at all. His office did not respond to multiple messages. There was no press release. There was no statement.

His own party called it a visit from the Third Reich

This is not a case where Democrats attacked and Republicans defended. The condemnation came from inside his own conference, and it was blunt.

"I compare this meeting on Capitol Hill as having a visit by the Third Reich," said Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "Members of the war criminal Putin regime must not be welcomed in any way."

Rep. Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who used to chair that same committee, said Vladimir Putin "should be punished for his abhorrent behavior — not rewarded," and warned that the country "must prevent Putin from exploiting the conflict in the Middle East to line his coffers or legitimize his cronies."

Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman now at CNN, called Crane and the others who hosted the delegation "traitors."

Democrats were no gentler. Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois posted that "foreign political operatives of our adversaries should NEVER be allowed on Capitol Hill," and said the visit "opened the doors to a massive security threat to the Speaker, to our Congress, and to democracy itself."

The Russian delegation wasn't a group of low-level staff, either. It included Vyacheslav Nikonov, who chairs the Duma's Foreign Affairs Committee, and Alexander Darchiev, Russia's ambassador in Washington.

The meeting was organized by Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who called it a "push for peace" and posted about it on X on March 26, writing that it was the first such meeting "in close to a 1/4 century." Luna is no stranger to saying indefensible things in public — we wrote about her comparing Anthony Fauci to a Nazi death-camp doctor — but at least she put her name on this one and defended it. Crane took the tour and went quiet.

Four months later, he tried to zero out Ukraine aid — and 136 Republicans said no

If you want to know what Crane actually believes about Russia's war, you don't need his statement about the tour. You can read the roll call.

On the night of July 21, 2026, the House voted on an amendment Crane wrote. It would have barred the Pentagon from spending a dollar on Ukraine security assistance — every dollar, with one narrow exception for guarding the U.S. embassy in Kyiv.

It failed 76 to 350.

Look closely at those numbers, because they matter. Every single one of the 76 votes for Crane's amendment came from Republicans. And 136 Republicans voted against it — nearly twice as many members of his own party rejected his amendment as supported it. Not one Democrat backed it. Both the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Mike Rogers, and its top Democrat, Adam Smith, spoke out against it earlier that day.

This is what it looks like when a member of Congress is not merely a party-line vote but an outlier — someone whose position is rejected by the overwhelming majority of the people he sits with, including the ones who agree with him about almost everything else.

This has been his position for years

Crane's record on Russia's invasion isn't a recent drift. It's a straight line.

In April 2023, he co-authored a letter with Utah Sen. Mike Lee demanding that President Biden end U.S. support for Ukraine: "Unrestrained U.S. aid for Ukraine must come to an end, and we will adamantly oppose all future aid packages unless they are linked to a clear diplomatic strategy designed to bring this war to a rapid conclusion."

Republicans for Ukraine, a conservative group that scores GOP lawmakers on the war, gives Crane an F. Their file on him logs a string of votes: for an amendment to strip $300 million in Ukraine assistance, for an amendment to prohibit all security assistance to Ukraine, for an amendment to kill lend-lease authority, and against the 2023 and 2024 Ukraine aid packages. In June 2023 he posted that the real aid America should send is "envoys to usher in peace talks."

He is not the only Republican on this site with that record. Missouri's Eric Burlison was one of just nine House members who wouldn't vote for a resolution condemning Russia for kidnapping Ukrainian children — a resolution that spent no money and sent no troops. Crane, to be clear, voted yes on that one.

But there's a difference between voting against foreign aid and personally walking Putin's legislators through the Capitol. You can believe America spends too much abroad — plenty of people do, and it's a real argument. Hosting the Duma is not a budget position. It's a gesture, and the whole point of a gesture is the message it sends.

What he says when the cameras are on

Crane has an answer ready for almost everything, as long as it's a friendly outlet.

On March 2, three days after the U.S. struck Iran, he went on the conservative channel Real America's Voice and offered a line about the war: "Toppling a regime isn't the hard part. It's what comes next." He called the U.S. operations there "dicey." That's a defensible thing to say, and he said it on camera.

Three weeks later he was hosting Russians — whose government was, according to the EU's chief diplomat, helping Iran target Americans in that very conflict — and he had nothing to say to anyone.

That pattern is the through-line of Crane's entire tenure. He does not hold in-person town halls in his district; constituents have organized "empty chair" events because he won't show up, and his office runs telephone forums instead. He gives interviews to conservative media and skips the rest.

His likely opponent in November, former Navajo Nation president Jonathan Nez, put it this way: "While Arizona families struggle with rising costs at home, Eli Crane is busy giving private tours to Russian officials — one day after a report that Russia is helping Iran kill Americans in the Middle East."

We deserve an answer

Arizona's 2nd District runs from Flagstaff to Sedona, Prescott to Cottonwood and across a large stretch of rural northern Arizona.

The people who live there are entitled to hear their congressman explain, in his own words, why he thought it was appropriate to host officials of the Russian government inside the Capitol at that particular moment — and why, when a Republican colleague on the Foreign Affairs Committee compared it to welcoming the Third Reich, he decided the right response was silence.

He was asked. He didn't answer. That's a choice, and it's the same choice he makes every time something is hard to defend.

We deserve better.

Source

Warm welcome for Russian lawmakers draws backlash for Rep. Crane — Zach Bradshaw, Cronkite News, March 30, 2026. Photo: Cronkite News.

Bobby Charles Says His Federal Record Qualifies Him to Fix Maine. More Than a Dozen Audits Found the Bureau He Ran Couldn't Account for Billions.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:04:00 +0000

At a debate in Auburn in February 2026, Bobby Charles raised his hand and listed what he had done in Washington.

"I was brought in by [Secretary of State] Colin Powell and the president to clean up that place. At the same time as I cut bureaucrats and cut the budget, I trained the Iraqi police. I trained the Iraqi police and the Afghan police."

That 18 months is the center of his pitch for governor. Charles tells Maine voters that running a big, complicated federal operation is what separates him from the rest of the field — and that it's why he can be trusted to hunt down waste and fraud in Augusta.

So the Bangor Daily News went and read the audits of the operation he ran.

What the watchdogs found

Charles was Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs — the bureau that fights drugs and crime abroad — from October 2003 to March 2005. After the invasions, his team was handed the job of rebuilding the police forces of both Iraq and Afghanistan. The State Department contracted with DynCorp International to do the work in early 2004.

More than a dozen federal audits criticized that bureau. They came from the State Department, the Pentagon, the Government Accountability Office and other watchdogs. Auditors found poor management, billions spent without accountability, and failure to accomplish the bureau's primary foreign policy goals — the two biggest being training national police and countering narcotics.

Some specifics from the reporting:

The U.S. paid $43.8 million between 2004 and 2006 for trailers meant to house the American police trainers rebuilding Iraq's security forces. They were built in Italy and sat unassembled in storage at the Baghdad airport for more than two years. Officials couldn't say whether they'd received what they paid for.
A federal audit found the bureau had accepted a contractor's word about the status of work without checking, paid invoices before the work was even contracted, and let millions in unauthorized construction go through without objection — including a swimming pool at the Adnan Palace in Baghdad.
On counternarcotics, audits found that in Afghanistan the only industry that grew after the U.S. invasion was the opium market. That is the exact opposite of what the bureau existed to do.
All told, the U.S. poured more than $21 billion into the police training effort over two decades and came away with little to show for it, according to a 2022 report led by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

In February 2005 — one month before Charles left — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a confidential memo from commanders in Afghanistan titled "ANP Horror Stories." It described an Afghan police force that was illiterate and largely untrained despite years of American investment.

"This is a serious problem," Rumsfeld wrote.

John Sopko spent nearly 13 years as the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction and oversaw more than 700 reports and investigations. Asked about the police training effort, he was blunt:

"I don't know why anybody in their right mind would take credit for this. I mean, it was a total disaster, and our reports confirm that."

The audit that covers his desk, in his own building

Charles's central defense is a timing argument, and it deserves to be stated fairly: the audits do not mention him by name. They refer to the position he held, and to work that began during his period. Many of them span two decades — far longer than the year and a half he was there.

But one of them is squarely about his tenure.

A 2005 State Department audit found the bureau suffered from "periodic leadership vacuums" and a front office that was "structurally dysfunctional" during Charles's time in charge. Morale was poor. Internal tensions had grown severe enough that the State Department's civil rights office had to send in a mediator.

The bureau also lost standing inside its own department under his leadership. That leadership, the audit said, was:

"perceived as preoccupied with defending its turf, too ready to embroil itself in sterile interagency strife, and as ineffective in presenting its positions in interagency forums"

The result, according to the audit, was a bureau that had become "isolated and marginalized."

That is not a report about the twenty years after he left. That is a contemporaneous review of the shop he was running.

What he says back

Charles's campaign declined an interview with the BDN and did not answer specific questions about his service. He referred to the paper in a post as the "Bobby Derangement Network," and later called the reporting an attack from the "[Gov. Janet] Mills-funded media."

In a statement, he said: "Our operation began with essentially zero police infrastructure, and my team helped build systems to keep people safe under extremely difficult conditions. We trained police, stood up institutions, and took on some of the toughest assignments in the world."

The next morning he went on WVOM's Maine's Morning News with Ric Tyler and made a fuller case. He called it "the season of fake news." He said he'd brought former colleagues and an acting inspector general to the paper and "of course, they ignored virtually everything that I brought to them." He listed accomplishments: counter-narcotics work tied to Plan Colombia, raising the State Department air wing's readiness from about 60% to 85% ("No more hangar queens"), and training what he said was 35,000 Iraqi police.

He said he was the one who called inspectors general into the bureau in the first place: "I want investigators to rip this place apart so that we know where all the fraud is." And he argued that reformers make enemies — "If you're an agent of change, they hate you."

Two people who worked with him back him up. William E. Todd, a career diplomat who was later ambassador to Brunei and Cambodia and worked with Charles directly from 2003 to 2005, said the bureaucracy resisted change and that Charles "brought into INL — which had been running on cruise control for a long time — fiscal responsibility." Retired Air Force Col. John Mosbey, who worked under Charles on police training, described an impossible situation: "The whole situation was complicated, really complicated. I think we made it work."

Pressed on whether any of the audit criticism was fair, Charles allowed that some was, framing it as normal for reform under wartime conditions: "Every business, every government is imperfect."

Those are real answers, and the job was genuinely brutal. The position had sat vacant for 14 months before he took it. Nobody rebuilt a national police force from nothing in a war zone.

Two answers worth looking at twice

On the $43.8 million in trailers, Charles told Tyler flatly: "That happened after me, Ric."

The payments ran from 2004 to 2006. He was in the job until March 2005. The spending started on his watch and continued after he left. "After me" is not what the record shows.

On the Rumsfeld memo describing Afghan police as illiterate and untrained, Charles said he wasn't concerned by it — Rumsfeld sent memos like that all the time, and he and Powell didn't get along. "We used to call them snowflakes, nasty grams."

And on the underlying failure, his explanation was the trainees: "The Afghans are illiterate, that's the problem." He repeated it: "The reason that the Afghanistan police program over the years became more difficult is because it is difficult to train people, period, who can't read."

Set that next to the debate line he opened with — "I trained the Iraqi police and the Afghan police." When it's an accomplishment, he trained them. When the audits come in, the problem is that they couldn't read.

Why this matters in Maine

None of this is ancient history the voters can safely skip, because Charles is the one who put it on the ballot. He isn't running on a Maine record — he doesn't have one. He is running on those 18 months, and on a promise to bring that same management to state government. He told Tyler the point of the whole story is that Maine "literally ha[s] to get accountability, fiscal management, outcomes, efficiency, and law enforcement."

Accountability and fiscal management are exactly what more than a dozen audits say his bureau lacked.

His campaign has a pattern here, and we wrote about another version of it this week: a television ad promising to quadruple Maine's homestead exemption — a tax break he had never signed up for himself — with no answer for how the state would pay for it. Big number, confident delivery, no arithmetic underneath.

When the Bangor Daily News checked the one credential his campaign is built on, he declined the interview, refused the specific questions, and called the paper fake news.

That is the tell. A candidate proud of his management record answers questions about it.

Mainers deserve a governor whose central qualification survives being read. We deserve better.

Source

Sawyer Loftus, "Bobby Charles ran a bureau that spent billions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Watchdogs say it failed." — Bangor Daily News / Maine Focus, May 6, 2026, republished by The Maine Monitor. BDN writer Michael Shepherd contributed. The BDN also published the underlying watchdog reports. Photo by Michael Shepherd / Bangor Daily News.

624 Americans Wounded in a War Congress Never Voted For

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:25:08 +0000

At least 624 American service members have been wounded since President Trump started the war with Iran in February. That's the Pentagon's own number, from its most recent update on July 25.

Six hundred and twenty-four. Every one of them is somebody's kid, somebody's parent, somebody's neighbor. And not one member of Congress ever cast a vote to send them there.

The number nobody was told about

Here's the part that should make you angry. This wasn't announced. There was no press conference, no briefing, no moment where the government looked the country in the eye and said "here is what this war has cost so far."

It just appeared in a database.

The Pentagon splits the total across two pages now: 417 wounded under "Operation Epic Fury" — the name for the initial attack on Iran — and another 207 under a category called "Overseas Operations." The BBC notes it's not even clear whether all 207 of those were hurt in the Iran war.

And the totals keep moving. Task & Purpose reported that the Pentagon's casualty database listed 420 troops injured in the conflict as of Friday — then 624 after the weekend update. More than 200 wounded Americans, added to the public record in one go. Of the 207 wounded since July 7, 182 are soldiers, 21 are from the Navy, and four are airmen.

Meanwhile the Epic Fury wounded count went the other direction. As late as Tuesday it read 482. Now it reads 417.

They did the same thing with the dead

If this feels familiar, it's because we wrote about it three days ago. The Pentagon's site said 18 U.S. troops had been killed in the Iran war. Then it said 14.

Four names didn't disappear, exactly. They were moved — off Operation Epic Fury and onto the brand-new "Overseas Operations" page, which the Pentagon says counts casualties "starting July 7th 2026." Those four are the only deaths listed there.

Who are they? Three soldiers killed when Iranian missiles hit a base in Jordan on July 17, and one killed in Iraq during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone. They died in this war. They just died in the part of it that came after Trump declared the ceasefire was over — the part the administration would apparently rather file somewhere else.

According to the Associated Press, the "Overseas Operations" category showed up on the Pentagon's website for the first time on Sunday. It did not exist until there were deaths that needed a new home.

"An absurd ruse"

You don't have to take a critic's word for it. Take a general's.

"The administration seems to have a real hard time being honest about what is going on — not just about casualties, but about the whole war in general."

That's Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who commanded U.S. forces in Europe when Trump first came to power.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie — a member of the president's own party — called splitting the conflict into separate categories an "absurd ruse" in a post on X.

And David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman from 2000 to 2003 and again from 2009 to 2011, told Task & Purpose exactly why this matters: "In the absence of specific information from the department about these military operations, unfortunately, casualty reporting is one of the few ways that the public can judge how this war is going."

That's the whole point. Spread the count across two pages, invent a new category, and edit the numbers quietly over a weekend, and suddenly nobody outside the building can tell how bad this war has gotten.

The official explanation makes it worse

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell called the shifting numbers "temporary data disruptions" and said "these site anomalies are currently being resolved in coordination with the Military Services."

Site anomalies. That's the phrase the U.S. government chose for four dead Americans changing categories overnight.

And note what the president himself was saying while this was happening. On July 21, Trump posted on Truth Social that the "Iran Military Conflict" had claimed 18 lives. Days later the official page for that conflict said 14. Either the president was wrong, or the Pentagon was — and nobody in charge has explained which.

This is what "no vote" buys you

Every part of this traces back to one decision: Congress never authorized this war, and Republicans in Congress have fought to keep it that way.

In the Senate on June 24, 13 Republican senators we track helped block a war powers resolution, 47–50, that would have ordered U.S. forces out of unauthorized hostilities with Iran.
In the House on July 23, the chamber voted 214–208 to order forces out — and 182 Republicans we track voted no.
When fighting restarted in July, House Republicans backed a legal theory that the ceasefire made this a "brand new" war, resetting Trump's 90-day War Powers clock so he'd never need Congress's permission at all.

That gimmick had an obvious appeal: if Congress never votes, no one in Congress ever has to answer for what the war does.

Now look at what it produced. Since mid-July, the U.S. traded fire with Iranian forces for 13 consecutive nights before the pause that started Friday. More than 200 additional wounded Americans then turned up in the official count over a single weekend — and the public found out from a database, not from anyone in charge. When the House finally did force a vote on July 23 and told the president to bring troops home, 182 of the Republicans we track voted to keep the war going. And when the numbers got ugly, the administration reorganized the numbers instead of the strategy.

The rest of us are paying for it too, in ways that show up closer to home: gas and fuel prices climbed after the Iran war started, squeezing drivers, farmers, and families already stretched thin.

The bottom line

A war costs whatever it costs. What a country chooses is whether to tell the truth about it.

Six hundred and twenty-four wounded Americans. Eighteen dead, or fourteen, depending on which page you loaded and which day you loaded it. A brand-new casualty category that appeared only once there were deaths it could absorb. A spokesman calling all of it a website glitch. And a Congress that has done everything in its power to make sure it never has to put its name on any of it.

Those service members didn't get to choose. They raised their hand and went where they were sent. The absolute least their country owes them is an honest count — and representatives willing to vote, on the record, on whether the war they're fighting should be fought at all.

We deserve better. So do they.

Source

"More than 600 US military service members injured since Iran War began in February," by Brandon Drenon, BBC News, July 27, 2026. Photo: U.S. soldiers carry a casket during a dignified transfer ceremony in Delaware in July / BBC.
"Pentagon reveals hundreds of new Iran war casualties," Task & Purpose, July 26, 2026.

Lauren Boebert Spent the Week Trying to Ban Trans Troops. Then She Missed the Actual Defense Vote.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 21:05:00 +0000

The National Defense Authorization Act is the bill that funds the American military. It comes up every year. It's about as must-pass as legislation gets, and this year's version carried $1.1 trillion.

Lauren Boebert had two jobs on it.

The first was the one she chose for herself: an amendment to write President Trump's transgender military ban into permanent law. She lost that one — and four Republicans helped beat her.

The second was just to show up and vote on the bill. She missed it. She was in a back room, waiting for a phone call.

The amendment failed, and Republicans killed it

On Tuesday, July 21, the House voted 212-217 to reject Boebert's amendment to the 2027 NDAA. The amendment would have codified Trump's January executive order barring transgender people from serving in the military — turning a presidential order into a law that a future president couldn't simply reverse.

Trump's order says that "expressing a false 'gender identity' divergent from an individual's sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service." That's the language Boebert wanted to make permanent.

Every House Democrat voted against it. So did four Republicans: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, James Moylan of Guam, and Kimberlyn King-Hinds of the Northern Mariana Islands.

That's the part worth pausing on. Republicans control the House. Boebert didn't lose this to Democratic obstruction — she lost it because members of her own party wouldn't go along.

There's context she left out, too. In June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's push to expel currently serving transgender troops was "motivated by animus against transgender people," violating their constitutional rights. Boebert's response to a court finding the policy unconstitutional was to try to make it law.

These are people who already volunteered. They already passed the physical standards. They're already doing the job. The "readiness" argument requires you to believe that troops who are currently serving are simultaneously unfit to serve.

Then she missed the vote on the whole bill

The next day, Wednesday, July 22, the House voted on the actual NDAA — the $1.1 trillion one.

Boebert wasn't there.

Her explanation, reported by AOL, is that she was waiting to hear from Hegseth about a different provision, Section 219, which would have the Defense Secretary designate an "executive agent" to synchronize U.S.–Israel cooperative efforts. Boebert opposed it, calling it "a big tech swap between us and Israel."

In her own words on X:

"Unfortunately, the vote was closed sooner than expected and before my conversations with DoW concluded."

And on camera to TMZ DC, describing what happened:

"It's a big issue on the left and the right, and many of my constituents have reached out. They don't want this provision in the bill. Well, White House doesn't want it in the bill, Secretary Hegseth doesn't want it in the bill. So I'm in the back, waiting for a call from the Secretary. I'm told that call is coming; I'm talking to someone underneath him, and I'm told the vote's going to stay open. They close the vote."

She says she wanted to vote for the NDAA. Seven Republicans, including Thomas Massie, voted against it. Boebert voted neither way. Only two other members missed it: Republican Andy Biggs of Arizona and Democrat Frederica Wilson of Florida.

Massie's amendment to strip Section 219 — the thing she was in the back room about — was defeated 314-104 anyway.

Boebert says she did eventually get a commitment from Hegseth that Section 219 would be stripped in conference, and that she'll get another vote on the bill when it comes back. Maybe so. But the annual defense authorization passed the House of Representatives, and the congresswoman from Colorado's 4th District is not recorded on it.

In the same TMZ interview where she explained missing the vote, she also had this to say:

"I don't want to be on camera this week and I've been on camera more than any other week. My Botox hasn't caught up on this side. Maybe in two days, this side will catch up to the other side."

That's the week. An amendment targeting transgender servicemembers that her own party helped kill, a missed vote on a trillion-dollar defense bill, and a Botox update.

This is the pattern

Boebert's time in Congress has a shape to it, and it's not legislating.

She refuses to hold in-person town halls, telling reporters, "For me personally, it's just not safe to do an in-person town hall because I don't know what to expect." She does telephone town halls instead — like the March 2025 call where she defended Elon Musk and DOGE against constituents' questions about federal workforce cuts.

Her record of controversies is long and well documented — including being ejected from a Denver production of Beetlejuice in September 2023 for vaping and causing a disruption, then telling reporters she'd been removed for "singing too loudly" until the venue's security footage said otherwise.

The through-line is that the performance is the point. Attacking transgender troops is a bill she can post about. Showing up for the defense authorization vote is not.

The bottom line

Transgender Americans serving in the military didn't ask for a culture war. They volunteered. A federal appeals court has already found that expelling them was driven by animus, not readiness.

Lauren Boebert's answer was an amendment to lock that policy into law. She lost — because four Republicans wouldn't vote for it.

Then, on the actual bill that pays for the entire United States military, she didn't vote at all.

Colorado's 4th District sent her to Washington to legislate. Last week she managed neither the culture war nor the day job.

Source

Faith Miller, Lauren Boebert Reveals Why She Missed Big NDAA Vote, AOL/Daily Caller News Foundation, July 23, 2026; Sudiksha Kochi, House rejects amendment banning transgender individuals from serving in military, The Hill, July 21, 2026; and Dems defeat Boebert's anti-trans amendment, LGBTQ Nation. Photo: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images.

Carlos Gimenez on U.S. Troops Killed in Iran: 'That's the Nature of Warfare'

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:21:00 +0000

The United States is now months into a war in Iran, and American troops are coming home in coffins. Asked about it on national television, Carlos Gimenez offered a shrug.

What he said

During an appearance on CNN's "The Lead," Gimenez was asked about the mounting U.S. death toll in the Iran conflict. His response:

"That's the nature of warfare; we will have some casualties."

He added that his "condolences go out to the families of our servicemen and women that are killed — have been killed — in Iran."

The context makes the tone land even harder. Three U.S. service members had been killed over the weekend, bringing the total to 17 dead. These aren't abstractions. They're sons and daughters, and their families were burying them the same week Gimenez waved the losses away as "the nature of warfare."

Easy to say when you've never had to go

Here's the part that stings for a lot of veterans and military families. Gimenez, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, has been a supporter of this war — and he's never worn the uniform himself.

His opponent, retired Navy Commander Phil Ehr, called the remarks "callous" and pointed out that Gimenez "never served." "This man talks about casualties and the nature of warfare in a callous, holier than thou manner," Ehr wrote.

It's a fair hit. It's one thing for someone who has been in combat to speak soberly about the costs of war. It's another for a politician who has never been in harm's way to treat dead Americans as an acceptable line item in a conflict he cheers on from Washington.

He supports the war — he should own the cost

This isn't just a bad soundbite. Gimenez is part of the group of Republicans backing an open-ended war with Iran, one that has already cost American lives and billions of dollars with no clear end. When you vote for and champion a war, you own its consequences — including the flag-draped coffins.

Instead of leveling with families about why their loved ones died, or asking hard questions about where this war is going, Gimenez reached for "that's the nature of warfare." That's not leadership. That's a lawmaker trying to make the deaths sound routine so he doesn't have to answer for them.

A pattern of telling people to move on

Brushing off uncomfortable truths is becoming a habit for Gimenez. He did the same thing with the Epstein files, going on CNN to tell Americans to get over it: "Americans, I think, are over the Epstein case. They have been over it for a long time... we need to move on."

Whether it's dead service members or a sex-trafficking scandal, the message from Carlos Gimenez is the same: don't dwell on it, move along.

The bottom line

American families grieving a child killed in Iran deserved more from their congressman than "that's the nature of warfare." Carlos Gimenez supports this war. The least he owes the troops fighting it — and the families burying them — is to treat their deaths as something more than the cost of doing business.

Source

This post is based on reporting from The Independent.

The Pentagon Quietly Made 4 Dead Soldiers Disappear From Its Iran War Count

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:15:00 +0000

Here is a number no family should ever have to argue about: how many American service members have died in a war.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon's own casualty website said 18 U.S. troops had been killed in the war in Iran. By Thursday, the same website said 14. Four dead Americans, gone from the count overnight.

That's not a rounding error. That's four families who lost someone — quietly erased from the official tally.

What actually happened

Three military officials told The New York Times what really went on. The Trump administration decided to take four service members killed over the past weekend off the list — three killed in Jordan and one in northern Iraq. The reason given: their deaths happened after President Trump declared a cease-fire back in April, so, the thinking goes, they don't count as part of the war.

Except the cease-fire fell apart. The fighting started again. These troops died in that renewed fighting. Telling their families their loved ones don't belong on the war's casualty list because of a cease-fire that no longer exists is not accounting — it's spin.

And the officials only described these internal discussions on the condition that their names not be used. That tells you how much the administration wanted this talked about out loud: not at all.

Two stories, one government

Here's where it gets worse. While three officials were explaining that the numbers changed because the administration pulled four deaths off the list, the Pentagon's acting press secretary, Joel Valdez, gave a completely different explanation. He blamed "temporary data disruptions" on the website — a glitch, basically — that he suggested would be fixed soon.

So which is it? A deliberate decision to remove four dead soldiers, or a computer hiccup? The government is telling the public two different stories about the same four deaths. When the people running a war can't get their story straight about how many Americans it has killed, that's not a technical problem. That's a trust problem.

A pattern of keeping you in the dark

This didn't come out of nowhere. Since the cease-fire collapsed, the Pentagon has told the public almost nothing about what the U.S. military is actually doing in Iran. It has been slow to release information about troops who've been wounded. The last real Pentagon briefing on the war was all the way back in early May.

The Defense Department's excuse is "operational security" — it says telling the public which bases Iran has struck would give the enemy useful information. Maybe some of that is fair. But "we can't tell you where the strikes hit" quietly became "we're going to lower the number of dead Americans and give you two conflicting reasons why." Those are not the same thing. One protects troops. The other protects politicians from bad headlines.

This is the war no one voted for

Remember how we got here. This is a war that Congress never voted on. When U.S. forces resumed fighting Iran in July, the Trump administration leaned on a legal gimmick — arguing that because there had been a cease-fire, this was a "brand new" war, which reset the 90-day clock the president has under the War Powers Resolution to get Congress's approval. No vote. No debate. No representatives on record.

A number of House Republicans cheered that workaround on instead of defending Congress's power to decide when the country goes to war. The whole appeal of the "reset" theory was simple: if Congress never votes, no one ever has to answer for the war or its consequences.

Now look at the consequence. When there's no vote, there's no accountability. And when there's no accountability, even the body count becomes something the administration feels free to quietly edit down. First they took away Congress's say. Now they're taking away an honest count of the dead.

The bottom line

Eighteen became fourteen overnight, and the government offered two contradicting excuses for it. Four Americans died in a war their own representatives never voted to authorize, and within days the Pentagon was scrubbing them from the official total.

Every one of those service members raised their hand and served. The least their country owes them is an accurate accounting of their sacrifice — not a number that shrinks when it becomes politically inconvenient. Any official who's fine with a war being fought this way, without a vote and without an honest death toll, isn't protecting the troops. They're protecting themselves.

Source

"Number of U.S. Troop Deaths Suddenly Appears Lower on Pentagon Website," by Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes and John Ismay, The New York Times, July 23, 2026. Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times.

House Republicans Just Teed Up Another $95 Billion Party-Line Bill — With $10 Billion to Reward Voter-ID States

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:48:00 +0000

On July 16, 2026, House Republicans took the first step toward doing it all over again. The House Budget Committee approved a budget resolution on a party-line 20–14 vote — the paperwork that unlocks a third "reconciliation" bill, the special process that lets the majority pass a law with zero votes from the other side.

Reconciliation is how Trump's Medicaid- and SNAP-cutting "big beautiful bill" became law. Now Republicans want to run the same play a third time, and they've said out loud what they want to spend the money on: up to $95 billion. Here's where it would go — and who it leaves out.

Where the $95 billion goes

According to Republicans on the committee, the coming package would set aside:

Up to $60 billion for the Department of Defense.
Up to $13 billion for the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Up to $12 billion in additional aid to farmers.
Up to $10 billion for the House Administration Committee — money the reporting says is "likely to create a grant program for states that institute voter identification requirements."

That last one is the tell. The resolution is written to help pay states to adopt the kind of voter-ID rules at the heart of the SAVE Act — the bill this site tracks because it could block millions of eligible Americans from voting. Republicans are now trying to bankroll it through the back door of the budget process.

Add it up: more than $70 billion for defense and intelligence, and $10 billion to nudge states toward voter suppression — but nothing in the resolution aimed at the cost of groceries, rent, health care, or child care.

What they said

Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington of Texas was blunt about the ambition. "We are going to use reconciliation to make a run at doing what we think will save this country for our children's future and for the remainder of this century," he said. "I can't think of a more important thing to work on."

The committee's top Democrat, Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan Boyle, saw different priorities. "Over the last 18 months, we have seen where Republicans' priorities are: trillions of dollars in tax cuts for billionaires, tens of billions of dollars for war and absolutely nothing for the American people," Boyle said.

Vermont Rep. Becca Balint tried to strip the defense and intelligence spending instructions out of the resolution. Her amendment failed. "They preach fiscal responsibility," Balint said, "and yet, when it comes to approving tens of billions of dollars in additional Pentagon spending, they are a rubber stamp." Michigan Republican Rep. Jack Bergman spoke up to defend the military money, calling it necessary "to support our troops."

Democrats offered more than a dozen amendments to redirect the package toward everyday costs or roll back pieces of the earlier Republican bills. None of them passed.

Why this matters

It's easy to tune out a committee vote on a "budget resolution." That's exactly why these votes matter. This is the quiet, procedural first step that unlocks the loud, party-line law later. The Budget Committee already used it twice to hand billionaires tax cuts and gut Medicaid and food assistance. Now the machinery is turning again.

And this round has a specific target for your right to vote. A $10 billion pot of federal money designed to reward states for adopting voter-ID requirements isn't a small line item — it's a national push to make it harder to cast a ballot, paid for out of a bill no Democrat will get to amend. The same process that took away health coverage is now being aimed at the ballot box.

House Republican leaders are expected to bring the resolution to the full floor as soon as next week, before the chamber leaves for a five-week August recess. When they do, every Republican who votes yes is voting to start the next party-line bill — the one that pours tens of billions into the Pentagon and tries to buy states into voter suppression, while offering nothing to the families struggling to afford daily life.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Jennifer Shutt for States Newsroom / Florida Phoenix (photo: U.S. Air Force / Department of Defense).