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Daily Caller

Trump Calls Biden’s Drilling Ban ‘Worst Abuse Of Power I’ve Ever Seen’

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Kish characterized Biden’s move as “a petulant act of a Hard Left Establishment out to punish 340 million Americans who rejected their calls to bow to their Climate Religion and its vows of poverty.”

The Biden White House said early Monday that outgoing President Joe Biden has ordered huge swaths  of U.S. federal waters off-limits to future leasing and drilling for oil and natural gas. The ban includes  the entire offshore Atlantic, offshore Pacific, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Northern Bering Sea.

All told, the regions impacted by the ban encompass 625 million acres, an area bigger than the states of Texas and Alaska combined. It is also significantly larger in scope than the Louisiana Purchase, which spanned 530 million acres.

“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks.”

Ironically, the Biden ban includes the Atlantic areas where his administration has spent billions of dollars subsidizing the construction of massive industrial wind power facilities. Those developments are currently the source of rising concerns related to impacts on sea mammals, seabirds and the once-thriving commercial fishing industry. All are concerns the administration has refused to adequately address in any real way.

Dan Kish, senior fellow at the D.C.-based Institute for Energy Research think tank, pointed to the “irony of his proposed windfarms in the same waters he is closing to American oil and gas is they are not going to be built. The electricity they produce is so expensive it is deindustrializing Europe and beginning to topple governments. The only question is whether the governments or the windmills will topple first.”

Kish characterized Biden’s move as “a petulant act of a Hard Left Establishment out to punish 340 million Americans who rejected their calls to bow to their Climate Religion and its vows of poverty.” Kish added that Biden and his White House “couldn’t care less about the national security implications, as witnessed by their feckless record that has lit fires around the world while they try to extinguish our gas stoves at home.”

In an interview with Salem Radio national talk show host Hugh Hewitt Monday, incoming President Donald Trump said he would reverse Biden’s order on his first day in office.

“I see that it has just come across that Biden has banned oil and gas drilling across 625 million acres of U.S. coastal territory,” Trump began, adding: “It’s ridiculous. I’ll un-ban it immediately. I have the right to un-ban it immediately.”

Trump acknowledge that the same climate-alarm groups behind the Biden ban will challenge any attempt to rescind it in court, saying, “They’ll do everything they can to make it as difficult as possible. They talk about a transition — they always say they want to have a smooth transition from party to party. Well, they’re making it really difficult. They’re throwing everything they can in the way.”

Trump concluded by telling Hewitt that Biden’s order amounts to “the worst abuse of power I’ve ever seen.”

The White House invoked the drilling ban under Section 12 of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA). It is a section of that law that previous presidents — including Barack Obama and Trump himself — have used to authorize similar drilling bans.

A reading of that provision makes it clear that Congress intended it to be used solely for reasons of national security and during national emergencies. Unfortunately, for the prospects of a Trump reversal, the law does not include any provision for revoking such bans.

Previous presidential bans have never been challenged all the way up through the Supreme Court, though a challenge by the Trump Justice Department to Obama’s ban in 2017 resulted in the set-aside being upheld by an Obama-appointed district judge in 2019. Trump’s Department of Justice chose not to challenge the decision.

This is clearly a political power move by the Biden White House, another payoff to the Democratic Party’s big climate-alarm funders. Whether Trump and his appointees can come up with an effective strategy to challenge it remains to be seen, but if Trump’s comments to Hewitt are any indication, the incoming president is fully prepared to take on the fight.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

Daily Caller

‘The One Place We Really Need To Change Policies’: One Of RFK Jr.’s Top Priorities

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Thursday evening on Fox News that the “one place” he wants to see policies changed is within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Kennedy was confirmed as the new HHS secretary on Thursday, with the Senate’s final vote hitting 52-48. On “The Ingraham Angle,” Fox News’ Laura Ingraham said his critics will call his new plan a “nanny state.” She asked if he would ban food items like McDonald’s Big Mac.

“Oh, we’re not going to take [that away]. That’s what I’m saying. If you want to eat a Big Mac, you ought to,” Kennedy said. “But you ought to. But, you know, McDonald’s ought to be incentivized to use beef tallow when it’s cooking its Big Macs. So that they’re good for people rather than using seed oils or some other cooking oils that are actually going to probably make you sicker.”

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“So we want to do a number of things but not take away choice from people,” Kennedy added. “The one place that I would say that we need to really change policies is in the SNAP program and food stamps and in school lunches because there the federal government in many cases is paying for it. We shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison.”

SNAP, a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program, provides food benefits to low-income families. Within a 2021 USDA report, the study said that nearly nine out of 10 SNAP participants faced barriers in “providing their households with a healthy diet throughout the month.”

During his run for president, Kennedy called out his concerns for Americans’ health, as Centers for Disease Control data states that over 100 million adults in the U.S. suffer from obesity and over 22 million adults have severe obesity. After withdrawing from the race and endorsing then-candidate Donald Trump for president, the term “Make America Healthy Again,” also known as MAHA, was coined.

WATCH:

Kennedy told Ingraham he believes in “freedom of choice” and wants to bring “radical transparency” so Americans can understand the effects of what they’re consuming.

“If you want to eat Twinkies, you ought to be able to eat them, but you ought to know what’s in them,” Kennedy said. “So a lot of what I’m going to do is about radical transparency, about making people understand, allowing people to understand and empower them with understanding that if you eat that, it may seem cheap, but it’s going to cost you in the long run. You’re going to get diabetes.”

“There are certain additives. We have 10,000 additives in our food,” Kennedy said. “The Europeans have 400. Many of the additives that we have are just illegal in Europe. We need to move more and more toward the European standard.”

Kennedy has previously addressed his concerns about seed oils in American food, telling Fox News during an October 2024 interview that the “unhealthy ingredients” are in the country’s foods due to being “heavily subsidized” despite “very serious illnesses, including body-wide inflammation.”

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Trump, Putin have begun negotiations to end Russia-Ukraine war

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that negotiations to end the Ukraine-Russia war are underway following a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump said Putin agreed to begin negotiations over Ukraine during the call, with the president saying he would inform Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the negotiations imminently, according to a Truth Social post. Since the war began in February 2022, the U.S. has spent over $130 billion aiding Ukraine.

“We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering, that Russia lost tens of millions of people, and we, likewise, lost so many!” Trump said on Truth Social. “We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together. But first, as we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine. President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, “COMMON SENSE.” We both believe very strongly in it. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations.”

Zelenskyy said Friday that he was open to a peace deal amid Trump’s request for Ukraine to supply the U.S. with rare earth elements and other minerals in exchange for aid. During his campaign, Trump vowed to bring peace to Ukraine and the world.

Earlier on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Ukraine joining NATO and returning to its 2014 borders, when it retained control over Crimea and the currently disputed Donbass and Donetsk regions, was not “realistic.”

The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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