(Daily Signal)—The Biden administration has gone into overdrive securing progressive policy goals from the impending Trump administration 2.0.
From confirming progressive judges, to constraining American energy with environmental red tape, to simply spending every last unjustified dollar, the Biden-Harris administration is committed to ensuring its policies carry on into the second Trump administration for as long as possible.
“It comes [down to] setting land mines and making it more difficult for the incoming administration to reverse those changes,” Cato Institute policy analyst Tad DeHaven told The Washington Times. “It matters or else they wouldn’t be doing it.”
The American people have decisively rejected the Biden-Harris agenda. So, naturally, the administration has responded by forcing its agenda upon Americans even harder, right down to Donald Trump‘s inauguration Jan. 20.
1. Employees
Across the bureaucracy, career government employees are lining up lawyers and setting up to lobby against mass firings, reports The Washington Times.
At the end of Trump’s first term, by executive order he created a new class of federal workers (Schedule F) which would be easier to hire and fire. The Biden-Harris administration undid Trump’s change, and now the bureaucracy is afraid Trump might reinstitute it.
Employees in two divisions of the Justice Department are also rushing to unionize, according to the Times. This would make it more difficult to fire them.
It also provokes the question, why? Shouldn’t their unimpeachable integrity and relentless pursuit of nonpartisan justice be enough to protect their positions?
2. Rulemaking
While executive branch employees rush to protect their jobs, executive branch agencies rush to protect their progressive policies. For instance, the Department of Education is rushing to finalize a proposed rule canceling student loans for people with “financial hardships,” which it previously expected to finish in 2025.
Regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency have been particularly busy. They announced $3 billion in grants to facilitate a rule that requires local municipalities to replace lead pipes within 10 years. They finalized a rule Nov. 12 to fine oil and gas companies for “wasteful methane emissions.”
EPA regulators are also rushing to impose penalties and reach settlements with companies accused of violating their environmental regulations. They plan to grant California a waiver to enforce its rule banning the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles in the state by 2035.
Meanwhile, bureaucrats in the Department of Energy are hurrying to complete a study on liquified natural gas exports that is expected to conclude that they’re not “consistent with the public interest” because of their climate impact, The Washington Post reported.
This won’t directly stop the Trump-Vance administration from restoring America’s energy exports, but could help fossil fuel opponents challenge the new administration in court.
“Biden’s decision on LNG [liquid natural gas] is the most consequential thing he can do on climate and fossil fuels before Trump takes office,” declared Fossil Free Media spokeswoman Cassidy DiPaola.
Other environmental rules the Biden-Harris administration is rushing to finalize include “narrowing the scope of an oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” “restricting drilling, mining, and livestock grazing across nearly 65 million acres … to save an imperiled bird,” and “finaliz[ing] three rules restricting the release of toxic chemicals.”
“From what we can tell, they’ve done a very good job lining this stuff up, so there’s not a whole lot at risk of getting punted into the next administration,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities. “I think everyone learned that lesson in 2016.”
The flurry of administrative rulemaking aimed to meet a late-November deadline that marked 60 days from Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
Rules finalized within 60 days of Trump taking office are subject to the Congressional Review Act, which means that the incoming Republican majority could block them with Trump’s approval.
3. Judges
Another area requiring cooperation between the Biden-Harris administration and Congress is judicial appointments. Senate Democrats are hurrying to confirm Biden-nominated judges to the federal bench, leaving few slots open for Trump to fill.
Positions in the federal judiciary, which are tenured for life, are officially not partisan, but it is generally acknowledged that judges appointed by Democratic presidents tend to lean more progressive, while appointees by Republican presidents tend to lean more conservative.
This means that the federal judges Biden can get through a lame-duck, Democrat-controlled Senate in the final days of his administration will likely look favorably on his progressive policies.
Before the Senate left for Thanksgiving break, Democrats and Republicans reached a compromise deal to vote on as many as 14 Biden nominees for district court appointments, but not to vote on four appellate court nominations.
4. Spending
The Biden-Harris administration is also hurrying to spend the remaining money allocated by Congress’ stimulus spending in 2021-2022, so that it won’t be available to the Trump-Vance administration.
The Washington Times’ reporting cites unnamed officials who plan to spend the remaining $46 billion available in fiscal year 2025, which ends next Sept. 30.
5. Foreign Policy
The Biden-Harris administration is also spending its lame-duck session making major foreign policy moves—which it declined or refused to make earlier—in hopes of constraining Trump’s diplomatic options.
Biden is trying to spend $6.4 billion in aid for Ukraine—funds Congress allocated in April but have not been spent—and cancel $4.65 billion in debt owed by Ukraine to the U.S. Also, Biden permitted Ukraine to fire longer-range missiles into Russia, provoking further Russian escalation.
NPR reported that the Biden-Harris administration is working hard to finalize another major loan to Ukraine through NATO, before Inauguration Day.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the administration pressured Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hezbollah before Trump takes office.
Why It Matters
The Biden-Harris administration is hoping to outfox the incoming Trump-Vance administration in a high-stakes, bureaucratic game of hot potato. Every time the White House changes hands, the incoming administration seeks to undo the rules adopted by its predecessors.
Thus, in 2021, the Biden-Harris administration reversed administrative actions taken by the outgoing Trump-Pence administration, just as the new Trump-Pence administration, in 2017, had reversed policy moves made by the Obama-Biden administration.
This back-and-forth has gone on at least since President Bill Clinton reversed President Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City Policy, but it has recently expanded to cover an ever-growing number of issues.
“It’s unfortunate but expected that [Biden officials] will try to throw as many roadblocks at what President-elect Trump has pledged to do,” Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, told the Post.
The reason why competing administrations play increasingly critical games of bureaucratic football is that they realize the legislative branch lacks either the ability or the will to stop them. And the sad truth of the matter is that progressives—with greater buy-in from employees of the executive branch and greater faith in the government’s problem-solving capabilities—are usually better at playing the game than conservatives.
To the extent that there is a “Deep State” in “The Swamp,” this is it.
Ordinary Americans don’t spend their lives obsessing over politics, except for occasionally wondering why voting for good people never seems to produce the desired results. In my conservative opinion, the answer resides not in electoral results but in the long-term executive and judicial strategies that round out our system of checks and balances (currently tilted in favor of the executive branch).
This is why bureaucratic maneuvering like these by the Biden-Harris administration matter. When Trump takes the keys and slides behind the wheel on Jan. 20, the success of his whole second administration will depend on how quickly he can take America from zero to 60.
This question—and particularly Trump’s first 100 days—will set the momentum for the next four years. And this question depends on how adroitly his deputies can remove these roadblocks thrown in their path by the Biden-Harris administration.
If Trump wants to return America to the prosperous, cruising state of 2019, he must undo four years of rulemaking by the Biden-Harris administration, and he has only four years to do so.
Can his bureaucracy work faster than Biden’s? We’ll soon find out.
Originally published by The Washington Stand
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
I hate, deplore, despise and abominate the word “progressive” as descriptive of the Democrat Communists. They are at best Socialist and in reality Marxist Communist seeking to destroy the American way of life. This is not being “progressive,” is is being intolerant, iconoclastic and radical destroyers of the social order that has been accepted over hundreds of years of compromise, due diligence and peaceful negotiations.