The Trump administration took a major whack at the climate-industrial complex this week. It’s a fantastic move. But another event this week spotlights the need to do more.
White House Office of Management and Budget Chief Russ Vought announced this week that the Trump administration would “be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.” Vought added: “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. A comprehensive review is underway and any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”
The announcement put climate hoaxers into orbit.
In “Trump officials to dismantle ‘global mothership’ of climate forecasting,” the Washington Post reported: “The announcement drew outrage and concern from scientists and local lawmakers, who said it could imperil the country’s weather and climate forecasting, and appeared to take officials and employees by surprise.”
“If true, public safety is at risk and science is being attacked,” Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said. “Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families,” he added.
NCAR “is quite literally our global mothership,” said the Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist. “Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet,” she added.
Beam’em up, Scotty.
While NCAR does valuable research related to weather, its climate-related work is awful. In 1970, NCAR researchers predicted that a new ice age would set in during the first third of the 21st century – i.e., right about now.
In 1979, NCAR climate legend Stephen Schneider predicted that global warming could cause the entire East Coast to be flooded within decades – i.e., right about now.
In 2009, NCAR all-star researcher Kevin Trenberth was caught in the Climategate e-mail scandal admitting to fellow climate hoaxers: “The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warmth at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
The good news is that the weather work NCAR does will continue. But NCAR’s always wrong, if not ridiculous, climate hoax work will be cut.
But as with other Trump administration efforts to terminate the climate hoax, fixing NCAR is not enough. Earlier this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its annual “Arctic Report Card,” in which it claimed (as usual) that the Arctic is heating up faster than the rest of the planet. The climate hoax-friendly media outlet, The Guardian, headlined the story as “Arctic endured year of record heat as climate scientists warn of ‘winter being redefined.”
The science problem with NOAA’s report card is that it lacks any historical perspective. We don’t have very good data on the Arctic. The Soviet Union established the first temperature station near the North Pole in 1937. But summer ice melt washed it away. The U.S. didn’t make it to the Arctic until 1952 – in a submarine. The satellite record of the Arctic didn’t begin until 1979, which was the very end of the mid-20th century cooling period and so Arctic ice was at a peak.
It started warming in the 1980s – no one knows why for sure – and Arctic sea ice extent began to shrink. Arctic sea ice extent stopped shrinking in the mid-2000s (despite huge emissions growth) and has never been close to ice-free in the summer as Al Gore predicted it would be by 2014.
Yet NOAA is still sounding the climate alarm. The White House needs to get on top of NOAA and give it the NCAR treatment: Weather, yes. Climate, no.
Guess what! Inflation, growth, jobs: Conventional wisdom from America’s economic punditry was across-the-board wrong. Again.
At the year’s start the punditry predicted that Trump’s tariffs would cause a surge of inflation and would likely trigger recession. Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released Consumer Price Index (CPI) numbers on Thursday. Reuters’ polling of private economists predicted inflation would accelerate to 3.1% year-over-year, the fastest pace since 2023. The actual BLS figure came in at 2.7%, with core inflation even lower at 2.6%.
But the news gets better. Year-over-year inflation means it includes inflationary pressures from the end of Biden’s presidency. It’s a very lagging figure.
To understand what inflation’s doing now, and to filter out some of the data’s noise, a better gauge is to look at inflation over the last two months, which came in at 1.2% annualized, well below the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
There is a small caveat to this good news. Due to the Schumer government shutdown, BLS was unable to collect all the usual data for the CPI report, so some items were left out. The economists who predicted accelerating inflation are thus arguing that inflation would, with all the data, have been much higher and thus excusing their bad forecasts.
However, as New York Fed President John Williams points out, the missing data “pushed down the CPI reading, probably by a tenth or so.” OK, so topline inflation was 2.8% while the annualized two-month figure goes to 1.8%, still well below consensus forecast and still below the Fed’s target rate.
What about Trump’s tariffs? To be sure, they pushed some prices up faster than they otherwise would have. But the tariffs only applied to a small fraction of all the goods and services sold in America. So, when it comes to overall inflation, the net effect could never be more than a one-time rounding error.
Further, inflation is fundamentally a monetary phenomenon. These tariff-induced price bumps occurred against a background of the underlying inflationary impulse from money supply interacting with money demand. The Fed has run a moderately restrictive policy for years, so naturally inflation is falling.
Assuming at least one of the Fed’s legion of economists can do this two-month calculation and has the temerity to show it to Chair Powell and the rest of the Fed’s leadership, then further Fed rate cuts should be assured and imminent on the road to neutral.
And what about that predicted recession? After inflation, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) soared 3.8% in the second quarter of this year, while the Atlanta Fed’s “Nowcast” of third quarter GDP is a still-impressive 3.5%.
Some of Reuters’ economists will likely portray this slight slowdown in growth as “scary” and a sign of pending recession. Nonsense. The economy is ripping, with the only recession pending threatening the salaries of those economists making silly forecasts.
Finally, those still desperate to argue economic weakness might turn to the labor market. The economy generated about 166,000 jobs a month during Biden’s last year in office. So far under Trump the economy has generated about 50,000 jobs a month. Sounds scary, but much of that decline occurred because federal employment fell by 27,000 jobs a month.
The even bigger jobs story is that employment by foreign-born workers has fallen by about 100,000 a month under Trump. This is what happens when immigration laws are enforced and the border is secured. Put it all together and private-sector native-born employment is doing very well.
And the cherry on top is that after stagnating for the four years of the Biden presidency, median real wages are now rising at a 1.6% annualized rate. Rising wages and plentiful private-sector jobs, not gimmicks like Obamacare subsidies and rent controls, are how you prosper American workers or, in today’s parlance, address “affordability.”
Just don’t be surprised if you don’t hear that from the legacy media.
J.D. Foster is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation. He is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.
U.S. consumer price inflation slowed more than expected in November, with the latest official data showing a notable drop in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and core inflation. This key measure strips out food and energy costs, according to an update released Thursday by the Joint Economic Committee (JEC).
The headline Consumer Price Index (CPI-U), a broad measure of prices consumers pay for everyday goods and services, rose only 2.7% from November 2024 to November 2025, below the roughly 3.0% economists had expected. This marks one of the lowest readings in 2025, signaling a potential easing of inflationary pressures.
Core CPI, a measure that excludes volatile food and energy prices, also fell to 2.63% year-over-year, its lowest reading since March 2021.
Between September and November, the headline CPI increased modestly by 0.20%, while core inflation edged up by 0.16% over the same period, indicating that prices rose only slightly in recent months, even after volatility is adjusted for.
The data showed a mixed picture for specific sectors:
Food price inflation was 2.65% year-over-year, a decline of roughly 0.46 percentage points from September.
Energy price inflation rose 4.24% year-over-year, up about 1.39 percentage points from September.
Regionally, the Northeast saw the highest inflation rate between September and November at 3.1%, while the West and Midwest tied at 3.0%. The South recorded the lowest inflation at 2.2%, down from 2.7% in the September report.
In addition to prices, the JEC noted improvements in real wages during the most recent two-month period. Inflation-adjusted earnings for private nonfarm workers showed that weekly earnings rose 0.66% and hourly earnings rose 0.35%, suggesting that wage growth modestly outpaced price gains through November.
In a post to X on Thursday, the White House highlighted the slowed inflation and the pace of wage increases, writing, “President Trump is turning the economy around—pulling it back from the brink & setting the stage for a HISTORIC BOOM.”
President Trump is turning the economy around—pulling it back from the brink & setting the stage for a HISTORIC BOOM.
✅ Bringing high prices down ✅ Wages rising faster than inflation ✅ 100% of new jobs to American-born workers ✅ Gas prices ⬇️
Economists have cautioned that some of the recent inflation slowdown reflected in official figures may be affected by data collection challenges earlier this year. Independent reporting highlights that federal data gathering was disrupted by a prolonged government shutdown, which prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from compiling October CPI data and may have altered how price changes were measured, according to Reuters.
Nonetheless, both headline and core measures show inflation moving closer to longer-term targets, a development policymakers and markets will be watching closely as the Federal Reserve, Congress, and Trump Administration consider their next steps in 2026.
Our country is facing an energy crisis. No, not because of new demand from data centers or AI. Instead, it’s because utilities in nearly every state, due to government imposed “renewable” mandates, self-imposed mandates, and the supercharging of the Green New Scam under the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” have been shutting down vital coal resources and building out almost exclusively intermittent and costly resources like solar, wind, and battery storage.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), through U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has achieved unprecedented border security milestones, with illegal border crossings reaching the lowest levels ever recorded at the start of a fiscal year.
Preliminary data for October and November 2025 show a continued historic decline in apprehensions and encounters, reflecting the effectiveness of President Trump’s policies and leadership.
Since President Trump took office on January 20, 2025, total enforcement encounters along the southwest border through the end of November stand at 117,105—37% below the monthly average of 185,625 recorded during the Biden administration.
U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions have averaged under 10,000 per month, described by DHS as “a level of deterrence unmatched in modern border history”.
Daily apprehensions along the southwest border now average just 245—fewer than 11 per hour—and a stunning 95% reduction from the Biden-era daily average of 5,110 (February 2021-December 2024). For comparison, December 2023 saw 336 illegal crossers apprehended every hour during the height of the prior administration’s border crisis—more than today’s entire daily total.
In October 2025, nationwide Border Patrol encounters and apprehensions totaled 30,573, distinctively down from 142,742 in October 2024, 309,605 in October 2023, and 278,317 in October 2022.
Preliminary data for November 2025 show 30,367 encounters, slightly lower than October’s record low. Combined, October and November recorded just 60,940 encounters—the lowest two-month start to any fiscal year on record and 28% below the previous low of 84,293 set in FY2012.
“Once again, we have a record low number of encounters at the border and the 7th straight month of zero releases. Month after month, we are delivering results that were once thought impossible: the most secure border in history and unmatched enforcement successes,” said Secretary Kristi Noem. “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and the dedication of DHS law enforcement, America’s borders are safer than ever before.”
Every individual apprehended is processed for removal in accordance with the law, reversing Biden-era policies that pulled agents from the field to facilitate mass releases, leaving hundreds of miles of border unpatrolled for extended periods.
Ethan Faverino is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
