Trail Notes
Stephen Miller cashes in on deportations / Senate scrambling to put "big, beautiful bill" to bed / Fox downplays Medicaid cuts / TRUMP in lights over Tel Aviv?
Stephen Miller Cashing in on Deportations?!
There’s no question that Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, is the Trump administration’s alpha attack dog in its immigrant deportation blitz. Last month, he railed at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials that they needed to hit a quota of 3,000 arrests a day. Well, it turns out that he has a financial interest in the company that’s helping to make that happen.
According to an ethics disclosure report released by the White House this week, Miller owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir Technologies. That revelation, first reported by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), is not surprisingly raising conflict of interest questions, particularly since the data analysis and software company’s financial relationship with the federal government has become especially lucrative since Donald Trump and Miller returned to the White House.
Palantir, cofounded by Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter and close friend of Vice President J.D. Vance, has received more than $113 million in government contracts this year, mainly for a software product that analyzes personal data and makes it much easier to integrate information from different government agencies. The additional commitment of federal dollars—it was 45 percent higher in the first quarter of 2025 than in the same period last year—has sent Palantir’s stock value soaring, from $73 per share on Trump’s first day in office to around $145 per share now. Earlier this month, 10 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Palantir seeking more details on how its product is “amassing troves of data on Americans.”
Miller, whose Palantir stock is in a brokerage account for one of his young children, is not the only White House staff member who has invested in the company. Eleven others own Palantir stock, including Gregory Barbaccia, the government’s chief information officer and a former Palantir employee. But none have near the level of Miller’s investment. And, according to government ethics experts, the combination of Palantir’s close collaboration with ICE and Miller’s very hands-on approach to orchestrating the deportation effort has him walking a very fine line.
A Last-Minute Scramble on the “Big Beautiful Bill”
The clock is ticking on the bloated One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), with the president insisting he wants it on his desk by the Fourth of July. But a lot has to happen between now and then, not just in the Senate, but also in shaping a version the House will support.
The biggest landmine, of course, is the Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid, which, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), could result in almost 11 million Americans losing their health insurance. Also in jeopardy are rural hospitals. Researchers at the University of North Carolina project that as many as 338 rural hospitals could be at risk, with 83 likely to close.
At issue is what’s known as a provider tax, which is levied on health care providers to help states cover their contributions to Medicaid. Without that income, states would likely have to cut back their support for health care, which would likely have the greatest impact on nursing facilities and hospitals in rural communities.
Complicating matters is the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, whose job is to determine if senators are following chamber rules. She concluded that a provision in the legislation to cut the provider tax in half can’t be included. That sent Senate Republicans scrambling to find other ways to compensate for that anticipated revenue.
The White House’s Orwellian OBBBA Fantasy
To counter the CBO’s projection that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, if passed, would add $2.4 trillion to the federal debt over 10 years, the White House, via its Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), issued a report on Wednesday contending that the legislation would actually lower the debt. It argues that the CBO doesn’t take into account what the CEA sees as potential economic growth from deregulation, unspecified future spending cuts, and revenue from tariffs.
Private sector economists are more than a little dubious.
“With this report, the CEA claims that these tax cuts will not only pay for themselves, [but] the tax cuts will also pay down the growing debt that exists under current law even without the tax bill,” said Kent Smetters, director of The Penn-Wharton Budget Model. “It is a truly fantastical claim.”
Fox News Downplays Medicaid Cuts
Fox News has certainly done its part to keep its viewers in the dark on Congress’s pending Medicaid evisceration. Between January 20, when Trump took office, and last Friday, network talking heads cited the word “Medicaid” only 1,390 times, according to a Media Matters report released Thursday. During the same period, they mentioned “Biden” 13,289 times.
The worst offender was “The Five” host Jesse Watters. He cited “Biden” 1,095 times, while “Medicaid” crossed his lips a paltry 20 times. And when he mentioned the program last month, he lied about who benefits from it.
“If you’re a young, able-bodied, healthy American man—26 years old, you don’t even want to go to work—you can get on Medicaid,” he said during a May 19 broadcast. “You can live at your parents’ house, play softball on the weekend, sell ecstasy on the side, not even look for a job— and you can get free health care. That’s what they’re doing. They’re just closing that lazy loophole.”
The Taxman Goeth
It’s been a very good spring for the Internal Revenue Service. The Treasury Department reported that tax revenue was up 9.5 percent in April compared to last year and it then jumped almost 15 percent in May year over year.
That boost is apparently due to a hiring spree at the IRS last year under then President Joe Biden that swelled the agency’s workforce to more than 100,000.
But all that changed once Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) goons began savaging government agencies. IRS workers were required to stay through the April filing deadline, but once it passed, thousands of employees who took buyouts left. Today, the agency’s staff is 26 percent smaller. Particularly hard hit is the IRS’s information technology (IT) department, according to a report by the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent organization within the IRS. More than 2,000 IT staffers are gone, which may make it that much harder to technically implement the tax law changes in the “big, beautiful bill” now before the Senate.
TRUMP Emblazoned on the Tel Aviv Skyline?
Somehow this seems fitting. Last weekend, Donald Trump partnered with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Soon, the Trump name could be prominently displayed on the Tel Aviv skyline.
Earlier this spring, Eric Trump entered into discussions with the owners of a hotel under construction in the city’s Sarona district. The potential deal, according to the New York Times, would probably enable the Trump family to manage the property, which would be the tallest hotel in Tel Aviv. At the top, of course, likely in lights, would be TRUMP.
Randy Rieland is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.
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