The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released an analysis of the policies last week estimating they would [cost] nearly $49 trillion over the next 10 years…

The 92-page report, titled “The Real Cost of Socialism in America,” examined eight elements of the DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” agenda, including:

• Medicare for all
• Student debt cancellation and free college
• Immigration policies (open borders),
• Universal rent control
• Green New Deal (end the use of gas, oil, coal)
• Mandate a 32-hour workweek but workers still get paid for 40 hours
• A wealth tax (“Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations”)
• Changes to policing and incarceration (ultimately abolish the police and abolish the prison system)

Seven of those policies were evaluated against the federal budget and are estimated by the CEA to cost  $52.84 trillion from 2027 through 2036, according to the report.

A proposed 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires would generate an estimated $3.94 trillion, bringing the net fiscal burden to $48.9 trillion.

“This amounts to approximately $355,000 per American household,” the report said, adding that the spending would have to be financed through additional debt (government borrowing money) or higher taxes.

Medicare for All accounts for most of the projected cost. The CEA estimated the single-payer system would add $47.4 trillion to federal deficits over the decade after accounting for projected administrative and Medicaid savings.

Canceling student debt and providing free undergraduate tuition would cost between $2.1 trillion and $3.6 trillion, depending on whether free tuition extended to private colleges.  The report used the higher figure in its overall calculation.

The report estimated the DSA’s  mandated 32-hour workweek would cost $918 billion, Green New Deal policies $370 billion and universal rent control about $16 billion.

The DSA has also promised open borders and amnesty for all illegal immigrants which is estimated to cost between $440 billion and $613 billion over 10 years. This assumes a lifetime net fiscal cost for every illegal immigrant of $166,716. Amnesty, in particular, is projected to cost between $36 billion and $47 billion due to welfare programs.

The CEA estimate didn’t evaluate all of the costs or savings of DSA proposals, such as moving toward abolishing police and prisons, defunding the Department of War and abolishing the Senate.

The White House published the report as Republicans focus on DSA-backed candidates who made surprising gains in primaries across the country.

“The Democrats’ embrace of communism and socialism is not only an existential threat to our nation’s fundamental values, but also a complete disaster for American families who would pay trillions to fund these out-of-touch ideas,” said White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales.

Republicans contend that the rise of DSA candidates deepens a split between moderate and progressive wings, making it harder for mainstream or centrist Democrats to govern or appeal to general election voters. GOP leaders argue that DSA-backed members will pull the entire Democratic Party sharply to the far left, dictating policy on the economy, immigration, public safety, and social issues.

The CEA report comes as the DSA has gained greater electoral prominence.

The organization said its membership reached a record 120,000 this summer while DSA-backed candidates won a series of Democrat primaries.

Compiled and adapted from articles published at Newsmax Wires, NY Post and The National Pulse and on Oct. 1. Posted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced without permission.

Law enforcement agencies and companies charged with trying to recover stolen vehicles say that while much of the thefts occur in border states, cartel operatives have stolen vehicles from as far away as New York, Chicago and Miami. But California remains the top target.

LAPD Sgt. Juvey Mejia, a member of the Task Force for Regional Auto Theft Prevention, said the cartels love heavy-duty pickup trucks and Jeeps. “Anything that can drive through tough terrain to get away from Border Patrol so they can move dope,” Mejia said.

Along with Chevy Suburbans, Ford Raptors and Toyota pickups, the vehicles of choice include Cadillac Escalades and BMW SUVs, according to people whose job is to recover them. To battle rival cartels or authorities, criminal groups sometimes convert the trucks into mutant tanks, adding heavy ballistic-proof steel plating, firing ports and gun mounts.

The thefts don’t require much stealth: vehicles are rented in the U.S. by cartel operatives and then driven across the border. The exact number of vehicles is unknown.

California sees significant theft, in part, because of its restrictive privacy laws on GPS tracking of rental vehicles, according to Sharky Laguana, owner of Bandago Van Rentals based in San Francisco.

Unlike other states, California requires that rental agencies wait to turn on GPS tracking until the vehicle return deadline has passed and the renter has been contacted by the company. By then, most stolen vehicles are deep in Mexican territory.

“California allows criminals to take advantage of the fact that we are not allowed to see where the vehicle is until it’s too late,” Laguana said. The American Car Rental Assn., a trade group, said in a statement that California laws make it harder to recover vehicles.

“Members are reporting a sharp increase in rental vehicle theft from California into Mexico, where California law uniquely restricts rental fleet operators from accessing technology to protect and recover their assets,” the association said in a statement. “The result is millions of dollars in annual theft-related costs.”

The number of rental cars stolen in the United States and taken to Mexico each year is unknown, but it is believed to be in the thousands. Businesses charged with recovering the vehicles estimate only a small percentage of them are ever found.

But statistics compiled by the California Highway Patrol give some sense of the problem. According to the CHP, since 2023, about 850 vehicles stolen in California have been recovered each year in Mexico. The numbers do not distinguish which cars are rentals or privately owned, but rental industry representatives estimate that many are rentals.
…

Along with California, Texas and Arizona are the other top targets for Mexican criminal groups.

One tactic involves cartels hiring people in the U.S. via social media to rent a vehicle for five days, get the damage waiver that includes covering the car if it is stolen, and then leave the keys in the vehicle still parked in the rental parking lot. An operative arrives, gets in the car and drives it south to Mexico.

In other cases, thieves will rent the vehicle online or at a kiosk using a stolen identity, said Mejia, the LAPD officer. Since the pandemic, it’s not unusual for people to wear protective masks, so the renter will wear a mask to hide their identity from the kiosk camera. “They know it won’t be traced back to them,” Mejia said.

The process for reporting a stolen rental vehicle varies from state to state, but it is often tedious. It can take three days after the vehicle has gone missing for a company to prepare a demand letter to the renter seeking return of the vehicle. Such notification is required before a vehicle can be reported stolen, and it can take another two days to send the letter by certified mail.

Depending on the state, a company might have to wait up to nine days to report the theft to police. Only then can it appear on the FBI-managed U.S. National Crime Incident Database, where stolen vehicles are reported.

More days will pass before the VIN number is registered in Mexico’s stolen vehicle database. If the car or truck was rented in one state, set to return in another state and crossed into Mexico via a third, the coordination required between three state law enforcement agencies can make timely recovery of the vehicle even more complicated.

Many vehicles are never registered in the U.S. stolen car database.  Kevin Carter, owner of Collateral Consultants, a rental car recovery company in Texas, said that of the approximately 1 million cases he has seen in his 15 years recovering rental vehicles in the U.S. and elsewhere, fewer than half made it into the U.S. database.

A vehicle is not officially considered stolen until it appears in the registry. Large rental agencies often don’t bother recovering vehicles that disappear across the border, and consider the loss the cost of doing business, Carter said.

“It’s a calculated risk to most of the big companies,” he said.

While insurance companies insure rental agencies against vehicle damage, they do not cover theft, according to Luguana of Bandago Van Rentals. Most agencies are self-insured, meaning the loss of a vehicle cuts into their bottom line, he said.

Though sometimes the target is a single vehicle, authorities have also uncovered larger theft operations.

In 2024, the Colorado attorney general’s office indicted 17 people associated with the Sinaloa Cartel, accusing them of stealing 190 new Ford F150s and luxury suburbans near the Denver airport. The cartel operatives drove the stolen vehicles, valued at nearly $10 million, to Mexico, according to court documents, and exchanged them for cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine.

In the Texas border city of Laredo, Deputy Police Chief Timothy Tubbs said he has seen a 50% increase in the theft of rental vehicles — about 10 a month.

“They have seen how easy it is to steal a rental car, and the process it takes to report it,” Tubbs said of criminal groups. And the vehicles are supporting drug trafficking into the U.S., he said. “These stolen vehicles empower the cartels,” Tubbs said. “It is another tool for them to continue their smuggling and continue their violence.”

Once the vehicles are in Mexico, operatives approach corrupt Mexican officials and change out the U.S. license plates for Mexican plates and register the vehicles on Mexico’s online car registry platform, according to car recovery experts.

Authorities install a chip that is scanned by machines along federal highways. The chips are supposed to flag stolen cars and trucks, but because the new plates are valid, the vehicles are never listed as stolen.

In the United States, stolen vehicles are far more likely to be identified, experts said, for a variety of reasons — a routine maintenance check or a scan by a highway license plate camera could trigger an alert. But once a stolen car arrives in Mexico, it essentially vanishes.

“It crosses that border, it is a brand-new car,” Carter said.

Fisher is a special correspondent. This article was co-published with Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit newsroom. Reporting for this article was supported with a grant by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

October 7, 2026:

The following text (from video above) is the second half of a major foreign policy address Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered on Oct. 7 at the Pnyx in Athens, Greece, with the Parthenon and the Acropolis in the background.

…The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things.  The ancient Greek city-states were filled.  They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict.  But from that constant struggle for distinction – from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it – the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride – is the heart of great civilization.  And without it?  Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.

Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality.  Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional.  We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world.  Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt.  We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.

The word “nationalism” became a dirty word.  And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history.  And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.  In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.

And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.

But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left – the vacuum left behind by our weakness.  And as the West’s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead.

And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads.  Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century.  The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.  We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.

Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice.  We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.

We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility.  To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

Now for all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive.  They understood that nations have interests.  They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy, but they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail.  They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself, it requires the credibility that you are willing to use it.

This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump Administration hopes to reclaim – reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.

We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.

There are already signs.

Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginnings of a generational shift: skyrocketing defense spending, a flurry of new partnerships and programs, expanded manufacturing and production, following on the historic defense commitments made last year in The Hague.

Greece has been at the center of this shift.  The people of this nation have proved themselves once again to be an indispensable friend to Europe and to the United States alike, on everything from energy to migration to defense, where Greece has been a model ally.

And it’s our sincerest hope that all of Europe will follow your example.

Though passions may, at times, have strained the bonds of affection between the United States and Europe, it must not be allowed to break them.  Together, we must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting threats of our age.

And we can.  Because we do not believe the transatlantic friendship should be zero sum.  Quite the opposite: our vision is of an alliance whose strength is greater than the sum of its parts.  It is a vision we saw in action just last month, in an unprecedented new agreement between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland – an agreement that will reshape the Arctic and bolster the security of all of NATO.  All three partners in that deal emerged victorious.  All of Europe – and NATO and the United States emerged safer, stronger, and more secure because of it.

We want to win together.  We must win together.

Now it’s has become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one’s own people.  And I think here, too, we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else.

They believed – fiercely – in the ideal of the great man: the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds.  But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself.  The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.

We see this in Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth even at the cost of his own life.  We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans – surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia – who refused the chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty.  And we see it in the epic myth of Achilles, who is offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life – but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory.

These – these are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination.  From the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life for his country; from Saint Thomas More to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which says, “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty – an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country.  Our heroes, the heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the proverbial captain, who goes down with his ship.

This is wholly different from what we see, even now, for example from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.

Our heroes – our heroes may be willing to die for their cause; but our heroes do not worship death.  It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles.  Now, we take the West’s conception of these things – heroism, honor, duty – we take these things for granted.  We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places.  They are not.  They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it.  A civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.

The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom, who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne, and Florence.  The quest to perfect the human form that moved the ancient Greek sculptors found a new expression in Michelangelo.  The Greek philosophers’ search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus, and then Galileo, then Kepler, and in Newton.

The hunger for new knowledge, that’s what gave birth to Magellan’s first expedition around the world, to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11’s journey to the moon.  And the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, then Charlemagne, and Cortes.

And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew.  An open and wild land became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition.  The Greek aspiration for new horizons became the American frontier spirit.  The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.

The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers – born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world.

Together, we must now rediscover that spirit.  We are at an inflection point – an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization.

The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity.

National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions.  War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace.  Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory, and technology, and resources, and markets, and energy, and power.

And now, there is war again.  There is new competition between great powers again.  There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again.

And so we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together – understanding that the purpose of these things is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them; it is to defend them.  And that nations need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests.

We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece.  In our defense partnerships, in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe’s borders from the threats of mass migration.

Our friendship dates back to the earliest years of my nation.  When Greece rose in 1821 to recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule, Americans recognized something familiar in that struggle.  Three years later, the great American statesman Daniel Webster, he delivered a famous address to Congress, helping bring the cause of the Greek Revolution before the representatives of the young American republic.

And he began by calling their attention to everything around them.  This is what he said in his speech; he said:  “This free form of government, this popular assembly… this practice of free debate, and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind… even the edifice in which we assemble, these proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors.”

Those words are as true today as they were when he said them.  And all of us – not just Americans, but Europeans and our friends across the West – must relearn the lessons our forefathers took from this place and from its history.

The history of Greece – the history of Greece does not just offer us a glimpse – it does not offer a glimpse of our institutions in their earliest forms.  The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves.

It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud – that we should be intensely proud – of where we come from.  We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside.  The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man.  And it began here, with the first men and women of the West.  From them – from them – we can rediscover the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.

Thank you.
(Watch the entire speech at state.gov.)

Although Christopher Columbus clearly was not the first European to visit the “New World” (Vikings had traveled here centuries earlier), he first widely publicized, and thus “discovered,” its existence to the Europeans. Columbus undertook his first voyage facing the prospect of great danger. The professional opinion of that day not only assured him of the impossibility of his proposed endeavor, but it also warned him that dragons and death awaited him beyond the charted waters. With such advice coming from the intellectual leaders of his day, his decision to embark on this unprecedented journey must have been difficult. So, then, why did he set out? Columbus himself answered that question in his own writings:

[O]ur Lord opened to my understanding (I could sense His hand upon me) so it became clear to me that it [the voyage] was feasible. . . . All those who heard about my enterprise rejected it with laughter, scoffing at me. . . . Who doubts that this illumination was from the Holy Spirit? I attest that He [the Holy Spirit], with marvelous rays of light, consoled me through the holy and sacred Scriptures . . . they inflame me with a sense of great urgency. . . . No one should be afraid to take on any enterprise in the name of our Savior if it is right and if the purpose is purely for His holy service. . . . And I say that the sign which convinces me that our Lord is hastening the end of the world is the preaching of the Gospel recently in so many lands.

Americans celebrated Columbus’s discovery of the New World and built numerous monuments to him in the late 19th century.

The city of Columbus, Ohio was established in 1812. In addition, cities and towns, streets and health facilities, libraries, universities, schools, and in modern times sport teams bearing his name are symbols of his American stature.

Columbus Day is a national holiday in the United States, proclaimed so in 1937 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Christopher Columbus wrote a book entitled Book of Prophecies, in which he copied down Scripture [verses from the Bible] pertaining to bringing the gospel to unknown coast lands. The following is an excerpt from his Introduction to the book:

At a very early age I began to sail upon the ocean. For more than forty years, I have sailed everywhere that people go. I prayed to the most merciful Lord about my heart’s great desire, and He gave me the spirit and the intelligence for the task: seafaring, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, skill in drafting spherical maps and placing correctly the cities, rivers, mountains and ports. I also studied cosmology, history, chronology and philosophy.

It was the Lord who put into my mind (I could feel His hand upon me) the fact that it would be possible to sail from there to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit, because he comforted me with rays of marvelous illumination from the Holy Scriptures … encouraging me to continually to press forward and without ceasing for a moment they now encourage me make haste.

Our Lord Jesus desired to perform a very obvious miracle in the voyage to the Indies, to comfort me and the whole people of God. I spent seven years in the royal court, discussing the matter with many persons of great reputation and wisdom in all the arts; and in the end they concluded that it was all foolishness, so they gave it up. …

It is possible that those who see this book will accuse me of being unlearned in literature, of being a layman and a sailor. I reply with the words of Matt. 11:25, “Lord, because thou has hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hath revealed them unto babes. …

For the execution of the journey to the to the Indies I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps. It is simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah had prophesied. All this is what I desire to write down for you in this book.

No one should fear to undertake any task in the name of our Savior, if it is just and if the intention is purely for His holy service. The working out of all things has been assigned to each person by our Lord, but it all happens according to His sovereign will even though He gives advice. He lacks nothing that it is in the power of men to give him. Oh what a gracious Lord, who desires that people should perform for Him those things for which He holds Himself responsible! Day and night moment by moment, everyone should express to Him their most devoted gratitude. …

The four voyages of Christopher Columbus (Encyclopædia Britannica)

Republican National Committee vs. Mi Familia Vota deals with proof-of-citizenship requirements for voters and state authority to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls.

The high court is asked to rule on two questions.

First, does the National Voter Registration Act prohibit the state of Arizona from requiring applicants for voter registration to show proof-of-citizenship?

Second, does the National Voter Registration Act prohibit Arizona from canceling the registrations of voters who are not U.S. citizens within 90 days of a federal election?

Proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting are a key policy President Trump has pursued during his second term, to fulfill a promise he made to constituents.

Arizona’s legislature [implemented laws requiring] proof-of-citizenship before Trump’s return to office, approving new policies for voting in 2022. Those policies were immediately challenged by Mi Familia Vota and other advocacy groups, who argued that the National Voter Registration Act prohibits such measures from taking hold.

The initial lawsuit also referenced a 2018 consent decree [a decree made by a judge with the consent of all parties] in the state that settled a challenge to the state’s voter registration rules. The settlement, between [the left-leaning] Campaign Legal Center and Arizona’s [Republican] secretary of state and Maricopa County, recognized that undue burdens were being placed on voters when registering to vote.

Under the settlement, local election officials are required to accept voter registrations without proof-of-citizenship.

In an amicus brief, the Republican State Leadership Committee noted “The key question presented in the case is whether the National Voter Registration Act or a federal consent decree entered by a single state executive official can prevent a state from requiring proof of U.S. citizenship in its voter registration process. [We] argue the answer is no.”

Lower courts have sided with the plaintiffs in this case and the Republican National Committee is appealing to the Supreme Court, seeking to put proof-of-citizenship requirements in place.

The case is set to be argued on Dec. 8.

Why this is being argued:

• The “Quiet Period” Conflict: The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) mandates a 90-day “quiet period” before a federal election, which restricts states from executing large, systematic database non-citizen voter roll removal programs to minimize the risk of mistakenly disenfranchising eligible citizens.
• Arizona’s Law (H.B. 2243): Enacted in 2022, this law directs local county recorders to continuously cross-reference voter registration rolls against state and federal databases to remove noncitizens—requiring these checks to continue even during the 90-day window.
• The Legal Stance: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals previously ruled that the NVRA’s 90-day rule blocks Arizona’s voter list maintenance program. The RNC is challenging that interpretation, arguing that the 90-day quiet period only applies to validly registered voters and should not shield individuals who were never legally eligible to vote from being removed.

Read an explanation of “Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota” at ballotpedia.

Compiled from an article published at UPI on Oct. 5 by Joe Fisher with Ballotpedia and an Oct. 5 Google AI Overview.

The site, led by Airbnb co-founder and U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia, is intended to serve as a “front door” to the federal government, allowing users to ask questions in plain language instead of navigating separate agency websites. Gebbia said the goal is for people to search for what they need and “never go back into the maze.”

“With America.gov, the federal government no longer stands in your way, and it stands only at your service,” President Trump said during a launch event in Washington. He called the platform “not just simply a website,” but “a restoration of America’s founding promise” and “a reinvention of your government for the 21st century and beyond.”

The president said the first version of America.gov is available now, with the administration planning to expand its capabilities in the coming weeks and months. The site is intended to spare users from navigating…an “endless maze” of government websites, rules and more than 10,000 forms.

Instead, Trump said, Americans will be able to ask for what they need through one digital front door. He pointed to eventual uses [starting in 2027] including passport applications, changing a name after marriage, reserving campsites, selecting Medicare plans and helping veterans access benefits. [Users ask questions in plain language, e.g., “How do I replace my Social Security card?” or “When do I qualify for Medicare?” and receive answers drawn exclusively from official government sources (federal, state, and local websites), with links to the originals].

“Anyone who’s used Grok or Gemini or ChatGPT will understand instantly how to use America.gov,” Trump said. “Not complicated.”

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz demonstrated how Americans could use the website to sign up for Medicare, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed how the platform could be used to get a passport online. …

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department is partnering with America.gov to “rebuild the entire” passport application process. Starting next year, Americans will be able to apply for their first passport entirely online, he said.

“No printing forms, no drugstore hostage photo, no appointment, no line, no middleman that you’re paying to do something that should be available to you,” Rubio said after demonstrating the proposed process.

Rubio said users will sign in through Login.gov, upload a passport photo and pay online, while America.gov guides them through the process and provides real-time status updates. The State Department’s goal is for the “vast majority” of Americans to be able to apply for a passport or passport card through America.gov by the end of 2027.

President Trump also signed an executive order directing federal agencies to integrate their public-facing services with America.gov “as soon as possible,” with the eventual goal of making “anything you might need from the United States government” accessible from the platform.

The president framed the launch as part of his broader push to accelerate AI development, saying the technology — which he…renamed “superintelligence” (SI) — will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. “Whoever wins superintelligence wins,” Trump said, adding that he would not “stifle the growth” of the technology.

The rollout came before Trump met with technology executives at the White House, including leaders from major artificial intelligence companies, as Washington confronts growing questions over AI safety and oversight.

Published at The National News Desk on Sept. 29. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission.