BREAKING: The US Treasury budget surplus fell -$43 billion YoY in April, or -17%, to $215 billion. April typically produces a budget surplus, as the mid-month tax filing deadline brings in a large wave of receipts from individuals and businesses. This comes as receipts fell -$13 billion YoY, to $837 billion. At the same time, outlays rose +$31 billion YoY, to $622 billion, led by higher interest costs and military spending. Gross interest jumped +$10 billion YoY, to $112 billion, the highest monthly reading on record, while military spending jumped +$6 billion YoY, to $73 billion. Despite April’s surplus, the US government has recorded a deficit of $954 billion over the first 7 months of FY2026, the 3rd-highest in history. Deficit spending is extremely high.

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I am the Deputy Director of Disclosure Compliance at the Office of Government Ethics. I oversee a team of 11 specialists. We process financial disclosure amendments for senior executive branch personnel. We are very good at our jobs. In Q1 2026, we received 113 pages of periodic transaction reports from a single trust. Form OGE-278-T, filed in duplicate. 3,642 individual stock trades. I want you to understand the scale of our achievement: we processed every single one. On time. In triplicate. Asset type, transaction date, notification date, value range. Every field populated. Every box checked. Every signature dated. 60 trades per trading day. My senior analyst calculated it on her lunch break. She thought the number was remarkable. I told her what was remarkable was our processing speed. For context: the previous 2 administrations filed primarily index funds and Treasury notes. Fewer than 200 transactions per year. My team reorganized the archive. We updated the flowchart. Those were quiet years. The system worked. I will summarize several entries that exemplify our compliance standards. On February 10, the trust purchased $1-5M in Dell Technologies stock. On May 8, at a White House Mother's Day event, the President of the United States said — on camera, into microphones — "Go buy Dell." The stock surged 14.6% to an all-time high of $263.99. Dell's founding family had pledged $6.25B to affiliated financial accounts the previous December. This is compliant. The disclosure was filed within the statutory window. Schedule C, Addendum J — I verified the columns personally. On January 6, the trust purchased $500K-$1M in Nvidia. 1 week later, the Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia H200 chips to China. On February 10, the trust purchased an additional $1-5M in Nvidia. The following week, Nvidia announced a major partnership with Meta. The CEO of Nvidia had been cultivating what the press corps describes as a "close personal relationship" with the President. Also compliant. Both transactions filed on time. I color-coded the Nvidia entries green. Green means technology sector. Palantir Technologies required its own subsection. The trust purchased $65-150K in January. Sold $1.1-5.3M in February — the same month the Department of Homeland Security signed a $1B Palantir contract for immigration enforcement. Then purchased another $200-500K in March, after the Pentagon awarded a separate $1B Palantir AI contract. Buy, sell, buy. Each transaction disclosed. Each form complete. My team processed the Palantir cycle in under 4 hours. I nominated them for the Distinguished Processing Award. Some trades carried a designation I should explain: "unsolicited." This means the trade was not broker-recommended. The filer or their representative specifically requested it. The large purchases of Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon — all unsolicited. This is not a flag. This is a checkbox. We check it. The box is checked. Intel deserves mention. The trust increased its Intel position beginning in March — after the federal government acquired a 9.9% equity stake worth $8.9B, now valued above $41B. On April 30, the President posted on Truth Social congratulating Intel. The stock rose 3%. Intel is up 140% year-to-date. I color-coded Intel blue. Blue means strategic national interest. On April 9, 2025, at 9:37 AM, the President posted: "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT." 3 hours and 47 minutes later, he announced a 90-day tariff pause. The S&P 500 gained $4 trillion in a single session. Trump Media stock rose 22.67%. The President's 53% stake increased $415M before the market closed. The President's annual salary is $400,000. These are separate line items on Form SF-278. This was not on our forms. The President's social media posts are not financial instruments subject to disclosure. They are communications. We file communications in a different cabinet. The trust also executed 9 Coinbase purchases and additional transactions through Robinhood and SoFi — while the administration signed pro-cryptocurrency executive orders, proposed a federal bitcoin reserve, and the Department of Justice dissolved its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. Robinhood served as custodian for several affiliated accounts. Combined crypto-adjacent holdings: $11.6B. Income from crypto in H1 2025: $800M. Fully disclosed. Every form filed. The Commerce Secretary appeared on Fox News and told viewers to buy Tesla stock. This is not within our jurisdiction. We process OGE forms. I have forwarded a memo. The memo has been filed. The late filings require a note. The STOCK Act mandates timely disclosure. When reports are filed late, the maximum penalty is $200. $200. That is the maximum penalty under the STOCK Act for late disclosure of stock trades executed by the President of the United States. The filing fee for a single LLC in Delaware is $250. The President acknowledged the fee. We acknowledged the acknowledgment. People misunderstand what "ethics oversight" means. The word "oversight" contains both "sight" and "over." We see it. Then it is over. My office has 74 employees. We can review, advise, recommend, refer, flag, note, catalog, and file. We cannot block a trade. We cannot delay an executive order. We cannot freeze an account. We have no subpoena power. We have no enforcement mechanism. We have a filing cabinet. It is a very organized filing cabinet. I should mention the blind trust. I drafted the implementation memo in 2017. Memo OGE-2017-041-R. 14 pages. Proper margins. Every president since Lyndon Johnson used a blind trust or equivalent. Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm. Barack Obama held Treasury notes and index funds. Joe Biden maintained a blind trust. My memo recommended voluntary divestiture or a qualified blind trust within 90 days of inauguration. It was received, acknowledged, and filed. Filed is the final stage. After filed, there is nothing. Filed is where recommendations go to be preserved. The trust is managed by the filer's adult sons, who simultaneously operate the family's private real estate and licensing business. My former director, Walter Shaub, called the arrangement "wholly inadequate" and "not a blind trust." He resigned in 2017. I was promoted to manage his filing backlog. His concerns were documented, stamped, and archived. Third shelf, first cabinet. A new analyst asked me last month why we don't refuse to process the forms. I explained that refusal is not a stage in the compliance lifecycle. The compliance lifecycle has 4 stages. None of them is refusal. A law professor at Oxford described the aggregate pattern as "potentially the most far-reaching securities fraud in history." This is an academic opinion. We do not process academic opinions. We process Form OGE-278-T. The form has been processed. The new STOCK Act reform bill in committee would ban congressional stock trading. It explicitly exempts the President and Vice President. It reduces our projected caseload by zero. The Treasury Secretary has publicly endorsed banning stock trades for members of Congress. Our office processes 60 executive branch trades per day. These are compatible positions. Senator Warren called the volume "unprecedented." She is technically correct. We have never processed this quantity before. I had to requisition a second filing cabinet. Form GSA-3402. Walnut finish. It is beautiful. "Conflict of interest" is a documentation category, not a prohibition. When we identify a conflict, we document it. When we document it, we have addressed it. When we have addressed it, the file is closed. This is the compliance lifecycle. It has 4 stages and a laminated flowchart. The system does not exist to prevent. The system exists to create a record that the system exists. The record is the product. The product is the record. We are in the record business. We are fully staffed. We are well-funded. We are operational. Cumulative transaction value for Q1: $220M-$750M. The next quarterly filing deadline is in 9 days. I expect volume to increase. I have requested a third cabinet.

I am the Health Services Contract Administrator for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and on October 3, 2025, I stopped paying for medical care, and the system has been working better ever since. I need to be specific about what "working better" means in this context because I am a contract administrator and specificity is my entire professional identity. It means: fewer invoices. Fewer reimbursement disputes. Fewer pharmacy reconciliations. Fewer appeals from providers who claim they provided urgent care and want to be compensated for having provided it. The workflow is cleaner. My inbox is lighter. The VA Financial Services Center, which had processed our medical claims since 2002, twenty-two years of pharmacy invoices, specialist referrals, hospital transports, dialysis authorizations, and oncology treatment plans, terminated its interagency agreement with us after a lawsuit from a nonprofit called the Center to Advance Security in America. They filed suit. The VA pulled out. Our entire claims processing pipeline vanished overnight. I posted a notice on on November 12 describing this as an "absolute emergency" that required resolution "immediately" to "prevent any further medical complications or loss of life." That was seven months ago. The replacement contractor, Acentra Health, had not achieved notice to proceed by the April 30 period of performance deadline. As of today, no entity is processing medical reimbursement claims for ICE detainees in the United States. When I say "no entity" I mean that structurally. A person held in a GEO Group facility in Georgia who requires dialysis three times per week is receiving dialysis from a provider who has not been paid since October. The provider continues to provide care because the alternative is that the confined person dies in their facility and the facility is then liable for a death that could have been prevented by a treatment that the facility was contractually obligated to provide. The treatment continues. The payment does not. The provider absorbs the cost. The cost is eventually written off. The write-off appears in the provider's quarterly financial statements as "uncompensated care, federal detention." It does not appear in our budget. It does not appear in any ICE financial disclosure. The care happened. The cost was real. The payment was imaginary. The system is working better. In fiscal year 2024, the VA processed $246.42 million in clinical reimbursement claims on our behalf. In fiscal year 2025, despite an 82.5% increase in our daily detained headcount, the VA processed only $157.2 million before the October termination. The delta between what was needed and what was processed is approximately $300 million. That $300 million represents medications not reimbursed, specialist consultations not paid for, emergency transports not covered, prenatal visits not compensated. It represents chemotherapy sessions where the drugs were administered and the oncologist submitted an invoice and the invoice entered a system that no longer exists. I have a filing cabinet in my office — three drawers, GSA-standard, beige, the kind with the lock that everyone has the same key to — that contains printed copies of the final VA-processed claims from September 2025. The bottom drawer has a jar of Tums that my predecessor left when she transferred to FEMA in August. I eat them daily. Not from stress. From the cafeteria. The cafeteria serves a chili that the facilities contractor, Aramark, describes as "Southwestern-inspired." It is inspired by the Southwest the way our medical payment system is inspired by the concept of paying for medical care. The death rate is the number people ask about, so I will provide it with the precision my role requires. Historical baseline, 2018 through 2024: 8.9 deaths per year in ICE custody. Calendar year 2025: 33 deaths. Twelve of those occurred after October 3, after the payment freeze. January through April 2026: 17 deaths. That is one death every six days. Annualized, the current rate is 51.7 deaths per year. 5.8 times the pre-October baseline. A study published in JAMA on April 16 calculated the per-capita rate: 88.9 deaths per 100,000 person-years in partial fiscal 2026, compared to 13.0 in fiscal 2023. Nearly seven times. The JAMA authors are epidemiologists. I am a contract administrator. We are counting the same bodies with different denominators. Emmanuel Damas was 56 years old, Haitian, confined at an installation I am not authorized to name. He had a tooth infection. The on-call clinical staff treated the infection with ibuprofen. Ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory. A tooth infection is a bacterial event. These are different categories of medical problem requiring different categories of intervention. The infection progressed to septic shock. Emmanuel Damas died. The ibuprofen was on our formulary. Antibiotics were on our formulary. The difference between the two was a reimbursement claim that would have been submitted to a payment processor that no longer existed. The detention center chose the treatment that did not generate a claim. I cannot tell you whether that decision was made consciously. I can tell you that it was made consistently. Across multiple facilities. Across multiple months. The ACLU reviewed deaths in ICE detention between 2017 and 2021, before the payment freeze, and determined that 95% were preventable with adequate treatment. I do not know what the percentage is now. I suspect it is also 95%. The category "preventable" has not changed. The category "payment" has. At Fort Bliss, a military installation in El Paso repurposed as a detention facility under a $1.24 billion sole-source contract awarded to Acquisition Logistics, a firm with no prior detention management experience, three people died within 44 days. One death was ruled a homicide by the El Paso County Medical Examiner. ICE reported it as a suicide. Those are different words describing different events with different legal implications. The Medical Examiner's ruling generates an investigation. A suicide generates a compliance review. An investigation involves law enforcement. A compliance review involves my filing cabinet. I am not qualified to determine which word is correct. I am qualified to tell you that the words produce different paperwork, and the paperwork determines which systems activate, and the systems that activate determine who is accountable, and in this case, the system that activated was the compliance review, and the compliance review found that all protocols were followed, and all protocols were followed because the protocols do not include "pay for medical care." Rodney Taylor was a double amputee detained at Stewart Detention Center, operated by CoreCivic. He was forced to crawl on floors covered in feces and mold because the center did not provide adequate mobility assistance. CoreCivic reported $2.2 billion in revenue last year, up 13%. Their profit was $116.5 million, up 70% year over year. Their ICE revenue nearly doubled between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025, from $120 million to $245 million per quarter. They received a 70% increase in profit and Rodney Taylor received a floor. CoreCivic's annual report describes their business model as "government solutions." Rodney Taylor's experience was, technically, a government solution. GEO Group, the other major for-profit detention operator, posted $2.6 billion in revenue in 2025 and $254 million in profit, a 700% increase. They secured $520 million in new ICE task orders that year. Combined, GEO and CoreCivic spent $6.8 million on lobbying to secure access to a $75 billion funding stream from the GOP's reconciliation bill. The return on that investment is so large I had to check my calculator twice. It was not a calculator error. It was the normal functioning of a procurement system where the companies that run the facilities also fund the campaigns of the legislators who appropriate the money for the facilities. The firm-fixed-price task orders specify a per diem rate of $187.48 per adult per day. That rate includes healthcare coverage. The rate has not changed since the disbursement freeze. We are still remitting $187.48 per day per person. The clinicians are not receiving any of it. The $187.48 goes to the facility operator. The operator is supposed to allocate a portion of it for clinical services. There is no SLA enforcement mechanism to verify that they do. There is only my filing cabinet, and the filing cabinet is for contracts, not outcomes. Senator Ossoff's office conducted an investigation between January and August 2025 and received 85 credible reports of medical neglect, including untreated chest pain causing heart attacks and unmanaged diabetes complications. That investigation preceded the payment freeze by two months. The conditions it documented were the baseline. The baseline was already 95% preventable death. The disbursement freeze removed the financial infrastructure supporting the 5% of care that was being provided. I have a Gantt chart in my office, printed on 11x17 cardstock and laminated and pinned above the Tums drawer, that tracks the Acentra Health onboarding timeline. The original completion date was April 30, 2026. That date passed twelve days ago. The chart has a red line through it drawn in Sharpie by my deputy, who does this for every missed milestone. There are four red lines. There will be more. Each red line represents a period during which no payment processor exists. Each period without a payment processor is a period during which clinicians must choose between providing unpaid care and not providing care. The first option costs them money. The second option costs someone their life. I do not track which choice they make. I track contracts. Seventy-one percent of ICE deaths in 2025 and 2026 occurred in privately operated detention sites. Half of 2026's deaths occurred in CoreCivic or GEO Group facilities. The Office of Detention Oversight, the COR entity responsible for facility inspections, conducted 36.25% fewer compliance audits in 2025 than the previous year. Fewer audits, more deaths, higher profits. The three trend lines move in coordinated directions. I do not draw conclusions from correlated trend lines. I am a contract administrator. I process contracts. The contracts are technically valid. The facilities are technically operational. The reimbursement apparatus is technically being replaced. The deaths are technically being counted. The word "technically" is doing more work in this paragraph than any clinician in the ICE detention system has been compensated for in seven months. My internal memo from November 12 used the phrase "absolute emergency." It recommended resolution "immediately" to "prevent any further medical complications or loss of life." That memo was written on government letterhead, classified as internal correspondence, distributed to eleven recipients, and filed in the correspondence tracking system under routing symbol HSA-OAQ, which requires a FOIA request to access. Seventeen people have died since I wrote it. The memo was technically effective. It generated a procurement action. The procurement action generated a bridge contract. The bridge contract generated an onboarding timeline. The onboarding timeline generated a Gantt chart. The Gantt chart generated four red Sharpie lines. The red Sharpie lines generated nothing. They are decorative. Like the per diem rate that includes medical care nobody is billing for. Like the 95% preventable death rate that is not being prevented. Like the word "emergency" in a seven-month-old memo that is technically still active, technically still urgent, technically still describing a situation that requires immediate resolution. I am technically still the person responsible for resolving it. The system is technically still working. The people are technically still dying. The filing cabinet is technically still organized. The contracts are technically still valid. The word "technically" has appeared so many times in this document that it has lost all meaning. That is exactly what it was designed to do.

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