Author: Editor

As repeatedly noticed on This Is Common Sense, politicians tend to treat Congress’s failures to come to agreements on federal government spending as a sort of game, where the most intransigent Player at the Game of Chicken wins. If you hold out for massive spending, refusing to fund government at lesser levels, you eventually get what you want: increased spending.

But early on Donald Trump suggested that he might treat this failure to reach a Continuing Resolution differently. Now, in The Daily Caller, the new plan is explained:

Trump depicted him as the Grim Reaper. His neighbors think he wants to cause “maximum trauma.” Senate Leader John Thune told Democrats to brace for impact.

And those who know Russ Vought best say, good. Democrats should be scared. Because if unleashed, Trump’s two-​time Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought has a swift and thorough plan to downsize the government that he has been preparing for years.

Reagan Reese, “Democrats Are Terrified Of Trump’s Shutdown Slasher — And They Should Be,” The Daily Caller (October 6, 2025).

It was the president himself who first mentioned Mr. Vought, in a Truth Social post on October 2nd:

I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.
I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.

President Donald Trump, Truth Social (October 2, 2025).

Russ Vought is an old Tea Party figure, serious about cutting government, says The Daily Caller.

Ned Ryun, the CEO of American Majority and a long-​time friend of Vought’s, told the Caller that Vought has been preparing for this moment for years. He’s an official Americans should be thankful for, Ryun added, explaining that he believes if Vought is allowed to fulfill his plan it will be a pivotal moment in American history.

“Not sure how many other moments we will get like this, and I truly believe if Trump fully empowers Russ, this could potentially be the beginning of the end of the administrative state,” Ryun told the Caller.

Those close to Vought all emphasized one thing above all when talking about the OMB Director: his humility. When this term is up and Vought’s work is over, Bovard told the Caller he won’t be bragging to the press, cashing in or looking for work on K Street.

And for now, he is focused on finishing the job and winning the game.

op cit.

On October 10, the White House notified over 4,100 federal workers of imminent layoffs via Reductions in Force (RIFs), the largest single-​day action yet. The reductions affect 

Is it worth noting that OMB Director Russ Vought is widely recognized as one of the principal architects and a key author of Project 2025, much demonized by Democrats at their 2024 presidential “nominating” convention.

Democrats can thus hardly complain that they did not see big cuts coming. So why did they risk it all by not going along with the latest CR?

Our solar system’s third identified interstellar intruder, 3I/​ATLAS, continues its course past the planets more-​or-​less within the plane of the ecliptic, and continues to surprise.

The least surprising thing is that it has finally developed a tail pointing away from the Sun:

On August 27, 2025, deep imaging of the interstellar object 3I/​ATLAS by the Gemini South 8.2‑meter telescope — aided by the Gemini Multi-​Object Spectrograph (GMOS), revealed a weak tail with a teardrop shape in the anti-​Sun direction (reported here). At that time, 3I/​ATLAS was at a distance from Earth of 2.59 times the Earth-​Sun separation. The Gemini South Observatory is located on a mountain called Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes.

Avi Loeb, “Detection of an Anti-​Solar Tail for 3I/​ATLAS,” Medium (August 30, 2025).

Earlier observations had not seen the usual tail forming away from the point of origination of the solar winds, like a normal comet. Instead, the “coma” of dust or ice or gas or whatnot surrounding the object extended in advance of its trajectory — as if it were throwing out flak to take out dangerous objects ahead of it!

Yes, from the beginning the oddities of this intruder were being considered as possible indications of an artificial object.

While this is heartening for those who itch to relegate 3I/​ATLAS to “mere” comet status (it’s already proved to be one weird comet, it comet it truly be), Abraham Loeb notes the accumulating oddities, too, which don’t fit the standard “nothing [challenging] to see here, folks” debunkers’ designations: “Recent spectroscopic data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile (accessible here), reported the surprising detection of cyanide and nickel without iron in the plume of gas around 3I/​ATLAS with steeply increasing rates as the object approaches the Sun. Nickel without iron is a signature of industrial production of nickel alloys. Natural comets generically show iron and nickel simultaneously, as both elements are produced simultaneously in supernova explosions.”

And as Loeb just noted, measuring the nucleus of the object remains extremely difficult and uncertain.

Further, though detection of CO2 in the object’s coma (surrounding matter) is indeed what one would expect of a comet, the absence of water and carbon monoxide is … peculiar.