Boston Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu’s 2021 campaign received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a fundraiser who is listed by a Chinese intelligence agency as an official, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation discovered.

Gary Yu, the founder of Boston International Media Consulting, helped raise over $300,000 for Wu with the help of a Chinese civic association he leads. However, Yu — whose Chinese name is Yu Guoliang — is listed as an official by an agency of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence and intelligence service called the United Front Work Department (UFWD), and also operates as a recruiter for the Chinese government, according to reports from the CCP, Chinese state media and civic associations led by Yu.

The Communist Party’s UFWD never rests,” author and China expert Gordon Chang told the DCNF. “There is no ethnic Chinese official in America who is not targeted. It’s time for law enforcement to investigate the CCP’s ties to Gary Yu and Yu’s ties to Mayor Michelle Wu.”

Wu has risen to national prominence as a central figure in the Democratic resistance to Trump’s border and deportation policies. Wu recently defended her city’s refusal to cooperate with immigration officials during her March 19, 2025 “State of the City” address, during which she criticized “presidents who think they are kings,” prompting the White House to fire back the next day with a press release labeling Wu a “radical mayor” who “puts violent criminal illegal aliens first.”

“Wu’s ultra-leftism makes her the perfect candidate for CCP recruitment and capture,” Chang said. “Or do we have it backward? Is her ultra-leftism the result of CCP recruitment and capture? More than just the people of Boston would like to know.”

Wu’s office, Yu, and Boston International Media Consulting did not respond to multiple requests for comment. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Pentagon, Energy Dept. Nuclear Research Projects Tapped Sanctioned Chinese Communist Party Supercomputers)

‘Overseas Chinese’

Yu has repeatedly met with high-ranking CCP intelligence leaders in China and is listed as an official by two regional branches of a UFWD arm, according to Chinese government announcements, state media reports and records from Chinese civic associations led by Yu.

The UFWD’s operations are a “unique blend of engagement, influence activities, and intelligence operations that the [CCP] uses to shape its political environment, including to influence other countries’ policy toward the [People’s Republic of China] and to gain access to advanced foreign technology,” according to the House Select Committee on the CCP.

Yu is identified as an “overseas committee member” by the Hangzhou municipal All-China Federation Of Returned Overseas Chinese (ACFROC) branch in Zhejiang province and has met with their officials in China multiple times, according to the website of the North American Hangzhou Association (NAHAUS), where Yu serves as chairman.

ACFROC is a UFWD agency specializing in overseas influence operations, including allegedly directing Chinese community leaders to illegally establish a secret Chinese police station in New York City.

“China’s strategy to influence state and local policymakers is executed, in part, through hundreds of ostensibly ‘civil society’ organizations that are actually affiliated with the CCP’s UFWD,” Michael Lucci, CEO of State Armor, a nonprofit focused on countering the CCP, told the DCNF. “Xi Jinping considers United Front work a critical tool to undermine democracies. It involves influence peddling, intelligence collection, and intellectual property theft, all for the end goal of aligning U.S. subnational governments with China’s foreign policy and exploiting weaknesses they find.”

NAHAUS’s website details one meeting in China between Yu and the Hangzhou ACFROC Communist Party secretary on Nov. 29, 2018. During the meeting, Yu said NAHAUS would “work tirelessly to support the construction of Hangzhou and continue to serve the function of uniting and leading overseas Chinese,” according to a Chinese social media post that includes a photo of Yu alongside the ACFROC Party secretary.

Yu is likewise listed as an “overseas committee member” by the Zhejiang ACFROC branch, and he also met with officials from that group in China in November 2018, according to NAHAUS’ website. In March 2023, Yu participated in a Zhejiang ACFROC overseas advisory committee webinar, according to Zhejiang ACFROC. During the webinar, Yu and other ACFROC officials discussed matters such as building overseas coalitions.

Talent Recruitment’

Yu also agreed to headhunt U.S. talent for at least half a dozen Chinese regional governments, including the cities of Hangzhou and Guangzhou, according to Chinese government and ACFROC announcements.

For instance, in November 2019, the CCP announced that Yu agreed to establish an “Overseas Talent Recruitment Work Station” in North America for the party’s Organization Department in Nanning, a city located in the Guangxi Autonomous Region.

The Organization Department oversees China’s malign talent recruitment programs, like the Thousand Talents Plan, which incentivizes participants to “return to China to augment its scientific and military capabilities,” according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Yu has also agreed to help recruit U.S. talent to support China’s high-tech development, including in the field of artificial intelligence.

Guangxi’s ACFROC branch recently announced that Yu had met with its officials on March 27, 2025. During that meeting, Yu promised to continue introducing “top-quality resources to Guangxi” after the ACFROC chairwoman told him the region’s artificial intelligence industry urgently required “overseas high-level talents.”

A November 2018 article by the Chinese media outlet Sohu reported Yu had previously headhunted for the Chengdu government’s High-Tech Zone and Tianfu Software Park, which are home to multiple Chinese military companies sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Defense, including Chengdu JOUAV Automation Tech Co., Chengdu M&S Electronics Technology Co., Tencent, and Huawei.

Unlimited Power’

Meanwhile, Yu has organized the Chinese American community in Massachusetts to canvas and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect Democratic lawmakers like Wu.

Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) records show Yu has personally donated $45,515 to various Massachusetts Democratic politicians since 2018, including $3,200 to Wu and $2,175 to Gov. Maura Healey.

Among other leadership roles, Yu also serves as the co-chair of the New England Chinese American Alliance (NECCA), which has “actively engaged the Chinese community in political campaigns,” according to the nonprofit’s website. Toward that end, NECCA has hosted “fundraising events” for at least nine Massachusetts politicians including Wu and Healey.

NECCA’s website claims it “raised over $300,000 from the Chinese American community for Michelle Wu,” and Yu’s Twitter advertised fundraising events for the future mayor in November 2020 and June 2021.

“We organized so many fundraisers and translated campaign materials into Chinese for more Chinese residents to read,” Yu said about his work for Wu, according to a November 2021 Boston University News Service (BUNS) report. “We did street canvassing every week. We had unlimited power for supporting her in the past year.”

By September 2021, NECCA had “expanded the fundraising scope from the Greater Boston area to more than 30 states across the country,” BUNS reported.

“Public officials need to thoroughly vet any organization and individual that has ties to China’s government, and interface with state and federal law enforcement when there is any uncertainty,” Lucci told the DCNF. “It is well-known that China’s government seeks to influence U.S. politics and place agents within our governance systems to further the CCP’s agenda. We need to stop letting them get away with it.”

Yu also donated $3,000 to Massachusetts State Auditor Diana DiZoglio, OCPF records show.

DiZoglio added Yu to her “policies and priorities” transition team after winning her race for state auditor in June 2021, and later appointed him to serve as a commissioner on the state’s Asian American and Pacific Islanders Commission (AAPIC) in January 2024.

Yu now serves as vice chair of AAPIC, which describes itself as “the Commonwealth’s only permanent, statewide body dedicated to addressing the needs and challenges of the AAPI community.”

AAPIC’s chairman, Saatvik Ahluwalia, told the DCNF by email the organization was completely “unaware” of any activity between Yu and ACFROC.

“[T]his is the first time we have heard of ACFROC, and we’ve had no contact, affiliation, or engagement with either the organization or the Chinese Government,” Ahluwalia said. “We absolutely intend to investigate what you outlined in your questions, including talking directly to Mr. Yu.”

NECCA, Healey, and DiZoglio did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Philip Lenczycki

Daily Caller News Foundation senior investigative reporter, political journalist, and China watcher. Twitter: @LenczyckiPhilip

In just their latest bizarre twist of logic, leftists are again accusing President Donald Trump of planning to steal an election — even though for the last four years, they insisted this was impossible.

On Friday, Paul Rosenzweig asserted in an article for The Atlantic that “Trump Is Already Undermining The Next Election.” He claimed Trump’s executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote was “nothing less than an attempt to disenfranchise his opponents and forestall electoral defeat.” In reality, the measure would simply prevent noncitizens from voting and reinforce other vulnerable areas of elections, for example, by requiring paper ballots. Still, he apparently thinks Trump will rig the next election.

Rosenzweig is not alone. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told The New Yorker last month that he thinks Trump is turning America “from a democracy to an autocracy,” and that “the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.” These concerns come as Democrats’ favorability is plummeting.

Even before Trump’s landslide victory in November, legacy media were planting seeds that he might “steal” the race. MSNBC said in October that then-Vice President Kamala Harris was “prepared if Trump tries to steal the election,” while NBC said Trump could “declare a premature election win.” Vox even speculated that Trump would use the Supreme Court to “steal the election.” And just days before the election, The Rolling Stone published an article on “How Republicans Could Help Steal The Election From Harris.” 

After Trump won, many Democrats began wondering how their immensely popular candidate could have lost. After all, she spent millions on celebrity endorsements, and rapper Lizzo promised that if Harris won, the “whole country will be like Detroit.” What could have gone wrong? 

Leftist writer Greg Palast claimed Trump used “Jim Crow tricks” to cheat Harris out of more than 3.5 million votes. Various other Democrats online began crafting stories about how Trump might have cheated Harris out of the election. It spiraled so far out of control that even NBC published a story stating, “Election denialism emerges on the left after Trump’s win.” 

This was a remarkable turn from the last four years, when leftist outlets constantly claimed rigging the election was impossible. When conservatives expressed concerns about things like noncitizen voting, or government censorship, or Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg giving millions to election administrators through leftist nonprofits to boost Democrat turnout, leftists smeared them as “election deniers.” 

To rewind the clock even further, Democrats were the real “election deniers” when Trump first won office in 2016. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign hatched a plot to paint Trump as a “Russian asset,” hiring the firm Fusion GPS to fabricate a dossier peddled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. It turned out that Steele’s sources lied extensively. Meanwhile, Clinton called Trump an “illegitimate president,” and Harris — then a senator — claimed that “Russia interfere[d] in the election of the president of the United States.” 

The amount of back-and-forth from Democrats on elections is enough to cause whiplash. When they lost in 2016, they denied the results. When then-candidate Joe Biden won in 2020, they claimed American elections were bulletproof, and anyone claiming otherwise must be an evil “election denier.” But after November’s election, which Trump won with both the Electoral College and popular vote, they again claimed he stole the election. Now, leftists are already planting seeds that Trump is planning to steal another.

This all goes to show that Democrats are not really concerned about election integrity — they are only concerned when they lose. 

Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He is a spring 2025 fellow of The College Fix. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.

European energy expert Samuel Furfari sums up green hydrogen (GH) perfectly; “It’s like burning Louis Vuitton handbags for heat.” He says this because it is so very expensive. Federal law allocated $9.5 billion for GH hubs, and the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act (Inflation Causing Act) expanded tax subsidies. Even with massive taxpayer subsidies, GH is a money loser.

Leftists claim GH is a way to replace batteries for transportation. It is at least five times more expensive, which doesn’t include all the extra costs associated with the production of natural gas, such as purifying massive amounts of water, which takes about 13 times more water than the hydrogen it produces. Desalination is an additional cost. Putting these processes anywhere they’ll need to compete for water resources is just plain stupid.

Infrastructure costs are astounding because we currently have none, and hydrogen is not suitable for pipelines because it escapes easily, embrittles metal, and is prone to explode. It only takes a few massive hydrogen car or truck explosions to end hydrogen use for transportation, just like the Hindenburg disaster that ended hydrogen ballon travel.

GH is an excessive waste of money, and it hasn’t ever been made at scale—even after tens of billions spent by Europeans, Australians, and the United States.

All it takes is a little critical thinking to realize that something is amiss once one understands how GH is produced. First of all, we don’t have enough wind and solar to power the hydrogen plants. Second, wind and solar are part-time and weather dependent. The GH process is required to run at all times, not just the 30 percent of the time the wind blows and the 20 percent of the time the sun shines bright enough.

Making GH requires pure water to be heated to 2,000° F and is then electrocuted. This cracks the hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The hydrogen is then chilled to 420° F below zero, turning it into a liquid, and then it is finally compressed to 10,000 psi, comparable to three times the average scuba tank or compressed natural gas (CNG). Without this chilling and compression, hydrogen has one-tenth the energy per volume as natural gas. Under normal compressed circumstances, hydrogen has less energy than CNG. A kilogram of this liquid hydrogen has the energy of a gallon of gas.

When working with the liquid near zero, compressed hydrogen is tricky, as it is the smallest molecule, escaping normal pipelines and embrittling metals, causing them to crack sooner than later.

“Every time you involve hydrogen, you get not small losses, but large, substantial losses,” an energy specialist tells us. “The main cause of the issue is that hydrogen is a molecule that is too small and volatile to be used, transported effectively using the gas pipelines, turbines, boilers, cooktops, or burner jets that are now in place.” Deep pocket oil companies are getting out of this boondoggle. BP cancelled 18 hydrogen projects because they were unprofitable, all in an effort to save $200 million a year. Shell cancelled a Norway hydrogen project and others for lack of demand, while a $750 million GH plant in Australia was cancelled because it was a money loser.

The first argument raised by climate hawks is the production of GH, which costs 40 percent more in energy than it produces. Some of the GH will leak, as it is stored in salt caverns.

When there isn’t any wind or solar power, which is usually the case, they then say we can use this stored hydrogen to create second-generation GH. Using second-generation hydrogen alone will bear 80 percent of the cost of the energy that is actually produced—not including losses—which doesn’t even factor in all the other costs associated with the process.

And what about water needs?

It’s just stupid to put hydrogen hubs in areas without enough water. Houston, Utah, and Southern California, to name a few, are recognized as government sponsored GH hotspots.

Particularly in Utah, on the edge of the desert, where solar and wind power barely account for 2 percent of total electricity generated. Or California, which suffers from droughts, and often sees water shortages.

Trump and Congressional Republicans must stop wasting billions on GH. Any money spent on GH adds to our $36.5 trillion national debt, driving up inflation. While it was reported that Trump is considering killing hydrogen hubs in blue states, Trump should kill all of them.

Green hydrogen is an expensive pipedream we simply cannot afford.

Frank Lasee, Townhall

https://youtu.be/ZqylROx2n3M?si=hN9eM1Uph19ZxtNu

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the Trump administration was negotiating trade policy with 130 countries.

Host Jake Tapper said, “What do you say to small business owners or even big business owners who say they’re having difficulty making long-term business decisions because the country seems right now to be run by capricious whim?”

Hassett said, “Oh, I don’t think at all that it’s run by a capricious whim. The way that I would think about it is that in the previous administration, you could sort of say, if you’re thinking about it in the football analogy, is that they were running out the clock and that what’s going on now in the Trump administration is across a wide array of policy areas. We’re in a two-minute offense, and the two-minute offense is pushing, as you’ve seen, the reconciliation bill through so that we get tax relief for American people, deregulation and trade policy.”

He added, “Now, on the trade policy, the whole point of the trade policy is to address the national emergency that we’re too dependent on foreign products in the U.S., especially if we were at a time of conflict and we’re doing something about that. The reciprocal act was basically, guys, if you come to the table and negotiate us with us and treat us the same way we treat you, then we’ll you’ll get your rate really low. And so right now 130 countries, 130 countries have responded, and we’re negotiating with them. And they’ve got their rate down to 10%. So, really, it’s almost a two-world system. There’s a process about China that’s very, very nascent, if at all, and then the process for everybody else. So the process for everybody else is orderly. It’s clear, people are coming to town with great, great offers.”

Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN

Comedian Bill Maher delivered a glowing and unexpected review of his recent private dinner with President Donald Trump, revealing during his HBO show Friday that the president was personable, self-aware, and even humorous — leaving Maher “blown away” by the encounter, the New York Post reported.

On “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the host devoted part of his opening monologue to recounting what he described as a surreal and surprisingly pleasant evening.

“Everything I’ve not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent — at least on this night, with this guy,” Maher, 69, said.

He said he felt more comfortable talking with Trump than he ever would with Presidents Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, despite having voted for both Democrats.

Maher said he entered the White House ready for confrontation, bringing with him a printed list of Trump’s past insults, including “sleaze-bag” and “low-life dummy.” He intended to see whether the president would sign it.

“I brought this to the White House because I wanted him to sign it, which he did … with good humor,” Maher said, holding up the signed document to applause from the studio audience. “And I know that as I say that, millions of liberal sphincters just tightened.”

The comedian also shared that Trump gave him multiple “Make America Great Again” hats — which Maher clarified were handed out in the same room where Clinton allegedly had trysts with Monica Lewinsky. Still, Maher said he didn’t feel pressured to “go MAGA.”

Maher described Trump as gracious and attentive, which he said was unlike many public figures with whom he’s interacted.

“I’ve had so many conversations with prominent people who are much less connected: people that don’t look you in the eye, people that don’t really listen because they just want to get to their next thing, people whose response to things you say just doesn’t track — none of that with him,” he said.

Maher said Trump led with curiosity, frequently asking, “What do you think about this?” and appeared to engage genuinely, even when the conversation turned heated — such as when Maher criticized Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal.

“He didn’t get mad or call me a left-wing lunatic. He took it in,” Maher said.

Maher said that the evening’s “most surreal” moment was turning on the television afterward to see Trump in full campaign mode.

“Who’s that guy? And why can’t we get the guy I met to be the public guy?

“A crazy person does not live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is f****d up; it’s just not as f****d up as I thought it was.”

Maher said the dinner was arranged by Kid Rock and also attended by UFC President Dana White.

Jim Thomas ✉

Jim Thomas is a writer based in Indiana. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, a law degree from U.I.C. Law School, and has practiced law for more than 20 years.

Obama appointed judge orders Trump to imprison all who didn’t vote Democrat.” Coming next?

Where does it end?

Under our current situation, you need only 1 leftist federal judge to reverse everything Trump does. This is still not America.

Trump has been told he cannot use his executive authority to deport people who have violated our immigration laws. Obama and Biden judges feel that if a law is unjust, then no President has a right to enforce it. This means judges — federal circuit court judges, not even the Supreme Court — have a right to abolish or create laws at will.

Similarly, and absurdly, circuit court judges nowhere near D.C. have ruled that President Trump must have members of the Communist media in the White House press room. Would a judge in San Francisco or Portland, OR, have a right to tell a private citizen which media he must watch, or be interviewed by — much less a President?

It’s truly insane. The Obama (and Biden) years installed a coup that won’t stop.

At some point, as wonderful as Trump’s presidency is so far, we’re going to need a revolution. People will have to be arrested and stopped in their open, brazen efforts to bring down what’s left of our Constitution and our free republic.

Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on X at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, @DrHurd on TruthSocial. Dr. Hurd is also now a Newsmax Insider!

Elon Musk, of the Department of Government Efficiency, has asserted that his goal is to cut some $1 trillion of “waste and fraud” from annual federal spending. Skeptics of the effort say that that’s just not possible, mainly because almost half of federal spending constitutes the “entitlements” — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and some smaller health insurance programs — and President Trump has pledged not to cut those. Add something close to $1 trillion for defense, and another close to $1 trillion for interest on the national debt, and the remainder (less than $2 trillion) doesn’t leave nearly enough room for a trillion of cuts.

But here’s the missing piece: What if there are large amounts of fraud in the entitlement programs? Trump hasn’t pledged not to go after that. Could the amounts of such fraud be significant in the context of the huge numbers at issue? I don’t fully know the answer to that question; but today I’ll look at one example involving very big numbers where obvious fraud is hiding in plain sight.

First, a look at the big picture numbers. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has on its website an overview of federal spending dated January 28, 2025, providing figures for fiscal year 2024 (which ended on September 30, 2024). The big categories:

– Federal spending for fiscal year 2024 was approximately $6.9 trillion.

– Health insurance entitlements (Medicare, Medicare, CHIP, and Obamacare subsidies totaled $1.7 trillion, or 24% of spending.

– Social Security totaled $1.5 trillion, or 21% of spending.

– Defense totaled $872 billion, or 15% of spending.

– Interest on the debt was about $892 million, or another 15% of spending.

– The remainder added up to $1.936 trillion.

And now, here’s a good place to start looking for fraud in the entitlements. In New York we have something called the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program. Bloomberg had a piece about it in July 2024, which is behind paywall, but Newsweek re-wrote the story here. The idea, supposedly, was that we could use Medicaid funds to pay relatives like spouses and children to take care of their infirm relatives, and thus save the costs of professional aides, let alone nursing homes. From Newsweek:

“Oftentimes, ideas that start with the best of intentions can be taken advantage of in the wrong hands,” Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek. “With home health, some states like New York thought it would be a good idea to allow family members and friends to get paid for providing home health assistance to loved ones using Medicaid and Medicare dollars.

So what’s the problem?

[Beene]: “The problem is now you have individuals taking advantage of a pretty liberal, open-ended process for determining who qualifies.”

It seems that the program to let family members become the home health aides got going in 2015.

In 2015, the eligibility rules changed, and the number of people getting care skyrocketed from 20,000 to 250,000.

And that was just the start. Here’s what Newsweek says were the relevant stats for the period 2019-2024:

[T]he money going to this program triple[d] across the span of the last five years, and home health jobs are [in 2024] considered to make up 12 percent of New York City’s private sector jobs, Bloomberg reported.

The occasion for the Bloomberg and Newsweek pieces in 2024 was an interview given to Bloomberg by New York Governor Kathy Hochul in July of that year. In the interview, Hochul appeared to recognize that the home health care aide situation had gotten out of hand and needed to be reined in. From the Newsweek piece:

[Hochul said,] “The problem is now you have individuals taking advantage of a pretty liberal, open-ended process for determining who qualifies.” Hochul told Bloomberg that the program was being abused so much that it now makes up the majority of New York City’s job increases. . . . “I’m telling you right now, when you look on TikTok and you see ads of young people saying, ‘Guess what, you can make $37 an hour by sitting home with your Grandma. You know, here’s how you sign up,’ it has become a racket,” Hochul told Bloomberg.

So less than a year ago, Governor Hochul had recognized this as a “racket.” Surely then she did something to get it under control? Not at all. Instead, it appears that she has switched sides, and in ongoing budget negotiations this year is supporting a vast increase in Medicaid spending to continue funding this racket, among many other things. The New York Post had an editorial on April 6. Excerpt:

In a tale all too typical of Albany, Gov. Kathy Hochul a year or so ago was pushing to rein in out-of-control state Medicaid spending on home health aides, only to since switch sides with an eye on her re-election run next year. Now Medicaid outlays are set to soar at least 17% in the next budget, while the aide ranks are soaring and indeed are by far the single largest job category in all New York.

The Post collects some truly incredible statistics from a Report issued by the Empire Center think tank on April 3. The Empire Center Report is based on federal BLS data issued on April 2, although the data only go up to May 2024. From the Empire Center:

New York’s home health employment is continuing to soar, growing by 57,000 jobs or 10 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to newly released data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state’s workforce of home health and personal care aides grew to an estimated 623,000 as of May 2024, according to BLS. . . .

From 20,000 in 2015 to 623,000 in 2024. Thanks, federal taxpayers, for picking up more than half of the tab. The Empire Center Report shows New York as by far the highest in the country in the number of these home health care aides per capita:

[New York has] 171 aides per 1,000 residents aged 65 or older, which was the highest rate in the U.S. – 153 percent higher than the national average and 24 percent ahead of the No. 2 state, California.

Over this period, the job category of home health aide has become far and away the largest job category in New York State. Here is a chart from the Empire Center Report, derived from BLS data, of the largest job categories in New York in 2024:

There are almost three times as many of these home health aides as all jobs in retail sales!

The Post attributes Governor Hochul’s switch of sides substantially to her buying the support of a health care union known as “Local 1199” (of the SEIU) in the run-up to her re-election campaign next year. Local 1199 hopes to unionize the home health aides to get hundreds of thousands of new dues-paying members, and then to engage in collusive wage negotiations where the bill will be paid substantially by the federal taxpayers.

I don’t know all the other examples of fraud in the entitlement programs. But if one this big and this obvious is just allowed to metastasize for years without any attempt at oversight, there are likely to be plenty of others.

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian