1. DHS Shuts Down - But Not the Parts That Matter
The Department of Homeland Security officially ran out of funding at midnight. Congress left town without a deal, and won’t be back until at least February 23. Over 260,000 DHS employees are affected.
But here’s the part worth paying attention to: the agencies at the center of the political fight aren’t affected at all. ICE is sitting on $75 billion from last summer’s reconciliation bill. Customs and Border Protection has another $64 billion. Both will continue operating at full capacity, paychecks included. The enforcement apparatus doesn’t even flinch.
What does get hit? TSA, the Coast Guard, FEMA, and CISA (the cybersecurity agency). CISA will furlough about two-thirds of its already-depleted workforce, halting proactive cyber threat-hunting and vulnerability scanning. Acting CISA director Madhu Gottumukkala told Congress this week that cyber threats don’t take a break when the government does.
This is the third federal funding lapse in five months. The pattern tells you everything about how Washington actually works: Congress can’t keep the lights on, but there’s never a shortage of cash for enforcement. The $140 billion ICE and CBP war chest was locked in before the budget fights even started. Priorities are revealed by what gets funded no matter what, and what gets cut first.
Sources: NBC News, NPR, CBS News, Nextgov
2. Five European Nations Confirm: Russia Poisoned Navalny in Prison
This one broke today. The UK, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands jointly announced that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed with epibatidine, a neurotoxin derived from South American poison dart frogs. The substance was confirmed in samples taken from his body. It is not found naturally anywhere in Russia.
Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024. He was serving a 19-year sentence that everyone understood to be politically motivated. Russian authorities claimed he fell ill on a walk. His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, announced the findings at the Munich Security Conference, saying she always knew it was murder.
This was the Kremlin’s second attempt. In 2020, Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent. A joint CNN-Bellingcat investigation tied the attack to an FSB team that had trailed him for years. He survived, recovered in Germany, then made the extraordinary choice to return to Russia knowing he’d be arrested.
A man spent his life fighting state corruption, and the state killed him for it. Twice, actually. It just took two tries. The five European nations are now reporting Russia to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for breaching the Chemical Weapons Convention. Whether anything comes of that is another question entirely.
Sources: NPR, NBC News, Bloomberg, CNN
3. Second Aircraft Carrier Heading to the Middle East
President Trump confirmed Friday that the USS Gerald R. Ford is being redeployed from the Caribbean to the Persian Gulf, joining the USS Abraham Lincoln already stationed there. Two carrier strike groups in one theater is an unusual concentration of firepower, and the crew of the Ford has already been at sea for eight months. The Navy has reportedly flagged the ship as overdue for maintenance. The sailors don’t get a vote.
The stated purpose is leverage against Iran over its nuclear program. Trump gave Tehran roughly a month to agree to a deal, warning that failure would be “very traumatic.” Iran says its ballistic missile program isn’t on the table. Meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham said at the Munich Security Conference that it would be a “disaster” if Trump “lets the Iranian regime survive.”
Inside Iran, the regime is dealing with fallout from a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests last month. Nearly 7,000 people were reportedly killed. Iranians are now holding 40-day mourning ceremonies, which historically reignite unrest.
Whether this ends in a deal or a strike, the invoice lands on the American taxpayer either way. A carrier strike group costs roughly $6 million a day to operate. None of this makes the average American safer, cheaper to insure, or better off. If it escalates, it means more dead people in a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map, more veterans coming home broken, and another decade of “stabilization” costs laundered through the defense budget. The track record in this region speaks for itself.
Sources: AP via Washington Times, NBC News, The National
4. The Government Says Inflation Fell. Your Grocery Bill Disagrees.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its January CPI report on Friday, claiming annual inflation slowed to 2.4%. If you find that number hard to square with reality, you’re not alone, and there’s a reason for that.
The CPI has been methodologically overhauled multiple times since the early 1980s, each revision conveniently producing a lower reported number. Substitution effects, hedonic quality adjustments, and changes to how housing costs are calculated have all pushed the index further from what people actually experience at the register. ShadowStats, which attempts to reconstruct CPI using pre-1990s methodology, has historically pegged real inflation several percentage points higher than official figures.
Then there’s Truflation, a decentralized index that pulls from 35 million real-time data points across sources like Amazon, Walmart, and Zillow. Its latest reading puts year-over-year inflation at just 0.68% as of early February, which tells a completely different story than either the BLS or ShadowStats. The takeaway isn’t that one source has the “right” number. It’s that the official number is a political product, shaped by decades of methodological changes that consistently skew in the government’s favor.
What’s not in dispute: food prices are climbing faster than the headline, shelter costs remain elevated, and the Fed isn’t cutting rates anytime soon. If you carry a mortgage, a car note, or credit card debt, borrowing costs stay where they are for the foreseeable future.
Sources: Econbrowser/Truflation, ShadowStats, CNN Business
5. 910 Measles Cases Across 24 States — Expect the Mandate Push
The CDC is reporting 910 confirmed measles cases across 24 states so far in 2026. We’re six weeks in and already approaching half of last year’s total of 2,280, which was the worst year since 1991. South Carolina remains the epicenter. No one has died from measles in 2026.
The U.S. may lose its “measles elimination” status, a designation it’s held since 2000. Canada and several European countries already lost theirs. The Pan American Health Organization is expected to review U.S. data sometime this year.
Why it matters: every spike in measles cases becomes a pretext for expanding government authority over personal medical decisions. Expect calls for mandatory vaccination with fewer exemptions, possible restrictions on travel, and more pressure on states that currently allow religious or philosophical opt-outs. The playbook is familiar — a public health concern, however legitimate, gets leveraged into an expansion of state power that never quite gets rolled back.
Whatever your personal decision on vaccination, the thing to watch here isn’t the case count itself. It’s what legislators and bureaucrats try to do with it.