Show Notes
In our last podcast for the year, the hosts of The Drill Down look back at the massively eventful year of 2025 and offer a few predictions. The show brought on a lot of newsmakers to discuss what they were focused on and covered a lot of bases from insider trading and welfare fraud to food dyes.
When Robert F. Kennedy took over the department of Health and Human Services, promising to “Make America Healthy Again,” The Drill Down welcomed to the show Vani Hari, aka “The Food Babe,” who told us in detail about the dyes and imitation foods used in food products in the United States that the same companies don’t dare to use in Europe. She’s been on this crusade for years.
“When I quit my job to do FoodBabe full time, the first company I took on was Kraft,” she told Schweizer and Eggers. “Kraft was selling a version of mac and cheese without artificial food dyes in Europe, using paprika and beta carotene. But here in the United States, they were using Yellow Dye #5 and #6. The reason they removed the artificial food dyes in Europe is because the Europeans started using a cigarette type warning label on their products that had artificial dye,” she told the hosts.
She is excited for RFK’s success because she has seen how the regulators at the Food and Drug Administration were “captured” by lobbyists for the big food companies. “He’s going to dismantle the corruption that has allowed our country to be the worst in terms of health outcomes, even though we spend the most on healthcare,” she said.
Fraud is always a big topic for the show, and for the Government Accountability Institute, and our listeners had a beat on the rest of the world about welfare fraud in Minnesota. We had on veteran welfare fraud investigator Andrew McClenahan, who has been beating this drum for years. EBT cards are ripe for fraud because there’s no incentive for the holder to use the funds properly, or really at all. Once benefits are issued to someone, EBT cards get monthly electronic deposits from the state government, he explained. Trump’s Agriculture secretary Brooker Rollins’s review of the program found EBT cards that have been carrying balances of more than $10,000 and sometimes issued to people who have never existed.
“In my experience, I’ve seen cards with as much as $20,000 on an EBT card,” McClenahan told the hosts.
Harmeet Dhillon has been making waves at the Justice Department as the hear of the civil rights division. She joined The Drill Down to talk about her first days in office, seeing lawyers crying in the hallways and quitting.
Dhillon has gone after so-called consent decrees that tied the hands of cops and funneled millions to left-wing monitors. Cities like Seattle became lawless under these deals — cops left, crime spiked, and radicals ran wild. Her DOJ is ripping up those agreements and stopping the quiet cash flow to Democrat-aligned groups.
“Crime goes up because the bad guys know cops’ hands are tied in that city,” Dhillon told Schweizer and Eggers. “And this is an immediate horror story for law-abiding citizens in these communities.”
“When people think about the ‘Deep State,’ they tend to think about the Pentagon or the intelligence community or some of the stuff that DOGE is shaking up,” Schweizer told her. “But, in a lot of respects, the legal ‘Deep State’ is exactly where you are: the Civil Rights Division,” Schweizer says of Dhillon.
Fraud happens everywhere, and Elon Musk’s DOGE project found that the Pentagon is no exception. The Drill Down did an episode highlighting credit card abuse by DoD employees, who were expensing things like strip clubs on their government credit cards.
Eggers noted on that show that from July of 2013 to end of June of 2014, we’re talking about 900 transactions for $100,000 at adult entertainment establishments and a 4,000 transactions outside of casinos,” he reports.
People on the right, Schweizer observes today, “view the Pentagon the same way liberals view the Department of Education – the more spending, the more you’re going to get. And the problem is, in the military there is a lot of fat, a lot of waste.”
Insider congressional trading is another story that hasn’t been covered well by establishment media, but The Drill Down has covered extensively. In an episode called “Hell is Freezing Over,” the hosts noted the irony of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who is the most successful stock-picker in Congress, finally agreeing to support banning members of Congress from trading in stocks. Just before she retires.
Over the last 10 years, the market is up 242 percent, Schweizer notes. The Pelosi family is up 745 percent! Not bad for a public servant and her husband who ran a limousine company.
The Drill Down brought on book authors, too, welcoming show friend Mark Levin to discuss his latest book, On Power, which he wrote while laid up in the hospital. They talked about the weird alliances between left and right in their worldview regarding Israel, a topic that has also roiled the conservative movement recently. Levin told the hosts: “There is a movement in the radical right… they sound like the radical Islamists.”
Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly talked about China and the fentanyl problem, told the hosts about meetings he had with Chinese officials. “They were saying, ‘we want Donald Trump to come to Beijing.’ I said, ‘you’re lucky to get me.’ But I’ll tell you what, in order for him to come here, you’re going to have to give him something. So, the director of security, toughest guy in the country – little guy – he looks at me, and says, ‘Well, what would that be?’ And I said, ‘You have to get out of the fentanyl business.’ Now, this is eye-to-eye now, he goes, ‘Well, we’re not in the fentanyl business. We just make the precursors.’”
O’Reilly told them, “Do you really need to do that?”
“Silence. I mean… silence,” he told Schweizer and Eggers. “And I didn’t say anything further.”
The Drill Down dis a show on housing affordability that affects ordinary Americans. Nation of Renters showed how immigration and government regulations have led to spikes in the cost of home ownership, though environmental and zoning restrictions. A recent study quantified those effects on housing prices. In San Francisco, restrictive zoning laws adds $400,000 to the cost of a home. “In Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City, it’s much better: it’s only $200,000 added to the costs there,” Schweizer adds.
The hosts close with a couple of bold predictions. Eggers believes the GOP may do well in the midterm elections because he predicts the economy will improve. “I like the House Republicans’ chances… I think they will be more successful.
Schweizer begs off on predicting the results of the midterm elections, but agrees the economy is going to do well in 2026. “I think the economy next year is going to boom,” he says. “You’ve got massive foreign investment coming in. You’ve got the tax reforms that have taken place… The economy is going to do very, very well.” He is cautious about inflation, however, worrying that with the increase in construction there may be wage increases that create inflationary pressure.
