(DCNF)—Democratic attorneys general who are suing to block Elon Musk’s supposed federal “power grab” are actively looking to hire lawyers from a program established with cash from Democrat mega donor Michael Bloomberg.
Keith Ellison of Minnesota, William Tong of Connecticut and Anthony Brown of Maryland are three of the 14 Democrat attorneys general who filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging that President Donald Trump broke the law in appointing Musk to launch a full assault on wasteful governance via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While the three officials say that Musk — an unelected official and billionaire — undermines the Constitution, each of their offices are soliciting applicants from a New York University (NYU) law school program that received about $6 million from Bloomberg, who is an unelected billionaire, in 2017.
NYU School of Law’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center (SEEIC) “studies and supports the work of state attorneys general in defending, enforcing, and promoting strong laws and policies in the areas of climate, environmental justice, environmental protection, and clean energy,” according to its website. SEEIC started with the help of about $6 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bloomberg’s charitable organization, and it has placed fellows into state attorney general offices in the past to assist with lawsuits targeting major energy companies for their role in climate change, for example.
SEEIC’s website currently features open applications for special attorney general positions inside the offices of Tong, Ellison and Brown; while the particulars vary for these positions, they all generally focus on climate, energy and related issues by design, according to their respective descriptions. However, SEEIC pays the salaries of its fellows, rather than the state governments that compensate the sitting attorneys general.
The description of the open roles in Minnesota notes that preferred qualifications include “a background in federal administrative law challenges,” suggesting that any prospective hire may be working on challenges to the Trump administration’s aggressive energy agenda. Depending on their level of experience and qualifications, applicants hired by the three attorneys general can rake in anywhere from $85,000 to $174,000 in salary.
While they are actively seeking out climate-focused lawyers funded by an unelected billionaire, the three Democrats are at the same time deeply concerned over their belief that Trump broke the law in deputizing Musk to make the government more efficient with his DOGE team.
“There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual. Although our constitutional system was designed to prevent the abuses of an 18th century monarch, the instruments of unchecked power are no less dangerous in the hands of a 21st century tech baron,” the Democrat attorneys’ general lawsuit states. “In recent weeks, Defendant Elon Musk, with President Donald J. Trump’s approval, has roamed through the federal government unraveling agencies, accessing sensitive data, and causing mass chaos and confusion for state and local governments, federal employees, and the American people.”
In personal statements, Ellison bemoaned that “Trump installed Elon Musk at the head of that agency without vetting and Senate confirmation,” while Tong lamented that “no one elected Elon Musk” and that “Donald Trump has allowed this unelected billionaire to worm his way into our government.” For his part, Brown said that “the president has given one man unchecked power to reshape our government.”
Bloomberg has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into climate activist groups and organizations explicitly aiming to crush the coal and petrochemical industries in the U.S. After Bloomberg dropped out of the 2020 presidential race, he proceeded to give future President Joe Biden tens of millions of dollars to beat Trump.
“It’s quite entertaining from a consumer protection perspective to watch public officials who are using billionaire-backed law firms to push climate change cases to fundamentally reshape our economy and remove products from store shelves, and officials who are actively soliciting for billionaire funded attorneys to be placed in their offices, turn around and sue over the amount of influence of a billionaire who they don’t agree with and don’t control,” O.H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “And that’s before considering how much money the federal government under Joe Biden shoveled out to left-wing nonprofits to subsidize their collective efforts to reshape our country, which is exactly what is under pressure from the efforts of Elon Musk and others in the Trump administration.”
The offices of Tong, Brown and Ellison did not respond to requests for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
