(The Epoch Times)—President Donald Trump on Sunday said that he wants Congress to pass an election security bill as part of extending a key section of a surveillance law that lapsed last week.
Trump said in a Truth Social said that some Democrats will continue to oppose renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—which lapsed on June 12 after Congress failed to reach a deal—regardless of who he chooses to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
“Besides, I’m against FISA if it doesn’t come with The Save America Act (Full version!) firmly attached to it,” he wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, referring to a bill designed combat voter fraud that has stalled in the Senate.
Trump last month announced he would select federal housing official Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence after director Tulsi Gabbard, announced she would be stepping down to be with her husband, who was recently diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Last week, Trump nominated U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton to serve as his permanent intelligence director.
The SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act, also called the SAVE America Act, is aimed at requiring voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. It passed in the House of Representatives earlier this year but hasn’t moved forward in the Republican-controlled Senate after four Republicans—Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Thom Tillis (N.C.), and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—voted with Democrats to block the measure.
Section 702 of FISA allows agencies such as the CIA, the National Security Agency, and FBI to collect communications from foreign targets overseas without a warrant. While members of both parties who cite privacy issues related to incidental collection of data on Americans have long wanted to limit its authority, there has historically been bipartisan support to renew it.
In a separate post on Sunday, Trump questioned why Democrats “are so afraid of Bill Pulte” as the temporary head of the ODNI. “He would only be Acting! What do they have to be afraid of, what are they hiding? There must be something BIG, mustn’t there?” he asked.
Some Democrats have explicitly said they would not extend the FISA section because of Pulte’s selection as acting intelligence chief. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), said last week that “Pulte has to go,“ adding, ”He cannot be in the DNI role. It’s too important.”
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal earlier in June, Trump said he wanted Pulte to reduce the number of employees in the ODNI, noting holdovers from previous administrations. Pulte, who currently serves as the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is due to take the temporary ODNI role in late June, Trump has said.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in an interview with Fox News on Sunday that the terrorism threat level in the Untied States is at an all-time high due to celebrations around the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding alongside America’s hosting the FIFA World Cup.
“When I say we arrest terrorists every single week, I’m not exaggerating. Those aren’t the individuals that are coming across our border, those are individuals that are still inside this country,” Mullin told the outlet, adding that the U.S. threat level is “the highest it’s ever been.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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.