A Billion Dollar Bribe That Raised Your Gas Bill

It is Saturday, March 28th, 2026 and the streets are waking up. This is a special weekend edition of the Ignition News.Three stories connect today's edition to something bigger than any one headline.First, 36 House Republicans have now announced they will not seek reelection in 2026, breaking the record set in 2018 when Democrats retook the House. These are not fringe members. Foreign Affairs Committee chair Michael McCall, swing district rep Don Bacon, Elise Stefanik, and Nevada's Mark Amodei are all walking out the door. Members are telling colleagues behind the scenes that Congress under this leadership is pointless, intolerable, or simply no longer functional. That is not a scheduling problem. That is an exodus.Second, the Trump administration has lost every federal case attempting to block offshore wind construction on the East Coast, so it found a different approach: it paid a French oil company $928 million of your tax money to abandon wind leases off New York and North Carolina. Those projects would have powered up to 1.4 million homes. TotalEnergies, the company that received the money, was already invested in the Texas LNG facility it agreed to prioritize. The administration used public funds to hand a foreign corporation a windfall for an investment it had already made.Third, 6 percent of Americans took hardship withdrawals from their 401ks in 2025, triple the pre-pandemic rate. The top reason: preventing foreclosure or eviction. Foreclosure filings were up 14 percent in 2025 and up 20 percent in February 2026 alone. The average account balance is up, but the median working-age American has saved just $1,000 for retirement. The people being forced to cash out are not the ones with rising averages.These stories are connected. The costs are being pushed onto working people while the benefits flow to those at the top. That is not an accident.Today is No Kings Day. If you showed up, you are the actual patriot.Stay awake, stay loud.