Just as the legacy media spent this week spinning the president’s pardon of Hunter Biden as an act of a loving father rather than the self-preservation of a criminal, they overlooked and ignored stories of great significance to all Americans. News reports show that, even as the Biden administration spent more taxpayer dollars subsidizing transgender procedures over the last four years, his administration revived one of the worst scandals of the Obama-Biden administration: secretly denying military veterans health care. As Biden’s FEMA workers skip the homes of Trump voters and extend tiny loans to U.S. hurricane victims, the president handed out another $1.7 billion to foreign nations. And a European nation with a crashing birth rate has liberalized its abortion law.

Here are the most significant, underreported stories of recent days.

1. U.S. Government Spent 60% More on Transgender Procedures under Biden-Harris Administration

The Democratic establishment went all-in on funding transgender procedures during the Biden-Harris administration. The 2024 Democratic Party platform classifies puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone injections, and the removal of healthy body parts as “medically necessary.” And the last two Democratic administrations have put your money where their mouth is.

According to partial data furnished to the media, the amount of money American taxpayers have spent on transgender procedures has risen by more than 60% during the Biden-Harris administration.

Megan Brock of The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained the amount taxpayers spent on transgender procedures in 16 states: Michigan, Idaho, Illinois, Virginia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Kentucky, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.

“From January 2018 to September 2023, 16 states spent more than $165 million funding ‘gender transition services’ —including puberty blockers, hormones, and sex-change surgeries — with more than $45 million spent on interventions for children 17 and younger,” reported Brock.

Of those 16 states, all but Utah broke down the data by year, allowing for an annual comparison.

Taxpayer funding of transgender procedures increased by nearly two-thirds during the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration alone, rising from $27,753,478 in 2020 to $44,553,052 in 2022. That a 64% increase in just two years.

Brock revealed how much money liberal states spent on transgender procedures, including medical interventions and social transitioning, such as speech therapy:

“Illinois spent $40,843,721, which included $14,296,558 in services for children 17 and under. Oregon spent $30,045,262 and Washington State spent $27,145,383. Other statewide totals for gender transition services includes Maryland, which spent $11,849,062, Nevada, which spent $10,096,655, Michigan, which spent $6,821,169, and New Hampshire, which spent $2,360,534.”

These funds can be attributed to the deliberate policies of the Obama and Biden-Harris administrations — the sort of legal sleight-of-hand currently being debated by the Supreme Court. In 2016, the Obama-Biden administration aggressively reinterpreted federal civil rights laws as though they covered people who identify as transgender. The Obama administration argued that “sex discrimination” included so-called “gender identity,” and it turned on the spigot of taxpayer funds to the transgender industry (coincidentally, a large Democratic donor group).

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, conventionally known as Obamacare, prevents discrimination based on sex. On its way out of office, the Obama administration issued a rule asserting that this prevented “discrimination” based on “gender identity” and sexual orientation. “Medicaid benefits are subject to Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the law’s major non-discrimination provisions,” notes the health news service KFF.

In other words, Obama said denying transgender procedures could constitute a civil rights violation and trigger a federal lawsuit, a brazen attempt to bully private insurance providers and state Medicaid programs into covering at least some transgender procedures. The number of transgender medical interventions nearly tripled over the next three years.

Experts say taxpayer funding helped fuel the explosion, reports Brock. “I would say that there has likely been an increase in ‘top surgery’ among 16 and 17 year olds simply due to the fact that this surgery has become more accessible,” according to an email DCNF obtained from Jason Rafferty, who helped write the transgender policy of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). “Most if not all [doctors inflicting transgender surgeries on minors] now take Medicaid — very few patients are paying the fully [sic] cost of surgery out of pocket.”

The Trump administration reversed this rule in June 2020 — not a moment too soon — and the Biden-Harris administration reversed Trump’s reversal, reinstating the Obama policy in May 2021.

Kamala Harris’s ideological commitment to extreme transgender ideology drove more swing-state voters away from her than any other issue. President-elect Donald Trump said the watchword of his next administration will be, “Promises made, promises kept.” Let him not waste any time keeping this vow and saving taxpayers’ dollars.

The Left’s funding priorities come into better focus when we observe that …

2. The Biden-Harris Administration Denied Timely Health Care to Veterans, Vets Group Says

Even as the Biden-Harris administration expedited the spending of taxpayer dollars for minors’ transgender procedures, it stands accused of denying basic health care to true American heroes: America’s military veterans.

Two dozen veterans associations have accused the Biden-Harris administration of implementing “a concerted and strategic effort to stop veterans from accessing health care.” Under federal law, the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) must allow veterans to seek health care outside the VA system when “the VA is unable to provide quality and timely health directly from VA clinicians.” But the Biden-Harris administration has circumvented the law by producing false measures of its wait list times, according to a letter to VA Secretary Denis McDonough.

The new administration has also revived one of the deadliest and least reported scandals of the Obama administration, according to the letter and federal documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. In 2014, news broke that VA officials had a long policy of lying about patient admission data to make it appear as though they treated veterans in a prompt manner — and the delays cost some veterans their lives. A year later, an Associated Press investigation found “the number of patients facing long waits at VA facilities has not dropped at all.” The number of veterans waiting 30 and 60 days for treatment at VA facilities remained flat, and those being delayed for 90 days had doubled. Subsequent investigations showed that Barack Obama had been advised of the problem during his 2008 transition to the presidency but apparently took no action.

President Donald Trump highlighted this travesty of justice in his campaign, and in 2018, he signed the VA Mission Act, which allows veterans to seek certain health care treatments in private facilities if the VA cannot provide care in a timely manner. The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) hailed the bill as “historic legislation [that] will help our veterans get the care they earned when they joined the military.”

But the law is only as good as its execution. The Biden-Harris administration, which has offered solicitous treatment to illegal immigrants — Kamala Harris famously favored giving taxpayer-funded abortions and transgender surgeries to illegal immigrants in prison — has turned a blind eye to the veteran health care crisis for the second time.

Under the Biden-Harris administration, VA officials went on using the old records-keeping system. “The VA continues to use outdated scheduling guidance from its legacy Veterans Choice Program instead of following the new Community Care Program guidance created after passage of the VA MISSION Act,” according to data reviewed by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation after a series of FOIA requests back in April. (That, too, was a story the media missed.) Using the old system “distorts eligibility for referral to community care and forces veterans to continue to wait in line at the VA.”

The veterans are calling on the Biden-Harris administration to do the right thing in its waning days. “Mr. Secretary, while these last approximately 50 days of the Biden-Harris Administration may seem like a minute for government agencies, for the sick veterans waiting for health care and getting the bureaucratic runaround from [Veterans Health Administration] VHA almost two months can be a lifetime, both figuratively and literally,” said the letter, sent Monday and obtained (in another coup) by The Daily Caller. It was signed by 24 veterans organizations, including the Association of the U.S. Navy, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, Vietnam Veterans of America, and the Korean War Veterans Association.

Undoubtedly, the Democrats populating both recent administrations harbor no illusions about the voting patterns of American veterans. Americans should harbor no illusions about their malign neglect.

While the Biden-Harris administration gives the cold shoulder to veterans and Trump-supporting hurricane victims, it has not spared any expense to support foreign interests …

3. Biden Gives Away $1.7 billion on His Way out the Door

After being defenestrated by his own party and having his replacement lose a near-landslide last month, President Joe Biden has ramped up his commitment to unpopular foreign aid giveaways. In between naps, the lame duck president committed to giving $1 billion to Africa as a misbegotten form of reparation for America’s (non-)history of colonialism. During a visit to the National Museum of Slavery, Biden invoked “the stolen men and women and children who were brought to our shores in chains and subjected to unimaginable cruelty.”

“I’ve learned that while history can be hidden, it cannot and should not be erased. It should be faced,” said the president, whose party has spent little time in the last decade facing any other direction.

More concerning, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced another $725 million weapons package to expand Ukraine’s losing war with Russia, including the use of anti-personnel landmines.

At least Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) has announced Wednesday that he will not include the Biden administration’s request for another $24 billion to Ukraine in his year-end funding bill.

It has become a cliché to contrast the level of foreign aid and funding of illegal immigrants with the unmet needs of veterans and other Americans — but as these underreported stories prove, the comparison is tragically apt.

Bonus Story: Facing a Low Birth Rate, Norway Increases Abortion to 18 Weeks

The nation of Norway has decided to put babies’ lives in danger for a longer period of time. On Tuesday, the nation’s parliament adopted a law that added six additional weeks to the nation’s abortion limit. The nation previously allowed abortion until 12 weeks, with the approval of a panel of comprised of one male and one female doctor. Under the new law, babies could be aborted until 18 weeks. With Norway’s total fertility rate crashing from nearly replacement level (1.98) in 2009 to an abysmally low 1.4 in 2023, the last thing the nation needs is fewer babies.