Authored by Emel Akan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Donald Trump will unveil a plan next week that would allow Americans to withdraw funds from their 401(k) accounts to use for a home down payment.

A for-sale sign is posted in front of a home in Las Vegas, Nev., on Aug. 8, 2025. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett announced the plan during an interview with Fox Business on Jan. 16, adding that the details of the proposal are still being finalized.

He said Trump will announce the final plan in Davos next week.

“The Fed lifted interest rates so much that mortgage rates went through the roof,” Hassett said.

He pointed out that the average monthly payment for a typical family buying a home has nearly doubled, and the down payment required had risen from about $15,000 to around $32,000 during the Biden administration.

Hassett stated that significant progress is needed to address the housing affordability problem, and the latest plan is one of many policies introduced by the president to help achieve this goal.

“We’re still talking about the mechanics of it,” he said.

Hassett explained that homeowners could put 10 percent of their home’s equity into a 401(k) plan, and as the home’s value goes up, the 401(k) would grow too. This approach, he said, could provide more funds for retirement, solve liquidity constraints, and make it easier to buy a house earlier in life.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has introduced a range of proposals to help more Americans achieve homeownership, including bringing down mortgage rates and banning large institutional investors from buying additional residential homes.

In a Jan. 8 Truth Social post, Trump directed the purchase of $200 billion in mortgage bonds to help reduce interest rates.

“This will drive Mortgage Rates down, monthly payments down, and make the cost of owning a home more affordable,” Trump wrote.

On Jan. 7, Trump also announced that he’s taking steps to bar large investors from purchasing more single-family homes, and said he would urge Congress to codify it.

Institutional investors are defined as companies owning 1,000 or more properties. Blackstone is considered the largest private-equity owner of U.S. apartments, with more than 230,000 units, according to data from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project as of April 2025.

Affordability of homeownership has become a growing concern, especially for first-time buyers.

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, housing costs rocketed, with median home prices rising 55 percent and rents surging more than 35 percent nationwide.

Borrowing costs also shot up in 2022 after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to combat inflation.

The American Dream is out of reach, especially for many young people. The typical age of first-time buyers climbed to 40 in 2025, the highest on record and up from 31 in 2014, according to a report by The Center for American Progress.

Andrew Moran and Jack Phillips contributed to this report.

New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America are moving to train and mobilize more than 4,000 anti-ICE activists into “rapid response” units designed to interfere with federal deportation operations targeting criminal illegal aliens, according to a New York Post report.

DSA’s effort to assemble a highly organized anti-ICE army of purple-haired leftists to impede federal deportation operations is particularly alarming because the planning phase was apparently being done at an upscale Midtown headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party-linked People’s Forum, a venue littered with pro-Communism rhetoric.

“As we’ve seen in other cities, we still do anticipate a big wave of federal immigration enforcement,” a DSA official who called herself Marina told the crowd of about 100 members last Thursday.

NYPost reported that the NYC chapter is preparing to train upwards of 2,000 DSA members and another 2,000 non-members, and to activate 50 additional trainers. If this story is accurate, it suggests that pressure campaigns against ICE agents on city streets, such as those seen in Minneapolis after the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer, are highly organized.  

“When we got the call for this ICE sighting, within minutes, we had 20 to 30 observers on foot and in vehicle, myself included. We showed up and we overwhelmed these ICE agents so much that they let this detainee go. They are scaring us, but we are scaring them right back. We have to keep going. It is working,” one of these legal observers in Minneapolis admitted in a social media post.

ALERT: Woman reveals that a quick response group she’s in was able impede and obstruct an ICE operation that ended in the detainee being let loose:

“When we got the call for this ICE sighting, within minutes, we had 20 to 30 observers on foot and in vehicle, myself included.… pic.twitter.com/4rYXbWfitN

— E X X ➠A L E R T S (@ExxAlerts) January 18, 2026

Here’s more from the NYPost report:

The group didn’t say what all of this will cost, but the member-funded organization repeatedly asked for money throughout the nearly two-hour long meeting – with one leader even going around the room with a red beanie soliciting cash donations in the socialist version of a collection plate.

Most concerning is that a dark-money NGO network tied to a CCP-linked communist billionaire, Neville Roy Singham, was allegedly at the center of this anti-ICE chaos and potentially seen as a command-and-control support node to organize nationwide protests.

This time around, as the Democratic Party’s NGO network attempts to spark ‘George Floyd 2.0’, we’ve understood how this protest industrial complex operates, and even the Trump administration has caught on, with Trump lashing out at paid protesters, and even Scott Bessent at the Treasury talking about investigating the NGOs.

It has become clearer than ever that Democrats and their NGO networks are waging a color-revolution-style operation against the America First agenda, one that increasingly appears aimed at obstructing federal deportation efforts intended to restore national security after the Biden-Harris regime allowed an invasion.

Democrats oppose the deportation of criminal illegals because they view this population as a future voting bloc, part of a broader strategy to entrench a sinister one-party rule. In the process, national security has been sacrificed for political power.

Why Democrats and their DSA allies are coordinating with a CCP-linked communist billionaire’s group to disrupt efforts to restore national security should be deeply alarming to the Trump administration. Yet amid all this chaos, one question remains: why have there been no meaningful reforms in the NGO universe?

“At this point, I have to believe that authorities and law enforcement know that the People’s Forum is not just ground zero for organizing NYC protests, but for foreign influence nonprofits on a national level. For them to be collaborating with the DSA, fresh off their return from Cuba, is a huge escalation in the revolution against the West. The DSA has an estimated 11,000 members in NYC alone. I pray that we don’t have another summer of protest-turned-riots in American cities, but these groups are training to do exactly that. You know the old saying: When someone tells you who they are, believe them,” an NGO expert focused on the Singham network told ZeroHedge.

Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Department of Justice is suing the Commonwealth of Virginia over its failure to provide election records, according to a news release Friday.

The U.S. Department of Justice in Washington on Aug. 7, 2025. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

This lawsuit becomes the latest in what’s been a flurry of legal actions by President Donald Trump’s administration against states to ensure election integrity and accurate voter rolls. The DOJ’s suit against Virginia now brings the total to 24 states and the District of Columbia.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced the latest lawsuit Friday evening in a post on X.

“Virginia becomes the next state sued for ignoring federal law!” Dhillon exclaimed in her post. “The Justice Department means business—and [the DOJ Civil Rights Division] will keep fighting to clean up voter rolls. Happy Friday!”

In the DOJ news release, Attorney General Pam Bondi said her office has sued the two dozen states, plus Washington, D.C., and will continue filing lawsuits to protect American elections.

“Accurate voter rolls are the foundation of election integrity, and any state that fails to meet this basic obligation of transparency can expect to see us in court,” Bondi said.

In the DOJ filing, Virginia Elections Commissioner Susan Beals is accused of violating a measure of the Civil Rights Act for not providing election records upon demand by the attorney general.

The Justice Department is asking the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to order Beals to turn over the statewide voter registration list, including each individual’s name, date of birth, address, and either their driver’s license number, last four digits of their Social Security number, or their Help America Vote Act unique identifier, the court documents read. The DOJ wants these records turned over within five days of a court order.

“Accurate voter rolls are essential to ensuring that American citizens’ votes count only once, and only with other eligible voters,” Dhillon said in the Friday news release.

“The Justice Department is committed to safeguarding fair and free elections, and will hold states accountable when they refuse to respect our federal elections laws.” [source]

Lindsey Halligan, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said the commonwealth’s refusal to turn over voter rolls not only violates federal law but also undercuts public trust in elections.

“This office will enforce the law to ensure the public and federal authorities receive the information they are entitled to,” Halligan said.

Friday’s lawsuit against Virginia comes only a day after a federal judge dismissed a similar DOJ lawsuit against California. The Golden State declined to provide its voter rolls, citing state privacy laws. California offered redacted records instead.

The judge called the Justice Department’s demand for voter data was “unprecedented and illegal.”

Virginia Election Commissioner Beals’s email bounced back twice when The Epoch Times reached out for comment. The state’s department of elections did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The NGO-funded madness continues in Minneapolis, but the volume on violence has been turned up and it appears that activists have been given the green light to physically assault anyone and everyone they deem a political enemy.  Conservative counter-protesters arriving in the area in small groups or alone have become easy targets for mobs of hundreds of rabid leftists roaming the streets. 

The activists now claim Minneapolis is “their city”, as we witnessed in Seattle during the short lived “CHAZ” experiment and the BLM riots. 

Social media is being flooded with multiple instances of conservative commentators, protesters and also unaffiliated bystanders being assaulted and some nearly killed.  This includes former J6 prisoner and “controversial” Florida Senate candidate Jake Lang, who was rushed by a large leftist mob, cornered, beaten and reportedly stabbed. 

Minneapolis: 🚨 Thousands of left-wing rioters are becoming increasingly violent.

Jake Lang was just PULLED INTO and TAKEN AWAY by a violent mob!
pic.twitter.com/MtVl9m7CQm

— Jay M.D. 🇺🇸 (@PatriotHQ) January 17, 2026

Lang was attacked following a speech he gave a the Minneapolis City Hall for his “March Against Fraud”.  There were no Minneapolis police to be found during the incident.  Lang was struck over the head several times with various weapons, and had to be hospitalized for severe lacerations and cranial bleeding.  Keep in mind, this attack was for Lang simply giving a speech. 

Whether or not one agrees with Lang’s views on immigration and race, he has the right to voice them without being nearly murdered.

Another pro-ICE demonstrator was stalked by a mob and is seen on video allegedly being chased into a parking garage and struck in the head with a pole by anti-ICE agitators. The mob continued following the unidentified man, who was walking to a car in the garage to leave.  They reportedly continued to pepper spray a gash on his head and struck the wound with their hands.

🚨 BREAKING: Leftists just caused RAPID BLEEDING of an ICE supporter by beating him over the head with a flag pole in Minneapolis

Police TOTALLY MISSING IN ACTION.

Mayor Frey called for this. He’s getting the violence he wants.

SEND THE FEDS!https://t.co/IqjWpILwYK

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 17, 2026

NGO protesters are also setting up road blocks and checkpoints to stop vehicles near the Minneapolis federal building, looking for ICE agents and anyone who might be conservative.  Detained drivers are asked to say “Fuck ICE”, as a test of their political affiliations.

🚨🇺🇸 PROTESTERS DEMANDING NAZI CHECKS BEFORE LETTING CARS PASS

Demonstrators blocking vehicles outside Minneapolis federal building, interrogating occupants before allowing passage.

City descending into mob rule territory.pic.twitter.com/qS5tIoXeJ6 https://t.co/MAZNTtlBIq

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) January 16, 2026

In some cases the rioters attack their own people.  This man was beaten and nearly mobbed simply for wearing a camo jacket.  Activists are heard screaming “He’s one of us!”

BREAKING – Minneapolis police have completely turned over the city to leftists, as they are now forming groups to hunt down anyone who appears to support ICE, with this man being saved by the feds just moments before being beaten for simply wearing camo. pic.twitter.com/4b29KEx79F

— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) January 17, 2026

This man was attacked for wearing a flag jacket with the word “Freedom” on the back.  Protesters yelled that they would not hurt him if he took the jacket off.

“Take it off and you won’t get hurt”

Minneapolis (Jan. 17) — Masked Antifa, far-left, anti-ICE thugs threaten and attack a person of color for wearing an American flag hoodie. Video by @Julio_Rosas11: pic.twitter.com/iwI6lMb8Gl

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) January 18, 2026

The Trump Administration is organizing a response to violent rioters – Around 1,500 active-duty soldiers on standby from the 11th Airborne.  It is clear that local law enforcement officials and Democrat leaders plan to do nothing to impede the unchecked criminality of the NGO funded mob. 

Mayor Jacob Frey asserts that the city will be peaceful again as soon as ICE agents leave the area. 

In other words, the activists are a tool for extortion; they create the chaos and the violence and ICE gets the blame.