The economy is one of the biggest issues this election cycle. In past elections where the economy has featured prominently, the biggest concerns are usually jobs or unemployment or fear of a recession. This year, and for the first time in generations, inflation is the big concern.

The most recent inflation reading of the consumer price index, the most closely watched inflation gauge, showed that inflation fell slightly to 3.4% for the year ending in April. While the data showed a decline, that number is still well above the 2% level that the Federal Reserve considers healthy.

The small downtick also follows months of increases. Late last year, inflation began falling quickly, leading consumers to believe the price-growth plague was coming to an end and the Fed would begin cutting interest rates. But those expectations have faded greatly as inflation readings in 2024 continue to disappoint.

A day before the CPI data were released, the producer price index, which gauges wholesale inflation, rose slightly once again, the third straight monthly increase.

Republicans are squarely blaming Biden for the high inflation and, in turn, the higher interest rates. They contend that a rash of federal spending under Biden artificially juiced demand and caused prices to rise, an attack they have used and will continue to use on the campaign trail.

“This report confirms that the grip of inflation won’t loosen anytime soon, even after 11 interest rate increases since March 2022,” House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) said after the latest CPI report. “The massive amount of federal spending by President Biden and Democrats has made this inflationary firestorm difficult to contain.”

Perhaps even more crucially for Biden is how the hotter numbers are shifting inflation expectations and consumer sentiment, which is how voters feel about the economy.

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index plunged to 67.4 in May, down from nearly 77.4 in April, according to early numbers for the month. That marks a nearly 13% decline over just the past month alone and shows consumers are souring on the economy and their perceived economic conditions.

“This 10 index-point decline is statistically significant and brings sentiment to its lowest reading in about six months,” survey director Joanne Hsu said. “This month’s trend in sentiment is characterized by a broad consensus across consumers, with decreases across age, income, and education groups.”

Year-ahead inflation expectations also rose, as did long-run inflation expectations, another troubling metric for the Biden campaign.

An April Bloomberg News-Morning Consult poll found that a mere 18% of registered voters predict that inflation will improve by the end of the year, while 75% said they think it will either stay the same or actually get worse. Further, 70% say the overall U.S. economy is going on the wrong track.

Additionally, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell to 97 in April, down from a revised 103.1 the month before. That marks the lowest consumer confidence reading in 22 months.

The expectations index, which tracks the short-term outlook of consumers for business, income, and labor market conditions, fell to 66.4 this month from 74 in March. An expectations index reading below 80 often signals a forthcoming recession, according to the Conference Board, more alarm bells for Biden.

“Confidence retreated further in April, reaching its lowest level since July 2022 as consumers became less positive about the current labor market situation and more concerned about future business conditions, job availability, and income,” Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board, said.

Dan North, a senior economist with Allianz Trade Americas, told the Washington Examiner after the release of the most recent CPI report that while it ticked down by a tenth of a percentage point, inflation has remained in a narrow band between 3% and 3.7% for nearly a year now, more than a full percentage point over what the Fed considers healthy.

The Fed has raised its interest rate target from 5.25% to 5.50%, the highest since the dot-com bubble at the turn of the century. The biggest question now is when the Fed will start cutting rates, although recent hotter-than-anticipated inflation reports have increased the odds of fewer cuts in 2024. Most investors expect the first rate cut to come in September.

North said the latest report doesn’t do much to move the needle toward quicker interest rate cuts.

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“It’s not enough to move the Fed by any means off of, in our opinions, September. It’s a good thing it’s not a surprise to the upside, which we’ve had too much of, but we’re still a long, long way from 2%,” North said.

If inflation readings keep showing little progress toward moving inflation down to the Fed’s goal, it could also push back the first rate cut until after the November elections, something that would further hurt Biden. Higher rates make things like buying a home or taking out a loan much more expensive for voters.

Furlow-Smiles, a resident of Marietta, Georgia, oversaw Facebook’s DEI programs from January 2017 to September 2021. She used her position at the company to fake business deals in exchange for kickbacks, stealing more than $4.9 million. 

After being terminated from Facebook, Furlow-Smiles led Nike’s DEI initiatives as senior director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. There, she stole over $120,000 between 2021 and 2023. 

At both companies, Furlow-Smiles used access to corporate credit cards, phony paperwork, and her authority to make purchases and approve invoices for vendors to commit fraud. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced the charges, stating that Furlow-Smiles had pleaded guilty to stealing from her employers to fund her luxury lifestyle. 

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The popularity boost that DEI initiatives saw following the massive Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 has now suffered from blowback, with politicians targeting them in schools, government, and companies.  

Research about the flourishing impact of DEI initiatives that were once celebrated has been challenged with new studies, and a recent Supreme Court ruling banned affirmative action in college admissions. Now, schools across the country are scrapping DEI requirements.

This week, Red Lobster announced it was shuttering over 50 locations. It comes as the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported on Tuesday that inflation went up 2.2% for the year ending in April.

“The reality is restaurants are in trouble, and this is not something we’re going to see consistently going forward because they’re going to have to raise prices to survive,” former CKE Restaurants CEO Andy Puzder said on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria Bartiromo. “You can’t survive in an environment like this and have your prices come down. Wages are surging, you’ve got these huge minimum wage increases, in addition to economic pressure, you’ve seen commodities go way up.”

In an effort to remain competitive, here are the restaurants that are offering meal deals.

Pizza Hut

The iconic pizza chain has recently unveiled its new My Hut Box, which will give customers a choice between various personal pizza entrees combined with either a side of fries or chicken wings and a 20-ounce soda for $6.99.

Buffalo Wild Wings

The sports bar is currently offering customers all-you-can-eat wings for $19.99 on Mondays and Wednesdays at participating locations.

KFC

Kentucky Fried Chicken revealed its “Taste of KFC” menu to include various deals for customers, with the cheapest offering being a $5 meal consisting of two pieces of chicken, mashed potatoes, and a biscuit. The menu also offers a $10 bucket of eight chicken pieces every Tuesday at participating restaurants.

McDonald’s

This week saw the release of a report that the Golden Arches is considering a $5 meal plan, which would give customers a choice between a McChicken sandwich or a McDouble, paired with a side of fries and a soda. However, some locations are cutting back on free refills of beverages.

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Restaurants are not the only food-related businesses seeking to offer deals amid inflation, as Walmart unveiled a new brand offering cheap food products, bettergoods. This line features items costing between $2 and $15, with a majority of items under this chain costing less than $5.

The change at the location in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was noticed by an Uber Eats delivery driver, and comes about 20 years after the fast food chain introduced the self-serve fountains. 

This update comes ahead of a plan by the chain to phase its self-serve soda fountains out of all its locations by 2032. McDonald’s has clarified that restaurants can still offer customers free refills “at the discretion of individual restaurant owner/operators.”

Amid its decision to phase out self-serve soda machines, McDonald’s is also reportedly considering a $5 meal plan to lure customers back to its stores, with this offer giving customers a choice between a McChicken sandwich or a McDouble burger, paired with a side of fries and a soda. Some chains like Wendy’s are already offering similar value meals. 

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McDonald’s sales did go up 1.9% between January and March, though that increase was below the 2.1% increase that had been forecasted. Restaurant executives for the chain have stated they would work to offer more deals to customers.

“The consumer is certainly being very discriminating in how they spend their dollar,” McDonald’s President and CEO Chris Kempczinski said. “It may be more pronounced with lower-income consumers, but it’s important to recognize that all income cohorts are seeking value.”

Joe Gold, the general manager at Key Brewing, a brewery and restaurant in Dundalk on the eastern end of the Key Bridge, said the city is “used to tragedy.”

“It’s just the nature of where we’re from, and we’re gritty folks,” Gold said during an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I think the optimism in our city is divided in that the people that have been affected the most, probably, have the most optimism.”

But Gold acknowledged that while local patrons, many of whom work at the Port of Baltimore, appear to be coming in more frequently, Key Brewing has also lost any new business coming across the water from the city proper.

“We’re literally cut off from sort of that side of the river, so you got to go up and around, and hazmats have to go all the way around, but we can go into the two tunnels,” he said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “But what’s happened is the commute from our side became more tedious on our people, but people that live on that side aren’t coming this way. They have other options.”

“We can tell our locals are coming in more often than they’ve ever been,” Gold continued, noting that the longshoremen living in Dundalk still don’t know when they will go back to working full time. “Unfortunately, their money is going to dry up one day, you’d sort of think, and we’re not getting an influx of anybody from outside.”

The Washington Examiner spoke to more than two dozen retailers, restaurants, and grocers on both sides of the collapsed Key Bridge, nearly all of whom said business had not significantly slowed since late March but are cautiously waiting to see if those levels can be maintained through the busy summer months.

Furthermore, a majority of the business owners who spoke with the Washington Examiner said they were unsure of how to apply for emergency relief loans provided by President Joe Biden’s Small Business Administration, even though they were aware that those funds had been made available by the federal government.

SBA officials declined to provide total numbers of loan applicants and recipients to the Washington Examiner, as it would violate the administration’s “personally identifiable information” protections for businesses.

Karen Gaffney operates Gaffney’s Crabs, a family-owned to-go crab house in Highlandtown, and she said increased traffic is making staff members rethink their delivery routes.

Gaffney’s husband runs the restaurant’s crab pots near the Eastern Shore’s Solomons Island. What used to be a relatively manageable drive via the Key Bridge has nearly doubled in length thanks to detours, and Gaffney has hired a longshoreman who has lost out on shifts while the cleanup effort continues around the port to make the haul for her.

“If I have to go down there and get the crabs for them, and I’m sitting in traffic, I can’t be here,” she told the Washington Examiner. “I’m the person who runs this.”

Asked if she plans to apply for any federal aid to help alleviate the costs of adding an employee, Gaffney said she had never heard of the SBA relief program but wouldn’t apply even if she had.

“I just don’t want to take from where it’s needed,” she said.

Arra Cho is a co-owner of Kraus’ Little Fare Deli and Cho’s Sea Garden, the latter of which was opened by her father in the old Lexington Market four decades ago. Both stores are now located in the new Lexington Market, which opened next door to the old building in 2022, near Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

The Chos say they haven’t experienced “too much of a delay” in receiving their products so far but are concerned about rent payments for both of their market stalls should any major bottlenecks arise.

Cho told the Washington Examiner that Lexington Market did receive pandemic-era emergency funding from the federal government but added that she was not aware of the exact mechanism to apply for an SBA loan herself. Jamal McCord, the general manager of Lexington Market, additionally told the Washington Examiner that the market is exploring a new SBA loan and determining how it would distribute those funds among its various vendors and staff members.

Stacey Guzman, the owner of Chris’ Seafood in Canton, lamented the low supply and high prices of both local blue crabs and crabs brought in from Texas and Louisiana. Guzman noted that the Gulf of Mexico is also having a down season, and the week after the bridge collapse, crab coming in from that region went up $34 a box.

“We’re not getting enough crabs because Louisiana has been so short, and then all the rains and the storms that they’re having has been really difficult on us,” she said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “This is definitely probably our slowest season so far to start.”

Guzman said Texas and Louisiana suppliers are only shipping twice a week, down from every day, and added that freight deliveries have been delayed due to Key Bridge detours.

She told the Washington Examiner that deliveries are increasingly arriving in the evening, rather than near opening, which can be a death sentence for a business built on freshness.

“You’re losing the majority of that day,” Guzman expressed with dismay. “All that’s bottlenecked because of the bridge being down.”

Baltimore is years removed from replacing the downed Key Bridge, but the state government has not reported any delays on the projected timeline. Authorities plan to use explosives Sunday to remove a section of the Dali ship in an effort to free it and reopen the port, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Richard Scher, a spokesman for the Maryland Port Administration, confirmed to the Washington Examiner that the state expects its “full, 50-foot deep, 700-foot wide channel to be reopened by the end of this month.”

Maryland Department of Transportation officials added that they are on track to complete construction of a new bridge by 2028, with an estimated cost ranging between $1.7 billion and $1.9 billion. MDTA additionally plans to release a Progressive Design-Build Request for Proposal this month, and it hosted an industry forum with contractors and engineers on Tuesday.

“Federal funding, insurance proceeds, and other reimbursements will bring a variety of resources toward the rebuild and recovery effort,” an MDTA spokesperson said in a statement. “The state is pursuing other recovery options to minimize net cost to taxpayers and toll customers.”

Biden himself visited Baltimore in early April and pledged full federal support for the recovery and rebuilding effort.

“This port is older than our republic,” Biden said. “It’s been through tough, tough times before. We’re determined to come back even stronger.”

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On the president’s response, Gold told the Washington Examiner that “we live in a five-minute news cycle.”

“It’s a double-edged sword when you said ‘people around here,’ and then you said ‘President Biden,'” he said. “This part of the world happens to probably not be the same color, blue or red, as what his politics are. So it’s less about Biden, and it’s more about our governor, our mayor, our people helping out, and it’s less about the Biden thing than the locals.”

Some 700 union workers went on strike after their contract expired almost a year ago. Their union has been in negotiations with Virgin Hotels for five months without an agreement on a raise for workers’ wages. The hotel surpassed one strike deadline before missing the most recent deadline, prompting the strike.

“Workers need a raise and have been clear on what they deserve, but the company has been coming to the table with zeros for wages,” Union Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge said in a statement. “Culinary Union calls on Virgin Las Vegas to stop treating their workers as second-class, respect them, and agree that they are worth more than zero. Every casino on the Las Vegas Strip and Downtown Las Vegas has already settled a fair contract and so this company is a total outlier and it’s disrespectful to the workers.”

Additionally, the union has established a 24/7 picket outside the hotel to discourage patrons from giving the hotel any business. The strike began on the day Latinos from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Belize celebrate Mother’s Day, and will continue through the U.S. holiday.

Virgin Hotels said it had a negotiation meeting scheduled for May 2 that the union canceled; however, a spokesperson denied the allegation to the Washington Examiner. It has also gone on to file a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the CWU has “failed and refused to negotiate in good faith” and issues threats to “retaliate against employees if they did not join or support the union.”

“Because the Union has not told us what agreements it believes are necessary to avoid a strike, we have asked the Union to join us in mediation as soon as possible. The goal of mediation is to reach an agreement without disrupting our guest and our team members’ lives with a work stoppage,” Virgin Hotels said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “While we are eager to move discussions forward, the Union has declined to participate in mediation at this time.”

Negotiations are next slated for May 14. This comes days before country music star Lee Price will have his debut performance at The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas on May 17, and months before Las Vegas is slated to host the Formula One Grand Prix in November.

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This comes after the CWU called off an impending strike against MGM, Caesar’s, and Wynn Resort last November. While the other resorts are long-standing hotels on the Vegas strip, Virgin Hotels opened its doors in March 2021, and has never experienced a labor strike until Friday.

The CWU represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Nevada, with all but 7,000 based in Las Vegas. It is considered the largest union in the state. Unionized members are majority female at 55% and another 45% of members are immigrants.

The chain has had annual pride collections since 2012, but last year’s run kicked up mountains of controversy. The company moved its displays of LGBT-theme merchandise, slated for the pride month of June, from the front of several stores to the back of the store or removed them entirely last year due to outrage.

“At Target, we know our business thrives when we create experiences that foster a sense of belonging. That’s why we support and celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community during Pride Month and year-round,” the store’s statement read. “We’re offering a collection of products including adult apparel and home and food and beverage items, curated based on consumer feedback. The collection will be available on Target.com and in select stores, based on historical sales performance.”

This is likely a reference to the child-sized pride merchandise offered last year, which was at the center of the backlash. As a result, five stores in Ohio’s Jackson Township, Boardman, Stow, Niles, one store in Monaca, Pennsylvania, and four stores in Utah’s Layton, Salt Lake, Taylorsville, and Provo reported threats to their stores. Layton briefly evacuated its store due to the severity of the threat against it.

“Since introducing this year’s collection, we’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and [well-being] while at work,” a statement from Target read at the time. “Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior.”

The retailer told the Washington Examiner that the collection “has been curated based on guest insights and consumer research.”

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Last year’s merchandise included designs from Abprallen, a brand out of the United Kingdom and headed by a self-proclaimed gay transgender man known as Erik, who had an affinity for satanism. The designer’s website was temporarily shut down. It remains to be seen if Target will turn to small designers for its next collection.

Target’s shares lost 12.6% in the weeks since the start of the collection, according to Dow Jones Market Data Group.

So when Kelton and her coterie of socialists put out an hour-35-minute documentary detailing their defense of MMT, your resident economics columnist watched Finding the Money so you don’t have to.

MMT operates off the axiom that a government responsible for minting its own currency can always print more when necessary. Finding the Money spends extensive time claiming that money didn’t result as a medium of exchange or record of debt more efficient than direct bartering between individuals (in classical economics, the basic definition of a market). Rather, in the MMT worldview, money is a creation of government. And crucially because government is solely responsible for making money, it is also the rightful owner of money.

In practice, MMT is a word game for progressives to justify driving up exponential debt growth.

“You could take the National Debt Clock that scares everyone and just rename it the ‘U.S. Dollar Savings Clock’ and I think everyone would have a very different kind of reaction,” Kelton said in the film. “And so I think 95% of the problems that we have getting better policy is probably down to the words we use to describe what’s actually happening.”

Convenient, isn’t it? In Kelton’s telling, our $32 trillion in national debt does not consist of “real resources” owed, such as net interest payments to foreign bondholders or Social Security checks or military aid to Ukraine. Instead, “their deficit” is private sector “surplus” because only the government is capable of creating real wealth, according to MMT.

The “documentary,” if we can call it that, mocks mainstream Keynesians like Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers for much of former President Barack Obama‘s second term. The film chides Furman for pointing out that public spending indeed crowds out private investments and that increased government deficits push the interest rates on Treasuries higher.

“How can he say that?” Kelton says in disbelief. “How can he say that knowing what we have been doing for decades?”

Beyond centuries of empirical economics, we can simply point to the past five years, as the annual deficit skyrocketed from fewer than $1 trillion to multiple consecutive years of $2 trillion or higher, and the corresponding and sustained surge of both long-term and short-term Treasury yields.

The doc only mentions MMT’s real-world test, the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years, under Biden, with 17 minutes to spare. That’s when Kelton gives the game away, saying, “You can actually spend money and reduce inflationary pressures.”

One of Kelton’s fellow travelers, Fadhel Kaboub, president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, adds, “If [inflation is] coming from a shortage from the energy sector, we can reduce our consumption of oil with policies to conserve, drive less, fly less, no fees for public transit, work from home, shorter work weeks, and we can also increase the capacity of that sector to relieve some of the pressure and bottlenecks.”

Though MMT argues that the money itself isn’t a constraint, what about those “real resources”? What if, as now, an economy is operating at full employment?

“Then the resources have to be freed up or created,” Kelton said, graduating from mere socialism to a flirtation with full-on communism. “How do you do that? I think of Medicare for All as a huge opportunity in this respect. We have the biggest, most expensive healthcare system in the entire world, roughly 18% of U.S. GDP. If we were to transition to a leaner, more efficient form of healthcare delivery, it’s going save us a lot of resources.”

Kelton adds, “Eliminating the middle man. Defense, military-industrial complex! And we have this behemoth of a finance sector.”

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Rather than an ideology with political conclusions that follow, MMT is better understood as a progressive wish list reverse-engineered to explain away and distort economic realities into an incoherent framework. The goal is not even to justify the passage of the Green New Deal, the shared policy aim of all MMT adherents, but rather to collectivize all means of production.

Kelton and company do not care that when put to the real test of the past three years of multitrillion-dollar deficits, inflation has not constrained the deficit, and the Federal Reserve has proven unable to constrain inflation unilaterally. Rather, they care about making the case you that the government is responsible for creating your own prosperity and earnings, and in turn, it is the government that should own the means of production in a way that would make Karl Marx proud.

In the United Arab Emirates, for example, the U.S. government has worked with Microsoft for the tech giant to buy a minority stake in that country’s dominant artificial intelligence company, G42. A key part of securing the deal was to ensure G42 disposed of Chinese hardware it was using in its operations.

Even just in recent weeks, the U.S. government has doled out numerous grants to both domestic and friendly foreign semiconductor manufacturers in a bid to halt the dominance of the world’s largest semiconductor company, Taiwan-based TSMC. U.S. authorities very much view TSMC as being under Chinese influence.

The semiconductor grants have largely been greeted with enthusiasm. Consider the reaction of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to the recent award of $6.1 billion in such grants to Micron Technology, which will aid that company in building manufacturing plants both in Schumer’s home state and in Idaho.

“This monumental and historic federal investment will power and propel Micron to bring its transformative $100+ billion four-fab project in central New York to life, creating an estimated 50,000 jobs,” Schumer said.

That grant, as well as others to Intel, Samsung, and even TSMC to boost manufacturing facilities in the United States, stems from the federal CHIPS and Science Act, which has a $52.6 billion budget allocated to it.

In reality, U.S. chip production has shrunk from 37% of the global market in 1990 to just 12% in 2020, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. In an era of ever-growing insecurity, hostile players, and staggering competitiveness, therefore, it may seem to make sense for the U.S. government to be subsidizing this and other important technology industries when there are national security issues at stake.

“AI and cybersecurity are already integral to national defense systems and infrastructure, and governments must ensure that these technologies are secure from foreign interference and manipulation,” said Ted Miracco, CEO of Approov Mobile Security, a cybersecurity company based in Palo Alto, California. “Data and AI are also major drivers of economic growth and competitiveness, and governments recognize the need to foster a strong domestic AI industry and not fall behind on the global stage. The goal of such intervention is not only to mitigate risks but also to maximize the benefits these technologies can offer to society.”

And the U.S. is only doing what other actors around the world, notably the Chinese and the Russians, have stated is their long-term aim.

“There is a new arms race as the U.S., China, and Russia have stated in their national security strategies that achieving dominance in AI is a priority,” said Tom Kellermann, senior vice president of cyber strategy at Los Altos, California-based Contrast Security. “This race to singularity has been burgeoning for the past five years. This does represent a holistic and long-term effort by the U.S. government.”

Not everyone’s on board

Not everyone agrees that such government action in the form of grants, or actively working with private companies to influence markets, is the best form of action.

The federal government spends about $100 billion annually on “corporate welfare,” equivalent to $800 a household, according to the Cato Institute. Such subsidies and grants induce recipient companies to become bloated and inefficient, Chris Edwards, Kilts family chairman in fiscal studies at the Cato Institute, told the Washington Examiner.

“The federal government’s role is to track threats, to warn about the Chinese, but not to actively intervene in markets,” he said. “How do we prevent China from accessing or stealing our most advanced technologies? I don’t know the answer. But I don’t think the answer is subsidizing our companies.”

Such government action is the opposite of what venture capital firms do, which is to try purposely to minimize the cash infusion to startups and young companies to keep them lean and efficient, he added. Vast VC and angel funding of the U.S. high-tech industry over the past decade means there is absolutely no “market failure” that would require federal intervention with subsidies.

Instead, it is excessive regulation and higher-than-average international corporate tax rates that scare foreign companies from investing in the U.S., Edwards said.

It’s happened before

Whatever the merits, the idea of giving federal grants to private companies or interfering in private business in the name of national security, such as the Microsoft G42 situation, is nothing new, said Irina Tsukerman, president of Scarab Rising, a security and geopolitical strategic risk group.

“This growing trend is a more modern take on the tech and arms race the U.S. was dealing with the Soviet Union during the Cold War,” she said. “Unlike the Cold War, however, the U.S. is now dealing with a network of adversaries with far more significant technology capabilities than what it faced at the time.”

And China is a prime example, she said, of a country focusing on gearing the bulk of its intelligence gathering toward industrial espionage so that it can penetrate the private sector and steal trade secrets in significant security areas, such as advanced internet, cyber, AI, and semiconductors.

“China views both the economy and defense sectors as a zero-sum game, which means it is willing to lean on dishonest methods to undermine competition and to procure competitive advantage,” she said.

The stakes may just, in the end, be too high to rely on free markets to solve all the problems such security issues and foreign threats bring. The U.S. may have been partly responsible for allowing such situations to happen, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has said in recent comments.

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“We allowed manufacturing in this country to wither on the vine in search of cheaper labor in Asia, cheaper capital in Asia, and here we are,” she said in a recent television interview on CBS. “We just pursued profit over national security.”

Such behavior cannot be allowed to continue unchecked as security concerns grow ever more threatening, she said.

Nick Thomas is a writer based in Denver, Colorado.

“Unfortunately, all orders that have been scheduled beginning on May 6, 2024, will be canceled and the status changed to pending,” a letter reportedly read. “After reevaluating our supply of chili, we have determined that it is too green to proceed with production as it is affecting the color of the product.”

A Huy Fong representative told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that they had no comment.

The change in the company’s supply of peppers will likely affect the brand’s chili garlic as well. This follows Huy Fong’s previous sriracha shortage in 2022.

Huy Fong has struggled with supply problems since it broke its contract with Underwood Ranches, which grows jalapenos and has since launched its own sriracha sauce. When Huy Fong was found to have violated its contract with Underwood Ranches, a jury awarded the U.S.-based farm with $23 million in damages.

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The Washington Examiner reached out to Underwood Ranches for comment.

Jalapenos tend to grow green at first, become dark, and then turn red during their final stage of ripeness. Their season tends to peak between mid-July and October.