(The Epoch Times)—President Donald Trump announced on March 6 that he would sign an executive order within a week that would rein in the unrestricted name, image, and likeness spending in college football.
“I will have an executive order within one week, and it’ll be very effective,” he said. “It’ll be very necessary for college, and we’re going to put it forward, and we’re going to get sued, and we’re going to see how it does.”
He convened a roundtable at the White House with state and federal lawmakers, as well as sports agents and leaders in professional, college, and Olympic athletics, to gather input on the best way forward to impose nationwide standards surrounding athletic benefits and eligibility.
The goal was to figure out a solution as soon as possible.
“This isn’t just about student athletes,” the president said. “This is about our whole educational system. It is going to go out of business because of this.”
Since the United States District Court for the Northern District of California’s ruling in NCAA v. Alton in 2021 found restrictions on student athletes’ ability to earn compensation from their name, image, and likeness unlawful, colleges entered what the president described as a “financial arms race” to offer prospective players more and more money in what are called NIL—name, image, likeness—deals.
Lawmakers and athletic professionals also pointed out this increasing financial burden, with some schools posting hundred-million-dollar losses. The drive to have competitive football programs is also causing funding to be repurposed from other sports, ultimately resulting in the cancellation of their programs. This funding issue is primarily affecting women’s sports programs and sports programs known for producing hundreds of America’s Olympic athletes.
“Every day, I got asked for more money for NILs,” Randy Levine, President of the New York Yankees, said at the meeting. “Every single day. And what happened is I gave money for an NIL for a quarterback who left the next year.”
“Meanwhile, a friend of mine’s daughter is on the rowing team, and she lost her scholarship, and she’s an Olympic hopeful, and now she has to pay her own way,” he said. ”That’s just not right.”
Sarah Hirshland, CEO of the United States Olympic Committee, noted that athletes at the Summer Olympic Games in Paris represented more than 230 different colleges and 71 athletic conferences. Team USA’s medalists alone represented 90 different schools.
“One of our competitive advantages is the education-based sport system our country has embraced for more than a century,” she said. “America’s colleges and universities built a world-class athletic system that develops the whole athlete academically and competitively.”
Since that court ruling, roundtable participants also noted that it had become more and more common for student athletes to transfer from one school to another after just a single season and remain eligible far beyond the traditional four-year stint.
Nick Saban, former head football coach for the University of Alabama, pointed out that the lack of eligibility restrictions had 25- and 26-year-olds playing against 18- and 19-year-olds.
Saban also emphasized the need to put education back at the forefront of the student athlete’s experience, providing them an opportunity to advance themselves beyond athletics.
Trump celebrated the United States’s college athletic tradition, stating, “No other nation in the world has built a system that develops champions in classrooms and on the field, producing Olympic heroes, professional legends, and the leaders of tomorrow all at once.”
Now, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said that legislation was already being discussed in Congress called the SCORE Act. Many of the industry leaders present approved the bill as a starting point.
However, Trump said he was going to draft and sign an executive order with the help of the leaders present due to his doubt that enough Democratic lawmakers would be convinced to support the legislation. Johnson would continue to work on the SCORE Act in the meantime, and Trump added that he could put his executive order before Congress to be codified.
Still, Charlie Baker, President of the NCAA, said that there was still a lot that was right with college sports. He noted that there were more youngsters playing college sports than at any other time in the nation’s history, and the visibility of women’s sports had grown drastically. He also praised work underway with the SCORE Act to make college athletics even better.
“We should do all we possibly can to ensure its success for the next generation and the generations after that,” he said.
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.
