(Just The News)—Gov. Bob Ferguson is the first Washington governor in more than 30 years to be found in violation of the state’s executive ethics law, according to the board’s enforcement website.
The governor signed an agreement last week, ahead of Friday’s Executive Ethics Board meeting, admitting to violating two provisions of the Ethics in Public Service Act. The agreement was accepted by the board during the meeting.
It’s the first time a governor has faced enforcement action from the state board since its inception in 1995, the board’s website shows.
The first violation stemmed from using state resources for private or another person’s benefit, and the second by using his position to secure privileges for a former aide.
The stipulations approved on Friday resolve a complaint from last July, after Ferguson allowed former Chief Strategy Officer Mike Webb to fly with him on a state plane to Tri-Cities.
As a result of the agreement, the first-term governor must pay a $4,000 fine, with half suspended if he avoids further ethics violations for the next two years.
“Ferguson knew there was an extra seat on the aircraft, so they offered it to Mike Webb,” according to Friday’s signed agreement. “Ferguson admits that they made a mistake, and it will not happen again.”
Neither Webb nor Ferguson immediately responded to a request for comment before publishing Friday.
As previously reported by The Center Square, Webb had resigned in March 2025 amid allegations that he created a hostile work environment.
However, that didn’t stop the governor from taking Webb on a state patrol plane to Tri-Cities, where Webb had a meeting on the same day Ferguson was there for business.
According to an ethics investigation, the taxpayer-funded trip was billed at $2,094.68 per flight hour.
“The individual’s presence did not displace any state employee,” Ferguson previously wrote, requesting the board to dismiss the complaint. “It did not create additional cost in terms of fuel, staffing or timе.”
Ethics board enforcement
State lawmakers created the Executive Ethics Board at the request of former Gov. Mike Lowry and Attorney General Christine Gregoire in 1994.
According to the board’s enforcement results webpage, only a single violation against the Office of the Governor is listed, but it was against a former assistant director of Indian Affairs.
Lowry and former Govs. Gary Locke and Jay Inslee faced ethics and campaign finance complaints in the past, but none resulted in formal enforcement actions from the ethics board against a sitting governor like Ferguson.
An email from The Center Square seeking confirmation that Ferguson is the first governor to face a penalty from the board was not returned before publication.
By accepting the stipulations, Ferguson avoided a public hearing and fines up to $5,000 per violation.
The Washington State Democratic Party did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
“Ferguson has been cutting corners on ethical behavior his whole political career,” Rep. Jim Walsh, chairman of the Washington State Republican Party, wrote in a statement.
“This latest scandal — giving his handsy political guru a ‘free’ ride on a taxpayer-funded private plane — is just the clearest example.”
“Many left-leaning politicians think they’re clever. Some think that signaling virtue in public buys them the ability to bend ethics rules in private. That’s not how it works. Ethics are how you act when no one is looking,” Walsh continued.
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.
