(The Epoch Times)—Three U.S. tax-exempt organizations linked to Shanghai-based businessman Neville Roy Singham have until Oct. 20 to comply with congressional subpoenas or face further action, including possible depositions of 21 officials and staff members, as lawmakers investigate alleged Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence through American nonprofits.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) issued the warning on Oct. 13 to The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, accusing them of refusing to provide documents concerning their finances and connections to Singham.
“Either these organizations turn over the documents, or their leaders will answer the Committee’s questions under oath,” Smith said.
The committee said potential deposition subpoenas would cover eight people at The People’s Forum, seven at BreakThrough News, and six at Tricontinental.
Singham Funding Network Under Scrutiny
Singham, an American technology entrepreneur living in Shanghai, has financed left-wing advocacy and media organizations through a network of nonprofit entities and charitable accounts.
He has participated in at least one CCP propaganda forum in Shanghai. At a February congressional hearing, Smith also identified Singham’s business connections to Chinese media ventures, including Shanghai Maku Cultural Communication, which has described its mission using a CCP slogan that promotes Beijing’s preferred narratives internationally.
The committee alleges that Singham’s financial network has helped advance CCP influence operations in the United States.
In July, the committee subpoenaed the three nonprofits after they declined earlier requests for financial documents.
Its July correspondence cited previous reporting that more than $22 million flowed from Singham’s donor-advised fund to The People’s Forum and more than $16 million to Tricontinental between 2017 and 2022. The committee also cited approximately $1.1 million going to BreakThrough News between 2022 and 2023.
Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) previously described a funding structure in which money moved from Singham-associated businesses through privately held companies and donor-advised funds before reaching nonprofit recipients.
“By the time the money reaches the end user, the original donor’s name has been stripped away three or four times,” LaHood told The Epoch Times in February.
The committee is seeking records of these financial arrangements, communications with Singham or foreign entities concerning finances and organizational control, and information about foreign-linked donations and projects sponsored through other tax-exempt organizations.
Congress Examines Foreign Funding, Tax Laws
Smith said the investigation is intended to determine whether existing tax laws adequately prevent foreign interests from using U.S. nonprofits to conceal funding sources or exercise influence over American activities.
In September, Smith and House Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) also asked the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service to investigate the broader Singham-linked nonprofit network.
BreakThrough News, in an Oct. 9 statement, accused the committee of targeting its journalists for their political views and maintained that it receives no outside editorial direction. Its attorneys have raised First Amendment objections to the subpoena.
The committee has rejected those objections, maintaining that its investigation concerns financial arrangements and organizational control rather than political speech.
BreakThrough News said journalists Rania Khalek, Zoe Alexandra, and Amanda Yee were among the staff members named in the latest congressional correspondence as potential deposition targets.
If the three organizations fail to meet the Oct. 20 deadline, Smith has warned that the committee will pursue more aggressive oversight measures, potentially compelling officials and staff members to testify under oath.
The Epoch Times sought comment from the House Ways and Means Committee, The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental, but none had responded by publication time.
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.
