Pretty much any libertarian can quote chapter and verse of how governments waste taxpayer money, but even the most doctrinaire libertarian must be boggled at the extent of waste and corruption enabled by the use of the cover organization USAID. And it’s only one federal agency! We may never be able to get a proper accounting, but it seems that a vast share of US tax revenue has been going to things never dreamed of by the framers of the Constitution or even by the legislators that set up all these various agencies.
On MeWe, Marc Adkins shared a post from a friend, discussing the USAID mess:
One of the dangers President Trump, Elon and DOGE face is that there is just so much crazy, bad, virtually unbelievable news coming out of USAID, the sheer volume [de-]sensitizes people to it.
I must admit, I’m beginning to be overwhelmed by the bad news. One begins to feel a sense of futility, especially when you have been paying taxes your entire life — for me, I have paid taxes since I was sixteen (on my part time jobs and gig jobs through high school and college) — that’s 50 years, and while what I have paid is extremely small compared to the USAID budget, it is simple math to calculate that everything I have ever paid, as well as everything many of us have ever paid has been flushed down the toilet. That is a tough thing to take.
And this has been going on since USAID was created by JFK’s executive order in 1961.
One of the hardest things to swallow in recent years is discovering that your tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist friends may have been closer to the truth all this time. I mean, yeah, we all knew that the government wasted money as if that was their main job, but all the whacko theories about the CIA destabilizing hostile (and friendly) foreign governments (Ngô Đình Diệm waves hello), humanitarian projects being covers for espionage, all kinds of secret squirrel nonsense all over the globe … may have been far closer to the truth than what CBS, The New York Times, or PBS had to say about them. So instead of being the calm, rational people we thought ourselves to be, we’ve been the chumps for all these years. That will leave a mark.
I don’t think it is a leap too far to say that in some way, each one of us has paid for the enrichment of a vast array of US Senators, Representatives, cabinet members, agency heads and even vice presidents and presidents, as well as funding terrorists and brutal dictators worldwide. Hell, it appears we are paying lower level government employees double because the same people are drawing two paychecks!
Then there are the billions that are being automatically paid, flowing like a river to unknown entities, criminals, fraudsters, and into the accounts of programs, the authorization of which expired years and decades ago.
It is almost too much to take in, especially when, in the face of such obvious money laundering, payola, mismanagement and waste, Democrats hit the streets to protest the people uncovering all of it rather than screaming about the criminal waste and let’s not kid ourselves, this scandal is a left wing Democrat thing, they absolutely own it because this money is flowing to left wing NGOs, media and other organizations — I daresay there is a significant slice of the pie that winds up in Democrat coffers at the end of the process.
The memes are almost always on point:
The simple fact is they do not give two shits about the taxpayer working his ass off just have his entire life’s sum of his taxes from his career of working ten hours a day in the blistering sun and freezing cold just to pay his share of a USAID program for transing handicapped children in Botswana.
It is shameless, of course, but something we have come to expect from Democrats and every single Democrat who protests this should be run out of office and never allowed near government again — ever.
The problem isn’t really Democrats or even RINOs … it’s the seductive nature of political office, and the US government is the biggest, richest, most pervasive government that has ever existed. No matter how pure and noble your aims may be, prolonged contact with the vast resources of the US government and the ability to direct the efforts of that government toward your goals will overpower the scruples of the most honest of men. [Insert Elrond and Isildur “cast it into the fire” meme here.] This is, I think, why DOGE is so disruptive: it has the potential to utterly destroy vast swathes of existing government blight and perhaps even keep it from regenerating. A bit. Maybe. Even a dynamo like Elon will probably find that there’s just too much to tackle in one presidential term.
The butt hurt Democrats are beginning to parse things trying to minimize them. You heard how it works when Martha Raddatz told J.D. Vance after he mentioned that TdA gangs had taken over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado. She said, “The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes …” as if the people in those complexes should grin and bear it because it just isn’t that bad.
Democrats have tried this when illegal aliens commit murders. They will trot out numbers that “prove’ American citizens are far more violent and it’s just a few murders anyway — as if the murders of innocents like Laken Riley are a statistic rather than a completely avoidable tragedy.
There are ludicrous people claiming that millions being sent abroad to support DEI, transgender plays, or to teach the Taliban how to be sensitive to women’s rights is just such a small number, it is OK – when, as in the Colorado gang situation, none of it should be happening.
The millions upon million that were sent to the left-wing media outlets that complied with the Democrats’ wishes to have hit pieces written about GOP candidates is harder to defend, but I’m sure some moron on MSNBC or CNN will find a way.
Here in Canada, of course, we’re much more familiar with the government of the day getting the kindest of treatment from the media … because the media get big subsidies from that very government, but at least it’s somewhat out in the open. US media may have been similarly subsidized, but until now it had been completely obscured.
Some people legitimately need help, and I am sure there are programs that do have a benefit to America, but this is the Democrats’ fault because the only way I see to fix it is to burn it all down and start over with an ironclad approval and review process. Every one of these alleged aid agencies should be required to produce an annual report for public view the same way legitimate private charities do.
And the quicker we strike the match, the faster this gets fixed.”
On Substack, Francis Turner points out that we’re only into the third week of the Trumptastrophe, and it’s glorious:
We’re in the third week of the political tsunami that is Trump 2.0. The DOGE boys are getting access to systems and turning off the money flows and the DC swamp creatures are panicking. I think they may be mistaking what happens now for about as bad as it can get, while actually what we have now is that moment when the sea retreats abruptly from the beach and poor widdle crabs and fishies are left flapping in pools that are too small for them. Although the FBI agents and DoJ persecutors prosecutors who were involved in the Jan 6 investigations and the Jack Smith fishing investigations are probably feeling the wave coming down on them. In particular I would very much not want to be the agent who pawed through Melania’s underwear.
Right now the lacka money, lacka graft and lacka future employment seems bad, and that may be all some of the bottom feeders experience, but in the weeks ahead we’re going to see just what the federal government was spending all that money on and just who was benefiting and what they were doing. People with nice modern automobiles, large houses and so on may be required to explain where the money for those possessions came from. That’s going to lead to prosecutions and, well, as Trump and the Jan 6 guys know the process is part of the punishment. Moreover, since the graft flow will have stopped, paying for defense lawyers etc. is going to be interesting. In particular it’s going to be really interesting because the big firms that might normally step up and offer pro bono support are likely to find the requests for support overwhelming and, simultaneously, their regular income from paying clients drastically reduced.
Well shucks
Mind you we have a while before that wave comes crashing down so it’s worth noting what we have learned so far.
The first is that Trump 2.0 is uninterested in slowing down. As I said in my previous post, DOGE are working 24×7 while the swamp is used to 9-5, Monday to Friday. With generous time for lunch etc. That means Trump/DOGE can (and have) got inside the OODA loop of the enemy. We can see this by how protests about DOGE actions are a couple of days after the action has happened. Moreover we see Trump people saying things like “yes we need to look at the Department of Education” which causes talking heads to rush to its defense. This is quite possibly a ruse and deliberate distraction.
