How Much Of This Has Been Paid For By The U.S. Taxpayer?

Elon Musk and the DOGE crew are now a few weeks into their work, and the examples of brazen waste, fraud, and misuse of taxpayer funds are exploding forth like a gusher.

At the first agency targeted, USAID, an early revelation was that much of the left-wing press has been quietly underwritten by the taxpayers in the form of hundreds of phony premium-priced subscriptions to such outlets as The New York Times, Associated Press, Politico, and Reuters. On February 5, the White House put out a document titled “At USAID, Waste and Abuse Runs Deep,” listing a dozen or so categories of abusive payments, including “Millions to EcoHealth Alliance — which was involved in research at the Wuhan lab . . . Hundreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria . . . Hundreds of millions of dollars to fund . . . the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan, benefiting the Taliban. . . .”

These are just examples. What other pet causes and activities of the Left have been getting paid for by USAID, and more broadly, by other various federal agencies?

A notable aspect of the past few weeks is that the shutting down of some of the federal money spigot funding the Left has been accompanied by the drying up of many of the notable activities of recent years. Could it be that many of these activities have been funded by the American taxpayers? Here are some examples where I would like to know how much has been paid for by the U.S. taxpayer:

Migrant caravans. We have been treated to extensive reporting of caravans of thousands of people trekking north from South America, through Central America and Mexico to the U.S. border. These treks take weeks. During that time, the people appear to be well fed. They seem to have camping supplies and equipment that magically appear for them to sleep at night. The cost of organizing one of these caravans and feeding and supplying it has to run into the many millions of dollars. Suddenly with USAID disrupted, the caravans have melted away. Who was putting up the money for these caravans? Did much of it come from the U.S. taxpayer?

Services in the U.S. to illegal aliens. Services provided to illegal aliens once in the U.S. can vary greatly from place to place, but can include everything from food to shelter to medical care to help finding a permanent home. Many to most illegal aliens also seem to have access to legal advice on how to avoid getting deported or how to present a claim for asylum. How much of all of this gets funded by the federal taxpayer? As another gigantic example, illegal aliens are supposedly not eligible for Medicaid and other federal medical assistance. Does anybody think that the Biden administration actually enforced this rule? How many illegal aliens in fact are receiving federally-funded medical care?

DEI. Over the past few years, a whole infrastructure of “diversity, equity and inclusion” stuff has been put together — staffs in every business and school, training programs, curricula, books, etc., etc. Who has been paying for this, particularly in the education sector? On February 11, Fox News here reported that DOGE had found and cut some $100 million of spending in the Department of Education directed toward DEI training programs in public schools. That is a start, but clearly is just a tiny piece of total spending on DEI. How much have the federal taxpayers been spending to support this propaganda?

Climate alarm. As with DEI, schools are filled with an infrastructure of climate alarm propaganda, ranging from staff training to curricula to textbooks and more. How much is the federal government spending on this?

Those are just a few categories that occur to me today. The funding model of agencies like USAID appears to be to make multi-million dollar grants to left-wing NGOs for high-minded sounding topics like “promoting democracy,” and then the NGOs spend the money as they see fit. It would not surprise me at all if we start to learn that things like Antifa and Black Lives Matter got large amounts of back-door funding that originated with the federal taxpayer. And how about the wave of anti-semitic demonstrations and riots that broke out on U.S. campuses in the aftermath of the massacre of October 7, 2023? Was federal taxpayer money involved in supporting that? I would actually be surprised if it wasn’t.