OPINION:
Sen. William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat, delighted in announcing his “Golden Fleece Awards.” Beginning in 1975, he spotlighted the latest waste of taxpayer money by federal bureaucrats.
Democrats don’t do that sort of Elon Musk stuff anymore. They are focused on themselves — power, money and ideologies. Diversity, equity and inclusion. Social justice. The transgender movement. Climate change. Woke-ism. Left-wing billionaires. Stock trading.
Thanks to President Trump’s creation, the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE), we not only know the Democrats couldn’t care less about waste, they revel in it. They turned the federal budget into their war chest, festooned with who knows how many slush funds feeding dollars out the door to left-wing activists promoting the Democratic Party. We the taxpayers now subsidize the Democratic Party. We are all the donor class.
DOGE — led by software-automobile-space rocket mogul Elon Musk and staffed by energetic CEOs and Gen Z techies — showed the nation this corruption in just the first 130 days, augmented by Mr. Trump’s Cabinet, whose members joined the DOGE cult.
Mr. Trump avoided the “commission” trap. He practices “Trump Time.” He had no patience for appointing a bunch of business and government leaders to hold hearings and then issue a boring report on how to manage taxpayer money.
Instead, Mr. Trump dispatched DOGE like a quick-strike shock force to penetrate the gates of government immediately, find waste, expose it and then stop it. Mr. Musk so infuriated the government class that liberals started burning down his car dealerships, vandalizing his sold Teslas and talking of assassination.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin struck one of the most telling blows. He quickly put a stop to Biden loyalists sending billions of dollars out the door, post-election, to Democratic cronies, with little oversight. There waiting was Stacey Abrams, the Democratic activist who claimed she is the truly elected governor of Georgia. A “nonprofit” with which she is associated was suddenly in line to receive $2 billion for people to buy electric stoves.
Here’s the EPA press release headline: “Administrator Lee Zeldin Finds Gold Bars from EPA at Stacey Abrams’ Connected Group, Biden-Harris Ethical Red Flags.” The “gold bars” is a reference to a video by an EPA activist likening the flood of cash to gold bars tossed from the Titanic.
“Roughly 20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA,” said Mr. Zeldin. “This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”
An EPA spokesman told me, “DOGE’s work across the federal government has been extremely valuable, saving taxpayers billions. EPA has worked diligently with DOGE to eliminate wasteful federal spending, including 400 environmental justice grants.”
Climate change is the key ideology for Democrats and the political left. It gives them control over our lives; it makes them rich personally and it enriches donors who launder the money back to the party. That’s billions for solar farms, windmills and consultants to promote climate theories.
Let’s look at the DOGE stop signs.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was handing out millions to a loyal Democratic Party support class: the LGBTQ+ movement. Items such as $350,000 “interactive gay travel guides” and a “digital storytelling project exploring and celebrating the lives of transgender older adults … in the Pacific Northwest.” DOGE says it cancelled $163 million in grants.
Florida schools received $800,000 to teach social justice to near-term voters (college students).
The Department of Labor was spending millions on gender equity.
The Department of Energy awarded $3.7 billion climate change grants, 16 of them after the November election.
The U.S. National Science Foundation canceled $203 million worth of DEI grants, including “Building Racial Equity in Marine Science.”
No agency faced faster DOGE penetration than the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This is a quasi foreign aid/left-wing activist fund. To Republicans, the independent federal agency shows how the Democratic Party corrupts a money-laden office to siphon off taxpayer funds for Democrats.
Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, says President Joe Biden’s USAID was so lax that it funded terrorists, especially Hamas in Gaza.
Mr. Musk, who left the DOGE command in May, posted on his platform, X: “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
The next month, USAID was shuttered. Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended over 80% of programs and moved the rest under the State Department.
“The 5200 contracts that are now canceled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Mr. Rubio posted on X.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul listed some USAID grants: $2 million on transgender surgeries and hormone therapy; a trip by Ukrainian women designers to a Paris fashion show; nearly $5 million to Ukraine’s public affairs office in Kyiv to pay social media influencers.
On another front, congressional Republicans have documented how the Biden team operated a partisan censorship network fueled with taxpayer money to “nonprofit” groups under the guise of blunting foreign propaganda. Some groups turned around and targeted American conservative news media. This helps Democrats who rely greatly on the unchallenged liberal news media to promote their candidates and talking points.
Mr. Musk is gone. But DOGE lives on. Worker bees are being institutionalized as permanent political appointees across departments. Can DOGE find enough spending cuts by itself to reduce the debt right away? Unlikely.
But it exposed how Democrats rip us off for their own good. Maybe they are embarrassed enough to restart Mr. Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece Awards.”
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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