OPINION:
The left’s use of the federal purse for self-enrichment is coming to an end. As it audits Uncle Sam’s books, the Department of Government Efficiency is amassing evidence of Democratic administrations abusing the Treasury to reward faithful servants of the liberal cause.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, for instance, just revealed “seven woke university grants” involving $54 million in payments to professors on the far-left fringe. The University of Southern California took $9 million to investigate racist roads, and the University of California, Davis, accepted $12 million for “accelerating equitable decarbonization.”
San Jose State University pocketed $6 million to look into “intermodal inequities, particularly how improvements to auto travel can benefit higher income, often white drivers, while depressing transit ridership potential and depriving it of revenues necessary to provide comprehensive services to lower income, often BIPOC people and research into using crowdsourcing and collaborative planning to address safety concerns of women and gender-nonconforming people using public transportation.”
The current administration is transitioning to more useful academic inquiries. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services released a study documenting the irreversible harm done by taxpayer-subsidized surgery on confused little girls who think they want to be boys and vice versa. Rachel Campos-Duffy spoke with National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya about the contrasting research priorities.
Referring to how things were done under Democrats, Dr. Bhattacharya said: “What we saw was the scientific establishment has closed ranks around itself, prohibited dissent, didn’t allow people to say, ‘Are you sure the evidence is good?’ In the Trump administration, it’s the exact opposite.”
The previous team’s scrutiny of public disbursements was so loose that the grant process became a self-serve operation. Last week, Levita Almuete Ferrer admitted she approved payments to herself amounting to $657,000 while working as a budget analyst for the State Department under President Biden when nobody bothered verifying the legitimacy of expenditures.
Over two years, she printed herself more than 60 checks, worth around $10,000 each. Once the ink was dry, she edited her name out of the electronic accounting records to cover her tracks.
Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, filed embezzlement charges that could send her to prison for a decade. Under sentencing guidelines, however, she could wind up spending less than 18 months behind bars, depending on the mood of U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper. It will be worth watching to see how the magistrate who imposed the most over-the-top sentences on Jan. 6 protesters treats an actual crook.
DOGE leader Elon Musk outlined the risk of not making an example of those who loot America’s bank account. “Generally, the fraud starts out small, and they try to hide it. But then, year after year, if nobody stops the fraud, it gets more and more brazen, and every year it gets bigger until they’re literally renting out stadiums,” he said in a Fox News interview.
He was referring to a Department of Education COVID-19 relief fund that allowed government functionaries to draw money without properly justifying expenses. The cash paid for Las Vegas hotel rooms and large venues for “conferences” in resort locations. Once the DOGE team required receipts before approving such payments, the government-financed partying came to a halt.
Now that Donald Trump is president, Democrats find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to pay for their own luxury vacations.
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