In the annals of government reform efforts, the efforts of Elon Musk and his task force of DOGE techies are more than tough love.
Because the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has (mostly) been given access to the books of government agencies, it has spotted billions of dollars in questionable grants, make-work programs, and outright gifts to politically connected activists who provided political support to their government paymasters. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers discuss a few examples, but also address a deeper question: “So what?”
“Even if the cuts DOGE has found are drops of water in the ocean of the U.S. national debt,” says Schweizer, “they shift the conversation.”
From a $324,000 grant to enhance “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programming within Integrated Pest Management” at the agriculture department to a $3 million Department of Education report that showed that its previous reports were not being used, the details are eye-popping even where the amounts are not.
The General Services Administration purchased 37,000 WinZip licenses for employees, DOGE found, although its file shrinking functions have been part of the Windows operating system for years, for example.
“Meanwhile, we’re stealin’ logins at GAI” to save money, Eggers quips.
Schweizer stresses that the stories show not just bureaucratic inertia, but efforts by the political class to launder money. At the Environmental Protection Agency, new director Lee Zeldin unearthed a $2 billion grant to a start-up nonprofit group associated with Georgia Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.
The $2 billion was used for the “decarbonization of homes” in low-income communities and paid for new household appliances, such as water heaters, induction stoves, solar panels, EV chargers, and weatherization, according to an April 2024 press release from Power Forward Communities as reported by Fox News.
Zeldin also identified a potential “conflict of interest” payment of $5 billion to the former director of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund under President Joe Biden. “All this money was put up front,” Zeldin said. “It was going to their friends on the left.”
The CEO of Stacey Abrams’s “Power Forward” nonprofit was a man named Timothy Mayopoulos, a lawyer and businessman and also a former political appointee under the Obama administration to Fannie Mae.
The problem with this kind of grant-making, Schweizer points out, is that little of the money actually gets to the people it is supposed to help. “By the time it gets to the double-wide trailer for better insulation, a huge percentage of it has gone to these politically connected cronies,” he says.
This kind of “nest-feathering” is nothing new. In his book Throw Them All Out, Schweizer pointed out that under the Obama administration 80 percent of the grants and loans given to green-energy startup companies were given to companies associated to members of the Obama campaign’s finance committee.
“This is why DOGE is important,” Schweizer says. “It is exposing the money-laundering operations.”
In his book Clinton Cash, Schweizer reported how the Clintons steered USAID funds to help their foundation’s benefactors. Among them was an Irish entrepreneur named Denis O’Brien. His company, Digicel, got a $2.5 million contract in earthquake-ravaged Haiti to create digital banking services.
“It was called the Haiti Mobile Money Initiative. This was a dual grant award from USAID and the [Bill and Melinda] Gates Foundation. So, they funded a cell phone banking system,” he explains. “Now, it just so happens that there’s a guy who runs a cell phone company in Haiti, who is a very good “Friend of Bill.” He adds that Bill Clinton made a series of speeches in Ireland that were sponsored by O’Brien, and the Clinton Foundation received a donation.
Schweizer reported in Clinton Cash that in September 2010, weeks after Digicel applied to receive the grant, Bill Clinton gave three speeches in Ireland and Jamaica that were sponsored by O’Brien. The Clinton Foundation received a donation after the speeches, and the foundation’s records show that O’Brien personally donated between $5 million and $10 million sometime between 2010 and 2011.
And, naturally, the Biden family repeated the pattern. Funds from a USAID program during the Obama administration to enhance oil and gas production in Ukraine went to the Ukrainian company Burisma for a “municipal energy reform project.” The funding arrived a few months after Burisma put Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter on its board of directors, despite his having no experience in the oil and gas business.
“This is legal graft,” Schweizer says. “You figure out a way to do it. So, you are crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s, but you are basically manipulating and funneling that money to other entities.”
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