Imagine working at a large company like ExxonMobil and being told that an audit was underway. Managers would be busy justifying spending and personnel and how they were enabling the company to prosper.
If the auditor found that someone had deliberately hidden or misclassified expenditures for personal gain or ideological reasons, company lawyers would not call it merely “waste” or “mismanagement.”
They’d call it “theft” or perhaps “embezzlement.” And they’d call the authorities.
It’s become clear that the federal government has been stealing trillions from American taxpayers and hiding how it’s been spent.
It’s not just waste or mismanagement, but a large-scale mugging. Likewise, it’s misleading to say the Obama and Biden administrations were “incompetent.” They were staffed by dedicated ideologues who used our tax dollars to fund their leftist revolution.
Under President Donald Trump, the whiz kids at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are using incredibly sophisticated algorithms to unearth decades of unexamined spending.
They are releasing it at breakneck speed so that Americans will learn about it before the Democrat media and overreaching judges can throw a blanket over it.
The DOGE probe is the fiscal equivalent of an anesthesia-free colonoscopy, except for the eight-months-of-pay buyout offer to federal employees, 77,000 of whom accepted it.
For years, the federal government has put trillions of dollars into the Beltway crowd’s pockets and into organizations favored by the permanent state. These include Planned Parenthood, LGBTQ groups, climate boondoggles and hundreds of leftist Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) overseas.
DOGE’s shocking audit of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is the tip of the iceberg. Hard-pressed taxpayers are not happy about funding drag queen events in Central America or terrorists linked to Hamas.
It’s the sheer size of the scam that’s so striking. Haywood Talcove, chief executive officer of Lexis-Nexis special services, testified to a House committee on Feb. 12 that federal agencies had reported $2.7 trillion in “cumulative improper payments” since 2003.
“Ineligible recipients and criminal networks” regularly rip off the system, he said.
Fiscal hawks like the late Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and the late Democratic Sen. William Proxmire of Wisconsin published annual lists of absurd government spending. But they didn’t have Musk’s genius squad.
Democrats are screaming that this is a “constitutional crisis.” It’s the same song they sang during the first Trump term.
Between 2017 and 2021, Democrats on Capitol Hill slapped the White House with phony scandals while the permanent bureaucracy leaked anything it could to embarrass the administration. It’s amazing that Mr. Trump accomplished as much as he did.
This time, Trump 2.0 has moved so fast with executive orders and DOGE that the genie can’t be put back in the bottle. Alternative media have exposed the lying legacy media as partisan hacks instead of journalists. Few believe them anymore when they declare “the end of democracy.”
Democrat state attorneys general have filed dozens of lawsuits alleging that the White House – the executive branch – has no business running the executive agencies. They think judges should do it—their kind of judges.
One judge granted a temporary restraining order of the president’s first-day order taking down gender ideology websites from government health agencies (HHS, CDC, and FDA) and ordered them restored.
A judge in Baltimore on Thursday issued an order to resume transgender treatments at hospitals and clinics, which Mr. Trump had suspended.
Two judges halted a Trump executive order against birthright citizenship. Yet another ruled the Treasury’s personnel files off limits to the agency’s new secretary.
A particularly ambitious judge issued a ruling halting the spending freeze and audits.
“What this federal judge has ruled is clearly unconstitutional,” said Gary Bauer, who was President Reagan’s domestic policy adviser. “He cannot order the executive branch of government to not conduct financial audits of the agencies it oversees.”
The micro-managing judges, most of whom were appointed by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, have a warped conception of the separation of powers.
"If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on X on Feb. 10. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal. Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power."
Democrats had no problem when Mr. Obama said, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone" to go around Congress.
They also cheered Joe Biden as he defied the U.S. Supreme Court when it ruled against his illegal transfer of hundreds of millions in unpaid student loans to taxpayers. Mr. Biden also ordered unconstitutional lockdowns, mandates, and a halt to evictions for non-payment of rent.
On Jan. 31, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called the Trump administration’s agenda “extreme” and said, “We are going to fight it legislatively. We’re going to fight it in the courts, and we’re going to fight it in the streets.”
At a protest outside the Treasury Department on Feb. 4, Rep. LaMonica McIver, New Jersey Democrat, called for shutting down the U.S. Senate. “We are at war!” she said.
This whole “resistance” schtick might have worked if the American people were still in the dark. But they’re not, and most of them like what Mr. Trump is doing.
It’s not waste he’s fighting, although there is plenty of that. It’s theft of their money and their God-given liberties.
This article first appeared here.
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