Government waste – now in the crosshairs of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – is not a new phenomenon in Washington, DC. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) says he and some others in Congress have been “screaming from the mountaintops,” but their voices drifted across the halls of legislation unrecognized.
The spending hawks have had their moments, like when former House member Matt Gaetz forced a vote on the job performance of former Speak Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy was ousted, opening the door for current Speaker Mike Johnson.
But even when united as fierce fiscal conservatives, the impact hasn’t been what it is now with Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, under the authority of President Donald Trump, acting as a spending superhero in a live-action fight against the far-left social initiatives of a government agency, USAID, and its abuse of taxpayer dollars.
Perry and others could call it out, but “the legacy media would never report it,” he said on Washington Watch Thursday.
Times have changed. The legacy media no longer corners the market on news. Musk, even before his friendship with Trump, had a big voice after his purchase of the social media platform Twitter, which he renamed X. It’s made a difference.
“The microphone has been turned into a megaphone. When people hear about this waste, they want something done about it,” Perry told show host Tony Perkins.
Now Congress appears to be catching up, and a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on USAID Thursday was an attempt to get something done. It was interrupted by protesters calling for restored funding for PEPFAR, a global AIDS relief program established during the George W. Bush administration.
Committee chairman Brian Mast (R-Florida) needled protesters for being behind in their information and not realizing the funding had already been restored. He suggested they watch Fox News.
"I guess these guys don't watch the news. They didn't realize that PEPFAR was one of the many programs that did prove to be life-saving, so the funding was restored,” Mast said. "Somebody better give them a link to, I don't know, maybe Fox News or something like that."
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has given an exemption to the federal funding freeze for programs that are considered “life-saving.”
Musk’s megaphone has brought attention to the many USAID abuses. Here are a few:
$1.5 million to advance LGBTQ in Serbia
$70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland
$32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru
$2 million for sex-change procedures in Guatemala
$15 million for contraceptives in Afghanistan
$1.5 million for climate leaders in Tajikistan
$20 million for a new Sesame Street show in Iraq
Biden’s remaking of USAID
Reform efforts were quieter, but Trump’s first administration had brought some change to USAID, the organization’s former deputy administrator, Max Primorac, told Perkins, but it all vanished quickly when Joe Biden took office in 2021.
There had been key gains in the areas of international religious freedom and free market economics. All of that ended as woke initiatives and corruption spread throughout the organization, Primorac said. While USAID is considered to be an organization that helps overseas, he said the Biden administration used it to help friends at home.
“They used or misused foreign aid as a global platform [for] woke ideology, DEI, gender fluidity, abortion, climate agenda …. When you consider that 50% of this money stays here in Washington, DC, not only was it a way of trying to remake the world in their progressive left-wing image, it also provided a ton of money for all of their friends here.”
The USAID budget under the Biden administration increased from $22 billion in 2020 to roughly $44 billion right now, Primorac said. “They had a huge money pot to promote this progressive agenda.”
USAID was trending toward such abuse under Barack Obama’s administration, Primorac said, such that when Trump’s first administration tried to secure funds for persecuted Christians in northern Iraq it was met with resistance. “We had difficulty trying to get the bureaucrats to accept that we should be helping them,” he said.
Democrats argued that helping Christians in Iraq would have violated the Constitution’s Establishment Clause which separates church and state.
Eventually, Trump sent Primorac – who is now with The Heritage Foundation – to Iraq for 18 months to ensure the aid reached the people in need.
While USAID is a chief offender, abuse is prevalent throughout a foreign aid industry in which 95% of donations to political campaigns “go to the left,” Primorac explained.
Musk has his megaphone, but Democrats are using theirs too.
“We didn’t elect him, we didn’t select him, we didn’t ask for him,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), also calling Musk a “thief and gangsta” as Democrats rallied in support of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on Monday. In like vein, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) called for Musk, hired by the U.S. president, to keep his “greedy grubby hands off of our government.”
Even the good gets corrupted
Congress has restored the PEPFAR funding, but that might not be a good thing. A program that saved lives when it started began to shift its focus under Biden.
“They started funding International Planned Parenthood and organizations that promote abortion,” Primorac said.
Christian leaders in Kenya and Mozambique last year, he explained, were horrified “by the fact that this really good, godly program had suddenly become utterly corrupted, using it to push trans ideology and abortion” in Africa and other very conservative parts of the world.
As budget negotiations continue in the House, Congressman Perry believes there is real improvement in the area of spending … although he concedes it’s not as much as he would like to see.
The Senate will likely submit a budget with a lower figure than the House, but details of the cuts are still being discussed in both chambers.
Spending has been “overcharged and out of control,” he said – but fiscal sanity is “closer than we’ve been in a long time, but we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
