Tag Archive for: Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Pedophilia and Politics

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In an important recap of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revelations, journalist Margaret Flavin reports on an audit of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as discussed in a recent interview with Vice President JD Vance. Flavin’s article, “Vice President Vance Underscores Reports of Massive Waste and Corruption in Foreign Aid (Video),” posted on Gateway Pundit, June 29, 2025. The results of the audit reveal that only 12% of the money allocated to USAID for aid arrives at its destination! How is this possible?

Vance explains the corruption:

“So, we send $100,000 to this group to buy food for poor kids in Africa, okay.”

“And what actually happens is it’s not $100,000 that go to the food for the poor kids in Africa. The NGO, the non-government organization that gets that money, contracts it out to somebody else, and then they subcontract it. So, there’s like three or four middlemen.”

“Marco Rubio, who’s the Secretary of State, he’s a very good friend. What he told me is that his best estimate, after he had his team look at it, is that 88 cents of every dollar was actually being collected by middlemen.”

“So, every dollar we were spending, humanitarian assistance, 12 cents, was actually making it to people who needed it.

In fiscal year 2023, USAID distributed $7 billion of American taxpayer monies worldwide, and less than $1 billion was actually distributed to the needy. This confirms the waste, fraud, and abuse that Elon Musk’s DOGE team discovered. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded with his March 10, 2025, announcement that 83% of USAID programs, a whopping 5200 contracts, many were cancelled saving tens of billions of American taxpayer dollars. The 1,000 remaining programs will be managed under the State Department.

Marco Rubio’s March 10, 2025 tweet:

After a 6-week review, we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID.

The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled 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.

In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping (approximately 1,000) to now be administered more effectively under the State Department.

Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform.

So, who are the big losers in the crackdown on USAID, and what programs and policies that harmed or did not serve the national interest were they funding?

To answer this question, it is important to remember the history of USAID. Former President John F. Kennedy created USAID in November 1961 by Executive Order 10973 with the specific purpose of supplying aid when the president deems it to be in the national interest. According to journalist Mike Gonzalez at The Heritage Foundation, “USAID devolved into an agency that spent money on programs that hindered the pursuit of freedom overseas and directly contravened our national interest.” Gonzalez’s February 19, 2025 article, “The Unmasking of USAID,” explains:

“During the Obama years the U.S. Agency for International Development was used to promote abroad policies that remain controversial within American society itself and that serve no clear national security interests,” “I wrote in a 2017 Heritage Foundation study.

These agendas, I wrote, included programs that promoted—sometimes as a condition of the aid—lifestyle choices that Americans debated for decades or are still being debated, such as transgender rights and same-sex marriage or trained foreign citizens in street “activism,” “civic engagement,” and “mobilization.”…

I added in my paper that in the promotion of radical agendas in several countries, USAID has found an ideal partner in George Soros, a billionaire supporter of far-left causes worldwide. Indeed, evidence began to emerge that, under former President Barack Obama, USAID made Soros’s foundations the main implementer of its aid.

The radical leftist/Marxist programs and policies of former President Barack Obama, embraced and financed by billionaire George Soros, and expanded under the ghost presidency of former President Joe Biden, are being dismantled by MAGA President Donald Trump. And USAID is being restored to its original mission to supply aid when the president deems it to be in the national interest. The diametrically opposed interpretations of our national interest are reflected in the policies and programs of radical Democrat past presidents Obama/Biden vs MAGA President Donald Trump.

Make America Great Again (MAGA) principles follow the U.S. Constitution to protect and preserve national sovereignty and individual sovereignty in our constitutional republic. Former president Marxist Barack Obama sought to fundamentally transform America into a socialist state in his first two terms, then through ghost President Biden, and now through his ongoing support of Marxist ideology designed to create chaos and to collapse America from within. The cultural battles between Democrat Marxism and MAGA Americanism are irreconcilable differences that have bifurcated our nation and left us teetering on revolutionary divorce.

The 2017 Heritage Foundation study referenced above includes the abhorrent sexualizing of children. First introduced unsuccessfully into Hungary by Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs (1885-1971), cultural terrorism is a communist tactic designed to destroy the nuclear family which is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition that is the foundation of Americanism, our constitutional republic, and western civilization.

Before the Bolsheviks came to power, Hungary was a Catholic nation. Lukács recognized the necessity of collapsing the traditional nuclear family in Marxist revolutions, following Lenin’s dictum, “Destroy the family, you destroy the country.”

As deputy commissar for education and culture, Lukács targeted Hungary’s family unit and its traditional sexual morals. He implemented a program called cultural terrorism, which had two tactical objectives. First, target children’s minds through lectures that encouraged them to ridicule and reject Christian ethics. Second, groom them with graphic sexual content and instruction in free love and sexual intercourse. People in Hungary were so enraged it forced Lukács to flee the country. (Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier––Reality Is, pp. 124-125, Linda Goudsmit 2024)

All forty-five chapters of my 2024 book Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier––Reality Is, begin with the same opening paragraph to remind the reader that we are a world at war: Globalism vs. Nationalism:

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

The cultural terrorism that was wholly rejected in Hungary in the 20th century, particularly the sexual component, has been wildly successful in 21st-century America and other western nations. The sexualization of children, sexual terrorism, is the nexus of the globalist elite campaign for one-world government, and the intersection of  the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and its affiliate organizations which uniformly support one-world global governance through implementation of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Goals.

All 17 Goals sound absolutely fantastic––but the language is a lie! The 17 Sustainable Goals are the roadmap to one-world governance. Each of the 17 Goals ultimately end in the surrender of your individual agency, your freedom, and your national sovereignty to the international, intergovernmental rule of the globalist elite through the agencies and authority of the United Nations. Do not be fooled by the politically seductive language of the 17 Goals. BUYER BEWARE!

Sustainable Development Goals

  • Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
  • Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
  • Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
  • Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
  • Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
  • Goal 6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
  • Goal 7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
  • Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
  • Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
  • Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries
  • Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
  • Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
  • Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts*
  • Goal 14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
  • Goal 15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
  • Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
  • Goal 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

* Acknowledging that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the primary international, intergovernmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change.

In Chapter 19: From Sex Education to Sexuality Education of Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is, I discuss Goal 3 in depth:

Goal 3 is of particular interest to this chapter, especially section 3.7:

By 2030, ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programs.

What, exactly, is the “information and education” young children will receive? Parents around the world will be shocked to learn what the United Nations and its specialty agencies consider appropriate sexual and reproductive information and education….

First, sex education is no longer just about human reproduction. The new label, Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE), is far more expansive and is defined on the Health and Education[v] section of the UNESCO website:

“Sexuality” is defined as “a core dimension of being human which includes: the understanding of, and relationship to, the human body; emotional attachment and love; sex; gender; gender identity; sexual orientation; sexual intimacy; pleasure and reproduction. Sexuality is complex and includes biological, social, psychological, spiritual, religious, political, legal, historic, ethical and cultural dimensions that evolve over a lifespan.” (International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education, p. 17)

Key values of CSE include:

Transformative: CSE impacts whole cultures and communities, not simply individual learners. It can contribute to the development of a fair and compassionate society by empowering individuals and communities, promoting critical thinking skills and strengthening young people’s sense of citizenship. It empowers young people to take responsibility for their own decisions and behaviours, and how they may affect others. It builds the skills and attitudes that enable young people to treat others with respect, acceptance, tolerance and empathy, regardless of their ethnicity, race, social, economic or immigration status, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics.

In the same way that the 17 Goals sound great but in reality, are catastrophic, the words sexuality and transformative are equally destructive, particularly in the context of the foundational assumption in CSE that schools are the appropriate place for sexuality education, not the home:

CSE is weaponized education on a global level. Its universal curriculum is designed to collapse existing cultures into a singular culture of the planetary Unistate and indoctrinate students with politicized education according to Marxist collectivist dogma. CSE grooms the children of the world to unite and become activists in preparation for global citizenship in the Unistate.

The deceitful manipulation of language is a weapon of war designed to dupe parents into accepting Comprehensive Sexuality Education as equivalent to the familiar and accepted Sex Education. There is no equivalence. Comprehensive Sexuality Education is a colossal deception that presents lessons in pornography as equal to lessons in human reproduction.

The globalist predators, many funded through the corruption of USAID, are advancing sexual terrorism in the United States in their attempt to legalize pedophilia––the soul murder of your children––to destroy their selfness and groom them for life in the totalitarian globalist Unistate.

Billionaire George Soros and his Open Societies Foundations (OSF) support transnational governance in the globalist Unistate. Soros-funded groups like Indivisible and MoveOn advocate the overthrow of the current world order of sovereign nation states, specifically targeting the United States under MAGA President Donald Trump. OSF is a grantmaking network of organizations dedicated to establishing “open” societies and limiting authoritarian regimes. Open Society Foundations website describes itself and its mission in glowing terms. Don’t be fooled by the lofty language––the goal of the globalist enterprise is the collapse of the United States from within:

The Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, are the world’s largest private funder of independent groups working for rights, equity, and justice.

The Open Society Foundations champion the search for bold, democratic solutions to our urgent, common challenges that advance rights, equity, and justice.

We do this by supporting a wide array of independent voices and organizations around the world that provide a creative and dynamic link between the governing and the governed.

Our approach seeks to counter the narrow pursuit of political self-interest and short-term opportunism—in pursuit of a sustainable future for people and planet that leaves no one behind.

In classic Orwellian word perversion, Soros’s “open” societies focus on rights, equity, and justice” limiting authoritarian regimes.” Like the UN 17 Sustainable Goals, the words sound great––until you realize the words rights, equity, and justice are tag lines for Marxist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)––the policies and programs designed to collapse Americanism into socialism, then communism, and ultimately feudalism in the dystopian globalist Unistate. Radical gender ideology is a core component of the radical leftist ideology advanced by George Soros, his Open Society Foundations, and its NGOs funded by USAID in order to implement the Marxist indoctrination and sexual terrorism that most definitely harmed the national interest!

The legalization of pedophilia is the medium and the message for total societal collapse––the endgame of the sexualization of children. It is the politics of pedophilia.

©2025 . All rights reserved.

REFERENCES:

[v]  Health and Education;

https://healtheducationresources.unesco.org/toolkit/what-comprehensive-sexuality-education-cse

Please visit Linda Goudsmit’s pundicity page and website: lindagoudsmit.com.

Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier––Reality Is is available in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats on barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, and directly from Ingram in paperback.

BREAKING: Russell Vought is the new boss of DOGE

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Russell Vought is set to take over leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from Elon Musk.

Vought is a prominent figure in the Trump administration, currently serving as the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

He is also known as the architect of Project 2025, a controversial plan to overhaul the federal government.

Vought has been working alongside Elon Musk at DOGE, focusing on cost-cutting measures and deregulation.

Musk is reportedly stepping down from his role, paving the way for Vought to assume leadership.

This transition is expected to solidify the cost-cutting and efficiency initiatives already underway at DOGE.

In essence, Vought is poised to take a more prominent role in leading DOGE’s efforts to streamline government operations and reduce spending, building upon the foundation laid by Musk.

©2025 . All rights reserved.

DOGE Is Doing the Clean-Up Leftists Can’t Stand

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In this allegorical scenario, Honey and Hank moved into a cozy home in a small community in New England 30 years ago.  The next day, their neighbor, Irene, brings over a hot, homemade casserole to welcome them to the neighborhood.

Within minutes, Honey and Irene “connect” in a phenomenon known as human chemistry. They just seem to “get” each other. And as their relationship evolves, they learn that they are on the same page on just about everything: raising kids, favorite foods, must-see TV programs, Mommy-and-Me classes, even the crocheting and knitting that their grandmothers taught them. And each of them has three children, with two of them having the same name!

As luck would have it, their husbands also hit it off and have quite a lot in common, the biggest that both are on-the-road salesmen.

Over the years, the couples become so close that they vacation and celebrate birthdays and holidays together. Honey and Irene even exchange house keys and list each other as emergency contacts on medical forms.

All good…for 30 years!

Uh-Oh…

Then, one day, Honey gets a phone call from her bank manager, Mr. Hervey, requesting that she and Hank come in for a sit-down.

“Of course,” Honey says, speculating with Hank that the investment they made with the bank’s money manager has either yielded a brilliant bonanza or — yikes — has gone bust.

When they sit down the next day with the Mr. Hervey — whom they call Linc, short for Lincoln — they notice a decidedly serious look on his face.

“Look,” he says. “We live in a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone else. I know Irene and her husband Fred very well. And I know how close you’ve been over all these years. I even know that you exchanged house keys in case of an emergency. And Honey, I know that you gave Irene the PIN to your bank account, again in case of an emergency.”

At this point, Honey and Hank are nonplussed, having no idea where Linc Hervey is going with this strange introduction.

“Well, I hate to tell you this,” he says, “but we just discovered that over the years — many, many years — Irene has been withdrawing money from your account — very cleverly, so you would never notice — but now it has added up to a small fortune.  A real fortune.”

When Mr. Hervey tells them the amount, they are both dumbstruck, speechless, almost out of breath.

Enter Politics

Both Hank and Fred, as mentioned, were businessmen, capitalists, conservatives. At the same time, both men tolerated that their wives were liberals with do-gooder instincts to save the climate, save the whales, save humanity! Both men had decided that it wasn’t worth arguing, because most other things in their lives were so harmonious.

But sitting in front of the bank manager, who had just informed him that his wife’s best friend was a colossal fraud, a thief, and worthy of a felony conviction, Hank immediately took out his iPhone and looked up the numbers of his lawyer and his local police department, with the intention of having Irene (and possibly her husband Fred, as a co-conspirator) served with papers and then arrested and, he hoped, indicted and imprisoned.

Honey, on the other hand, started screaming at the bank manager. “How dare you accuse Irene of any wrongdoing? You are on a witch hunt. You have no proof!”

“Unfortunately, Honey, we have empirical proof,” Linc said, “all scrupulously documented on our computers, going back years, in fact decades.”

Skip to 2025

Is this scenario not exactly what Americans — and, for that matter, the entire world — have been witnessing in real time as Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) discover the malfeasance, fraud, and criminality of not the fictional housewife Irene, but the real live people who run our massive government institutions? To name only a few, there are the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Pentagon, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).  All of these have been fleecing our country — with our tax dollars — not of millions or billions, but of trillions of dollars!

In fact, DOGE has been unearthing the deep corruption involving both Republicans and (mostly) Democrats and proving the maxim that to unearth criminal behavior, always, always, always follow the money!

We have learned that our elected officials have sent vast fortunes to terrorist groups with eye-popping millions upon millions of dollars.  And looky here:

Among other egregious examples of the kinds of waste, fraud, and abuse DOGE has been uncovering is that tens of millions of dead people are on our Social Security rolls, many of them children and people over 115 years old! And look what DOGE found — that $4.7 trillion in payments from the Treasury Department were “almost impossible” to track. That is trillion, with a T!

DOGE has also found that California, New York, and Massachusetts, three deep-blue states — surprise, surprise! — were responsible for over half of the fraudulent unemployment claims in the United States since 2020, again involving massive mountains of  money.

Enter the Pearl-Clutchers

OMG, bleat the perpetually sky-is-falling, glass-is-half-empty leftists. This is illegitimate! While, according to Victor Davis Hanson, Musk acts completely under executive authority.

Like Honey, they are shooting the messenger. That is understandable. After all, most of the criminality has been committed by the people they trusted, sent money to, voted for, based their entire belief systems on. Talk about an existential threat!

But unlike Honey, if it were their own personal bank accounts that were robbed, you can be sure they would be squarely in Hank’s camp, going after the crooks with the intention of bringing them to justice.

They remind me of a child having a temper tantrum in Aisle 4 of a supermarket — flailing arms, copious tears, kicking and screaming, crashing the cans and breakable jars off the shelf, simply because Mommy didn’t buy those all-important Animal Crackers.

“Clean-up in Aisle 4” is then blared over the loudspeaker.

That is what DOGE is all about: cleaning up the monumental financial mess that our greedy and corrupt elected officials and government agencies have inflicted on all of us.

Here is a way to keep track of the immense savings — and criminality — DOGE is uncovering every day.  So far, literally billions — going on trillions — in fraud, waste and abuse.

May this grand effort to Make America Great — and financially solvent — Again continue unimpeded!

©2025 . All rights reserved.

‘It’s Really Difficult.’: Elon Musk Reflects On Successes, Challenges Of DOGE At 100 Days

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THE WHITE HOUSE – On day 101 of the second Trump administration, Elon Musk recognized that his mission to cleanse the federal government of “waste, fraud and abuse” hasn’t been easy.

But Musk believes he and his team have had success — and the team will continue on its mission, according to Musk, well beyond 100 days.

“DOGE is a way of life, like Buddhism,” Musk laughed while meeting with reporters on Wednesday.

Elon Musk sat in the Roosevelt Room of the West Wing with the Daily Caller and a handful of other print reporters on Wednesday evening to reflect back on what DOGE has been able to accomplish as the Trump administration celebrated its first 100 days in office. As of Wednesday, DOGE says it has saved the American taxpayer $160 billion, which is equivalent to about $1,000 per taxpayer.

470,000 of the 4.6 million active U.S. government credit cards and accounts have been cancelled, a six page fact sheet on “DOGE wins” provided to the Caller read. The Social Security Administration has cleaned up its records at the directive of DOGE, finding 11 million number holders (all listed to be 120 years old or older) to be dead, the fact sheet claims.

“There [was] also an intense period in the beginning to try to figure out what’s going on, so just to get the lay of the land, things have to be very intense for the first three months,” Musk said.

“Just literally trying to understand what’s going on and try to map out, map out an understanding of the government in general. So, because the federal government is gigantic, very complicated and so if you’re trying to figure out how to stop racing forward, you’ve got to map the territory, understand how money’s been spent and why and where,” he continued.

Musk has said he will be stepping back from his full-time role at DOGE (he has been working in D.C. since the start of the administration about seven days a week) because the program has gotten into a rhythm and doesn’t need as much attention as some of his businesses do.

But Musk won’t completely disappear from DOGE, telling reporters that he will continue to work in D.C. on the project about two days each week.

In fact, Musk told the Caller that he thinks DOGE could be around for all four years of the second Trump administration — dependent on how long Trump wants his services. But for now, they’re still needed.

Musk and his team provided some examples of fraud they are currently working on eliminating from the federal government, which is escalating to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her team at the Department of Justice.

“There are hundreds of thousands of cases of fraud in the federal government,” Musk told reporters.

“We try to find the cases that are the most clear cut, we send that evidence to the DOJ, where they run it through their process, which takes several weeks,” Musk said, explaining that from there the DOJ has to decide whether it has the resources to pursue the case, if worthwhile.

It is a start, but DOGE is going deeper, Musk told reporters, explaining that he believes there are fraud rings being run in the federal government.

“There are definitely fraud rings operating, but in order to break up a fraud ring, it’s kind of like the mafia. You have to basically arrest one of the mafia foot soldiers, hopeful that they do a plea deal, then they tell you who their fraud manager is, and you can kind of work your way up the chain,” Musk explained.

The Federal Reserve is another potential place of interest for DOGE to inspect, as Musk seemed baffled by the report that the department is planning on spending $2.5 billion to revamp its headquarters.

“I think since at the end of the day, this is all taxpayer money, I think we would certainly look to see if indeed the  Federal Reserve is spending two and a half billion dollars on their design. But that’s an eyebrow raiser,” Musk said.

At the beginning of DOGE, Musk set a goal of saving the American people $2 trillion. Despite outside doubt, Musk still believes.

“I think it’s possible to do that, but there’s a long road to go,” Musk said.

“It’s really difficult … It’s sort of, how much pain does the cabinet and Congress want to take because it can be done, but it requires dealing with a lot of complaints,” he continued.

Musk is no stranger to complaints. Though joyful and laughing for a majority of the meeting, it was clear his task has brought some rocky waters to Musk. Just a few weeks ago, protestors lit Tesla chargers on fire across the country, vandalized Tesla cars and threw Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership.

“I’m proud of the incredible work by those teams who’ve taken a lot of flack. And these are people that can easily get high paying jobs in the private sector. In fact, came from high paying jobs in the private sector,” he said.

In February, Musk admitted that he and his team would make mistakes and that they would aim to correct them. Cutting USAID was one of the moves DOGE made in the last few months that received the most pushback, some of which caused the team to make mistakes, Musk previously told Fox News.

“I think there’s maybe another tendency to focus on the regrets … it’s sort of like focusing on balls missed, versus balls hit,” Musk told the Caller about how DOGE would avoid mistakes in the future. “Nobody bats 1.000 but nobody even bats .800.”

“I think we’re probably getting things right 70/80% of the time, something like that, which would be a ridiculous number for baseball, and so the wins far exceed the losses,” Musk said.

Musk’s time in the administration has brought about once-in-a-lifetime experiences too. The richest man in the world gave a window into what it has been like to be friends with President Donald Trump and run DOGE.

“We’ll be on Air Force One or Marine One and [Trump] will be like ‘Hey do you want to stay over?’ ‘I’m like, sure.’ But I didn’t request it, to be clear,” Musk said, sharing with reporters that sometimes when he is in D.C. he stays at the White House in the Lincoln Bedroom. “It’s just like we’ve literally arrived at a friend’s house, I guess. And then it’s like, do you want to stay here? I’m like, “‘sure.’”

Musk even attested that Trump is a very good host, explaining that one night when he stayed over, the president called him to make sure he helped himself to some dessert in the kitchen.

“Then he’ll actually call late at night and say, like, ‘Oh, why don’t we make sure you get some ice cream from the kitchen?’ And then I went to the kitchen and got the ice cream and I ate a whole tub of ice cream,” Musk said, adding that it was caramel flavored.

“Don’t tell RFK Jr,” he joked.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House correspondent. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why Do “Green” Groups Oppose Nuclear Energy?

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Biden Administration Approved $485 Million for Anti-Nuclear Nonprofits. 

During the last half of the Biden administration, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm began talking up the virtues of reliable, safe, and carbon-free nuclear energy. In August 2024 she called for constructing 98 more of our largest nuclear reactors—enough to power 50 million additional American homes.

But as she said this, Granholm’s own department and others within the Biden administration were putting the last touches on $485 million in combined grant awards for 20 opponents of nuclear power.

This help wasn’t needed. The known opponents of nuclear energy collectively rake in at least $2.5 billion every year.

To put this in perspective, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the main trade association promoting American nuclear power, reported a mere $57.3 million annual revenue in its last publicly available IRS filing. At least seven strident anti-nuclear nonprofits, such as the Sierra Club, reported double or even triple that amount.

But elections have consequences. The Biden-era grant awards were approved grants, and the recent work of the Department of Government Efficiency has in many cases clawed back or blocked the total awarded spending.

Big Winners

With $313.8 million in total Biden-era grant awards, Grid Alternatives was set to become the biggest of the anti-nuclear winners.

This would have been a nearly 100-fold increase over all federal funding approved for Grid Alternatives from 2008 through 2020. This is typical of the Biden-era anti-nuclear grants. Most of the other 19 awardees had received comparably little or even zero federal funding prior to 2021.

As covered in a previous report, most of the approved funding for Grid Alternatives was to come from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to be used for hanging solar panels in low-income communities.

Grid Alternatives advertised its hatred of nuclear power long before the first grant was approved. The nonprofit cosigned a 2019 letter to Congress that referred to nuclear power as “dirty” and opposed its inclusion in any carbon-cutting energy policy.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was approved for $55.5 million in grants from several different agencies and departments during the Biden administration, more than half of it from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The WWF denounced a 2019 proposal from the European Union to include nuclear energy as a carbon-reduction tool, saying in a 2021 news release that doing so would be “greenwashing.”

The World Resources Institute (WRI) was approved for $43.6 million during the Biden years, most of it from USAID and the State Department. Impeding energy progress in developing nations is part of this nonprofit’s mission. In April 2018, WRI gave an “environmental prize” to a pair of South African activists for their work in blocking a $76 billion nuclear power investment in their homeland.

In 2023, the Department of Agriculture approved a $25 million grant for GreenLatinos. This sum was more than double the combined revenue raised by GreenLatinos from 2010 through 2023.

GreenLatinos consigned a May 2021 letter to Congress that opposed nuclear power and referred to it as a “dirty” energy source.

Other Anti-Nuclear Nonprofits

Here are the 16 other known anti-nuclear nonprofits that were approved for Biden administration grants, along with the approved cumulative total funding:

In addition to the federal departments and agencies already listed, the Biden-era anti-nuclear grants were also awarded by the Department of Interior, the Department Health and Human Services, the Federal Communications Commission, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Department of Commerce, NASA, and the Denali Commission.

Opponents of Civilization

The 20 anti-nuclear groups winning those awards also oppose the use of hydrocarbon fuels: oil, natural gas, and coal. This means they oppose 88 percent of all the energy used in America. As energy is the life blood of prosperity, it’s not an exaggeration to say these groups are implicitly opponents of industrial civilization itself.

Approval of these grants was in effect an attempt to force federal taxpayers to fund their own economic destruction. Going forward, perhaps federal grant seekers should be required to answer a rigorous set of questions regarding whether they have a position in opposition to the sources of American wealth and civilization that they are hoping to tap.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of the DOGE Files, a series of CRC investigations into federal grants to nonprofits. This article explores grants made to opponents of nuclear power.

AUTHOR

Ken Braun

Ken Braun is CRC’s senior investigative researcher and authors profiles for InfluenceWatch.org and the Capital Research magazine.

He previously worked for several free market policy organizations, spent six years as a chief of staff in the Michigan Legislature, and also wrote political columns for MLive Media Group, a consortium including the Grand Rapids Press and seven other mid-sized Michigan newspapers. He is an alumni of Michigan State University.

EDITORS NOTE: This Capital Research Center column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

WATCH: Pro-terrorist, anti-Trump, anti-America March in Washington, D.C. funded by Soros Organizations

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Who is paying for these terror marches? Who paid for the bus caravan of terror supporters into DC. Who paid for that giant terror flag? 

The Soros-backed group Indivisible is proud to admit they’re orchestrating the 1300 paid protests going down today across all 50 states.

WATCH: Sarah Parker Florida Democrat Party Committeewoman speak at the Anti-Trump rally in D.C.

These Democrat billionaires are bankrolling the chaos, and they ought to face legal consequences for the violence and destruction.

Thousands of terror supporters have taken over Washington, D.C., calling for a “global intifada.”

These people have no business being in America.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Newsrael News Desk column with videos is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

How Selfish Bureaucrats Undermine America, and How to Fix It

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Former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer Emanuel Isac Celedon “has been sentenced to federal prison in two separate cases for allowing aliens and cocaine across the border,” the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced last Friday. He provides a particularly egregious example of how career federal employees can undermine America.

In 2023, Celedon reached out to a Mexican cartel, offering to allow drugs and illegal immigrants through his travel lane in exchange for bribes. He subsequently allowed human smugglers through his lane on at least nine separate occasions. He twice “allowed several kilograms of what he believed to be cocaine into the United States” in exchange for $6,000, unknowingly falling into the clutches of a sting operation. He subsequently received 117 months in prison, or nearly 10 years.

Celedon was essentially a dirty cop, taking money from a criminal organization in exchange for looking the other way when they carried out their criminal enterprises. And he was trapped, arrested, and sentenced just as other dirty cops are. But, as a CBP officer, he was no ordinary cop. By allowing illegal immigrants and dangerous drugs through our country’s border, Celedon’s actions directly undermined U.S. national security. Because this federal employee didn’t like his civil service salary, he chose to join a plot against America.

If Celedon showed how a single individual can undermine America, imagine what a more systematic effort could do.

Unfortunately, no imagination is necessary. On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee published records from an internal chat log at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which “shows the FBI deliberately withheld information about the FBI having Hunter Biden’s laptop,” the Committee said, manipulating Twitter into censoring the story as misinformation.

In a 2023 deposition, FBI official Laura Dehmlow testified concerning a call between Twitter employees and FBI officials, at the time when the FBI was actively directing Twitter how to censor the free speech of American citizens. “Somebody from Twitter essentially asked whether the laptop was real,” said Dehmlow. “And one of the FBI folks who was on the call did confirm that, ‘yes, it was,’ before another participant jumped in and said, ‘no further comment.’”

The internal chat log further authenticates Dehmlow’s account and provides additional detail. One message indicated that concealing the true facts was the FBI’s deliberate stance, as a senior official (name redacted) instructed, “do not discuss biden matter.” Another message indicated that DOJ lawyers had placed a “gag order” on the FBI employee who had spoken out of turn. Further discussion revealed that the analyst had been “admonished” by FBI staff, but still wouldn’t “shut up.” These last messages came right after another user reported that “twitter is treating as disinformation” the story about the Biden laptop, which the FBI knew to be true.

In this incident, we see senior officials at the FBI scrambling to silence their own staff to conceal information, knowing that would cause social media platforms to censor Americans exercising their free speech rights by repeating true information. The sole reason for this course of action was to influence the political process during a presidential campaign by protecting their preferred candidate from a potential scandal.

FBI officials did this, again, without any public accountability because they are unelected, career federal employees.

These are two anecdotes. They do not, by themselves, prove a trend. There are doubtless other cases of bureaucratic misconduct — perhaps many more — that still fall short of demonstrating that every bureaucrat is out there trying to undermine America. But just these two anecdotes demonstrate the outsized impact bureaucrats can have when they selfishly pursue an interest contrary to that of the American people for whom they ostensibly work.

One fairly obvious conclusion is that bureaucrats have too much power and too little accountability. An emotionally satisfying but oversimplified solution is to eliminate bureaucracy, but that is not an achievable outcome.

Instead, conservatives should push to review the incentives that bureaucrats face. Prudent policymakers recognize the fallen nature of man and account for it. They create incentive structures that harness our natural self-interestedness so that it works for the general good. Free and open markets achieve this economically. Frequent elections accomplish this goal for politicians.

But most of America’s bureaucracy was established at a time when America was governed by people who believed in the inherent goodness of man. They believed that government could be perfected by placing it in the hands of benevolent technocrats. Consequently, they devised inadequate constraints on the power of those technocrats, as well as inadequate mechanisms to hold them accountable.

America needs a serious conversation about how to reform the incentives bureaucrats face. Yes, this includes eliminating wokeness and DEI hiring requirements. Yes, it involves finding ways to fire bad employees. But we also need to discuss more changes at the structural and incentive level, too.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is going about reforming the bureaucracy in a crude, hasty manner — one which circumstances may even justify. But mowing the 18th green with a steamroller does not create a surface golfers will want to play on. Eventually, you have to find the right tool for the job.

In any event, DOGE’s efforts have made one thing clear: judging by the hornets’ nest they have stirred up, reforming the bureaucracy will be no easy task.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Crowd Goes Silent When Elon Musk EXPOSES new report sent to Trump and Pam Bondi

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Transparency: The Biblical Impulse Underpinning DOGE’s Mission

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Nothing in the second Trump administration has divided Washington more sharply than the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. The frenetic effort has featured foibles, but it has also uncovered shocking wastes of taxpayer dollars — discoveries which may have earned DOGE more detractors than its faults. Whatever the final results may be, it’s worthwhile for Christians to consider a driving impulse behind DOGE’s work that is deeply consistent with biblical values.

This is DOGE’s impulse to push for transparency — or, perhaps more precisely, illumination — about government spending and processes. “In a Fox interview, Musk and his team … shined a greater light on the amount of inefficiency and financial waste that’s propagated by our federal government,” said FRC Action President Jody Hice.

In that interview, Musk told “Special Report” host Bret Baier, “We want to reduce spending by eliminating waste and fraud and reduce the spending by 15%. … The government is not efficient, and there’s a lot of waste and fraud. So, we feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services.”

“Most taxpayers would generally agree, I believe, that government transparency is a good thing,” responded Hice, a former U.S. congressman.

This is especially true of the voters who sent fiscal conservatives like him to Washington, D.C. and who were frustrated by the systematized sloth that prevented a few good men from attacking acreage of bureaucratic kudzu with any tool larger than nail clippers.

“We would often just beat our heads against the wall, because we would be so frustrated with the amount of money that the government is spending,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) recalled on “Washington Watch.” And so, he welcomed “the fact … that President Trump is allowing and asking Elon Musk and the DOGE team to go through the checkbook of the American taxpayer and find waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“We always knew, instinctively, that the government was spending money irresponsibly — not in places that the American people would ever approve,” stated Stutzman. “We used to … think, ‘Oh, it’s probably, you know, maybe 1%, 2%.’ We’ve all known that there’s probably a lot more than that. And that’s what Elon is finding.” As of April 1, the DOGE website claimed an estimated $140 billion in savings, already more than 2% of U.S. federal government expenditures in fiscal year 2024 ($6.75 trillion).

“God always asks us to be light in this world,” argued Stutzman. “When there [are] problems, you need to shine a light on the problem. And that’s what the DOGE team is doing, shining a light on all of the spending. And we’re seeing where our tax dollars are going, and it’s just appalling.”

The primary way in which the Bible calls Christ-followers to be “the light of the world” is as models of righteous living, so that others “may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:14-16).

But the application of this principle extends far beyond religious observance or spiritual disciplines. The Apostle Paul wrote that “the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true” (Ephesians 5:9). Therefore, he urged believers, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. … When anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible” (Ephesians 5:11, 13). (Thus “illumination” is an apter descriptor than “transparency.”)

In other words, Stutzman is right to extend the biblical metaphor of “shining a light” to exposing waste, fraud, and abuse in government.

One further extension of the Bible’s “light” metaphor is appropriate. Jesus taught in John 3 that “people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God” (John 3:19-21). The most direct application is that wicked people hide their sin, while the righteous repent of their sin and find forgiveness.

But Jesus draws out at truth about human nature that remains true in lesser contexts as well. Wrongdoers often try to conceal their wrongdoing. If this is true, and if there are wrongdoers benefitting from waste, fraud, and abuse in payments of the federal government, then we would expect significant opposition to any attempt to expose that waste, fraud, and abuse. (It does not follow from this that every DOGE critic wrongly benefits from government largesse; there are other legitimate reasons to criticize the department.)

In fact, some of DOGE’s findings are consistent with a pattern of attempted concealment. One of DOGE’s first targets was the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was funding bizarre projects like a transgender comic book in Peru.

“It’s easier to hide money away from us overseas than it is to hide it here in the United States,” Stutzman pointed out, and “the fact that President Trump and Elon Musk decided just to shut down USAID shows you how bad it is … there.” On Friday, the U.S. State Department and USAID “notified Congress on their intent to undertake a reorganization that would involve realigning certain USAID functions to the Department by July 1, 2025, and discontinuing the remaining USAID functions that do not align with Administration priorities.”

Nevertheless, some DOGE detractors are “screaming very loudly” about Musk’s outsider team bringing sunshine to The Swamp, added Stutzman.

“I told the Democrats … if this is what you’re proud of — if you feel like these are the priorities of the American people — you should not have a problem with DOGE just telling all of us where our tax dollars are going —whether it’s DEI programs in South America, or whether it’s DEI programs in the Middle East, or a Sesame Street program for $20 million in Iraq,” Stutzman stipulated. “If those are your priorities, why are you upset that the DOGE team is announcing those on … social media, telling us what they’re finding? I mean, if that’s what you want done with federal tax dollars, then you shouldn’t have a problem with it.”

Here, Jesus’s words echo loudly, “Everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed” (John 3:20).

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Party That Woke Broke

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Democrats have been wallowing in the despair of last November’s elections for months, unable — or maybe unwilling — to crawl out of the pit of public opinion they find themselves in. “It’s hard to win if you don’t know why you lost,” Axios’s Alex Thompson observed. But it’s even harder, some would say, if you know and do nothing about it.

To most people, the solution to the party’s problems is simple. After a year of losing ground with virtually every demographic — men, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, young people, Independents, suburban moms — the polling all points to Democrats being completely out of step with everyday voters. So why not just abandon the extremism Americans rejected? For the party of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the answer is much more complicated.

The crisis facing Democrats isn’t about their identity; they have one. The crisis is that they can’t moderate their ideology — or embrace it — without severe consequences. As National Review’s Rich Lowry put it, “The reason Joe Biden won in 2020 is he didn’t seem like a progressive, and one reason that his party lost in 2024 is that he governed like one.” For Democrats, ideological extremism is their kryptonite and their lifeblood. It’s what excites the base and repels the populace. In other words, it’s a recipe for long-term political disaster.

And yet, in several instances, the Democrats who’ve tried to soften their positions or build a temporary bridge to sanity have been beaten back into conformity. After the election, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) dared to say he didn’t want his daughters to play sports against biological boys — like 80% of his country — only to turn around and vote against his girls three months later. “I was just speaking authentically as a dad about one of many issues where I think we’re just out of touch with the majority of voters,” he explained to the angry mob in November. “… I stand by my position.” Or at least he stood by it until the time came to act on it, Americans learned.

But lately, even the barest hints of compromise are punished. Look at the hysteria over Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who needs increased security simply for voting with Republicans to stop a government shutdown — something his own party argued would be a disaster for hard-working families a month earlier. For sticking to that position, there’ve been furious calls for his ouster and a leadership mutiny in party ranks.

Then, there’s California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who tested the waters earlier this month with his whiplash comments on Title IX. Sitting down with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk on his podcast, the governor was asked about the issue of trans-identifying athletes in girls’ sports. To most people’s surprise, the progressive replied, “I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that.” He emphasized his point by adding, “It’s deeply unfair.”

Newsom, who, by his own admission, has been a “leader” in the “LGBTQ” movement, encouraged his party to admit that a lopsided playing field is cause for concern. He said, “We’ve got to own that. We’ve got to acknowledge it.” His sudden openness to a broader discussion was met with horror on the Left and deep skepticism on the Right — a perfect illustration of the conundrum facing Democrats.

As California Family Council President Jonathan Keller pointed out on a recent episode of the “Outstanding” podcast, “He’s trying to set it up in such a way that … he’s going to look like he’s a moderate.” But frankly, Keller said, “I’m not positive that’s actually going to be an effective strategy from him. I think what it may be effective in doing is getting him destroyed in the primaries,” he said, referring to the root problem for Democrats, which is that what wins primaries is the same thing that loses general elections.

In Newsom’s case, even an insincere shift to the middle is next-to-impossible to pull off, thanks to years of activist baggage. As Kirk wrote after the interview, “I’m under no illusions about why I was invited: Gavin Newsom wants to run for president in three years, and he thinks that talking [to] conservative figures like me increase his recognition, help him present as a centrist, and cast him as a champion of the Left in a time when the [L]eft has no real leaders. … We shouldn’t fall for this… ” he warned. “[A]nd fortunately, swerving to the center won’t be that simple for Gavin. … He knows his current record can’t win him the White House, and so he’s trying to rewrite what that record is.”

Polling proved the governor’s flirtation with rationality didn’t help his case. Of 1,000 California voters, only 24% said the podcast helped them see Newsom as more moderate, while 17% insisted it made them less likely to see him as a moderate. A majority, 59%, said it made no difference. Americans are not so easily fooled. A few soundbites does not a record make.

“Like the national Democrat[ic] Party and the legacy media,” John Nolte stressed, “Newsom has painted himself into a corner where the only way to survive is through the fealty to the 20 percent of hard leftists that make up the left’s base of activist and financial support. … With all their lies and lunacy in support of things like open borders and this transsexual nonsense, Newsom, Democrats, and the corporate media have alienated all the Normal People, probably forever. So that 20 percent is all they’ve got.”

The foot soldiers of the Democratic Party grasp the paradox. They’ve tried, unsuccessfully, for the last nine years to turn the heads of leadership to mainstream positions on things like gender, immigration, education, and energy. “I don’t want to be the freak show party like they have branded us,” one DNC member from Florida complained after the election when it was obvious the Left’s social radicalism had cost them every lever of power in Washington. “When you’re a mom with three kids,” she pointed out, “and you live in middle America, and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”

Others echoed her alarm. “The progressive wing of the party has to recognize — we all have to recognize — the country’s not progressive, and not to the far left or the far right. They’re in the middle,” said Joseph Paolino, a DNC committeeman for Rhode Island.

It felt like, at least from those comments, that the party was finally going to pivot. “This is basically a rebuild job from the bottom up,” former DNC Chair Donna Brazile emphasized.

But what happened when push came to shove? Against the pleas of their non-elite base, the far-left won even greater control of the party — electing woke, anti-gun, pro-trans, defund-the-police, ICE-abolishing, climate change-pimping DNC leaders in Chairman Ken Martin and Vice Chair David Hogg. To the everyday Democrats, who’d been “begging the party to ditch the radical Left,” it was an astonishing betrayal.

“The weaknesses of Democrats among non-white voters, particularly Hispanic and Black working-class voters, is pretty significant,” authors of a new book, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” insist. “They’re sort of realizing this is a problem. On the other hand, they’re so invested in this whole vector of cultural issues. They’re worried about the blowback on social media and from the college-educated ‘liberalish’ voters who are increasingly a loyal base of the Democratic Party. Trump understood that and he played upon it. He continues to play upon it. He continues to get votes upon it. And the Democrats are oblivious to it.”

Not all Democrats, it seems. A growing chorus of disillusioned officials are starting to speak up about the continued reckoning that awaits the party in future elections. During snippets of his interview with NPR Monday, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) sounded outright logical in his assessment. “We can’t just resist. It can’t just be why we’re against Trump and what’s wrong with Trump. … The Democratic brand has been damaged. “

“When you ask people … ‘What do the Republicans stand for?’ They say, ‘Well, Make America Great Again. They want to cut the size of government, they want to give tax cuts, stuff like [that].’” Then, Suozzi said, when you ask, “‘What do the Democrats stand for?’ And I think the people are kind of scratching their head a little bit, they believe in, like, [abortion] and LGBT rights — which I believe in those things too — but I don’t know that you can build a whole party around that.” He talked about running on the border issue in 2024, and his consultants protested, arguing, “‘Well, Tom, that’s a Republican issue. I don’t know if you should be talking [about that].’ I said, ‘No, this is what the people of my district are talking about. We can’t ignore what the people are talking about.’”

Even longtime fixtures of the party are starting to reconsider the wisdom of pandering to a sliver of the country. Trusted Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel took on the misguided messaging of the current party earlier this month, urging local Democrats to beat the drum on “safe streets, strong schools, stable finances. Focus on those three things, and your city’s going to be fine,” he said on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” “Less about the bathrooms, more about the classrooms.”

The party’s fringe had a fit, forcing the ex-mayor to clarify, “I wasn’t looking to have a fight on woke culture. I was looking to have a debate on the failure of eighth graders to read. I don’t think culturally that being not just into the generic woke debate is wrong politically. It’s also [that] the data is pretty clear that people think that’s all we care about.” And in the end, he admitted, “We sunk our party. We’re responsible for that. And we’re also therefore responsible for rebuilding it.”

So far, the Democrats’ only idea for rebuilding has been parading Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) around the country as the movement’s future standard-bearers. And, yes, CNN polling of the party’s voters did suggest that Sanders and the Squad leader “best represented the Democrats’ core values” — without asking if the majority of Democrats even supported those values in the first place. What they did question is if Democratic leaders are taking the party in the wrong direction, and a majority said “yes.” Either way, Lowry quipped, “If AOC is the Democratic future, the party is even worse off than we think.”

Most of us, FRC Action’s Matt Carpenter observed, “are used to seeing the Democrats operate as a tightly-knit team. For years, they moved in lockstep at the direction of their leaders toward the party’s goals,” he told The Washington Stand. “So it’s a curious thing to see them now rudderless, searching for leadership, searching for an issue to rally around, searching for support from voters and donors, and coming up short. The ground they gained over the years under the leadership of figures like Obama, Pelosi, and even Biden turns out to have left them stranded in the political wilderness.”

Making matters worse, Carpenter pointed out, “They just had their worst performance among minority voters maybe of all time. They are seen as the party of inflation, war, and obsessed with abortion and turning girls into boys and boys into girls. But that’s not even the worst of it for them,” he shook his head. “The worst part of it for the Democratic Party is that they’ve inculcated these ideas into their base. So they cannot retreat from their unpopular positions without watching their base become demoralized, or worse, angry.”

The reality is a painful one for a party in disarray, but Democrats are boxed in without a viable way out — at least for now. They’ve hitched their wagon to a radical, self-aggrandizing Left without looking behind them to see if anyone followed. Now that the wheels have come off, the sobering truth is this: they have no one to blame but themselves.

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Leftist Attacks on Tesla Are ‘Domestic Terrorism’: DOJ

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Progressive Marxism reduces down to two basic instincts: 1) rich businessmen are evil, and 2) government is god (rich politicians, therefore, get a pass). So, it’s no surprise that progressive Marxists were outraged when Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, got an inside pass to knock the waste, fraud, and abuse out of government agencies like a bull in a china shop.

Unfortunately, the response by these progressive Marxists was no less surprising. Alarmed at the utterly fascistic powers wielded by a man with no official office, these courageous freedom fighters resorted to every democracy’s tool of choice — the Molotov cocktail.

But these misled radicals had to confront a glaring, strategic contradiction: the American people had placed the institutions they most revered in the hands of the people they most despised. Attacking the American government is no way to save the American government. Therefore, they had to target Musk some other way. Blessed with all the strategic foresight and aim of a Stormtrooper, they chose to assault private property and businesses instead — in particular, anything carrying the “T” for Tesla, Musk’s most successful company.

Yes, as strange as it sounds, for the past month leftist radicals have turned America’s top electric-car company into a totem for Nazism. This has given them a mental excuse to treat Teslas with all the disgust normally felt for a sworn enemy. All over the country, the built-in cameras on Teslas have recorded random passers-by doing everything from subtly keying the hated car’s door to smearing feces on it.

Such malicious, irrational behavior is almost a performative, religious act, for an insecure progressive to prove (at least to him or herself) that he or she is a good citizen — a mandatory requirement for those who believe government is god. The acts seem like a bizarre, voluntary form of fumie, the 17th century Japanese practice whereby people were forced to step on an image of Jesus Christ to prove they were not Christians.

The sudden animosity towards Tesla from its erstwhile customer base has seriously hurt the business, whose shares have fallen 35% this month and 42% this year (the company also issued a major recall last week). Even Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D), a recent candidate for vice president of the United States, was induced to mock the brand online, “If you need a boost during the day, check out Tesla stock.”

But the catty turned catastrophic when several individuals chose to escalate the violence to arson attacks. In Salem, Ore., a man armed with an AR-15 rifle threw approximately eight Molotov cocktails into a Tesla dealership. In Loveland, Colo., another man attempted to ignite Teslas with Molotov cocktails, while in Charleston, S.C. a man turned his fiery rage against Tesla charging stations.

The Department of Justice swiftly arrested all three perpetrators and announced on Thursday that they “will face the full force of the law.” Each faces charges carrying a minimum of five years in prison, and a maximum of 20 years.

“The days of committing crimes without consequence have ended,” declared U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.”

Two days earlier, Bondi had warned, “The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism. … We will continue investigations that impose severe consequences on those involved in these attacks, including those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”

President Donald Trump endorsed the DOJ’s vigorous prosecution in his own statement. “Those people are going to go through a big problem when we catch them. We’ve got a lot of cameras up. We already know who some of them are. We’re going to catch them,” he said. “And they’re bad guys. They’re the same guys that screw around with our schools and universities, the same garbage.”

While the Trump administration’s approach to law enforcement is sometimes open to the charge that it is unmeasured or hasty, here Bondi and Trump are on solid ground, suggested the editors of National Review, who are by no means instinctual Trump cheerleaders.

“It was appropriate for Attorney General Pam Bondi to describe what is happening as a ‘wave of domestic terrorism,’” they wrote, “in the sense that the perpetrators are resorting to violence to achieve a political or ideological goal; they want to convince people not to buy Teslas and to do enough damage to Musk’s company that it drives him out of public life.” Non-state actors resorting to violence to achieve a political goal is the definition of terrorism.

Boycotting a store or product — as conservatives did to Target and Bud Light — is one thing. It preserves a respect for property rights, violates no laws, and puts no one’s life in danger. Actively destroying someone else’s property or business by arson is something entirely different.

It’s no surprise, then, that the column of radicals torching Teslas is the group with little ideological allegiance to private property, the rule of law, or the value of human life — or even to America itself. But, when government-worshipers confront the unwelcome reality that government is now run by their sworn enemies, their tactical options are limited. Violence is the expected result.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Analysis: Trump Admin Besieged by Record Number of Injunctions from Partisan Courts

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump Urged to Dust Off an Old Weapon to Legislate DOGE Cuts

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If you ask House Republicans, the most reviled phrase in leadership’s vocabulary is “continuing resolution.” Nothing seems to raise conservatives’ blood pressure like a CR — mainly because it’s become synonymous with Congress’s perpetual failure to pass a long-term budget. And while there’s certainly grumbling about the idea this time around, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) may be heading into his seventh government shutdown threat with less resistance from his own party. And another two words explain why: Donald Trump.

With a handful of days until the clock runs out on another government funding deadline, no one’s been working the phones harder than the president. Together with Johnson, the White House has been doing everything it can to hold the fragile party together long enough to keep the lights on in Washington, D.C. When House leaders released the text of a 99-page funding extension that would give appropriators another six months to hammer out the budget in regular order, Trump was the first to rally the troops.

“The House and Senate have put together, under the circumstances, a very good funding Bill (‘CR’)!” he insisted on Truth Social Saturday. “All Republicans should vote (Please!) YES next week. Great things are coming for America,” Trump promised, “and I am asking you all to give us a few months to get us through to September so we can continue to put the Country’s ‘financial house’ in order. Democrats will do anything they can to shut down our Government, and we can’t let that happen. We have to remain UNITED — NO DISSENT — Fight for another day when the timing is right…”

The message to conservative rabble-rousers was clear: get on board and give us room to hammer out the reforms you want for the next fiscal year. Adding to the usual drama, Johnson can only afford to lose one vote on the CR with the current 218-214 margin — giving him almost zero space to maneuver if any Republicans go rogue. To sweeten the post for conservatives who complain that this bill would keep the government spending at Joe Biden’s levels, negotiators did manage to slash $13 billion in nondefense spending, boosted veterans’ health care, and found more dollars for defense. Despite the Democrats’ desperate claims to the contrary, Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare would remain untouched.

Incredibly, House Freedom Caucus members, who are the most likely to upend Johnson’s apple cart, seemed a little more subdued in their criticism. That may be thanks, Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) pointed out, to the group’s meeting with Trump last week.

“I’m certainly no fan of CRs myself,” he told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice Friday. “The whole notion of Congress continuing to kick the can down the road, so to speak, is very troubling. And considering that this originally started as a budget under the Biden administration could give one pause. But,” he explained, “as we look to where we’re going, there’s a couple of things at play here. One is [that] DOGE is doing some great work to uncover the waste, fraud, abuse, [and] corruption that is happening in our federal government right now. But there’s a lot more work to be done,” he acknowledged, “and we need to give them a little bit of time to finish the work so that we can take the lessons learned, the savings [can] be found for the American people, and [we can] work that into the appropriations process. And so, in the meantime, we’ve got to keep the federal government running.”

His colleague, Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.) toed that same line with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Monday’s show, insisting that the only people who might profit from a prolonged fight are Democrats. “I think the key here is that we’re avoiding a government shutdown, because really, all a government shutdown is, is a distraction from getting our important work done, which President Trump has said is securing our southern border, protecting our national security interests, and reining in spending,” she underscored. “And although we don’t have the opportunity to make some of the cuts that we would like to in a full appropriations package, this holds spending flat and gives some flexibility to agencies to be able to move money around.”

After Congress gets the next six months squared away in the CR, “we will immediately go into the FY 26 appropriations process,” Bice vowed, despite the fact that the budget hasn’t been done in regular order for about 20 years. “That’s going to be quite significant,” Perkins chimed in, “if Congress is able to move through the normal appropriations process.”

But, as a growing number of senators are starting to point out, there’s another way to hack through the thick growth of government waste and fraud that Elon Musk has uncovered — and a lot sooner than October. It’s a process called rescission, a powerful — but sparsely used — weapon that Trump can use to claw back billions of dollars of spending Congress has already approved.

Thanks to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, presidents can permanently cancel funding to executive agencies if it’s within a 45-day window and if a simple majority of Congress approves. As the Congressional Institute outlines, “The President begins the process by sending both [c]hambers of Congress a message indicating how much money he thinks should be cut; what agency and project the money was for; why it should not be spent; how withholding the money will affect fiscal policy, the economy, and the program it was intended for; and ‘all facts, circumstances, and considerations relating to or bearing upon the proposed rescission.’”

While it’s hardly an obscure rule (Ronald Reagan proposed 133 rescissions), recent presidents haven’t really pursued the idea — with the exception of Trump who tried to roll back pieces of a massive omnibus in 2018 only to be blocked by the Senate.

The beauty of the rescission process is that Congress can fast-track it. Unlike normal spending bills, the proposal would bypass the 60-vote majority in the Senate. Using Musk’s recommendations as a guide, the president could zero in on hundreds of unnecessary, woke, and obsolete programs or positions to bulldoze. It would also help insulate the administration from the flurry of legal challenges to the string of cuts the president has already made. “You know, if we lose in court … we’re bound by it,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) warned after a GOP lunch with Musk Wednesday. “You have rescission and reconciliation. … Take these two tools and use them.”

From a messaging standpoint, Democrats would have a much harder time landing their blows on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) if the GOP handles the reforms legislatively. “What we’ve got to do as Republicans is capture their work product, put it in a bill and vote on it,” Graham argued. “So the White House, I’m urging them to come up with a rescission package.”

Even Musk himself wasn’t aware of this option to chip away at runaway spending and raised his arms triumphantly in the air when Republican senators explained it to him, Graham recounted. “[I]t’s time for the White House now to go on offense. We’re losing altitude here,” the senator declared. “… And the way you can regain altitude is to take the work product, get away from the personalities and the drama, take the work product and vote on it.”

As the editors of National Review write in support, “A successful effort would likely involve Elon Musk in his capacity as public spokesman for DOGE, making it clear to Republicans that a vote for the rescission package is a vote for cleaning up wasteful spending. The package should also be crafted by the White House with congressional input, so that Republicans know they’ll be receiving something they can all vote for.”

It’s also, they continue, “one way to ensure that DOGE-inspired spending cuts pass legal muster.” Not to mention that it would “bring some order to what has been at times a chaotic and undisciplined effort. Requiring the president to list the items he’d like to see cut in a statement that Congress can then take up and approve with a roll call vote would help make clear to the American people what DOGE is doing and give Republican members of Congress buy-in to tell their constituents they did something to cut spending.”

Obviously, the editors caution, “The rescission process is not going to come anywhere close to balancing the budget or changing the long-run trajectory of the federal debt burden. That will still require entitlement reform and spending cuts enacted through the appropriations process. But when DOGE finds dumb spending to eliminate, the president should put together a rescission package, and the speaker and Senate majority leader should work to pass it as soon as they can,” they urge. “A little spring cleaning of the budget wouldn’t hurt.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Who Is Suing DOGE?

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Dozens of Lawsuits Against the Trump Administration Filed by Government Employee Unions, Left-Wing Activists, and Democratic Politicians.

“The main function of American trade unions is collective bargaining. It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” — AFL-CIO president George Meany, December, 1955

Last week, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan refused to grant an emergency temporary restraining order (TRO) to halt the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The underlying lawsuit, State of New Mexico v. Musk, was filed by 14 Democratic state attorneys general (AGs) who have alleged that creating DOGE without congressional approval violated the Constitution’s appointments clause. The AGs argued an immediate TRO was needed to pause DOGE’s work while the merits of their case were decided.

But Judge Chutkan decided they had failed to prove the “clear evidence of imminent, irreparable harm” needed to impose an emergency halt. The status of the TRO notwithstanding, Judge Chutkan ruled the case is legitimate and will proceed. (Perhaps relevant: She was appointed by President Obama and is not a stranger to lawsuits involving Trump.)

State of New Mexico is just one of dozens of lawsuits on multiple issues that were filed against the Trump administration during its first month in office. Many of them target DOGE or are DOGE-adjacent. Others involve the new administration’s crackdown on border security; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs; and federal transgender policies.

The status of these legal challenges changes daily, sometimes hourly. What follows is an effort to explain what the fights are about, not where they stand at the time this is posted.

General Challenges to DOGE

National Council of Nonprofits v. OMB was the first attack on DOGE. It challenged a Trump administration memo that required federal agencies to pause federal grants and payments, pending a review. At the end of January, a federal judge temporarily lifted the moratorium, and the Trump administration rescinded the memo.

The lead plaintiff in the case, National Council of Nonprofits, represents the supposedly “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) that have paradoxically been major recipients of government loot and account for many of the plaintiffs suing the Trump administration. (Perhaps, we should begin calling these “basically governmental organizations”?)

Co-plaintiffs in National Council include the Main Street Alliance (a cabal of businesses initially built to promote ObamaCare and other Democratic agenda items), the American Public Health Association (a group of health professionals that reliably supports Democratic Party positions on issues such as climate), and Services and Advocacy for Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Elders.

State of New York v. Donald J. Trump is another direct attack on DOGE, this one from 19 Democratic state attorneys general. It seeks to halt the DOGE team’s access to the federal payment system. If successful, this would be an exceptionally efficient way to render DOGE inefficient.

The Trump administration’s pauses and moratoriums directed at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been challenged by at least four federal lawsuits:

In each of these four cases judges have granted TROs or other requests to delay implementation of the orders while the lawsuits work their way through the system.

Another employment case, Public Citizen, Inc v. Trump, is the merger of several cases that argue DOGE violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). The Trump administration does not believe FACA applies to DOGE, while the plaintiffs argue among other points that DOGE should be subjected to FACA’s requirement to be “fairly balanced” in its leadership.

Plaintiffs in Public Citizen include Public Citizen, the State Democracy Defenders Fund, the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Public Health Association, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the VoteVets Action Fund, the Center for Auto Safety, and the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

The consolidated Public Citizen case repeatedly references Musk as a “billionaire” and “the world’s richest individual.” The jealousy appeal against Musk’s money isn’t relevant to the dispute any more than the hefty combined annual revenue of his accusers, which exceeds $340 million:

The other Public Citizen co-plaintiff, State Democracy Defenders Fund, was created in 2024 by Democratic Party zampolit Norm Eisen. Suffering from a potentially fatal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Eisen recently partnered on a new media venture with former Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin. Another TDS sufferer, Rubin quit her newspaper job because the Post wouldn’t endorse Kamala Harris.

AUTHOR

Ken Braun

Ken Braun is CRC’s senior investigative researcher and authors profiles for InfluenceWatch.org and the Capital Research magazine.

He previously worked for several free market policy organizations, spent six years as a chief of staff in the Michigan Legislature, and also wrote political columns for MLive Media Group, a consortium including the Grand Rapids Press and seven other mid-sized Michigan newspapers. He is an alumni of Michigan State University.

RELATED ARTICLES:

General Challenges to DOGE

Does Bureaucracy Equal Democracy?
Don’t Quit … but Don’t Do Your Job Either!

Say “Bye, Bye” to DEI

EDITORS NOTE: This Capital Research Center column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

In the next installment, federal bureaucrats sue to keep their jobs.

Agencies Bear Much of the Blame for Government Waste

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The Trump administration is only four weeks old, and the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already revealed numerous examples of government waste, with each item seemingly more shocking than the last. For many ordinary Americans, the natural reaction to such revelations is horror, followed by a series of unanswered questions: How did this happen? Who is to blame? And why have these problems gone unaddressed for so long?

Although there’s plenty of blame to go around, blaming Congress — the usual punching bag when executive agencies rewrite policy without pushback — is inappropriate here because the waste and errors uncovered by DOGE are not at the policy level but at the detail level. No, much of the blame must fall upon the executive agencies themselves.

Take the recent revelation that the Treasury Department’s computer system made it optional to fill in a code linking a payment with a budget line item for approximately $4.7 trillion in payments (over an unspecified period… are we talking about one year or 20?). Certainly such granular details of a payment system are best left to agencies, not Congress.

But such an oversight can cause real financial headaches. Because this field was optional, it “was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE announced. Thus, not even the Treasury Department can explain to auditors why this money was spent.

Contrast this apparent sloppiness in the Treasury Department with the apparent pride its veteran employees took in their work. “The fiscal service performs some of the most vital functions in government,” declared senior Treasury bureaucrat David Lebryk, who announced his retirement after he briefly denied DOGE access to the payment system, during a short-lived stint as acting secretary. “Our work may be unknown to most of the public, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exceptionally important.”

Lebryk was the type of civil servant who receives glowing reviews from his bosses. “For many years, Dave Lebryk’s leadership has helped to make our payment systems reliable and trusted at home and abroad,” said Jacob Lew, a former Treasury Secretary during the Obama administration.

I agree with Lebryk that the government paying its bills correctly is “exceptionally important.” But I disagree with Lew, when he described as “reliable” a payment system that can’t account for up to $4.7 trillion.

Not that this was a particularly difficult fix for the Treasury Department. “As of Saturday,” DOGE continued, “this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.” Just change a bit of code, and — presto! — the problem disappeared. Was that so hard?

Why didn’t the Treasury Department correct this oversight before? Were they waiting on Congress to tell them to fix it (or, more realistically, waiting on Congress to ask about it)? Did they never review their own protocols and policies? How could they not know this was a problem?

The truth is, what DOGE found — oodles of improper payments — is not a new revelation. “Improper payments — those that should not have been made or were made in the incorrect amount — have consistently been a government-wide issue. Since fiscal year 2003, cumulative improper payment estimates by executive branch agencies have totaled about $2.7 trillion,” wrote the Government Accountability Office in March 2024. “GAO has found that these payments represent a material deficiency or weakness in internal controls. Specifically, GAO has noted that the federal government is unable to determine the full extent of its improper payments or to reasonably assure that appropriate actions are taken to reduce them.”

That sounds like a big problem; someone should get on that. Did bureaucrats think this meant “someone else,” or did the thought never occur to them at all?

I don’t mean to be overly harsh towards career employees of the executive branch, but I simply cannot conceive of any more innocent explanations. If I were part of a team that was critical to the operations of the freest, most powerful government on earth, then I would urgently correct any errors that came to my attention — or at least alert my superiors to them. If I failed to address these errors, I don’t know how I could take as much pride in my performance as these civil servants evidently do.

Consider another recent example, the announcement that the Social Security database contained more than 10 million Americans over the age of 120, who were marked as living. This is impossible, of course. Early in human history, the Lord proclaimed, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years” (Genesis 6:3). As of October 2024, the oldest living American is Naomi Whitehead, age 114, and the oldest living person on earth was 116.

But while members of Congress do not readily cross-reference the Social Security database against death reports, surely someone in the Social Security Administration (SSA) should have that job. Even if no one has that job, surely it should raise some red flags when the intrepid civil servants at the SSA go to disburse a payment to a person born during the McKinley administration.

DOGE’s investigation has provided a few answers but provoked far more questions, such as the ones I’ve asked here. American taxpayers will ask these questions, and they deserve to know the answers.

At this point, it’s still possible that there are reasonable explanations for some of these questions (poor agency structuring resulting in broken communications, things that slipped through the cracks, lack of modernization, etc.) — though even such answers reveal a broken bureaucratic underbelly betraying their brazen braggadocio.

However, the longer these questions remain unanswered, the more Americans will suspect — rightly or wrongly — that the answer involves fraud, grift, or political favors. They are also likely to suspect — rightly or wrongly — that the public officials, civil servants, labor unions, activists, and media opposing DOGE’s effort to root out corruption are doing so because they have something to hide.

Something stinks in Washington, and DOGE has only begun to uncover the symptoms. When there’s a dead mouse in the wall, those blaming the pest control guy working to remove it are only pointing a finger at themselves.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Eric Trump: ‘People need to go to jail for some of this reckless government spending.’

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The DOGE Mandate

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Mr. Elon Musk the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and Mr. Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman, author of “Truths: The Future of America First” and former candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. President-elect Trump has named them co-heads of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy lay out their plan for the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. For example:

  • Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, appointed civil servants within government agencies
  • The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.
  • DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government

By: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2024:

Following the Supreme Court’s guidance, we’ll reverse a decades long executive power grab.

Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.

This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision. It imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers. Thankfully, we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.

President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.

We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure.

Continue reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved.