Tag: taxes

Trump signs most explosive executive order yet as he pulls all federal funding to illegal migrants

Donald Trump made his strongest move against illegal immigration yet on Wednesday, signing an executive order that stops taxpayer money from going to undocumented migrants. 

The White House stated that Trump is ‘committed to safeguarding Federal public benefits for American citizens who are truly in need, including individuals with disabilities and veterans.’ 

Trump is demanding ‘corrective action’ to stop ‘all taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens‘.

Currently, children are entitled to a free K-12 public education regardless of immigration status under a 1982 Supreme Court ruling.

Trump’s order says a 1996 welfare law is supposed to deny public benefits to most illegal migrants, but points out that overhaul was ‘repeatedly undercut’ under Biden.  

He claims the Biden administration’s border crisis resulted ‘in the improper expenditure of significant taxpayer resources.’

The president also immediately ended his predecessor’s use of parole to allow people into America temporarily, including via the controversial CBP One app that allowed in 900,000 migrants at the Mexican border. 

More than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who flew to the US at their own expense with a financial sponsor took advantage of the program. 

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Almost Fired For Working With DOGE, Social Security Fraud Expert Now Leads The Agency

Leland Dudek was an obscure bureaucrat at the Social Security Administration who dedicated his career to stopping fraud. But when he worked with the Department of Government Efficiency to do just that, he came close to being fired.

“At 4:30pm EST, my boss called me to tell me I had been placed on administrative leave pending an Investigation,” Dudek wrote on LinkedIn. “They want to fire me for cooperating with DOGE,” he wrote in a now-deleted post obtained by The Daily Wire.

Then, a stunning reversal occurred. It was Acting Social Security Commissioner Michelle King who was out of a job. And Dudek was reinstated with a big promotion — taking her job leading the massive agency on an interim basis.

The Washington Post reported that King exited the agency after refusing to let DOGE access agency data and was replaced by Dudek. But it has not been reported that managers at the agency had moved to punish Dudek as he cooperated with the efficiency czars.

The LinkedIn post said “I confess. I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE. I confess. I moved contractor money around to add data science resources to my anti-fraud team. I confess. I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

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SHOCKING: DOGE Uncovers Over 4 Million Government Credit Cards Linked to 90 Million Unique Transactions

In a bombshell revelation, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has exposed a shocking level of federal spending abuse, revealing that the U.S. government has over 4.6 million active credit cards in circulation, processing a staggering 90 million transactions worth nearly $40 billion in Fiscal Year 2024 alone.

DOGE, the new federal watchdog agency established under President Donald Trump, posted its findings on X on Tuesday, accompanied by a breakdown of federal agency expenditures.

“The US government currently has ~4.6M active credit cards/accounts, which processed ~90M unique transactions for ~$40B of spend in FY24. DOGE is working w/ the agencies to simplify the program and reduce admin costs – we will report back in 1 week,” the account wrote.

Leading the charge in spending? None other than the Department of Defense (DOD), which boasts roughly 2.4 million individual accounts and a jaw-dropping 27.2 million transactions in just one fiscal year.

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How USAID Funded Hamas

The most striking aspect of President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) isn’t that unsavory aid recipients have misused taxpayer dollars. It’s that anyone is shocked by the revelations of waste, fraud, and abuse. After all, watchdog groups have sounded the alarm for years about misuse of USAID funds.

People shouldn’t just be enraged by USAID’s wasteful spending. They should also focus on what that spending supported—particularly when it promoted terror or aligned with Hamas’s interests.

Rather than being used to provide humanitarian aid and stabilize conflict-ridden regions—in accordance with USAID’s stated goal—American funds have often been funneled into corrupt, Hamas-tied institutions, with minimal oversight. A new multiyear study of USAID by the Middle East Forum identified $164 million in grants to radical organizations, including $122 million to those “aligned with designated terrorists and their supporters.” The MEF also found that “millions of federal dollars have been handed by USAID to organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas, with government officials even visiting Gaza terror proxies’ offices and launching joint programs.”

The money has kept flowing, as the U.S. has distributed $2.1 billion in Gaza since Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages on October 7, 2023. But the warning signs predate October 7. The USAID’s Inspector General—now raising the alarm about Trump’s shutdown of the agency—has consistently voiced concern over lax vetting mechanisms and inadvertent terror funding in the region.

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Why was the US funding LGBT “Pride” marches in Ukraine?

There is an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization, for the uninitiated) called “KyivPride” that runs the annual LGBT “Pride” march in Ukraine, and has done so for approximately a decade. KyivPride, like many similarly situated organizations, received US government largesse through a dizzying array of funding mechanisms — mainly stemming from USAID, the agency to which a sledgehammer has now ostensibly been taken by the Second Trump Administration. Whatever else one may think of the recent developments around USAID, it’s simply factually correct to state that US taxpayers had previously been subsidizing LGBT activism in the Donbass — a fact that can only be seen as facially ridiculous when explained to the majority of Americans. Simply take a look at KyivPride’s own public website for confirmation of its highly fruitful partnership with USAID…

As much as the newly emboldened DOGE whiz-kid crew might want to take credit for dramatically unearthing and exposing these blunderous expenditures, the reality is they’ve long been available for public inspection. That they never aroused much scrutiny till now is perhaps the real scandal.

As the money has gotten doled out, the standardized LGBT acronym has concurrently grown (now approximating something like 2SLGBTQIA+, but who’s really keeping track anymore). US diplomatic personnel participated in a Ukrainian “Pride” march in September 2021, a few months before the Russian invasion, when there perhaps might’ve been some more pressing diplomatic matters to attend to. An annual report from USAID on its Ukraine-related activities, which I helpfully saved years ago before DOGE largely nuked the agency’s assets from the internet, boasts that these Pride Marches had been “safely conducted” in Ukraine since 2015 — a year after the Ukrainian government was overthrown in a violent putsch, and US funding for “civil society” organs in the country greatly accelerated.

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Report: Hegseth Orders Pentagon To Make Sweeping Budget Cuts

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered Pentagon leaders to develop plans to make sweeping cuts to the Defense Department’s budget, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

According to a memo obtained by the Post, Hegseth’s order calls for an 8% cut to the Pentagon budget each year for five years. The Pentagon budget for 2025 is about $850 billion, and an 8% cut for five years would bring it down to roughly $560 billion, a reduction of $290 billion.

Hegseth wants the proposed cuts to be drawn up by February 24, and the memo included a list of 17 categories that would be exempt from the spending cuts.

The Post report said the exemptions include operations at the southern border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense, and acquisition of submarines, one-way attack drones, and other munitions.

The Pentagon has also been targeted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the Trump administration ordered the Pentagon to hand over a list of its probationary employees with the expectation that many may be fired, which came as DOGE workers arrived at the Pentagon.

The news of the plan to cut the Pentagon budget comes after President Trump suggested he wanted a major reduction in US military spending, saying he wanted to cut it in half as part of a deal with Russia and China.

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Report: Fact Checker Group Received $2.4M in US Government Funds Amid Fact-Checking Controversy

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is one of the organizations that received US taxpayer money over the last 12 years – most of it during the Biden administration and during about six months leading up to the former president’s election.

The Media Research Center (MRC) said it discovered this by searching the USASpending.gov site, which showed Poynter received the majority of funds from the Small Business Administration ($1.67 million), followed by the US Agency for Global Media and the State Department with $423,781, and $367,435.

The total amount the government gave Poynter in obligations from 2013 until this year is reported to be at least $2.4 million.

The problem with this “arrangement” is not simply irresponsible spending of public money, but the nature of the Poynter Institute.

Since 2015, it has been running the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), certifying and supporting more than 170 fact-checking outfits around the world with training, resources, and organizing of events.

Throughout the former administration’s time in power, conservatives and others engaging in “disfavored” speech online accused these third-party groups of bias that led to censorship.

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The DOGE of the 1880s

After years of government failures, an angry Congress confronted the federal bureaucracy. The much-criticized bureaucracy used archaic technology and was badly behind on its business. Many employees didn’t even bother to show up to work in person. Congress and the nation were ready for a thorough overhaul of the executive branch. The year was 1887.

Just as the late Gilded Age bureaucracy was failing to adapt to the industrial age, today’s bureaucracy is proving itself inadequate for the digital age. There is once again a push for fundamental reform, embodied today in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Lawmakers who support DOGE should draw lessons from the 1880s, when congressional investigations helped drive reform by uncovering bureaucratic failure.

In the 1800s, accusations of government inefficiency and corruption were as common as today. So were congressional investigations of these allegations. Congress, in addition to routine oversight, had conducted at least 63 one-off investigations of particular issues. But all of these investigations relied upon information that bureaucrats voluntarily submitted, so nobody knew what the bureaucracy was hiding. 

Although complaints from constituents indicated that delays and mistakes were more serious than agencies admitted, nobody knew the depth or causes of the bureaucracy’s problems. Businessmen felt that agencies were hidebound and that civil servants were lazy, whereas officials felt that the government was inadequately staffed. In 1887, Senator Francis Cockrell hit upon a novel solution: He formed what came to be called the “Cockrell Committee,” whose members set out to see the bureaucracy’s problems with their own eyes.

To acquaint itself with actual government procedure, the committee chose eight representative government tasks, such as purchasing stationary for the Treasury Department and paying the salary of a consul abroad—not the kind of practices that Congress, or anybody really, had taken much interest in before. Members went into the government’s office buildings and observed, from beginning to end, administrative processes. They recorded how forms were passed from department to department and observed the technology that clerks used for their work. They even witnessed the final settlement of a piece of business by Treasury Department accountants. At every point, they interviewed low-level civil servants and invited interested parties to comment.

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USAID accused of funding Boko Haram’s REIGN OF TERROR against Nigerian Christians

In a shocking revelation that has sent ripples across international borders, Nigerian politician Adamu Garba has accused the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) of funding Islamic terrorist groups, including Boko Haram and ISIS, in Nigeria. Garba, a prominent member of Nigeria’s All Progressives Congress, claims that USAID funds have been used to purchase weapons for these groups, which have waged a brutal campaign of violence against Christians in the region.

Boko Haram, often operating under the guise of Fulani herdsmen, has terrorized northeastern Nigeria for years. Their tactics include burning homes, killing men, and kidnapping and raping women and girls. A 2018 report by Voice of the Martyrs documented the displacement of over 300,000 people and the deaths of more than 500 individuals in that year alone. Garba’s allegations suggest that these atrocities were bankrolled, at least in part, by U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Garba’s claims align with recent statements by U.S. Congressman Scott Perry, who during a February 12 hearing titled “The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud,” accused USAID of misdirecting 697 million to terrorist organizations. Perry highlighted a specific example in which 136 million intended for the construction of 120 schools in Pakistan vanished without a trace.

“I mentioned this before that Boko Haram, ISWAP, and most of these terrorists, the weapons they get are actually funded by some clandestine foreign operators,” Garba stated in a video posted on his X page. “The exposé about USAID has confirmed that Boko Haram and all these terrorists are getting their weapons through the funding from USAID.”

Garba questioned the whereabouts of $824 million in USAID funding allocated to Nigeria last year, which was ostensibly intended for child mortality and education programs. “When did the money come in, where did it go to?” he asked. “These monies go to the funding of Boko Haram and kidnappers that are used to kill and destroy our land.”

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‘Disinformation’: Democrats refuse to believe USAID bankrolled transgender operas, woke activism

Confronted with almost $200 million in questionable spending by the U.S. Agency for International Development, congressional Democrats said it was just a pathetic excuse to cut off foreign aid.

The Democrats would not voice support for spending taxpayer dollars on transgender operas, “DEI musicals” and promotion of LGBTQ causes around the world. Instead, they said they didn’t believe it.

“I’d like to see the evidence,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told The Washington Times when asked about her stance on USAID’s culture war activism.

Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia chalked it up to “mis- and disinformation” from the White House.

“Even if what you say is true, it makes up such a minute portion of federal taxpayer dollars,” he said, insisting that his constituents support U.S. foreign aid. “The value of the expenditures outweighs by far any mistakes that may have been made in terms of individual line items.”

Mr. Johnson and several of his fellow Democrats said the benefits of “soft power” of foreign aid make it all worthwhile.

Democrats have been outraged by President Trump’s moves to shutter USAID after Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency revealed the spending.

The questionable programs bankrolled by USAID included roughly $75 million spent on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in foreign countries.

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