The howls of indignation over Trump and Marco Rubio pausing USAID grants rather than “gradually” examining all of the agency’s expenditures over time are particularly disingenuous. Such a stall will only mean that more taxpayer money will go out the metaphorical door for wasteful, ideological projects like what red-pilled former Rolling Stone pundit Matt Taibbi calls its “colossal library of crazy-ass contracts.” He cites the $39 million for “Gender Equality in Water, Power, and Transportation,” “Recognizing the Third Gender in Bangladesh,” “Ukrainian Resilience Through Fashion,” a “TransFormation Salon” and a pre-Taliban plan to help “Afghan Women Enter the Financial Sector,” but there are others that Elon Musk opening the ledgers on “the Matterhorn of suck that is USAID” (Taibbi again) have revealed.
Above we see the screen shot revealing that USAID gave over $8 million in grants during fiscal year 2024 to Politico, the online Axis news and punditry site. Politico is almost always critical of Trump, conservatives and Republicans and just as consistently a vocal ally of the “resistance,” Democrats and progressive policies and advocates.
Why was the Biden administration giving Politico cash in an election year, or is that the reason? How many other supposedly independent news organization were on the Biden government payroll? I can’t say this surprises me, given how important controlling the news media is to totalitarian regimes, and that’s what the previous administration and the current Democratic Party aspired and aspires to—still, it’s damning news.
Also damning is the fact that Politico never informed its readers about the money, which created an automatic conflict of interest. This would be mandatory when Politico issued such Democratic Party lapdog propaganda as this post about the House censoring lying, incompetent, Squad member Jamaal Bowman, now mercifully sent home by his New York district’s voters because he was an embarrassment as well as an anti-Semite.
I wonder if other card-carrying members of the Axis’s mainstream media propaganda club have been rewarded for their loyalty. If I were MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times or the Washington Post and saw that Politico was on the take, I’d feel unappreciated.
In related news, it was impossible to find a news report of the grant using Google. If I typed in any combination of “USAID” and “Politico,” all that Google gave me were posts at Politico, which, at least so far, in remaining mum about its connection to USAID. The metaphorical beans were spilled on Twitter/”X.” If the pre-Musk owners were still in charge, those tweets would probably have been censored as “misinformation.”
Ethics Alarms 
Two criticisms that keep appearing are that unelected Elon Musk and a bunch of kids are snooping around where they don’t belong, and that many of the waste and fraud ocurred d also during the prior Trump administration.
Very few of the millions of federal employees are elected. Elon’s group has been hired by the elected President Trump to conduct an independent audit of the trillions of taxpayer dollars spent each year. And these “kids” are brilliant IT experts who can write the algorithms to effectively identify waste and fraud without thousands of labor hours. It will fall to elected members of Congress and the President to enact the needed changes, strategies and budget adjustments.
In his first term President Trump was hampered by a steep learning curve, time constraints, and the subterfuge of adversaries who were quite effective at sabotage. He isn’t going to make the same mistakes. If he can help it, most of the fraud, waste and defalcations won’t be repeated under his watch.
God bless this team!