The DOGE Is Deadly To The Swamp

A doctor tells her sick patient, “I’ve got good news and bad news. You have an aggressive form of cancer, but I think with surgery we can make you better.”   

Stunning news, but thank God. There’s hope. There’s a way forward.  

Instead of being relieved, though, the patient furiously denies the diagnosis and screams at the doctor, “How dare you tell me I have cancer! I don’t have cancer! You’re the one who’s sick.” 

That’s basically what we’re hearing from the left, the Pravda Press, and a Democrat Party doubling down on insanity as the Department of Government Efficiency (the DOGE) begins detailing the diseases sickening the body politic and devouring taxpayer dollars.

Oh, these guys are mad. Like frothing at the mouth, rabies mad. Jussie Smollett gaslighting fraudulent righteous indignation mad — because President Donald Trump and a billionaire businessman they used to crush on are exposing the big government scam the American taxpayer has long been forced to fund. 

Corrupt Bargainers

Badly defeated and desperately trying to crawl out of the political wilderness, Democrats are choosing to die on the government-waste-is-good political hill after holding a four-year orgy of waste. They are great at projection. You’ve got to give them that. 

“What we are witnessing here is the biggest heist in American history,” deranged Sen. Chris Van Hollen said at a protest Wednesday near the U.S. Capitol. The Maryland Democrat made the rounds this week at a series of D.C. protests and press conferences in support of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, the poster-child for galling waste, fraud, and abuse in government. 

Van Hollen and posse got together for Wednesday’s made-for-corporate media political temper tantrum, decrying Trump’s move to dismantle the corrupt foreign aid dispenser, one of the swampiest agencies in the fetid swamp. 

He described Elon Musk leading the Department of Government Efficiency as “the most corrupt bargain we’ve ever seen in American history.” Apparently, the senator is unfamiliar with the Biden family’s body of work. 

“Elon Musk gives $250 million to elect Donald Trump, and Donald Trump turns over the keys to United States government to Elon Musk and his billionaire friends and his cronies,” Van Hollen said at the cringy protest with some of the most stereotypical, mask-wearing Marxists this side of a Columbia University Hamas pep rally.

“Are we going to let that stand? Hell no, we are not going to let that stand,” he told the leftist demonstrators, who looked like they were promised lunch. “We have to fight this in the courts, we have to fight this in the Congress, we have to fight this in the streets. We need to fight this all over America.”

This is what the Democrats want to fight for? This is their line in the sand?  Boy, they love to lose. But, then again, this is the same party recently led by Kamala Harris, who reportedly sought advice about her political future from Hillary Clinton. That’s a recipe for success. 

‘This Level of Insanity’

Let’s talk about the “biggest heist in American history.” Thanks to President Trump, DOGE, and some other government trackers, we’re seeing just how badly the uniparty has screwed we the people — we the taxpayer. 

Here are just some of the most egregious examples of baffling projects funded by USAID, as my colleague Tristan Justice detailed earlier this week. How about $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia? A transgender comic book in Peru? Price tag, $32,000. (Como se dice, The Continuing Adventures of They, Fighting Crime in Gender-Affirming Underwear?) Or $1.5 million for an LGBTQ jobs program in Serbia? 

There’s more. So much more. 

Parker Thayer, investigative researcher at nonprofit tracker Capital Research Center, notes $19.5 billion from the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act going to “climate smart agriculture.” What’s “climate smart agriculture,” pray tell? 

“What exactly that means is hard to say, but the Department of Agriculture has committed over $1 billion in federal grant money to nonprofits funding it,” Thayer writes in the DOGE Files, the center’s effort to “document some of the most egregious examples of the federal government’s careless use of your tax dollars.”

“This level of insanity exists throughout every single department the we’ve looked at so far,” Thayer told me this week on the latest episode of “The Federalist Radio Hour.” And so much of it is hard to track — by design. 

Thayer said the DOGE Files team found $4 billion that the Biden administration pushed out in foreign grants that were listed as “miscellaneous.” 

“What that means is, the names were redacted,” he said. “They don’t want to tell us where the money went.”

That’s a problem. 

And that’s the hill the irrelevant left is dying on these days. Why? A couple of reasons. 

The Swamp Rats are Scurrying

Things are about to get worse for their power centers and their useful political idiots as the Trump administration continues to pull back the curtain on what reasonable minds would agree is an insane use of tax dollars in a country carrying an insanely high debt. And we’re not just dealing with waste here. Lifting the veil could expose crimes committed in these agencies, the kind of corruption the average American has long suspected. We’re about to see how the sausage is made, and there are a lot of people in positions of power — some with Ds and Rs next to their names and plenty of no-name Deep Staters and back office bureaucrats  — who would do just about anything to keep a lid on this information. 

So we’re seeing all kinds of kicking and screaming from people who aren’t sleeping very well these days, people talking about “corrupt bargains” and taking the battle against transparency in government “to the streets.” 

Of course, some of the loudest protesters are from the corporate “news” organizations that like to say brave things such as, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” They have much to lose. They’re already losing. The White House on Thursday confirmed that leftist propaganda peddler Politico will no longer get its cozy $8 million in taxpayer-funded premium subscriptions from federal agencies. As my colleague Logan Washburn reported, the Associated Press, which bills itself “an independent news cooperative,”  has pocketed $37.5 million in federal tax dollars over the last 15 years. 

“The AP issues a stylebook that journalists have widely adopted for standards in style, formatting, and word choice. According to InfluenceWatch, the stylebook shifted in 2013 — just before The AP’s federal funding began to trend upward — to favor left-wing terminology. The problem has worsened in recent years,” Logan wrote. 

Interesting. 

Will the accomplice media die without public subsidies? The “resistance movement” gravy train is drying up.  

We’re getting a much better look at the cancer killing this republic. The DOGE is proving to be a pretty powerful MRI. Sunlight indeed is the best disinfectant. Sit back and watch the swamp rats scurry from the light. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.