The DOGE axe has fallen at the United States Agency for International Aid (USAID), starting with its past year's $8 million in payments to (supposedly "centrist" but actually rabidly left-wing and openly anti-Trump) online American political news publication, "Politico".
At a White House press conference this past week, Press Secretary for the new Trump Administration, Karoline Leavitt, said: 'We're going line by line" through all Federal government agency spending, as part of a whole-of-government audit.
"We're asking: 'Do these receipts serve the interests of the American people? is this a good use of the American taxpayer's money?'"
As applied to Politico, the answer was clearly a resounding "no", with Leavitt saying, "The DOGE team is cancelling those payments now."
On February 6,
Elon Musk tweeted (or X'd?):
"Many media outlets are going to experience a mysterious drop in revenue."
(This apparently also includes, for example, the BBC - UK's premier leftist media institution.)
President Trump took to the Truth Social platform, meantime, to declare the questionable Politico funding probably the most significant scandal in which the mainstream media ("MSM") has ever been embroiled:
"'
. . . much of it
(i.e. the USAID funds have gone) to the fake news media as a pay-off for creating good stories about the Democtrats. Did the NYT
(i.e. New York Times) receive money? Who else did? This could be the biggest scandal of them all, perhaps in history!"
High-profile Youtuber and political commentator, Benny Johnson, noted that:
"No employee at Politico got paid yesterday. First time the company ever missed a pay period. Hmmm .. . . that kind of tells you something right there."
Wildly popular conservative commentator Glenn Beck of Blaze TV i.e. his own large and independent media channel, had this to say on his broadcast:
"If you're receiving that sort of money from the government, THEY ARE YOUR MASTERS."
'This Isn't Just Waste. It Goes Deeper.'
Joe Rogan also spoke out on his podcast:
"This isn't just waste. It goes deeper."
Rogan was speaking not just in reference to the funding of "fake news" outlets but to the broader funding decisions by USAID . . . which spent nearly US44 billion last year on outrageous DEI, LGBQT and uber-leftist projects in far-flung places - with neither projects nor geographies demonstrating any benefit, logic or rationale - at least from an American taxpayer perspective.
The outspoken and always entertaining Republican Senator Kennedy referred to the "Washington Bubble":
"People in this town have never had anyone review their spending before," he said. "Common sense is illegal in this town.
"But this is the information the American people want. It's what they voted for."
Opinion from Yours Truly, The Ed:
Do we have our own "Wellington bubble"?
What of the New Zealand government and the crazy leftie spending our still newish "centrist" government hasn't got the guts to cut?
Expenditure like the internal government hotline for departmental or agency employees having a meltdown because some member of the public didn't use their "preferred pronoun"?
No, no. Turn a blind eye to all that supposedly great value for taxpayer money. Far better that the PM and his henchwoman Louise Upston concern themselves with easier targets:
Targets like cutting disability funding relied upon by the most financially and physically defenceless all members of New Zealand society. Or introducing extra misery and pressure to the lives of those who are now reliant on general government support - as a direct result of the current political power set's own economic "turnaround" measures.
