Millionaires Tug-of-War for the Taxpayer Slush Fund You’ve Never Heard Of

Pointing Fingers and Crying Corruption in the Era of USAID, Bureaucracy and Millionaire Awareness

It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen . . . You’re waiting in line at the bank, listening as an endless string of customers dispute withdrawals and fees, when suddenly, a cop jumps out and shouts “Thief!” Startled, you turn your head to see a masked burglar, splaying his sack wide as the bank teller hurriedly drops in stacks of cash. “I’m no thief!” the burglar responds “The bank is giving me the money for free!”

“Giving you the money? It belongs to these people!” the cop argues, gesturing to you and the fellow bank-goers in line. They nod their heads and shake their fists in agreement.

“No, it belongs to the bank,” the burglar scoffs. You laugh, and look around expecting to see your indignance mirrored on everyone else. Instead, they’ve dropped their fists and turned their attention to the burglar. “And what if its all for charity and for ordinary bank fees, which I happen to collect for? Why are you so interested in this money? Is it because you want to steal it? Because you’re a cop—they’re all corrupt!” The bank-goers nod thoughtfully. “Where is your evidence that I am stealing?” the burglar adds. “Where is your evidence that youare not the one stealing? A crooked cop, trying to take money that has nothing to do with you?”

“But the bank gets its money from you all!” the cop points out, but the bank-goers are still looking to the banker and the burglar. “Evidence? You’re wearing a mask, you’re taking the money right before our eyes! You’ve admitted that!” the cop sputters, but the bank-goers have started shaking their fists in his direction. The cop points stiffly at the burglar “You have no right to steal from them!” he shouts.

The banker gasps. “Is that a Nazi salute?” The bank explodes into anarchy.

Defeated, the cop turns to the banker. Over the roars and the growing picket line, he asks how the banker could do this. “The burglar makes it worth my while.” The banker shrugs. “And the people let me. They could just choose a different bank.”

But they can’t just change banks—not easily. Because what we are talking about, of course, is not a cop, a banker and a burglar. We are talking about Elon Musk, Congress, and unelected bureaucracies like USAID. The metaphorical bank is America, and the bank-goers rallying against their own interests, naturally, are the American public.

What is USIAD?

After WWII, when U.S. foreign aid spending drastically escalated, President JFK established the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through executive order in order to centralize existing international aid efforts with post-war development programs. USAID operations abroad steadily shifted over the last six decades, and now purportedly serve a vital international function, receiving tens of billions of dollars annually. These projects supply basic aid to underdeveloped regions, but also help implement programs for democracy-building, economic development, and social safety nets following global events—for example, following the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. The American public became aware of USAID when Trump, Elon and DOGE set their sights on it for audits and cuts. Aghast Democrats and the Leftist media suggest that USAID projects provide necessary and vital aid abroad, while incredulous Republicans argue that USAID spending rarely goes towards vital projects, or any legitimate projects at all . . .

Pointing the finger at the Burglar: Why are People Mad at USAID?

Over the last week, extensive proofs show USAID was not only blowing through billions of taxpayer dollars on projects no one asked for or heard of, but was also using those projects to directly harm us. Just from a standpoint of government waste, the projects revealed so far are absurd. Tens of thousands were spent on transgender operas in Colombia ($47k), transgender comic books in Peru (32k); and a DEI musical in Ireland ($70k). Millions were spent on sex changes and LGBTQ activism in Guatemala ($2M); DEI promotion in Serbian workplaces (1.5M); boosting tourism in Egypt ($6M); and boosting Electric Vehicles in Vietnam ($2.5M). And the list goes on, for billions in annual spending . . . for who knows how long.

Equally absurd are the known USAID projects that blew billions only to make worse the problems they incoherently were designed to resolve. $1.46 billion aimed disincentivizing opioid production in Afghanistan actually increased opioid production by 119% in two years and grew opioid fields from basically nil to around 350 hectares. $29.6 million aimed at protecting African children via Kenyan orphanages accidentally funded child sexual exploitation and abuse. Millions funding the Wuhan labs, presumably for some public health objective, seemingly led to leaking the largest pandemic in modern history.

What’s worse is the evidence that our taxpayer money was just blatantly stolen, as well as used against us through weaponized state and international censorship and terror apparatuses. USAID officials conspired with, and/or used hundreds of millions of US tax dollars to fund, international organizations that push leftist ideologies both nationally and internationally including Soros-affiliated NGOs (more on that below), the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. USAID used millions of US tax dollars to fund ‘independent’ U.S. and international media entities that just so happen to only push stories that promote Leftist politics—Domestically, USAID funding contributed to the $8M the government gave to Politico, and many sources suggest USAID contributed to the tens of millions of government funds sent to the New York Times, The Associated Press, and Bloomberg. Perhaps most insulting, however, were all the expenditures linked to anti-American terror. USAID sent hundreds of millions of US tax dollars to fund individuals and NGOs linked to designated terrorist organizations: funding college tuition for an al-Queda terrorist, a Gaza-based terror charity affiliated with Hamas and an al Queda affiliated militant group fighting (and committing human rights atrocities) to overthrow the Syrian government.

This is infuriating with the added context of American woes during these expenditures. Not only did the government quietly delegate billions to unnecessary projects abroad, they did so while Americans were suffering through Great Depression level inflation and cost of living; the poverty, homelessness, and sickness of our own citizens; and the multiple deadly and devastating natural disasters our people have been unable to receive adequate aid for, from the 2023 Maui Fires, to the 2024 hurricane in North Carolina, to the 2025 LA Fires.

And it isn’t just Elon Musk and DOGE Bros showing the receipts, with a historic level of government spending transparency. Former USAID official Mark Moyar admitted USAID was a hub of waste and corruption. During Trump’s first term, USAID was mostly comprised of Obama and Clinton cronies actively hiding their spending projects from then-President Trump. Even during Biden’s administration, significant amounts of money were being spent at USAID without any political appointees’ knowledge, including from a “big slush fund” discovered in 2019 (more than halfway through Biden’s administration). Such issues were apparently widespread across the agency, and it was commonplace for USAID employees to quietly (and illegally) use their position to benefit private businesses in which they held a stake. When Moyar tried to report such conflicts of interest, he was removed from the agency.

Former U.S. Department of State official Mike Benz advocated about USAID fraud for years:

There really is a USA Trueman’s show that much of the world believes in. . . . They are finding out the reach of it in everything from unions, to US censorship, to pandemic and gain-of-function research, to even strange ties to US-targeted terrorism and the drug trade. These institutions that everyone thought were private and independent are being funded by a 44 billion dollar a year budget.

. . .

I thought internet censorship was a domestic story at first. But then you start following the trail of it and you see ‘oh this next disinformation conference the next panel is on energy geopolitics, what are they doing together?’ And then you go over the energy geopolitics people conference and their fellow panelists are all military contractors. And so you’re like okay the military has something to do with energy politics and the disinformation pipeline, and Ukraine has something to do with it. And you keep following down the line, these chamber of commerce people, and then this sleet of humanitarian aid organizations like USAID, NED, the whole suite of NGOs, US state department grantees, national science foundation grantees, . . . in order to tell the story about censorship and what to do to stop it, you had to explain a completely different world than the one people thought that they lived in.

So, it’s rather obvious why people are mad. The better question is why isn’t everyone mad? Why are there still people defending USAID?

Pointing the Finger Back at the Cop: Why are People Defending USAID?

The answer here is pretty unclear, but seems to generally filter down to the following: (1) only Congress should be deciding where this money goes; (2) what about the “good” done by USAID, which is all getting frozen out now; and (3) why is an “unelected billionaire” doing this?

The first concern is, in essence, the bank-goers from the start of this article crying “it’s not our money, it’s the bank’s money!”

Like the bank-goers that suggest that the bank is free to do whatever with the money rightfully within their possession, at whatever detriment it poses to the consenting bank-goers, USAID supporters argue Congress is free to designate taxpayer money as it see’s fit, at whatever detriment it poses to the American public that elected them. There’s a lot to unpack there.

Every fiscal year, Congress is indeed empowered to appropriate funds to various executive entities through the federal budget, which the President signs into law. Sensibly, these appropriations are not “open checks” but will specify the entities to receive the funds and how those entities should spend those funds. Money cannot be used for whatever once it leaves the hands of Congress and goes to its designated agency, overriding its Presidentially and Congressionally authorized purpose. Simply put, that would be fraud. For fiscal year 2023, information like this can be found in the Consolidated Appropriates Act of 2023, which specifically designates the sort of spending appropriate for USAID. To the extent that the aforementioned USAID spending choices do not align with the budget designations (spoiler alert, they don’t), Congressmen have no coherent defense for them—no matter how many songs they sing or screams they scream at the capital.

Even if an argument is made that the spending choices articulated above serve some redeeming USAID purpose, that is not the “end all” to the discussion. As long as the USAID money is going towards a valid USAID objective—even if there is better use for the funds or less money necessary to support that objective—the expenditures may not be fraudulent, but can still certainly be wasteful. Perhaps Congress did not articulate strong enough guardrails to how agencies like USAID should use the money to achieve their objectives (spoiler alert, they didn’t), but where expenditures are ridiculous and ineffectual to achieve a certain objective, we cannot hide behind that objective to avoid scrutiny. There are other ways to support the people in developing countries than funding LGBTQ dance festivals. Yes, waste is not as morally abhorrent as fraud. But it still isn’t good. So why are Americans nonetheless defending the waste alongside the politicians who authorized it?

This brings us to the second general complaint against USAID reform: Stalled USAID funds for “good” is an indictment on Musk and MAGA, regardless of what absurd spending they find.

This is, in essence, like the bank-goers from the start of this article crying that at least some of the money might be going to normal and good causes, like ordinary bank fees or charity, even if theft is alleged. The response to this, of course, is that it does not really matter. That some money goes to good or proper causes is not a basis to ignore apparent billions in waste and fraud. Any entity receiving billions a year will almost certainly accomplish some good. We still must root out fraud and waste. Funds freezing so auditors can accomplish that is not the fault of the auditors, but the fraudsters and wasters that made the audit necessary in the first place.

Indeed, USAID supporters suggest that as long as a USAID as an entity did “some good”, critics cannot point out any of its harm without being condemned as against the good. Like the BLM leaders that could defraud their supporters by millions, while insisting anyone standing up for those supporters about the theft were obviously racists that hate black lives, USAID supporters ironically shift blame away from those actively harming them unto the people trying to root out and stop the harm. The very politicians protesting the USAID audit, whom Americans are singing and screaming with at the capital, are likely the biggest beneficiaries of USAID’s absurd expenditures—at the expense of those very Americans. After all, the only people typically against rooting out fraud and waste are the fraudsters and wasters themselves.

Yet, it’s unclear if USAID even does “some good” anymore. As former Official Benz explains:

USAID aids access and reputation completely depends on its perception of being a sort of quasi charity, even though within it, no charity is every going to be found. It’s a US foreign policy instrument, “aid” is not even in the name . . . When I was trying to write my book 8 years ago and explain the tectonic plates of the US and global censorship campaign, I was on the USAID website more than anything else. Going through everything and saying “this cant be true, this cant be true . . . oh my god it is!”

Benz explains that this entity gets harder and harder to justify on humanitarian grounds the more one looks into it. As the mask starts to slip on this front, the last justifiable defense of USAID is its morally ambiguous “soft power” purposes. Through USAID, the U.S. can and does have quid pro quo arrangements abroad wherein it helps a developing country, while also strengthening a U.S. interest—like securing inport/export markets, natural resources, or national security goals. What people don’t realize, according to Benz, is the extreme extent USAID is doing this—such as by toppling democracies abroad where foreign leaders are less favorable to U.S. interests, as we apparently did in Ukraine for our oil interests (and bragged about) and in Bangladesh to build a U.S. military base on there. It is doubtful that these are the interests USAID supporters are screaming about at the capital right now . . .

The last general criticism against USAID is just blanket fury that it’s Elon Musk stopping the money flow and rooting out the waste or fraud.

The argument here seems to be that we should assume, against all evidence, that whatever “unelected billionaire” Musk is doing to break up USAID is worse than whatever USAID was doing. This is, in essence, the bank-goers from the start of this article submitting to social conditioning that “cops are corrupt” even when confronted with obvious evidence that the cop is supporting their interests. The salient issue with that is not really whether the burglar or the cop is right—just as it isn’t really the point whether USAID or Musk is right.

Where it sure as hell appears to be the case that, for years, billions of US taxpayer dollars were either intentionally or recklessly spent on wasteful and harmful causes, without any transparency to the American Public, the important thing to focus on is why Americans are not unanimously supportive of freezing and investigating these expenditures. Just as it is possible that the aforementioned masked bank burglar was authorized to take the bank’s money—it’s at least possible that there’s justifiable reasons for USAID expenditures. Yet, instead of being uniformly aghast at all the sketchy spending uncovered, and interested in verifying and rooting it out, Americans are parading around D.C. protesting the person that identified all the sketchy spending, right alongside the politicians that likely condoned that sketchy spending. Like the bank-goers leaping to the defense of the burglar, many Americans are shrugging their shoulders at every expenditure evidenced by DOGE and Musk no matter what.

Pointing the Finger Harder and Crying Nazi: Vilifying Musk and DOGE as Authoritarian Threats

Even before anyone had ever heard of USAID, the Left accused Musk of being an “unelected billionaire” aiming to improperly influence U.S. policy for himself, Trump and other multi-millionaires. But bald DARVO accusations of what bad things Trump/Musk might do, and seem to threaten, don’t change facts on which administration actually expanded the reach of the executive branch through “independent” agencies and actually achieves political and social advantage through conspiracy with unelected millionaires and billionaires.

DOGE was created by Executive Order to implement the agenda of the head of the executive branch to oversee his branch’s numerous agencies and departments. Many other executive agencies were similarly created by executive order, and are generally deemed as legitimate even though they have much broader influence—like the FBI, the Homeland Security Council, the EPA, the NSA, the Peace Corps, and the Welfare Administration. Curiously, the media and Congressmen haven’t been fear mongering about these entities overreaching executive power, and so no one protests them . . . or any actual executive power overreach under Biden, from his weaponization of the FBI and other federal agencies against his political rival, having those same agencies sweep his own criminality under the rug, and his open contradiction of SCOTUS rulings. In short: Democrats will lose the debate on which side of the aisle uses invented executive agencies to exert their will or otherwise overreaches executive authority. . . or if we have that same debate regarding the use of the unelected super rich like Elon Musk.

Firstly, if we compare ‘apples to apples’ on the rich influencing politics, for years democrats have had the power of the purse in their elections by a margin of hundreds of millions and have otherwise acquired the consistent, generous financial support of a jaw-dropping number of ‘corrupt capitalist corporations’ and national and international millionaires and billionaires. A curious reality, for the party ‘of the middle class’ that claims to ‘go after’ millionaires . . Secondly, millionaires like Zuckerberg have already ousted the Biden-Harris Administration for being the ones to conspire with the tech “oligarchs” to pressure and censor in order to propagandize the American people. Thirdly, no right-wing billionaire has come close to influencing American politics and culture as much as the fanatically Left Soros family. Father-Son Hungarian multi-billionaires George and Alex Soros donated hundreds of millions to democratic causes, election efforts, and projects over the last few years alone and nearly $12 billion since the late 1970s. Some recent projects include: anti-Israel protests at Ivy League schools; hundreds of millions on mass naturalization efforts for illegals trying to influence our election; and hundreds of millions on local radio channels to suppress information right before our election, in violation of the FCC.

Through their FJP project, the Soroses ensured 3 in 10 Americans live under a Soros elected prosecutor “directed . . . to manipulate the rule of law concerning illegal immigration, drugs, abortion, election integrity, capital punishment and laws against childhood sex changes.” The FJP had the “Soros-backed attorneys sign 33 pledges to not enforce certain laws — including election integrity measures and immigration laws — and attend more than 50 meetings or ‘convenings,’ some of which were ‘mandatory.’” On at least 20 occasions, the “FJP sent prosecutors ‘templates’ of press releases they should send out, as well as social media posts to ‘adapt.’” One “high profile” Soros-backed prosecutor is none other than Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. See more on the Soroses role in “The American Oligarchy” here.

Pointing the Finger Beyond USAID

It is obviously a bad thing to let the unelected super-rich control policy without our knowledge or consent, but not only is that not what is happening with Musk, it is predominantly happening on the Left in broader, secretive ways that Musk’s efforts are ironically likely to uncover. Not only have “Trump’s millionaires” not achieved any amount in power and influence close to what the Left’s has, but Elon Musk was actually appointed in fulfillment of a campaign promise by a popularly elected President he openly campaigned alongside to do precisely what he has been doing. Even if voters didn’t vote with eyes wide open for Musk to do all he is doing, the public has already expressed popular consent for Trump to be President, and to discretionarily use whomever he need to pursue his promised federal objectives. Elon Musk didn’t buy that and its basically the same thing as being elected himself for his role—a lot more than the secretive Leftist billionaires like Soros could claim, or the 2 million other ‘unelected bureaucrats’ that have been running all of our executive agencies. Until now . . .

What’s more, Trump is head of the executive and constitutionally entitled to oversee all members of the executive branch. That includes Elon, DOGE, and all the agencies they audit. There is no unconstitutional overreach of authority—that isn’t just something you claim when proper authority is exercised in a way you don’t like.

We should bear all this in mind as Elon Musk moves beyond USAID to root out waste, fraud, and abuse across executive bureaucracies, from his already shocking findings in the treasury, FEMA, social security, and Medicaid/Medicare, to his plans for the DOE and IRS. Remember: evidence of improper spending is spotting the burglar in the bank. Let’s not attack the Cop, especially if its just because we distrust cops—at least not until we’ve given him the chance to unmask the burglars, investigate, and propose a plan of action. Let’s not attack Musk for finding sketchy government spending, especially if its just because we distrust billionaires and Trump allies—at least not until we’ve given him the chance to unmask, investigate, and propose a plan.