Top 5 examples of government waste: DOGE

May not be the biggest bucks, but they certainly contend  for most outrageous!

*$132,000 to  Taliban official (Mohammad Qasem Halimi, a former Taliban member who was Afghanistan’s former Chief of Protocol) by the United States Institute of Peace (who?)

Halimi was detained by the U.S. and held at Bagram Air Base for a year beginning Jan. 2, 2002. He held several positions in Afghanistan’s government following his release and was appointed as the Minister of Hajj and Religious Affairs in Afghanistan in 2020.

“A small agency called the United States Institute of Peace is definitely the agency we’ve had the most fight at. We actually went into the agency and found they had loaded guns inside their headquarters — Institute for Peace,” a DOGE staffer told Watters. “So by far, the least peaceful agency that we’ve worked with, ironically. Additionally, we found that they were spending money on things like private jets,…”

*Over $200,000,000,000 in Covid relief funds spent by school districts with little or no accountability. Those extra three zeroes are NOT a typo. $200 billion.

Granite School District in Utah spent their COVID-relief funds on $86,000 in hotel rooms for an educational conference at Caesars Palace, a ritzy Las Vegas casino, while Santa Ana Unified in California spent $393,000 to rent out a Major League Baseball stadium,…

The cost-cutting department also revealed that schools spent $60,000 of COVID-relief funds on swimming pool passes, while a California district used its funds to purchase an ice cream truck.

*Joni Ernst (LTCOL, Ret.,  Senator R-IA) released that USAID spent $20,000,000 to create an Iraqi “Sesame Street.”

Ernst said that under the Biden administration, USAID awarded the $20 million to a nonprofit called Sesame Workshop to produce a show called “Ahlan Simsim Iraq” in an effort to “promote inclusion, mutual respect and understanding across ethnic, religious and sectarian groups.”

Seems to me a simple phone call “be polite or we make rubble and then bounce the rubble” would have been a lot cheaper.

*Next, agencies made $162,000,000,000 in “improper payments” :

75% of the waste found was concentrated in five programs: $54 billion from three Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Medicare programs; $31 billion in HHS Medicaid; $16 billion from the Department of the Treasury’s earned income tax credit; $11 billion from the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; and $9 billion from the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Restaurant Revitalization Fund.

And that $162 billion was actually $74,000,000,000 LESS than the year before.

*And last we have “hundreds of millions” in DEI programs. This isn’t things like spurious deletion of Medal of Honor awardees, removing Tuskegee Airman photos and history – no, this is some serious cash.

DOGE has announced over the last few months that it has cut hundreds of millions in DEI contracts.

Earlier this month, DOGE announced it had worked with the U.S. National Science Foundation to cancel 402 “wasteful” DEI grants, which will save $233 million, including $1 million for “Antiracist Teacher Leadership for Statewide Transformation.”  Fox News

Some of the targets mentioned include DEI training in the Air Force, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (really?) and $100,000,000 just to Education’s DEI programs. Fun read.

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Crime, Government Incompetence