(WND News Center)—A new report posted at Fox News, based on comments from DOGE employees during an interview with Jesse Watters, reveals the “most outrageous” ways those on the taxpayers’ payroll wasted tax money.
President Donald Trump launched the Department of Government Efficiency when he took office, and officials there have reported cutting at least $160 billion in waste, fraud and abuse.
During Trump’s first 100 days.
DOGE chief Elon Musk and his team joined Watters, and revealed that the U.S. Institute for Peace had tried to pay Mohammad Qasem Halimi $132,000 by contract.
The trouble is he is a former member of the Taliban, and was detained by the U.S. and held at Bagram Air Base for a year beginning Jan. 2, 2002. The report noted he held several positions in Afghanistan’s government.
A staff member told Watters, “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. 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, and they even had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban. This is real. We don’t encounter that in most agencies.”
Also there was some $200 billion spent by the nation’s schools, from COVID-19 relief funds, on things like trips to a Las Vegas hotel and the purchase of an ice cream truck.
The report said, “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, according to a report by Parents Defending Education and shared by DOGE.”
It was a California district that bought the ice cream truck.
Then, too, there was the $20 million “Sesame Street” in Iraq funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, a bureaucracy shut down by DOGE.
“Improper payments” by multiple agencies cost taxpayers $162 billion, the report said, with three quarters of that concentrated in three Department of Health and Human Services Medicare programs; Medicaid, the Department of the Treasury’s earned income tax credit; the Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; and the Small Business Administration’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund.
Hundreds of millions in spending planned for DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, social agenda points also have been cut.
Some 400 “wasteful” DEI grants through the U.S. National Science Foundation alone, now canceled, saved $223 million.
The Department of Education already had canceled more than $100 million in grants to DEI training.
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