The podcast was filmed several weeks ago but a clip from this discussion is making the rounds this week on social media.
During their conversation, Mike Benz shared how Barack Obama was using money to USAID to pretend to send “aid” overseas. In actuality, Obama was laundering the taxpayer dollars and using it to train “rent-a-mobs” instead!
This is a huge development but maybe not so surprising considering how Democrats believe they can do anything they please. With other people’s money.
I’ve been writing about the government’s data processing troubles for quite awhile now, and particularly since DOGE started to find where the bodies — well, I was going to say “bodies were buried” but that’s wrong. The government’s data processing corpses aren’t buried. They’re stinking shambling zombie bodies shuffling through the corridors seeking brains.
Of course, as wild wastes of money are uncovered, everyone and their aforementioned brothers, brothers-in-law, and politically connected people outside government have been screaming, while we regular old taxpayers are saying “God oh God, how did we get in this mess?”
So, Sam Corcos, CEO of Levels, a health startup, and Scott Bessent, secretary of the Treasury, were on Laura Ingraham’s show on March 20, talking about data processing at the IRS in particular.
The IRS has come up before — for example, when Musk and the DOGE boys discovered there were people up to almost 400 years old still active in the Social Security records, which are closely tied to the IRS records ever since the IRS declared that line on the Social Security Card about “not to be used for identification” was no longer operative.
Corcos was brought in to work for the Treasury to look at the IRS modernization program and its operations and maintenance budget. Now, the modernization program is new development — they’re attempting to build a more modern system and infrastructure to handle what the Social Security Administration does, while maintenance and operations is the budget that pays for just keeping the existing system running.
Corcos is running a successful startup — have a look at its website. So he has some expertise in software development. He started looking at the IRS systems.
It was interesting, if by interesting you mean “enraging” and “obscene.” The IRS has had this ongoing modernization program in operation since 1990 — that after a previous modernization program called Tax Systems Modernization (TSM), which started in 1986 and was finally declared a failure in 1997. Then there was the Customer Account Data Engine (CADE), which was launched in 2001 and terminated as a failure in 2009, having delivered about 15 percent of its planned function.
The existing system, as I’ve written about before, is based on IBM mainframes and written in COBOL and Assembler — that is, directly as machine instructions.
The current modernization program, according to Corcos, is currently 30 years behind schedule and $15 billion over budget. It’s been 35 years in development, and is now “five years away” from completion. And has been since 1996.
According to Secretary Bessent, the hangup is “entrenched interests” like consultants and contractors. Eighty percent of the IRS’s $3.5 billion budget goes to outsiders. Bessent says, “That’s not efficiency — that’s a racket.”
Corcos says the top priority is to turn this around. “The IRS spends way more than any private company would on a program like this. We’ve cut about $1.5 billion from the modernization budget. … It’s about asking tough questions and trimming the fat.”
It’s easy to blame the government developers, but Corcos says the developers are excellent — it’s management that’s the issue. “You see contracts — $10 million, $20 million, $50 million — and ask ‘Why are we doing this?’ Everyone shrugs. … You cancel it and nothing breaks. Inertia’s running the show — it just takes someone who cares to start asking questions.”
By all means you can't trust the Federal Government under any circumstance.@CarlHigbie gives an excellent monologue on the recently released JFK files. pic.twitter.com/oMe7AeXLZK
After Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to X on Monday to declare that 83 percent of the USAID programs would be cancelled and contracts rescinded, a curious memo from a USAID senior staffer obtained by POLITICO instructed remaining staffers to convene at the former agency on Tuesday for destruction of “classified safes and personnel documents.”
After a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID.
The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.
In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping (approximately 1000) to now be administered more effectively under the State Department.
Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform.
A senior official at USAID instructed the agency’s remaining staff to convene at the agency’s now-former headquarters in Washington on Tuesday for an “all day” group effort to destroy documents stored there, many of which contain sensitive information.
The materials earmarked for destruction include contents of the agency’s “classified safes and personnel documents” at the Ronald Reagan Building, said an email sent by USAID’s acting executive director, Erica Carr, and obtained by POLITICO.
“Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” the email said. Carr instructed staff to label the burn bags with the words “SECRET” and “USAID/B/IO/” (agency shorthand for “bureau or independent office”) in dark Sharpie.
The email didn’t provide any reason for the document destruction. The building is being emptied out after mass layoffs, which may have disrupted routine document destruction timetables. Customs and Border Protection is planning to move into the USAID facility, having rented 390,000 square feet of office space in the building last month.
BLUF
As more and more of this fraud and waste is uncovered, Americans will get even angrier at those that perpetrated it…especially in the name of “climate”. Apparently, the only climate Biden’s EPA was interested in protecting was the political one.
New York Post has a map of the gold bar trail, which led to 8 NGO’s of questionable origin and purpose.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall that late last year, Brent Efron, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) special advisor implementing Biden’s climate agenda, made many controversial statements during an undercover video about the agency’s actions in anticipation of a potential Trump administration.
Efron reportedly told Project Veritas that the EPA was rapidly distributing billions of dollars in grants to nonprofits as an “insurance policy” against Trump winning the election. He described the situation as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic,” referring to the urgency with which the agency allocates funds.
Now the Trump Administration has followed those gold bars. An exclusive report by the New York Post indicates the trail of those bars led back to Deep State Obama/Biden minion, John Podesta.
The story began in September 2022, when Biden named Podesta to helm the $375 billion climate fund, which resulted from the Inflation Reduction Act, a 2022 law that was basically “Green New Deal” poison hidden beneath a wrapper of sweet economic promises.
As a senior adviser to Mr. Biden on clean energy innovation, Mr. Podesta will shape how the government disburses billions of dollars in tax credits and incentives to industries that are developing wind and solar energy, as well as to consumers who want to install solar panels, heat and cool their homes with electric heat pumps or buy electric vehicles.
..In an interview, Mr. Podesta described his new job as “throwing the weight of federal government policy behind a cycle of investment and innovation that we haven’t seen before in the United States, and that is almost unique in the world.”
There was absolutely no questioning by The New York Times as to where these monies would go, or how the funds would be used to help either our climate or energy industry.
On the other hand, the New York Post has a map of the gold bar trail. Apparently, billions went to “Non-Governmental Organizations” that were founded after the fund was created.
The Biden administration funneled at least $20 billion dollars into environmental groups, most of which had only recently been founded, The Post has discovered.
In one case, former Vice President Kamala Harris handed over a check for nearly $7 billion to Bethesda, Maryland, based group Climate United Fund, which does not appear in the IRS’s charities database, and has no federal filings.
The non-profit fund had only been incorporated in Delaware on November 30, 2023, according to public records, five months before Harris handed over the cash in April 2024.
The Climate United Fund then announced “the historic investment” in a press release, noting the group’s work “delivers benefits like cleaner air…and increased energy security.”’
However, because the company is so new, there is no publicly published accounting of how it plans to spend the $7 billion.
DOGE: After it was clear Democrats were losing the White House, they rushed to create brand new NGOs so Biden could $20 billion into them from the Green New Deal slush fund. pic.twitter.com/gs8hsrd8lw
Well, well, well,’ as the old-time movie detectives always say when they surprise the culprits with their hands in the cookie jars.
WHAT HAVE WE HERE?
Three short weeks ago, a newly confirmed Lee Zeldin got to his office at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and hit the broom closet to start sweeping.
Thanks to the previous braggadocious occupants and their already well-documented pre-exit shoveling of cash and grants out the door, he had an inkling there might be plenty of questionable transactions to uncover that hadn’t exactly been notated ‘on the books’ or done ‘by the book’ either.
I mean, what were the odds?
It didn’t take long for Zeldin to find himself a whopper of a honeypot hidden away that made quite a splash when he announced it, particularly as it was tied to an infamous Project Veritas video from December boasting about its very surreptitious creation.
Project Veritas dropped a shocker of a video back in December, in which an EPA manager was bragging that the Biden administration was metaphorically ‘dropping gold bars off the Titanic.’ They were shoving every dime they could out to their NGO buddies so they could harass the Trump administration and continue to suck off the taxpayers’ teat for years to come.
We all know such things happen, but to have it so vividly described was revealing. Well, Lee Zeldin is retrieving those gold bars, and it turns out to be a lot of them. $20 billion, all sitting in the equivalent of a bank vault.
The massive scale of this scam–which as with so many things is SOP at government agencies–blows your mind. Pushing $20 billion out the door to friends of the administration with little to no financial controls, zero accountability, and lots of malice aforethought is only different in scale and not in kind.
…Zeldin has referred the matter to the Inspector General & Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“Shockingly, roughly 20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA. This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rushed job with reduced oversight.
Even further. This pot of $20 billion was awarded to just eight entities that were then responsible for doling out your money to NGOs and others at their discretion, with far less transparency. Just under $7 billion was sent to one entity called the Climate United Fund.”
As if $20B squirreled away in a Citibank account wasn’t insult enough, when the dollar sleuths started digging into who the money was earmarked for – because surely someone had a bead on those bucks – one of the names that popped up for a two billion dollar payday was an organization associated with none other than the cranky claimant to the governorship of Georgia and President of Earth, Stacey Abrams.
Her organization – Power Forward Communities – was only a few months old and had a whopping $100 in the bank at the time of the $2B with a “B” award.
…How did Biden’s EPA even know who they were, less mind that they were worthy of a couple of billion of federal largesse aka Green grift?
One can only assume it was because the President of Earth was connected to the enterprise.
…Power Forward Communities was established in October 2023 as a coalition of groupsled by Rewiring America, a left-wing group that advocates for electrification policies and a transition away from fossil fuel dependence. Abrams, who serves as Rewiring America’s senior counsel, said at the time that she was “thrilled” to be part of the Power Forward Communities coalition. “This is how we expand access to clean energy—by prioritizing housing, equity and resilience,” she wrotein an X post.
…In itsonly press releaseto date, Power Forward Communities said that, in addition to induction stoves, it would use the $2 billion received from the EPA to help install heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, solar panels, home battery systems, EV chargers, and weatherization upgrades.
The Trump Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to uncover shameless misuse of our taxpayer dollars for insider payoffs and woke activism.
It really is stunning what our elected officials and unelected bureaucrats believe they have the right to spend our money on. Besides the Taliban condoms, European DEI musicals, and Iraqi muppets already exposed by DOGE, the new department led by Elon Musk has found yet more leftist nonsense and grift to cancel.
DOGE on Thursday revealed the following initiatives on which our money was set to be spent, but which fortunately have been shut down:
One of their markers of credibility when the left preached their altruistic egalitarian drivel, that was their substitute for political philosophy, was their supposed willingness to live a middle class life themselves. They told us everyone was supposed to be happy with modest off-the-shelf clothes, split-level homes in suburban neighborhoods, driving a Chevy or Ford, and a two-week vacation in Yellowstone. Some of them even lived that life for a while.
It was the greedy Capitalists and Robber-Barons who wanted piles of cash, tailor-made clothes, mansions (+ vacation homes), expensive cars, and exotic vacations.
Now it turns out Ayn Rand was right all along. Altruism is a racket.
You won’t believe this – Representative Jamie Raskin, one of the key figures on the J6 Committee sho received a pardon from Biden, is linked to a MASSIVE $160 MILLION from USAID! 😱
Not only was he part of the squad trying to ‘keep us in check’ during the J6 hearings, but he’s also the representative for Global Communities, a giant USAID contractor that raked in $160,000,000 in 2023! 🤑💸
Is this what they call “following the money”? Talk about a conflict of interest!
“Mexico threatens to escalate US gunmakers lawsuit with terror charges,” The Guardian reported Friday. “Claudia Scheinbaum warns of reciprocal action if Washington designates country’s cartels as terrorist groups.”
“If they declare these criminal groups as terrorists, then we’ll have to expand our US lawsuit… The lawyers are looking at it, but they could be accomplices,” Mexico’s president told the press, adding a time-worn disinformation go-to:
“She said the US justice department itself has recognized that ‘74% of the weapons’ used by criminal groups in Mexico come from north of the border.”
That’s the bit of calculated propaganda that primed ATF to implement Operation Fast and Furious “gunwalking,” creating calls for a renewed “assault weapon” ban (Note: Some of the links that follow go to the Internet Archive and may load slowly). The numbers may vary, but the lie remains constant.
It started out with voices like Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and then-Brady Campaign president Paul Helmke, claiming “American gun sellers supply the cartels with 95 to 100 percent of their guns.” The BBC put it at “90%.” Then it was 80%.
“According to ATF’s Tracing Center, 90 percent of the firearms about which ATF receives information are traceable to the United States.”
“About which ATF receives information…” That’s not “all,” that’s what’s been selectively submitted for tracing. A Fox News analysis at the time concluded
“There’s just one problem with the 90 percent “statistic” and it’s a big one: It’s just not true. In fact, it’s not even close. The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.”
Here we are in 2025 and those lies are still being thrown out and “reported” unchallenged by media hacks who either don’t know, which makes them incompetent and unqualified informants, or do know, which makes them complicit in the deliberate deception and manipulation of their readers and viewers.
It’s been less than two weeks since conservatives cheered when the Democratic National Committee was dumb enough to elect David Hogg as the token white male vice chair. Well, we got the first laugh, and it looks like we’re going to get the last laugh because Hogg is already causing headaches for the Democratic National Committee, with insiders accusing him of exploiting his new role for personal gain.
Just two weeks into his tenure as a DNC vice chair, Hogg has been using the party’s contact lists to send out donation requests for his own political action committee, Leaders We Deserve PAC, which pays him over $100,000 a year, according to Federal Election Commission records.
“David Hogg — talk about living up to your name. A trough of DNC dollars all for him and he doesn’t seem to give an oink,” a top Democrat told The New York Post.
Many of us predicted disaster for the Democrats for electing Hogg, but who knew he was basically running to grift for his organization?
But alas, that’s just what he’s done.
“David Hogg here: I was just elected DNC Vice Chair! This is a huge win for our movement to make the Democratic Party more reflective of our base: youthful, energetic, and ready to win,” reads one of at least eight texts he blasted out to the DNC’s vast database of phone numbers.
Hogg co-founded “Leaders We Deserve” in August 2023 with the stated goal of electing young progressives to Congress and state legislatures across the country. It also provided him a six-figure income job right out of college.
Since the PAC was founded, Hogg has pocketed more than $175,000, records show, with more than $20,000 in salary payments coming in December alone, the most recent month for which public data is available.
While it’s not officially against the rules, personal PAC fundraising — instead of fundraising for the DNC — has rubbed some party brass the wrong way.
“It’s especially important for all Democratic national officials to focus on raising support for the party and not using their position to raise money for themselves or their personal political PACS,” groused a second senior Democratic Party official. “It’s a stunning lack of judgment that is concerning to many people.”
The 24-year-old came to public prominence as a survivor of the February 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, which left 17 people dead.
Hogg’s appointment to the party’s vice chair job at just 24 makes him arguably the most powerful Zoomer in the United States, but at least some members of the party were alarmed by his lack of experience and a long history of social media posts supporting far-left positions like defund the police and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“I mean it’s just very frustrating to be in a party in desperate need of increased accountability for our struggling leadership, and watch someone who is never held accountable ascend to leadership,” Cameron Kasky, a fellow Stoneman Douglas survivor, told the New York Post.
OGE is currently conducting what amount to audits of every single bureaucratic office, department, and budget in the extremely tangled web of the U.S. government bureaucracy. The substack “Eko Loves You” is an interesting and insightful read. There’s a lot of speculation that this is Elon Musk writing his thoughts on the work and discoveries of DOGE. Whether it’s Musk or not, the posts are well worth reading. The posts lay out in clear language what’s been discovered, connections, Constitutional issues… the whole shebang.
Now, some of you and some of your friends may be the ones screaming about the actions of DOGE. I have one question for you: Why are you so virulently against an audit of the bureaucracy? Ah, ah, ah. I don’t want to hear about how your research grant got frozen, nor do I want to hear about those poor federal workers who got laid off… with, for the most part, hefty compensation packages. I want to know why you’re so focused on those things and apparently don’t give a rat’s ass about all the evidence of fraud, waste, mis-management, sheer incompetence, and outright bribery currently coming to light. Why is all of that not a concern for you?
If you try to tell me you haven’t seen any evidence of that, I would point you to the White House Press Secretary, the White House, any media OTHER THAN MSNBC, CNN, or any of the legacy media. Branch out. Read sites like Red State, Rantburg, Washington Times, Epoch Times, Instapundit, Real Clear Politics. What are you afraid of? Cooties from unapproved news sites?
Every anti-DOGE rant I’ve seen so far has focused on the alleged lack of constitutional authority for DOGE and Musk. Nope, sorry, all the necessary constitutional authority is there. The anti-DOGE rants which don’t focus on constitutional authority are absolutely filled with nothing but emotional pleas. “Think about the chillllldrennnnn!” “What about the water projects in Africa?” “How can we abandon all of that?” “You’re a monster if you don’t care about the less fortunate in the world!”
One of the things the DOGE audits have revealed (and really they’re not even at the actual audit part yet, they’re just revealing money trails), is that the vast majority of money sent out by USAID and its associated agencies is not going to its intended recipients. When well over half the money is going to “overhead” or simply disappearing, that should be a HUGE red flag. Yet, none of the overly emotional, heartstring pulling posts even mentions that.
Gun owners are getting exactly what they voted for with President Donald Trump. There’s now an accounting for government malfeasance in process and he’s turned up the receipts.
President Trump is delivering on his promise to break open the secretive spending habits of government officials. It’s exactly what voters wanted and, frankly, expected. The results, however, have been jaw-dropping. Gun control proponents have been smashing open the government piggy bank to swipe dollars for their pet gun control projects.
That’s right. Gun control advocates were using taxpayer dollars to fund their campaigns to rob Americans of their Constitutionally-protected rights to keep and bear arms. That’s adding insult to injury after the Biden-Harris administration installed a taxpayer-funded office dedicated to pushing gun control. It was staffed by a former lobbyist for Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control group funded by antigun billionaire Michael Bloomberg. That office effectively closed up in the days leading up to President Trump taking office as its staff all resigned.
It turns out, though, that billions of Bloomberg bucks and even more money from George and Alexander Soros weren’t enough for gun control advocates. They wanted to fund the effort to cut off Second Amendment rights straight from Americans’ wallets – including tax dollars paid by gun owners themselves.
Lee Williams uncovered, in a post to Shooting News Weekly, what many have suspected for years. Except it had been covered up in layers of bureaucracy and farmed out as “grants” through the U.S. Agency for International Development. That’s the federal agency that’s drawn the first and damning examination by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Scott Jennings, aka the voice of reason on CNN, managed to extract a damning admission from one of the network’s analysts on Tuesday night. Appearing at a roundtable during Abby Phillip’s show, the conservative commentator faced off against former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman.
What was said by the latter was stunning, not insofar as it is a revelation (we already know what Democrats think of American voters) but that someone would be brazen enough to say it out loud. Here’s how Jennings set things up.
JENNINGS: Here’s what I think is a joke, that you have these partisan hack Democrat attorney generals, they get together, and the only thing they know how to do is try to nullify the results of the last election by venue-shopping these district court judges. They find the most lunatic liberals they can. They file lawsuits knowing full well they’re going to try to usurp the president’s authority, tie this up in court for years…
Akerman then responded by describing the bureaucratic state as “sacrosanct.”
AKERMAN: That stuff is sacrosanct, and you’ve got people going in there who don’t know anything about…(crosstalk)…Elon Musk doing this, he knows nothing about it.
The word “sacrosanct” means something is too important to be interfered with. In other words, a former government hanger-on believes that bureaucracies are simply above being controlled and reformed by pesky elected officials. They are, in effect, an untouchable fourth branch of government.
It only got worse from there because Akerman then said the following.
JENNINGS: What you just said is so profound. You said these people don’t know anything and they don’t know what they’re doing.
AKERMAN: That’s right. I’m talking about Elon Musk.
JENNINGS: I understand, but they are appointees of the duly elected president so your view, you’re here as our legal expert, but your view is because you don’t personally believe they know enough, that the duly-elected president who appointed a treasury secretary and who appoints special appointees like Elon Musk shouldn’t be able to act as the president because you don’t personally believe they know enough? Is that how it works? Do elections mean anything to you?
AKERMAN: It’s got nothing to do with elections.
That last line is the money quote that perfectly illustrates the left wing of democratic governance. While they love to toss around the word “democracy” while pretending they are defenders of it, they do not believe in representative government. What they believe in is an unaccountable bureaucratic system that allows them to thumb their noses at American voters. It’s a “heads I win, tails you lose” setup, and it has been the basis of Democratic Party power stretching back to the Woodrow Wilson era.
Akerman and those like him truly think their grip on power has “nothing to do with elections.” They want to be able to dictate their policy wants regardless of who wins. It is a tyrannical mindset wrapped up in a high-minded facade. It’s also abject nonsense in a technical sense. How efficient has the government been while being run by those Akerman would call qualified? How effective has it been at managing your taxpayer money? Meaningless credentialism is how the nation ended up with a nightmarish bureaucratic system that wouldn’t last five minutes in the private sector without major reforms or outright dismissal.
Democrats can continue their lawfare games if they’d like (and they’ll eventually lose), but all it’s doing is postponing the inevitable while continuing to turn Americans against them.
I wonder who DIDN’T get USAID money?
USAID: The swamp is deep. One of the activist judges blocking Trump's agenda, Judge John Bates, is married to the founder of a USAID-funded NGO. Carol Rhees is a Democrat lawyer who started Hope for Children in Ethiopia a long-time USAID grant recipient.
Almost 70 years ago, the U.S. State Department dispatched a new ambassador to a Southeast Asian nation. As often seemed to happen, the new U.S. official was no expert on the nation, its economy, or its culture. He did not speak the language. And his concerns were more geopolitical and career-oriented.
To be honest, the ambassador’s most important job had nothing to do with representing the U.S. there or helping that nation. It was instead bolstering that country against the advancing threat of Communism.
At that time in the 1950s, the subversive threat of that evil ideology had gripped the American psyche throughout government and entertainment all the way down to elementary schools, where even kindergartners practiced air-raid drills.
Government reactions, over-reactions, and some stupidity caused a cascading array of official decisions over decades, each one seemingly reasonable at the time, that collectively led to the need for this overdue federal housecleaning.
Now, the results of those potent fears and shortsighted decisions are culminating in an explosive Washington scandal and unfolding crisis over USAID under the new aggressive Trump Administration. The impacts run through thousands of employees, likely millions of beneficiaries in 177 countries, and affect the U.S. image around the world.
This explains why the developing details of outrageous abuse of taxpayer money by Woke USAID officials are resonating so profoundly in this country and, indeed, globally. This crisis reckoning is far from over.
