Musk’s Money Sleuths Making Democrats Sweat

Written by Robert Knight 

Imagine working at a large company like Exxon Mobil and being told that an audit was underway. Managers would be busy justifying spending and personnel and how they were enabling the company to prosper.

If the auditor found that someone had deliberately hidden or misclassified expenditures for personal gain or ideological reasons, company lawyers would not call it merely “waste” or “mismanagement.”

They would call it “theft” or perhaps “embezzlement,” and they would call the authorities.

It’s become clear that the federal government has been stealing trillions from American taxpayers and hiding how it has spent them.

It’s not just waste or mismanagement but a large-scale mugging. Likewise, it is misleading to say the Obama and Biden administrations were “incompetent.” They were staffed by dedicated ideologues who used our tax dollars to fund their leftist revolution.

Under President Trump, the whiz kids at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are using incredibly sophisticated algorithms to unearth decades of unexamined spending.

They are releasing it at breakneck speed so that Americans will learn about it before the Democratic media and overreaching judges can throw a blanket over it.

The DOGE probe is the fiscal equivalent of an anesthesia-free colonoscopy, except for the eight-month pay buyout offer, which 77,000 federal employees have accepted.

For years, the federal government has put trillions of dollars into the Beltway crowd’s pockets and into organizations favored by the permanent state. These include Planned Parenthood, LGBTQ groups, climate boondoggles and hundreds of leftist nongovernmental organizations overseas.

DOGE’s shocking audit of the U.S. Agency for International Development is the tip of the iceberg. Hard-pressed taxpayers are not happy about funding drag queen events in Central America or terrorists linked to Hamas.

It’s the sheer size of the scam that’s so striking. Haywood Talcove, chief executive officer of Lexis-Nexis special services, testified to a U.S. House committee on Wednesday that federal agencies had reported $2.7 trillion in “cumulative improper payments” since 2003.

“Ineligible recipients and criminal networks” regularly rip off the system, he said.

Fiscal hawks such as U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, and U.S. Senator William Proxmire, Wisconsin Democrat, published annual lists of absurd government spending, but they didn’t have Musk’s genius squad.

Democrats are screaming that this is a “constitutional crisis.” It’s the same song they sang during the first Trump term.

From 2017 to 2021, Democrats on Capitol Hill slapped the White House with phony scandals while the permanent bureaucracy leaked anything it could to embarrass the administration. It’s amazing that Mr. Trump accomplished as much as he did.

Trump 2.0 has moved so fast with executive orders and DOGE that the genie can’t be put back into the bottle. Alternative media have exposed the lying legacy media as partisan hacks instead of journalists. Few believe them anymore when they declare “the end of democracy.”

Democratic state attorneys general have filed dozens of lawsuits alleging that the White House, the executive branch, has no business running the executive agencies. They think judges should do it — their kinds of judges.

One judge granted a temporary restraining order for the president’s first-day order, removing gender ideology websites from government health agencies (the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration) and restoring them.

A judge in Baltimore on Thursday issued an order to resume transgender treatments at hospitals and clinics, which Mr. Trump had suspended.

Two judges halted a Trump executive order against birthright citizenship. Yet another ruled that the Treasury’s personnel files off limits to the agency’s new secretary.

A particularly ambitious judge issued a ruling halting the spending freeze and audits.

“What this federal judge has ruled is clearly unconstitutional,” said Gary Bauer, who was President Reagan’s domestic policy adviser. “He cannot order the executive branch of government to not conduct financial audits of the agencies it oversees.”

The micromanaging judges, most of whom were appointed by Presidents Clinton, Obama or Biden, have a warped conception of the separation of powers.

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vice President J.D. Vance wrote on X on Feb. 10. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Democrats had no problem with Mr. Obama saying, “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone” to circumvent Congress.

They also cheered Mr. Biden as he defied the U.S. Supreme Court when it ruled against his illegal transfer of hundreds of millions in unpaid student loans to taxpayers. Mr. Biden also ordered unconstitutional lockdowns, mandates and a halt to evictions for nonpayment of rent.

On Jan. 31, U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Democrat, called the Trump administration’s agenda “extreme” and said, “We are going to fight it legislatively. We’re going to fight it in the courts, and we’re going to fight it in the streets.”

At a protest outside the Treasury Department on Feb. 4, U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver, New Jersey Democrat, called for shutting down the Senate. “We are at war,” she said.

This whole “resistance” shtick might have worked if the American people were still in the dark. But they’re not, and most like what Mr. Trump is doing.

It’s not waste he is fighting, although there is plenty of that. It’s theft of their money and their God-given liberties.

This article was originally published by The Washington Times.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.