DV Journal

For an alternate viewpoint, see “Counterpoint: First, They Came for USAID”

The opening month of the second Trump administration has been marked by incredible speed and progress, especially toward their goal of scaling back the bloat of the federal government. The pace has left an out-of-power Democratic Party reeling. Rather than propose their own spending cuts, most Democrats have decided to oppose reflexively everything Trump is doing.

They have directed their loudest opposition toward the administration’s merging of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a little-known Washington organization, with the Department of State.

On the list of pressing issues facing the country, most Americans would not identify the future of USAID, something many had likely never heard of, as top of mind. In fact, according to polling from the Associated Press, seven in 10 believe the government is spending too much on “assistance to other countries.”

Yet, to hear the Democrats’ bellyaching and complaining, you’d think the sky was falling.

Much of the fallout has focused on the more egregious examples of USAID waste. Items like $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities,” $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia, and $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, according to the White House.

The list goes on and can be as amusing as outrageous. For Americans sitting down to complete their taxes, the time of year when families tally their bills to the federal government, hearing these examples of misplaced spending is infuriating and makes the case for the new Department of Government Efficiency created by President Trump and run by Elon Musk.

In other instances, the misplaced spending is more sinister. Specific USAID spending appears to support terrorism. According to the Washington Free Beacon, six days before Hamas executed the worst terror attack in Israel’s history on October 7, 2023, USAID awarded $900,000 to a Gaza charity connected to the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. The Beacon also reported that USAID funded a Gazan “educational and community center” controlled by an association whose leader once said that Jerusalem needed to be cleansed “from the impurity of the Jews.”

The federal budget will not be balanced by streamlining USAID. Its 2023 spending ($38 billion) was less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

However, that doesn’t make it — or any other federal line item — immune from scrutiny or belt-tightening. If the federal government were a business, it would have shuttered its doors long ago. In 2010, the national debt was $13 trillion. Today, it’s $36 trillion — a 177 percent increase. Try applying that math to your household budget over the last 15 years and see how it works out.

The current trajectory is unsustainable. Half of every dollar we borrow today goes to pay down the debt. Within five years, interest payments on the debt are projected to exceed our annual military budget. This bill isn’t going to come due in my lifetime. It will fall to my grandkids and their kids to dig out of a fiscal mess.

Where are the Democrats on this pressing issue? With their heads in the sand, pretending all is well and spewing venom at Musk for daring to shed long-overdue sunlight on the rot and corruption of the federal government. The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker recently observed, “Many strange battle lines the Democratic Party has chosen to defend these past few years: illegal migrants over citizens, teachers unions over parents and children, criminals over victims, men-turned-women over girls.”

Add the spending crisis to that growing list.

No doubt, USAID has done some good on the world stage since its creation in 1961. Folding its responsibilities underneath the broader umbrella of the State Department can allow that positive output to continue in time.

Even more glaring is the need to get tough on spending, a principle that used to be bipartisan. Remember Bill Clinton’s 1996 promise that the era of big government is over? Even Barack Obama launched a “Campaign to Cut Waste.”

Today’s Democratic Party is far from those days and even further from common sense. They believe the status quo and spending money  like a drunken sailor, as the late John McCain was fond of saying, is perfectly acceptable.

Every long journey starts with a first step, and streamlining USAID is a sensible place to begin.

Like other federal agencies, the IRS has come to the attention of Elon Musk. He is polling X users about IRS funding. This comes as congressional Republicans are trying to shave $20 billion from the funding windfall that the IRS has received in recent years. The Biden administration maintains that such a cut would have catastrophic effects on IRS enforcement efforts. However, the IRS is a world-class organization when it comes to wasting funds.

I attended a tax conference at the University of Virginia Law School in 2018. The acting IRS commissioner, David Kautter, was invited to speak and showed up in a motorcade of large SUVs. He had at least six armed IRS Criminal Investigation agents as bodyguards and was met by two UVA police officers.  

In other words, he had at least eight people carrying guns to protect him from 100 tax lawyers and accountants. Two agents stood post on each side of him as he spoke, staring intently into the crowd. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so wasteful.  

I understand that the IRS is not popular, and I received a death threat back then. Why didn’t Kautter drive to Charlottesville and meet with a UVA police officer there?

The IRS has maintained that the extra funding would be spent only on customer service and audits of large companies and wealthy individuals. This is ridiculous.  To quote John F. Kennedy, a rising tide lifts all boats. All components of the IRS have lined up for their share of the windfall.

After the funding windfall, the IRS Office of Chief Counsel busily filled senior-level counsel positions. According to a source, the office was trying to lock in the extra spending.  The Office of Chief Counsel has also rewarded its executives and managers with five- and six-figure bonuses and “retention” bonuses.  Then, there is travel.  I have witnessed chief counsel conferences in Chicago and Los Angeles that were basically celebrations for the executives.  I can attest that a former chief counsel liked to play his guitar in front of captive audiences.

The IRS also finds money to intimidate and eliminate internal whistleblowers.  According to sources, the IRS spent at least eight years plotting to get rid of me.  How much time and money did it spend on that? The process was so absurd that the IRS had me fill in as a manager on my way to being kicked out the door.

There are ways of right-sizing and reforming the agency, particularly the chief counsel. The number of chief counsel Senior Executive Service executives should be slashed, and the chief counsel national office size could easily be cut in half. It should be made prohibitively risky and time-consuming for the IRS national office to give lobbyists inside access, and the IRS should be prevented from paying external whistleblowers who inform on their fellow citizens.

The main issue with IRS funding is that the agency is so corrupt and dysfunctional that no extra money will make up for a lack of accountability. The inspector general is a captive entity of IRS management.  I witnessed the inspector general arrogantly stonewalling a congressman’s staff for nine months, refusing to disclose why it did not contact nine witnesses to IRS misconduct.  

Three sources, including the Justice Department attorney supervising the tea party district court litigation, told me there were significant issues concerning the IRS disclosing documents in that scandal. Yet, no one was investigated or held accountable.  

Extra funding to audit large companies means nothing when those large companies can then hire lobbyists to use their inside access at the IRS. Extra funding to audit high-income individuals means nothing when those audits get sidetracked to go after vulnerable targets such as elderly taxpayers.  

Extra funding means nothing when the IRS is used to go after political opponents and perceived undesirables. They say that money cannot buy love.  It also cannot buy accountability and integrity.