2-5-25 - 7am - USAID is a Slush Fund

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
One of the most ironic posts this year is this
week when Chuck Schumer posted about an unelected shadow government
is taking over our federal government. Oh and you reposted it,
Alex Soros. Just hilarious.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
It is hilarious when you think about what they're uncovering
with USAID, and for that matter, as they start to
dig in.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Well, let's put in perspective USAID.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Don't hold me to this figure, but somewhere in the
back of my ap, you know, diet coke, cattle brain
accounts for something like point seven percent of the entire
federal budget. Point seven percent. Now, percentage wise, that's minuscule.

(00:56):
But to the point going back to something that Dragon
and I are. I think we had this conversation off
air yesterday, but maybe it's spilled on on air about
you know, I went through a litany of different things
they had spent money on. Seventy thousand dollars for this,
or you know, one point five million dollars for this,
or maybe there was one hundred million dollars for something.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
There were all these things that they had spent money on.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
Well, the numbers seemed very minuscule, and you were saying, well,
those will add up and if they don't add up.
I mean it was like the biggest number of any
one thing was one point five million dollars, right, and
for a organization that had a fifty billion dollar budget.
It's like, well, I don't care about thirty thousand dollars

(01:45):
for a magazine in you know, wherever.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Yeah, And and my point was, you just like any anything,
you know, if you are whatever you're doing, people you
know and you just can't get going, you have to
take the first step. You have to take a first step.

(02:13):
And you know, psychiatrist, psychologist, therapist, friends, family, will I'll
tell you if you want to do something, you take
that first step, whatever that is. Or the old adage
about you know, how you eat an elephant one bite

(02:33):
at a time, and this is what Trump's Trump's trying
to swallow an elephant. He's trying to destroy an elephant,
and he's trying to do it one bite at a time,
and every time he takes a bite, they squeal like
stuck pigs, like, oh my gosh, it is the end

(02:55):
of civilization. If you touch this now before I get
in can do some specifics. I want us to think
broadly for a moment about why Democrats are so apoplectic
about Trump going into USAID. First and foremost, it's a

(03:19):
slush fund. It's a slush fund. I posted something XT
a couple of days ago, and I may have mentioned
if I mentioned this on air yesterday. I apologized because,
as you know, I just don't remember what I did
the day before. Very I might remember generally, but not specifically.
But as I said, whenever I would travel with the

(03:40):
Secretary of State that there was always either the director
or his designy from the US Agency for International Development
on the plane with us, and I always I remember
the maybe it's probably the second or third time that
I was on the plane and we were going to

(04:03):
we were going to the tsunami in Southeast Asia. So
we are our first full saw. I mean, we stopped
in all the different places, but our first major stop
was in Bangkok, and so we're we make a stop
somewhere in the Middle East to refuel. Powell gets off

(04:23):
the plane to go meet with some you know, imam
or something, and I'm wondering around with a couple of
State Department employees, and I pulled one of Colin Powell's
political pointies aside to just ask why why why are
the USAID people with us? I mean, I'm genuinely curious

(04:44):
what we know, what each of our functions are, Like,
I know why I'm on the plane, and I'm on
the plane because Bush wanted me on the plane because
he wanted me to be able to see what we
were doing in response to that, and to come back
with recommendations about what we should be asking d O
D or any other agency that might be involved what

(05:08):
they should be doing. He wanted a second set of eyes.
So I'm there on behalf of the president. And so
now I'm curious, like, Okay, I know why you're here,
and I know why you're here. Why is us AI
D here? And the answer was because they've probably got
some money that they want to dole out to U.

(05:30):
Maybe not necessarily in Thailand, but maybe they want to
spread some money around in Indonesia. Maybe they want to
spread some money around in some of the other countries
that we visited.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
And I'm like, what do you mean spread it around?

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Well, they will quietly announce that they're going to give
some grant money. You know, they'll they'll meet while while
we might be meeting with the Prime Minister or the
King or whoever it might be. They'll be meeting with,
you know, some finance minister and they'll just quietly announce that, hey,
we're going to give you a you know, a five
million dollar grant to go do something, and I'm like, wow,

(06:10):
I mean, I'm confessing I was pretty naive about it.
And that's when I really started digging into USAID, simply
because I was curious about what do they do, what
do they spend money on? And it turns out that
much like I would get appropriated. Like so, whenever my
appropriations would come around, I would have a team, a

(06:35):
finance team that would go through that appropriations bill to
show me every single item in big blocks, like big
chunks for responding to disasters, or big chunks that would
be grant money for something, and there was always a
line item about stuff that they wanted to bring to

(06:55):
my attention that were earmarks, stuff that simple individual members
of Congress, House or Senate would put into an appropriations bill.
That was money that they were trying to direct me
to go spend in a particular state. Might not have

(07:17):
anything to do with FEMA, but they wanted me to
go spend that money and they'd slip it in and
I would look through.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
Those, and there.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
Are several that stick in my mind that I went
to the Congressman and we had knocked down dragouts over
those ear marks. To Dragon's point, some of them were minuscule,
some of them were you know, and for me, minuscule
might be five million dollars. I don't think I ever
had anything it was like a fifty thousand dollars ear mark,

(07:47):
but I would have like a five million dollar ear mark.
And I remember one in particular, was to a university
in Florida for setting up some sort of program. Had
nothing to do with emergency management, nothing to do with
you know, national security or homeland security or anything else.
I totally forget what the earmark was for, but I

(08:08):
was just appalled at it. So I went to that
congressman and we had this knockdown drag out about it,
and I couldn't get him to budge, and I wouldn't budge.
So that's when I pulled in Mitch Daniel, the director
of om B, and said, look, this is absurd. And
you know, I pointed out twe what it was. What
did they do? They just rescinded it Now, what do

(08:28):
I mean by they rescinded it? They withdrew my authority.
The White House did. They withdrew my authority to spend
that money. So now it's a fight not between the
undersecretary and a member of Congress. The fights now between
the White House and a member of Congress. And ultimately
the White House won because they just didn't spend the money. Now,

(08:52):
what did they do? I'm not sure what they did,
but I can tell you what they could have done.
They could have told that congressman, you appropriated the money,
but you know, we're not going to spend on that.
We need five million dollars over here. I don't know,
maybe to build a border wall. Maybe we need five
million dollars over here. You've appropriated this money as part
of a subset of DHS, so we're just going to
reallocate it somewhere else in DHS. Now, there are all

(09:15):
sorts of arguments against that, including my own argument against it,
which is, why don't we just resend it and send
it back, like, just not spend it at all. But
it's appropriated money's and the way Washington works, unfortunately, is
they're going to find a place to spend it where
they're you know, at least the Bush White House wanted
to spend it on something that they thought was worthwhile.

(09:37):
Now what it was, I don't know, because I never
found out. It didn't follow up. But that's how this
whole thing works. And USAID is this gigantic slush fund.
Just like they have a slush fund to pay off
people that sue them for you know, sexual harassment or something.
This is their slush fund to get their particular NGO

(09:57):
funded so they can go do things that they couldn't
otherwise do themselves. And the fact that USAID, this small,
little nondescript agency, has blown up in their faces, I
find absolutely hilarious. How badly has it blown up. Chris Murphy,

(10:21):
a Senator from Connecticut, a Democrat, claims that USAID quote
supports freedom fighters everywhere in the world. I don't think
that's necessarily true.

Speaker 3 (10:38):
Now.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
USAID has finance groups that have engaged in smear campaigns
and in efforts to silence American dissidents, American voices that
don't follow the HERD, think COVID, think about any number

(11:01):
of things that got censored by big tech. USAID has
funded the Zinc Network. The ZINC Network is an antidisinformation
group that has targeted reporter Max Blumenthal, the Vake Bamaswamy,

(11:23):
and Congressman Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona. USAID has
funded a pesticide industry public relations effort known as the Fluence.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
What did it do?

Speaker 2 (11:35):
It dug up dirt about a couple of journalists that
their focus is on American food, Michael poland Mark Bittman.
They target them through USAID journalists. Now, these happened to
be liberal journalists, and they happen to focus on things that,

(11:59):
you know, the kind of a Bobby Kennedy kind of things, Oh,
you know, poisoning our food supply. But if you really
want the most troubling example, they have financed a network
of groups in Ukraine that have spread unsubstantiated claims that
American voices in favor of peace negotiations with Russia are

(12:25):
actually agents of the Kremlin. Talk about counterspy, counterintelligence, talk
about disinformation. A network of groups in Ukraine that spread
unsubstantiated claims that those Americans that talk about in favor

(12:46):
of peace negotiations are actually Russian agents.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
What is it about?

Speaker 2 (12:52):
American tax dollars or the American deep state always focused
about Russia, Russia, Russia. American government entities face legal restrictions
on spreading that kind of propaganda against domestic targets. The

(13:13):
foreign nexus of USAID is a loophole. American grants and
contracts flow, often through through a third party intermediaries, to
a network of foreign recipients, which can push to silence
American journalists and politicians by advocacy that appears to come
from outside the government. In Ukraine, through a contractor with

(13:43):
USAID called Internews, they support a network of social media
focused news outlets, things like New Voice of Ukraine, Vox Ukraine,
Detector Media, the Institute of Mass Information. What do they
all do? They produce a series of videos and reports
that target economist Jeffrey Sachs, They target Tucker Carlson, they

(14:07):
target Glenn Greenwald, they target professor John Mursheimer, all claiming,
they claim, all of whom are figures controlled by a
network of Russian propaganda. They're all Russian agents that's funded
by USAID. The influence of those outlets goes way beyond

(14:31):
just Ukraine, though Vox Ukraine is an official fact checking
partner to Meta, and in that role they help Facebook
sensor so called disinformation. Now, Zuckerberg claims that they've gotten
rid of that contract and they're not using them anymore,

(14:54):
and I don't know whether that's true or not. I
just have to take Zuckerberg's word at it. But even
if they have terminated that contract, that does not negate
the fact that they at one time had a contract
that was financed by USAID through something called Vox Ukraine

(15:16):
that became a fact checking partner to MATA, that helped
them censor what they believed. What Vox Ukraine, or for
that matter, what really USAID believed was disinformation. Now, let
me tell you what that really means. That means the
government is using a third party. These are the USAID

(15:42):
to censor American journalists. Oh, put that sink in for
a moment. Now, go look at the video. Go look
at the video of Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters and all
those Democrats all acting like a bunch of I don't know,
teenage protesters outside us AI D screaming about we will win,

(16:05):
we will win, we will win. What are you trying
to win? What are you trying to protect? What are
you trying to defend. And again, this is something that's
just zero point seven percent or whatever the figure is
of the entire United States budget, and yet they are
so distraught over what's being uncovered that well, Elon Musk

(16:34):
is out of control. Elon Musk went into us AI
D and he accessed people's personal identify personal identifying information,
their PII. They he did, he seized their computers, he
did all.

Speaker 3 (16:49):
No, all, that's bull craft, out of bull craft.

Speaker 2 (16:55):
So think about those Box Ukraine and New Voice of
Ukraine and all of that. They brand themselves as independent outlets,
but are they really because they're reliant totally on USAID.

Speaker 5 (17:12):
Hey, Mike, why can't we frame the Department of Government
Efficiencies Mission the same way that we are framing the
deportation of the illegals as the worst?

Speaker 2 (17:25):
First, Yeah, that's actually a good idea because it is
the worst of the worst. And I'll go into some
more detail in a minute about the structure of USAID,
but I just want to give you some I think
these examples are important to show that what they're really
doing is they're doing things through USAID that they would

(17:47):
otherwise be prohibited from doing by the Constitution.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
You can't sensor journalists.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
You can't propagandize the American public, even though you know
the networks and the cables do it all the time.
But the government's not supposed to be propagandizing the American population.
The influence of these organizations that get funded. I know

(18:15):
most of the ones I've mentioned have the word Ukraine
in it, but it goes far beyond the borders of
just Ukraine, like doing the the Meta project. Detector Media,
another outfit that gets funding from USAID, produces English language

(18:36):
disinformation reports that they then circulate through Western media. It's
kind of like a wire service for what they decide
is disinformation, and they feed that to the kabal, and
the Kabal then takes that out and spreads it out
as news. Well, look, you know we did some reporting

(18:57):
a non you know sources tell us, well, the source
may be Detector Media that gets its funding from USAID.
Now I'll admit I was not paying attention yesterday, so
I can't give you the details, but being a drive
by consumer of the news, yesterday, one of the local

(19:19):
stations had a story about some organization in Colorado. Don't
know what it is, but whatever it is, they were
bitching and moaning and crying and screaming. Because if Trump continues,
particularly I think they said Elon Musk, If Elon Musk
continues down this pathway of you know, disemboweling USAID, that organization,

(19:46):
whatever it was in Colorado will probably have to go
out of business because they they rely so much on
USAID that they can't function without it, to which I
would say, then I really don't know, nor do I
give a rats ask what they do. They may have

(20:08):
the most wonderful mission statement in the world. They may be,
you know, saving starving babies or starving puppies in the world.
You know, in Colorado, whatever it is, I don't know,
and I don't care. Because if you are dependent upon
the US Agency for International Development, as that's the actual

(20:29):
name of the organization. If you're an organization in Colorado
that is dependent upon money from USAID to keep your
doors open, then shut them down.

Speaker 4 (20:39):
And don't worry. If you're one of those people that
happen to have lost your job from that happening, don't worry.
You can learn to code.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
You can learn to code, exactly, go learn to code.
So let's go back to director Director Detector Media for
a moment. So contracts from USAID show that these special
grants to Detector Media to quote undermine Kremlin information operations

(21:09):
and to quote bolster international support for solidary with Ukraine.
That's the purpose of the contracts. As an example of
the Colorado example I just cited you, Detector Media gets
more than thirty five percent of its one million dollar

(21:29):
budget from USAID contractor Internews.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
Now do you.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Understand what I just told you? So Detector Media, which
also gets direct funding from USAID, also gets more than
thirty five percent of its funding for this million dollar
budget from another USAID contractor, the very definition of money laundering. Oh,

(22:02):
let's put a contract out to somebody else and let
them give the money to Detector Media, and that way
we are hands off. It won't show up that we're
giving all of this money to Detector Media. In twenty
twenty three, the last year for which we have full numbers,

(22:23):
USAID provided a two and a half million dollar direct
grant to Detector Media. And you wonder why Democrats are
out screaming, we will win, we will win. This is
going up against their other slush fund. Now, historically this

(22:45):
is another good lesson for us to learn here. When
Kennedy set up USAID in nineteen sixty one, it really
was for a I would say, a genuinely good purpose.

Speaker 3 (22:59):
It was.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
It was set up in order to provide humanitarian assistance
following the Marshall Plan, using aid to advance our foreign
policy interests. But it sends mushrooming and something else. Do
you know that this country provides forty percent of the

(23:21):
world's humanitarian assistance Of all the humanitarian assistants.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
All over the world.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Forty percent of it comes from US. And then USAID,
with a fifty billion dollar budget, is one of the
largest development agencies in the entire world. Fifteen thousand people
in DC, thousands more I don't know what the figure is,
but thousands more overseas, and then beyond the thousand more overseas,

(23:53):
then there are those that get funded indirectly via grants
from USAID. And what I find fascinating now I want
you to listen closely, because the radical left, the international
to be more specific, the international radical left has long

(24:15):
been a critic of USAID because they claim that it
is a tool of US capitalist and imperialistic interests. Okay,
so it seems to me that right now everybody is
pissed off at USAID. Now, sometimes it's a good thing
to have critics because that means you're doing something right.

(24:37):
But when everybody's a critic, you must not be doing
anything right. Those radical lefty critics claim that its purpose
is not to help foreign states on their own terms,
but instead that we're creating opportunities for American businesses as
well as funding NGOs that foment political unrest abroad and

(24:59):
political unrest that's in line with our particular national interests.
So you see domestically, us ai D is out there
censoring journalists, and then the left is upset, particularly the
overseas left is upset because they see us ai D

(25:22):
as fomenting political unrest, riots, protests, whatever, in order to
expand American businesses overseas. Wow, you've made enemies everywhere. So
let's go back again. Let's go back domestically for a moment.

(25:42):
The agency's propaganda efforts that target American citizens have actually
confused and frustrated the targets of that censorship. For example,
the the in Fluence campaign sought to intimidate critics of
toxic pesticides that are linked to cancer and other serious
health issues. You see, it doesn't make it doesn't make

(26:08):
any difference which political side of an issue you're on.
They're just helping their friends. They're helping whatever member of
Congress says, hey, this is a bugaboo of mine. Okay,
well we'll go do that now. On the complete opposite
side of the political spectrum, some congressmen may come and say, well,

(26:31):
this is a bugaboo of mine, and I said, okay,
well we'll find that for you. As an example, go
back to that the influence campaign that was trying to
intimidate critics of toxic pesticides linked to cancer and other
health issues. The effort included a database set up in
concert by an industry trade group called Crop Life America

(26:53):
and USAID. So Michael Poland the reporter, I told you
that reports on foodges, he told The Guardian this. It's
one thing to have an industry come after you after
publishing a critical article about your industry. This happens all
the time in journalism. But to have your own government
pay for that criticism is outrageous. Those are my tax

(27:16):
dollars at work, Which leads me to one simple conclusion
that is this, I think the future of USAID is
now in doubt. They've faced a sudden freeze on most
of their foreign projects. They can't log in. I tried
to go to the website yesterday. I don't know about
this morning, but yesterday I tried to go to the website.

(27:38):
Couldn't access the website, just nothing would load. And now
Doge by focusing on this agency and implementing cuts, may
have spelled the death knell for USAID. Now, if that's
the case, there's fifty billion dollars. There's fifty billion dollars

(28:00):
I know in a three, four, five, six, seven trillion
dollar budget. May not be a lot, but it shows
their coming and it shows that everything's on the line,
which I would then caution you there may be something
that gets put on the line that'll piss you off.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
Don't faint dragon.

Speaker 6 (28:22):
But Michael has a good point. All the rest of
us who are board presidents and board members of nonprofits
that function on the US side of things both are
wisdom and government regulation are required to work towards sustainability

(28:42):
and not being too dependent on the long source of
fun day period.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
What were you wrong about?

Speaker 4 (28:52):
I'm not I don't faint, so I'm supposed to be
surprised that you were actually right on something.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Oh oh, okay, okay, right uh. I want to give
one more inside example. So when I was under secretary Politico,
which you know you can you can go online right
now to politico dot com and you can read some
of the stories they put up. They have a not

(29:19):
behind the paywall section, but they also have a behind
the paywall now Politico and the National Journal, which is
the other example I want to use. The National Journal
both are inside the beltway must reads for any political
person or NGO or lobbyist or lawyer or whatever working
inside the beltway must read publications.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
Well, when I.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
Left government service, I frankly couldn't afford them.

Speaker 1 (29:52):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
I don't know what the current subscription cost is to
the National Journal, but it's it's outrageous, you know, ten
thousand dollars a year something. Well, I'm not going to
pay that to, you know, to read the National Journal
and Politico. Politico received some eight million dollars, which again

(30:13):
I know is not a big sum, but eight million
dollars a year in federal money spent on Politico subscriptions,
we appear to be funneling large sums of tax money
or to publications like this which probably could not sustain

(30:34):
themselves if bureaucrats, politicians, or people in the media like
me outside government actually had to pay for them. What
do you think would happen if I walked down the
hallway to management and said, hey, listen for my for
my program, I really need a professional subscription to Politico

(30:55):
or to the National Journal. Okay, well, what's the You know,
they're probably think in their minds. Well, first of all,
they're already thinking in their minds, well, whatever it is,
we're not going to pay for it. But the second
thing they're thinking of is, well, I'm just kind of
curious what would it costs? And they're probably thinking in
their minds, you know, the cost of a subscription to
the Denver Post, which I have no clue what that is,
but you know, about twenty bucks a month or something. No,

(31:17):
I need twenty thousand dollars for those two publications. I'd
have to clean myself from all the coffee that gets
spewed all over me. So think about now. And by
the way, Politico was able to maintain their subscriptions because

(31:37):
they're government funded, and then they're able to sell themselves
to a foreign entity. And that's the same Politico that
ran a story about, oh, the Hunter Biden laptop story is,
you know, false information, that's Russian disinformation. So if ninety
percent of the subscribers to a left wing publication like
Politico are fake in the sense that their taxpayer funded,

(32:01):
and then they use those fake subscriptions or government funded
subscriptions to pump up their revenue, then Political gets to
sell itself to a German propaganda giant like Axle Springer
for a billion dollars subsidized by you.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
I always want to.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Remind you that all these numbers that we're talking about,
I know, in the grand scheme of things, don't seem
like much. And when it comes down to you individually,
it may just whatever you paid in taxes last year.
It may be you know, maybe maybe it's a dollar,
maybe it's fifty cents, whatever it is. But nonetheless, it's
your money and you should be deciding what you want

(32:37):
your money spent on. So the lesson to learn from
all of this is just keep shining the light. And
you know this, this is what audits do. And while
this may not necessarily be a formal audit, it is. Nonetheless,
someone taking a big ass flashlight and shining in on

(32:58):
this stuff and saying, a minute, maybe I'll just take
a pause for a moment and see what we're really
spending money on, and then we can have a national
discussion about what we should be spending money on as
opposed to what we are spending money on. Wouldn't that
be kind of nice? I mean, I sometimes I'd like
to do that within this this organization, like what are

(33:21):
we spending money on? Are we spending money on things
that actually help us produce more revenue, produce even higher
ratings or you know, or are we spending on things
that we shouldn't be spending it on. I think, to
the talkback point, every organization, private or public, publicly traded, private, nonprofit, charitable,

(33:42):
whatever it might be, whether you are a contributor, a donor,
a shareholder, an investor, whatever it is, you demand that
in the private sector. Why are we demanding the public sector?
We wanted someone that actually like a businessman to run
the government. Got it, Yeah, don't squeal about it.

Speaker 5 (34:05):
M hm.