Does Chucky Schumer really believe that $20 million for Sesame Street in Iraq will somehow benefit the U.S.?  Or $7 million to promote LGBT advocacy in Jamaica and Uganda?  Uganda enforces the death penalty for gays.

The list goes on and on and on.  I don’t need to bore you with the recitation.  But it is extremely important to understand that $1.5 million promoting DIE in Serbia isn’t about DIE.  It’s about something much more sinister.

President Eisenhower coined the term “military-industrial complex,” referring to a revolving door between the Defense Department and manufacturers of bombs and bullets.  This revolving door saw the DoD ask for munitions and shovel the money to manufacturers, and those manufacturers made handsome profits.  Gratitude for those profits led the war industry to reward its patrons with campaign contributions and other “private” benefits.

World War II filled this feed trough to overflowing.  Of course, after the war, the profits of the defense industry would shrink as the money in the feeder dried up.  Is it any surprise that the Korean War started not long after V.J. Day?  Given this obvious fact, it’s not hard to make a case that the U.S. has been in a nearly constant state of war for a very long time.  And it’s even more obvious why certain political persons (NeverTrumps? RINOs? pro-war lefties?) are so adamant that we need to support the cause du jour with our hard earned wealth.  The war industry in their state would suffer if they didn’t, and they might lose votes.  That may also be why Joe Biden and the Democrats were somewhat “soft” in their opposition to Israel’s war of liberation from Hamas in Gaza.  Their patrons in the war industry would be harmed by full opposition, while paid protests would be enough to establish their Jew-hating bona fides.

USAID was created by President Kennedy through Executive Order 10973, after the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 allowed him to do so.  Notice that key fact.  USAID was optional.  Left-wing apologists claim that the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 (also here, not identical!) turned it into a congressionally mandated organization.  A text search of both versions of the act revealed a pot full of “Agency for International Development” instances.  And a curious thing failed to show up.  All of those pointed to various funding and management prescriptions for USAID.  Not one of them said, “We establish USAID as an agency of the State Department” or something to that effect.

When the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was split in 1980 under President Carter, it was accomplished by the Department of Education Organization Act, which says, “There is established an executive department to be known as the Department of Education.”  No such language exists anywhere regarding USAID.  Arguing that an act of Congress is required to get rid of it is like saying you can’t pull out that tree you planted without first getting my permission.  The fact that I gave you the fertilizer is irrelevant.  You chose to plant it, and now you want to get rid of it.  It’s in your power, not mine.

DOGE is another case of gaslighting by the left.  Tom Renz (@RenzTom on X) has done yeoman work exposing this scam by the frightened swamp.  It seems that DOGE is not a new government entity at all.  Trump’s executive order masterfully changes the name of the “United States Digital Service” into the “United States DOGE Service.”  It doesn’t even change the letters of the government software development agency created under Obamacare.  It just changes it into something useful.

Of particular importance, because DOGE is inside the government, it doesn’t have to answer questions about how its employees have access to government computers.  President Trump has full authority under Article II, Section 1, Sentence 1, to give access to anyone he wants.  Being inside at the beginning just makes it easier.  But wait!  There’s more!

Trump and Musk had to have carefully planned every step of this.  Recall that Elon dismissed the majority of the workforce for X and still gets everything done.  I’m sure that the whiz kids who are doing the algorithmic audits all over the government had their software all refined by doing the same job at X.  So when it took them hours to expose all the corruption in USAID, that was no surprise.  They had refined their skills, allowing their computers to collate and reorganize the financial records into meaningful results.  And no one’s personal data were revealed...yet.  If money for USAID programs was diverted, the term for that is “misappropriation of funds,” punishable by up to ten years under 18 USC §641.  I’m certain that there will be many songbirds who will prefer supervised freedom to three hots and a cot with monthly visitation.

Finally, federal employee unions are screaming that Trump’s buyout offer is illegal.  The fact that he can eliminate the unions entirely with a stroke of his pen is lost on them.  But the judge issued his temporary injunction under the rule that the plaintiff’s lawyers’ presentations are presumed true at the outset.  But once each case is properly briefed, any honest judge (Will we find one?) will find for Trump.

Let’s go back through the key issues.  First, DOGE is inside the Executive Branch of the government, with full access granted by the president. Unless its employees reveal privileged information, as that IRS employee did with Trump’s tax returns, they aren’t breaking any laws when they do their automated audits.  The screaming about “Who elected Elon?!” goes nowhere.  Who elected the two million or so employees of the federal government?  Are you upset because they aren’t your guys?  Thought so.

Second, because USAID was created by an E.O., it can be uncreated by an E.O.  I know, this one will have a bit longer arguments in front of a judge, but there is no “establishment” language for USAID in any statute that I know of.  Without that, the swamp is just ooze.

Third, we have the issue of standing.  Article III §2 starts with “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity ...”  The key for those in Rio Linda is the word “Controversies,” which pops up several times a bit later in the same section.  For a legal controversy to exist, at least two parties must have a “cognizable” disagreement.  That other word identifies an argument that the Court has authority to settle.  And this is where the swamp must take the bull squarely by the tail and face the situation (apologies to W.C. Fields).  Trump’s attorneys really did their homework.

None of these “cases” gives any federal employee or Congress any cause to complain.  Congress is boxed out because these are policy decisions by the Executive, and no Congresscritter was harmed in the making of the decision.  No federal employee has a property interest in the existence of his job.  The Civil Service Act provides procedural protections for firing from a job, but if the job no longer exists, the employee is simply out of luck.  Pressing “Delete” on USAID is that sort of situation.  Offering someone a buyout is even harder to challenge.  When you get to decide whether to check or not check the box, there is no case.  You either did or did not.  End of story.

I’m skipping the popcorn on this one, going straight for the cake and ice cream.  Celebrations are in order.

J.D. Vance invited the ire of countless woke historical revisionists when he pushed back against the suggestion that, when Pete Hegseth removed retired General Mark Milley’s portrait from the Pentagon, this was somehow a sign that the Trump administration will be iconoclastic and authoritarian:

Vance’s response perfectly captures what most Americans probably felt in reading Glasser’s nonsense:

Vance’s including Robert E. Lee in this short list of American heroes whose reputations have been wrongfully tarnished could not have been an accident. It is a brave statement for Vance to make and a brilliant cultural flank against those who have been uninterruptedly murdering historical truth throughout the post-Obama era.

Violent mobs and woke social initiatives have led to the defacement or removal of these great Americans’ monuments for many years now.  They were to be newly cast as racists and villains, and you were also to be smeared if you didn’t buy into the lies.

You were a racist, for example, if you questioned the claims made in The 1619 Project. This farce-masquerading-as-journalism argued that the United States engaged in its war of independence because American colonials wanted to keep slaves.

Then, in 2020, Democrats began tearing down the statues of generals such as Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, men tarred by the taint of the Confederacy, but also began defacing statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Their reasoning was that the American colonials and the Confederate rebels were both just slaveholders who were fighting to keep their slaves, making them all reasonable targets for the revisionists.

Of course, even honest leftists have admitted that the 1619 Project is among the purest garbage ever put to print. The historical record clearly shows that there’s no credible evidence suggesting that the colonials wanted independence to keep slaves. But if that sort of nuance is important, it should also be important that the historical record clearly shows that the Southern states didn’t simply engage in its failed war for independence because they wanted to keep slaves, either.

The War Between the States was the result of a cold war that had lasted over three decades by the time the war began. Yes, slavery was a driver of this conflict between North and South since at least the Missouri Compromise of 1820, but so were myriad other economic considerations due to trade and taxation (mostly, protectionist tariffs that benefited Northern states at painful cost to Southern states).

Perhaps most important were representation issues due to disproportionate population growth shifting huge amounts of federal power to the North over time, which left states south of the Mason-Dixon line feeling very much like our Founders in 1776—that they were being taxed heavily without representation enough to have their own interests served in government.

That the Civil War was the most tragic moment in American history is a simple historical fact. The modern left asserts, however, that there was a clear villain, and that one side of the war is to be disparaged to the point of humiliation or irrelevancy. This is a disgusting modern conceit.

After all, the combatants did not feel that way. After the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, there were no hangings. Rather, Confederates “were saluted… they were not humiliated or beaten; they were embraced.”

Robert E. Lee’s legacy as an American hero has much to do with his role in the peaceful reunification of the country. He spent his later years urging all Americans to “unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war and restore the blessings of peace.”

When Southerners threatened to boycott the drafting of new state constitutions, Lee announced that it is the “duty of the [southern] people to accept the situation fully” and that everyone should “prepare his friends, white and colored, to vote and vote rightly.”

As far as his post-war legacy on race relations goes, he continually “set an example in treating black freedmen as equals.” In one documented incident at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, a black man rose to take communion, shocking the congregation. Lee “strode up the aisle and knelt beside the black man to take communion. Others then rose and followed his lead.”

Lee, like many Virginians, did not believe that secession was the appropriate path in 1861. But he did believe, as many Southerners did, that participating in the union of states that the Constitution established was voluntary. As Lee wrote in January of 1861:

A Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets has no charm for me. If the Union is dissolved and the government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people, and save in defense will draw my sword against none.

But when the Union demanded tens of thousands of Virginian soldiers to be conscripted to the federal cause, the legislature of Virginia also decided to secede rather than send its sons to forcibly subjugate the seceding states.

Lee encountered an unimaginable conflict—and I don’t think his most ardent detractors ever consider what they would have done in his position.

He was reticent to resign from the U.S. Army, telling General Winfield Scott that it was a service to which “I have devoted the best years of my life and all the ability I possess.” But in the end, he was even more reticent to take up arms against, in his words, “my birthplace, my home, my children. Save in defense of my native state, I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword.”

Here’s a curious thought, though: If Lee had chosen not to defend his home state against what he perceived to be federal aggression against it, and had he instead chosen to place his allegiance with the federal government over his allegiance to his birthplace, home, children, and native state by accepting the role of commander of the U.S. forces in the spring of 1861, “the war probably would have come to an end more quickly, and slavery would most likely have survived it.”

He could have “been the eighth president from Virginia,” says the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, and he would have been a national hero. Many have argued throughout history, whether despite his choice or because of it, that he is a hero all the same.

Robert E. Lee is among the greatest American heroes to have ever lived in our nation’s proud history. He was inspired by neither a traitorous spirit nor racist intent. During a more sensible time, General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower summed up the historical estimation of Lee. Lee was, he says, “one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation... selfless almost to a fault... noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul.”

It’s high time that we Americans remember that, and return to honoring Marse Robert in the manner he deserves.

It has become increasingly obvious that DOGE is Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) reprised. Glasnost soon led to perestroika (reform) and the Soviet Union croaked. DOGE will play a key role in dismantling the Deep State. We’ve lost count of how many decades former congressman Ron Paul has called for auditing the bankers’ plaything, the Federal Reserve System and its 400+ PhD economists. Or more recently, when senators Sanders and Grassley teamed to demand a Pentagon audit. Not only will DOGE audit the Fed and get to the bottom of the Pentagon’s missing trillions, but the entire federal leviathan is undergoing a full MRI scan. We know the diagnosis: Stage 4 metastatic cancer throughout the system. Drs. Musk and Trump have already indicated some of the initial body parts needing surgical intervention, starting with USAID, the CIA’s cover vehicle for adventures such as Victoria Nuland’s regime change fiascos or propaganda initiatives, at home and abroad.

Once DOGE’s results are made public, and crowdsourcing digests the mass of data posted online, the verdict will come into focus. Entire agencies will no longer exist and those surviving will be substantially curtailed. Individuals will be exposed and some may face prosecution.

Trump’s second term lasts 208 weeks. In just two weeks DOGE’s initial progress has been encouraging. The timeline for DOGE’s completion is July 4, 2026, 530 days from the inauguration. In its first two weeks (2.6% of the way to the deadline) Washington’s status quo brigades mounted resistance to allowing DOGE auditors access to records. Trump responded with the same treatment Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro received. He swiftly came down hard on both to make examples of them lest others consider blocking his reforms. USAID officials are now suspended, its headquarters doors are closed, and its website is offline. According to Musk, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” According to Trump, USAID is “run by a bunch of radical lunatics” Bill Kristol is an early example of collateral damage. Why USAID funded gain-of-function research needs explaining.

DOGE auditors won’t randomly proceed through thousands of federal agencies and subagencies. The Department of Agriculture can wait, Trump has bigger targets. USAID is a big one, playing its part in the deaths of millions after the Cold War in places such as Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia. HHS and its FDA and CDC will be additional piñatas. What spills out when they are smashed open will end careers, perhaps trigger prosecutions, and precipitate wholesale reforms. We know, for example, that even Obama ordered an end to reckless gain-of-function research. Yet somehow it survived and was offshored to China, Ukraine, and wherever. Following money trails reveals who did what.

DOGE progeny will inevitably appear at state and local levels. Open, online checkbooks of entities such as local boards of education will become manifest. The games citizens and journalists must play with FOIA requests to pry out spending details must end. Government spending is decipherable in databases and spreadsheets. There is no excuse (but considerable internal resistance) for not making details readily accessible to public scrutiny. Statutes require revision, including creating criminal penalties for failures to comply or concealing expenditures. Consider the entertaining drama of America’s favorite mayor, Tiffany Henyard of Dolton, Illinois. If her village’s books were maintained online, matters would never have gotten to this point.

Eliminating the need for servicing a significant portion of FOIA requests (including costs such as paying municipal attorneys to hamstring citizens’ inquiries) can yield savings. It is cheaper to take pre-existing digitized data and park it online -- permitting public access to what bureaucrats view -- rather than servicing each FOIA request.

Secrecy and concealment permit bureaucratic misbehavior. According to Musk, "Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress." His solution: blockchain, presumably to match payments with statutory and programmatic requirements. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent provided DOGE auditors access to the federal payment system. Stay tuned.

Federal Medicaid spending soared 53% in the five years ending in 2023, due in large part to illegal immigrants and probably the vaccine injured. A recent Maine report reveals up to 40% of non-citizens (illegal immigrants and legal aliens) in that state have voted (or had votes cast in their names) in recent years, determined by matching MaineCare records (requiring citizenship status and date of birth to receive healthcare) with voting records. Blockchain transaction matching protocols could eliminate such fraud. The investigative group which uncovered the Maine voting irregularities published an illuminating footnote:

Since the publication of the Maine Wire’s original investigation into noncitizen voting, we have offered the opportunity to review our underlying records in person to both Republican and Democratic elected officials. While no Democrats have accepted our offer, several Republicans have, and they can attest to the veracity and accuracy of our reporting. We have also shared redacted but sensitive versions of the records underlying this reporting with the Bangor Daily News, the Maine Monitor, WGME, and any other media outlet that has requested proof of the assertions made in our reporting. The information shared with these outlets is more than enough for them to prove for themselves that noncitizens are registered to vote in Maine.

None of these news outlets have filed reports of their own based on those records.

We have taken this approach toward sharing proof of our reporting while simultaneously refusing to turn over the records to Maine’s Attorney General and Secretary of State in order to protect the identity of any source(s). We have also declined to turn over our records to agents of the state in order to protect the identities of the noncitizens who may, in fact, themselves be victims of a form of identity theft. We understand the gravity of the facts conveyed in these reports and have taken unusual and extreme measures to prove that our reporting is accurate and true.

If it’s that bad in Maine, imagine the truth regarding California. It’s straightforward to conclude where DOGEian initiatives, at all government levels, are headed. Systemic government malfeasance is rampant and bipartisan. Democrats have the most at stake. We are entering an era, lasting perhaps a decade or longer, of government austerity. Debt got us here. Democrats’ power base depends on government largesse. Think teachers unions. Or postal unions for an agency hemorrhaging $6.5 billion in 2023 and $9.5 billion last year, with no end in sight for perpetually climbing deficits. Think NGOs, money laundering operations pretending not to be government agents.

Contaminated voter rolls require pruning. Think of politicians such as Maine’s senator Susan Collins, dependent on voting shenanigans. How many governors and members of Congress required voting fraud to get elected? Don’t expect Musk to stop with forensic accounting. Voting rolls are ripe for technological rehabilitation. Remember when the Left screamed that voter ID was somehow racist? That ship has sailed. Big changes lie ahead.

Douglas Schwartz blogs on history and gaslighting at The Great Class War