Circling the government gravy train (02-05-2025--Hour3)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content, like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] We are doing the deep dive into the deep state, as it were. USAID, that has been the focus. The stuff that has come out about this organization and the funding that it has been pushing out the door, taxpayer dollars to the tune of $40 billion annually, it shocks the conscience. The stuff that they have been funding, that we know of, that we know of, and that they have tried to keep hidden,

[00:00:58] from any kind of oversight for years. Played the soundbite yesterday, Marco Rubio talking about how, like, they would try to get stuff from USAID and they would just refuse. They would refuse. So they're like, we don't have to give that to you. We'll respond to, you know, the, I guess the president or something, but then the president asked for it and they say no to them too. So, like, it's some sort of an unaccountable agency that's just pushing money out the door.

[00:01:28] Surprise, surprise, surprise. corrupted by bureaucrats and, you know, predominantly Democrats. They give like USAID employees give like 97% of their contributions to Democrats. So it is a predominantly Democrat leftist problem here. But there are Republicans. I mentioned yesterday also Bill Kristol. He has gotten money through these grants, this elaborate network.

[00:01:57] When you look at the way the money gets sent out and dispersed, it looks like a money laundering operation. If you're trying to mask where the money goes and where it's coming from, who's writing what grants and all of that, I'm not sure you could devise a better way to try to mask that than with the USAID.

[00:02:19] And had Donald Trump not won and Elon Musk not started here and not moved in on USAID, we would not know this. Right. But for Trump's election, but for Elon Musk's participation in this effort. And he's he's getting a lot of crap, by the way, they just the left is running with a story right now that, oh, USAID was investigating Musk and Grant that one of his companies.

[00:02:49] It's behind a paywall, so I can't see it. But but one of his companies and they were investigating that. Yeah, that's not a surprise. You know why? When Musk came out for Trump, all of the agencies in the federal administration were weaponized against him to try to dig up anything they could against him. That's how they roll. That's what Trump is trying to dismantle. If he does nothing else. I will be happy.

[00:03:15] I said, look, remember what I said at the very beginning when Trump had won and I was warning people, I said he's only got a limited amount of time to get stuff done. He has to hit the ground running. I did not even contemplate this pace. I thought he was going to have to get so he was going to this week is infrastructure week and this week is, you know, USAID week or whatever. Like this is a frenetic pace. I don't know if they keep it up.

[00:03:43] I don't know for how long they can keep it up, but it is just one thing after another. You've heard the term drinking from a fire hose. And like I keep saying it. I don't know if I've said it this many times in a shorter period. But I am impressed with what they have been doing. Now, they're all here come the legal challenges. We knew that was going to happen. But that's why I said you got to do it first. You got to do it soon.

[00:04:08] This stuff has to you got to get out of the gate and you got to get this stuff rolling because after about 12 to 18 months, you're going to get a lot of you're going to get a lot of hesitancy from spineless Republicans. And they're not going to be willing to stand with you because you're your term limited. So this is it. Democrats are very mad at what is happening with USAID.

[00:04:36] They are very, very mad that their shadow government is being dismantled. And when you need somebody to lead the troops of anger. Right. And you need to direct the mobs outrage. You call on the one and only. Wait, Chuck Schumer. And we cannot we cannot allow Elon Musk and a small group of people to secretly behind closed doors.

[00:05:06] Take away our privacy. Take away our dollars. Take away everything we have. We are going to fight this fight. I am going to stand with you in this fight. And we will win. We will win. We will win. We will win. Yeah. We will win. Wait, wait, wait. We will win. No, no. We will win. We won't rest. Yes. We won't rest. We won't rest. Yes.

[00:05:35] We won't rest. Far better. Oh, yeah. Especially delivered in the croaking throat of septuagenarian. Because we all know they don't like to rest. Oh, I kid. I kid. But I really I mean, I bet he's good for at least one nap a day. Look, I look forward to being of age where I can have at least one nap a day. That would be amazing. I don't even know what I would do with all that extra energy. No, I probably wouldn't. I wouldn't have extra energy.

[00:06:05] That's why I'm resting. Actually, never mind. OK, so Chuck Schumer, the face of the resistance. We we mentioned this yesterday. Talking about the problems that the Democrat Party has. They are leaderless. They don't have somebody right at the head of the party to motivate and rally the troops and direct their anger towards, you know, various downtown areas to burn loot and pillage. And so Chuck Schumer, it just kind of falls to him. A de facto leader there.

[00:06:34] But there are people inside the Democrat Party that want him to step aside. You know, they want like they want to be able to to have somebody else be the face. And so you're seeing some jockeying going on, which I find to be comical. Please make it AOC. Please make it AOC. AOC.

[00:06:59] Yeah, she did an Instagram video the other day yesterday, I think, and said Elon Musk is stupid. The dude is literally a rocket scientist. OK. Hello, Dunning Kruger. So. This is how worried. The quote unquote deep state or the administrative state, the shadow government.

[00:07:27] And I keep calling it that because that is, to me, pretty obvious what it is when you have all of these people that move from an administration, a Democrat administration. They go into, you know, agency work or nonprofit work that's funded by the USAID. Then it's pretty clear. Like, you're it's just a you're just moving them over. They keep drawing their their big paychecks and and and benefits.

[00:07:53] And then as soon as they are needed again, when a Democrat wins back the White House, then you just move them back into position. Right. And they don't miss a beat. That's why they staff up very, very quickly. They never stop doing, quote, the work, you know. Although I don't really think they do a lot of work with the nonprofits. It's much like the gigs that Democrats always seem to land at universities. Right. Bev Perdue got one. Remember that up at Harvard?

[00:08:22] John Edwards. Remember, UNC Chapel Hill created an entire center for work and poverty or something like that for him. Which was basically just a placeholder gig where he could make taxpayer money. Or maybe it was donor driven. I don't remember. But but it was a place for him to, quote, work while he actually was building his presidential campaign.

[00:08:46] That's what he did after he first ran and then he ran again, ended up as the is it the VP the second time? I forget. But it's it's a place that they park themselves drawing the largesse out of the system. And then you remember what happened when Pat McCrory tried to do that. Remember, a college had offered him. I think it may have been Davidson, but I forget. Some college offered him a professorship of some kind.

[00:09:15] You know, when it's not like a full blown professorship. It's like you come in and you you do like one or two sessions. I don't even remember the terms of the deal. But Pat McCrory got offered something like this. And the students were like, I can't. He's HB2 governor. I can't even. And then they were like, OK, fine, Pat, you're out. And they yanked it from him. Right. They never do that for leftists. They never do that for Democrats. Right. This is why I call it the shadow government.

[00:09:42] It's just they move them into these other positions and then they pick them up and bring them back in when they retain power. And they always thought they were going to hold the White House because demographics is destiny and their blue wall. They had this thing sewn up. We don't have to listen to you. We're free now to do whatever we want. You might have jumped the gun a little bit. Here's a great idea. Yep. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina, just a quick drive up the mountain? And Cabins of Asheville is your connection.

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[00:11:37] All right, all right. She was actually the former head of USAID. And she went on? Stephen Colbert? There's certainly a lot of work for- Oh, no, that's Elon. No, no, no. AFK established USAID in 1961, which, you know, this was a product of the Cold War, USAID. What was its mission, and why is that mission still vital now that the Cold War is over? Why do we still need it?

[00:12:06] Well, the Cold War, of course, Kennedy was thinking about the battle for hearts and minds and what would win America the affections of global publics. So this is an investment in our stability, in our security, in our alliances. And that is what USAID has done since Kennedy created it. Helped eradicate smallpox on the verge of eradicating polio. Again and again, USAID is on the front lines of some of the hardest challenges that our country faces and that some of the most vulnerable people in the world face.

[00:12:35] Right, like the DEI musical in Ireland, for example. It's like wiping out polio people. It's a premier example. Listen to the seals bark and clap. It's like a prime example of people call soft power in the world, influence on the rest of the world through the way we help them. Right, like sex changes in Guatemala. A sense of what's actually going on at the agency right now? Because it's kind of confusing what the status is.

[00:13:02] It's confusing in some respects, but the core fact is programs that were running that people were depending on, in some cases for life-saving medicine, like medicine if you have HIV that keeps you alive, quite literally, or if you're in Sudan and you have a child who's wasting away because of malnutrition. Here's the mod. A miracle paste, a peanut paste that USAID provides, brings that kid back from the brink of death. All of those programs are shuttered.

[00:13:33] Immediately. They were shuttered from the minute the executive order went out, and it didn't say, hey, let's review programs going forward. They are. It said stop everything you are doing globally. Right now, stop it no matter the human consequences. Regardless if you were in the middle of distributing food. We have stories of kids who are going in for their TB medicine, and the first three kids in a long, long line waiting out in the hot sun got the TB medicine. Everybody else told to go home.

[00:14:00] So let's say Trump gets what he wants, and the U.S. stops providing $40 billion in aid around the world. Yes, please. Let's. Oh, sorry. You have to spend millions on EcoHealth Alliance and the research on bats and coronaviruses in Wuhan at the WIV, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

[00:14:28] You have to do that or else the starving kid doesn't get the miracle paste. Right? See how that works? This is the same ploy that GovCo does when they are trying to extract more money for themselves from you. They do this all the time. And the perfect example of it at the local level is the shuttering of firehouses, right? Or police stations.

[00:14:56] Oh, well, you know, we can't do that thing that everybody expects us to do. The thing, the actual service that people want government to do won't be done unless you give us millions and millions of dollars for all this other garbage that we want to do but you don't want to do. And so it's a hostage situation. They're holding hostage the good stuff so we don't ask questions about all the bad stuff.

[00:15:23] It's the same old playbook. All right. I hope you had a happy holiday season, but tell me if something like this happened at your house. Your family and friends are gathered around. Maybe y'all are in the living room. You're laughing, swapping stories, reminiscing, and then somebody says, Hey, Dad, remember those old VHS tapes? Did you ever get them transferred? And then the room gets all quiet. All eyes are on Dad who says, Oh, you know, well, I've been meaning to, but I just haven't gotten around to it.

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[00:16:21] Talk about a memorable gift. So do what I did. Trust the experts at Create A Video, conveniently located in Mint Hill, right off I-485, and online at createavideo.com. I have a message from Russ. Russ says, The great thing about going after USAID first is that the waste, fraud, and abuse is easily understood. The left is forced to scream that these are critical programs. They also say that it's such a small fraction of government spending.

[00:16:49] But I think everybody who hears the list of spending sees stupid programs that are close to their tax liability or total income and wonder, why the heck do they need my money if this is the kind of crap they spend it on? To that point here, Dennis writes in and says, Nothing is more entertaining to me than watching the liberal Democrats gathering today to scream like stuck pigs when they get caught with their hands in the cookie jar. I like them best when they use the bullhorns rather than microphones.

[00:17:20] Elon didn't waste any time finding waste and corruption, and this is just the first month. Yeah, did you notice also in that Chuck Schumer quote when he was screaming at the microphone that they're going to take away our dollars? We're not going to let them take away everything we have. Like, whoa, whoa, dude. Like, probably not a great idea to use that kind of framing here, taking away our dollars, taking away everything we have.

[00:17:47] Like, you're kind of getting close to owning it, you know? All right, so I mentioned Samantha Power. She appeared before a Senate committee in April of 2023, okay? And Rand Paul, Senator Rand Paul, raised these very questions of secrecy and inappropriate funding at that time. Power was in charge of USAID at the time. That's not the question.

[00:18:16] The question is, did you fund coronavirus research in Wuhan, China? Before my time, there was the PREDICT program with which you're familiar, which ended in China in 2019. This is a $200 million program, and the GAO has also identified that some of these grants went directly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where there is a suspicion that the lab leak began that began the pandemic. Has USAID awarded funds to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in China?

[00:18:45] Not to my knowledge, but I'd have to give it a question. I think the answer is, once again, yes. GAO has found that there have been subawards of NIH money, probably as well as USAID money, that went to the Academy of not just medical research, military medical research in China. Now, part of the unknowns here is we can't get the records to look at this. So I've been asking for months and months for records.

[00:19:09] In September of last year, I wrote Ms. Powers, USAID, a request asking for records from the PREDICT program. These are not classified. These are simply records of scientific research, and we want to read the grants to find out what they were doing and whether the research was dangerous or not. The response I got from your agency was, USAID will not be providing any documents at this time. They're just unwilling to give documents on scientific grant proposal. We're paying for it.

[00:19:37] They're asking for $745 million more in money, and we get no response. So two weeks ago, the ranking member, Rish, myself, and 25 other Republican senators, unfortunately, so far, signed a letter once again. It's still no response. We're not asking for classified information. We're not asking for anything unusual. 20 million people died around the world. You're supposed to be an agency that cares about the death of people around the world.

[00:20:03] We, you know, talk about starvation and famine, and 20 million people died from a virus, and you won't give us the basic information about what grants you're funding around the world and who you're funding. Should we be funding the Academy of Military Medical Research in China? They're now off limits. But did we fund them? And who was making the decision? You know who ran the PREDICT program? UC Davis. Have you had any conversations with UC Davis about research in China and whether it was advisable?

[00:20:35] So, again, to set the record straight, first of all, the PREDICT program ended in 2019. We have people... And yet it goes on in other forms and other names. That's certainly not USAID program. Well, you have a program called Emergency Pandemic Threats Program still, don't you? If I could just finish in response to the first set of allegations, we have provided hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents related to the PREDICT program for the very reason that you say,

[00:21:04] because we are in... Not to us. We are, again, as I know you had an exchange with Secretary Blinken as well, consistent with longstanding practice. Not going to give them to us. We have been responsive to the committees of jurisdiction. Not going to... You've been consistent in not giving us any information. That's not true. But what you're saying is... We've provided hundreds of pages in response to the current ranking. To whom? To the Senate, Homeland Security, and Government Affairs Committee. For example, we've had extensive... We've been requesting this and gotten none of it.

[00:21:34] I'm on that committee as well. Oh! The thing is, is what we get from you and from the State Department at large is that if Senator Menendez signs it, you'll give us documents. Until then, you'll give us nothing. And we have got nothing. Zero. You said we'll not be providing any documents. I now have 25 senators have sent you a letter and you aren't responding. And we don't... We want to see the scientific grants. We give you the money. The taxpayers give you the money. We deserve to know where the money went, whether it happened. Look, you're right.

[00:22:04] It ended in 2019. When did the virus come about? In about 2019. Some of the research proposals that came about in 2018 were Wuhan Institute of Virology asking for money to create a virus with a furin cleavage site in it. A coronavirus, a SARS-like virus with a furin cleavage site. That's exactly what COVID turned out to be. They wanted money to create such a virus.

[00:22:28] So we want to know, are there other research proposals that you either granted or denied that were on the same veins of creating viruses that could have become COVID-19? We can't tell because you won't give us information. Again, consistent with longstanding practice, we are providing extensive documentation. We have a whole team of people who do nothing other than look back and predict. That is not true. It is factually accurate. That is not true. Everything we have asked, we have not gotten.

[00:22:56] I have not seen one document on the Predict program. I understand that. Again, consistent with common practice across administration. Consistent that you're not going to give it to any senators for that. No, no, no. We're providing all of the kinds of documentation that you're describing. You are not. We are. You're being dishonest. You're being dishonest. No, I'm not. I absolutely not. We haven't gotten one scrap of paper from you. Not one scrap of paper. Again, with the committees of jurisdiction, we are providing all of the paperwork that you requested by the chair. I'm on the other committee. I'm the ranking member on the other committee, and I haven't seen a scrap of paper from that committee either.

[00:23:26] Well, that is – See, here's what the American people – I can tell you what has happened. Actually, I can't tell you what happens at the committee. The American people think this, that because you won't respond, because you respond with a non-response, that you have something to hide. I don't know if you have anything to hide or not. I want to see every grant proposal that had to do with coronaviruses that went to China from the U.S. government, from all facets of the U.S. government, and every bit of the Biden administration is stonewalling us and will not give us the information.

[00:23:54] It makes us think and makes us suspicious that you're hiding something. And it wasn't even you. This was the previous administration. We go back two or three administrations. We just want to see the information, and yet you sit there and you say we will do something, we are doing something, which is absolutely the opposite of the truth. You are not being honest. Gosh, if only there was a sign that USAID wasn't disclosing all of its expenditures. I don't know. All right.

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[00:25:20] Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Inez Stepman from the Claremont Institute says this is nothing short of simply defunding the professional left. The leftist institutional infrastructure has relied for decades on basically being paid by the taxpayer.

[00:25:43] It's like if a thousand heritage foundations were being funded by the government, and that's just the way it was until now. And that's not being included in the reporting. Everything is framed through Donald Trump, Elon Musk. He's a billionaire. Boogity boogity. And USAID is a humanitarian agency, and all they do is save lives.

[00:26:11] That's all they do, and that's not all they do. All right. As this is Jorge Bonilla at NewsBusters.org. He says, The reports do not air all of the other stuff that USAID notoriously funds, from transgender opera in Colombia to gain-of-function bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Virology Institute to Soros DA candidates in the U.S. They never mention those things.

[00:26:42] Here's an ABC report. This is comical. I'll tell you why in a second. ABC report by Jonathan Karl, who just happens to get a hold of an employee at USAID. But Elon Musk's influence is sweeping throughout the administration. It was late last week that the Doge team showed up at USAID offices in Washington and demanded access. USAID employee Christina Dry described the scene.

[00:27:12] Doge was in the building. We started, we took down our pride flags. We took down, I took out any books I felt would be incriminating. No one was talking. We heard they started taking transcripts automatically of all of our Google Meets. We unplugged the news in the little kitchen galleys. It didn't feel good. And then Saturday, all of the websites went down. And then I lost complete access to my computer. All right. So a couple of things of note here.

[00:27:40] First, she says, we found out Doge was in the building. And so what did they immediately scramble to do? Take down all the pride flags that are hanging up in their offices. Do you wonder if that has any impact on why they keep giving all these grants to LGBT issues all around the globe? There may be a connection there, people. I'm not so sure, though. But so they scramble to start taking down our pride flags.

[00:28:10] And then she says she took out of her office any books I felt would be incriminating. Why would books be incriminating? What are those books? What books do you have on your office shelf there that might raise some suspicions, like how to launder money through NGOs for dummies or something? Like what kind of books do you have? But here's the big thing. Do you know who Christina Dry is?

[00:28:40] Why would you? Nobody knows who she is. ABC didn't tell us, and maybe they didn't know either. But if you track down who she is, she's the speechwriter for Samantha Power. She's the one who would write the speeches for the woman that you just heard with Senator Rand Paul, the head of USAID.

[00:29:05] So the speechwriter has incriminating books and pride flags all over the office. That's the speechwriter for Samantha Power. Okay. Over at CNN. Republicans, they're going to tell us, they're going to tell it to a street. They're going to give us all the background we need to know about USAID. Okay.

[00:29:27] And they say Republicans typically push to give the State Department, which provides overall foreign policy guidance to USAID. So state gives guidance. But USAID pushes the money out the door to all of the NGOs and the United Nations and all other types of operations. Just like the breadth and scope of what they fund, it knows no bounds. It's everything.

[00:29:56] Their funding, they got a little bit of money going everywhere. But it's all driven by one political philosophy. So Republicans typically push to give the State Department more control of its policy and funding. Democrats typically promote USAID autonomy and authority. In other words, they don't even want state to be in control.

[00:30:24] They don't want the State Department to hold USAID accountable for any of their spending. That is a recipe for graft. Remember hearing about the Teapot Dome scandal? This thing, this scandal will dwarf that. CNN goes on to say, Funding for U.N. agencies, including peacekeeping, human rights, and refugee agencies, have been traditional targets for Republican administrations to cut.

[00:30:51] The first Trump administration moved to reduce foreign aid spending, suspending payments to various U.N. agencies, including the U.N. Population Fund, and funding to the Palestinian Authority. So here's the question, and you know me. I am a why guy. My question is, why do Republicans do that? It's because there is a level of unaccountability when you start pushing these grants out, and then you do what's called sub-awards. USAID gets the chunk of money, then they issue the grants,

[00:31:21] and then those recipients issue other grants, and you have no idea where the money is going. And when you ask, you get stonewalled. And that's the problem. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page, or go to thepetecalendorshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening,

[00:31:51] and don't break anything while I'm gone.