Dear Democrats: Why are you so disinterested in rooting out government waste? (02-11-2025--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, write to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] So I started in the last hour talking about Rui Teixeira, who is a Democrat strategist guy, and he was the one that came up with the Demographics is Destiny tactic or strategy. He articulated this in a book like 20 years ago.

[00:00:52] And it essentially promised Democrats power in perpetuity. If we just wait long enough for all of the white Republicans to die off and be replaced. And that has turned out to be not true because Donald Trump.

[00:01:12] And so he has a piece talking about the Democrats' strategy on USAID, but also just more generally, the doge dudes, as I'm calling them.

[00:01:29] Like the reaction by the Democrats and media, but I repeat myself, the reaction to the identification of hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse by Democrats has been confusing. To people like Teixeira, who is saying, like, this is not a good position to be taking.

[00:01:55] Donald Trump actually has the high ground here because Americans are not fond of. Number one, bureaucrats. Number two, foreign aid. And you can say it's only one percent of the budget. People don't care. Trust me. I have had these discussions for over a decade with people. They do not care. It doesn't matter. It's a principle thing. They don't want any money going anywhere.

[00:02:23] And you could talk about soft power. I did this last week when all of this stuff first started coming out. USAID was initially a program designed to maximize soft power. You know, rather than invading a country, conquering them, you know, bending them to our will or anything like that. It was simply, hey, you guys need some help. We'll help you out. And then you put your name on everything. And so they know that it was America that helped you.

[00:02:51] Right. And then that creates in marketing what they call a halo effect. And people look at you more favorably. So that was the whole point. The problem is it became this $40 billion behemoth that has virtually no accountability. Oh, and by the way, not for nothing, what the hell is up with all the inspectors general?

[00:03:15] These are people who have their jobs specifically to root out waste, fraud and abuse inside the particular agencies where they are assigned. How is it that Elon Musk and a couple of 20 year old doge dudes can go in there and identify hundreds of billions of dollars in this stuff within days?

[00:03:41] And the IG in every one of these agencies hasn't been able to figure any of this stuff out. And they've been there for years. Right. The whole that the whole apple is worms to paraphrase Elon Musk. So to share. Oh, and by the way, yes, I was going to get into more of Rui to share his comments. But then Tony called and I hadn't talked to Tony since the election. I don't know why he hasn't called more frequently since the election.

[00:04:11] But anyway, so he called back in and apparently Tony is now MAGA. I don't think he I don't think he saw where that was going. So I do have some messages. Scott says Tony was hoping to beat you into an agreement, but you were too savvy for his little game. Very, very satisfying. Now I just need to figure out how to do that with my wife. That is Scott.

[00:04:39] I don't think it works in marriage like that. But but good luck to you, sir. Seth says, I love hearing people like Tony wanting instant change from Trump, who has been in office for what, 24 days? Tony, what did Joe and Kamala do for poor people in the four years they were given the chance? Good grief. Yeah, this is a this is a common refrain I hear like they're they're they're bleating on about the price of eggs. How about the price of eggs?

[00:05:09] Like, OK, first off, there was like the bird flu that broke out, you know, that whole bird flu thing. And they had to slaughter a whole bunch of chickens. And that was under Biden. And also Trump's been in office for three weeks. And you think that like he sets the price of eggs or something like these these things take time. Time. To work, you know, like these fiscal policies and stuff, they. They take time, but messages of certainty. And a consistent standard.

[00:05:38] Help give confidence to markets and industries. And so those things and when you say we're going to open everything up for more energy production, like the like the futures markets respond because they are looking to the future. And so you will see some of this stuff starting to flesh out now. I don't know what happens with the tariffs like that's, you know. Tariffs are going to increase prices.

[00:06:02] That's what that's what happens because the other countries are going to respond with their own tariffs like new core steel today sent out a message saying to all of the builders that use their rebar and stuff like, hey, our prices are going to be going up because of all the tariffs on steel. So construction is going to get more expensive. And. Like that, just prepare yourself because that's what's coming and that's going to be one of the lines of attack. Now, back to the Rui to share a piece.

[00:06:30] He says Democrats are. And this is a Democrat, by the way. Rui to share. Democrats are unconditionally defending an obscure government institution at USAID at a time when even well-known and previously trusted institutions are regarded with intense suspicion. Right. Think about that. People don't even know what USAID is about. They have no idea what this thing is, why it was set up, what it does.

[00:06:58] Why do you think they're going to have a level of confidence and trust in that institution when their trust and confidence in institutions that they do know about have been completely obliterated over the last five years, eight years?

[00:07:12] A key finding from a New York Times poll in 2024 during the election cycle was that voters overwhelmingly believe that the political and economic system in America needs either major changes or needs to be completely rebuilt. That's what they see Trump doing.

[00:07:34] And I will tell you, as one, like in 2015, when Trump was running initially the first time, I was a Rand Paul supporter. I wanted Rand Paul because Rand Paul wanted to reduce the footprint of the executive branch. He said that the executive branch has become too powerful. Right. The administrative state. He wanted to rip apart that, push all of that power back to the legislative branch where it was originally intended to rest.

[00:08:05] And he was the only one saying that stuff. This version of Donald Trump 2.0, he is delivering the things that I wanted out of Rand Paul. And so I recognize what it is that he's doing. Will it work? God, I hope so. I really do hope so. But I don't know. Not for sure. I'm with you. Like, I got to sit and wait and see how this stuff plays out.

[00:08:30] But USAID is an obscure institution, and it does one of American voters' least favorite things, which is provide foreign aid. Also, not only are Democrats blanket defending an obscure institution that does something American voters don't particularly want to, they are defending it without explaining their own priorities. Right. They're not getting up there.

[00:08:55] Like, they cannot get up there and defend all of the grants that USAID has been pushing out. They can't do it. And so they make it about these other things. They make it about, oh, the starving children in Africa. Well, if that's all USAID was doing, then there wouldn't be all of these other grants that have been identified, and there wouldn't be such outrage about all of those other grants.

[00:09:22] But if you're not going to stand with us and say, that's inappropriate, we need to be, you know, defunding the, you know, transgender Morocco reading group, well, then you're saying you just want to keep funding this stuff and you want the corruption to continue, which is basically what they're saying. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do, too. And you probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why?

[00:09:50] Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description, too.

[00:10:11] I started using Ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check.ground.news slash Pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature.

[00:10:38] Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Democrats, I have a question. Why are you guys so uninterested? In rooting out government waste. What's the problem?

[00:10:58] Why don't you care if we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars all over the globe and wait till this stuff, wait till the Doge dudes gets into or they get into the domestic agencies? I mean, you guys are always talking about the bloated military budget. Do you really think that Doge is going to find no waste inside the DoD budget? I bet they do. And by the way, I'm here for that, too.

[00:11:28] Like. I expect there to be a very large amount of waste, fraud and abuse inside that budget. And when you say get rid of that, I will be right there with you to say, yes, get rid of that, too. But why don't you want to get rid of all of the other agencies waste? Right. Unless, of course. You agree with the waste. You want the waste. Because we're going to waste. The abuse.

[00:11:58] Because we now have all of the receipts. We have the records and we're getting more and more and more of them of all of the various connections, as I outlined last week. How the taxpayer money gets confiscated, then flows through the grant programs and then makes their way down to these NGOs. And these various organizations that are staffed by you and your friends.

[00:12:23] And so it kind of looks like you're personally enriching yourselves at the taxpayer trough. And that might explain to me, and I'm trying to, you know, give the benefit of the doubt. I'm trying to keep an open mind here as to why there is just this visceral pushback on the identification of waste in government spending. Like, and I'm really, it's a head scratcher for me.

[00:12:53] Except, of course, for the, you know, personally enriching yourselves. But I don't want to make any, you know, accusations unless I've got the evidence. Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com. He says, you know who loves USAID and its unaccountable structure? The progressive academia elite that run it. And other less than responsive federal bureaucracies. Why? It appeals to their elitism.

[00:13:23] And the flow of money without accountability allows for massive manipulations and social engineering. You know who hates USAID? And other less than accountable federal bureaucracies? Like, almost literally everybody else. Almost everybody else hates this.

[00:13:42] To address Rui Teixeira's third point, where he says that Democrats are defending an obscure institution that does something American voters don't want to do. He says it's worth noting, Morrissey says it's worth noting that Democrats have a different strategy altogether. They want to preserve the structure as is. Not offer any kind of priority sets that would necessarily prompt scaled down decisions.

[00:14:11] They're using the time-tested and usually successful strategy of victim naming, or if you will, what he calls the poster child strategy. I called this the Mott Bailey, the Mott and Bailey fallacy. Like, that's how I described it last week. Which is, you know, an easily defensible position. That's the Mott. Think of a castle, right? The Bailey is the fields all around the castle, right? Where the farming takes place and the old medieval kind of setup there.

[00:14:40] And so the Bailey is a more easily attacked argument. And the Mott is the easily defended one. And so people will go out and they'll do something or they'll say something. They'll make an argument. They're out on the Bailey. They get attacked. And then they retreat to the Mott. And they're like, but we just want to feed starving children in Africa. And then the attackers are like, oh, well, I mean, that's okay. But down on the Bailey, that's where you've got the, you know, the funding for the Guatemalan sex changes.

[00:15:09] And that's a controversial thing. That's indefensible. We shouldn't be funding that stuff as American taxpayers. That's really a thing that we were funding, by the way. I'm not making that up. Like, the things that we have been funding that they have identified through USAID, including terrorist organizations and the like, like, you would think it was out of a parody. I would say Saturday Night Live, but that hasn't been funny in a long time. So, right.

[00:15:38] So it's like the Babylon Bee. Like, these are things that you would expect to see in some mockery post from the Babylon Bee. But we actually have been funding them. That's the Bailey. And then when attacked for funding the Guatemalan sex changes, they retreat to the Mott. But we're only feeding starving children a more easily defensible position. He calls it, Ed Morrissey calls it, the poster child strategy. Okay.

[00:16:05] He says he expected this would happen when these programs got exposed. The Democrats and the protection racket media would cherry pick a handful of worthy spending decisions as a way to defend the whole corrupt structure. And that's what we have seen with references to a couple of medical trials, right, which actually should have been under the NIH, not USAID. Poverty programs that will disrupt real humanitarian efforts.

[00:16:30] And that's assuming that the money reached those recipients in the first place, which we don't even know that to be the case. Less than 5% of USAID's Haiti program spending actually got to Haitians. Less than 5%. Where else did the money go? Clinton Global Initiative, anybody? Here's a great idea.

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[00:18:14] Constitutional crisis is the new danger to democracy. Yes, they've been using this term that they're trying to make it happen. Like fetch, you know? And they may be as successful, I don't know. But it's interesting too, if you track, like when the narrative of the democracy really ramped up,

[00:18:33] you know, within the last five years, you can see a lot of the NGOs and these non-profits started putting the word democracy into their grant applications. And it was like opening the spigots for the funding, you know? Like you put that in there and it's like gold, you know? Like almost literally.

[00:19:00] Another message, this is from a Twitter user called FormerPollDancer, who says, Pete, when you put people into a position of power without accountability, you create the opportunity for corruption. We need a sufficiently difficult method that it won't be abused, but simple enough that it's not impossible to hold judges accountable. I don't pretend to know exactly how to put that method together, though. Yeah, that is the challenge.

[00:19:30] Because you do want judges to be able to, you know, to rule without fear of retribution for any opinion. But I think if you get a track record built up of constantly getting overturned on legal grounds, right, on constitutional grounds, and you've shown yourself, you know, unable to weigh constitutional arguments, then you probably shouldn't have the gig anymore.

[00:20:00] Russ says, the left needs to lean into the constitutional crisis narratives. I know several people who don't pay much attention to politics, but have come to realize constitutional crisis means the left just doesn't like it. Same for worse than civil war, as well as Hitler and Watergate. Horribilizing everything is a strategy with diminishing returns. That is correct.

[00:20:26] In fact, Russ goes on to say those people are saying if there was an actual problem, Democrats would address the facts, not just wait, that it's not just whale, that it's the same as some other awful thing. Right. Address the thing that is at issue. And, you know, there is this identification of all of this waste, and your response is to attack the people that have identified the waste?

[00:20:58] I've got a message here from Dennis. This is a Pete mail. He says, I'm having fun watching these Democrats protesting Trump's doge findings of all the corruption and wasteful spending in the federal government. Once again, it's another exercise of the modus operandi, which is to first create the problem, then second claim you want to fix it. But this really does make great comedy, especially when you have Aunt Esther's replica, Maxine Waters, leading the way. Yeah. Yeah, she's always good for a laugh.

[00:21:27] And John says, good show today, Pete. I have learned much. Thank you, John. I appreciate that. Ed Morrissey, who I always learn from as well. This is a piece over at HotAir.com. Liberal analyst warns Democrats it's suicide to defend USAID. He says, the obvious point is Congress could restore funding for any worthy efforts at USAID that the administration has terminated.

[00:21:57] There are no legitimate reasons that the funds for worthy projects should have to come out of a slush fund that defeats accountability, both fiscal and political. Right. This is it's the same argument I make on teacher pay. I said this last week. I want great teachers to make a lot of money, six figures. I want them really well paid, but I refuse to be held hostage and pay the bad teachers the same amount of money as the great ones get paid. Not going to do that.

[00:22:23] And you can't make me pay for good things at the expense of having to fund way more terrible things. Ed Morrissey asks, why aren't Democrats in Congress stepping up with proposals to specifically fund any USAID projects? Right. So if you identify one that you want to keep, run a bill, say, OK, you know what, you're going to you're wanting to pause funding on all this.

[00:22:51] Let's fund this particular thing at this funding level. And the reason why they're not doing is because almost all of them would not just be unpopular, but a significant amount of them were corrupt from the start. They don't want to put their names on most of these specific programs, nor have their support for those programs on the record, which is why USAID got set up as an unaccountable slush fund in the first place. They don't want their fingerprints on it on a larger scale.

[00:23:20] That's how we got the bureaucratic state, too, or the deep state, if you prefer. That goes back a century to the first wave of progressive policies when Woodrow Wilson and after his strokes, his wife helped create agency law to bypass the Constitution and aggrandize the executive branch at the expense of the legislative branch. Wilson argued that experts could craft laws better than elected representatives.

[00:23:48] And legislators eventually embraced this dereliction of their duty. That's why we're in this mess. Trump's actions now leverage that overwhelming executive authority to dismantle at least some of the bureaucratic state, starting with the least popular outposts of the United Bureaucracies of America. Democrats won't address foreign aid priorities because they're not defending foreign aid.

[00:24:17] They're defending the bureaucratic state. That should be obvious at this point. Now, on Friday, a Trump-appointed judge, Carl Nichols, a federal district court in Washington, D.C., temporarily paused Trump's directives, placing about 2,700 USAID employees on administrative leave and evacuating them from their host countries on an expedited basis.

[00:24:42] The objections were raised by government employee unions, which we really shouldn't even have either. When we look closely at the order, Judge Nichols is not saying that the Trump administration will not eventually be able to do what the president wants done. Rather, the judge's concern is whether irreparable harm will result from the abrupt manner in which employees who continue to be paid have been cut off from USAID information systems and they've been told to evacuate.

[00:25:12] And this is where he said, you know, evacuating out of Syria is not like, you know, having to leave your job at the office in Virginia. It's not the same. So does this hold water? 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?

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[00:26:29] So I mentioned before the break, Judge Carl Nichols, Trump appointee, Washington, D.C. Federal District Court, temporarily paused the directives, putting a bunch of USAID employees on paid administrative leave and evacuating them from their host countries. The judge's concern is over getting some of them out of some of those locations.

[00:26:53] So the government's going to have to address particular perils faced by employees in unstable countries, as well as those who have special needs kids, property, other considerations at risk if the evacuation is carried out too hastily. But these things can be worked out.

[00:27:13] Andy McCarthy at National Review says, constitutionally speaking, I believe Trump is going to prevail as the litigation moves forward, quite possibly up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, Julie Kelly has a copy of the sworn declaration to the court by Pete Morocco, who oversees USAID for President Trump.

[00:27:40] He says, I made numerous requests for information about USAID's operations, programs, and compliance with the president's directives. I have consistently found USAID senior staff were unwilling or unable to provide basic compliance and oversight information.

[00:28:00] For example, senior professionals in the finance, legal, and human capital groups, so human resources, were not able to identify who, when, and why dozens of very specific multimillion-dollar payments were approved or dispersed in the days following Trump's directives to pause the disbursements. Right?

[00:28:26] So think about what that means, is that Trump says, pause the disbursements, and they pushed out the door, multimillion-dollar payments in direct violation of that order. That's insubordination, at the very least, no? This lack of clear or timely information sharing caused grave concern about whether USAID was faithfully following the president's and Secretary of State Rubio's directives.

[00:28:53] Those concerns were amplified when agency leadership became aware that a group of USAID employees were not complying with the executive order and continued to permit new funding obligations that were paused by the directives. So this goes all the way up to the top. The leadership was like, yeah, keep doing it.

[00:29:13] By February 1, the administration had placed 115 USAID officials on paid leave for noncompliance and other acts of insubordination. The plan was for all but roughly 600 out of the roughly 4,765 full-time USAID employees to be put on leave. As Morocco and his team analyzed foreign projects.

[00:29:40] But that was thwarted by this judge's temporary restraining order. By the way, Morocco also took a swipe at the judge's unsubstantiated claim that USAID employees in Syria faced imminent danger. He said, to the best of my knowledge, none of these employees were located in high-risk countries like Syria. Perhaps Nichols would have learned that had he allowed the DOJ to respond to the lawsuit before issuing his temporary restraining order. But he did not.

[00:30:09] Morocco also identified one USAID employee who defied the directive related to assistance funding for Gaza. Quote, one USAID employee who broke that chain of command did not communicate with her immediate USAID supervisor and attempted to obligate or authorize the expenditure of nearly half a billion dollars in assistance in a manner that was inconsistent with the president's priorities.

[00:30:41] So she's trying to push out the door half a billion dollars to Gaza in direct violation of what the president ordered. Meanwhile, in Manhattan court, federal court, Southern District of New York, Judge Paul Engelmeyer has paused the access of the DOJ to what are described as sensitive Treasury Department records.

[00:31:06] By the way, DOJ is an overhaul of the existing U.S. Digital Service, which was put in place by Barack Obama, hoisted on his own petard there. The stated concern of that judge, an Obama appointee, is that DOJ's access to sensitive records carries a high risk of improper disclosure or hacking. And these concerns are echoed in the media, I'm sure just a coincidence, and in the New York Times op-ed by five former Treasury Department secretaries.

[00:31:36] So, political actors can't be trusted. We need the altruistic professional bureaucrats who aren't at all partisan. They can be trusted. You see the disconnect here? It's pretty obvious. 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.

[00:32:03] You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendorshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.