waste fraud & abuse BS
2ND ADD BS ON DOGE B3 BS DOWN DEVIL TERM
2 26 context eg of actual wfa eg pentagon
JDV TASK FORCE BS RETALIATION WALZ
WEAPONIZED AGAINST BLUE CITY/STATE EG MINN RENEE GOOD 1 26 green funding bbb
SEE GOP WASTE FRAUD EG FOR CTR- EXAMPLES
SEE NOEM 2 PVT JET 737MAX VOUGHT SECURITY KASH GIRLFRIEND?
SEE IG INSPECTORS GENL FIRED BY TRUMP MUSK VOUGHT
MAGICAL MANTRA INCANTATION that makes it possible to cut food and rx for poor ppl; joni e grow up ppl die and others say we can SAVE medicare by getting rid of lazy grifters
919 sorta ironical node b/c hard rw always denounce, yet produce?
see biz man savior mitt romney? trump? jack welch? jamie diamond ducks.
--> DOGE DOGE COUP DISMANTLE GOVT IN THE NAME OF EFFICIENCY [note devil term opposite waste fraud and abuse]
musk on rogan JO cd not even bother to send pix to trick him, waste
part of magic voodoo tax cut BS, we can lower taxes w/o hurting ppl/safety net
but military weapons contractor the most bloated sacred cow
right gop happy to cut programs for ideological purposes, beat up on poor ppl who cannot fight back
trump admin wanted to grift off gov’t jared covid gear?
clinton gore?
quayle?
vpence $600K limo to trump ireland
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/gop-blocks-probe-of-mike-pences-trip-to-ireland-after-vp-spent-600000-on-limousine-rides-so-he-could-stay-at-trumps-resort/
===
an 10 26
President Donald Trump announced that he's starting a "tip line" for people to call in and report someone for committing government fraud, offering a hefty award of $30,000 for successful tips. He's dumping $25 million into the program to search for "waste, fraud and abuse."
According to *The Wall Street Journal,* Vice President JD Vance is running a government task force.
"The new $25 million program will be administered by the Justice Department and tips can be submitted through a government website. Individuals can receive up to $30,000 if a tip leads to a conviction," the Journal said.
But experts questioned whether something like that could backfire.
"I predict this won't last long -- if only because it'll lead to a flood of FOIA-able material about why DOJ refuses to prosecute Trump fraud," wrote national security analyst Marcy Wheeler.
The first check will go to right-wing content creator Nick Shirley for $10,000 for a video about fraudulent daycare centers that were already under investigation by the state and federal government. Four of the centers were already under investigation by the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families.
One person remarked that this is already something done "under regulatory systems."
'How do you think most government fraud is prosecuted via whistleblowers?" they wondered.
The government had a number of fraud investigators before Trump took over on Jan. 20, 2025. The government already had substantial anti-fraud machinery outside inspectors general. That includes the FBI, the Justice Department and IRS criminal investigators. A new whistleblower fund adds an incentive to submit tips, but it does not create the government’s ability to investigate fraud from scratch.
The DOJ's Civil Fraud Division is one of the main government mechanisms that would have investigated these matters, but staffing was cut 25 percent amid DOGE layoffs.
By September 2026, The Hill reported internal DOJ charts showed substantial declines in Civil Division attorney staffing alongside rising caseloads. DOJ responded that the division had hired more than 200 attorneys since the administration began, with additional hires planned.
One person asked whether reporting fraud by White House members, including the president, would earn them a reward.
-=-=
an 10 26 big bogus bill reality sinks in?
Republicans shift to healthcare fraud as costs dominate voter fears
-=-=
-=-=
noaa ocean sensor?
Backlog of unsigned contracts paralyzes NOAA
An agency official said “everything has ground to a halt,” waiting for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to review more than 200 agreements.
By:
Scott Waldman
| 05/20/2025
CLIMATEWIRE | A growing backlog of hundreds of unsigned NOAA contracts has slowed agency operations to a crawl — so much so that even Sen. Ted Cruz, a staunch ally of the Trump administration, has raised concerns about the gridlock.
The bottleneck is due largely to one man: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose portfolio includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. After taking office in February, Lutnick insisted that he personally review any contract in excess of $100,000.
Intended as an attempt to identify waste and redundancy, the policy instead has sown chaos at the nation’s preeminent climate and weather agency, say former and current NOAA officials.
More than 200 NOAA contracts — including one aimed at helping local communities prepare for extreme weather events — are now stuck in limbo, waiting for Lutnick to make a decision. The impasse has forced NOAA to furlough employees, and it has created a work environment where NOAA staffers spend much of their time trying to justify their work — rather than doing it, they say.
...
-=-=-
-=-=
AN 9 26
NOEM ASST
Trump officials caught 'intentionally destroying' evidence during court battle
//
AN 9 26
A Trump administration official and former senior aide to Kristi Noem was recently "disgraced" after a bruising story came to light, but according to a new report from The Daily Beast, she has moved on to an "extraordinary" new position, all the more alarming given her recent conduct.
Earlier this month, The Daily Beast turned up court documents revealing that Karen Evans, the one-time acting director of FEMA under fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, had been caught "intentionally destroying" workplace correspondence, which she had previously been ordered to retain as evidence in a lawsuit dealing with President Donald Trump's efforts to gut the disaster response agency. This included deleting messages sent on the communications app, Signal, which members of the administration have been caught using for under-the-radar talks repeatedly. Some of the group chats in which messages were deleted included Noem and her top lieutenant, Corey Lewandowski.
On Tuesday, the outlet's investigative Substack, PunchUp, published a follow-up report on Evans, revealing that instead of being let go, she was moved to an eyebrow-raising new role within the administration.
"After Donald Trump, 80, fired Noem in March, Evans was dumped as FEMA’s acting administrator after less than six months in the role," The Daily Beast detailed. "But rather than following her boss out of the door, she was made the department’s director of the Waste, Fraud and Abuse Task Force — three weeks before the court found her to have deleted evidence, PunchUp reports."
One anonymous source within the department, described as "beleaguered" in the report, gave the outlet a blunt response to this news.
"That sounds pretty appropriate for this admin," the insider said.
"Evans’s actions have brought grave consequences for the Trump administration," the report added. "The ruling by [Judge Susan] Illston, a Clinton appointee, means the court will now assume the missing messages would have helped prove that DHS directed and carried out the plan to slash FEMA staffing."
Evans reportedly returned to DHS 15 days prior to the judge's ruling, beginning her new role leading the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. DHS undersecretary for management Brian Cavanaugh issued a statement about Evans taking on the role, praising her for her "extensive background in federal IT and cybersecurity leadership, along with her deep experience in public service."
"But as PunchUp notes, Judge Illston’s ruling raises questions about why Evans still runs a task force dedicated to rooting out fraud after the finding, and what Cavanaugh and the department knew when she was rehired," the report noted. "DHS was asked whether Evans has faced any disciplinary measures over the destruction of government records, and if it still considers Evans an appropriate official to lead its efforts to combat fraud. Declining to comment on whether Evans had faced sanctions, the department said it was grateful for her service and work at DHS."
-=-=
===
mpu
pgm more $ for admin than services?!
every diff state gets billed for each query over and over
Sep 8, 2026
The biggest welfare scam in the country is run by a consulting giant. Deloitte has made over $6 billion running error-prone eligibility systems that make it harder for Americans to get the healthcare and food aid they rely on. We investigated the big business of welfare.
The People Abusing Welfare Are Not Who You Think
-=-=
-=-=
an 8 26
While President Donald Trump claims he’s been waging a war against fraud, one of his former officials asserts that the White House-led anti-fraud task force is really a “ruse to prosecute political foes.” This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Homeland Security Deputy Chief of Staff during Trump’s first term and at the time penned an anonymous article exposing the dysfunctional inner workings of the administration.
As Taylor wrote on Thursday, according to reports from the New York Times and other outlets, the Trump administration has been leveling claims of fraud against targets ranging from immigrant-owned ice cream trucks to Democratic governors. “The goal was not to take down serious criminals,” argues Taylor. “It was storytelling. Trump says his enemies are grifters. Accordingly, he’s reorienting the federal government to prove — whether they’re governors or immigrants — that his political and societal opponents are rotten right down to the food trucks from which they sell.”
YES I AM CROOKED BUT SO ARE THEY THEM ENEMY
Taylor says there is a clear giveaway to the president’s intentions, writing, “As DOJ is building these types of cases, it’s simultaneously abandoning major white-collar prosecutions. Corporate investigations (which can uncover billions in theft and billions in restitution for victims) have fallen to their lowest level in decades. In fact, the Times found that the volume of such cases is literally thousands below the Biden administration and far below Trump’s own first term. Meanwhile, the president has been pardoning wealthy executives and dropping cases left and right against friendly corporations. So no, the Trump administration is not hunting fraud. It’s hunting down its enemies with anything it can find. ‘Fraud’ just happens to be the easiest label to apply.”
Trump’s actions in Minnesota, says Taylor, offer a clear example. As he writes, “Late last year, welfare fraud was used as the thinly veiled pretext for the Trump administration to launch a massive immigration crackdown (and political shakedown) in a state led by Democrat Tim Walz, who challenged Trump for the White House in 2024. Thousands of ICE and CBP agents flooded into Minnesota to address a problem that — if the reasons were genuine — should have required not more than a few dozen accountants. It certainly didn’t need gun-toting agents. While Trump was forced into retreat, his team first tried to coerce state leaders to forfeit their voter rolls, which critics pointed out had precisely nothing to do with the original fraud claims. Of course it didn’t; from the start, the whole exercise was about political leverage.”
“To understand what Trump’s task force is actually meant for,” says Taylor, “just look at how it’s being managed. The DOJ’s new fraud division doesn’t report to some expert in criminal investigations. It reports directly to Vice President JD Vance, an arrangement without precedent, especially since it effectively circumvents the Attorney General himself…In June, he personally made the criminal referral against Walz. Asked where the ‘war on fraud’ goes next, Vance answered: California. (Surely it’s just a coincidence that they’re going after the blue state led by the man Trump most fears will try to succeed him.)”
Taylor notes other examples, such as charges of mortgage fraud leveled against New York Attorney General Letitia James — who had previously won a nine-figure civil fraud case against Trump — Senator Adam Schiff (D-NY), and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. According to Taylor, “‘Fraud’ has become the administration’s codeword for ‘revenge.’ The term is a respectable-sounding wrapper for criminalizing the political opposition. And now that Trump’s team has systematized the plan with a task force — making the issue a top priority for all U.S. attorneys in the country — we will see more and more cases brought, like the recent cases against left-leaning nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.”
The reality, asserts Taylor, is that Trump’s White House is rampant with fraud, the scale of which will be exposed by a future Democratic administration. While Trump and his allies will attempt to conceal their crimes, “They can’t shred it all on the way out the door, because they’ve trapped themselves. If they want their prosecutions to survive, there must be evidence, discovery, and a chain of custody. The records must exist somewhere, or the cases go away. I suspect that when investigators finally follow that paper trail, it will lead exactly where the Letitia James and Adam Schiff cases already point — back to the White House — and to proof of the deliberate weaponization of the American government against its own citizens. That’s when the real fraud trials will begin.”
-=-=-=
-=-=
During the early months of Donald Trump's second presidency, he vowed to fight "waste, fraud and abuse" in the federal government. Now, more than one year and a half after Trump's return to the White House and less than three months away from the 2026 midterms, Vice President JD Vance is urging Republican lawmakers to tackle alleged abuse in federal safety-net programs. But according to Politico, something that Vance and his allies hope will fire up the GOP base is running into a brick wall in Congress.
"Finding cost savings by rooting out so-called government waste and fraud in Medicare, Medicaid and the federal food assistance program known as SNAP was a top priority for House Republicans, who set out earlier this year to pass another party-line reconciliation package on the heels of last year's 'big, beautiful bill' and June's immigration enforcement measure," journalists Mia McCarthy and Robert King report in Politico. "Many Republicans believe the fraud issue will have salience with voters amid larger concerns about affordability, since it would ostensibly involve returning lost funds to government health programs."
But according to the Politico reporter, "many" Republicans are "skeptical any such bill will ultimately reach the president's desk."
Rep. Riley Moore (R-West Virginia) told Politico, "It should be one of our top priorities, and I am very much in favor of seeing this in some type of reconciliation package."
Similarly, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee) told Politico that "if Congress is listening to the public," it should "have the guts" to move ahead with legislation on "fraud."
Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Florida) told Politico, "Allowing fraud to run rampant in the United States of America is a slap in the face to hard-working Americans."
But McCarthy and King report that "with less than 100 days until the midterms, Republicans who were eager to go home to their districts for August recess and fold significant fraud wins into affordability messaging have little to show for it."
House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) cautions that how Republican lawmakers tackle alleged fraud before the midterms is much different from tackling it after the midterms — which are set for Tuesday, November 3.
Arrington told Politico, "The political will that it takes to do any spending reform in 100 days prior to an historic midterm election is very different than the dynamics in the lame duck. You get past the election, and you got an invigorated body that is not thinking about their political life."
-=-=
an 7 26
Whether by intention, error or force of law, the Trump administration has owned up that Donald Trump sees himself president of MAGA, not of the nation.
A New York Times report this week disclosed a month-old court filing in which federal officials acknowledged that they cut $7.5 billion in clean energy programs selectively among states “based solely” on whether those stated had voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
In court answers about a lawsuit challenging the stated reasons of cuts based on “waste and fraud,” the government copped to the real reason – partisan politics. Indeed, the administration funded grants for states that had backed Trump in 2024, even though the Energy Department had recommended they be cancelled.
It may not be a specifically impeachable offence, but it certainly shows that Donald Trump is abusing his office, his oath – and weirdly even punishing the Trump voters in the states taking the cuts.
Trump certainly has been acting in a variety of ways as if he wants to target states that voted against him, but this court filing seemed a public acknowledgement that should get some serious attention.
As The Times concluded, “The admission showed how Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.”
Trump certainly has no hesitation about collecting taxes from blue states or demanding voting rolls or demanding special treatment, just in spending the money disproportionately raised from those states.
President for Some, Not All
The White House and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget , have remained silent about the government’s court arguments in a suit brought by the affected states. At the time of the cuts, Vought posted that “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.”
Now, a government lawyer told the court that none of the cancellations were “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”
Apart from all else, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright repeated the waste argument in sworn congressional testimony, telling House members in June, “No decisions (about the cuts) were made on politics.”
Someone might tell Jim Jordan, chair of the Judiciary Committee, who referred former special prosecutor Jack Smith to the Justice Department for investigation of perjury for not answering a question that Jordan had never asked.
Vought is seeking to finalize rules that would make political appointees the final arbiters of how the government would award more than $1 trillion in annual grants. He wants the power to block or revoke money if states do not conform to administration priorities. The White House has also sought to layer additional restrictions on grant recipients, limiting their political activities, memberships along with vague requirements that they cannot use the money for certain purposes, including those deemed “anti-American,” reported The Times.
Rather than combatting waste, it appears Trump and his cronies are trying to take control of the United States government, using the power of the American people for their own ends, argues historian Heather Cox Richardson in Substack.
Sen. Patty Murray. D-WA., and Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, said that politically minded grant cuts amounted to an “outright un-American” weaponization of government.
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker pointed out that the cancelled grants included $583 million intended for Illinois “that would have gone toward lowering energy costs, strengthening grid reliability, and creating energy jobs.” He demanded the funds be restored. “Despite what he might think, Donald Trump is not the president of MAGA,” Pritzker said in a statement, but “the president of all America.”
Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.
---
SEE NOEM 2 PVT JET 737MAX VOUGHT SECURITY KASH GIRLFRIEND?
---
an 7 26
I’m no political consultant, but I don’t think I would make “fraud” the theme of the Trump administration’s midterm election campaign push.
At least not while the reflecting pool disaster remains in the news, the White House is doubling down on sticking with its no-bid contract for the company that oversaw the algae-infested, peeling pool mess, and President Donald Trump is making headlines for raking in $2.2 billion since he came back into office, including $1.4 billion from the Trump family’s cryptocurrency scheme.
“We have got to have a governor who takes fraud as seriously as the President of the United States,” Vice President JD Vance declared Wednesday in Milwaukee during a speech apparently intended to boost Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany.
Vance’s remarks, delivered ahead of a $10,000-per-couple fundraiser ($35,000 if you wanted a photo with the VP), could be read in different ways.
One way is in the context of the poster-sized photo Vance displayed of a Black woman “with the smug look and a Louis Vuitton bag,” as Vance put it — one of the people who owned prenatal care coordination businesses that a 2022 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found had defrauded Medicaid, costing the state more than $15.5 million among them between 2019 and 2022.
Vance, although he was elaborately praised by other Republicans at the Wednesday event in Milwaukee for leading the Trump administration’s crackdown on healthcare fraud, had nothing to do with uncovering the prenatal care scandal in Milwaukee. That was the dogged work of the Journal Sentinel reporters whose efforts led the state Department of Justice to investigate, cut off Medicaid to the fraudulent businesses and pursue criminal charges — all of that years before Vance took office. But Vance saw an opportunity in Milwaukee to connect various Trump administration claims about fraud to a picture of someone Ronald Reagan would have called a “welfare queen.” In his speech, Vance moved directly from that photo to the Trump administration’s efforts to “kick illegal aliens out of our country.”
Black people, immigrants and people who receive food assistance and Medicaid are the “fraudsters,” according to Vance and Republican Reps. Tiffany, Derrick Van Orden and Bryan Steil, who joined Vance on stage in Milwaukee. They denounced Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers for not sharing sensitive personal data on SNAP recipients with the Trump administration. Vance called Evers’ refusal “borderline criminal.”
“Why won’t Tony Evers turn over the SNAP rolls? ‘Cause he’s cooked the books!” Van Orden hollered.
Steil connected claims about fraud in SNAP and Medicaid to discredited allegations of voter fraud, calling the federal takeover of elections Trump has been trying to force on Congress as “total common sense.”
When a reporter asked Vance about Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s request to talk to him about the harassment of election workers by FBI agents deployed to Milwaukee to “investigate” nonexistent voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Vance implied that Johnson is trying to cover up the fraud.
All of this hype about fraud and repeated assertions by the GOP chorus in Milwaukee that the Trump administration had saved the taxpayers of Wisconsin billions of dollars by rooting it out, is meant to cover up a much, much bigger problem.
Medicaid cuts pushed by the Trump administration and supported by Tiffany, Van Orden and Steil, coupled with the same Republicans’ refusal to renew Affordable Care Act tax credits, have already pushed about 22,000 Wisconsinites off their health insurance. A new KFF report shows that insurers on the ACA marketplace are planning another double-digit increase in rates this year, driven by inflation and the loss of the tax credits, which will cause even more people to lose coverage. Altogether, more than 258,000 Wisconsinites will lose health coverage by 2034 because of Trump administration policy changes, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.
While Van Orden was yelling from the stage in Milwaukee about people who are ineligible for SNAP allegedly signing up for the program and “literally taking the food out of the mouths of hungry babies,” Wisconsinites know that he voted for SNAP cuts and changes to eligibility rules that led to 15,500 Wisconsinites losing food assistance.
Instead of adequately funding healthcare, food and a decent society, Republicans pushed through trillions of dollars in tax giveaways to corporations and the very rich, tens of billions of dollars for a domestic paramilitary organization that is conducting violent arrests of people who pose no public safety risk, and hundreds of millions of dollarsfor an obscene White House ballroom and no-bid contracts for Trump’s vanity projects on the national mall. That is the real fraud.
Republicans are screaming about “waste, fraud and abuse” to try to distract voters from all of this destruction and graft. But their “fraud” talk just reminds people of the stunning theft of public resources they’ve enabled and are now trying to cover up with flimsy, slanderous lies.
---
---
CONTEXT? JDV SPOZED TO FIGHT? SEE PARDONS; SOMALI MICH
07/02/26
---
an 2 26
'Head scratcher': Trump aides struggle to spend $500 billion more the military asked for
===
---
mma
April 16, 2026, edition ofThe Benny Show, streamed on YouTube
BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): You know that our take on Iran has been pragmatic. Not light ourselves on fire. Don't burn your MAGA hats. But I don't like the distraction. It's too far away, and the distraction is, like, burning up political capital that should be spent on lowering prices for America.
The economic numbers are underwater for our side, and they need to be flipped. And you can flip them quick. How do you flip them? Cheap gas. Plow gas directly back down to $2 a gallon, which is where it was. Home prices. You must fix affordable housing in this country. How do you do that? Well, first thing is you deport 20 million criminal aliens. Free up 20 million houses, right? Especially the starter homes, the homes that they occupy. The starter homes get people started with the American dream. Free up those houses, more supply that will reduce the prices.
And then you got to get grocery prices down. How do you fix that? Well, 40% of the groceries are free to the parasitic class. Many of them criminal aliens. Many of them people who need to have their benefits cut, to be quite honest. People who are engaging in welfare and SNAP fraud.
And that was ubiquitous on the old block — I used to live in the ghetto in Washington DC. Everybody would trade their SNAP cards for cash. Ubiquitous — is like literally probably the largest scale fraud in the country is SNAP fraud. And so crack down on that. Make it so that all — like, we're not subsidizing with our groceries, so every time you buy a steak for $22 a pound, you're subsidizing some jackrabbit on SNAP who's buying the same steak for free off the government that you're paying for. Anyway, that's how you reduce — so that you get rid of fraud, I think, and you get rid of dependency on those systems, prices lower.
---
---
AN 2 26
President Donald Trump is costing US taxpayers “billions” with his various military ventures, an expert wrote on Tuesday, even though both he and his critics have been strangely silent on the subject.
From his quite real military action in Venezuela to his threatened activities in Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Gaza, Iran and Greenland, Trump is repeatedly actually or potentially engaging in multibillion dollar military campaigns all over the globe, according to a report by Bloomberg. For example Operation Southern Sphere in January, during which Trump captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, cost $31 million per day, according to an analysis by the Washington think tank the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
“That comes to more than $11 billion a year if the US maintains its current level there,” reported Bloomberg’s Wes Kosova. If Trump successfully pushes US oil companies to spend $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s energy industry, “that means you’re bringing in some kind of occupation,” explained Heidi Peltier, director of programs at Brown University’s Costs of War project. “US taxpayers would be rebuilding the oil industry and paying for a military presence there to stabilize the country and make it a safe enough investment.”
Similarly Trump’s threatened attacks against Iran, which he said would be “far worse” than the B-2 bomber attacks from last year, would cost $8 million daily or $2.9 billion annually.
“That’s on top of the at least $2 billion the US spent on military action against Iran and its proxies in 2025, according to calculations by the Costs of War project,” Bloomberg wrote. “Needless to say, those numbers will climb dramatically if Trump orders further strikes.” And that doesn’t include the cost of Trump’s threatened occupation of Greenland (roughly $700 billion).
“No matter how compelling a president’s argument may be for missile strikes or troop deployments, the current practice of heaping war costs atop the nation’s already staggering pile of debt can last only so long,” Bloomberg reported. “At the start of the Iraq War, US debt held by the public was $3.7 trillion, or 33 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Today it’s more than $30 trillion, equal to 97 percent of GDP.”
Bloomberg is not alone within the business world in looking askance at Trump’s invasion of Venezuela. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné told reporters that he quit the country in 2022 and Trump’s invasion has not changed that.
"It was too expensive and too polluting," Pouyanné said, "and that is still the case.”
Similarly Exxon CEO Darren Woods has described the Venezuelan market as “uninvestable.” Trump replied by threatening to sideline the Exxon leader by “playing too cute.” Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton also observed in January that oil companies might not feel comfortable investing in Venezuela because of the instability injected by Trump’s policies.
“If I were an oil company executive being pressured by Trump to invest billions of dollars of capital expenditures to revive Venezuela's oil infrastructure, I would want a regime in place committed to the rule of law,” Bolton said.
Overall the economic risk involved in Venezuela stems from the uncertainty baked into the military operation’s future, said one expert.
"Tactically, it was executed with precision," retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said for the conservative publication The Bulwark. "But the immediate aftermath revealed a strategic uncertainty. Even in the (Trump) Administration's first press briefings, it was unclear who was in charge in Caracas, what authority Washington claimed to exercise, and what political end state the United States was pursuing. That ambiguity has not improved with time."
---
---
an 2 26
Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday that President Donald Trump wanted a hefty budget for the start of his "Golden Dome" project, but even Republicans have no idea what's going on with it.
Speaking with Republicans on Capitol Hill, Briana Reilly and Anthony Adragna found that even they don't know what has been done or what will happen in the next year.
The so-called "Golden Dome" is supposed to be similar to the Israeli anti-missile system in place that detects and shoots down any aerial weapons coming into the country. The United States, however, is over 400 times the size of Israel. Part of Trump's reasoning for demanding Greenland become part of the U.S. was the claim that he wanted the dome to stretch all the way there.
That would mean expanding the area under the "Golden Dome" to over 1,000 times the size of Israel.
A report titled Build Your Own Golden Dome: A Framework for Understanding Costs, Choices, and Tradeoffs from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute estimated the cost at anywhere between $252 billion and $3.6 trillion over 20 years.
Thus far, Congress has allocated $23 billion to the Department of Defense. Lawmakers have since been asking what they got for that.
Punchbowl cited Pentagon officials telling the Hill they would speak to Congress about its detailed plans. But that was three months ago. Lawmakers are still waiting.
“I would hope we could have hearings on it — both classified and unclassified — to lay out the plan and also talk about budgets and where the money’s coming from, and how we’re going to integrate technology,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) told Punchbowl.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast (R-Fla.) anticipates there are going to be huge arguments over the project from now on.
“It’s stirring, big debate here,” Mast revealed.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is a top lawmaker on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. Speaking to Punchbowl, she explained that the GOP members were happy to turn over the billions, but they don't know where they have disappeared to.
“I can tell you how much we included within the reconciliation bill for Golden Dome, but in terms of what it exactly means, I think the Congress is still waiting to hear on that as well,” she said. “That’s what I’d like to know.”
One of the biggest fiscal complaints about the Pentagon is that the Defense Department budget has ballooned to $1 trillion only to deliver years late at twice the price.
"Many weapons systems also don’t work too well. The F-35 works less than one-third of the time. The Navy is retiring Littoral Combat Ships decades ahead of schedule because they can’t perform the missions the Navy needs. Army leaders cancelled the Future Combat System without producing a single operational vehicle," wrote Dan Grazier, senior fellow and director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center.
---
---
WEAPONIZED AGAINST BLUE CITY/STATE EG MINN RENEE GOOD
AN 1 26
The cities that President Donald Trump and his allies are targeting for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids — Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and now, Minneapolis — have something in common: They are run by Democrats. And the cities that Trump is singling out have Democratic governors such as California's Gavin Newsom, Illinois' JB Pritzker and Minnesota's Tim Walz.
In an article published on January 12, Politico reporters Blake Jones, Jeremy B. White and Nick Reisman cite fraud allegations as one of the tactics that Trump is using against blue states.
"Donald Trump has found a new way to bludgeon blue states: accuse them of fraud, then move to cut off their money," the journalists explain. "The attacks ramping up across the map — from Albany and Springfield to Denver and Sacramento — follow Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz ending his reelection campaign amid allegations of welfare fraud in his state — a case Trump's MAGA allies seized to cast similar aspersions at other Democratic leaders. The Trump Administration cited unproven fraud allegations last week as it put a hold on $10 billion in child care funding to five Democratic-run states."
Jones, White and Reisman add, "The Department of Justice announced it's launching a new division of fraud enforcement, pointing to Minnesota's 'fraud epidemic.' And in California, Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said he's pursuing additional charges of fraud involving state homelessness programs after railing for months against Gov. Gavin Newsom's management of state spending…. The spending-focused line of attack from Trump marks an escalation in Trump’s already red-hot war on blue states."
Democratic New York State Sen. Liz Krueger argues that Trump's attacks on blue states were easy to predict during the 2024 presidential election.
Kreuger told Politico, "I'll say one thing about our president: He told us he was going to do this. He told us he was going to punish blue states. We have to brace for impact, we have to use our legal skills, our amazing attorney general, and endless lawsuits to at least hold them back."
According to U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Illinois), Trump is using a range of methods to attack blue states.
Schneider told Politico, "He's attacking blue states out of revenge. If that's in the form of sending in ICE, he sends in ICE. If it's denying food and education to their children, which to be clear are America's children, he's gonna do that. What he is doing is seeking revenge at the cost of America's most vulnerable people, putting those communities at risk."
*Read the full Politico article at this link.
---
---
AN 10 25
“Waste, fraud, and abuse.”
It’s President Donald Trump’s battle cry as he dismantles federal agencies, fires hundreds of thousands of employees, and demoralizes the workers who remain. It’s also another of his false flag operations.
Rather than ferreting out corruption, waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government, Trump has undermined the very professionals who have that job: inspectors general.
The Role of the IGs
In the wake of procurement scandals and President Richard Nixon’s corrupt abuse of executive power for personal ends, Congress passed the Inspector General Act of 1978 to establish formally the duties and responsibilities of the office. Inspectors general pursue their missions with nonpartisan objectives and have a central role in holding government accountable.
Approximately half of the 70-plus inspectors general are appointed by the president, subject to Senate confirmation. They are the only independent offices within federal agencies designed to protect taxpayer money and root out corruption, fraud, waste, and mismanagement. IGs also investigate whistleblowers’ confidential claims.
Over the almost 50 years of their statutory existence, they have saved taxpayers billions of dollars.
Trump’s Escalating War on Independent IGs
For Trump and his allies, independent inspectors general have been a nuisance and worse. Following acquittal in his first impeachment, he replaced IGs for the intelligence community, State Department, Defense Department, Health and Human Services, and Transportation Department.
In his second term, Trump has moved more broadly and more rapidly. Typically, IGs remained in place when new presidents took office, underscoring their nonpartisan roles. But in violation of the statutory 30-day notice and “for cause” requirements for termination, Trump fired 17 of them during the first week of his second term. He had appointed several of them during his first term.
So the next time Trump and his allies say they’re eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government, remember that Trump is actually doing the opposite: clearing away key guardrails of accountability.
During post-termination interviews with the New York Times, the fired IGs said that their biggest concern was the “chilling effect” that their abrupt, unlawful, and unjustified terminations would have on others. Professor Timothy Snyder calls it “obeying in advance.” The inspectors general used similar language to describe their fears:
“Self-censorship”
“Why would you want to write a report that will get you fired?”
“Installing someone who has more loyalty to one person than to the mission of the office.”
“If you do the work that you’re intended to do and it’s not popular, then you will be punished.”
“Who will speak truth to power?”
The concerns were justified. Trump doesn’t want anyone speaking truth to his power.
On Tuesday, February 11, the inspector general for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Paul Martin, issued a report criticizing Trump’s proposed dismantling of that agency and outlining the disastrous consequences. The next day, Trump fired him.
Final Act of Destruction
On September 28, 2025, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that effective October 1 it was defunding the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. It was a strategic kill shot because the council is the umbrella agency supporting all of the inspectors general offices.
Beginning on October 1, what had been the website for the council stated only:
Due to a lack of apportionment of funds, this website is currently unavailable.
The same line appeared at numerous Office of Inspector General websites, including the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Justice, Interior and Veterans Affairs, and by those of AmeriCorps, Export-Import Bank of the United States, Federal Trade Commission, International Trade Commission, National Archives and Records Administration, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Personnel Management, Smithsonian Institution, and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
Contacting the watchdog website for the National Labor Relations Board’s OIG page resulted in a “404 error.” The Architect of the Capitol’s IG page said “Not found”; another new page offered only hotline information and blamed the change on a “funding issue impacting Oversight.gov functions.”
The council also runs Oversight.gov, which houses over 34,000 reports from most of the OIGs, and operates 28 OIG websites that host legally required hotlines for whistleblowers to report suspected cases of government corruption, waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. That site was down too. The council site’s link to the “Inspectors General directory” stated only: “Not Found—the requested URL was not found on this server.”
Not a Funding Issue
But the so-called “lack of funds” asserted on the inoperative council website was not the result of the simultaneous government shutdown. The council’s budget did not require additional congressional authorization.
Rather, the OMB under the leadership of Director Russell Vought decided not to fund it. Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist, was a primary architect of Project 2025—a 900-page blueprint for expanding executive power (“the unitary executive”) and imposing an ultraconservative social vision. During the 2024 campaign, Project 2025 was so toxic that Trump repeatedly disavowed and claimed to know nothing about it; as president, he’s boasting about working with Vought to implement it.
Asked about its defunding decision, the OMB asserted without evidence that it shut down the IGs because they had “become corrupt, partisan, and in some cases, have lied to the public.”
Republicans Are Concerned?!
Even Senate Republicans were outraged. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called on the White House to release the funding immediately.
So far, it hasn’t.
So the next time Trump and his allies say they’re eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government, remember that Trump is actually doing the opposite: clearing away key guardrails of accountability.
And remember that when Republicans in Congress say they are “outraged” at some action Trump has taken, don’t expect them to do anything about it.
---
omg
an 725
Trump official bills CFPB $5 million for his security detail while gutting agency’s consumer work
A top Trump White House official who has incessantly bemoaned wasteful government spending has reportedly billed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau nearly $5 million for his security detail as he guts the agency's ability to fight for Americans scammed by predatory corporations.
Government Executive on Wednesday obtained a memo from the CFPB's deputy chief financial officer showing that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the consumer bureau "are entering into an interagency agreement to pay the costs" of Russell Vought's security.
Vought currently serves as both OMB director and acting director of the CFPB—a longtime target of Trump, congressional Republicans, and corporate forces.
"The memo spelled out that the agreement was 'on a fast track,' despite the funding not being included in the bureau's fiscal 2025 budget," Government Executive noted. "The $4.7 million will cover Vought's security through December, meaning it will draw from both fiscal years 2025 and 2026."
Earlier this year, Vought described the consumer agency's budget—around $820 million for 2025—as "excessive in the current fiscal environment." An OMB spokesperson did not respond when Government Executive asked why CFPB is footing Vought's security bill.
David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, wrote sardonically that Vought—who has helped turn the consumer bureau into a shell of its former self—is "finally getting things done that matter at CFPB."
"And when I say that, I mean his security detail," Dayen added. "At heart, these guys are all kleptocrats."
Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, wrote that Vought is "simultaneously stopping CFPB from protecting American consumers from scams, while also charging it $5 million for his security team."
While the Trump administration's effort to dismantle the bureau entirely has been held up in court, Vought and Republicans in Congress have succeeded at slashing the consumer agency's budget and grinding its enforcement work to a halt. A pair of advocacy groups noted in a memo released in late May that the Vought-led CFPB has quietly dismissed more than 20 public enforcement actions against corporate wrongdoers.
Supporters of the CFPB, which was established in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, have described the agency as a "model of efficiency," touting the fact that it has returned tens of billions of dollars to consumers since its creation.
But that's done nothing to slow the Trump administration's assault on the bureau.
The Prospect's Maureen Tkacik and James Baratta wrote earlier this month that for close to half of 2025, the CFPB's roughly 1,500 staffers "have been locked out of their offices and agency computers, while attorneys and judges deliberate over the degree to which Trump's wrecking crew is legally allowed to assassinate the bureau."
"In the meantime, formal entries into the CFPB's consumer complaints database have soared, suggesting that the business of junk fees, predatory terms, and routine swindles is booming," the pair wrote. "All told, 2.5 million complaints have flooded into the CFPB over the past six months, roughly a quarter of the total complaints the agency has recorded since its inception in 2011, with reports of everything from being shut out of bank accounts after a hurricane to scammers impersonating ICE officials who convince consumers to buy them gift cards in order to help them avoid deportation."
"The ability to force financial scammers to return ill-gotten gains to millions of customers is an awesome authority in a political system that makes it so difficult to materially improve people's lives," they added, "so Vought has unsurprisingly dedicated special effort to destroying that power."
A report released earlier this week by the nonprofit Better Markets notes that the Trump administration's regulatory rollbacks at the CFPB have cost American consumers billions in savings and left them more vulnerable to corporate misconduct.
"The magnitude of the rollback and its costs for American consumers is staggering," said Brady Williams, legal counsel at Better Markets. "The Trump CFPB has aligned itself with industry interests, abandoning its mission to protect consumers."
---
===
interesting jdv does not play i am biz man card b/c hedge fund hated? but elon is savior see waste fraud and ineff BS
===
bb 9 24
JD Vance described the cabinet position from which Elon "Leon"Musk will direct a brain trust to save social security from "migrants" and fix the DOD.
In what appeared to be a momentary break from disparaging asylum seekers in the US, JD Vance found his way back to disparaging "migrants" as somehow responsible for the social security fraud that he also imagines. The answer to this is noted Pedo Guy Leon Musk. Following his disastrous re-imaging of "X," most Americans will likely not choose to have Leon fix social security.
Shawn Ryan: Let's talk about government reform.
JD Vance: Yeah.
Ryan: So, it looks like Elon's going to be on the cabinet.
Vance: That's right, yeah.
Ryan: And will be in the charge on the government efficiency department.
Vance: Yep.
Ryan: If that's what you call it.
Vance: Yep.
Ryan: How do you see? How, have you spoken to him about the plan? How he's going to do it?
Vance: Well, I've spoken. You mean with the president or with Elon?
Ryan: With Elon.
Vance: Ok, yeah, with Elon. So, I've spoken with Elon a little bit about it and um, you know, I think that the way that this is envisioned is you set up a, you know, you set up an organization with very smart people from the private sector and a few smart people from government and you go in and you say, 'How are we going to fix all of these inefficiencies?' And the thing that's complicated about this, man, is it's going to look much different in say the Department of Defense versus Social Security, right?
via MTN
Previously:
• Leon Musk complains there is not enough assassinating going on
===
===
an 10 22
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was part of the CARES Act of 2020, was launched under former President Donald Trump in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and continued into the Joe Biden era. Some PPP loans were investigated by federal officials and flagged for potential fraud. But according to a Project on Government Oversight (POGO) report released on Thursday, October 6, the Trump Administration eliminated an abundance of flags during its final weeks in office.
Truthout’s Sharon Zhang reports that according to POGO’s report, Small Business Administration (SBA) officials “eliminated 2.7 million flags between December 2020 and January 2021, as the Administration was in its lame duck period.”
In an article published on October 6, Zhang notes, “Special preference was given to the largest loans, which often also went to the largest corporations. On January 16, 2021, four days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s SBA wiped 99 percent of special review flags — which were given out to every loan above $2 million for separate investigatory purposes.”
Zhang notes that according to POGO, the Trump Administration “appeared to have favored the very largest loan recipients.”
“Trump continually gave huge financial favors to large corporations during his time in office — and though most large corporations were exempt from receiving PPP loans, some large corporations managed to skirt the rules and receive loans anyway,” Zhang observes. “Out of the $800 billion given out in the program, flagged loans accounted for at least $189 billion. Because the vast majority of PPP loans — 95 percent — have been forgiven, it’s likely that many of these loans that had previously been flagged have been forgiven entirely.”
Zhang points out that a National Bureau of Economic Research study released in January 2022 “estimated that only between about a quarter and a third of PPP loans went to saving workers’ jobs.”
“The rest — about 66 to 77 percent — went to business owners and people like shareholders,” Zhang reports. “Many loans went directly to the rich. Several billionaires or companies owned by billionaires received loans, like Republican fundraiser Joe Farrell or Kanye West’s apparel company, valued at $3 billion. One loan, POGO found, went to a hotel owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican who is the richest man in the state and a former billionaire.”
READ MORE: White House shreds Marjorie Taylor Greene over PPP loan hypocrisy
Zhang adds, “The loan was worth $8.9 million and appeared to have been flagged eight times by the SBA. Another loan with nine flags, worth over $5 million, appears to belong to a Kentucky hospitality corporation whose annual revenue of $850 million would likely make it too large to receive a PPP loan.”
===
===
desantis $600K fraud migrants to martha vineyard 922
===
mma 9 22
Then-President Donald Trump ordered Alex Azar, then his health and human services secretary, to immediately approve the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment because Fox News host Laura Ingraham had said it was effective, according to a new book.
Trump, an avid Fox viewer who regularly turned the network’s programming into White House policy, became transfixed by the drug after his trusted Fox hosts started talking it up in mid-March of 2020, as the novel coronavirus swept across the country. If hydroxychloroquine had worked as the COVID-19 miracle cure Fox claimed, it would have allowed Americans to swiftly return to normal life without fear of becoming seriously ill from the virus. Unfortunately, hydroxychloroquine is not an effective coronavirus treatment, according to numerous studies as well as U.S. and international health agencies.
Peter Baker and Susan Glasser shed new light on the role Fox played in convincing Trump that hydroxychloroquine would be a COVID-19 “game changer” in their new book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.
They chronicle a phone call between Trump and Azar that took place on March 18, 2020, two days after Ingraham had praised the hydroxychloroquine’s potential during an interview with the Long Island lawyer Gregory Rigano, who championed the drug.
“Laura says hydroxychloroquine works. It’s perfectly safe, so just approve it,” they write that Trump told Azar during the phone call.
When Azar protested, the then-president told him, “Laura takes it. It’s safe,” Baker and Glasser report.
“I want it approved today. That’s an order,” he ultimately demanded, according to the book.
After Trump publicly touted hydroxychloroquine at a press briefing the day after his call with Azar, the Fox-Trump feedback loop went into full swing: Fox ran hundreds of segments talking up the drug’s benefits; Trump tweeted praise of the drug in response to the coverage and successfully pressured health officials to issue guidance supporting the use of the drug as a coronavirus treatment; and Ingraham visited the White House with two members of her “medicine cabinet” to meet with Trump and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn and push for additional support for the treatment.
The federal government ultimately amassed a stockpile of 66 million doses of a drug that is not effective in treating COVID-19 because Fox hosts told Trump that it worked and he believed them. Meanwhile, the network moved on to peddling ivermectin, another drug studies show is ineffective in treating COVID-19, while slandering the actually effective COVID-19 vaccines. The results for Fox’s viewers have been devastating.
===
===
rev door mil logistic bd, hallib charged govt for meals never provided; did intial study bush 41 that said pvt cheaper but real # 2x more $
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/study-says-nearly-half-of-defense-spending-for-9-11-wars-went-to-private-contractors
Sep 13, 2021 5:58 PM EDT
Up to half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since 9/11 went to for-profit defense contractors,a study released Monday found. While much of this money went to weapons suppliers, the research is the latest to point to the dependence on contractors for war-zone duties as contributing to mission failures in Afghanistan in particular.
In the post-9/11 wars, U.S. corporations contracted by the Defense Department not only handled war-zone logistics like running fuel convoys and staffing chow lines but performed mission-crucial work like [dyncorp]training and equipping Afghan security forces — security forces that collapsed last month as the Taliban swept the country.
Within weeks, and before the U.S. military had even completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban easily routed an Afghan government and military that Americans had spent 20 years and billions of dollars to stand up. President Joe Biden placed blame squarely on the Afghans themselves. “We gave them every chance,” he said last month. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight.”
But William Hartung, the author of Monday’s study by Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Center for International Policy,and others say it’s essential that Americans examine what role the reliance on private contractors played in the post-9/11 wars. In Afghanistan, that included contractors allegedly paying protection money to warlords and the Taliban themselves, and the Defense Department insisting on equipping the Afghan air force with complex Blackhawk helicopters and other aircraft that few but U.S. contractors knew how to maintain.
“If it were only the money, that would be outrageous enough,” Hartung, the director of the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy, said of instances where the Pentagon’s reliance on contractors backfired. “But the fact it undermined the mission and put troops at risk is even more outrageous.”
At the start of this year, before Biden began the final American withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were far more contractors in Afghanistan and also in Iraq than U.S. troops.
The U.S. saw about 7,000 military members die in all post-9/11 conflicts, and nearly 8,000 contractors, another Costs of War study estimates.[total pvt out# mil 150k?]
The Professional Services Council, an organization representing businesses contracting with the government, cited a lower figure from the U.S. Department of Labor saying nearly 4,000 federal contractors have been killed since 2001.
A spokeswoman pointed to a statement last month from the organization’s president, David J. Berteau: “For almost two decades, government contractors have provided broad and essential support for U.S. and allied forces, for the Afghan military and other elements of the Afghan government, and for humanitarian and economic development assistance.”
U.S. officials after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks embraced private contractors as an essential part of the U.S. military response.
It started with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, [nope bush 41 hallib study to pvtize]the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton received more than $30 billion to help set up and run bases, feed troops and carry out other work in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, the study says. Cheney and defense contractors argued that relying on private contractors for work that service members did in previous wars would allow for a trimmer U.S. military, and be more efficient and cost effective.
By 2010, Pentagon spending had surged by more than one-third, as the U.S. fought dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a post-9/11 American, politicians vied to show support for the military in a country grown far more security conscious.
“Any member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November,” the study notes Harry Stonecipher, then the vice president of Boeing, telling The Wall Street Journal the month after the attacks.[up 3-5% /yr soon to hill trillion; reconciliation 3.5 trill over 10 years so this is 2x?!]
And up to a third of the Pentagon contracts went to just five weapons suppliers. Last fiscal year, for example, the money Lockheed Martin alone got from Pentagon contracts was one and a half times the entire budgets of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the study.
The Pentagon pumped out more contracts than it could oversee, lawmakers and government special investigators said.
For example, a Florida Republican Party official made millions on what lawmakers charged were excess profits when the U.S. granted a one-of-a-kind contract for fuel convoys from Jordan to Iraq, the study notes. The electrocution of at least 18 service members by bad wiring in bases in Iraq, some of it blamed on major contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root, was another of many instances where government investigations pointed to shoddy logistics and reconstruction work.
The stunning Taliban victory last month in Afghanistan is drawing attention now to even graver consequences: the extent to which the U.S. reliance on contractors may have heightened the difficulties of the Afghan security forces.
Jodi Vittori, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and scholar of corruption and fragile states at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was not involved in the study, points to the U.S. insistence that the Afghan air force use U.S.-made helicopters. Afghans preferred Russian helicopters, which were easier to fly, could be maintained by Afghans, and were suited to rugged Afghanistan.
When U.S. contractors pulled out with U.S. troops this spring and summer, taking their knowledge of how to maintain U.S.-provided aircraft with them, top Afghan leaders bitterly complained to the U.S. that it had deprived them of one essential advantage over the Taliban.
Hartung, like others, also points to the corruption engendered by the billions of loosely monitored dollars that the U.S. poured into Afghanistan as one central reason that Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government lost popular support, and Afghan fighters lost morale.
Hillary Clinton, while secretary of state under President Barack Obama, accused defense contractors at risk in war zones of resorting to payoffs to armed groups, making protection money one of the biggest sources of funding for the Taliban.
The United States also relied, in part, on defense contractors to carry out one of the tasks most central to its hopes of success in Afghanistan — helping to set up and train an Afghan military and other security forces that could stand up to extremist groups and to insurgents, including the Taliban.
Tellingly, Vittori said, it was Afghan commandos who had consistent training by U.S. special operations forces and others who did most of the fighting against the Taliban last month.
Relying less on private contractors, and more on the U.S. military as in past wars, might have given the U.S. better chances of victory in Afghanistan, Vittori noted. She said that would have meant U.S. presidents accepting the political risks of sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and getting more body bags of U.S. troops back.
“Using contractors allowed America to fight a war that a lot of Americans forgot we were fighting,” Vittori said.
no lnx
https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-september-14-2021/
==
===
Recent Republican-pushed federal shutdowns gained nothing — but cost taxpayers at least $4 billion
A new Senate report pegs the cost of the last three government shutdowns, from the bizarre 2013 Republican shutdown demanding the end of “Obamacare” to the two 2018-2019 Trump-led shutdowns.
==