Joe Biden’s NGO Scams Unmasked by DOGE

The revelations are breathtaking.

Joe Biden (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Of all the wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive spending of taxpayer dollars that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and agency heads have uncovered, Elon Musk has identified what he believes is the most audacious boondoggle perpetrated by the Biden administration.

“One of the biggest sources of fraud in the world is government-funded nongovernmental organizations,” Musk recently told Larry Kudlow on Fox Business. “This is a gigantic fraud loophole where the government can give money to an NGO, and then there are no controls over that NGO.” Musk is referring to what most people have traditionally called non-profit, tax-exempt organizations. Indeed, a clever way to expend taxpayer funds for purposes that are either nefarious and/or that the government would prefer not to reveal is to channel block-grant funding to an NGO with an explicit mission in line with the government’s desired outcome. By doing so, the feds can wash their hands of any direct responsibility for how the money is spent.

Before Donald Trump returned to the White House, funneling funds to NGOs had become a standard operating procedure at several federal agencies, most prominently USAID, which has now been cut to the bone and transferred to the control of the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the cancellation of a whopping 83% of USAID programs – 5200 contracts in all – “that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.”

The EPA’s Grand Scam

In recent days, much of the DOGE-fueled cost-cutting attention has turned to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where tens of billions of dollars were shoved out the door right after the Biden-Harris administration was turned away by voters last November. This was likely the most glaring case of expediting massive funding to NGOs that could be relied on to use the money for a particular left-wing cause. President Trump highlighted the most flagrant of those last-minute expenditures in his recent address to Congress, referring explicitly to left-wing activist Stacey Abrams. The former Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Georgia serves as lead counsel for a group known as Power Forward Communities, which obtained its tax-exempt status just eight months before the 2024 election, listing assets of a mere $100. Incredibly, it was granted $2 billion from Biden’s EPA. Abrams herself was invulnerable to scrutiny because the funding did not go to her but to her start-up NGO. Nevertheless, Trump calling her out before the entire nation certainly served the president’s purpose of castigating the reckless spending of the Biden administration.

According to RealClear Investigations (RCI), $20 billion of Biden’s last-minute spending spree went to eight NGOs that, like the EPA itself, had never handled such enormous grants. Trump’s EPA head, Lee Zeldin, has moved to end the arrangements made by his predecessor, but several agencies benefiting from Biden’s largesse have filed lawsuits looking to protect their grants. According to RCI, “[T]he deal classified the now-suspect $20 billion in a novel way making it hard to track. An arrangement was made between the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and EPA in which the money was designated ‘non-exchange’ rather than ‘exchange’” – a method designed to protect the grants from rescission by the incoming Trump administration.

An undercover video recorded by Project Veritas captured a Biden EPA official likening the whole scheme to “throwing gold bars off the deck of the Titanic.”

DOGE and the Tip of the Biden Iceberg

Zeldin recently wrote on X that such grants to NGOs “are the tip of the iceberg and suggest a deeply entrenched pattern of political favoritism, lack of qualifications, and other possibly unlawful allocation of taxpayer funds. … Disturbingly, these cases likely represent only a fraction of broader issues.” Musk added that “we estimate tens of billions of dollars [were given] to NGOs that are essentially scams.”

The Department of Government Efficiency is driven by a rare commodity in the federal government: transparency. Every boondoggle, left-wing funding scheme, reckless expenditure, and dubious contribution to an NGO identified by DOGE is itemized on its website for all the world to see. The list is so long that you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. DOGE has been engaged in what might be called a reverse treasure hunt, with the tally of taxpayer money saved now heading inexorably toward the one trillion dollars projected by the world’s wealthiest man. And with his chainsaw and scalpel in hand – and the agency’s charge not set to expire until Independence Day 2026, 16 months down the road – the best of the rest is yet to come.

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