The Trump Administration Sets Its Sights on the Parallel Government
DOGE has begun to have a real effect on the federal budget as the DOJ and Congress mull legal actions.
This article originally appeared in American Spectator
The Trump administration has started to have a real effect on the size and scope of government, thanks to its focus on wasteful and fraudulent spending doled out to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The more the administration uncovers, the worse it looks for the institutions of the Swamp—and the better the approval polls look for Trump.
Like turning over a rock to see what creepy-crawlies live under there, the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had all sorts of unintended consequences that revealed the seedy nature of federal funding. Now, between Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Department of Justice, we’ve begun to see real investigations into where our taxpayer money goes. Via the sunlight of laptop-powered financial reconstructions and the weight of future prosecutions, we may very well see permanent changes to the way the federal government operates.
In fact, the preliminary budget numbers show that the monthly deficits have unexpectedly fallen.
The course has come into focus: The only way to achieve the original goals of the Tea Party and other historical reform movements is to expose the rot, eliminate the bureaucracies, prosecute those responsible for the fraud, and show American citizens just how badly their confiscated taxpayer funds have been wasted. Only then can the political will build to tear down the bloated federal government and return it to its constitutional restraints.
The Trump administration has found itself on the cusp of a seminal change in the relationship between America’s citizens and their government. This is how Trump has begun to have a real effect on the permanent structure of the federal government.
Neither Liberals nor Conservatives Recognize the Pattern
For decades now, fiscal conservatives, budget hawks, Tea Party upstarts, and free market enthusiasts have called on Congress to utilize its power of the purse as assigned in the Constitution. Many have failed to realize that line of attack was a waste of energy. Both political parties have spent decades failing to pass proper budgets, shying away from proper oversight of the federal leviathan, and hoping no voters would notice. It's largely worked, as they continue to enjoy a reelection rate above 90 percent despite approval ratings in the toilet.
In short, Congress has utterly failed its oversight role over the federal agencies, in direct proportion to the extent to which members have worked out the grift to stay in office into perpetuity. That has been the rule whether Republicans or Democrats held the majority.
Thus, President Trump's attack on the Swamp lands in ways wholly unfamiliar—and threatening. Instead of politely asking the institutions to oversee the other institutions in an orderly and collegial manner, Trump has put disruptors in charge of the offending institutions and told them to feel free to upset the status quo. He's replaced fleets of low-level staffers and white-collar professionals with teenage coders and Elon Musk, often referred to as the Bart Simpson of billionaires.
Trump has approached it from the opposite direction of what many reformers have tried over the years.
The mission of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) mirrors that of Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth, EPA Chief Lee Zeldin, HHS Sec. Robert F. Kennedy, Education Sec. Linda McMahon, and the other agency heads he's installed. That mission is to attack the problem of rotten, cancer-ridden bureaucracy and its associated waste, fraud, and anti-American spending from the opposite direction. Instead of drafting white papers and binders full of reports, and even audits (which, let's be honest, have never been conducted), the Trump administration has sent armies of hackers into the soft underbelly of the government.
Disruptors like this stand out in history precisely because they upset the status quo. Almost always, that status quo needed disruption. Whether it be Henry Ford and the assembly line, Travis Kalanick and Uber, or Elon Musk and… well… everything, an existing order of things did not stand a chance of stopping someone's vision of success.
Trump doesn't care if his fleet of disruptors upset the established order of things in The Swamp. In fact, he uses it to his advantage. His actions are so bold, bordering on outrageous, it serves to smoke out his opposition and makes them take a side.
He's gotten results few could have imagined—and his approval poll numbers have stayed consistently higher than in his first term.
Money Laundering Exposed
Hardly a day has gone by without some massive revelation of abusive spending of federal tax dollars. DOGE was just the start. USAID was the tip of the iceberg. Laying the groundwork to dismantle the Department of Education sent shockwaves through the D.C. establishment. So did Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth's reforms of the Pentagon.
Because we can't keep track of that kind of money, it often ends up going to questionable organizations, like Stacey Abrams getting a whopping $2 billion for her brand-new non-profit she formed in 2024 to take advantage of the Biden administration.
EXPOSED: Stacey Abrams-linked group, Power Forward Communities, was given $2 billion in taxpayer money and only generated a dismal $100 in revenue in its first three months of operation.
— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) February 20, 2025
The waste and abuse must stop! pic.twitter.com/b3E0uOA50z
In another suspicious example, one user on X pointed out David Hogg's anti-gun group faced a funding crisis after Trump shuttered USAID.
USAID: David Hogg’s gun control group had a drastic collapse in donations via ActBlue immediately following Trump’s closure of USAID. As a result, March for Our Lives has had to layoff almost all of its staff.
— @amuse (@amuse) April 13, 2025
h/t @gunpolicy pic.twitter.com/03tHOWv5Bd
These are just two of the small but most egregious examples of trillions of dollars wasted over a few decades. The amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that has begun to emerge from unaudited Social Security, Medicaid, all forms of welfare, and defense spending is several orders of magnitude greater than that.
What happens when we do start to shut down the federal money laundering operations?
The spending will start to fix itself, despite a lack of action by Congress. In fact, just over 100 days in, it already has. The budget deficit—the gap between tax revenues and federal spending—dropped to a five-year low in March. The monthly spending deficit was half what it was in February, with only the preliminary results from the most rudimentary cuts to wasteful and fraudulent spending enacted.
Projected out for a full year, just those preliminary savings would add up to a hair under $1.9 trillion in savings.
That doesn't get the United States out of debt—yet. We still have to pay off almost $37 trillion we've borrowed in deficit spending, and we still run deficits every month.
But not only is this a good start, this is the momentum we need to build to encourage the rest of the federal government to start tightening its belt—and the impetus for Congress to finally step in and do something fiscally responsible.
In short, the Executive branch will lead the Legislative branch back to its core function and show it how to disrupt even more.
Shutting Down the Parallel Government
Watchdogs and whistleblowers have long suspected a potentially illegal connection between murky federal outlays and leftist fundraising groups.
BREAKING: The Federal Election Commission has opened an investigation into Rep. Jasmine Crockett regarding contributions linked to ActBlue.
— The General (@GeneralMCNews) April 11, 2025
That explains House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) investigating the Democratic fundraising group ActBlue. In a report, the Oversight Committee said, "ActBlue made its fraud-prevention rules 'more lenient' twice in 2024—even though there is extensive fraud on the platform, including from foreign sources." The committee has sent a letter to the CEO of ActBlue requesting more information.
ActBlue has faced allegations for years that they employ "Smurfs"—unsuspecting donors with hundreds or thousands of small dollar donations in their name, that they never authorized or made. The suspected scheme works by attributing illegal donations to legal donors on record with ActBlue to give the donations the veneer of legitimacy.
Smurfing may be just one aspect of illegal money laundering by ActBlue. One X user diagrammed a potential pathway for foreign donations laundered via ActBlue and USAID:
The Alleged ActBlue-USAID Money Laundering Scheme A grave accusation has emerged: the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is purportedly directing substantial funds to dubious foreign governments. These nations, in a calculated maneuver, are said to redirect the money back to the United States through the use of gift cards, channeling the funds to ActBlue, a prominent Democratic fundraising platform. ActBlue then allegedly allocates these resources to support Democratic political campaigns. If true, this represents a staggering breach of integrity—an audacious fraud perpetrated on an immense scale.
At the end of April, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum to crack down foreign "straw donors"—instructing federal agencies to take action on potentially illegal foreign donations via ActBlue. The memo instructed the Department of Justice to open an investigation.
If the federal government had a better handle on where its money went, it would make it that much harder to pull off these schemes. But bad actors in the bureaucracies have gotten away with it for so long, they clearly thought they'd never get caught.
Jennica Pounds, a.k.a. DataRepublican on X, has spent months tracking federal spending and abuses by the government. She recently posted, "Over the last few months, we've come to a realization that should have landed much harder: NGOs weren't just adjacent to government, they were the parallel government . . . NGOs operate outside the chain of command. They answer to no electorate, no oversight, no public mandate. They can push any agenda they choose without accountability."
As she put it at the end of her long post, "If you wanted to carry out a bloodless coup, this is exactly how you do it." No need to pass new laws, or subvert the constitution, or organize an armed resistance. Just set up a parallel government and fund it with tax dollars. Almost as if then-candidate Barack Obama's hopes have all come true: "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."
Or, as Glenn Harlan Reynolds put it in a recent op-ed, "as we’ve learned recently . . . many 'non-governmental' entities are really just fronts for government activities that Americans would never stand for if Washington attempted them directly." He lists several examples, including the Biden border invasion, the push for "trans rights," global warming hysteria, and all the other things Americans never voted for that somehow get paid by our government. "An NGO that can't function without government money," he concludes, "is anything but 'non-governmental.'"
A Leaner, More Responsive Government
It turns out this was the way it had to be. Those who have worked for and dreamed of government reform for decades have come to realize working within the system couldn't possibly work. Any such effort was doomed to failure. The rot was just too widespread, the problem just too big, the resistance to reform too intractable.
Congress clearly lacks the intestinal fortitude to engage in boring oversight that relies on forensic accountants and audits that nobody will read and won't generate headlines. Those things won't generate press conferences and grandstanding. What does generate endless opportunities to find a camera? Prosecutions.
Once the bad actors throughout our government start getting hauled in front of congressional hearings or deposed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, ambitious government reformers will have all sorts of opportunities to get their lighting just right, hold press conferences, and appear on cable news.
If We The People get lucky this time around, we may just see collegiality go out the window in favor of prosecutions and permanent structural change in our government.
