Donald Trump has unleashed a panther in the payment systems of Federal agencies, and while opponents rant, protest, march, object, and file lawsuits, one thing stands out above the rest. The supposed party of Truth squads – the Democrats – don’t want Americans to know the truth about where their money is being spent.
In the Obama era, the Democrats created Attack Watch, which became the Truth Team, as a host of efforts attempted to align and direct the full force of a weaponized government at anyone who dared to carry the wrong water. Faceless bureaucrats in numerous agencies were granted unfettered access to personal information to hunt down and silence anyone who tried to make Barry Obama look bad. Details (like donor lists) leaked to third parties who were then tasked to do the Admininstrations dirty work
An important historical fact for Democrats claiming DOGE is a threat to privacy.
Lois Learner became a household name when she became the face of weaponized IRS interfering in the 2012 elections to help her boss. Joe the Plumber strung the wrong words together and found himself an object of federal might, as did numerous businesses whose donation histories were not favorable to the priorities of a Democrat president and his Democrat congress.
These were the genesis of other efforts to suppress and silence dissent while the government’s foreign-facing propaganda machine was permitted to direct its “munitions” at the domestic population. There are a thousand such stories in the naked surveillance city, but they all led to the misinformation, disinformation, and malformation war underway – most, if not all, of it, funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Trump and DOGE transitioned USAID from the ballsy laundromat for the Blob’s dirty tricks team into a neutered teen dumping terabytes of truth about the agency’s activity into the public domain.
Trump then sent DOGE to the treasury, and that was when the judicial restraining orders began to propagate. Desperate hail mary passes meant to keep the truth relegated to dusty digital basements where even the regulators could not find them. DOGE has since gotten a pass to map payment systems at Defense and the IRS just got its short straw. Trump says everyone will get DOGE’d at some point all of which has the NGO’s defunded by the USAID raid rattling the cages of blue state AGs to ask judges – to quote Randolph Duke from the movie Trading Places – to turn those machines back on.
This is an outrage. It belongs to us.
Randolph and Mortimer didn’t have activist judges overstepping their separation of powers, but Democrats do (as do Republicans when it suits them). But USAID’s hundreds of billions in laundered money may not be the only casualty. While America elected Trump, with Musk in tow, clear-eyed about the plan to audit the government for waste, fraud, and abuse, was scrutiny of the judiciary even a consideration?
Lower court judges are ordering Trump to re-open spigots for everything from education funding to foreign aid (depending on which EO or action irks the activists at the other end of their leash), all while states and AGs are rediscovering the doctrine of nullification.
We don’t have to follow your orders but you have to give us that federal money, the polar opposite of how federal funding works with deep state strings attached. And who was it that wanted 87 thousand more IRS agents again? These agents can always be redeployed from the southern border when boo-hoo blue states tell their citizens to withhold federal taxes until they get their block grants and federal feeding troughs back (a redux of threats from Trump 1.0) as if this isn’t exactly what the doctor ordered.
Will Gov Newsom announce that California will not aid or abet agents to the IRS (which I will applaud) in the course of their duties?
Democrats cutting the federal budget as an act of resistance is a dream every state should follow.
As for judges, members of Congress are already proposing impeachment proceedings for lower court federal judges who think they have the power to prevent the chief executive from executing the law or any power afforded his office, and they have a case to make. It isn’t the Judiciary’s job to micro-manage the executive branch, nor is the latter obligated to appease the former.
An attempt on the part of the judicial department of the government to enforce the performance of such duties by the President might be justly characterized, in the language of Chief Justice Marshal, as “an absurd and excessive extravagance.”
But Trump has said he would do battle in the courts over his choices, which suggests, like everything else in Trump 2.0, that this was the plan all along, and the truth we arrive at may not be the one the Truth Squad party is going to celebrate.
It’s been less than a month. Feels like a year.
