DOGE Exposes Corruption, Likelihood Midterm Elections Will Be Stolen Increases

Author: Steve Baldwin is the former executive director of Council for National Policy and a retired California lawmaker.

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Since Trump’s election, there have been many stunning developments exposing the left’s secretive agenda. Indeed, it has almost become a daily routine to read announcements by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovering massive government fraud and schemes to fund the left’s agenda. Even more shocking is the emergence of dozens of judges engaging in unconstitutional actions to frantically keep the left’s secrets intact.  Forget January 6; the interference by judges into the executive branch is the real insurrection, and this judicial abuse is now educating many Americans as to the true nature of the left and its goal to transform America into an authoritarian regime where the elites decide all policy, the people be damned. 

Indeed, Trump’s jihad on corrupt government is the most serious threat to the left’s power structure in American history, but if the right does not act now to prepare for the left’s efforts to steal the upcoming congressional midterm elections, the Democrats could very well take control of the House and thus shut down much of the Trump agenda.      

The way the media has reported on DOGE’s revelations is shameful. For example, reporters will not report that DOGE was created by Barack Obama as an effort  to use the latest technology to uncover government waste and fraud.  This agency was renamed by Trump but not created by him.  Nor is DOGE the first effort to expose government fraud and corruption.  Perhaps the most well-known similar effort was the Grace Commission in 1982, which identified over $400 billion in wasteful spending, but Reagan was so surrounded by RINOs that very few of its recommendations were ever acted upon. But the left of that day were not yet the full Marxists they are today, and they did not hysterically attack the Grace Commission or threaten to kill Peter Grace. In fact, many Democrats were supportive of its findings. 

The left claims they object to Musk’s effort because he was not elected nor approved by the Senate, but neither are the thousands of government bureaucrats who serve in key positions running various government departments.  How is that different? Moreover, a president appointing a non-elected and non-Senate-confirmed person to assist with managing an agency is not illegal, nor is it new. Let’s remember that Barack Obama appointed over 20 “czars,” who in many cases had more power to make personnel and budgetary decisions than does Elon Musk. But the media didn’t raise any objections to Obama’s czars and, in fact, published glowing stories about them.

Americans are rightly shocked by all the DOGE revelations regarding how government has been massively funding the left’s agenda, both domestically and abroad. But they shouldn’t be.  The Federal government has a long history of funding leftist groups and causes.

In the 1960s and 70s, our State Department and the CIA created many “fronts” to work their will around the world, the principal one being USAID. It started out with good intentions, mainly to fund programs that would take the wind out of Soviet efforts to move Third World countries into their sphere of influence.  However, by the 1970s, USAID began to fund liberal causes in hundreds of countries that were often at odds with our foreign policy.

When President Reagan came to power, he was expected to cut these out-of-control programs, but most of his agencies apparently never got the memo.  Indeed, despite the leftist mythology regarding Reagan’s ”spending cuts,” his budgets only decreased the rate of increase regarding spending, and many of his agencies enjoyed funding increases in real dollars.  Under Reagan, government bureaucrats doled out hundreds of grants to the left, and even humanitarian-oriented agencies such as the Peace Corps were corrupted by the gobs of government money thrown at them, as documented by James Bovard’s article in the May 1986 Reason Magazine.

Reagan’s agencies even gave grants to elements of the “nuclear freeze” movement leading the charge to shut down his effort to install new missiles in Europe, which we now know started the chain of events leading to the demise of the Soviet empire. Shockingly, under the Reaganites, Planned Parenthood received $35 million a year, anti-family feminist groups such as NOW received grants, and so did radical environmentalists, unions, the NEA, Marxist student groups, and even the gay movement, such as the group that received $370,500 to build “halfway houses” for homosexual Cuban refugees.   And the media told us Reagan was a cold-hearted budget slasher.

Indeed, in its April 1983 and April 1982 issues, the Conservative Digest documented hundreds of millions of dollars being doled out by Reagan appointees to virtually the entire domestic left, which, of course, was then used to sabotage the Reagan agenda.  Even Reagan’s National Endowment for Humanities got in on the action by giving $45,000 to a group to make a positive film about the Communist Party – with its cooperation.   Internationally, Reagan-controlled agencies gave funds to propaganda organs controlled by terrorist groups such as PLO and SWAPO. Unfortunately, there is little evidence Reagan’s appointees made any substantial effort to cut the hundreds of millions of dollars that continued to flow to leftist groups and causes worldwide. Sadly, it is doubtful he knew anything about it.      

This abuse became so pervasive that this author was hired by legendary conservative leader and President of the Conservative Caucus, Howard Phillips, to lobby for passage of a bill, S. 3122 (in the House it was H.R. 7299), which would “prohibit the use of federal funds for political advocacy.”  Over 100 congressmen were approached to co-sponsor it, but only a dozen would do so.  Not even the Reagan administration would support the bill, and it died a quick death in committee. 

Incredibly, members of Congress actually defended the spending on political causes, claiming that it helps advance goodwill around the world. That wasn’t true, and shockingly, none of the Republican congressmen seemed to understand that the grants being distributed to the  American left were being used to undermine the Reagan agenda.  For example, Reagan gave millions of dollars to the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), founded allegedly to assist low-income people with legal needs. However, during the Reagan years, the LSC became the leading legal attack dog for the left and was often successful in court undermining the Reagan agenda. Indeed, thanks to the generosity of the Reagan administration, it is not a stretch to argue that LSC literally invented the concept of “lawfare” as a way of shutting down your opponent’s political agenda. You can read about the LSC here.    

Under the first President Bush, the taxpayers continued to fund the left everywhere in the world and at home as well, and despite efforts by conservative groups to stop this abuse, they were ignored. But that should not be surprising since Bush made a conscious effort to keep all conservative influences out of his administration.   

Despite President Clinton’s alleged reputation as being a “moderate” during his time in office, we witnessed the hyper-politicization of many agencies as they shifted their focus away from traditional functions and began to fund the left. For example, the Agency for International Development (AID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) became big supporters of socialist causes internationally.  Indeed, according to a report, “Big Labor and American Foreign Policy” by R. Cort Kirkwood, the NED became perhaps the most generous supporter of socialism in the Third World. 

Moreover, under Clinton, agencies such as the National Endowment of the Humanities (NIH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), began to fund obscene and offensive “art” and to use these agencies as yet another tool to undermine what’s left of America’s Christian-inspired culture.  

President George W. Bush was, of course, like his father and chose to be oblivious to the millions given to his enemies and continued subsidizing them as if it were his sacred duty.  Indeed, the folks Bush hired to throw buckets of USAID money at worthless and usually anti-American groups and causes are today defending such expenditures. Typically, these grifters profited personally from this abuse, and, not surprisingly, some of them are now mainstays of the “Never-Trump” movement. 

By the time Barack Obama became president, funding the left was generally accepted as a legitimate role of government thanks to Republican congressional leaders who had the power to stop this but instead allowed this abuse to grow over the last 60 years.  Stupid is as stupid does.  However, under Obama, the left began to institutionalize this scam, and since they never feared any scrutiny from naive Republicans, they took it a step further by monetizing the billions being thrown at the international and domestic left.  

They learned how to set up hundreds of NGOs to serve as the “middlemen” between government agencies and various causes and groups.  These NGOs were almost always led by big Democrat supporters who, of course, would give tens of thousands of dollars back to Obama and Biden in the form of campaign contributions.  This is how the Democrats funded the left while making its largest donors richer so they could give more to the Democrat Party.  It became a racket.   

Under Obama, the scale and scope of funding the left dramatically increased. Indeed, the focus of “foreign” aid”—mostly using USAID—was transformed in order to challenge the cultural values of the Third World. Thousands of causes and projects worldwide received funds that had little to do with advancing our foreign policy.  Millions were spent empowering the gay and abortion movements in these countries with the goal of eradicating whatever cultural values they had left.  Indeed, the USAID even employed a “LGBTQI+” coordinator to ensure the worldwide gay movement was funded by American taxpayers.  

It was clear that the Marxist ideologues who populated Obama’s agencies wanted to transform these countries into hard-core secular societies by undermining traditional marriages and promoting lifestyles that undermined their cultures.  The most recent  “alternative lifestyle” to be funded by U.S. governmental agencies is the transsexual movement, a movement created by the gay leadership in order to finally destroy the concept of gender. Millions has flowed to such groups as if castrating one’s genitals and reproductive organs were critical to our foreign policy goals.  Just in one country alone—Guatemala—our government spent $2 million in one year in order to propagandize impoverished peasants about the glories of mutilating one’s sexual organs.   

Contrary to modern Western “norms,” these countries still believe in the traditional family unit, and flooding them with arrogant USAID bureaucrats and American-style woke propaganda has not gone down well. The left loves to attack “cultural appropriation,” but they have done more to undermine Third World cultures than anyone. Such efforts have gone on unimpeded for decades, even under Republican presidents such as both Bushes and even Trump’s first term.  

Under Joe Biden, things actually got worse.  Our foreign policy became subservient to the woke agenda, and this has greatly damaged America’s reputation worldwide. This author knows a member of Nepal’s parliament, and he messaged me this: “Up until a year ago, the rainbow flag would be flying in front of the U.S. Embassy in Nepal, and priority would be given to woke agendas and working with the communist parties here in Nepal rather than with the pro-democratic parties or other pressing humanitarian issues…the world looks upon America as the stalwarts of democracy, free world and believe in its values and systems, but cannot understand its woke policies.”

Indeed, the evidence is strong that much of the growth of the Federal government since Obama came to power had more to do with advancing the left’s political agenda than with actual governing. The EPA literally created the fake “Climate Change” narrative from scratch by funding propaganda and subsidizing scientists in the pocket of radical environmental groups.  The Energy Department has never created any energy but has spent billions destroying the oil and gas industry with outrageous and unnecessary regulations fed to them by the most lunatic wing of the environmental movement.  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) has become a puppet of the gun control movement and spends our tax dollars spewing out anti-gun propaganda with no basis in reality.      

The Department of Education was created by the left in 1979 not to educate children or to even improve our schools, but to fund numerous far-left programs that promote “gender identity,” DEI, and other disruptive agendas that conflict with the values most parents imbue in their children.  The Health and Human Services agency has spent the last few years throwing billions at Democrat donors to supposedly provide services for illegal aliens that were nothing but get-rich-quick scams.  Every federal agency has been politicized.

Americans need to understand that the growth of the U.S. left has been heavily dependent upon the growth of the federal government. The left’s policies are so contrary to common sense that without government funding, many of its groups would cease to exist.   In particular, the USAID has become a piggy bank for the left. But so have many other agencies. This is how the American left has been winning the cultural war and why they are going ballistic on Musk’s efforts, even to the point of terrorizing Tesla dealerships.  They are fighting for their survival.

Let’s be clear here:  America’s founding fathers envisioned that 99% of the governing in this country would be carried out at the state and local levels. They wanted to prevent a particular political faction from using the central government to promote and fund its causes, which was common in Europe at the time of our founding.  This is why Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates 17 areas the federal government is responsible for, and none of them even remotely involve the creation of massive regulatory agencies.

Agencies such as the Health & Human Services, Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Transportation, Education, etc. were never considered the responsibility of the Federal government and thus have no constitutional authority. They are not functional entities but are rather purely political creations.   If we ever had a truly “original intent” Supreme Court, these agencies would have been declared unconstitutional generations ago.

Moreover, all 50 states have agencies that regulate the same exact activities, so what was the real purpose in creating duplicate federal agencies?  It is time for the right to come to grips with the idea that the federal regulatory monster has no real rationale and was created solely to advance the left’s political agenda.  If Trump really wants to reform the federal government in a lasting way, he should start shutting down all these agencies and return all governing to the states where it belongs.   

But there’s also an ideological motivation behind the massive growth of the federal government, and that is the desire of the left to transform America into a socialist regime. That is difficult to do if power is diffused among all the states, which is why centralizing all governmental power in Washington is key to the left’s long-term goals. 

Moving on to the gaggle of judges issuing unconstitutional injunctions and orders, Americans need to understand the left’s plan for the next two years. The left has to destroy Trump in order to survive and to return to its goal of transforming America into a socialist “utopia.”  They are mobilizing leftist judges to file injunctions in order to delay Trump’s efforts to reform the federal government—the real source of the left’s power and money.  At the same time, the left is encouraging congressional RINOS to side with them to stop Trump’s legislative agenda in Congress.   

Between the rogue judges’ unconstitutional legal actions and the actions of ignorant RINOS, the plan is to delay Trump’s agenda just long enough until the arrival of the 2026 midterm elections.   Then the Dems plan to use their tried-and-true election fraud techniques to pick up a half dozen seats in the House and thus retake control. After that, EVERYTHING Trump proposes will be dead on arrival, and the Trump era will come to a screeching halt. 

Regarding Chief Justice John Roberts, it appears that he has been responsible for a few opinions that reject the numerous illegal actions by federal judges who think they have the right to manage the executive branch.   However, he needs to be more aggressive and not buy into the Left’s delay tactics.  If he refuses to quickly shut down the illegal actions of these rogue judges, the Supreme Court will be undermining the rule of law and democracy itself.  How Roberts responds in the next few months will cement his legacy more than anything else. One has to assume that Roberts understands there’s no point in having elections if judges are allowed to subvert the actions of the president whenever they want to.   

Based on Robert’s bizarre rulings on Obamacare and other critical cases, he clearly is motivated by how he’s perceived by the elites regardless of what our founders actually intended.  However, if he does not follow his oath and act NOW to stop this silliness, his legacy will be how America came to be governed by judges and not by the American people through their elected officials.   

It also needs to be pointed out that Trump has the right to ignore illegal court injunctions that limit his constitutional authority.  Our founders built mechanisms into the Constitution that enable each branch to “check” the other branches. Indeed, there is zero evidence our founders gave the Judicial branch the power to dominate the other two branches; all branches were designed to be “co-equals.” 

In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton stated that “The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment, and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote something similar: “Each of the three [branches] has equally the right to decide for itself what is its duty under the Constitution without regard to what the others may have decided for themselves under a similar question.”  

Indeed, presidents in the past have ignored the rulings of judges, but such actions should be viewed as part of the normal “checking” process. It is not “becoming a dictator,” as the left and the media claim.  However, if a president does ignore the illegal rulings of rogue federal judges, the check on that would be impeachment by the legislative branch.  But impeachment requires a 2/3 vote in the U.S. Senate, a very unlikely scenario.    

Due to Trump’s electoral victory, many Americans think election fraud is no longer a major threat, but don’t be fooled.  Trump won because his vote turnout was so massive, it outpaced the fraud. And there was fraud in the 2024 election. Lots of it.  A group called Common Sense Elections (CSE) developed data software that uses quantum speed to integrate a variety of government databases—such as property tax and post office data files—with the official voter files and is, by far, the best software ever designed to expose ineligible voters. 

CSE analyzed the voter files in five swing states shortly prior to the 2024 election and identified over 4 million ineligible voters who no longer lived in the state or were registered at addresses that are NOT legal residences, such as gas stations and warehouses.  The millions of phantom voters CSE identified still remain on those voter files and will no doubt be used to steal congressional seats in 2026.Indeed, there are 144,000 ineligible voters on the Wisconsin voter file, and yet the GOP is in the dark about how we lost that Supreme Court race. Really?

Democrat operatives have mastered the science of identifying these ineligible “phantom voters” and will then submit “address change” forms in order to receive the mail-in ballots at an address they control.  This is how the left has been manipulating elections since at least 2020, but the GOP still hasn’t figured it out.

In other words, the 2024 victory should have been much larger.Indeed, phantom voters appear to have been heavily used in Arizona, Wisconsin, and states where the GOP lost Senate races they should have won.  Once the left sees their candidate is losing, these hijacked ballots are dumped into the process, usually a day or two after Election Day.  It is not a coincidence that Republican candidates lost EVERY close Senate and House race after the Democrat “miraculously” pulled ahead days after Election Day.

We also saw what transpired in a special election for a state senate seat in Pennsylvania last month.  CSE analyzed the Pennsylvania voter database shortly before the 2024 election and found 1,420,435 ineligible voters of which 262,488 had moved out of state and 169,083 had moved out of their county.  Even though Trump won this district four months ago and it has 19% more registered Republicans and Democrats, the Republican lost.  There is little doubt that Democrat operatives in that state hijacked thousands of the ineligible ballots and voted them. There were also many other abnormalities involving this election.  

Had the RNC and/or the Trump campaign employed the latest technology to identify ineligible ballots and then sued states—BEFORE THE ELECTION—that have allowed these ballots to be voted, the Republicans would have picked up at least four more Senate seats and a dozen more House seats. This failure has created a GOP majority so narrow in both chambers that the most powerful political entity in DC is now the RINO Republicans, many of whom will work with the Democrats to stop the Trump agenda. 

Bear in mind that blue state election clerks have the technology to identify and remove ineligible voters but are purposely not doing so, even though this is required by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).  In other words, they have blatantly allowed ineligible voters to cast ballots and have done so for years.  Moreover, based on years of experience, CSE has calculated that the vast majority of these ineligible ballots are cast for Democrats. 

There is already evidence emerging that the Democrats are preparing to use their control of the election apparatus in Democrat-controlled swing states to once again inject hijacked ballots into the vote count and thereby steal congressional seats.  Remember, they just need to pick up 3-4 seats. The Republican Party and/or the Trump campaign needs to assemble a team of crack election law attorneys and initiate a litigation strategy focused on suing states that continue to violate the NVRA by refusing to remove ineligible voters from their voter files. This needs to be done NOW, not six months from now. If this is not done, there is no doubt the Republicans will lose control of the House in 2026, and that will be the end of the Trump revolution. It’s time for Republican leaders to put their big boy pants on.