From $20,000 toilet seats to foreign propaganda on our dime, Trump’s team is exposing billions in government waste. President Trump’s administration has been opening government filing cabinets and finding more waste than a landfill on garbage day. The government spending situation makes even the most extravagant shopping spree look like extreme couponing.

Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been tracking down billions in questionable spending across federal agencies. “We’re finding entire departments whose sole purpose seems to be justifying their own existence,” one administration official quipped. And the president has made it clear: the gravy train has reached its final station.

Broadcasting Bureaucracy Gets The Axe

When it comes to government waste, few examples are more egregious than what’s happening at Voice of America. President Trump signed an executive order on Friday to trim the agency back to basics. It turns out VOA, created in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, had morphed into something entirely different.

Enter Kari Lake, the former Arizona gubernatorial candidate and now senior advisor to the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA. Lake didn’t waste time, she immediately started slashing waste faster than a contestant on a cooking show.

From ‘The Post Millennial’:
“We terminated all of the contracts for Reuters, the AP, the Agence France Press,” Lake said, noting that these were hefty prices for USAGM to pay to essentially reprint articles from those publications. “But we’re a media company, right? We shouldn’t have to rely on the AP and Reuters and Agence France Press to tell us what news is. We should be out, going out, uncovering stories, digging up the news and covering it ourselves.”

Million-Dollar Mistakes and Real Estate Ridiculousness

The waste Lake uncovered could make even the most hardened taxpayer faint. For starters, she canceled a lease for what she described as a “shiny, beautiful building on Pennsylvania Avenue” that would have cost American taxpayers a quarter of a billion dollars. The kicker? The building didn’t even have broadcasting capabilities!

“I brought DOGE in and realized we had to start going through the finances and everything with a fine-tooth comb,” Lake said. Under her direction, nearly half of the agency’s workforce has been placed on administrative leave while they assess how to scale back to statutory minimums. With 1700-1900 employees plus countless contractors, VOA had apparently become more focused on employment than actual broadcasting.

Spies, Sympathizers, and Soft Power Gone Soft

But the problems at VOA went beyond mere fiscal waste. Lake dropped a bombshell when she revealed her team had discovered “massive national security violations, including spies and terrorist sympathizers and terrorist supporters who have infiltrated the agency.”

When questioned about whether cutting global media grants represented a rollback of American “soft power,” Lake was refreshingly frank. She acknowledged that it was indeed a reduction, but argued that the content being distributed wasn’t actually promoting American values in the first place.

She cited examples of how VOA and related outlets had been used under the previous administration to undermine allies like Hungary, where American taxpayer dollars funded alternative media and special interest groups against a democratically elected conservative government.

Trimming The Fat, Not The Mission

Despite the significant cuts, Lake is adamant that the agency will still fulfill its core statutory requirements. “We’re going to deliver on all the statutory programs. Whatever the statute says we must deliver on, we will, and will shed light on everything that is not statutorily required: waste, fraud and abuse, which run rampant in this agency.”

The Voice of America had been operating on an annual budget exceeding $267 million and reaching more than 420 million people weekly across the globe. But as Tesla CEO and DOGE leader Elon Musk bluntly stated about VOA, “Nobody listens to it anymore.”

Lake emphasized that the executive order from Trump wasn’t about destroying the agency but scaling back an out-of-control bureaucracy. “This government has gotten out of control. We cannot continue to afford things the way they’re going as a country, and so for a variety of reasons, we need to scale things back.”

Key Takeaways:

• President Trump is cutting waste at Voice of America, an agency with a $267 million budget that strayed from promoting American values.
• Kari Lake canceled a quarter-billion-dollar unnecessary building lease and terminated contracts with major news agencies.
• Lake uncovered serious national security concerns, including “spies and terrorist sympathizers” who had infiltrated the agency.

Source: The Post Millennial