Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, said on Tuesday that he will dial back his spending on future political campaigns.
Asked about his plans for political contributions at Bloomberg&#8217;s Qatar Economic Forum, Musk said over video that he&#8217;s &#8220;going to do a lot less in the future.&#8221; Musk <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-277-million-trump-republican-candidates-donations/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">spent</a> nearly $240 million through his political action committee, America PAC, helping Trump and Republicans in the 2024 election cycle. His comments on Tuesday, however, indicate that he won&#8217;t be as aggressive in pushing Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.
&#8220;I think I&#8217;ve done enough,&#8221; Musk said, adding, &#8220;If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. I do not currently see a reason.&#8221;
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Along with his major donations to the Republican effort last election cycle, Musk was also a major fixture on the campaign trail, appearing multiple times alongside Trump. After Trump took office in January, Musk led the effort, alongside the Department of Government Efficiency project, to find waste and fraud within the federal government.
After joining Trump in the White House, Musk got behind the conservative candidate in the closely watched Wisconsin Supreme Court election, saying the race could affect the &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/musk-says-wisconsin-supreme-court-election-is-a-vote-for-which-party-controls-the-house" target="_blank" rel="noopener">entire destiny</a>&#8221; of humanity. Musk&#8217;s America PAC spent millions of dollars on race, but conservative candidate Brad Schimel <a href="https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2025/wisconsin/?r=50888" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lost</a> to liberal candidate Susan Crawford by 10 percentage points, and the liberals maintained a majority on the court.
Musk, who was regularly seen with the president during the Trump administration&#8217;s first 100 days, has taken a step back from overseeing Trump&#8217;s DOGE initiative.
“I’ll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla&#8230;&#8221; Musk <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/elon-significantly-cut-back-doge-time?author=Daniel+Chaitin&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=undefined&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Elon+To+%E2%80%98Significantly%E2%80%99+Cut+Back+On+DOGE+Time" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> last month.
The Tesla CEO added in his interview on Tuesday that he is committed to leading the electric car company for at least the next five years, <a href="https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1924835630858543332" target="_blank" rel="noopener">saying</a> that he wants “sufficient voting control” to keep Tesla from falling into the hands of activist investors.
“It’s not a money thing,” Musk said. “It’s a reasonable control thing over the future of the company.”
Musk&#8217;s shift back to focusing on Tesla comes after the company saw a drop in revenue and net income over the first quarter of 2025. Tesla stock dropped from $379 at the beginning of January to $222 at the beginning of April. Since then, however, the stock has climbed back up to $349. After Musk became a senior adviser to Trump and pushed for major government spending cuts, Tesla has been targeted by leftist activists who have set fires to and vandalized vehicles and threatened Tesla dealerships.
&#8220;Firing bullets into showrooms and burning down cars is unacceptable. Those people will go to prison, and the people that funded them and organized them will also go to prison. Don&#8217;t worry, we&#8217;re coming for you,&#8221; Musk said on Tuesday&#8217;s video call to the applause of the crowd.
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Elon Musk

‘I’ve Done Enough’: Musk Says He Will Spend ‘A Lot Less’ On Future Political Campaigns

Bloomberg News

Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Donald Trump

General

Politics

Qatar

Republicans

Tesla

African Development Foundation locked the doors when DOGE tried to gain access

This Foreign Aid Agency Locked Its Doors To Keep DOGE Out. Now We Know Why.

Africa

Foreign Funding

USAID

On Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confronted the question of whether Elon Musk tried to fire air traffic controllers.
The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/us/politics/trump-musk-doge-power.html?campaign_id=190&amp;emc=edit_ufn_20250307&amp;instance_id=149417&amp;nl=from-the-times&amp;regi_id=78841373&amp;segment_id=192873&amp;user_id=2c0c856b2ce44b95592cc8015e73caee" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> back in March that there was a clash in which Duffy vented about staffers from Musk&#8217;s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort trying to lay off air traffic controllers at a time when the Transportation Department was dealing with multiple plane crashes. Musk reportedly denied the claim.
&#8220;Did Elon Musk ask you to cut air traffic controllers directly?&#8221; NBC&#8217;s Kristen Welker asked Duffy during a &#8220;Meet The Press&#8221; <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/transportation-sec-duffy-says-elon-musk-never-asked-him-to-cut-air-traffic-controllers-239336517927" target="_blank" rel="noopener">interview</a>.
&#8220;So, listen, we were having a conversation about, &#8216;Who do we preserve?&#8217; And, again, I wanted in those probationary employees to preserve air traffic controllers,&#8221; Duffy said. &#8220;We went back and forth, and Elon agreed, the president agreed. Of course you want to keep air traffic controllers. We&#8217;re trying to hire more of them.&#8221;
He added: &#8220;But I think the key is, &#8216;Can your government be more efficient?&#8217; We&#8217;ve had a massive expansion of government. You can actually be more efficient and still accomplish the mission of safety, which is what I think we can do. And actually, we are doing that.&#8221;
Welker pressed Duffy again.
&#8220;Did Elon Musk, though, initially ask you to cut air traffic controllers?&#8221; she asked.
&#8220;No,&#8221; Duffy said.
&#8220;And did you dispute that?&#8221; Welker asked.
&#8220;No,&#8221; Duffy replied.
&#8220;Did you have a disagreement with him about that?&#8221; Welker followed up.
&#8220;So, Elon and I get along really well. He never called me and said, &#8216;Cut air traffic control.&#8217; He would never do that. This was a broader conversation about what positions are going to be preserved, right? So if we&#8217;re going to let probationary employees go, again, they’ve – they&#8217;re new employees. They just were hired on. Some might have been there for a month, some of them 10 months,&#8221; Duffy said.
&#8220;It was the new employees that we were going to let go,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;Many of them have come back. But this is not the institutional knowledge of the FAA that&#8217;s being let go. Elon Musk understands the importance of the airspace and the need to have good controllers. Actually, [Musk&#8217;s] SpaceX launches through the airspace and the FAA. We want good controllers that know the airspace to navigate all the issues that come up.&#8221;

Sean Duffy

Transportation Secretary Clears Air On Whether Elon Tried To Fire Air Traffic Controllers

Air Travel

Executive

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)

U.S.

A USAID employee in charge of managing contracts for the agency created a fake company to fraudulently secure coronavirus benefits for himself, federal prosecutors said Friday.
“Yusuf Akoll worked as a Senior Procurement Contract Specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development,” according to a previously unreported <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.280449/gov.uscourts.dcd.280449.2.0.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">court document</a>. “From at least in or around March 2021, and continuing through at least in or around August 2021, Akoll [made] materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements…that resulted in Akoll receiving two [Paycheck Protection Program] loans totaling approximately $16,666 that he was not entitled to receive.”
Prosecutors said that in November 2020, Akoll registered a company in Virginia called Naagode Consulting LLC, then applied for a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan under the coronavirus bailout package, claiming he worked at Naagode and the money was necessary to prevent job losses.
Only companies in operation in February 2020 were eligible, so he falsely said it was established in January 2020. To establish a loss of income, he said the company had $40,000 in income in 2019 when it actually had no income, prosecutors said.
Akoll was accused of making false statements in Washington, D.C., federal court via an “information,” which typically signals a plea deal.
The fact that the money was paid out highlights how carelessly the government disbursed massive sums during coronavirus. The claim that the company had $40,000 in revenue in 2019 contradicts his own claim that it didn’t exist until January 2020.
The fact that Small Business Administration officials didn’t check state corporation records and catch the fact that it was actually established in November 2020 — or federal tax returns to verify the $40,000 — indicate that the government wasn’t doing basic database cross-referencing, the kind of thing the Department of Government Efficiency has made its bread and butter.
USAID was shuttered, with its remnants folded into the State Department, amidst concern by Republicans and the Department of Government Efficiency that the money was mismanaged. Akoll was in charge of hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing to foreign countries, where the money could be difficult to monitor, records <a href="https://www.highergov.com/people/yakoll-usaid-dot-gov/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">show</a>.
Coronavirus payments were disbursed with little vetting under a “pay and chase” model, where fraudulent claims would ostensibly be recovered later. But the Biden administration quickly gave up on chasing.
The Biden administration said in 2023 that it <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/sba-wont-even-try-to-collect-on-ppp-loans-that-are-supposed-to-be-paid-back-citing-equity" target="_blank" rel="noopener">would not seek to collect</a> on loans of less than $100,000 that were required to be paid back, citing “equity.” Most of the loans were designed to be forgiven, but those who did not meet the requirements were supposed to repay them.
That’s despite the Small Business Administration’s inspector general saying the move “is not in compliance with applicable criteria,” and that not even attempting to stop people from cheating the government encouraged future fraud.  
Congress nearly let the Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery, which was set up to police fraud in the pandemic bailout, expire in March 2025, which would have quickly closed the book on the government’s largest and most chaotic payment frenzy ever.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said the Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery had only recovered three dollars for every dollar spent on its staff, which should have been higher. <a href="https://www.courtwatch.news/p/court-watch-112-you-re-about-to-lose-577-billion-dollars" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CourtWatch</a>, which advocated for its continuance, said the Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery had meager resources of only a few dozen employees, and that shutting it down could lead to even less recovery. CourtWatch said the Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery had open investigations into $577 million in suspected fraud.
 Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the head of the Senate DOGE Caucus, fought to keep the inspector general, saying, “I will not allow fraudsters to get away with stealing hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers.”
The head of Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions testified to Congress that criminals stole <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/witness-at-first-doge-hearing-confronts-lawmakers-with-scale-of-covid-fraud-they-stole-1-trillion/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">$1 trillion</a> in COVID money, most of which went overseas.

Trump And Musk’s USAID ‘Shut Down’ Threat Opens Door For China

USAID Contracting Officer Charged With Pandemic Bailout Fraud

Coronavirus

Joni Ernst

Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final part in a series of investigative reports on the African Development Foundation, which gained notoriety for resisting a review by the Department of Government Efficiency. Check out <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/foreign-aid-official-who-resisted-doge-took-secret-payments-after-steering-africa-money-to-friend?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Foreign+Aid+Official+Who+Resisted+DOGE+Took+Secret+Payments+After+Steering+Africa+Money+To+Friend%C2%A0">part one,</a> <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/african-aid-agency-used-foreign-pass-throughs-to-hide-money-that-went-to-d-c-staff-friends">part two,</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/aid-agency-pushed-officials-for-profit-pyramid-scheme-on-poor-africans?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Aid+Agency+Pushed+Official%E2%80%99s+For-Profit+Pyramid+Scheme+On+Poor+Africans">part three</a>.
—
A small, USAID-like federal agency called the African Development Foundation refused to hire white people, and treated white employees who did slip through so poorly that one soiled herself because she was afraid to leave her desk to use the bathroom, employees told The Daily Wire.
The agency violated so many rules and laws that its general counsel was flabbergasted — but when he called attention to it, officials framed him for violent threats and removed him from his job with a bizarre manifesto that called him “grimy” and “unwholesome,” the general counsel, Mateo Dunne, who is white, said.
The agency attracted attention by locking the doors to prevent auditors from the Department of Government Efficiency from seeing its books, and suing Elon Musk to prevent a takeover. The lawsuit is pending, but all of its employees have been laid off after the Trump administration gained access to the office space using U.S. Marshals.
From 2021 until February, the agency was led by CEO Travis Adkins, who came to it after a short stint at USAID as a Joe Biden political appointee.
Adkins’ former assistant, who is black, said in a sworn affidavit that “On at least three occasions, Mr. Adkins told me that he wanted his entire team (to include the General Counsel) to consist only of Black people. He wanted all of his direct reports to be Black.”
“He was very adamant in only hiring African Americans, mainly female, and he told me many times he would not hire a white person or a veteran. I said that’s discrimination, and he said ‘I’m the president and CEO, I can do what I want,’” the assistant told The Daily Wire on condition of anonymity. Adkins is also a lecturer at Georgetown University.
The African Development Foundation was created by Congress in 1980 as a board whose members are appointed by the president of the United States to six-year terms, who in turn appoint a CEO to run day-to-day operations. The board chair was Jack Leslie, a white former staffer to former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) who was appointed to the board by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Adkins bragged about concealing operations from the board, saying “them white motherf&#8212;ers, they don’t need to know… I don’t think I should tell them sh&#8211;,” according to the assistant.
A junior employee disappeared a few months after she took complaints to the board, and the assistant asked what happened to her; Adkins replied, “I just put the white b&#8212;h on a contract and then the contract ended,” the assistant said.
The situation was the same under the prior CEO, C.D. Glin, a former Peace Corps DEI officer and later an Obama political appointee to the Peace Corps who led the agency from 2016 to 2021. “C.D. [Glin] literally said to me that he needed to hire black people,” another employee told The Daily Wire on condition of anonymity. “Virtually everyone he hired in programs was black.”
In 2021, the agency had to pay a settlement after it laid off a white senior executive without paying her severance or following federal rules, and she alleged it was because of her race. It conducted a “reduction in force” that was targeted at her, and falsely claimed she didn’t have the qualifications to shift into another job, even though many of those jobs had actually reported to her.
In previous installments in this series, The Daily Wire reported how its agency&#8217;s CFO received payments to his personal bank account from a company to which he steered $1 million. The agency gave money to African grantees and then instructed them to re-route it to the agency&#8217;s employees and friends in America, and even pushed a for-profit multi-level marketing scheme run by a board member on poor Africans.
<blockquote>
<h1>&#8220;I think USADF deserved the fate that it received, because if it couldn’t be run correctly, then it shouldn’t be run at all.&#8221;</h1>
</blockquote>
<h3>Retaliation</h3>
In a government agency, the job of the general counsel is to ensure that rules and laws are followed. Glin ensured that the role was either empty or filled with junior lawyers with no experience in government, even though the agency engaged in complex international finance.
After he departed as CEO in May 2021, there was a brief period in which the agency had no permanent leader, and a traditional general counsel managed to slip through. When Mateo Dunne, a white former high-level Defense Department executive, took the job, he was appalled by how little the African Development Foundation seemed to care about laws and rules.
The lawyer set out to interview employees about conflicts of interest, purchase card abuse, contracting fraud, and a toxic workplace environment. In a matter of days, the evidence started stacking up. He told the acting CEO, Elisabeth Feleke, that outside lawyers would have to be brought in to document the full scope of the lawbreaking.
Instead, Feleke ordered him to stop the investigation, told him to change the preliminary findings, and falsely told the board the probe was complete, he told The Daily Wire. Dunne stopped investigating, but sent his preliminary report to the board.
He soon learned that despite nearly uniform agreement that Glin had been abusive, the organization wasn’t getting a fresh start. The board agreed to hire a decades-long friend of Glin’s, Travis Adkins, to replace him. When Adkins entered the office for the first time, Glin enveloped him in a bear hug.
Adkins later testified under oath that he was selected to lead the African Development Foundation without even applying for the job, and that he couldn’t recall when or how he managed to be selected.
As Adkins’ start date neared, Dunne prepared to show him the lawbreaking he had found so that Adkins could reform the agency. But it seemed that Adkins already knew, and his first priority was shutting Dunne’s investigation down.
Within hours of Adkins being sworn in as president and CEO in January 2022, he put Dunne on leave and cut off his access to evidence before he could even speak, video shows.
“You will be on administrative leave the very moment that we hang up this call. You will have a box mailed to your home to allow you to send back to us any USADF-issued equipment,” he told Dunne. “You are not to contact any of the members of the USADF staff. And again, your access to all of our data and systems will be closed down immediately.”
Dunne replied: “I had prepared this slide deck to introduce myself and what I’ve done at USADF. This conversation obviously went a different way … I guess I have a couple of questions.”
“We’re not going to do questions and answers,” Adkins said. “We’re not going to have a back and forth about this.” Dunne was never told why he was placed on paid leave, which Adkins acknowledged was the first step in a discipline process.
Internally, the agency sought to build a justification for firing the white lawyer, with chief of staff Brandi James compiling a 75-page manifesto that called Dunne “Adversarial, Belittling, Calculating, Combative, Condescending, Deceitful, Defensive, Grimy, Sinister, and Unwholesome.”
The report called Dunne a “danger to USADF’s mission and staff.” But the details made clear that the risk was not to anyone’s life, but rather the livelihoods of law-breaking bureaucrats. The dossier faulted him for his “insistence on tying up staff time on investigatory digs.”
The evidence of insubordination was that he had investigated apparent spending on luxuries and personal items by top staff, when Acting CEO Elisabeth Feleke said, “I have not given Mateo direction or mandate to investigate credit card fraud.”
<blockquote>
<h1>&#8220;Them white motherf&#8212;ers, they don’t need to know… I don’t think I should tell them sh&#8211;.&#8221;</h1>
</blockquote>
As evidence of Dunne “circumventing and breaching USADF protocols,” the dossier complained that Dunne notified Glin that he had not filed years&#8217; worth of mandatory Office of Government Ethics conflict-of-interest forms, carrying a $600 penalty, even though Feleke told him not to raise the issue. As general counsel, Dunne was the agency’s “designated ethics officer” and required to do so by the government-wide ethics office. The forms would have revealed that the African group had paid money to a group associated with Glin, and refusal to file them can carry criminal penalties.
Adkins went as far as implying that Dunne had threatened to kill him, alluding to something “being sent to people regarding the death of government officials, as all of us are government officials.” This, it turned out, was a fantastical distortion of Dunne sharing a sentimental quote from a New York governor acknowledging the passing of a former legislator.
Then a new comment appeared on the agency’s profile on the employer-review site GlassDoor that said, under “Advice to Management”: “die.” The post was attributed to “General Counsel.” The African Development Foundation sicced four different law enforcement agencies on Dunne for making death threats.
The former Sunday school-teaching lawyer said he was framed. “If I was going to do an anonymous post I would obviously not put my job title in there,&#8221; he said.
Adkins was forthright with the board’s chair, Jack Leslie, about what was really going on. He wrote to Leslie that Dunne was placed on leave for his “efforts to damage USADF’s reputation via the Office of Inspector General…Dunne conducted an unauthorized, backward-focused investigation that unsettled staff. &#8230; He then began leveling accusations that USADF senior leadership was ‘interfering’ with his investigations and General Counsel functions.”
<h3>Lies </h3>
The African Development Foundation never told Dunne what he was being investigated for, or formally moved to fire him, which would require proving that he did something wrong. It simply left him on paid leave indefinitely, violating a <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/6329b" target="_blank" rel="noopener">law</a> that limits investigative leave to 90 days. After six months, in July 2022, he quit to take another job.
An agency’s top lawyer calling attention to rampant lawbreaking, only for him to be removed from duty, is as remarkable a case of whistleblower retaliation as the government has seen. Dunne provided documentation to the Office of Special Counsel, which exists to investigate whistleblower retaliation. But it closed his file when the employee he’d been working with left her job, he said.
He filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging discrimination on the basis of his race and retaliation. In August 2024, an administrative law judge dismissed his case, even though he had an affidavit from a black employee saying that Adkins had told her repeatedly that he did not want any white people working for him. Dunne is appealing in court.
Dunne deposed African Development Foundation staff in the course of that lawsuit. In his sworn testimony, Adkins denied saying he wouldn’t hire white people — but also claimed he didn’t know how many people worked for him, that he could only remember the names of two, and that he didn’t know what race various employees were.
<div id="attachment_918261" style="width: 746px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-918261" class="size-large wp-image-918261" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/adkins-dep-736x576.jpg" alt="" width="736" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/adkins-dep-736x576.jpg 736w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/adkins-dep-300x235.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/adkins-dep-768x601.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/adkins-dep.jpg 1184w" sizes="(max-width: 736px) 100vw, 736px" />A typical exchange from Adkins’ deposition</div>
Adkins’ sworn testimony was repeatedly contradicted by documents and the testimony of other employees.
Adkins had told the board that a government-wide human resource office had “recommended Mr. Dunne immediately be placed on Administrative Leave for misconduct and performance.” A representative of that office testified that it was not true.
He denied plotting to remove Dunne as general counsel before he even started as CEO in an effort to spare his friend Glin and officials like Mathieu Zahui, the chief financial officer, and a target of the investigation.
But discovery in the lawsuit showed that Zahui had written during that time period that “The board and the incoming president would like to explore the possibilities of a do-over” on the general counsel hire.
Adkins did not return a request for comment from The Daily Wire.
Dunne said it has been painful to watch some turn the African Development Foundation into a “martyr,” seemingly to avoid acknowledging that DOGE’s scrutiny was warranted, when no one cared to fix it, though signs were abundant that it was broken.
He said he left his job at the Defense Department to come to the African agency “because I wanted to help people,” but found that widespread rule-breaking was short-changing both Africans and low-level staff.
“I think USADF deserved the fate that it received, because if it couldn’t be run correctly, then it shouldn’t be run at all. If the leaders of that agency couldn’t act, and members of the foreign policy establishment wouldn’t act,” he said. “It’s an indictment of the entire system.”
READ MORE:
<ul>
<li aria-level="1"><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/foreign-aid-official-who-resisted-doge-took-secret-payments-after-steering-africa-money-to-friend?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Foreign+Aid+Official+Who+Resisted+DOGE+Took+Secret+Payments+After+Steering+Africa+Money+To+Friend%C2%A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend</a> </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li aria-level="1"><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/african-aid-agency-used-foreign-pass-throughs-to-hide-money-that-went-to-d-c-staff-friends" target="_blank" rel="noopener">African Aid Agency Used Foreign Pass-Throughs To Hide Money That Went To D.C. Staff</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li aria-level="1"><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/aid-agency-pushed-officials-for-profit-pyramid-scheme-on-poor-africans?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Aid+Agency+Pushed+Official%E2%80%99s+For-Profit+Pyramid+Scheme+On+Poor+Africans" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Aid Agency Pushed Official’s For-Profit Pyramid Scheme On Poor Africans</a></li>
</ul>

‘Them White Motherf-ers’: Racist Agency Framed Its Lawyer After He Discovered Lawbreaking, He Says

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

Editor’s Note: This is part three in a series of investigative reports on the African Development Foundation, which gained notoriety for resisting a review by the Department of Government Efficiency. 
—
The Department of Government Efficiency has shuttered a small, USAID-adjacent federal agency called the African Development Foundation, over the outrage of Democrats who say it means poor Africans will suffer and public servants will lose their jobs.
But top officials used the agency to advance their own interests and live lives of luxury at the expense of those Africans, while forcing some staff to work without pay and abusing others so badly that they routinely cried, a Daily Wire investigation found.
That included helping Herbalife, a multi-level marketing scheme run by an agency board member, make inroads in Africa. John Agwunobi, who served as CEO of Herbalife, was an African Development Foundation board member until President Donald Trump fired the board in March.
Agency management locked the doors to prevent DOGE auditors from entering, and the Trump administration gained access only with the assistance of U.S. Marshals. The standoff made the agency the subject of <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/united-states-african-development-foudation-doge-lawsuit/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">fawning</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/06/federal-workers-block-musks-doge-africa-development-agency" target="_blank" rel="noopener">coverage</a> from media outlets that said it was standing up for principles.
But its employees knew better.
“The hero of the story is actually the villain,” one former employee said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It was so hard to see ADF being used as a beacon of hope and resistance against DOGE because I knew they were actually covering up horrible things…When I saw that ADF was being celebrated as a David vs. Goliath situation, I knew the doors were being kept locked for a reason.”
In 2020, the African agency partnered with Herbalife at Agwunobi’s behest. That was two months after Herbalife paid a $122 million settlement to the Department of Justice to settle criminal charges that it <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/herbalife-nutrition-ltd-agrees-pay-over-122-million-resolve-fcpa-case" target="_blank" rel="noopener">violated the Foreign Corrupt</a> Practices Act. It also paid $200 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it was a <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2016/07/herbalife-will-restructure-its-multi-level-marketing-operations-pay-200-million-consumer-redress" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pyramid scheme</a> that exploited people into opening money-losing businesses.
The African Development Foundation made it seem like the partnership was with a nonprofit affiliated with Herbalife. But it was actually with the company itself, which was seeking to expand its reach in Africa, the agency’s former general counsel, Mateo Dunne, found, according to materials obtained by The Daily Wire. The grants involved paying five Africans $5,000 and providing them “product donations, and Herbalife Nutrition staff as global volunteers in their businesses,” partnership materials said.
“The marketing materials prepared by USADF and Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. reflect that the partnership was being used to drive corporate sales and marketing, not charitable objectives,” Dunne concluded. “USADF personnel described the partnership with Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. as designed to leverage USADF’s network and reputation to promote the Herbalife brand in Africa.”
That sort of violation of conflict of interest rules was common in the agency, Dunne said.
The agency’s chief executive from 2016 to 2021, C.D. Glin — a former Peace Corps DEI officer and later an Obama political appointee to the Peace Corps — had the agency pay $5,000 a year to an organization, Root Capital, of which he was a board member, employees said. Glin did not file conflict-of-interest reports and ethics pledges, which are required <a href="https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-5/chapter-XVI/subchapter-B/part-2634" target="_blank" rel="noopener">by law</a> and designed to prevent such situations, for most of the years he worked there. He filed one in 2019, but omitted Root Capital from it.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-917689" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/unnamed-572x576.png" alt="" width="572" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/unnamed-572x576.png 572w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/unnamed-298x300.png 298w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/unnamed-150x150.png 150w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/unnamed-768x773.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/unnamed-1526x1536.png 1526w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/unnamed.png 1590w" sizes="(max-width: 572px) 100vw, 572px" /></div>
<h3>Using poverty funds for luxury.</h3>
In January 2022, Travis Adkins, who had been serving as a <a href="https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-africa-global-funders-2021-3-biden-appoints-head-of-usaid-africa-bureau/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Joe Biden appointee</a> to USAID, took over as CEO of the African Development Foundation. He had a lien against him for unpaid federal taxes from 2015 until February 2021, according to public records. Landlords in New York and Washington, D.C., said in court filings that he owed them money.
Employees said both Glin and Adkins used agency spending to build their personal brands and glad-hand with celebrities and billionaires, while treating workers with the callous cruelty of which liberals accuse DOGE, employees said.
Glin had the agency pay for him to “travel to countries and network at things that had nothing to do with grassroots African economic development. He went to a Scandinavian country, a European country, African countries where there was no ADF program being considered. He was spending ADF money to get his next job,” an employee said.
Another employee said he’d have the agency pay to sponsor conferences in order to buy prominent speaking slots: “He’d pay $30,000 to speak at events.”
Glin had the agency pay $1,000 to <a href="http://theboardlist.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">theboardlist.com</a>, which helps executives get prestigious board seats based on DEI hiring in exchange for that amount, and $7,500 for a Harvard executive class just before leaving the agency, workers said.
All of that seems to have paid off: Glin is now president of the PepsiCo Foundation, overseeing $70 million.
<blockquote>
<h3>&#8220;He went to a Scandinavian country, a European country, African countries where there was no ADF program being considered. He was spending ADF money to get his next job.&#8221;</h3>
</blockquote>
Adkins, for his part, brushed off government rules about travel costs and demanded $1,000-a-night hotels, summarily firing an assistant who raised concerns about his travel arrangements, the former assistant told The Daily Wire, speaking on condition of anonymity. He had a tailor fit him for three custom suits, and sent the bill to the agency, she alleged.
The executives seemed more concerned about making the agency look good — so congressional funding would continue flowing — than they were in actually doing good, employees said.
One grantee, called Vava Coffee, violated rules about how it spent grant money, but threatened to publicly disparage the agency as “colonizers” if the checks didn’t keep coming. Glin ordered disbursements to continue, employee Kate Ristroph said in an internal interview obtained by The Daily Wire. She said she eventually succeeded in terminating the grant.
The agency entered into a partnership with the National Basketball Players Association, where NBA players could choose how to spend money in Africa, and American taxpayers would match it. Some of the money was used to build a basketball court.
<h3>Toxic workplace.</h3>
The African Development Foundation had a staff of between 30 and 60, and a budget of $45 million. By law, it was permitted to give grants only to African groups, and in the amount of $250,000 or less.
Glin and Adkins frequently hired workers as contractors instead of government employees, sometimes directing African funding recipients to, in turn, pay D.C. bureaucrats to get around rules and hide their overhead costs.
There were also other advantages. Hiring workers as contractors meant they didn’t have to follow merit-based hiring practices, prove wrongdoing when firing people, or grant them union protections.
The agency appeared so intent on avoiding those protections that it would essentially use government credit cards to pay workers in “micropurchases,” a petty cash-like payment style that avoids scrutiny from Treasury Department officials. One contractor described having to restart her employment every five weeks, each time being paid by a different pass-through LLC, and sometimes working for long periods without pay.
Staff were horrifically mistreated by Glin and Adkins, who acted as if they were global celebrities instead of what amounted to managers of a few dozen people in an obscure organization, according to Daily Wire interviews and videos of an internal investigation.
Brandi James, the chief of staff, said in a videotaped internal interview: “Toxic would be people crying or things like that. Yeah, we had that, we had [Glin] yelling.”
A junior employee said she soiled herself after Glin made her afraid to leave her desk to use the bathroom. She said Glin would pound his fists, and people would walk into his office “with their hands shaking.”
Jeff Gilleo, a senior program manager, called Glin a “narcissistic bully” who “said mean things to almost everybody.”
Associate General Counsel Nina-Belle Mbayu said Glin screamed at her until she cried, and she sought therapy after having “physical reactions” anytime she thought of him. “People were just treated, in my opinion, as disposable,” she said.
Yael Nagar, a senior program analyst, said one employee “went on extended sick leave for a mental health program because they were so stressed at work,” and Glin’s takeaway was “we need to make sure no one…finds out about this.”
Employees said they tried to warn PepsiCo against hiring Glin, sending a letter “about the horrific culture and use of money” under Glin, but that he was hired anyway.
PepsiCo and Glin did not return a request for comment.
The African Development Foundation board also received the letter. But despite widespread agreement about Glin’s toxicity, it hired a close friend of Glin’s, Adkins, without Adkins even applying, Adkins said in a deposition. And many of the patterns continued.
On GlassDoor, the website where employees rate their workplaces, the themes were consistent. “USADF is a scary place to work… Maybe one day it will be a workplace that has admirable values and care for its staff. Presently though, it is rotten to the core,” one wrote in 2023.
“Toxic work environment led by narcissists,” another said that year. “After years of mismanagement, it cannot fulfill its potential.”
Brandi James, the agency’s chief of staff, said in an internal email that she tried to use government funds to pay GlassDoor to remove negative posts about the agency, but the site refused, leaving them visible to anyone who cared to look.
Though DOGE critics now claim that the African Development Foundation was essential and mourn for the jobs lost, when it was operational, no one showed an interest.
It “just seemed like there was never going to be any consequence for any of these things,” Nagar said.
READ PART ONE: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/foreign-aid-official-who-resisted-doge-took-secret-payments-after-steering-africa-money-to-friend?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Foreign+Aid+Official+Who+Resisted+DOGE+Took+Secret+Payments+After+Steering+Africa+Money+To+Friend%C2%A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend</a> 
PART TWO: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/african-aid-agency-used-foreign-pass-throughs-to-hide-money-that-went-to-d-c-staff-friends" target="_blank" rel="noopener">African Aid Agency Used Foreign Pass-Throughs To Hide Money That Went To D.C. Staff</a>
PART FOUR: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/them-white-motherf-ers-racist-agency-framed-its-lawyer-after-he-discovered-lawbreaking-he-says?topStoryPosition=undefined&amp;author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=Investigation&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=1&amp;rowHeadline=Top+Stories&amp;rowType=Top+Stories&amp;title=‘Them+White+Motherf-ers’%3A+Racist+Agency+Framed+Its+Lawyer+After+He+Discovered+Lawbreaking%2C+He+Says">‘Them White Motherf-ers’: Racist Agency Framed Its Lawyer After He Discovered Lawbreaking, He Says</a>

African Development Foundation

Aid Agency Pushed Official’s For-Profit Pyramid Scheme On Poor Africans

Corruption

Editor&#8217;s Note: This is part two in a series of investigative reports on the African Development Foundation, which gained notoriety for resisting a review by the Department of Government Efficiency. 
—
When Department of Government Efficiency aides showed up at a small USAID-linked federal agency called the African Development Foundation in March, its management locked the doors and refused to let them in. A fired board member <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278118/gov.uscourts.dcd.278118.1.0.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sued</a> to stop DOGE, and the group was <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/united-states-african-development-foudation-doge-lawsuit/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lauded</a> for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/06/federal-workers-block-musks-doge-africa-development-agency" target="_blank" rel="noopener">resisting</a> DOGE&#8217;s demands for “access to USADF systems including financial records, payment and human resources systems.”
But the objection, several former employees told The Daily Wire, might not have been on principled grounds, but rather because those records amounted to a crime scene.
The African Development Foundation has an annual budget of just $45 million. But, operating out of sight and out of mind, it might have been the most corrupt agency in Washington, a Daily Wire investigation found. Its employees have been sounding the alarm for years about a culture of self-dealing, abuse, and anti-white discrimination, while those who now object to DOGE’s shuttering of the agency did nothing to help fix it.
By <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/96/hr6942/text" target="_blank" rel="noopener">law</a>, the agency is only allowed to give grants to Africa-based groups. But it moved money through African entities and then back to the United States to pad salaries of D.C. bureaucrats and pay their friends and former employers, employees said.
Until the DOGE takeover, which culminated in U.S. Marshals ordering building security to let Trump administration officials in, the agency was led by CEO Travis Adkins, who arrived in 2021 after a short stint as a Biden appointee at USAID. An assistant to Adkins said after she asked why her paycheck was lower than agreed upon, Adkins informed her that the remainder would be coming from an overseas account.
He “sent me an email connecting me with this guy in Africa who asked for my banking information. Within a few days this guy wired me $17,000,” she told The Daily Wire on condition of anonymity. The Daily Wire reviewed bank paperwork showing the transfer from an account in Kenya.
Another longtime employee, she said, was eventually “put on the payroll of an African partner and was informed she was being paid through an entity in Mauritania. No payroll, state or federal taxes were withheld from her paychecks.”
“The contracts don’t make sense and they know [DOGE] will find lots of wrongdoing and illegal activity,” she said. “I’m not a fan of DOGE, but some of the things they’re doing need to be done. They have been operating like this for years and no one did anything about it.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
Getting more dramatic now. They are trying to get into the office but the agency won&#8217;t let them. Here is a video, shared with permission, of Marocco and some of the DOGE folks outside the elevators <a href="https://t.co/VkLmw3hodW">pic.twitter.com/VkLmw3hodW</a>
— Brett Murphy (@BrettMmurphy) <a href="https://twitter.com/BrettMmurphy/status/1897356477725278340?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 5, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Video shows DOGE aides locked out of the African Development Foundation&#8217;s office. / @BrettMmurphy
<h3>International money-laundering?</h3>
As the Trump administration dismantled USAID and contractors in D.C.’s affluent suburbs complained about the job losses it would cause, some speculated about whether international charity funding was being laundered to politically-connected Washingtonians.
That is not dissimilar to what the African Development Foundation did regularly, according to The Daily Wire’s interviews with employees as well as videotaped internal interviews that became part of a lawsuit.
In one instance, it awarded a grant to a Kenyan journalism group called Africa 24 and directed that group to, in turn, pay the salaries of Americans at the federal agency’s D.C. headquarters. That meant Congress thought it was a charitable grant to Africa, and that the agency had a low overhead rate. In reality, the money was being spent on D.C. bureaucrats.
Chief Financial Officer Mathieu Zahui acknowledged and defended the arrangement.
“The grant was provided to an African organization&#8230;A grant can pay for people,” he told The Daily Wire in an interview at his home, where he has been spending his days after being locked out of the office. “Yeah, granted, they were in D.C.”
Part one of this series revealed that last year, the USAID inspector general seized Zahui’s phone and found that he had received <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/foreign-aid-official-who-resisted-doge-took-secret-payments-after-steering-africa-money-to-friend?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Foreign+Aid+Official+Who+Resisted+DOGE+Took+Secret+Payments+After+Steering+Africa+Money+To+Friend%C2%A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">payments to his personal bank account</a> from the owner of a company to which he steered contracts, but he has not been charged with a crime.
<blockquote>
<h1>“We’re in that murky territory of like, is this legal?” a staffer said. “The CEO specifically directed it.”</h1>
</blockquote>
The agency hired many workers as contractors instead of official government employees, making it possible to pay them using creative funding mechanisms. Once they were hired, executives drew no distinction between contractors and government employees, even having contractors supervise employees, possess government credit cards, and make decisions about money in violation of federal rules, the agency’s former general counsel, Mateo Dunne, told The Daily Wire.
Its CEO from 2016 to 2021, C.D. Glin — a former Peace Corps DEI officer and later an Obama political appointee to the Peace Corps — reverse-engineered African grants to steer money to friends in the United States, employees said.
The agency gave grants to the Association of Ghana Industries on the condition that the African group pay Pyxera Global, a D.C. organization where Glin previously worked as director of business development, to “do a study of the artisan sector in Ghana,” agency program manager Kate Ristroph said in a videotaped internal investigative interview with Dunne.
“We’re in that murky territory of like, is this legal?” she said. “The CEO specifically directed it.”
Glin attempted to foist grants addressing nonexistent problems on African groups as a way to steer money to an affiliate of the Aspen Institute, the left-wing Colorado nonprofit, called Artisan Alliance, Ristroph said. The head of Artisan Alliance at the time “flat out tells us she’s a close personal friend of C.D. Glin,” she said.
The agency offered a grant to the Heva Fund, an African group, on the condition that it send a portion to Artisan Alliance. The grant was ostensibly to produce personal protective equipment like face masks, even though Heva told the agency there was no demand for such a thing because affordable personal protective equipment was readily available in the region.
Heva was so uncomfortable with the proposition that it asked to cancel the grant, Ristroph said. So the agency pushed the plan on a Kenyan group called Ustadi, which also balked, saying “We don&#8217;t need to pay Artisan Alliance, an American company, to help Kenyans learn how to sell masks,” she said.
In another case, a grant to the African group CS Consulting was used to pay the <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/supporting-small-and-medium-enterprises-sub-saharan-africa-through-blended-finance" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Center for Strategic and International Studies</a>, a D.C. think tank. “It’s all basically a pass through to CSIS,” Ristroph said.
She said the agency trains African grantees to avoid third-world style corruption by only giving out contracts that have been competitively bid at arm&#8217;s length, yet she was forced to tell them that the Americans were ordering them to do the opposite.
“I was on the phone with them…saying we’re signing a new grant to [the Association of Ghana Industries], and there will be a component that is a contract with Pyxera Global that is not competed. It’s already been decided,” she said. “It puts me in a compromising position.”
READ PART ONE: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/foreign-aid-official-who-resisted-doge-took-secret-payments-after-steering-africa-money-to-friend?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Foreign+Aid+Official+Who+Resisted+DOGE+Took+Secret+Payments+After+Steering+Africa+Money+To+Friend%C2%A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend</a> 
PART THREE: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/aid-agency-pushed-officials-for-profit-pyramid-scheme-on-poor-africans?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Aid+Agency+Pushed+Official%E2%80%99s+For-Profit+Pyramid+Scheme+On+Poor+Africans">Aid Agency Pushed Official’s For-Profit Pyramid Scheme On Poor Africans</a>
PART FOUR: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/them-white-motherf-ers-racist-agency-framed-its-lawyer-after-he-discovered-lawbreaking-he-says?topStoryPosition=undefined&amp;author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=Investigation&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=1&amp;rowHeadline=Top+Stories&amp;rowType=Top+Stories&amp;title=‘Them+White+Motherf-ers’%3A+Racist+Agency+Framed+Its+Lawyer+After+He+Discovered+Lawbreaking%2C+He+Says">‘Them White Motherf-ers’: Racist Agency Framed Its Lawyer After He Discovered Lawbreaking, He Says</a>

African Aid Agency Used Foreign Pass-Throughs To Hide Money That Went To D.C. Staff

Editor&#8217;s Note: This is part one of a series of investigative reports on the African Development Foundation, which gained notoriety for resisting the microscope of the Department of Government Efficiency.
&#8212;
A foreign aid official who refused the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to his agency&#8217;s financial records may have had a reason to keep auditors out: he steered illicit contracts to a friend who sent him secret payments, according to a law enforcement affidavit obtained by The Daily Wire.
Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation, refused to <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69711562/20/4/brehm-v-marocco/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">grant</a> DOGE access to its books and told the White House that the agency would not acknowledge President Donald Trump’s appointee as chairman of the board. After a dramatic showdown in March, DOGE physically took over the building with U.S. Marshals, but control of the agency is now the subject of a lawsuit objecting to “swooping in with DOGE staff, demanding access to sensitive information systems” — an objection that reads differently in light of the criminal probe.
For years, workers at the small, USAID-adjacent federal agency focused on Africa have told oversight bodies about allegations of self-dealing, procurement violations, and mysterious offshore bank accounts, many of them involving Zahui. But little was done about it, several told The Daily Wire.
One action that raised eyebrows was Zahui’s insistence on directing both grants and contracts to a company in Kenya called Ganiam Ltd. According to <a href="https://www.usaspending.gov/search/?hash=974d7f91d366380036f5f1029bc26978" target="_blank" rel="noopener">spending records</a>, it was awarded nearly $800,000 in contracts without competition. For example, a one-year, <a href="https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_20341920P00003_2036_-NONE-_-NONE-" target="_blank" rel="noopener">$350,000</a> contract for “transport, travel, relocation” services was executed in March 2020, when few people were traveling or holding conferences because of coronavirus.
According to a <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.274261/gov.uscourts.dcd.274261.1.0.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">search warrant application</a> uncovered by The Daily Wire, USAID’s inspector general established by August 2024 that the company’s owner had secretly wired money to Zahui’s personal bank account at times that matched up with the federal contracts. To date, the Department of Justice has not charged either man with a crime.
Ganiam Ltd. is owned by Maina Gakure, whom Zahui has known for decades. Both worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego and later moved to Fairfax, Virginia. Gakure had been in charge of awarding contracts at the VA, then created his own company designed to get government <a href="http://www.ganiam.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">construction contracts</a> by taking advantage of a minority preference program. It was called Ganiam LLC and was based out of a house in Virginia. Gakure similarly created a company based in Kenya called Gakure Ltd. The African Development Foundation is permitted by <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/96/hr6942/text" target="_blank" rel="noopener">law</a> to give grants only to African entities.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Earlier this week, a briefing with Pete Marocco (the architect of Trump’s illegal dismantling of USAID) left us with more questions than answers. Worse, he left early to take DOGE staffers and federal marshals to try and forcibly close the U.S. African Development Foundation. <a href="https://t.co/Sxyf2gqL2g">pic.twitter.com/Sxyf2gqL2g</a>
— Senator Brian Schatz (@SenBrianSchatz) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenBrianSchatz/status/1898391541594419261?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 8, 2025</a></blockquote>
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In January 2024, inspector general agents interviewed Zahui about the Ganiam contracts, and he acknowledged having known Gakure personally since 1999, and having been to his apartment. He “could not explain why the contract with Ganiam was sole-sourced instead of being competitively bid,” the agents wrote.
Zahui — who was named chief financial officer of the federal agency after he declared bankruptcy and had his house foreclosed on — acknowledged to investigators that the travel contract was executed after COVID had already shut down travel. He told them the contract was actually used for IT services, but since Ganiam had no expertise in IT, it subcontracted it to a different company. A Department of the Treasury contracting official told the agents that was not allowed.
Zahui continued to give more contracts to Ganiam without competition, which he justified by saying he was “lazy” and didn’t want to find a new vendor. “Zahui stated that he did not receive any direct or indirect benefits from Gakure,” agents wrote.
But in February 2024, the agents seized Zahui’s work phone and examined a subset of the data.
“Agents found text messages showing at least eight instances of wire transfers or electronic payments from Gakure to Zahui’s Bank of America account, totaling over $10,000. These payments coincide with USADF’s awarding of sole-source contracts to Ganiam,” they wrote.
“After identifying these payments, the agents stopped their review. Based on the aforementioned evidence, there is probable cause to believe that there are additional relevant communications and instances of payments on the TARGET DEVICE in the applications that have not been reviewed,” they told a judge on October 29, 2024, eight months after seizing the device. They asked for a warrant to examine the rest.
On November 4, 2024, the day before the presidential election, they executed the search warrant.
This February, President Trump fired the African Development Foundation’s board members, and its CEO, Travis Adkins, resigned. A three-person committee, including Zahui, took over the duties of CEO.
On February 21, DOGE “demanded immediate access to USADF systems including financial records and payment and human resources systems,” but Zahui <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69711562/31/brehm-v-marocco/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">stalled</a> them. On February 28, the White House emailed Zahui that Pete Marocco, the Trump operative tasked with dismantling USAID, had become acting chairman of the African Development Foundation. Zahui told the White House that agency staff would not honor the appointment because Marocco had not been confirmed by the Senate.
When DOGE returned, staff locked the doors and refused to let them in, creating a dramatic showdown, according to a <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69711562/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lawsuit</a> filed against DOGE by the now-fired board. DOGE eventually gained access to the building using U.S. Marshals, and put the staff on leave.
In an interview with The Daily Wire at his home, Zahui said DOGE changed the locks, but that they didn’t know about a back door, and he had gained access since the takeover.
He acknowledged that he selected Gakure’s firm because of their personal relationship, and said Gakure moved to Kenya before COVID.
During the same time period that Ganiam Ltd. was paid as an African company, Ganiam LLC received roughly <a href="https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=175860208aca119e74e2819f7a2dd58a" target="_blank" rel="noopener">$90,000</a> in U.S. coronavirus assistance designed to prevent the loss of American jobs. Gakure did not return a request for comment.
Zahui told The Daily Wire that Ganiam performed IT services during COVID instead of the travel services advertised on contracting documents. Contracting records show that the agency, with only 30 employees, was separately paying astronomical sums for IT, including <a href="https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_IDV_20341920D00002_2036" target="_blank" rel="noopener">$865,000</a> to another minority-owned contractor called Etranservices Corp. between 2020 and 2022, with the option to bill up to $4 million.
A former agency employee told The Daily Wire that on top of the $800,000 in contracts to Ganiam, the African Development Foundation also awarded it grants. Zahui initially denied that to The Daily Wire, then conceded it was true. He said it gave grants to Ganiam, which it was required to use to buy airline tickets for the agency’s African partners to attend events on the continent and to take a trip to the United States, where they visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The amount of “grants” to the company is unknown.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Africa Aid Standoff
Workers at the US African Development Foundation, a self-described independent agency, refused building access to the agency’s new acting director on Wednesday.
Marshalls came with DOGE Thurday for attitude adjustment
Is this a peaceful transition of power? <a href="https://t.co/ySOwWbZYNW">pic.twitter.com/ySOwWbZYNW</a>
— Jim DaBink (@JimDaBink) <a href="https://twitter.com/JimDaBink/status/1898862332631306499?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 9, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Offshore bank accounts
In November 2023, Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), then the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, asked the USAID inspector general, which has oversight of the African Development Foundation, to open an “immediate investigation” into what he said was a slew of whistleblower complaints about financial irregularities at the agency. Those included “misuse of official funds; fraudulent and corrupt spending practices; conflicts of interest [and] gross mismanagement.”
Among the irregularities cited was “an alleged $2 million deposit by [Zahui] into a bank account in Ghana in February 2023 — that typically would require signature by at least two presently responsible fiduciary agents of the agency,” Risch wrote. “This may also explain why a senior USADF official was unable to account for major financial discrepancies included in the agency&#8217;s FY2024 budget request.”
In an internal videotaped interview obtained by The Daily Wire, regional portfolio manager Jeff Gileo, who was tasked with supervising projects in Africa, said, “a lot of those projects, we never actually saw them. They were managed by [the CFO’s office] directly.” For example, he said he asked for information about a grant in the country of Mauritius and was “told no, because there might be some other information in there that people don&#8217;t need to know about, being run by finance.”
Zahui strongly denied to The Daily Wire that there was a $2 million deposit. He said it was true that there are accounts throughout Africa with money sitting in them, some in countries where the agency hadn’t been active in years. He also said that he had traveled to open and close such bank accounts, but that the money was all accounted for.
“We’ve not operated in Guinea for a long time, it&#8217;s been more than eight years now, but the bank account is there. There&#8217;s money there. When we attempted to transfer the fund to the U.S. Treasury, it didn&#8217;t work. We tried three times,” he said. “I went to Botswana, I close it, I take the money out. I went to Swaziland&#8230;.I close it, and the funds are accounted for today. I couldn&#8217;t bring it here because I couldn&#8217;t cross the — so we put it where we transfer them in an account, what we call ADF — I forget the name, but we have an account in Kenya.”
“We call it funds ‘outside of treasury,’” he said, adding that he planned to help Congress locate the money, but that he hasn’t pointed it out to DOGE because no one has made contact with him. According to its 2022-2023 <a href="https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/0-ADF-24-003-C.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">financial statement</a>, the agency had $9.7 million “held outside treasury.”
Mateo Dunne, the agency’s former general counsel, told The Daily Wire that he provided the USAID inspector general with extensive documentation of violations of procurement, personnel, and ethics regulations by African Development Foundation officials beginning in 2021, but that even clear-cut violations didn’t appear to be acted upon.
Sen. Risch warned USAID’s inspector general in the 2023 letter that if it didn’t urgently reform the African Development Foundation, Americans might lose trust in USAID and foreign funding as a whole.
“Development assistance plays an important role in U.S. foreign policy. Turning a blind eye to alleged fraud, corruption, and mismanagement in any single development agency or program would undermine the credibility of U.S. development assistance across the board,” he wrote.
Now, just over 3 months into the Trump administration, USAID and the African Development Foundation are gone.
This is Part 1 in a series.
READ PART TWO: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/african-aid-agency-used-foreign-pass-throughs-to-hide-money-that-went-to-d-c-staff-friends?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=African+Aid+Agency+Used+Foreign+Pass-Throughs+To+Hide+Money+That+Went+To+D.C.+Staff%2C+Friends">African Aid Agency Used Foreign Pass-Throughs To Hide Money That Went To D.C. Staff</a>
PART THREE: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/aid-agency-pushed-officials-for-profit-pyramid-scheme-on-poor-africans?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Aid+Agency+Pushed+Official%E2%80%99s+For-Profit+Pyramid+Scheme+On+Poor+Africans">Aid Agency Pushed Official’s For-Profit Pyramid Scheme On Poor Africans</a>
PART FOUR: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/them-white-motherf-ers-racist-agency-framed-its-lawyer-after-he-discovered-lawbreaking-he-says?topStoryPosition=undefined&amp;author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=Investigation&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=1&amp;rowHeadline=Top+Stories&amp;rowType=Top+Stories&amp;title=‘Them+White+Motherf-ers’%3A+Racist+Agency+Framed+Its+Lawyer+After+He+Discovered+Lawbreaking%2C+He+Says">‘Them White Motherf-ers’: Racist Agency Framed Its Lawyer After He Discovered Lawbreaking, He Says</a>

Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation

Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend 

A student at Brown University is facing disciplinary charges for emailing thousands of non-faculty employees in a “Doge-like” email asking, &#8220;What do you do all day?&#8221;
Alex Shieh created a database of 3,805 administrative employees to attempt to understand why the Ivy League has become so expensive after the latest tuition hike brought annual costs for students up to $93,000.
Shieh’s email attempted to identify three particular jobs: &#8220;DEI jobs, redundant jobs, and bulls*** jobs,&#8221; but in the end, Shieh only received several dozen largely profane, belligerent responses from irate bureaucrats in addition to possible repercussions from Brown.
&#8220;Brown is retaliating against me for exposing that the exorbitant tuition costs are going to a bloated bureaucracy, not educating students,&#8221; Shieh <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/brown-university-student-who-angered-non-faculty-employees-doge-like-email-faces-punishment-from-school">told</a> Fox News.
&#8220;Because Brown can’t outright punish me for calling out their hypocrisy, they are instead accusing me of committing obscure conduct violations that are not applicable to my situation, in order to scare other students from speaking out,” he added.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/brown-university-gop-crosshairs-after-students-doge-like-email-kicks-off-frenzy">sent</a> a letter to Brown University Friday morning urging the school to &#8220;reconsider any disciplinary action&#8221; against the Brown sophomore, first reported by Fox News.
&#8220;Reports indicate that Mr. Shieh engaged in a journalistic act of contacting university administrative employees to inquire about their roles and responsibilities. This action, it appears, stemmed from his perspective as a student paying a substantial tuition fee and experiencing concerns regarding university facilities, leading him to question the allocation of administrative resources,&#8221; Nehls <a href="https://nehls.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/nehls.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/05.02.2025-rep-troy-e-nehls-letter-to-brown-university.pdf">wrote</a>.
&#8220;Penalizing a student for what appears to be an attempt to understand the university&#8217;s administrative structure raises serious questions about the institution&#8217;s commitment to open inquiry and the tolerance of dissenting viewpoints.&#8221;
The congressman demanded information on how Brown uses its $7.2 billion endowment, which boasts a 10% annual return, to reduce student costs.
Annual expenses to attend Brown for 2025-2026 are estimated at nearly $96,000, including tuition, fees, food, and housing. Nehls previously introduced legislation that would significantly increase excise taxes on larger colleges&#8217; endowment funds from 1.4% to 21%.
Brown University spokesman Brian Clark denied free speech was the issue, writing in a statement to Fox News, &#8220;At the center of Brown&#8217;s review are questions focused on whether improper use of non-public Brown data systems and/or targeting of individual employees violated law or policy.&#8221;
The controversy emerges as Ivy League schools face scrutiny from the Trump administration over both tuition rates and anti-Semitism concerns.
Shieh’s concerns regarding inflated college bureaucracies are <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/administrative-bloat-at-us-colleges-is-skyrocketing/">reflected</a> in a larger trend amongst universities, as according to Forbes, “Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively,” and “the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.”
Shieh is planning to bring his campaign to other Ivy Leagues such as The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Cornell University &#8220;to expose wasteful expenditures there&#8221; and release &#8220;an online tool to demand that schools cease and desist DEI.&#8221;

GettyImages-548776411 (1)

University Student Faces Discipline For Emailing 3,800 Staff: ‘What Do You Do All Day?’

Brown University

Education

Free Speech

Ivy League

The Environmental Protection Agency will save $300 million per year through a massive reorganization by completely slashing unnecessary climate programs and reducing staffing levels to levels not seen since the Reagan administration, the agency announced Friday.
Administrator Lee Zeldin said the streamlined reorganization is oriented towards focusing on the agency&#8217;s &#8220;core mission,&#8221; which he defines as &#8220;protecting human health and the environment.&#8221; Rather than focusing on environmental justice, it will focus on its statutory responsibilities such as air quality and safety of the water supply.
“With these organizational improvements, we recommit to fulfilling all of our statutory obligations and exceptionally delivering on EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment,&#8221; said Zeldin. &#8220;This reorganization will bring much needed efficiencies to incorporate science into our rule makings and sharply focus our work on providing the cleanest air, land, and water for our communities. It will also save at least $300 million annually for the American people.&#8221;
A source familiar with the restructuring told The Daily Wire that the reorganization could lead to future cuts amounting to around 10% of the current workforce. In the ongoing round of the Deferred Resignation Program, better known as the &#8220;fork in the road&#8221; option for federal employees to leave government, there has been significant interest.
The agency has already received about 1,300 applications to leave, a source told The Daily Wire. The first &#8220;fork in the road&#8221; offer months ago yielded around 545 early resignations.
With the ongoing restructuring, more employees could soon be taking up the offer to leave. Over 8,300 EPA employees hopped on a briefing this week to learn about the agency&#8217;s ongoing Deferred Resignation Program and the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority.
<div id="attachment_915329" style="width: 2570px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-915329" class="size-full wp-image-915329" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-02-May-2025-02-02-PM-9910-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1280" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-02-May-2025-02-02-PM-9910-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-02-May-2025-02-02-PM-9910-300x150.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-02-May-2025-02-02-PM-9910-1024x512.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-02-May-2025-02-02-PM-9910-768x384.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-02-May-2025-02-02-PM-9910-1536x768.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-02-May-2025-02-02-PM-9910-2048x1024.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />Side by side of current and proposed EPA Administrator Office restructuring.</div>
The changes will primarily impact the Office of the Administrator, Office of Air and Radiation, Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP), and Office of Water as the agency will seek to focus on its core statutory duties. Specifically, climate and atmospheric focused programs inside the Office of Air and Radiation are expected to be on the chopping block.
In some cases, the agency will also be incorporating more modern issues into the departments. For example, the Office of Water will now have more of a focus on cybersecurity to protect the water supply and water reuse issues. The agency will also be looking to form the Office of State Air Partnerships within the Office of Air and Radiation.
Earlier this year, the EPA ended the Biden administration&#8217;s diversity, equity, and inclusion office and its Office of Environmental Justice. With this move, the agency cut 280 employees and moved another 175 to perform tasks for other offices.

Vice President JD Vance

EPA To Slash Climate Programs, Promises Return To Reagan-Level Staffing

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Lee Zeldin

Trump Administration

The United States economy added more jobs than expected in April, while government positions continued to decline, according to the April jobs report.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_05022025.htm">report</a> on Friday, showing that jobs had increased in April by 177,000, much more than the 133,000 that had been projected by the Dow Jones. At the same time, federal jobs declined by around 9,000 while the healthcare, transportation and warehousing, financial activities, and social assistance industries all saw growth. 
&#8220;This is the second month in a row where the jobs report has beat expectations,&#8221; <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/05/jobs-boom-more-americans-working-for-higher-pay/">said</a> White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. &#8220;Wages are continuing to rise and labor force participation is increasing. This is exactly what we want to see. More Americans working for higher wages. More winning is on the way!”
The healthcare industry added 51,000 jobs, including 22,000 in hospitals and 21,000 in ambulatory services, while transportation and warehousing increased by 29,000, according to the report. The 177,000 jobs were lower than the 185,000 jobs that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-cant-lose-march-job-growth-vastly-outpaces-expectations" target="_blank" rel="noopener">were added</a> in March, which also beat job growth expectations. 
Unemployment remained at 4.2%, and the labor force participation rate changed little. This was the first jobs report released after President Donald Trump announced &#8220;Liberation Day&#8221; tariffs. Most of those tariffs have been lowered to 10% across the board, with a 145% tariff on China.
The markets responded positively to the jobs report, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&amp;P 500, and the Nasdaq all jumping more than 1%.
Responding to the news, the White House&#8217;s official &#8220;Rapid Response&#8221; X account celebrated the job gains made in the private sector and the decline in government employment. According to the White House, more than 95% of the jobs added to the economy under President Donald Trump have come from the private sector, while around 25% of the jobs created during President Joe Biden&#8217;s final two years were government jobs.
&#8220;Federal employment has already shrank by 26,000 jobs under Trump after ballooning by 139,000 jobs in Biden’s last two years. President Trump is right-sizing government while unleashing private-sector growth,&#8221; the account posted.
Trump and his top donor, Elon Musk, have pushed for a variety of cuts across the federal workforce — from the IRS to the State Department — through Musk&#8217;s Department of Government Efficiency project. Some of the cuts have come through firings, while other departments have pushed federal employees to accept buyouts to vacate their jobs.
The White House also celebrated the job gains made among native-born Americans during President Trump&#8217;s first three months in office.
&#8220;Biden relied on government jobs and foreign-born workers. Native-born workers have fueled 97.6% of job growth under President Trump,&#8221; the White House posted. &#8220;In Biden’s final two years, native-born Americans accounted for only HALF (56.9%) of employment gains.&#8221;

President Trump Announces Aviation Safety Executive Orders In The Oval Office Of White House

Solid April Jobs Report Shows Govt Employment Drops As Private Sector Growth Beats Expectations

Economy

Jobs

Karoline Leavitt

Stock Market

The Department of Government Efficiency has helped federal agencies terminate 8,500 contracts, saving taxpayers up to $160 billion in the first 100 days of President Donald Trump&#8217;s second term, it says. It also axed nearly 10,000 grants totaling $33 billion, including many from USAID.
It&#8217;s terminated nearly 650 leases, resulting in about $311 million in savings.
That totals about a fifth of the trillion dollars that Elon Musk hoped to cut from the federal budget — though many of the big-ticket savings were costs set to be spread over multiple years. And it remains to be seen whether it can keep cutting at the same pace, or whether the trajectory will slow with low-hanging fruit exhausted.
Musk has said he will soon spend significantly less time on DOGE as he returns focus to his private companies. He is currently classified as a “special government employee,” meaning he can only serve 130 days per year.
Other savings, not included in those figures, are likely to be realized over the long term thanks to process reforms spurred by DOGE. That includes revamping how federal expenditures are tracked, requiring each outlay to have an explanation, and cross-referencing expenditures with other databases to stop fraudulent or disallowed payments.
DOGE’s most important accomplishment may be shaking up Washington&#8217;s culture with a new spirit of optimism and creativity. Its existence has inspired department heads to make bold decisions in their own right. Items that conservatives had criticized for decades, but believed they had no choice but to accept, are now on the table. Some small agencies have been essentially <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/author/luke-rosiak#:~:text=Inside%20The%20Now,By%20Luke%20Rosiak" target="_blank" rel="noopener">abolished outright</a>.
The office is operating out of the organizational skin of the U.S. Digital Service, an entity established by President Barack Obama to bring Silicon Valley talent into government for short-term stints. Obama created the legal structure for the group to operate out of the White House, and set a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/a-doge-origin-story-how-barack-obama-laid-the-groundwork-for-elon-musk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">precedent of partisanship</a>. The old USDS was so overtly liberal that when The Daily Wire visited its office on the White House complex on February 7, it was taunting the president with a “Hate Has No Home Here” poster in its window.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-913599" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/hate-has-no-home-768x576.jpeg" alt="" width="768" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/hate-has-no-home-768x576.jpeg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/hate-has-no-home-300x225.jpeg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/hate-has-no-home.jpeg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" /></div>
Now renamed the U.S. DOGE Service, it is formally run by Amy Gleason, a healthcare executive who worked at USDS during the first Trump administration.
Many of the contract terminations listed on <a href="https://doge.gov/savings" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DOGE’s website</a> have relied on tech expertise, axing shockingly expensive payments for software to Beltway consulting firms. The biggest contract terminations are:
<ul>
<li>Nearly $3 billion for an “Office of Refugee Resettlement Influx Care Facility” to house “up to 3,000 unaccompanied alien children.” The contract was to Family Endeavors, which hit a contracting jackpot after adding a former Biden administration official to its payroll. Half a million children were separated from their parents because of a loophole that granted them the ability to stay in the United States if they were unaccompanied. The federal government kept the children secret from state child welfare agencies, even though they were vulnerable to sex and labor <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/guatemalan-traffickers-exploit-bidens-unaccompanied-alien-children-program-records-suggest" target="_blank" rel="noopener">traffickers</a>, and one-third of unaccompanied minors <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/whistleblowers-detail-how-85000-unaccompanied-minors-went-missing-after-biden-admin-dropped-them-off-with-sponsors" target="_blank" rel="noopener">disappeared</a> after they were sent to live with “sponsors.”</li>
<li>Up to $1.9 billion for a seven-year contract providing technology services to the IRS. The contract to Centennial Technologies was signed in August 2024, and no money was spent before it was cancelled, according to federal records. In the last 10 years, Centennial has been listed as receiving only $15 million in government contracts.</li>
<li>Up to $1.7 billion to A1FedImpact LLC for tech work for the Defense Health Agency. Federal contracting records list the potential total as $2.4 billion.</li>
<li>A $1 billion contract to Securigence LLC, another government IT company in the Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C., was cut in half. The contract was for “multi-network support services” for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.</li>
<li>A proposed $318 million contract to the Office of Personnel Management for “human resources related products and services” was cancelled before it was awarded.</li>
</ul>
The largest grants cancelled were:
<ul>
<li>$2.6 billion from USAID to the Gavi Foundation for “the global community’s Immunization Agenda 2030, which was endorsed by the World Health Assembly in May 2020.” Nearly a billion dollars was spent before it was cancelled.</li>
<li>A $1.5 billion contract from the Department of Health and Human Services to Texas was cut in half, with no details provided.</li>
<li>Most of the money from a $1 billion USAID grant to the World Health Organization for “polio and immunization” was halted before it went out the door.</li>
<li>Nearly half a billion was shaved off a $1.5 billion grant to Public Health Foundation Enterprises, Inc., operating as Heluna Health. Since 1998, the nonprofit had received a few million per year from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, operating as a pass-through that sends the money to other groups performing public health research or interventions. In 2020, that jumped to half a billion, and nearly $3 billion in 2021.</li>
</ul>
In other ways, DOGE has fallen short of its hopes, sometimes after running into the buzz-saw of institutional Washington. Courts, appeals panels, unions, and government rules have all bogged down attempts to implement layoffs or access government data.
The “Fork in the Road” buyouts offered to federal employees to reduce salary expenses — modeled after the choice Musk offered to Twitter employees after acquiring the company, were underwhelming — with fewer employees accepting the offer than would typically retire or leave government on their own in a given year.
Thousands of employees who didn’t accept the buyout have since been targeted with “reduction in force” layoffs, but some have been ordered reinstated by courts, and are now on paid leave. Federal personnel rules, which the Office of Personnel Management has not moved to rewrite, give strong deference to employees with the longest tenure, and could wind up pushing low-paid junior employees out of the workforce, while <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-laying-off-dei-employees-could-backfire-thanks-to-bizarre-federal-rules?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=13&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=How+Laying+Off+DEI+Employees+Could+Backfire+Thanks+To+Bizarre+Federal+Rules" target="_blank" rel="noopener">keeping more highly compensated</a> and deeply entrenched ones — sometimes doing junior work at senior salaries.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/a-doge-origin-story-how-barack-obama-laid-the-groundwork-for-elon-musk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A DOGE Origin Story: How Barack Obama Laid The Groundwork For Elon Musk</a>
Katie Miller, a spokesperson for DOGE, declined to provide The Daily Wire with a list of DOGE’s top accomplishments or comment on whether it is on track.
Ultimately, savings will only reduce the deficit if Congress aggressively slashes annual funding to agencies or passes “recision” packages that claw back money that was previously appropriated.
DOGE earned the support of the American people, even though its cuts could be painful, because Musk made a compelling case that spending money we don’t have was irresponsible and would lead to a debt bomb where a significant portion of federal expenditures did nothing more than pay interest on past debt. But Republicans may weaken that justification, and imperil support for DOGE, by passing a budget that makes the deficit grow even faster, thanks to military spending increases and tax cuts that more than cancel out any spending savings.
So far, the Republican-led government has not returned spending to pre-pandemic levels, much less cut it below that baseline. Between 2015 and 2018, the government spent about $5 trillion a year, according to the <a href="https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Treasury Department</a>. That jumped to $8 trillion in 2020 and 2021, and $7 trillion in 2024.
According to the <a href="https://www.crfb.org/blogs/whats-senates-concurrent-fy-2025-budget" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget</a>, the Republican-led Senate’s plan for a 2025 budget would allow legislators to add $5.8 trillion to deficits over the next nine years, and require only 0.005% of projected spending through 2034 to be cut in order to pay down the deficit.
It said the Senate plan’s lack of spending reductions coupled with its tax breaks means that it would be worse for the deficit than major welfare programs and Joe Biden&#8217;s American Rescue Plan, and that the <a href="https://www.crfb.org/blogs/2025-reconciliation-tracker" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Senate plan</a> would cut only a few billion from Democrat priorities like urban affairs, while adding hundreds of billions in deficit spending to Republican priorities like the military.
The Daily Wire has outlined remaining opportunities for savings, including:
<ul>
<li>Reform food stamps to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-can-food-stamps-buy-junk-food-how-doge-could-save-billions-and-maha?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=70&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Why+Can+Food+Stamps+Buy+Junk+Food%3F+How+DOGE+Could+Save+Billions+And+MAHA" target="_blank" rel="noopener">exclude junk food and corner stores</a></li>
<li>Abolish the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/job-corps-spends-764k-per-graduate?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Federal+%E2%80%98Job+Corps%E2%80%99+Spends+Up+To+%24764K+Per+Graduate.+Participants+Go+On+To+Earn+%2417K+Annually." target="_blank" rel="noopener">$2 billion Job Corps</a></li>
<li>Reform <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/activist-judges-rubber-stamp-billions-in-suspect-social-security-disability-claims" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Social Security’s disability program</a></li>
<li>Abolish all <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-zealand-scrapped-all-social-science-funding-trump-could-too?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=34&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=New+Zealand+Scrapped+All+%E2%80%98Social+Science%E2%80%99+Funding.+Trump+Could+Too." target="_blank" rel="noopener">“social science” funding</a></li>
</ul>

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100 Days Of DOGE: Elon Musk’s Initiative Says It Cut $200 Billion. What’s Next?

Senate

Spending Bill

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