President Donald Trump delivered a roundhouse kick to the murky Washington swamp on Tuesday when he fired off a shocking list of waste and “fraud” uncovered so far by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), spearheaded by Elon Musk.
“They’re finding a level of fraud and waste and abuse like, I think, nobody ever thought possible,” the president said during a press conference held at Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach.
Trump took questions from the media and addressed the peace talks in Ukraine, which he called a “very sad situation” but reiterated that he believed he had the “power” to end the war.
Moving on from the topic of Eastern Europe, President Trump hammered down hard on the waste being exposed by DOGE, which was truly shocking. He said DOGE had discovered millions of people supposedly over the age of 100 drawing Social Security checks.
Incredibly, the president noted that individuals up to the obviously impossible age of over 300 years old were drawing Social Security benefits. Of course, the United States didn’t even exist 300 years ago.
“Where’s the money being spent?” Trump asked ominously.
He then dug in to some of the most shocking receipts of waste perpetrated by the federal government, including the following as examples:
- $520 million spent on an environmental consultant for ESG investments in Africa,
- $25 million to promote biodiversity and conservation in Cambodia,
- $40 million to improve social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants,
- $42 million for Johns Hopkins to study social issues in Uganda,
- $70 million for a center at Purdue University to student solutions for developmental mental challenges,
- $10 million for voluntary circumcision procedures in Mozambique,
- $9.7 million for UC Berkely to develop a cohort of Cambodian youth,
- $2.3 million for strengthening independent voices in Cambodia,
- $32 million for the Prague Civil Society Center,
- $14 million for improving public procurement in Serbia,
- $486 million for the Consortium for Elections and Political Processes, some of which when to Moldova and India,
- $21 million for fiscal federalism in Nepal and $19 million for biodiversity and conservation in Nepal.
These are just some examples of the waste DOGE has brought to the attention of the president and the American people.
“We have a very, very corrupt country, and it’s a sad thing to say,” Trump said.
However, the president noted that if the corruption could be rooted out, for example, in Social Security, there would be more than enough money to provide for the real people in this country who are eligible to receive it.
Lastly, the president reacted to news that the acting Social Security commissioner, Michelle King, had reportedly resigned this week. The president suggested that King said she was resigning because she was likely fired.
“Who would keep them? How can you have numbers like this?” he remarked. “…How many of these people got paid? Were they getting paid?”
He said if that was the case, it’s a “massive fraud.”