The pushback in Washington, DC, against the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) efforts to dramatically cut federal waste has taken on the authenticity of professional wrestling. Credentialed “experts” decrying the profound tragedy of it all can be instantly tied to the gushing money spigot they so desperately do not want to see turned off. A leading think tank provides a handy example.
Elaine Kamarck is a “senior fellow in Governance Studies and the director of the Center for Effective Public Management” at the Brookings Institution. She is extraordinarily skilled in her field, the group stresses. Kamarck “is an expert on American electoral politics and government innovation and reform in the United States, [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] nations, and developing countries,” her Brookings bio reads.
On Feb. 14, Kamarck lent the weight of her expertism to advising DOGE not to get too carried away. “Cutting government budgets is broadly popular in theory, but if Trump and [DOGE head Elon] Musk overcome legal challenges and succeed in large-scale downsizing, they will find that cutting government can backfire on them,” Kamarck wrote. “By using an axe instead of a scalpel, they run the risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater and eliminating essential functions.”
Kamarck asserted that America may in essence collapse if the federal cuts run too deep. Social Security and veterans’ benefits disruptions, delays in tax refund processing, massive increases in food poisoning deaths, a budding food scarcity catastrophe — all are now on the table due to DOGE.
The sky is falling, and you have to be a respected DC think tank official to see it.
Kamarck and her Brookings colleagues have good reason to be so alarmed about the gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and similar federal programs. A look at the group’s finances reveals its revenue streams are highly dependent on the government agencies being targeted by DOGE.
According to its annual report for the fiscal 2023-2024 year, Brookings received large sums of money directly from the federal government via the National Institutes of Health (between $500,000 and $999,999) and the Department of Education (between $100,000 and $249,999).
Its other major donors speak volumes about the organization’s strident claims to “nonpartisan” professionalism. Comcast NBCUniversal was a six-figure donor last year. Here’s a neat coincidence: NBC News featured Kamarck and other Brookings officials as “experts” in its DOGE news coverage on multiple occasions in February.
Other Brookings funders include Amazon, Bank of America, powerhouse leftist philanthropy the Ford Foundation, Google, Facebook parent company Meta, and defense contractor behemoth Northrop Grumman.
But two of the biggest contributors to the think tank stand out amid the DOGE gnashing and wailing. Brookings received at least $2 million in the 2023-2024 fiscal year alone from Bill Gates’ Gates Foundation and at least $1 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
As has been widely reported by independent media sources, Gates and Soros both benefit enormously from USAID and other federal funding pipelines for projects that promote their personal agendas.
Gates is a founding partner of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and has worked intimately with the organization all over the world as part of his controversial personal health care crusade.
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Gavi has received multi-billions of dollars from the US government over the years. “The US is the third-largest contributor to Gavi and its second-largest government contributor, providing 12% overall and 15% of government funding (not including COVAX),” KFF, a health news site (also heavily funded by Gates), reported in July. “US annual contributions have grown over time, reaching $300 million in FY 2024. Additionally, the US recently pledged at least $1.58 billion to Gavi over the next five years for its next replenishment period.”
Gates appeared on NBC’s (it’s just a coincidence!) Today show on Feb. 5 to defend USAID and its crucial role in helping Gavi. “I went through that ‘Hey, I’ve been out in the field with USAID,’” Gates told the network. “It’s unbelievable what an asset that is … I know all the development agencies of all the countries, and this is the best of them.”
A 2020 USAID fact sheet revealed how much taxpayer money has flowed to Gates’ project via the government agency. “As one of Gavi’s longstanding donors, USAID has directly contributed to progress in immunization coverage, providing more than $2 billion in support to Gavi since FY 2001,” the fact sheet stated.
And then there is Soros.
Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger reported that USAID provides funding for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a “news outlet” jointly financed by Soros and the US government that Shellenberger stated played a key role in the first impeachment of President Donald Trump in 2019.
“OCCRP does not operate like a normal investigative journalism organization in that its goals appear to include interfering in foreign political matters, including elections, aimed at regime change,” Shellenberger wrote. He presented disturbing evidence that OCCRP has been largely controlled by USAID.
“In a 2024 documentary that German television broadcaster NDR made about OCCRP’s dependence on the US government, a USAID official confirmed that USAID approves OCCRP’s ‘annual work plan’ and approves new hires of ‘key personnel,’” Shellenberger reported.
A glance at OCCRP’s “supporters” listed in its 2023 annual report uncovered a cozy menagerie of US government agencies and globalist big-ticket “philanthropies.” The Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Soros’ Open Society Foundations appear alongside USAID and the US State Department.
“If DOGE indiscriminately slashes budgets and fires essential workers, it risks disaster. The fallout from major failures could hurt Trump’s poll numbers and weaken GOP support,” Brookings expert Kamarck concluded in her think tank essay.
There are more than 3 million reasons in the last year alone to suspect that future prospects of Republican political viability are not her paramount concern.