By Cliff Maloney
While the obscene levels of waste, fraud, and abuse DOGE uncovered that USAID has been engaged in for decades have mostly fallen from media coverage lately, more evidence of the corruption continues to pile up. The issues uncovered, unfortunately, are far from resolved.
Just last week, USAID officials and three company executives pleaded guilty in a massive fraud and bribery scheme involving at least 14 contracts totaling over $550 million
The trial showed that USAID contracting officer Roderick Watson took bribes and was showered with lavish gifts—including cash, laptops, thousands of dollars in tickets to a suite at an NBA game, a country club wedding, downpayments on two residential mortgages, cell phones, and even jobs for his relatives.
In exchange for these bribe payments, Watson influenced the award of over $550 million in contracts by manipulating the procurement process at USAID. He now faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
“Public trust is a hallmark of our nation’s values, so corruption within a federal government agency is intolerable,” said U.S. Attorney Kelly O. Hayes for the District of Maryland.
I couldn’t agree more.
This, unfortunately, has become business as usual in our government, and it’s become abundantly evident to all but the most extreme leftists over the last year. America is not meant to be run like this, by an unelected shadow government driven by self-enrichment. It’s meant to be run by a government of and for the people.
The USAID situation is appalling, but I’m afraid it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and it’s a perfect example of the entrenched swamp that President Trump was elected to drain.
This means that our policies must be designed to create freedom and opportunity for American citizens—not to create a vast slush fund for big government bureaucrats to enforce their own vision for the country and reward their minions. We need a strong system of checks and balances to prevent this, along with complete transparency and accountability from our elected officials.
The solution is twofold.
The first part is to root out and eliminate these programs, which are currently managed by unelected bureaucrats and shouldn’t exist in the first place.
DOGE was the first step in that, but we need to go further by enacting similar programs at the state level, and then codify that elimination into law—along with legislation to prevent them from popping back up under new names. Without that, this is all nothing more than the political theater that Americans are already tired of.
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The only way to do this is to elect representatives who agree with these principles, and then hold them accountable to ensure they do what we’ve elected them to do.
The second part is to enforce radical transparency and accountability in all future government activity. This part is much more difficult.
It starts with only allowing programs to be created in public through the official legislative process. No more administrative decree. If an elected official isn’t willing to go to the public and say, “Here’s what I want to create, here’s why, and here’s how it will work,” then it shouldn’t be allowed to exist. But it’s not just elected officials who play a role here—as citizens, we have a duty to make our voices heard during that process and then look at the results of the programs that our tax dollars, whether federal or local, are spent on and determine if they’ve been effective.
If citizens feel they’re getting value from how their tax dollars are being spent on a particular program, then it gets to continue, but if not, it needs to be either quickly reformed or eliminated. No gray area. No more going along just to get along. We need to operate with ruthless efficiency. The survival of our country depends on it.
And if any elected official doesn’t abide by these principles, then they need to be removed from office. In a worst-case scenario, this happens when the next election comes up, but ideally, this should be an immediate process that triggers a special election.
Get on board with the will of the people or get out of office. It’s that simple.
This is what’s necessary to restore America, and create a freedom-first environment that puts the power back in the hands of the people.
Cliff Maloney is the CEO of Citizens Alliance and the founder of the PA Chase. He can be found @Maloney on X.
Editor's Note: DOGE is finding billions of dollars in wasteful spending, and the Democrats are losing their minds as they realize their gravy train and woke projects are coming to an end.
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