The DOGE Files: Top ten ways to waste tax dollars

At the start of this year the Capital Research Center launched the DOGE Files, a new project named after the new government agency dedicated to rooting out waste fraud and abuse in the federal government. As part of that effort, CRC researchers spent weeks combing through thousands of pages of federal records to use our expertise in the nonprofit sector to identify nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations receiving federal funds that probably shouldn’t be. 

Our findings were highly disturbing and are documented in full on the Capital Research Center website. To give a sense of what we found, here are the top 10 most absurd federal grants and grantees unearthed in the DOGE Files.

1. Transgender Colombian Opera

In a long list of puzzling government funded projects unearthed by the Capital Research Center’s DOGE Files project, one grant stands out as the “best.” In 2021, the State Department awarded $25,000 to the Colombian Universidad de los Andes to produce “The Opera As One,” an opera aimed at raising awareness and increasing transgender representation, with another $22,020 in presumably matching funds coming from an unnamed nonfederal source. All told, roughly $47,000 in funds went toward this avant-garde performance. 

President Donald Trump himself was shocked by the “trans opera,” sarcastically quipping about it in his address to Congress as part of a long list of absurd State Department grants illustrating what DOGE was trying to prevent. White House officials repeatedly cited the grant as one of the premier examples of the waste DOGE would be targeting in the very first days of the Trump administration. 

How did this grant come to the attention of the White House so quickly? Capital Research Center was the first to report on the grant back in 2023 as part of a massive data project on the over $100 million the Biden administration was spending specifically to prop-up and research transgenderism. The project unearthed millions of dollars of grants to universities and hospitals to study why transgender people were so prone to heart attacks, HIV/AIDS, asthma, alcoholism, cancer, blood clots, mental health issues, cigarette smoking, drug abuse, and much more. There were also grants for apps to connect “gender curious” children to transgender adults online, millions of dollars in contracts for building gender neutral bathrooms, and grants to promote transgender inclusion in countries all over the world. But the grant for the trans-Colombian opera, as it has been unaffectionately dubbed, takes the cake for the most absurd and well known.  

The data project tracing the Biden administration’s funding of transgenderism also eventually became the model for the DOGE Files, which have now unearthed billions in government absurdities that can be found at the top of the Capital Research Center website and in this article. The grant might be small, but for sheer absurdity, media attention and kick-starting the entire DOGE Files project the trans-Colombian opera earns the top spot.

2. The EPA’s “Green Bank” Grants

The second spot on this list goes not to one grant, but to several. When Congress first included a $27 billion “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” a quasi-public green bank at the EPA, in the infamous Inflation Reduction Act, critics warned it could become an slush fund for dubiously profitable energy companies. The Capital Research Center was one of those critics. 

Instead of distributing the funds itself, the EPA immediately began shipping the money out—or “throwing gold bars off of the Titanic” as one EPA staffer was described it on a hidden camera—to a series of nonprofits. The grants were nominally supposed to use the nonprofits to set up easy-to-access capital for green energy companies. 

What they actually seem to have created is a series of minimally overseen slush funds tailor-made for bailing out investors with cozy ties to Democrats in the administration. Case in point: $5 billion was awarded to the nonprofit Coalition for Green Capital by the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was led by a man named Jahi Wise. Jahi Wise’s previous job was the director of policy for the Coalition for Green Capital, and David Hayes, a former special assistant to the president in the White House Climate Policy Office has just recently obtained a seat on the Coalition for Green Capital’s board of directors. 

Similar ethical and transparency issues can be found at the other “green bank” grantees highlighted in the DOGE Files including Inclusiv ($1.9 billion), Climate United Fund ($7 billion), The Opportunity Finance Network ($2.3 billion), and Power Forward Communities ($2 billion). Together they were four of the five largest grants made to any nonprofit in the history of the United States. DOGE Files first compiled these grants in January. By March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin had cancelled every one of them. While the legal battles over the cancellation of the grants are still ongoing, the DOGE Files may have played a part in stopping one of the biggest “green” boondoggles in history and for that reason the “green bank” grants earn the number two spot.

3. Church World Service

Church World Service (CWS) is a faith-based charity that looks noble on paper. It’s website tells about how they help refugees and disaster victims, and how they need your support to keep doing it. It’s not nearly as innocuous as it seems though. CWS receives, or received, 85 percent of its revenue from government grants to run a refugee resettlement program. Under the Biden administration CWS raked in $375 million of federal grants to resettle refugees within the United States and abroad. Essentially, U.S. taxpayers underwrite CWS’s operations to “welcome refugees and asylum seekers with open arms” but CWS does much more than welcome refugees.  

CWS is actively suing the Trump administration to restore its now-cancelled funding. It was a staunch supporter of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) up until court cases and executive orders forced them to cancel their DEI programs. It has an “advocacy and organizing” program that leads protests and get-out-the-vote drives. CWS regularly releases policy statements that uniformly support left-wing and open borders policies of all descriptions, and it encourages people to call their representatives and express support for those policies. 

But nothing encapsulates CWS’s political radicalism quite like its Platform on Racial Justice. Published during the identitarian madness of the summer of 2020, the five-page document calls for ending cash bail and all fines, defunding the police, rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, banning the police from using any force, enacting nationwide automatic voter registration, banning police officers from schools, decriminalizing prostitution, decriminalizing all drug possession, defunding and abolishing ICE, decarbonizing the economy, ending the “wage gap,” universal health care, doubling the minimum food stamp benefits, and much more. 

CWS also wrote, “White capitalism holds a legacy of unchecked power that dictates how land around the world is used, distributed and dismantled.” It also repeatedly endorsed the Movement for Black Lives, a group that was housed at the time within the Alliance for Global Justice (AGJ), which has repeatedly written defending the North Korean and Venezuelan communist dictatorships. AGJ also housed Samidoun, a front group that is officially designated as a Palestinian terrorist organization by the U.S. government. 

The unchecked political radicalism that dominates CWS is a marvel to behold, but CWS apparently doesn’t want it to be beheld. Shortly after the DOGE Files report exposed the insanity of its Platform on Racial Justice, CWS deleted the document from their website. However, Capital Research Center had already archived a copy. This attempt at concealment coupled with mind-blowing radicalism easily earns Church World Service the third spot on the DOGE Files top 10.

4. The National Harm Reduction Coalition

Dozens of government programs have been working for decades to try to get people off drugs or prevent people from taking them. After billions of dollars of spending and years of study the effectiveness of these programs can probably now be safely as questionable at best, but that’s not what the waste here is. No, under Biden the Department of Health a Human Services (HHS) decided to try a new approach. Instead of trying to get addicts to stop taking drugs, tell them to keep doing it if they want, even encourage it, and give them a list of tips and tricks for not dying while doing them. 

This is where the National Harm Reduction Coalition came in. Since mid-2020, the group has received over $2.4 million in grants for expanding “technical assistance” to syringe service providers across the country. Two of its staff even helped shape the federal government’s official harm reduction policy at HHS as part of the steering committee of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. In 2022, the group reported $12.8 million in revenue with 73 percent coming from government grants. With such a high percentage, taxpayers might be shocked to see the messaging they are paying for. The group calls itself a “nationwide advocate and ally for people who use drugs” and calls for “non-judgmental” approach that encourages drug users to “try snorting or smoking fentanyl” instead of injecting it, while doing away with the idea of rehab or abstinence entirely. It also suggests that with proper equipment, one can “completely avoid” the health risks of injecting hard drugs, which sounds horrifyingly like what an addict about to overdose would say. This isn’t drug “harm reduction,” it’s taxpayer-funded drug normalization. Politically, the coalition leans predictably far to the left, blaming the war on drugs on white supremacy while calling to “defund, disarm, and disband” police. If this is the path that America’s drug policy is going to go down, it would frankly be more cost effective to just send the grant money directly to the cartels and cut out of the middle man.

5. Solidarity Center

The first Big Labor–backed organization on this list, the Solidarity Center is an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest labor union, where left-wing union activists do left-wing union activism at the inexplicably high expense of the U.S. taxpayer. 

The Solidarity Center preaches “equality, radical inclusion and intersectionality” in its work, declaring that it views everything through the lens of “explicitly feminist, anti-racist, pro-migrant and class conscious,” while supporting “social justice unionism” and the “climate justice movement.” Everything the Solidarity Center does is covered in left-leaning political jargon, but an astonishing 99 percent of Solidarity Center’s nearly $73 million budget (2023) came from U.S. government grants. The Biden Department of Labor alone awarded over $60.2 million in grants and cooperative agreements, while the U.S Agency for International Development chipped in the rest. 

Unions known for a long history of corruption and shady financial dealings should not be getting taxpayer funds, period, but there is no world where an activist group affiliate of that union should receive 99 percent of its funding from taxpayers. The DOGE Files first wrote about the Solidarity Center grants in January. By April tens of millions of dollars of grants to the group had been cancelled.

6. Rocky Mountain Institute

Starting out the bottom half of the top 10 is the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). RMI is a notably left-of-center energy policy think tank that has long pushed for electrifying basically everything without an actual plan for providing the electricity. RMI mostly recently became infamous as one of the driving forces behind the gas-stove-ban debacle of 2022. The group has also long held positions against the use of virtually all fossil fuels because of their carbon emissions, but it confusingly also opposes zero-emission nuclear energy. RMI also frequently collaborates with the Chinese government on “net-zero” studies aimed at “decarbonizing” China and even has a large office in Beijing. 

In all, the Biden administration handed RMI more than $12 million in grants from the Departments of Energy, State, and Transportation. Some of the highlights included $2.4 million from the State Department for a vaguely defined “climate finance network” in the Bahamas, $5.1 million from the Department of Transportation for a “technical assistance (TA), planning, and capacity building” program meant to “improve and foster thriving communities through transportation improvements,” and $1.2 million from the Department of Energy to develop a plan for building electric truck chargers in San Francisco. The Biden administration was infamously inept at getting EV chargers built, so one can imagine that the massive grants to RMI for studying how to build them did little to help.

7. National Urban League

The Biden Department of Labor, as noted above with the Solidarity Center, was a generous funder of numerous left-leaning activist groups, but one of the most notable is the National Urban League. Under Biden the National Urban League was awarded a staggering $80.3 million in federal grants, mostly from the Departments of Labor, and Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Even though it’s one of the longest-standing civil rights groups in the nation it has grown increasingly reliant on government funding. According to their latest tax forms, government grants make up over 40% of the League’s annual revenue. 

As the government checks bot bigger, the National Urban League became more and more involved in politics. It has claimed that policing is rooted in slavery and Jim Crow, praised Biden’s spree of death row commutations, labeled voter ID laws as racist (even though most people of color support them), called opposing DEI “white supremacist,” advocated for gun control, and called the overturning of Roe v. Wade “horrifying.” 

In 2024, the group’s president, Marc Morial, even spoke on stage at the Democratic National Convention, attacking Trump and praising Kamala Harris. Around the same time, the league also published a “nonpartisan” voter guide that called Biden and Kamal Harris civil rights champions while claiming Trump has a “reputation for enabling racist ideologies.” Like many others on this list, the National Urban League is actively suing the Trump administration for ending the spending programs it benefited from.

8. UNIDOS US

Formerly known as the National Council of La Raza “The Race,” UnidosUS is an unabashedly left-leaning political advocacy organization. UNIDOS is an outspoken supporter of left-leaning immigration policy, gun control, abortion, and policing. It maintains an affiliated 501(c)(4) “dark money” advocacy group, and an entire page of its “policy” section on its website is dedicated to studying Latino voter turnout and registration. 

Funding a left-wing policy shop with taxpayer funds would already be bad enough, but UnidosUS is also an “organizing” group, which is nonprofit-speak for being a political turnout machine. Nonetheless, or perhaps because it, UnidosUS was awarded tens of million of dollars in government grants by the Biden administration for all sorts of things which which it seemingly should have nothing to do. Health and Human Services gave UnidosUS $20 million for an “education and awareness campaign” about the COVID-19 vaccine in the very first month of the Biden administration. The Department of Commerce gave UnidosUS $11 million for job training in Puerto Rico and Denver. The Department of Labor gave 3.8 million for a “Youth – Young Offenders” outreach program, and HUD gave over $10 million for “housing counselling” programs. These are sizable sums for any advocacy group, and in 2023 government grants accounted for 20 percent of Unidos’s revenue.  

9. Redacted USAID Grantees

Most federal grants come with strings, paperwork, and some semblance of transparency. Then there’s USAID and its “Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees.” For safety reasons USAID often obscures the identities of grant recipients to prevent, for example, foreign terror organizations from targeting American aid workers. It makes sense that, in extreme cases, this would be a necessary precaution. But from 2021 to 2024 this redacted category of recipient soaked up more than $4.2 billion in taxpayer grants, making for over $1 billion of nearly untraceable grant spending per year. Are they all really in mortal peril should people learn that they’re receiving U.S. government funding? It seems unlikely. Most of the time there was a vague description provided of what the grant would do, or at least an identification of what country the money was destined for, but not always.  

For a whopping $460 million worth of grants absolutely nothing was disclosed: a complete black hole without a description, country, or even continent identified. Though, among the grants that with descriptions provided, there was no shortage of absurdity. One grant was for “multi-purpose cash assistance to vulnerable households in Gaza.” What could go wrong? Another $20 million was sent away for “improving social cohesion in Burma” by creating a “locally-driven, community-owned development agenda,” which clarifies almost nothing. There were also $15 million for anonymous “investigative journalism” projects somewhere in Eurasia, $49 million for “addressing COVID-19” in Ukraine, and $2.7 million for advocating for constitutional forms in Zimbabwe.

10. TransLatin@ Coalition

Rounding out this list is a small nonprofit by the name of the “TransLatin@ Coalition” whose mission is to “advocate for the specific needs of the Trans Latin@ community.” Under the Biden administration, the group suddenly became a federal funding magnet. Like many of the other groups on this list, the TransLatin@ Coalition has its own policy manifesto that is predictably radical. The group’s “Trans Policy Agenda 2024” is 98 pages of far-left lunacy. 

One brief excerpt reads, “To bring indigenous justice to US stolen land, and equity for TGI [transgender] people across the globe, we advocate for international dialogue of the rights, histories and identities of TGI people.” Among other things it calls for easier access to abortion, transgender hormone injections and surgeries for children, and abolishing the police and immigration and customs enforcement. 

Unbelievably, this group received grants from the Departments of Labor, Justice, and Health and Human Services totaling nearly $2 million. On its 2023 Form 990, the group disclosed that $4.1 million, or 50 percent, of its revenue came from government grants.  

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-doge-files-top-ten-ways-to-waste-tax-dollars/