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One of the worst offenders? The United States Institute of Peace (USIP), which DOGE discovered had paid $132,000 to Mohammad Qasem Halimi — a former Taliban official who once served as Afghanistan’s Chief of Protocol. After spending a year detained at Bagram Air Base starting in 2002, Halimi later held several high-ranking positions in Afghanistan, including Minister of Hajj and Religious Affairs in 2020. DOGE quickly moved to terminate the shocking contract earlier this year.
In a revealing moment, a DOGE staffer told Watters, “A small agency called the United States Institute of Peace is definitely the agency we’ve had the most fight at. We actually went into the agency and found they had loaded guns inside their headquarters — Institute for Peace. So by far, the least peaceful agency that we’ve worked with, ironically. Additionally, we found that they were spending money on things like private jets, and they even had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban. This is real. We don’t encounter that in most agencies.”
But the waste didn’t end there.
DOGE audits also unearthed massive COVID-19 relief fraud in America’s schools. Earlier this year, Fox News Digital reported that school districts spent an outrageous $200 billion in pandemic aid with “little oversight or impact on students.” Some school officials even splurged on luxury hotels and treats.
The Granite School District in Utah dropped $86,000 on hotel rooms at the lavish Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for a so-called “educational conference.” Meanwhile, California’s Santa Ana Unified School District shelled out $393,000 to rent an entire Major League Baseball stadium. According to a report from Parents Defending Education, Granite later denied any wrongdoing, but the damage was already done.
DOGE’s investigations also found that schools were burning through relief money on items like $60,000 worth of swimming pool passes — and shockingly, one California district even bought an ice cream truck with pandemic funds.
The mismanagement reached far beyond American borders.
Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a fierce watchdog for government waste and chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, exposed that USAID spent a jaw-dropping $20 million to produce a “Sesame Street” show in Iraq. Ernst explained that under Biden’s administration, “USAID authorized a whopping $20 million to create a ‘Sesame Street’ in Iraq.” The taxpayer-funded program, called Ahlan Simsim Iraq, aimed to “promote inclusion, mutual respect and understanding across ethnic, religious and sectarian groups.”
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If that wasn’t enough, the numbers behind improper payments are downright staggering.
In March, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) dropped a bombshell report revealing federal agencies had made $162 billion in improper payments. While the figure is slightly down from the previous year, it remains shockingly high. According to GAO, a whopping 75% of the waste came from just five programs — including Medicare, Medicaid, the Treasury Department, the Department of Agriculture, and the Small Business Administration.
Another major target for DOGE was the bloated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy.
Throughout his campaign and presidency, Trump vowed to dismantle the DEI industrial complex and restore a merit-based system. DOGE, following Trump’s lead, has already slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in DEI contracts in a major push toward restoring fiscal sanity.
As Musk prepares to officially step aside, his short tenure at DOGE has exposed a federal government addicted to wasteful spending — and a desperate need for the kind of leadership that puts American taxpayers first.
