Under President Trump’s bold leadership, his administration is ushering in a new era of financial transparency in government. I’ve long wondered where my tax dollars are going but haven’t bothered to do the five minutes of research it would take to learn that all that information is already meticulously documented and tracked in numerous publicly available reports and websites.
Trump has taken decisive, possibly illegal action to fund a billionaire and his tech bro protégés to uncover information that is already available for free to anyone who wants to see it at any time. Now, information about nearly every dollar the government spends will be publicly available to every American citizen, as it has been for decades.
It used to be that if you wanted to know how much the US Agency for International Development (USAID) spent on which projects, you had to google it and wait .00043 seconds for the results to show you links to the websites of USAID, the government’s foreign assistance dashboard, and various nongovernmental watchdog organizations, where all of this information has always been accessible to all.
Thankfully, that straightforward accountability is ending, as the new administration is taking down the USAID and other government websites. Instead, they are posting snippets of decontextualized, often purposely mischaracterized information about a few of the thousands of government-funded efforts, which are intended to turn Americans against their own government and stage a hostile takeover—the best use of my tax dollars.
And I’m just as excited that, in addition to paying large salaries to engineers and programmers to google things, my taxes fund an effort to finally audit government agencies, like they are already statutorily required to be at legislatively mandated intervals. It is a travesty that the IRS, for example, has not been audited since their annual mandatory audit last year, which is done every year by the Government Accountability Office, which then issues a public report that, along with all other government agency audit reports, anyone can read and assess.
Another audit might sound duplicative, but I don’t trust a government agency to audit another agency, because even though the information is available for all to review, they might be biased. Instead, I want someone who has already made an explicit, politically motivated claim that all government agencies and their workers are maliciously carrying out illegal acts and should be immediately abolished and imprisoned to do an objective audit. It’s just common sense, like asking a fox to guard a henhouse or Donald Trump to guard a dressing room.
The government has been misusing taxpayer money for too long, and I am more than ready for it to use taxpayer money to redundantly undertake the expensive process of reviewing every piece of paper, saved document, and financial transaction across the entire federal government and continuously pretending that it has “discovered” legal, congressionally appropriated public expenditures.
And as they do all this, I know they will use my tax dollars responsibly because they’re already bypassing commonly held legal definitions of government waste, fraud, and abuse, and efficiently redefining it as “what one billionaire and a dozen current or former Hitler youth unilaterally decide to cancel because it might get in the way of their government takeover.”
Finally, I can rest assured that I don’t have to worry about whether something the government does actually wastes my tax dollars and should be investigated or simply gets in the way of the wealthiest man in the world staging a coup, because there will be no way for me to know anymore.