Other People’s Money | Power Line

The latest from DOGE:

The VA cancelled a $56,000 contract to water ~8 plants for 5 years. This is ~$1400/plant/year. The contract has been canceled and DOGE will water the plants free of charge. pic.twitter.com/CAj8xINzJG

— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) March 7, 2025

Democrats are screeching about cuts in Veterans’ Administration spending, calling them a war on veterans. It would be more accurate to call it a war on house plants in the VA headquarters, except the plants are still being watered. It just won’t cost so much.

Who would pay $1,400 a year to water one house plant? No one, if it was his $1,400. That is the key to government spending: it is grotesquely wasteful because the people spending the money don’t really care. The inefficiency is inherent, and it infects every government department and agency.

But that is only part of the problem; the rest of the truth is worse. The inefficiency is inherent, but the corruption has exploded in recent years. Today, government spending is largely intended to benefit Democratic Party constituencies and people who have recently served in Democratic Party administrations. A case in point is the $20 billion that the EPA shoveled out the door to party cronies in the dying days of the Biden administration, in the name of “environmental justice.” Those dollars, if they are ever spent–the government is trying to get them back–represent pure corruption. They would have done zero good, and a considerable amount of harm.

Another instance is the $2.13 billion that USAID purports to have spent on Haiti relief. You can’t cut foreign aid, the Democrats scream. People will die! But it turns out that of that $2.13 billion, only two percent, $48.6 million, went to people in Haiti. $1.2 billion was paid to people and entities in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia. It was a Democratic Party slush fund. No doubt some percentage of that $1.2 billion eventually wended its way down to Haiti, but that was incidental: as with the EPA grants, the purpose of the effort was to enrich employees of liberal NGOs who are closely allied with the Democratic Party.

I wish President Trump well in his effort to clean up Washington, D.C., but he has his work cut out for him: both the incompetence and the corruption run deep.