Lee Fang Reacts to Trump's Speech to Congress; Will DOGE Tackle Military Waste?
Lee Fang reacts to Trump's speech to Congress. Plus: Project on Government Oversight president Danielle Brian on DOGE, government accountability, and cutting Pentagon waste.
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I'm your host of System Update, coming to you live from a very foggy San Francisco.
Glenn Greenwald is out this week.
Last night, Trump gave his fifth State of the Union address.
The president doubled down on tariffs, called for an end to the war in Ukraine, and touted his many executive orders, especially on DEI. And yes, there were moments of theatrics between Trump and the Democrats in the audience.
But Trump did something special that...
I think deserves greater scrutiny.
Unlike recent administrations, including his own, he dedicated a big part of his speech to his quest to root out wasteful spending.
Let's watch a clip.
And to that end, I have created the brand new Department of Government Efficiency.
Goj.
Perhaps you've heard of it.
Perhaps.
Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.
Thank you.
Thank you, Elon.
He's working very hard.
He didn't need this.
He didn't need this.
Thank you very much.
We appreciate it.
Everybody here, even this side, appreciates it, I believe.
They just don't want to admit that.
Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified.
$22 billion from HHS to provide free housing and cars for illegal aliens.
$45 million for diversity, equity and inclusion.
Scholarships in Burma.
$40 million to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants.
Nobody knows what that is.
$8 million to promote LGBTQI +, in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.
$60 million for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America.
$60 million. $8 million for making mice transgender.
This is real.
$32 million for a left-wing propaganda operation in Moldova.
$10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique.
$20 million for...
The Arab Sesame Street in the Middle East.
It's a program.
$20 million for a program.
$1.9 billion to recently created decarbonization of Holmes Committee, headed up, and we know she's involved.
Just at the last moment, the money was passed over by a woman named Stacey Abrams.
Have you ever heard of her?
A $3.5 million consulting contract for lavish fish monitoring.
$1.5 million for voter confidence in Liberia.
$14 million for social cohesion in Mali.
$59 million for illegal alien hotel rooms in New York City.
He's a real estate developer.
He's done very well.
$250,000 to increase vegan local climate action innovation in Zambia.
$42 million for social and behavior change in Uganda.
$14 million for improving public procurement in Serbia.
$47 million for improving learning outcomes in Asia.
Asia's doing very well with learning.
You know what we're doing.
We should use it ourselves.
$101 million for DEI contracts at the Department of Education.
The most ever paid.
Nothing even like it.
Under the Trump administration, all of these scams.
This is an important topic and one that really cuts across ideological and partisan lines.
Or at least it should.
Corruption is a soul-sucking force not only because it bloats government debt and deficits.
We all suffer from waste.
For every fraudulent contract, for every misallocated dollar, that's a loss of resources that could have been spent making America more educated, more secure, more healthy, and more prepared for the future.
It's also a problem that fuels alienation.
We lose faith in our elected officials and our entire system of governance when we can't count on basic accountability for how our tax dollars are spent.
Where I live in San Francisco, the government has One of the largest per capita local budgets in the world, yet problems never seem to go away.
No matter how much money gets spent, housing gets more expensive, there are rampant overdose deaths, a growing homeless population, despite the highest level of spending on homeless outreach programs in the nation, out-of-control property crime, empty storefronts, and programs that seem like a parody of municipal waste.
$1.7 million spent building a single toilet in Noe Valley?
$2 billion on a small expansion of the Muni subway, which was over budget, which blew through deadlines, and now is shutting down just after opening because of faulty construction.
And the more the city spends, the more questions are raised as NGO and private contractors keep getting busted with their hands in the cookie jar.
We've had repeated FBI raids of city workers and city contractors, scandal after scandal about missing funds and kickback schemes.
The problems seem endless, and given that so many Democratic leaders from Nancy Pelosi to Kamala Harris to Gavin Newsom got their political start in this city, it's no wonder that many Americans question whether these Californians are fit to lead.
But as bad as the problems of San Francisco have become, the city pales in comparison to the federal government.
The Government Accountability Office estimated that between 2018 and 2022 Taxpayers lost somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion due to fraud.
Much of that money was lost during the pandemic, when a gusher of nearly $2 trillion went out with little accountability.
Both Democrats and Republicans are to blame for the lack of oversight.
But this is not a phenomenon that is limited to the emergency actions taken around COVID-19.
Not even close.
The most pernicious systemic fraud can be found throughout the system.
Especially in healthcare and defense spending.
President Donald Trump, to his credit, has made it a focal point of his administration.
His new Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, helmed in part by Elon Musk, has rapidly deployed in agency after agency, slashing private contracts and cutting the workforce.
In particular, he has moved to scale down the entire USAID budget.
Like a lot of the Trump administration, it's a mix of good and bad.
A bold action that no other administration would take alongside reckless actions that could do real harm.
In many cases, they're missing the window of opportunity to go after real waste embedded in our system and have instead cut self-funding agencies like the CFPB. First, let's talk a little bit about the good around USAID cuts.
I've reported for years on USAID money going to groups that work to overthrow foreign governments, undermine democratic elections, and indeed censor even Americans over bogus claims of misinformation.
Congressional Democrats have claimed that USAID simply, in the words of Senator Chris Murphy, "supports freedom fighters all over the globe." That reality, however, is much more murky.
USAID has funded the Zinc Network, an anti-disinformation contractor that has targeted reporter Max Blumenthal Politician Vivek Gramoswamy and Congressman Andy Biggs, USAID also funded a pesticide industry public relations effort known as VFluence, which dug up dirt about American food journalists such as Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman.
But most troubling, the Foreign Assistance Agency has financed a network of groups in Ukraine that have spread unsubstantiated claims That Americans in favor of peace are part of a dangerous misinformation network tied to the Kremlin.
In Ukraine, USAID, through its contractor Internews, supports a network of social media-focused news outlets, including the New Voice of Ukraine, Vox Ukraine, Detector Media, and the Institute of Mass Information.
These news outlets have produced a series of videos and reports targeting economist Jeffrey Sachs, Commentator Tucker Carlson, Professor John Mearsheimer, and even our own esteemed host Glenn Greenwald as figures within a, quote, network of Russian propaganda who need to be censored from social media.
In other words, American taxpayers have been funding a defamatory smear campaign against other American citizens, all in order to build out support for another forever war.
But let's not forget USAID also helps administer global health programs.
That have been widely touted for saving millions of lives.
USAID helps administer PEPFAR, a program to distribute HIV-AIDS medications.
And the agency also funds the distribution of medicine and preventative care for malaria, polio, tuberculosis, and a variety of programs for maternal and child health care in developing countries.
There's a pause in these programs as the administration reviews them, but it seems clear that there's a real risk that they may be cut.
These programs might not be perfect, but they've generally impacted the world in profound and positive ways.
Given how much other waste, fraud, and abuse exists in our system, these global health programs should be a low priority, if not even not a priority at all when it comes to cuts.
Where should we be cutting?
To prepare this segment, I just look back at my own reporting over the last decade.
I've written for years about Pentagon waste that is...
Far beyond the dollar figure for any silly-sounding science grant or health program that was discussed last night at the State of the Union.
In 2015, a military blimp broke free from its harness in suburban Maryland and dragged a cable through homes, causing destruction and property damage.
Where did this thing come from?
One week ago, we were chasing a blimp that broke free from the Aberdeen proving ground.
Tonight, the Army still really hasn't let us know what could happen.
We do know that the Pentagon suspended the Jalen's program for now.
The pair of blimps was being used to scan for incoming missiles and other flying threats.
After the first one broke free, the army grounded the second limb.
The military is waiting for the results of its investigation before making a final call on the program.
And Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger issued a statement on the Pentagon's decision.
He says it's an unfortunate irony that a program designed to help safeguard the skies over the nation's capital threatened the security of our citizens on the ground, including in my district.
He goes on to say the program is important for the defense of our state and country, but says civilians Safety must come first.
He said the decision to continue the program should come after the Army's investigation into how the blimp got free in the first place.
The project was called J-Lens, or Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Neted Sensor System.
Produced by Raytheon at a nearly $3 billion cost to the Army, the project was intended to defend against cruise missiles.
Theoretically, it was supposed to attract objects over an area the size of Texas.
But these blimps kept getting destroyed in weather events and faced chronic technical issues.
Frankly, they didn't seem to serve any useful purpose.
Finally, former Joint Chief of Staff James Cartwright rescued the program and had it deployed to Afghanistan, where it again failed to provide any real protection to U.S. troops.
But Cartwright, after securing the deal, joined Raytheon's board of directors, a job that paid him nearly $900,000 a year.
Inevitably, Jay Lens ended up in Maryland, where it eventually untethered and caused random destruction.
This phenomenon is actually not unique.
There are dozens of failed missile defense and radar systems that get refunded year after year by Congress under the influence of defense lobbyists and the allure for politicians and staff to one day become defense lobbyists.
Let's take a look at a few quick examples.
The government has spent $40 billion on the ground-based mid-course defense system managed by Raytheon and Boeing.
That program, which was carefully scripted with conditions in which the system operators knew the exact location, trajectory, speed, and dimensions of test missiles, even under those conditions, the GMD intercept systems failed to consistently produce any interceptions.
There's the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, a project from Northrop Grumman and Raytheon that also failed missile interception systems and was canceled after Navy officials found multiple problems, including its limited range.
That program costs $1.7 billion.
Or what about the multi-object kill vehicle developed by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin at a cost of $700 million?
This program was canceled after military officials found that the anti-missile program faced insurmountable technical challenges.
The sea-based X-BAN radar, a floating radar designed to detect enemy missile launches, which failed after tests found that the radar had a limited field of vision and was highly vulnerable to corrosion at sea.
The program, managed by Boeing and Raytheon, cost $2.2 billion.
I could go on and on, just on the failed missile defense and radar systems, and I could spend another hour talking about faulty logistics systems, corrosive and fraudulent work on submarines, That leave them completely ineffective and inoperable.
Billions of dollars of waste on MRAPs and tanks.
And the list keeps going on and on.
Where is the watchdog?
Who's keeping this accountable?
There are a few champions in Congress, people like Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders, who consistently call out military waste, but they are in the minority.
The defense industrial lobby largely keeps Congress and any administration, Democrat or Republican, completely subdued and subservient.
We heard reports initially that DOGE was crossing the Potomac and planning to tackle military fraud and waste.
But so far, we've only heard about canceled military DEI contracts.
I have no problem cutting the DEI contracts, but let's be honest, that is small potatoes compared to the big fraudulent and wasteful contracts from the defense industrial base.
Project on Government Oversight is a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. that investigates Waste, fraud, and abuse.
As a journalist, I've relied on POGO's investigations for a very long time.
They've investigated Pentagon waste of all types, everything from the $500 hammer that kind of went viral back in the 1980s to more recent failed radar systems, the F-22, the F-35, a lot of issues around the Abrams tanks.
They've also investigated other federal contracts, the waste, fraud, and abuse that occurred during the pandemic and a lot of those.
They've been around for 40 years doing really vital work.
And since the topic du jour in Washington is waste, fraud, and abuse, I thought it would be great to talk to POGO today.
Danielle is the executive director of POGO. She's an award-winning journalist, really doing cutting-edge work in this regard.
Danielle, welcome to the program.
Thanks so much, Leah.
It's lovely to be here.
Yeah, thanks for joining us.
Well, I just want to get right to it.
The discussion, the news has been dominated by Elon Musk's Doge effort.
And, you know, to be frank, I'm of two minds here.
It seems like there's been a lot of government contracts, a lot of government bureaucracy that's on autopilot, and it's been difficult to kind of hit the brakes and stop any of this out of control.
Spending and you kind of need something radical to shake things up and uproot some of these kind of entrenched problems.
On the other hand, it looks like Doge has fired people on an arbitrary basis, you know, really just taking a look at any worker, any government scientist or any expert on this kind of probationary period and cutting them, even if they're doing vital work.
They've gotten things wrong.
They've been sloppy.
A lot of the awards that they've listed as Successful government cuts have been mislabeled and billions should actually have been millions.
And it seems like day after day we're seeing these types of problems.
So it's an interesting area and just let's get to it.
What's your perspective on Doge?
So you just made so many points in that one little thing that I want to touch on.
The first is, yes, their purported mission is a good one, right?
I think there's no question that shaking things up and doing things radical is in itself not bad.
And I think you're totally right.
We have been trying for decades to get Democrats and Republicans to take seriously the need to provide more accountability and transparency around how money is being spent and whether it should be spent there.
And the problem in this particular case is, though, that you still need to do it by following the law.
And one of the sort of threshold problems I have is among the things that has happened because of DOGE has been essentially making decisions that are not the executive branch's power to make.
These are programs that have been duly authorized and appropriated by Congress, and then to just rip them up.
It's not in the White House or DOGE or however we want to define where they actually sit or whether they're an agency or they're a White House advisor.
They don't have the power to make that decision.
What they should be doing is saying in the next president's budget and work with the Congress to say, we're going to defund these things.
These are the things that we think need to be cut.
From a constitutional perspective, the way things should be operating, where it's the Congress's decision ultimately to decide whether a program or an agency should exist, not the executive branch.
So that's like the 30 foot, 30,000 foot level.
And then what is it that they have cut?
And that's where it really becomes clear to me that not only did they really not care about sort of the constitutional power of the purse being in the Congress, but they're not really, at least yet, Serious about cutting waste.
And I have a few reasons why that's the case.
One is that the point you've made is it looks like they wanted to sort of do easy, cheap shots and saying, like, we've cut this program, which it turns out they didn't or they, you know, they're messing with the millions versus billions.
But the first things they cut, literally, I think the first things that they cut were offices or positions that bring in money.
To the government, whether it's the inspectors general's offices or it's the CFPB and the IRS. That's not to say that there are not possibly all kinds of efficiencies that could happen with those two agencies, but they and the IGs literally bring in more money than they cost.
And of course, when it comes to the CFPB, they actually don't cost taxpayers anything.
So that raises a question.
And then what they've...
Targeted in terms of programs are foreign aid.
That's a tiny part of the federal budget.
And now they're looking at the Department of Education.
But they've explicitly said, and we thought for a minute, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon was maybe going to get an 8% cut.
And I perked up my ears.
I'm like, okay, now we're talking.
And then it's like, oh, well, actually, we're not talking about an 8% cut.
It's a shift within the Pentagon budget, which they plan to increase.
So I was like, oh, this is the same old.
Okay, so now what we've seen is the two agencies that they want to expand their spending on are both the Pentagon and DHS because of their growth of trying to put more money into immigration enforcement.
And those are two of the agencies that have the biggest slush funds that need the most accountability.
And to tell them they're essentially off limits from cutting is more evidence to me that they're not really serious about cutting.
Well, look, I look at some of the contracts that have been cut, and it is kind of unclear to me if there is a clear mandate for some of the spending.
You know, I see this Booz Allen Hamilton or Deloitte contracts on, you know, HR training or DEI training.
But again, as the critics have pointed out, these are drops in the bucket for the federal budget.
The big forms of potential fraud are in Medicare Advantage and a lot of these DOD contracts.
Has DOGE spoken to POGO in a proactive way?
Is there any kind of cooperative mindset here?
And I will say that we did testify before the first DOGE committee that's chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And in our testimony, we said exactly what you would expect to say.
Yes, there's all kinds of things.
Look here.
Look at the Pentagon.
And not just look at the weapons systems, which they should be, and how the weapons get approved to full right production when they haven't passed testing.
And so that's why we keep having weapons that don't work.
That is a problem, a legacy problem that has existed since Pogo existed 40 years ago.
But also how we're buying things.
And I can get into the weeds on how procurement rules have been largely written by defense contractors to, of course, favor their interests.
And so what that means is there's a huge percentage of the goods that the Pentagon buys that were...
Essentially subject of price gouging or overpaying for and then there's all the services and that gets to companies like Booz Allen and others where they are vastly overcharging the government for services that if it was a federal employee doing that job it would be two to three times less expensive to the taxpayer.
So that's actually is one of the things that was really important that we spoke to in our testimony which was If you were serious about cutting spending, you wouldn't start with federal employees, because those actually, for your dollar for dollar, are far less expensive than the contractors that we have since,
essentially, the Clinton-Gore era reinventing government started shifting a lot of the work of government to the private sector, to government contractors, and the analysis that POGO did that still hasn't been...
No one else has done a better job than we did in 2011 on that.
We found that a comparison to the taxpayer of a federal employee with a government contractor doing exactly the same work is generally two to three times more expensive to have the contractor.
And Doge and Musk specifically have been operating under the same misperception that the Clinton-Gore administration did, that federal employees are overly expensive and the private sector does things cheaper.
And the basic Weakness in that argument is that might be true if you're talking about the actual private sector, but we're not.
We're talking about government contractors where their only client is the government.
And so there isn't a market that's sort of determining prices, you know, that they can charge.
And that's sort of the fundamental problem.
You know, one thing not to get too technical, but I think this is an important distinction that's getting lost in the discourse.
We're seeing the president and some of his supporters say that waste and fraud is being cut.
Waste is a subjective term.
One person's waste could be another person's vital program.
But fraud has a technical definition.
It's breaking the law.
It's stealing money.
It's things that are violations of the federal statute or the certifications of federal contracts.
Could you talk a little bit about this distinction?
Because so far, one could argue that, yes, DOGE is cutting waste.
We can get into that, but you've already kind of talked a little bit about that.
But what is this distinction with fraud?
I mean, do you believe that this Department of Justice is going to work with the inspector generals or with others to actually claw back some of the misappropriated funds or illegally obtained funds?
Because there is a difference here.
There's absolutely a difference.
It's a really good point that you're making, Lee.
And I do want to emphasize, you know, what they are arguing is waste.
Any DEI program, any foreign aid.
Those absolutely are policy decisions.
So in my estimation, that is not how you would define waste.
I define waste by sort of the legalized corruption, where we are paying far too much for something that we may actually want to be buying.
It's just we're paying too much for it, but our systems have allowed it to happen.
That's not breaking any law.
Our systems let it happen.
Now, when it comes to fraud, I would argue they so far haven't identified anything that I would calculate was fraud.
And if anything, what we're seeing in terms of the other offices at DOJ specifically, that they're either beheading or shrinking or...
Entire programs, like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, that they're saying, you know what, we're going to be scaling back our enforcement.
We're going to scale back our enforcement on the public integrity section.
We're scaling back, literally, the kinds of fraud-fighting efforts by DOJ very explicitly.
They're talking about just yesterday.
Tweeted that they're not going to be enforcing the, what's the CTA stand for?
The Corporate Transparency Act.
So they're not hiding the fact that the best fraud-fighting laws and offices are those things that they are targeting to weaken.
You know, just to kind of spin out this argument a little bit, you know, for a lot of conservatives, they looked at the last four years, they say, okay, look.
We had this out-of-control spending on the pandemic, on the Inflation Reduction Act.
We have all this inflation from government spending.
Democrats and progressives talk a good game about clawing back fraud and waste, but it seems like there weren't that many proactive efforts.
I don't know if that's a fair critique.
I want to hear your perspective on that.
I don't think it is fair.
I will say that I rejected the legitimacy of the decision to essentially Give a waiver to a huge percentage of the improperly gained PPP loans.
There was a real opportunity to capture a lot of the funds that were not used as intended.
And I have to admit, I don't remember whether it was at the end of the Trump...
I do think it was at the end of the Trump administration and not the beginning of the Biden administration that they essentially gave a waiver because the argument they made was it was going to be too labor-intensive to track down all the information to determine whether the loans were legitimately spent or not.
I think that was a terrible mistake.
And I do believe that was under Trump and not Biden.
I would also say that when we look at the federal budget and the deficits, I don't think you can honestly say that looking at those numbers, that it is the Democrats that are vastly overspending and the Republicans that are not.
That's another one of these myths that when you actually look at the numbers, it's just not actually how it works out.
And I think when it comes to inflation, I do know enough to know that it's more complicated than being able to blame one president or another.
I mean, I think it's really smart and honest and true to say that is a problem.
It's impacting real people.
And there are economic policies that can be helping the population when there's inflation.
And I don't know that I see that the Democrat or Republicans are better or worse on those things.
Well, fair enough.
You know, one other issue that I know Pogo is a leader on is really taking a fine...
Tooth comb to what the inspector generals are all doing.
Each agency, for the viewers who do not know this, has its own kind of quasi-independent watchdog to kind of help police waste, fraud, and abuse.
And they produce reports that then become recommendations to the public and to prosecutors for how to clean up certain problems at each agency.
A lot of people don't pay attention to what each IG is doing.
I know your group is doing it.
One thing that really Blew my mind.
I feel it is one of the most important historical records of the 20-year American war in Afghanistan are the Special Inspector General John Sopko's reports on the Afghanistan war.
If you just want to see kind of a cathedral to government waste, fraud, and abuse, it's these reports on the Afghanistan war.
I mean, billions of dollars to highways that went nowhere, to schools that were half built, to, you know, poorly trained Afghan...
Police and military that were completely unprepared to take on the job of governing that society.
I mean, it's a laundry list of hundreds, if not thousands, of failed and fraudulent programs, money stolen by both Afghans and American and European contractors.
It's exhausting to look at.
And I look at this, and I have two questions for you.
One, why don't we apply the same kind of rigor and aggressive nature of the special Special Inspector General of Afghanistan and apply it back to the Pentagon and other parts of the US government.
We know we have these investigative and audit related skills.
And second, are you concerned that we have a similar kind of mountain of fraud in Ukraine where the Biden administration initially opposed?
A similar Special Inspector General for Ukraine.
Now there is one, but it's not clear if it's really rooting out fraud in the same way that the Afghanistan investigation had.
Maybe I'm not giving it enough time.
It's relatively new.
But wanted to get your perspective on those issues.
I think it's great to call out the fantastic work that John did.
And not only is it a cathedral to waste and fraud, but it's also a cathedral to really good investigations by NIG, who did a fantastic job.
of alerting the public and the Congress to problems.
It's not his fault that they weren't acting on his findings.
I will say that I only wish every IG were as good as John Sopko were.
They have much bigger offices, the agency IGs, than he has.
So it's not as though he had more resources than they do.
So I would say he does fantastic work.
The difference with his special IG function was that it was a whole-of-government approach.
It wasn't just what is one agency spending and how is that program working.
It was looking across the agencies, which in something like a contingency zone, which is what they call war zones, is much more valuable to have a sense of how are the pieces all fitting together.
The equivalent when it comes to Ukraine is still assuming that the Pentagon IG is the lead IG. They're working with other IGs like the State Department and AID. But it's not a special IG with that whole of government approach.
So I don't anticipate that were they all actually to be currently still active with Senate confirmed heads that they would have the same success that he would.
I know for a fact it's not going to happen now because they were all fired at the beginning of the Trump administration.
And I'll say that's one of the great strengths of the inspector general system had been that they had a level of independence from a president that they felt empowered to raise concerns, to raise the bad news that an agency doesn't want.
The public or a president to know.
They've all been fired now, except two.
And I think in some ways the fact that he explicitly didn't fire the two IGs that he fairly or not perceives were politically valuable to him.
In the case of the Justice Department's Inspector General, he said, well, I didn't fire Horowitz because I really liked his report that he did about Comey.
That's not a reason why you should keep an inspector general.
And of course, the DHS inspector general, Kafari, has a long line.
We have been arguing he's maybe the worst inspector general in my life's experience working in this.
And he was politically advantageous to the president as well.
So those offices have now been told we need to just bring up the good news that's going to make the president happy or we're going to get fired.
So I think unless we are Collectively successful demonstrating that they were illegally fired.
I think those offices are largely made toothless.
And just one final question.
I know Pogo has, I don't know if it's a lawsuit or a challenge to Doge for some of their records, for some of the personnel that's working with Doge.
I wanted to ask if you could just explain that whole challenge to Doge.
And then is there any kind of prospect for collaborative?
Accountability, because too often these efforts become partisan affairs where one side is accusing the other, where there is certainly a public interest here.
There is an opportunity for broad-minded reform.
Do you see it, and what are your recommendations to Doge in that respect?
So our suit is simply around transparency, that they were originally designated, and the president has changed how he describes whether Doge is Is it an advisor to the President in the White House or is it the different circumstances that it exists?
And the reason that matters is that the Presidential Records Act allows an office within the White House to not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act for 12 years.
And what we're arguing is, given the work that they're doing, they're acting as an agency.
And that means the Presidential Records Act does not apply.
It's the Federal Records Act, which does allow FOIA or the Freedom of Information Act.
And so that is what our lawsuit is, is to say, you are operating, you are not, they want to have the PRA, Presidential Records Act, apply.
And we're saying, no, that's not what applies.
So there's a lot of other organizations that have filed FOIA lawsuits.
And they're essentially, I think, going to have to wait until our case makes it up to demonstrate that actually FOIA should apply because of that particular law.
So that's that's what we're doing.
So we're not it's not on the merits of their work, just to make sure that we can we collectively can see what it is that they're doing.
And I absolutely want and continue to hope that, you know, this is we have been nonpartisan from our origins and waste is one of the places where there has always been an alignment between the parties.
But as you've pointed out, one person's waste is not the same as another's.
But I did take it as a great opportunity for us to be able to testify before Marjorie Taylor Greene's committee and say, yes, these are the places.
We want to look at them.
And we have not at all been...
We're not encouraged by what Doge has done yet.
We did submit suggestions of places where they should be looking and we're not hearing back from them.
But we'll sit down with anyone and say, this is what you should be doing.
And I hope maybe at some point soon they learn their lesson that the way they're going about things is likely illegal and so far kind of incompetent.
And we have a roadmap that could help them be successful if they wanted to.
Okay, great.
Well, Danielle, thank you again for your time and for all the work that you do.
