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April 1, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
21:31
Trump Goes To War On The Institute Of Peace (But It's A Good Thing!)

President Trump has gutted the US government funded US Department of Peace after a scuffle between staff members and Elon Musk's Department of Government Oversight, making it more likely that the misnamed government funded "NGO" will follow USAID into the dustbin of history. Also today, a US judge has blocked Trump from firing CIA's DEI staff.

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Uncertain Reform Ahead 00:14:48
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Good.
We'll sort out some problems in the country and give some advice.
Oh, no, we don't give advice, really.
We'll bring some good news today.
We say things that sometimes we say a little prayer.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I want to talk a little bit about, you know, sounds like a good move, but we better be sure we're doing the right thing.
Trump wants to get rid of, you know, some employees at the Institute of Peace.
Well, I'm for peace.
And, you know, we've been talking about trying to figure out exactly what Trump's position is, you know, when we're looking at Yemen and Iran and these other places in the Middle East.
So maybe this will help us figure this out.
But he wants to fire somebody from the Institute of Peace.
Well, maybe this Institute of Peace really isn't for peace.
Maybe they're for robbing the taxpayers.
And if that's the case, that's a different story.
So I think that's where we lead.
This sounds like the Institute of Peace was another gimmick and another thing buried into the bureaucracy where people who have nothing to contribute to society, to the taxpayers, or to the issue of peace.
Matter of fact, their activities, sometimes I think they're doing exactly the opposite.
They're challenging the whole issue of peace and what they're doing and they're interfering.
And there's a lot of personality involved in doing the opposite.
So that's in the news, but it's in the court now.
Matter of fact, that was why it was called to attention because he fired them and Musk.
They say, oh, well, that raises a lot of controversy.
But a judge ruled differently.
So they're in the middle and middle of this.
And this, I think the issue is important.
The numbers are not overwhelming, but a lot of this type of activity is going on.
You know, the people who are very sincere in the administration, who believe that the government is overly bloated, want to fire people and get rid of them and change it.
And there's technicalities that they have to dwell on.
And then there are created technicalities that the people who don't want it to occur come up with these arguments.
And the one thing I noticed is when all these arguments are back and forth, what can Musk do and Trump do?
What can the Congress do?
What can the regulators do?
It turns out that they never talk about, is this whole mess constitutional?
Should we even be involved in this type of stuff?
Maybe this Institute of Peace should be just abolished for one reason.
It's unconstitutional.
It doesn't make any sense.
It has nothing to do with national security and prove the point.
But that's not where we are right now.
We're going to be arguing about whether or not the president can fire people at the Department of Peace.
But it seems to me that his instincts are correct on this one, that I would probably be supporting this and cheering him on.
Yeah, no, you can put on that first clip.
So this is what's he's been, it's been in the crosshairs for a few weeks now, the Institute of Peace.
And here now, what he did over the weekend on Friday is he fired hundreds of the employees.
And this is brought to us by Zero Hedge via Headline USA.
The Trump administration has fired nearly half the bureaucrats at the obscure and infamously named U.S. Institute of Peace as part of Doge's effort to cut government waste and reduce the size of government.
Now, I would say, Dr. Paul, this is one of the good news stories.
We've been hitting Trump a little hard this last week or so because it seems to be morphing into George W. Bush.
But this is one of the good things.
And this is this along with USAID.
I mean, all they needed to do was go in there and shine the light on what these groups are doing.
And most of America will say, I don't want any part of that.
And so that's what we're doing, what they're doing with this.
They're essentially gutting it.
They also fired most of the board members.
So they basically took back control of this institute.
Now, this was started in 1984 under the Reagan administration.
I'm sure that President Reagan had the best of intention when he started it.
However, as all of these bureaucracies over time, it becomes something the opposite of what it was.
You know, it becomes a home for retired neocon politicians and this and that and the other.
So there are a lot of problems within, and I'll go through a few of them, but I will just say sort of in a broad way, it's a very, very good thing.
And I hope that this part of the administration continues and keeps growing, getting rid of these bureaucracies.
So I have a couple of clips now.
This is Mario Naufall.
If you do this next post on X, and here's what he wrote about it.
Elon, and this is interesting controversy, Dr. Paul.
And I would have been interesting to get there that people from Doge were trying to get into the U.S. Institute for Peace, and they were blocking their way.
They called the cops to try to keep Doge out.
They were not successful.
So here's what Elon said.
The U.S. Institute of Peace tried to delete Taliban funding records.
Doge recovered it.
Elon says the U.S. Institute of Peace deleted a terabyte of financial data linking them to funding Taliban and Iraqi leadership.
But Doge wasn't fooled.
According to Elon, the agency attempted to scrub the records, but Doge engineers recovered the entire archive thanks to, quote, their shocking incompetence with tech.
Doesn't surprise me, Dr. Paul.
The data reportedly includes detailed financial transfers tied to the groups in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No comment from the agency.
Now, I would say this may be less of a smoking gun.
As bad as they are, I seriously doubt that throughout the Afghanistan war, they were funding the Taliban.
What they were doing was funding these ridiculous training programs and elaborate trips for people and this sort of thing.
So I think that sounds a little bit more nefarious than it was.
I think probably at best, it was a massive waste of money.
Excuse me.
We live with a massive bureaucracy, whether it's made up by the people that Congress creates, the executive branch, the whole works.
But you touched on the real issue and the benefit of what's going on and trying to find this inefficiency of government and doing something about it and trying to fire people, which is difficult.
But really the issue is letting the people know, because most people do know now about USAID and the horrors.
I bet if we did a polling on that, I'll bet you enough people would say, get rid of it.
Why are we doing this?
Probably conservatives and liberals.
Well, it'd be some liberals.
Probably what that is.
But no, it's the information that's coming out.
And because we don't even know how the final opinion is going to be even under USAID.
Maybe they will sneak it in someplace else and rename it or who knows what.
And somebody might not want to fight on their hands again and give up on it.
So that I think has to continue.
This is very, very important.
But it's also interesting to see how this pans out, whether or not the executive branch of government has this authority.
It seems to me like one isolated judge should have quite this much authority to override what the president wants to do.
Let's go ahead and skip one clip and go to the Department of Government Efficiency post on X, because this is where it gets a little bit interesting, Dr. Paul.
There's a little more than meets the eye to the U.S. Institute for Peace.
Now, here's what they wrote.
Each year, the U.S. Institute for Peace receives $55 million in congressional, i.e. taxpayer funds.
Now, this is really fascinating.
Prior management would sweep excess funds into its private endowment with zero congressional oversight.
In the past 10 years, U.S. Institute for Peace has transferred $13 million to its private endowment, mainly used for private events and travel.
Now, here are some of the contract services.
So essentially, if you go ahead, skip ahead to the next one.
I'm going to go into that in a second.
I just want to show you, Dr. Paul, you may have seen this.
In my opinion, this is one of the most prime pieces of real estate in Washington, D.C.
This is the new building.
I forget when it opened about 10, 15 years ago-ish.
Massive building.
I can only imagine how many hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to build this right there.
Waterside view, foggy bottom, really prime, prime, prime real estate.
But back to this whole thing, Dr. Paul, of this endowment versus the funding.
Go to the next one.
Now, this is fascinating.
I did not know this.
But someone called Amuse on X wrote an excellent article that I highly recommend.
But look what they, it's titled The Agency That Isn't How USIP's Private Face Shields It From Democratic Oversight.
Now, I'm not going to go into the weeds too much, Dr. Paul, but go to that next clip because this is really where the story gets a little bit interesting and weird.
So the USIP is on the left.
That is federally funded.
All of those things with the red X are things it is not allowed to do.
It can't accept private donations.
It can't accept foreign government money.
It can't accept foreign capital construction.
It can't accept awards and medals and plaques, et cetera, et cetera, investment funds long-term.
All of these things it can't accept.
So what they did, Dr. Paul, is they created an endowment, which is virtually the same thing as USIP.
It's simply a different legal terminology.
And look, all of a sudden, all of those green spaces open up.
It can accept private donations.
It can fund all of these different things that it has not been allowed.
And even indirectly, if you read this article, it can accept foreign government money.
So it's completely now open to manipulation.
So it's really just like the National Endowment for Democracy, where they have the best of both worlds.
They have all the money that's stolen from us, but zero oversight.
And that's the real scandal, I think, at USIP.
You know, I spent a lot of time in politics dealing with audits, especially the one.
I think it has something to do with the Fed because everything comes from the Fed.
That's the counterfeiter.
And then also right up close to the Fed is the Pentagon.
You can't get too much in that, but you might, or the CIA, you know, you never know all these details.
So this is interesting because this even makes it look even worse.
It's so sophisticated and so trickly, so built in with lies.
I wonder if there is any attempt to make audits.
Obviously, if they did, they did it in secret because the people would be furious with this.
It's so bad.
So like we said at the beginning of this, this is the information that's so important for the people to know because it might wake up a few people, you know, and say, hey, enough is enough.
And that's the one thing that I think is happening right now.
People aren't going to continue to put up with this, but what's up for grabs is what's going to fill the vacuum.
You know, you break these units up and fire a couple people, but will everybody get disappear?
Or do they have how many judges are out there still waiting for their day in the sun?
You know, that's where the real problem is.
And I think the Soros types have planned very well on how they can be prepared.
And that certainly came up on all the shenanigans that went on in the campaign for four years against Trump.
I mean, they had a lot of friends in the judicial system.
So maybe they have a lot of friends in the accounting system too.
Yeah.
Well, I think another benefit of what's happening, and this is from a philosophical perspective, you know, they're going to save a few million dollars a year.
But when you're looking at a $37 trillion debt, it's kind of a drop in the bucket.
But I think the real service it does, especially to our philosophy, is it really hammers home to the average American how corrupt Washington, D.C. is, how completely cavalier they are with the hard-earned money that Americans are forced to pay.
They're using for ridiculous buildings.
They should have stayed in a hut because they probably would have been able to hide, but that big, huge building just is a big, you know, that just shows the hubris that they have.
I'll bet there hasn't been many of these dollars that we've talked about in the last year or six months or whatever that wouldn't fall into the category of not being constitutional in the first place.
And I think every time they pull one of these up, I would always want to add this.
And besides, there is no constitutional authority for this thing to be like the Department of Education.
They had no authority whatsoever.
Article 1, Section A and the 10th Amendment, they said they're not supposed to be doing that.
So I would like to see that crowned and be the big thing.
But in the meantime, let's clean up the corruption.
And this is what it is.
It is corruption because there probably are some sincere people trying to do their job.
But, you know, it's the deciders.
It's the people who are running these shows.
That's who makes these trips and enjoy the largesse of the money they put away in a foundation.
Yeah, and I think this also gives us more ammo in the argument between to reform a rescission.
Cleaning Up Agency Corruption 00:05:46
Do we try to reform these agencies or do we just completely knock them out?
And I think we fall on the side of you have to just cut them out.
And I think seeing the ugliness of what this is all about bolsters our argument.
Well, let's move ahead.
We want to cover another related topic.
And this is another good news thing.
But if you go ahead to that CIA one, this is from Politico today.
And this is pretty annoying, Dr. Paul.
Judge blocks Trump administration from firing CIA and Office of Department of National Intelligence staffers who worked on DEI.
Trump was elected, obviously, to get rid of this DEI stuff.
He gets elected.
He gets the mandate of the people.
goes into executive agencies, agencies within the executive branch of government, and tries to do what he promised the American people.
And you have activist judges saying, you can't do that.
You can't fire these people.
It's pretty amazing.
Yes.
And, you know, the CIA is involved.
And the one thing about the CIA, they're not going to give up easy.
There's always going to be, and it's bipartisan so often.
They're making a little headway with JFK, but I still don't think that we've heard every word about the JFK.
Now it's the media that's withholding the information on this assassination.
But in this whole thing, as far as I'm concerned, in my mind and my understanding, the CIA and their allies was started in the 60s.
And that's when I think there was a rather secret coup where the security agencies took over, the CIA in particular.
That's why I think this in the Pentagon will be right close to them.
We're never going to know exactly how all those funds are doing.
And ironically, when was the last time they really had a thorough or passed an audit in the Pentagon?
Once again, people have to wake up because they can't just say, you know, my bread costs too much.
It is true, but you better know why your bread costs too much and why jobs go overseas and why people have bad policies to compensate for inflation and devaluation of the currency because they come up with schemes that don't work.
They've tried them forever and they want to distract from the whole thing that there's a lot of people who say this is just be quiet.
We get our benefits.
What do you mean?
Start with cutting off Social Security?
And oh no, on and on it goes because I just don't think we're making progress.
There's knowledge there, but I think we have a ways to go to know exactly what to happen and what should replace this monstrosity out there of the bureaucracy.
And the bureaucracy, the size of the bureaucracy, to me is a threat to our liberty.
I don't make it any more complicated than that.
Yeah.
And the idea that you can't fire these DEI, the diversity, equity, and all this stuff, you can't get rid of these people is astonishing.
That's horrible.
How can a judge come in there and tell Trump, no, you can't fire these diversity people in the CIA of all places?
You know, they're supposed to be working on national security, not having Rainbow Flag Month or whatever they do there.
You know, it's astonishing.
So I don't know what's going to happen with these activist judges who are trying to block firing of these people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's going to be very, very tough.
But at least they're taking a step in the right direction.
And we wouldn't, we didn't have, I didn't, I think the Democrats have had a chance to do something.
Biden, didn't he say some nice things about cleaning up the inefficiency of government?
Yeah.
It didn't seem to happen.
He did the opposite.
What a joke.
Well, I'm going to close down today, Dr. Paul, by thanking our viewers for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
Please hit that like button or thumbs up button wherever you're watching and share the show with your friends if you don't mind.
Help us get more eyes on what we're trying to put out, which is not the Institute for Peace, but the Institute for Peace and Prosperity doesn't go hand in hand.
So thanks a lot.
And over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
Yeah, another institute.
And the more the better.
But I try to advise anybody that comes close to me or works for me or asks for an opinion, be very careful because the heading of any of these, whether it's a piece of legislation or whether it's a new institute or a new program, it's very deceiving.
Everything that came to the House floor, you could be sure that if they were doing something for peace and prosperity, they were doing exactly the opposite.
And this is something that people finally do get cynical about it.
And the cynicism of the last hundred years, of course, was the cynicism of the Russian people who suffered from the monstrosity of communism because it was just the same thing.
And it was just overwhelming.
And yet that finally ended.
And what was so fortunate for the world was the Soviet system, the Soviet empire, the evil that it portrayed.
It ended, and we didn't have to have an exchange of weapons.
And here we are talking about who's having the weapons and how do we expand our empire, always looking for another fight.
So I think that is the real danger.
And that is why the policies that we have, the policy of non-interventionism across the board in our personalized way we get along with people, the way we deal in economics, the way we do religious values, the whole work should be voluntary.
Desperately Need Restatement 00:00:45
Just think of everything that we did.
The two parties had to do things with a voluntary agreement and never deliver the decision-making power to some government that turns it over to a secret bureaucracy that's funded by an able system of monetary counterfeiting.
And that is a system that's wearing out.
It's going to end.
So we have this wonderful opportunity to now fill the vacuum out there because the vacuum has been studied and looked at for hundreds of years.
Our founders knew about it.
But right now, we desperately need the restatement of what a free society would be like.
I want to thank all of you for turning in today to deliver the report.
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