00:00The gentle lady's time has expired. I now recognize Mr. Cloud from Texas.
00:04Thank you, Chairwoman. And I think it's important at the outset to kind of level set on the language being used
00:09because there seems to be an intentional attempt at creating a smokescreen about what we're talking about today
00:17in order to confuse people. Indeed, the ranking member tried to equate private donations going to conservative organizations
00:24with taxpayer dollars going to leftist organizations, as if that was the same thing.
00:29And even as you talk about charitable NGOs, we're all for charitable NGOs.
00:33And a lot of what you're saying is true about the vast majority of NGOs.
00:36But there's 120,000 of them, as you mentioned, and not all of them are that wonderful.
00:42And to the point, Republicans historically, decades over decades, have far outpaced Democrats in their charitable giving.
00:50As a matter of fact, Scripture gives a definition of what charity is.
00:54Each of you should give exactly what you've decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion
00:59God loves a cheerful giver.
01:00We're all about charity, but charity isn't given at the strong-arm mandate of the federal government requiring taxpayers.
01:08That's not charity. That is taxes. That's a completely different thing.
01:13And so what we're going after today is taxpayer dollars going to NGOs that are doing bad work.
01:20Indeed, so many of these organizations do have a high percentage.
01:24I appreciate what you said, Mr. Walter. You call them basically government organizations.
01:29I've thought of them, in a sense, as quasi-government organizations.
01:32Many of these have been stood up, in a sense, because it removes, it adds one more layer away from accountability on the taxpayer dollars.
01:41For example, we had Secretary Mayorkas coming here claiming plausible deniability on much of the stuff that was happening at our border.
01:47Why? Because the dollars go to an NGO who's doing the work.
01:50And so if they're giving out Sodexo cards to illegal immigrants to incentivize them coming into the United States,
01:56you know, I don't know anything about that. It's an NGO doing that.
01:59And then when we send that through the UN as another kind of filter away from accountability, it muddies the waters even more.
02:07And so as the Department of Government Efficiency and the DOGE subcommittee here,
02:13we're working to bring transparency to this process.
02:16One of the things I wanted to mention was Endeavors.
02:19Endeavors was stood up as part of this legal immigration scheme that,
02:26and this entire industry that was created.
02:28Endeavors, I think, approximately had maybe a $40 million operating budget.
02:33And you had a gentleman by the name of Lorenzen Strait who was on the Biden Transition Committee who suddenly found himself on the Endeavors board.
02:45And normally when a government puts out, you know, they put out a request for proposal.
02:51And then you're supposed to get multiple sources.
02:53Here, the government didn't even put out a request for proposal.
02:56He came and presented a proposal and got a $530 million contract from the federal government,
03:06followed by an $87 million contract.
03:08So far more, 90 percent or more of the income was coming from the federal government.
03:15To me, this ceases to be an NGO.
03:17Mr. Walter, you spoke to that.
03:19Could you narrow down what we're talking about here when we talk about these NGOs that are,
03:24how many are there that are like this, is, you know, where much of their income is from taxpayer dollars?
03:33Shockingly, there are at least 35,000 NGOs that receive most of their money from government.
03:39And thank you, by the way, for mentioning that, yes, the ranking member attacked a charity that supports my organization.
03:47So I don't understand why Ms. Yentelot didn't upbraid her for that.
03:50Well, one of the things that Doge is uncovering, it's shocking that this is,
03:59you would think that this would be an issue across the lines,
04:03that you have a lack of transparency on taxpayer dollars.
04:06But it would seem that many on the left are content with the fact that this is a feature of the system,
04:10not a bug of the system.
04:12We're working to get that out.
04:13Mr. Krikorian, I wanted to see if you could bring light as to how this NGO apparatus helped enable cartels to profit
04:21and also helped to incentivize illegal immigration into our country.
04:26The, what the nonprofits did and the UN, again, funded in part by the U.S. government,
04:33was make it possible for people to move through.
04:36Because these are people without, don't have a lot of money anyway.
04:39And so by providing them cash, literally envelopes of cash sometimes,
04:44as well as cash cards, food, supplies, et cetera,
04:48they made it possible for people to move.
04:51And who were the smugglers making money off of this?
04:54Many of them were actually drug smuggling organizations,
04:57who either just collected a toll,
05:00or in some cases, as we saw in Colombia,
05:02were integrally part of the smuggling operation.
05:05So this was, they were clearly working with these cartel and smuggling organizations,
05:12which were enriched by this flow of illegal immigration.
05:18The gentleman's time has expired.
05:20I now recognize Mr. Lynch from Massachusetts for five minutes.
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