Bob Onder: NGOs Running As ‘Money Laundering Operations’ Draining Taxpayer Dollars

5 months ago

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Rep. Bob Onder (R-MO) criticized the use of taxpayer funds for non-governmental organizations’ campaigns.

Transcript

00:00recognize Dr. Onder from Missouri. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to all the witnesses for

00:05being here today. First, Mr. Gonzalez, again, you work for the Heritage Foundation. Does the

00:13Heritage Foundation receive any federal government money? Zero. Any USAID money? Zero. Okay, and any

00:22of these other organizations that receive any grants from the Vera Foundation, which does

00:28receive federal government money? No. I think my Democrat colleagues missed the point of today's

00:34hearing. Yeah. George Soros has every business to spend his own money, however he sees fit, as does

00:42Charles Koch, as does Elon Musk. The point is, we are talking about taxpayers' money here today,

00:51and the idea that these left-wing so-called NGOs, I think one of you said, call them BGOs,

00:59basically government organizations. Was that you, Mr. Walther? They're just, basically, they're acting

01:05as money laundering operations from our pockets, my taxpayers who I represent in Missouri, to these

01:15leftist causes. That is antithetical to a democratic republic like we work at, we live in, we think we

01:23live in. Mr. Walther, you know, during President Trump's first few weeks in office, Doge identified

01:30federal funding that was not being used as Congress intended. Many times I heard my Democrat colleagues

01:35say, well, it was appropriated, so, you know, this NGO or this government agency has a right to it.

01:42One egregious example was federal funding of $1.3 million to the NIH's Institute of Nursing Research,

01:52which was awarded to a non-profit to partner with Girl2Girl to text minors sex education content,

02:01including how to have sex with other minor girls. Girl2Girl's website encouraged girls not to tell

02:08their parents that they're taking part in this research. The federal government, I mean, the federal

02:13government should not be in this business of doing research that parents would disapprove of.

02:20Going forward, we need to ensure that agencies are complying with existing transparency requirements.

02:27Now, this NIH grant was identified through usspending.gov, but most of Doge's work

02:33was uncovering grant misuse that was not publicly reported. USAspending.gov was created by Congress

02:41through the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which required OMB and

02:47Treasury to coordinate with federal agencies to publicly post federal awards on a publicly searchable

02:56website. But a 2023 GAO report found that 49 of 52 federal agencies didn't report data to usaspending.gov,

03:07and some of the agencies reported COVID spending that didn't match their annual financial reports.

03:13Mr. Walter, would you say that the current version of usaspending.gov is compliant with this law?

03:20No. As you point out, there seems to be evidence that it hasn't. Plus, there's a huge thing that needs

03:24to be done. The grants are not listed by the grantee's EIN number, their tax ID number,

03:31which would make it enormously simpler to find what you're looking for.

03:35Right. So you mentioned your website, dogefiles.org.

03:41Yes.

03:41I imagine it's fair for me to say that there are things in dogefiles.org that I couldn't find on USA.

03:50Well, we used USA Spending to get it, but believe me, it's a struggle to use it. It needs to be much

03:55better.

03:56It was not easy. Okay. What can we do on this committee to ensure that agencies under our

04:02jurisdiction are complying with existing transparency requirements?

04:06Well, I'm not aware of any accountability, right? So if I'm an agency and I don't do what I'm

04:11supposed to, who cares? What happens? If anybody even finds it out.

04:14Okay. How can we increase transparency and accounts for subawards and subcontracts? Is that part of the

04:22problem that it goes to, there's a contract, but then I think Mr. O'Neill maybe alluded to some of

04:29this, and then it goes to a contractor who then awards it to another subcontractor and the money

04:35cannot be followed?

04:38Yeah. There's a little bit of that sort of information on USA Spending, but absolutely not all of it. And

04:43some of the most notorious things in the last administration were, you know, some of the

04:46green slush funds that got created in the billions.

04:49Very good. Okay. Thank you very much for your testimony. I yield back.

Bob Onder: NGOs Running As ‘Money Laundering Operations’ Draining Taxpayer Dollars

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