News/Commentary

‘Likely an underestimate’: Over a BILLION of your taxpayer dollars went to foreign ‘adversaries’ for ‘pointless projects’

June 1, 2023 | | Print Article

The U.S. government has funneled over $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds to China and Russia over the past five years, according to a new report from Sen. Joni Ernst.

“With the help of the Congressional Research Service and Open the Books, I was able to determine that more than $490 million of taxpayer money was paid to organizations in China the last five years. That’s ten times more than GAO’s estimate!” she announced this week in a newsletter.

“Over $870 million was paid to entities in Russia during the same period! Together that adds up to more than $1.3 billion paid to our adversaries,” she added.

But even this is likely an underestimate since the amount of money “paid to institutions in China or Russia” evidently isn’t directly tracked.

For example, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has estimated that only $48 million has been funneled to China in the past five years.  That’s nearly 10 times less than the actual amount of $490 million, as Ernst noted in her newsletter.

Part of the problem, according to Ernst, is that the GAO neglected to factor in all the money that has been directed to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth Alliance, the “shady” group run by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s friend, Peter Daszak.

“A shady passthrough organization, EcoHealth Alliance, funneled nearly $2 million of U.S. taxpayer money to the state-run Chinese lab to pay for the dangerous experiments on bat coronaviruses which may have been the source of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Ernst noted in her newsletter.

“This included $1.1 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and another $600,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH),” she continued.

“It is gravely concerning that no one in Washington can actually account for millions sent to institutions in China for pointless projects, but I have the receipts,” Ernst told the New York Post.

“Already, we have seen EcoHealth hide the use of taxpayer dollars to fund research at the Wuhan Lab that may have unleashed the COVID-19 pandemic on the world,” she added.

So why are China and Russia getting this money anyway? Because of “pointless projects,” according to Ernst. In her newsletter, she specifically cited examples such as the U.S. government paying Russia “to put cats on a treadmill” and the U.S. government paying to buy puppy parts at Chinese wet markets.

Her study also “found the State Department handed nearly $58.7 million to China, and used nearly $100,000 of that sum to promote ‘gender equality’ awareness through a series of New Yorker magazine cartoons,” according to the Daily Mail.

The good news is Ernst is fighting back. On Wednesday she and Rep. Mike Gallagher introduced the Tracking Receipts to Adversarial Countries for the Knowledge of Spending (TRACKS) bill.

“Thanks to Senator Ernst’s work, we know the federal government has wasted more than one billion in US taxpayer dollars on our adversaries. This is crazy, but to make matters worse, this may only be the tip of the iceberg,” Gallagher said in a statement.

“The TRACKS Act brings badly needed transparency to how we spend federal dollars and will help us take steps to hold the government accountable and prevent taxpayers from supporting our adversaries,” he added.

Critics among the public meanwhile were apoplectic over the news that so much money has been given to America’s enemies instead of being used to bless the American people.

Look:

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Vivek Saxena
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