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President Donald Trump and his administration have certainly started rooting out what they see as government waste. Elon Musk's Doge, for instance, has been scouring various agencies for funds they deem to be useless or excessive. In fact, the Trump Administration is currently in a legal battle over a federal funding freeze; a federal judge set a 5-day deadline for Trump to unfreeze USAID funding Friday, for instance. Unfortunately for the Trump Administration, there also appears to be significant amounts of funding the Biden Administration approved at the last second.
Journalist Matt Taibbi has a new piece titled “The EPA’s Incredible $20 Billion Caper Explained,” where he breaks down just such an instance. He starts off by alluding to a statement from Trump’s EPA Chief, Lee Zeldin: “Roughly $20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA. This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history, and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight,” Taibbi writes in his piece. “I get the controversy over the means of the incoming administration’s cuts, but even I’m shocked at how bottomless the waste problem appears to be and how valiantly the entire machinery of Washington is rallying to the cause of budget.”
Joining us now to discuss is Matt Taibbi. Welcome back to Rising.
Thanks for having me, Robbie.
Yeah, it’s always great to have you on the program. Um, you know, so much of this is, I think, unsurprising. You know, of course, Biden’s Administration tries to tie Trump’s administration’s hand by approving at the last minute a number of things that they’re now trying to unwind. Um, what did you make of of what Lee Zeldin was saying there?
So it’s a fascinating little twist to the whole thing because there there is a legitimate controversy over whether or not the president has the discretion to just cut things or not spend things that are obligated by Congress. I think the Constitution is—there’s sort of a gray area there—but I think there’s a real legal argument to be made. But in advance of that, the EPA essentially moved $20 billion—of money that was allocated as part of the Inflation Reduction Act and not having a place to actually send it yet—they just moved it to a designated financial agent, which was Citibank, kind of in purgatory, specifically so that they couldn’t—so that the Trump Administration couldn’t touch it. So they were, in advance, kind of getting around this whole Doge problem, which is a fascinating thing. It—and for me it was interesting because I had covered a very similar story decades ago in Yeltsin’s Russia involving a thing called “authorized banks.” So it’s a unique thing that they’re doing. And we’re seeing, you know, for instance, with USAID, with all this spending on all sorts of programs that the American people have no knowledge of—that the executive, the leader of the of the the branch that is has all the agencies that allocate this funding—has no knowledge of. You know, some of these things are, of course, in legitimate national security interest or were clearly designated by Congress for these purposes. Um, others are, I think, a bit harder to justify, or than it’s like, why is this agency doing it? I’m still struggling to understand why, for instance, like research funding in Wuhan, China, was going through USAID in addition to the National Institutes of Health. Like, why isn’t that all under the same agency? Um, you know, but of course, canceling it all or firing huge numbers of people, and then they have to invite other people back to work—that, you know, looks crazy and chaotic. And I wish they would do it maybe, maybe a different way. But of course, we’ve had, you know, for decades, people—so many Republicans come into Washington, say, “We’re going to cut funding, we’re going to reduce the size of government,” and they do nothing. In fact, they grow government. So it’s—we, I mean, we’ve never seen this level of effort actually put toward what Republicans have promised they’re going to do my entire lifetime.
Yeah, and I think you’re accurately getting at the dilemma here, which is that we we have had politicians come into office and promise to cut the budget, but instantaneously they slide into the same old patterns, and ultimately you end up getting a bigger budget in the end. Um, even under Trump that happened, you know, frankly, with the, you know, with the Department of Defense. He he gave them record increases. Uh, and what you’re talking about where you’re unable to even find uh who the contractor is or who who’s actually doing the work—remember this—that’s a systemic problem. You know, the Department of Defense has been unable to be audited for decades now. They they literally cannot do that job. So so it’s a serious problem. There’s just money flying out the door, and this EPA story is is kind of a microcosm of all of them—wra into one—because it’s it’s $20 billion that was earmarked for a general uh project to distribute community uh climate research uh but they haven’t really even found the projects yet or even been pitched that. It’s it’s—they’re just moving the money to an area where they will eventually kickstart programs, which is as big as you can possibly get, I think, for that amount of money.
Yeah, Matt, I’m not familiar with the EPA program or the budget piece that you’re talking about there, but I am aware that the Biden Administration, much like many other administrations before it, did a lot of pushing out of resources in those final weeks in office. And I guess the fundamental question is, is that always wrong, or is that something that is okay under certain circumstances? There’s that old saying, right, that you’re president until you’re not. So every moment that you’re in office you’re doing the work of the taxpayers and you’re doing the uh carrying out the vision that you have for your Administration. I mean, I guess that the question is what sort of parameters should you really have here?
Yeah, I don’t know. I think I think they’re difficult questions. I I I would argue that specifically moving the money out just so that it can’t be unspent, um, that gets a little difficult. Uh, my understanding, talking just on back around to some folks uh about this, is that there might ultimately ultimately be a legal question here about the intent of the transaction. It’s not—the transaction itself is clearly legal. And as you say, uh, this is done kind of routinely in—in other words, at the end of the year, spending all the money that you need to, among other things, because some departments depend on um amounts of money spent to calculate the projections for their coming budget. So if you don’t spend at the end of a fiscal year, you’re going to have a lower budget the next year. So this happens sort of routinely, but in this case, you know, they had this weird video from Project Veritas where you have a guy who’s sitting there drinking a cocktail talking about how, “Oh, we got to toss these gold bars off the deck of the Titanic,” um, you know, so that the before the Trump Administration comes in. I think that might be looked at differently, both ethically and legally, than simply rushing to spend uh money so so that it isn’t um wasted, right, uh in the end. So so that the program survives—that that feels a little different to me.
Before we let you go, Matt, just want to quickly get your thoughts on—what we’ve been talking about quite a lot on Rising last 48 hours, and I I know I saw you commenting on it on X as well—this kind of really tremendous uh exposé on a German uh censorship uh efforts, or police being sent to people’s homes. 60 Minutes doing a story on this, a conversation with German prosecutors um describing their efforts to actually uh arrest people or at least confiscate their electronics for um sharing hate speech or even just insults of politicians online. It was pretty eye-opening uh uh for me. Uh, what did you make of that?
It was amazing. Obviously, I’ve spent years now working on this exact issue, and one of the things I’ve been trying to raise awareness about is just exactly how crazy it’s gotten overseas. Uh, the specific law in Germany is called NSDG, um, the Network Enforcement Act, but there’s also a superseding law called the Digital Services Act. There are similar laws in the UK. And in Germany, they will send six armed people to your door to uh burst in and collect your electronics—your your phone, your your laptop and other items—for things as silly as calling somebody like a weenie, basically. Um, you know, there’s some other things that are more like hate speech offenses, but even that are—it’s all stuff that we would consider protected speech here in the United States. And 60 Minutes did a did a feature which seemed to be very admiring of this program, and uh I I think it kind of landed like a lead balloon. It was—it felt crazy to me. It felt like propaganda for that kind of thing.
Indeed. Matt Taibbi, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.
Thank you. Have a good day. Next up, Jen Psaki is blasting the Democrats. We’ll discuss. Stay tuned. [Music]