USAID Funds Ended up at BLM (and You Might Not Believe Where Else)

One rule of money is that money is fungible. Another rule of money — and this one is Washington's favorite — is that fungibility is the opposite of transparency. If you have $100 and I give you $20 and you spend $20 on candy, did I give you $20 for candy? Well, no. Not directly. But you started with $100, you still have $100, and you have $20 worth of candy.

If anybody asks, I can say with a straight face that I did not give you $20 to blow on delicious Twix. You're going to share one of those, right?

Let's begin today's tale with the Tides Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit and a major recipient of George Soros's largess via his Open Society Foundation. "Open" in the case of OSF follows the "fungibility is the opposite of transparency" rule. So, not very open at all. Tides and OSF both receive money via USAID. Kyle Becker estimates that USAID gave OSF between $24 and $27 million in recent years.

I set ChatGPT loose on the problem, hoping it would be able to collate more sources than I ever could, but I was also prepared for its leftwing bias to shine through. Here's what it told me: "Determining the exact amount of funding that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided to the Tides Foundation is challenging due to the complex nature of grant distributions and the lack of publicly detailed records. The Tides Foundation often acts as an intermediary, redistributing funds to various initiatives and organizations, which can obscure the original sources of funding."

Fungibility is the opposite of transparency, and please pass the Twix.

It was a "gotta go pop some more corn" moment when I learned today that Tides and BLM are in a legal dispute over funding. In its lawsuit against Tides, BLM claims that "during the time Tides served as its fiscal sponsor, Tides 'refused to honor its promises and continues to commandeer BLM GNF’s donation' rather than following through on the charity’s expectations that Tides would direct donations based on BLM GNF’s requests."

BLM wanted $33 million. Apparently, they only got around $12 million. So we have that going for us, which is nice. What isn't so nice is that even a single taxpayer dollar goes to fund the political machinations of George Soros, one of the richest men in the world.

In 2022 alone, Tides took in more than $1.6 billion and distributed about $1.3 billion. So, a few million here and there to BLM is practically pocket change. But through the obfuscatory magic of fungibility, it's safe to conclude that BLM enjoyed more than a few Twix at taxpayer expense.

Meanwhile, the DOGE boys have Democrats spewing nonsense even more nonsensical than usual. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif., SSR) admitted on CNBC's Squawk Box Thursday that DOGE is "likely to find awful examples of wasteful spending" and that he's "sure they can legitimately offer transparency and sunlight to the American people."

"Just come to Congress, show us what you’re finding, and then force up or down votes,” Khanna suggested. “And if Ro Khanna still votes for those [sic] wasteful spending, I’ll have to answer back home.”

It was immediately following Khanna's modified limited hangout that the flailing began.

"Part of the issue Khanna has with Musk’s approach is that he appears to be making decisions without the voice of Congress," IJR reported, "with Khanna stating that Musk can’t just 'stop the payments or make these decisions unilaterally.'"

Did you catch that? It would be against the will of Congress for DOGE to stop Treasury payments that were never approved by Congress.

The flop sweat is glossy and rank and glorious.

And Another Thing: I was kidding in the headline where it says, "You Might Not Believe Where Else." Because, let's face it, after maybe two weeks of DOGE going through USAID's books, you'd do little more than yawn if they revealed that USAID had been paying for Mexican cat juggling.

Here's where we are in our argument with the Left over using taxpayer dollars to fund private groups that are only marginally non-partisan (if that).

Taxpayer: I would never have given my money to a group like [BLANK] that espouses things I don't believe in.

Lefty: That's why they need money from the government.

Taxpayer: But Congress didn't even approve it. How can you do that?

Lefty: [sounding very earnest] Democracy.

It's madness. It's got to stop — and are you going to eat all those Twix?

I already linked to it, but I can't mention Mexican cat juggling without posting the clip — so here you go.