How Trump Is Decimating the Left’s Patronage Networks

President Donald Trump has launched a political counterrevolution in the early days of his second presidency. One of the most profound ways he’s doing this is by effectively cutting off the Left’s massive, government-funded patronage networks. 

What’s making Trump’s moves so effective is that many of these networks are based on government functions that long ago either waned in usefulness or have completely abandoned their purpose. 

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin appeared on One America News Wednesday and explained how the Left has insidiously transformed the federal government into a Democratic Party funding apparatus. 

Zeldin explained how the EPA under the Biden administration was used as a slush fund to give money to activists. 

“The EPA was absolutely being used to push out this green slush fund to their friends,” Zeldin said. “By design, the director of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund leaves one of these NGOs, goes to work for the Biden administration to design this whole setup, and then sees his former employer get $5 billion.” 

Zeldin said that this scheme applied to contracts, large and small, to both green nongovernmental organization executives and to low-level activists. The EPA has been acting as a conduit to transfer huge amounts of taxpayer money to the Left’s base. 

“Are we providing clean air, land, and water?” Zeldin asked rhetorically. “This wasn’t money spent toward remediating environmental issues. This was money going through their friends.” 

Indeed, it was. Zeldin has canceled hundreds of contracts worth $1.5 billion that were tabbed to go to essentially leftwing activist networks focused on “environmental justice.”  

Democrats are apoplectic about the move, of course. Big surprise.  

Zeldin is going ham on other climate change initiatives too where big money is at stake for the Left’s green client network.  

This is only the tip of the iceberg. One of the real misunderstandings about the modern administrative statedemolished in recent years is that it’s operated by “nonpartisan experts.” 

Nearly a century and a half after civil service reform was supposed to eliminate the “spoils system,” we have a vast federal leviathan that has not only failed to eliminate partisan administration, it has spread its corruption to an almost unimaginable scale. 

Since at least Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society this modern spoils system has been used to the benefit of one party, the Democrats who run the system no matter who is in the White House. 

In his second term, Trump is waging political war on that network. It’s not just the EPA. Department by department, Trump’s secretaries—assisted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—are severing the ties that bind this vast, corrupt octopus. 

That’s what freezing U.S. Agency for International Development funding was partly about. Foreign aid is already deeply unpopular with the American people, but what we are spending money on is not just generic aid to potential international partners.  

Like many of the federal government’s projects, USAID is in many ways a relic of a bygone era when the U.S. aimed to stop the influence of communism around the globe. Sometime after the fall of the USSR it became a vehicle to fund various leftist projects around the globe with little relation to U.S. national interest. In fact, many of these projects were downright loathed in countries that weren’t too pleased with the U.S. government funding Pride parades in their capital city. 

The Trump administration is pulling the plug on the unofficially established church of the Left too. They are withdrawing, or threatening to withdraw, hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money directed at colleges and universities that failed to protect their students from antisemitism on campus. 

They are threatening schools with removing even more funds if they continue their illegal, racially discriminatory DEI programs too. And one might add that the problem goes far beyond antisemitism and DEI.  

American universities, which have in many cases become hedge funds with schools attached, are increasingly failing to serve the public good. Much of what they call vital “research” is bogus. In addition, there’s no question that taxpayer-funded research grants allow universities to fund their obnoxious humanities departments that are politically monolithic at nearly every school. 

They are in the business of gatekeeping the American elite and turning out generations of activists who not only run the show on campus but populate newsrooms, corporate boardrooms, and government institutions. 

Want to know what nearly everyone who runs an elite institution sounds the same, spouts the same dogmas, and went along with every insanity of the 2020 Great Awokening? There’s your source. 

Again, this vast machine, the “Regime,” is underwritten by the taxpayer. Trump is breaking up that system. He’s targeting its power at the source. 

To complete Trump’s revolution, Congress is going to have to get involved at some point. For instance, National Public Radio’s taxpayer-funded scam to fund leftwing journalists was completely exposed by the disastrous testimony of its CEO at a House hearing on Wednesday. There’s no excuse for keeping the money flowing to a blatantly partisan news network that lost its public function long ago. 

Musk had it right when he called NPR an “taxpayer-funded” arm of the DNC.

This is why the Left’s instititions are often so powerful. They are often grafted on to a money spigot coming from the federal government. The Right is used to operating without that kind of support and has found ways to thrive without it. How will the Left function without their massive financial cushion? For now, probanly not too well.

What the Trump administration has accomplished already is remarkable. They’ve disrupted the Left’s government funding racket in ways no president has before. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has called this a “Second American Revolution,” and in many ways it is. 

Self-government is being restored, the Left’s spoils system is being defunded, and there is now hope that a downsized and more efficient federal government can begin again to serve the American people, all the people, rather than bilking them. 

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