Trump administration paid federal employees billions not to work, report says DOGE wasted $21.7 billion in taxpayer funds, according to a new report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Aug. 1, 2025, 2:42 PM CDT By Ja'han Jones Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has spent nearly $22 billion in taxpayer funds on employees who’ve been paid not to work, according to a new Senate report. Compiled by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s staff on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the report accuses DOGE — the entity Trump and Elon Musk ginned up to gut federal programs under the guise of “efficiency” — of generating “at least $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government” in just the first half of this year. It notes that this total is more than twice the amount of the Trump-backed rescissions package Republicans recently passed to codify DOGE-backed cuts to federal programs. The report reads: The Department of Gov...

‘Explosive’ conservative non-doctor turbocharging RFK Jr’s healthcare coup 05:52 July 31, 2025, 4:18 PM CDT By Brandy Zadrozny, Senior Reporter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants Americans to turn over their health data to tech companies and the government. It’s the very thing — prior to his takeover of the nation’s public health — that he’d been warning his followers to fear. “It’s connecting all the things in your life, anything that you call smart, that could be your Apple Watch, it could be your telephone, your GPS on your telephone, the GPS on your car, your garage door opener,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on his podcast in 2020, produced by his then-employer, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense. “They have so much data now that they have access to … They’re going to take billions of terabytes of data and then they’re gonna do analytics on them and monetize them and sell them back to companies that want to turn you into a permanent consumer.” Kennedy spent years warnin...