MTG Calls America ‘Spoiled,’ Threatens to Defund NPR and ‘Toilets in Africa’
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been tapped to lead a House subcommittee connected to the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has named her targets for investigation and defunding. They include: NPR, “toilets in Africa,” “sex apps in Malaysia,” sanctuary cities, and the Pentagon.
In a Sunday interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Greene said America has been “really spoiled for a long time,” calling the federal government “one of the worst abusers of American’s tax dollars and the American people’s trust.”
She promised to comb through “every single government department, program, grant programs, contracts” to identify what she deems as waste.
“When we look into a deep dive into this massive problem that’s caused America to be 36 trillion dollars in debt, we’re going to have to go into all kinds of buckets. And that’s how I’ll be separating things on the oversight subcommittee on DOGE,” she said.
She continued, “We’ll be looking at everything from government-funded media program like NPR that spread nothing but Democrat propaganda. We’ll be going into grant programs that fund things like sex apps in Malaysia, toilets in Africa.”
NPR has long been a target of conservatives who don’t like its reporting. In April, after NPR CEO Katherine Maher declined to testify at a committee hearing about alleged biased reporting, the Republican House majority sent a letter to Maher demanding she report to Congress about NPR newsroom employees’ political affiliations. Musk fired shots at NPR when his company X added a tag to the media outlet’s posts that identified it as “state-affiliated media,” later changing the label to “government-funded media.” NPR pushed back, saying identifying it with those terms is false and misleading, and it ceased posting on X.
The alleged “sex apps in Malaysia” Greene mentioned is a reference to JomCare, an app created by Roman Shrestha, an assistant professor in the University of Connecticut’s Department of Allied Health Sciences, with a $3.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The app is designed to increase access to harm reduction services for gay and bisexual men engaging in chemsex — the practice of taking psychoactive drugs before or during sexual activities — with the goal of reducing the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.
Although Greene did not expand on what she meant by “toilets in Africa,” she could be referring to USAID funding for sanitation programs in Africa that reduce the spread of disease and bring clean water to communities in need. As USAID writes on its website, “Water and sanitation are essential to advance global health, prosperity, stability, and resilience.”
Also on Greene’s hit list are the Department of Defense. “I want to talk to the people at the Pentagon and ask them why they can’t find billions of dollars every single year and why they fail their audit,” she said.
“But not just that,” Greene continued. “I’d like to talk to the governors of sanctuary states and the mayors of sanctuary cities and have them come before our committee and explain why they deserve federal dollars if they’re going to harbor illegal criminal aliens in their states and their cities.
“We’re going to look into every single aspect, and we don’t care about people’s feelings,” Greene concluded.
Of course, rather than going on a federal budget witch hunt, another way to reduce the deficit is to roll back the massive tax cuts for the wealthy that Trump signed in 2017. But considering Republicans are already planning to extend the cuts, even though doing so will further reduce federal revenue by approximately $4 trillion, that route seems unlikely. Instead, we’ll get whatever circus Musk, Ramaswamy, and Greene can conjure up.
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