Global Affairs goes on March Madness spending spree, buys $9,900 Lego set

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Global Affairs Canada bought $527,000 worth of artwork during year-end spending sprees in 2023 and 2024 – a practice commonly referred to as “March Madness.”

Bureaucrats even spent $9,900 on “Lego blocks,” according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

“If you want proof that government bureaucrats have way too many tax dollars on their hands, look no further than Global Affairs Canada’s half-a-million dollar March Madness art spending spree,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “It’s supremely disrespectful to taxpayers to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on art they’ll never see in far-flung embassies.”

The government of Canada’s fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 31.

On March 31, 2023, GAC bureaucrats purchased 32 pieces of artwork for $160,000, according to the records.

Included in the purchases were a $25,000 “archival pigment print photograph,” a $20,000 piece of “fabric art” made of “poly-cotton, canvas, steel hanging rod” and a $3,500 piece featuring “cowhide, dyed fox fur, Swarovski crystals, caribou hair and 24K gold.”

Bureaucrats also expensed a $6,000 oil painting on canvas and a $8,500 piece of “fabric art” made of “home-tanned moose hide, cross fox fur, canvas, trim, seed beads, 24K gold beads [and] nylon thread.”

The following year, on Feb. 9, 2024, GAC bureaucrats bought 71 pieces of artwork on the same day, billing taxpayers for $291,000.

Purchases included 31 paintings costing a combined $153,000.

One bureaucrat ordered a $9,900 set of “Lego blocks,” described in government records as “mixed media.”

Then, on March 26, 2024, GAC bureaucrats expensed 12 more pieces of artwork to taxpayers, costing more than $50,000.

Included in the purchases was a $9,000 piece of “fabric art” described as “wool, cotton, embroidery floss,” and a $7,500 piece of “mixed media” described as “handmade khadi paper woven on block printed industrially.”

All told, GAC’s year-end spending spree on art the past two years cost taxpayers $527,000. For the sake of comparison, that’s enough money to cover an entire year’s grocery bills for 31 Canadian families of four.

“March Madness is a long-observed phenomenon in Ottawa which sees federal departments quickly spend all of their remaining annual budgets in the last month of the fiscal year,” according to a report from CBC.

“Every March, taxpayers are forced to watch a bad episode of bureaucrats gone wild,” Terrazzano said. “Taxpayers need the government to fully open up the books, go line by line through each department’s spending and take a chainsaw to all this waste.”

This isn’t the first time spending by GAC bureaucrats has triggered alarms bells.

GAC bureaucrats spent more than $3.3 million on alcohol between January 2019 and May 2024, according to separate access-to-information records obtained by the CTF. That means the department is spending an average of $51,000 a month on beer, wine and spirits.

The CTF has long criticized GAC spending, including a $8,800 sex toy show in Germany, $1,700 for a “Lesbian Pirates!” musical, $12,500 for senior citizens in other countries to talk about their sex lives and a $51,000 red-carpet photo exhibit for rockstar Bryan Adams.

“From sex toy shows to lesbian pirate musicals to a $9,900 Lego set, Global Affairs Canada may be the worst waste offender in the entire federal government,” Terrazzano said. “And that’s saying a lot.”

Related Topics:#CanadianTaxpayersAssociation #RyanThorpe GlobalAffairsCanada

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Elon Musk, DOGE officials reveal ‘astonishing’ government waste, fraud in viral interview

Published on March 28, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Elon Musk said that ‘the sheer amount of waste and fraud’ in federal agencies, is ‘astonishing’ and that DOGE is cutting ‘$4 billion a day’ in misused taxpayer funds.

In a remarkable Fox News interview, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) founder Elon Musk and top officials of the DOGE team offered stunning, often infuriating, insights into how the federal government functions.

The interview, which has garnered well over 10 million online views on X in less than 24 hours, provided one extreme example after another of government mismanagement, excess, waste, and fraud while simultaneously promising a future where the D.C. Leviathan is tamed and restored to its proper, efficient role.

The new Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), former U.S. House Rep. Dan Bishop, averred that the DOGE A-Team interview was the “most amazing and significant half-hour in TV history.”

Musk was joined by DOGE team members Steve Davis, Joe Gebbia, Aram Moghaddassi, Brad Smith, Anthony Armstrong, Tom Krause, and Tyler Hassen – all successful businessmen and entrepreneurs in their own rights – to describe the widespread systemic weaknesses and failures at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and more.

Fox host Bret Baier described the group as “Silicon Valley colliding with government.”

“This is a revolution. And I think it might be the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution,” said Musk during the discussion.

“But at the end of the day, America’s going to be in much better shape,” he promised.

“America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work, and it’s going to be a fantastic future.”

My interview with the @elonmusk and the @DOGE team tonight on #SpecialReport pic.twitter.com/KKpxEPtu1Z

— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) March 27, 2025

Musk said that the most stunning thing he’s discovered during the early phases of DOGE is “the sheer amount of waste and fraud in government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing.”

Musk cited the example of a simple 10-question National Park online survey for which the government was charged nearly $1 billion and which in the end served no purpose.

“I think we will accomplish most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within [130 days],” he predicted. “Our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far, we are succeeding.”

Billionaire Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, is working to digitize the retirement process for government employees, which is currently stuck using 1950s technology, housed in a Pennsylvania cave.

“It’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching the show tonight,” said Gebbia. “We really believe that the government can have an Apple store-like experience, beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.”

“The retirement process is all by paper, literally, with people carrying paper and manila envelopes into this gigantic mine,” added Musk, limiting the number of federal employees who can retire to no more than 8,000 per month.

Gebbia expects to have the antiquated system updated and overhauled in a matter of months.

“The two improvements that we’re trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis and also make the experience better,” said DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi.

He offered an amazing statistic: “When you want to change your (direct deposit) bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters” who are attempting to commandeer retired seniors’ benefit payments.

“What we’re doing will help their benefits,” assured Musk. “As a result of the work of DOGE, legitimate recipients of social security will receive more money, not less money.”

“There are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the Social Security system,” said Steve Davis, who has previously worked alongside Musk at SpaceX, the Boring Company, and X

He explained that despite this being discovered by hardworking personnel at the SSA back in 2008, nothing was done. As a result, 15-20 million social security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were just floating around, susceptible to being used for “bad intentions.”

Health care entrepreneur Brad Smith, who has taken charge of auditing HHS and NIH, also cited stunning, troubling statistics displaying the extreme inefficiencies of the nation’s top federal health organizations.

Smith said that at NIH, “Today they have 27 different centers” created by Congress over the years and there are “700 different IT systems,” each using their own IT software.

“They have 27 different CIOs (Chief Information Officers),” added Smith, “so when you think about making great medical discoveries, you have to connect the data.”

Those discoveries are likely severely hampered by NIH’s communications disconnect.

Anthony Armstrong, a Morgan Stanley banker now working for DOGE at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) talked about “duplicative functions” and “overstaffing” at government agencies. He said that money is “sloshing out the door.”

As an example, he cited the IRS, which has 1,400 employees whose only job is to provision laptops and cell phones to IRS workers.

“As an ex-CFO of a big public tech company, really what we’re doing is, we’re applying public company standards to the federal government, and it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today,” said Tom Krause, CEO of Cloud Software Group.

He explained that there is virtually no accountability or verification protections when it comes to the Treasury Department disbursing funds to various government agencies.

A 94-year-old grandmother is no longer “going to be robbed by forces like she’s getting robbed today, and the solvency of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those social security checks,” added Musk.

“The reason we’re doing this is because if we don’t do it, America is going to go insolvent and go bankrupt, and nobody’s going to get anything,” said Musk.

Tyler Hassen, a former oil executive working at the Interior Department for DOGE alleged that there was no departmental oversight at the Interior Department “whatsoever” under the Biden administration.

Steve Davis talked about the out-of-control issuance and use of federal credit cards.

“There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn’t make sense. So, one of the things all of the teams have worked on is we’ve worked for the agencies and said, ‘Do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used? Can you tell us physically where they are?’” recounted Davis.

“Clearly there should not be more credit cards than there are people,” interjected Musk.

Musk later described how the Small Business Administration (SBA) has given out $300 million in loans to people “under the age of 11.” An additional $300 million in loans has been handed out to people “over the age of 120.”

Musk said that these government loans are clearly “fraudulent.”

“Terrible things are being done,” he exclaimed. “We’re stopping it.”

Business

Americans rallying behind Trump’s tariffs

Published on March 28, 2025

Todayville

From Larson’s Political Economy

The Trump administration’s new tariffs are working:

The European Union will delay tariffs on U.S. exports into the trading bloc in response to the imposition of tariffs on European aluminum and steal, a measure announced in February by the White House as a part of an overhaul of the U.S. trade policies.

Instead of taking effect March 12, these tariffs will not apply until “mid-April”, according to a European official interviewed by The Hill.

This is not the first time the EU has responded this way to U.S. tariff measures. It happened already last time Trump was in office. One of the reasons why Brussels is so accommodative is that the European Parliament emphasized negotiations already back in February. Furthermore, as Forbes notes,

The U.S. economy is the largest in the world, and many countries rely on American consumers to buy their goods. By import tariffs, the U.S. can pressure trading partners into more favorable deals and protect domestic industries from unfair competition.

More on unfair competition in a moment. First, it is important to note that Trump did not start this trade skirmish. Please note what IndustryWeek reported back in 2018:

Trump points to U.S. auto exports to Europe, saying they are taxed at a higher rate than European exports to the United States. Here, facts do offer Trump some support: U.S. autos face duties of 10% while European cars are subject to dugies of only 2.5% in the United States.

They also noted some nuances, e.g., that the United States applies a higher tariff on light trucks, presumably to defend the most profitable vehicles rolling out of U.S. based manufacturing plants. Nevertheless, the story that most media outlets do not tell is that Europe has a history of putting tariffs on U.S. exports to a greater extent than tariffs are applied in the opposite direction.

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Facts notwithstanding, this trade war has caught media attention and is reaching ridiculous proportions. According to CNBC,

Auto stocks are digesting President Donald Trump’s annoncement that he would place 25% tariffs on “all cars that are not made in the United Sates,” as well as certain automobile parts. … Shares of the “Detroit Three” all fell.

They also explain that GM took a particularly hard beating, and that Ferrari is going to use the tariffs as a reason to raise prices by ten percent. This sounds dramatic, but keep in mind that stocks fly up and down with impressive amplitude; what was lost yesterday can come back with a bonus tomorrow. As for Ferrari, a ten-percent price hike is basically meaningless since these cars are often sold in highly customized, individual negotiations before they are even produced.

Despite the media hype, these tariffs will not last the year. One reason is the retaliatory nature in President Trump’s tariffs, which—again—has already caught the attention of the Europeans and brought them to the negotiation table. We can debate whether or not his tactics are the best in order to create more fair trade terms between the United States and our trading partners, but there is no question that Trump’s methods have caught the attention of the powers that be (which include Mexico and Canada).

There is another reason why I do not see this tariffs tit-for-tat continuing for much longer. The European economy is in bad shape, especially compared to the U.S. economy. With European corporations already signaling increased direct investment in the U.S. economy, Europe is holding the short end of this stick.

But the bad news for the Europeans does not stop there. They are at an intrinsic disadvantage going into a tariffs-based trade war. The EU has a “tariff” of sorts that we do not have, namely the value-added tax, VAT. Shiphub.co has a succinct summary of how the VAT affects trade:

When importing (into the European Union), VAT should be taken into account. … VAT is calculated based on the customs value (the good’s value and transport costs … ) plus the due duty amount.

The term “duty” here, of course, refers to trade tariffs. This means that when tariffs go up, the VAT surcharge goes up as well. Aside from creating a tax-on-tax problem, this also means that the inflationary effect from U.S. imports is significantly stronger than it is on EU imports to the United States—even when tariffs are equal.

If the U.S. government wanted to, they could include the tax-on-tax effect of the VAT when assessing the effective EU tariffs on imports from the United States. This would quickly expand the tit-for-tat tariff war, with Europe at an escalating disadvantage.

For these reasons, I do not see how this “trade war” will continue beyond the summer, but even that is a pessimistic outlook.

Before I close this tariff topic and declare it a weekend, let me also mention that the use of tariffs in trade war is neither a new nor an unusual tactic. Check out this little brochure from the Directorate-General for Trade under the European Commission’:

Trade defence instruments, such as anti-dumping or anti-subsidy duties, are ways of protecting European production against international trade distortions.

What they refer to as “defence instruments” are primarily tariffs on imports. In a separate report the Directorate lists no fewer than 63 trade-war cases where the EU imposes tariffs to punish a country for unfair trade tactics.

Trade what, and what countries, you wonder? Sweet corn from Thailand, fused alumina from China, biodiesel from Argentina and Indonesia, malleable tube fittings from China and Thailand, epoxy resins from China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand… and lots and lots of tableware from China.

Like most people, I would prefer a world without taxes and tariffs, and the closer we can get to zero on either of those, the better. But until we get there, we should take a deep breath in the face of the media hype and trust our president on this one.

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