During the past year, we have learned how billions of your federal tax dollars have been, continuously and fraudulently, washed, laundered, and routed around the world through non-governmental organizations, in the DOGE exposes of Washington DC’s USAID scams.
And we have also watched as state after state has been revealed to have similar operations at the state level, as billions of dollars in fraud has been found in crooked charities, health and education programs in California, Minnesota, New York, Arizona, and more.
Because of the massive numbers involved, many of these crimes at least have attracted coverage by the major media, so the public could hear of some of them, though the press often covers such stories just once (so they can say “See, we covered it!”), then forget them as fast as they can.
But there are also quieter discoveries, with smaller numbers – huge numbers to regular folks like you and me, of course, but apparently just a rounding error to the esteemed journalists in the mainstream media, who don’t think such stories merit coverage.
The latest such relative small-time example comes from Atlanta, where the Washington Times reports that Tracy Jones, a former vice president of an Atlanta Housing Authority, spent years arranging for the taxpayers to fund the housing of her relatives and herself, funneling payments through shell companies and false names, in order to take advantage of the programs under her supervision. They caught her with abuse of public housing and pandemic funds, in minor-league scams going back years.
She pleaded guilty this week, accepting a deal that will only put her in jail for nine months, and will require repayments and fines totaling just $130,000.
She got tens of thousands out of her crimes – tens of thousands that the state could prove, anyway; we don’t know how much more is suspected by didn’t make it into the plea deal – so it’s not the kind of big story that attracts national attention.
But this is the sort of thing that happens all over the country, all the time.
Small towns and big cities, from the mayors’ office to the housing commissions. From a toll road authority to a health department permitting office. Local press might cover it, when the firings or arrests happen, or when the plea deal is announced, but it doesn’t get picked up by the national news bureaus; the stories get forgotten after the next cup of coffee and the turn of the page.
And the voters keep reelecting the people who commit the crime – or at least, the people who give the criminals this power.
For those of us who have been paying attention for decades, there are unmistakable patterns:
Where government budgets aren’t scrutinized carefully, day by day, there is fraud.
Sometimes it’s in plain sight, like the Quality Learing Center of Minnesota’s Somali community, and it quickly becomes evident that political leaders had to have been in on it.
Sometimes it’s small-potatoes, carefully hidden and hard to discover, like Tracy Jones’ shell game in Atlanta, so it’s possible that there wasn’t a conscious political sponsorship behind the fraud.
But in virtually all these cases, there is a common thread:
The programs are “progressive” in spirit – crimes committed by leftists who were empowered by other leftists, criminals who were given undeserved positions of trust by still more leftists – allegedly designed for the pursuit of healthcare, or education, or environmental care, or housing, or equality.
The tax dollars they plunder come from capitalism; the criminals and the crimes themselves come from socialism.
When we look at the Republican party, there’s plenty there with which to find fault: cowardice, moderation, laziness, weakness. As a party, the Republicans are far from perfect.
But it should be eye-opening that the stories of fraud and abuse are virtually all about programs run by and for Democrats, in cities, counties, states and federal agencies where Democrats have been in control for decades, freezing out oversight by Republicans.
In practically every case, from small-time fake charities to very big-time money-laundering NGOs, it’s Democrat operatives – Democrat activists, donors, appointees and bag-men – who turn out to be at the heart of these scams.
The big cities and counties, the blue states and capital NGO networks, aren’t just connected at the hip with the Democratic Party; in far too many cases, they appear to share bloodstreams, nervous systems and internal organs with them as well.
We can keep investigating, keep revealing, keep stopping payment, and keep prosecuting. And we certainly compliment the Trump Administration for cracking down as hard as they can on it all.
But the problem won’t end until that mindset, that worldview – the criminal element and the avaricious, unamerican motivations behind it – are purged from government entirely, both from elected and appointed office, from the local level to the federal.
We don’t like to indict an entire political party, but the evidence is conclusive. All this fraud is essentially a byproduct of electing Democrats to public office. We won’t be free of the fraud until our government is free of the fraudsters.
Copyright 2026 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. A President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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