Washington: An Empire of Grift

https://mises.org/mises-wire/washington-empire-grift

02/06/2025•Mises Wire•Tho Bishop

In 1992, Murray Rothbard outlined a strategy for confronting the American regime that relied on transforming critiques of state intervention into a full front culture war. In his words, the intellectual battle “must necessarily be a strategy of boldness and confrontation, of dynamism and excitement, a strategy, in short, of rousing the masses from their slumber and exposing the arrogant elites that are ruling them, controlling them, taxing them, and ripping them off.”

This energy has fueled multiple attempts at political change in Washington, including the electorally unsuccessful presidential campaigns of Buchanan, Perot and Ron Paul, the quickly co-opted “Tea Party Revolution” of 2010, and Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016. During this 30-year period, the challenge has consistently been transforming the energy of campaign rhetoric into meaningful political change within an organization explicitly designed for self-preservation, and an imperial city that enriches itself through preying upon the homeland through taxation, regulation, and the constant threat of lawfare.

In 2025, however, for the first time the regime seems to be on the defensive. The election of Donald Trump represented a major blow to the media-industrial complex that has long served as an essential propaganda tool for Washington. More importantly, his return to the White House has brought with him non-traditional political talent that has focused on the financial plumbing of the federal government, and has placed the rank and file of the professional political class squarely in its cross hairs.

The chief agitator has been Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, which has provided some essential services for translating standard campaign rhetoric into action. Musk’s teams have been focused on following the root of the state’s power: money. The last week has witnessed the center of political discourse focused on an agency that most Americans likely did not know existed, USAID. 

As Connor O’Keeffe has noted, USAID is an example of the US government at its most perverse, nominally an organization dedicated to “global charity,” in practice it has been a source of a Washington-financed propaganda outfit exporting censorship, political upheaval, and ideological crusades abroad. Examples include sterilization campaigns in Peru, campaigns to promote atheism in Nepal, and a litany of trans-normalization efforts around the globe.

As heinous as the missions of these USAID programs are at their face, their exposure highlights a larger element of the regime. From the billions spent on USAID money is a network of administrators, directors, and consultants who have been able to create lucrative lives from themselves by embedding themselves into a network of patronage entirely reliant upon the regime’s plunder of the public.

Musk’s involvement here is key, not only for the technical expertise his team has provided in tracking the complex web of federal appropriations, but in his role as one of the most influential voices in social media. With his platform X, Americans are now treated with daily examples of the routine grift that makes up so much of Washington’s operation. And this, so far, is simply from a relatively minor agency that makes up less than 1% of the federal government.

The reality, of course, is that the American regime is itself an empire of grift, saturating every department under DC’s control. From a Pentagon that can’t successfully complete an audit, the trillions of dollars in fraud in “government relief” programs such as FEMA or responses to covid, non-USAID related foreign aid, or abuse of Medicare and Medicaid systems.

While everyone politicians inevitably pays lip-service to a desire to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse” within government, the underlying incentives of power have always been to ignore the obvious. Efforts to cut an absurd program in a Congressional district in Iowa, may result in additional scrutiny to a member’s district in New York. 

As such, the opposition to DOGE has already begun, even if the initial results are more comical than threatening. The spectacle of octogenarians waving their canes denouncing cuts to transgendered comic books in Peru is more useful as a demonstration of how unimpressive America’s ruling parasites are as individuals than it is a meaningful line of self-preservation from the leviathan. The true backlash, however, has just begun.

In the coming months, we can expect bipartisan support gathering to leash the efforts of DOGE. Already, Republican Senators are desperately trying to identify exemptions from grant freezes and other attempts to cut off the spigot and defend USAID’s efforts on standard “national security” grounds. 

The simple reality is that while it’s easy to hold up the most absurd ideological projects as red meat fodder for Republican audiences, the extent of the grift is bipartisan and systemic. It is the lifeblood of the modern state.

Raid the treasury, reward your friends, enrich your children, lie to voters, and steal from the public via taxation or inflation. This is the standard playbook of modern statecraft, one that will not be retired without a true fight.

Musk’s DOGE model offers a fascinating case of putting the aims of Rothbardian populism into practice. Can it manage to sustain the anger and disgust of the public enough to build the sort of political capital necessary to achieve meaningful victories? Only time will tell.

At the very least, Washington’s empire of grift is being exposed to millions, many for the first time.

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