Research reveals how taxpayer funds are often misused with little appreciable benefit
- June 30, 2026
Staff, Daily News
[This article contains a quote from an op-ed by Michael Chamberlain that was published several months ago]
Forgive us if we don’t feel overly sorry for those impacted by the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to drain the so-called federal swamp.
It recently was reported by The New York Times that Sheryl Cowan, for example, lost her job — complete with a $272,000 salary — as a senior vice president at a nonprofit organization that previously was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Many taxpayers will recall the decision by the Trump administration to shutter the USAID effort because of, among other things, redundancy and ineffective use of taxpayer funds.
We would concede that anyone who loses a job deserves some empathy, but ours is lessened by the fact that the nonprofit Ms. Cowan worked for reportedly spent $28 million on salaries and benefits to distribute just $4 million in grants.
Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, said that’s just one example of the large federal swamp.
“It contains multitudes. It creates industries to dispose of the wealth that taxpayers send. And it self-perpetuates,” he recently wrote. “It attracts special interest groups and activists, lawyers by the thousands, rent-seeking companies and charlatans eager to make a buck selling government on the latest fad.”
As we’ve noted in this space previously on numerous occasions, the federal bureaucracy grew significantly during the Joe Biden administration. One area of emphasis was the creation of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund, which was able to appropriate $20 billion that was supposed to be distributed as grants to nonprofits. Those organizations were then supposed to disburse them to other entities to fund a variety of clean energy initiatives.
Based on research done by Protect the Public’s Trust, it seems that just three organizations were awarded $14 billion of the $20 billion total. The problem was that the grant application reviewers noticed that required information was missing — including financial statements in one case. Details were lacking, processes were not described and goals were “not measurable.”