As DOGE strikes at the heart of waste, with Elon Musk and his brilliant team of nerds finding millions and even billions of dollars of wasted U.S. taxpayer money domestically, NGOs have been busy grifting billions in foreign lands.  

Money the U.S. has ostensibly “allocated” for good is occasionally used for “good.” A "good" thing in the broadest term possible. A good act meaning that an NGO, tasked, on paper, with providing goods and services may provide those goods and services but “administrative costs" (aka the grift) will take the lion’s share of the US taxpayer. Money poured into the NGO coffers may do "good" as a smokescreen for grift. 

The Democrats and the media have been playing defense for three weeks because Trump and Musk seem not to sleep or at least not slow down. The media has been desperately searching for the “puppy” killed by Trump's cuts. On Wednesday they thought they had found it. The “dead puppy” being a metaphor. In movies you can blow up men and women, but don’t kill the dog. The puppy in this instance was a woman in Thailand. She is dead they claim, because evil Orangeman Trump cut off her oxygen and she died. It was as if Trump had put his hands around her neck and choked the life out of her.  

The Telegraph headline reads:  

US aid freeze claims first victims as oxygen supplies cut off 

Seventy-one-year-old woman dies after being sent home from USAID funded hospital. Others die after hospitals close in refugee camps 

The first three paragraphs:  

A 71-year-old woman has died after her oxygen supply was cut off when the United States announced a freeze on aid funding. 

Pe Kha Lau, a refugee from Myanmar living in a displacement camp in neighbouring Thailand, died four days after she was discharged from a USAID-funded healthcare facility operated by the International Rescue Committee (IRC). 

She is thought to be one of the first people to have died as a direct result of Washington’s decision to freeze all funding for aid projects for 90 days. 

The Telegraph had its story. There were photos of the woman's 50-year-old daughter with her husband and child sitting on a bed. The child appears to be well under 10. The husband said when the mother-in-law would get short of breath, he would carry her to the IRC hospital. The 71-year-old would then recover. He said they are poor, and cannot afford “oxygen."  

The article has a photo of the daughter holding her smartphone. On the smartphone is a photograph from her mother's funeral. Yes, she has a smartphone.

One might ask, why is America funding Myanmar refugee camps in Thailand? Why isn’t the Thai government, or a host of other Asian countries, spending their money on refugee camps in their own backyard? Why did this woman need oxygen in the first place? And why, of all things, did the IRC suddenly cut off the “oxygen supply” within a few days of Trump taking office? I have a dozen more questions. 

The answers are not clear, but The Telegraph had a narrative to sell. That narrative is simple.

“Trump killed an old woman.” 

The article ends with:

The IRC told the Telegraph: “To hear of this loss of life is devastating and we offer our condolences to the family and friends of Pe Kha Lau."

However, a bit of sleuthing found a rather seedy underbelly of IRC, and it doesn’t match the “Trump is a monster” narrative. 

5 minutes of research and I found out the NGO that couldn’t afford oxygen without USAID has a $98 million stock portfolio and a CEO making $1.2 million a year.

I wear a hard hat to work, @sneweyy https://t.co/LvU6N4Ecda

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) February 13, 2025

Remember when George Clooney laughed and said Trump “will never be president"? Recall when his efforts to elect Joe Biden to a second term went up in flames? Clooney it seems is a chum of the guy that runs this NGO. He seems to have sucked all of the oxygen out of the room.  

The former Labour MP running the NGO didn't think to cut his $1.3M salary before cutting off Pe Kha Lau's oxygen. You guys should ask George Clooney and his wife (major IRC backers) if they think David Miliband made the right call. pic.twitter.com/g67s9oqV1V

— @amuse (@amuse) February 13, 2025

Musk will find more waste and billions going into the pockets of NGO leadership, and the media will play along. Puppies will die and the media will blame Trump. But the scales are off the eyes of most Americans. 

The gig is up. Legacy media can publish stories about dead grandmothers in Thailand and blame Trump and Musk and DOGE, but the new media will sleuth for the truth, and if the story is nonsense, the nonsense will be exposed.