DOGE takes over key web site that handles distribution of $500bn in federal grants | EUROtoday

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency program has reportedly embedded itself inside a key federal web site dealing with over $500 billion in annual grant funding for businesses throughout the federal government.

DOGE will reportedly assessment and approve alternatives on grants.gov, which posts hundreds of notices of grant alternatives annually from businesses such because the Departments of State, Interior and Defense, 4 unnamed sources near the trouble informed The Washington Post.

A DOGE engineer has already eliminated federal officers’ permissions to put up such alternatives with out notifying the staffers, in keeping with the sources, additional entrenching the DOGE program’s affect on federal spending.

Separately, DOGE could have new authorities to assessment and approve funding notices from the National Institutes of Health, in keeping with assembly information obtained by the outlet.

As a part of its wider efforts to chop federal spending, the Trump administration has fired hundreds of individuals from the well being company, used DOGE to assist cancel grants with ties to range and inclusion, and sought to chop $2.6 billion in contracts. The administration has additionally pulled or threatened to tug billions in funding to universities as a part of its efforts to crack down on alleged antisemitism on campus.

The DOGE effort, staffed with younger tech allies and acolytes of Musk, has made utilizing information and entry to federal expertise methods a key a part of its agenda.

DOGE is reportedly concerned in an effort so as to add residing hundreds of undocumented immigrants to a Social Security “death file” as a method to chop off their entry to federal advantages and employment.

Despite making an attempt to entry giant swathes of federal information, DOGE has been accused of mishandling and misinterpreting that very same info.

In February, it quietly deleted the 5 largest financial savings it had posted on its much-touted “wall of receipts.”

Musk has regularly and inaccurately claimed that Social Security, in the meantime, is a “Ponzi scheme,” sending thousands and thousands of lifeless individuals checks – nevertheless, lower than one p.c of the company’s funds between 2015 and 2022 had been improper, in keeping with a 2024 inspector common report.