Your Money, Their Agenda: The Left’s Taxpayer-Funded War on Trump

What if I told you that your tax dollars helped prop up a massive left-wing political influence campaign that fed staff and policy ideas into the Biden administration and is now working to oppose President Donald Trump’s policies on immigration and his reforms to the bureaucracy?

My book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government” lays out the Left’s massive influence campaign that shaped policy in the Biden administration. The research for that book helped inform my reporting as this influence campaign entered political exile, forming an opposition outside the government after it had benefited from federal dollars.

My series “Your Money, Their Agenda: The Left’s Taxpayer-Funded War on Trump” outlines the perverse ways your tax dollars have propped up this influence campaign. I testified before Congress on this research twice, and my book has drawn increased attention to the infrastructure of the Left.

USAID

Government grants helped prop up the infrastructure of the Left. For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development, now notorious after the Department of Government Efficiency revealed its funding for woke causes, awarded more than $20 million to the Tides Center, a dark money nonprofit that props up a host of leftist groups.

USAID also had longstanding ties to the nonprofits established by Hungarian American billionaire donor George Soros, who has bankrolled almost every leftist cause you’ve ever heard of.

Tides and the Soros Open Society Foundations funded the American Civil Liberties Union, which pushed open borders in the Biden administration and is now suing to block Trump’s immigration policies. They supported the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which has sued to block Trump’s ban on DEI programs. They bankrolled the Southern Poverty Law Center, which advised the Biden Justice Department on the “domestic terrorism threat”supposedly posed by conservatives and which also sued the Trump administration.

From closing the border and deporting illegal aliens to rooting out racial preferences in the federal government, Trump faces lawsuit after lawsuit aiming to hamstring his agenda.

Over the course of the Biden administration, $1.7 billion in taxpayer funding went to 15 nonprofits that sued the Trump administration in its very first month.

Unions

Big Labor unions form a massive part of the Left’s infrastructure, sending money to the Left’s dark money network, which then props up the activist groups filing lawsuits.

The SEIU, for example, gave $1.6 million to New Venture Fund, a left-wing dark money nonprofit that allows donors to cloak which projects receive their funds. The SEIU also gave $1.8 million to the Tides Foundation. The AFL-CIO, America’s largest union, gave $250,000 to New Venture Fund and $100,000 to the Tides Foundation.

Many federal government workers are members of these unions. In a perverse practice called “official time,” these bureaucrats can bill the taxpayer not for work they do in their official government jobs but for hours they spend working for the union.

The Biden administration refused to release the numbers of how much money the unions effectively receive in “official time,” but after the Trump administration agreed to release the numbers, I exclusively reported that the government spent $207 million to pay for union time in 2024.

Not only do these unions help fund leftist groups suing Trump, but many have gotten in on the action themselves. The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union and part of the AFL-CIO, has filed at least nine lawsuits, aiming to block Trump’s reforms to the federal bureaucracy, which aim to make the government more accountable to the people.

These lawsuits arguably help defend the deep state, efforts of unelected bureaucrats to oppose the president’s agenda from within.

DOGE rightly drew attention to the radical projects that undeservedly received taxpayer funding, such as DEI training in Serbia’s workplaces and a transgender opera in Colombia, but the rot goes much further. The federal government has been propping up the infrastructure of the Left, sending funds to the Left’s dark money network, which supports activist groups that actively oppose the president’s agenda.

My research highlights this broader issue, and underscores just how important it is for Trump to reform the federal government and make it more accountable to the people.

This article originally appeared at The Daily Signal.