President Donald Trump’s Cabinet outlined billions of dollars in contracts it says it has canceled since he took office, including a ‘$300,000 contract educating on food justice for queer and transgender farmers in San Francisco’ and $830 million on surveys described as looking like ‘anyone’s child in junior high could have put together.’
The contracts, which Trump said represented ‘fraud,’ are being canceled as Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are trying to eliminate wasteful spending by the federal government.
‘Even at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we canceled a $300,000 contract educating on food justice for queer and transgender farmers in San Francisco. A similar contract we canceled in New York, again educating transgender and queer farmers on food justice and food equality. I’m not even sure what that means, but apparently the last administration wanted to put out taxpayer dollars towards that,’ Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Trump.
‘We canceled a $600,000 contract out of Louisiana that was studying the menstrual cycles of transgender men. We canceled another contract out of a university in the middle of the country that focused on getting more diversity, equity and inclusion into our pest management industry,’ she continued. ‘Again, these are nonsensical, it makes zero sense to use taxpayer dollars to fund these. I know these are just a few examples of the hundreds and hundreds we have found.’
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Trump that ‘There is a federal consulting group which was a group inside of Interior, but it was managing contracts for many different agencies that flowed through here’ and ‘one of those contracts was to do surveys of individuals, $830 million for surveys.’
‘And so part of the question was ‘hey could we actually see the surveys?’ and then the surveys came back and it was, the survey was like 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper with ten questions that anyone’s child in junior high could have put together, or AI could have done for free,’ Burgum said during the Cabinet meeting. ‘$830 million, so that is one that we stopped and that contract was going out after you were inaugurated, sir.’
‘It’s fraud,’ Trump responded. ‘But we’ve had many fraudulent contracts that were caught by the work that Elon and his people are doing and working with our people. It’s been brought to light. The fraud, not just waste and abuse. The fraud has been incredible.’
An X account linked to the White House said Burgum announced $830 million in savings by ‘cutting contracts for useless surveys.’
‘The EPA has now canceled over $22 billion worth of contracts – $2 billion going to this NGO that Stacey Abrams was tied to. They received only $100 in 2023 and then the Biden administration gave them $2 billion,’ Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin also said. ‘The director of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund saw his former employer get $5 billion dollars. So $20 billion went to just eight NGOs.’
‘The partnership with DOGE and Elon Musk has been incredible at EPA. Their team is very talented, we wouldn’t have been able to do it without them and of course this mandate from President Trump to make sure that we identify every last penny, whether we are saving $50,000, five million dollars or $22 billion dollars we will not rest until every last penny is saved. Thank you, Mr. President for the opportunity to do this for the American public,’ Zeldin added.