President Biden’s administration used $267 million of your money to study “misinformation” since he took office, a new report reveals — as President-elect Donald Trump vows to purge the term from the federal lexicon and make sweeping spending cuts.
The cash doled out to universities, nonprofits and companies peaked at $126 million in 2021 while US public health officials were imposing mandates they later admitted had no scientific basis, the taxpayer-transparency group OpenTheBooks said in its report Friday.
The scope of the “misinformation” grant-making emerged as Trump’s advisory Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) looks for areas to trim wasteful spending.
“When it comes to government spending, the truth is often stranger than fiction,” entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who is leading the DOGE with billionaire Elon Musk, told The NY Post regarding the findings.
“We’re gearing up to fix the egregious waste of taxpayer dollars,” Ramaswamy said.
Proponents of fighting alleged “misinformation” argue that it’s in the public’s interest to weed out false claims — with Biden personally accusing social media companies of “killing people” by platforming posts critiquing the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, as anti-“misinformation” spending surged.
Opponents of speech-policing argue it both violates the First Amendment and prevents vigorous debate and competing narratives that allow for a more full understanding of issues of public concern.
Critics also note that much of what is initially deemed “misinformation” later turns out to gain evidentiary support, such as the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab that was doing risky US-funded “gain of function” research.
Another example is the fact that mandated masks, vaccination, social distancing and economic shutdowns were largely ineffective due to evolving COVID-19 variants or had significant side-effects and unintended social consequences.
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