Dear Mr. Tucker,
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| Jeffery A Tucker Photo by By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61547947 |
In your most recent column in the Epoch Times you chose to reinforce a falsehood about non-partisan public civil servants, essentially blaming dedicated non-political employees for the large amounts of waste in our Federal system. You also claim, without providing any proof, that this system has been corrupted by "a very small group of career bureaucrats who "manage the multiple millions of dollars coming and going without oversight." Sir, that is a bold-faced lie and you, with your pedigree, know it to be false
I am calling you out on it because you have a responsibility as a journalist to be plain and truthful to your public and not attempt to justify your support for Trump's unconstitutional and Federal law-breaking by lying about not only Federal employees, but about the audit process itself.
Let's begin with your demonizing of the the Federal employees who have access to the system. I promise you that when they fill out their ethics forms each year, they are listing all their loans, credit cards, and bank accounts. Yet the research on the non-profit you founded, Brownstone Institute, confirmed that you chose not to list a single donor for the $2,288,044 in contributions, grants, and other income you received in 2023. That represents over 93% of all revenue your non-profit firm received. You want transparency from others that you do not provide to the public yourself. There is a name for that- hypocrite. While you are holding the wrong government worker's feet to the fire (for the purpose of creating a false narrative of fraud and waste somehow caused by the folks processing the payments the government authorizes to spend), you shut and locked the doors to your own barn. Your historian father must be rolling over in his grave.
There is a very distinct difference between the employees of the Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS) who process payments and the folks in government making the policy-level decisions that determine who receives those those payments. The BFS employees have a primary task of making certain that payments are processed accurately, efficiently, and to verify that the data they receive is correct. I am going to underline the next sentence even though I know, from your extensive economic background, that you already know this but decided to patronize these employees anyway. These employees are not making policy-level decisions on who gets paid or how much. Do you know who is? Try reading the Republican Budget Resolution where they plan on raising the debt ceiling by over 4 trillion dollars.
Mr. Tucker, there are only three groups that can determine the amount, the recipient, and the timing of payments. The first and most important of these is Congress who passes legislation that authorizes payment. Federal Agencies that administer departments like Social Security, and Medicare, and the Directors of those agencies. That is it, that's the whole bunch. Please stop blaming the mechanic for the lousy driver who owns the car and then totals it.
Now let's research your other bold-faced lie. You claim there is no auditing oversight. If that is correct why is there an FASB at all? The Office of Inspector General (OIC) is the auditing watchdog for several Federal agencies. President Trump fired seventeen OIC inspectors after taking office. But he didn't fire Heather Hill, the TGIA Inspector General who has oversight and answers to the Secretary of the Treasury and probably he cant' fire her without violating The Inspector General Act of 1978, which they may have already violated in their earlier firings of 17 other inspectors.
Congress can also audit the books as a requirement for every expenditure they authorize. It is a standard practice for Grant recipients to be audited. This is where you should be concerned, instead of attacking civil servants with no decision-making ability for the hard work they do, And finally, the TGIA Inspector alone has audit responsibilities over the IRS, not some poor schmuck cleaning the processor.
We are all patriots here, Mr. Tucker. So when you write a disingenuous patently fact less column in order to gaslight your readers, we fellow patriots must respond. The Guinea pigs running on the machinery wheels to keep payments moving efficiently are not society's thieves. I would submit that those thieves are the ones who, (according to your own tax records), turned a beginning balance of $932,000 in January of 2023 into $2,500,00 through publicly traded investments. Wow, Brownstone made $1.5 million off of less than a million dollars.in a single year. And this during Joe Biden's term!
Finally, the Institute you founded and donate your time to (how magnanimous of you) gave a grant in the amount of $250,000 to a foreign entity. Who are you in bed with, other than Donald Trump, Mr. Tucker? That is more than you pay your Executive Director. A quarter million just flies away.
In conclusion, you might want to take a good look in your Baptist mirror and think about your historian daddy. Because you are helping to destroy the very fabric of our country and, like so many others in the Trump Kingdom, you are a hypocrite and you have lied to your readers in order to advance a coup.
My daddy used to say that some folks go to school half their lives and when they get out they don't know a damn thing about how to manage life so they make shit up. Bird-dog 'em when you can. Sir, you've been sniffed out.
Sincerely,
Rick Fisher, Retired Town Manager
Ridgecrest, California
Brownstone Institute Tax Records
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