MAGA Hogs at the Government Trough

For the Trumpiest federal agencies, it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/27/maga-hogs-government-trough-federal-contracts-spending/


ICE agents guard the Delaney Hall detention center during a protest against the transfer of detainees, May 26, 2026, in Newark, New Jersey. Credit: Andres Kudacki/AP Photo

One of Republicans’ classic attacks on government goes like this: Scroll through the list of government grants to find the ones that sound silliest—usually some kind of scientific research—and hold hearings where you hold up the result, mugging to the camera, pretending to be outraged about the price. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has been doing this for years, and Elon Musk has joined in on X more recently. Invariably, these attacks are either grotesque misrepresentations of the research, or a basic misunderstanding of science itself. Musk repeated claims that the government had spent millions “to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine,” but this turned out to be a study into why people with PTSD—like veterans—often develop alcohol use disorder.

Even studies that do sound legitimately silly can often lead to spectacular results, because a scientist doesn’t know what she is going to find before she looks. It would be easy to guffaw at government grants for, say, injecting Gila monster venom into guinea pig pancreases to see what happens—except when government scientists at the VA and NIH did this back in the 1980s and ’90s, they hit upon the key ingredient in GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. That said, the fact that Musk and Paul are liars or ignorant or hypocrites or all three does not mean it is impossible for a government contract to be a waste of money—and even ordinary contracts illustrate an administration’s priorities. We have therefore trawled through the federal spending database to see if we could find any instances of waste, fraud, and abuse.

Find them we did. The Trump administration is spending billions and billions of dollars on building a pointless wall on the border with Mexico, kidnapping and deporting immigrants, and turning debt collectors loose on student debtors—all while slashing programs to provide the American people with food and health insurance. It’s important to be clear about scale here. The U.S. federal government is immense, and anything less than a billion dollars barely scratches the $5.23 trillion that was collected in tax revenue last year, much less the $7.01 trillion it spent. The biggest new contracts over the last 12 months went to weapons and construction companies; war and lunatic xenophobia are reliably the big sources of spending in a Trump presidency. The single largest awards were up to $4.7 billion for Boeing to send 96 new Apache attack helicopters to Poland, two to Egypt, and eight to Kuwait; up to $3.4 billion to Raytheon for missiles; and up to almost $2 billion to Fisher Sand and Gravel Co. and $1.7 billion for Southwest Valley Constructors to build Trump’s wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

By the same token, Medicaid plus Obamacare funding is many times larger than ICE’s entire budget, and those programs were cut deeply in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Some ten million people are projected to lose their health insurance. Yet when asked about such problems last month, Trump refused point-blank to acknowledge the costs of the cuts. “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” he said. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things … We have to take care of one thing: military protection.” At any rate, all told, at time of writing there have been 24 contracts awarded over the last 12 months that cost American taxpayers more than $1 billion. More than half of them were for war machines and Trump’s wall.

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