The far-right congresswomanMarjorie Taylor Greenehas assembled a “rogues’ gallery of extremists, conspiracy theorists and C-team political operatives” to promote Donald Trump’s crackdown on non-government organisations (NGOs), a congressional watchdog has claimed.
The House of Representatives’ Delivering on Government Efficiency (Doge) subcommittee, chaired by Greene, isdue to hold a hearingon Wednesday entitled “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild”.
The subcommitteesaid in a press releasethat the hearing will “expose” the use of federal funds by NGOs to advance “radical” agendas such as “open borders and the Green New Deal scam”. It frames its work as an investigation of the alleged funneling of taxpayer dollars to politically motivated groups while “lining the pockets of their friends and allies”.
But a memo from theCongressional Integrity Project(CIP), obtained by the Guardian, condemns the hearing as “political theater”, “weaponized government oversight” and an exercise in hypocrisy, given the substantial federal funding received by Republican allies and rightwing groups.
While attacking civil society organisations for receiving federal grants, the memo says, “their own networks have systematically benefited from government contracts, subsidies, and loans worth billions of dollars”.
Wednesday’s hearing on Capitol Hill will feature witnesses Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies; Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of Power the Future; and Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center.
The CIP describes Greene’s line-up as “rogues’ gallery of extremists, conspiracy theorists and C-team political operatives masquerading as government watchdogs”.
It notes that the Center for Immigration Studies has been designated a hate group by theSouthern Poverty Law Centerand regularly circulates content from “white nationalist and antisemitic writers”.
Krikorian has made statements including that Haiti’s problems stem from not being “colonised long enough”.
The memo adds that CIS received more than $700,000 in PPP loans and is now under investigation by the justice department for potentially lying to obtain at least one of them. “That’s right,Republicanschose as their star witness on government waste someone who may have committed fraud to secure government money for his organization.”
The CIP describes Turner as a career political operative who worked for the Charles Koch Institute before foundingPower the Future, a climate-denial organisation that attacks environmental groups for receiving federal grants. Yet Turner’s former employer, Charles Koch, has received more than $750m in government subsidies.
The memo states: “Turner, who calls ‘climate change the slippery slope to socialism’ and promotes conspiracy theories about climate science, represents everything wrong with this sham hearing.
“He’s a junior varsity Republican operative masquerading as an objective analyst while advancing the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry – the same interests that have systematically profited from the very government largesse he now pretends to oppose.”
Walter leads the Capital Research Center, “a secretive organization that won’t disclose its donors while attacking others for lacking transparency”, the CIP alleges.
“His organization’s fiscal arrangements appear designed to shield activities from public scrutiny, yet he positions himself as a watchdog exposing liberal ‘dark money’.”
In 2023, according to the memo, Walter helped funnel nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations to supreme court justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas’s group while his organisation had business before the supreme court, creating conflicts of interest.
Walter also has a history of making or defending offensive statements about race, gender and sexual orientation. He publicly defended a university professoraccused of making racist statements, said average Americans have “disgust at homosexual practice” and in the 1990s mused that one good thing from the Monica Lewinsky scandal might be “that feminism will die, that sexual harassment laws will fizzle”.
The memo adds: “This hearing represents weaponized government oversight at its worst, with Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene assembling hate group leaders, conspiracy theorists, and dark money operatives to attack civil society organizations while the very people crying about government waste have pocketed billions in federal contracts and subsidies.”