🚨 Your tax dollars have been set on fire by the government—and it’s much worse than you think. Jesse Watters just sat…

🚨 Your tax dollars have been set on fire by the government—and it’s much worse than you think. Jesse Watters just sat down with Elon Musk and the DOGE team to pull back the curtain. What they uncovered will leave you speechless. And yes, you finally get to meet Big Balls. His backstory did not disappoint. 🧵 THREAD

📍Don't forget to bookmark this thread. You'll want to remember what the bureaucracy spent your money on before DOGE stepped in. Now, onto the clips!

It kicked off with a bombshell. Elon Musk and his DOGE team had uncovered one of the most outrageous COVID-era scams inside the Department of Education. There was a $4 billion fund sitting there—and no one had to provide a receipt to use it. As one DOGE staffer explained, “There was a four billion-dollar COVID fund in the Department of Education. There was no receipt required so people could just draw down on it.” Naturally, the money went everywhere it shouldn’t have. “When people looked into it—they found that money was being used to rent out Caesars Palace for parties, rent out stadiums, et cetera.” To stop the abuse, DOGE made one change. “The one change that DOGE made with the Department of Education, is we had the simple requirement that if you draw down money you must first upload a receipt.” That’s it. Upload a receipt. “That was the only change made—you must upload your receipt—and upon doing so nobody drew down money anymore.” The grift dried up overnight.

But that was just the beginning. Next up: the United States Institute of Peace—a government agency with “peace” in the name that turned out to be anything but. “We went into the agency and found they had loaded guns inside of their headquarters. Institute for Peace,” a DOGE staffer said. Musk put it bluntly: “Any organizational name is going to kind of be the opposite of the title.” And according to the team, that proved to be true. “It was by far the least peaceful agency we’ve worked with, ironically.” But the deeper they looked, the worse it got. “Additionally we found they were spending money on things like private jets and they even had a $130,000-dollar contract with a former member of the Taliban. This is real. We don’t encounter that in most agencies.” Guns. Jets. Taliban contracts. All tucked under a banner of “peace.”

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But the Institute of Peace saga went deeper. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more surreal—the cover-up began. DOGE had barely walked through the doors before the agency started deleting records. “Just a few hours we got into their headquarters we found their chief accountant had actually deleted over a terabyte of accounting records from several years.” The obvious question came up: why? “You would have to ask the question, well why would somebody do that? The DOGE team was fortunately able to recover that data with the help of a few great employees at the Institute of Peace.” Once they had the files back, the full picture emerged. “They received $55 million a year from Congress and on the money that went unspent, instead of returning that to Congress, they would sweep it into a private bank account which has no congressional oversight and that’s what they would use to fund events at their headquarters and the private jets.” For the DOGE team, this wasn’t just an example of government waste—it was something far worse. “I think it’s a great example because most Americans don’t know what’s going on at a lot of these smaller agencies and this is—I think this is the most extreme case of some of the wasteful spending we are finding.”

Then came something so ridiculous it sounded like satire. The Small Business Administration had sent out over $300 million in loans… to people who were already dead. And that’s not even the wildest part. A DOGE staffer detailed: “Is the Small Business Administration giving loans to dead people, people over the age of 120? The answer was yes and it was around $330 million in total.” Musk followed up with the part that shocked everyone at the table. “And also people with birthdays in the future.” “Like, the birthdate I think in one case was like—we’re talking about your great grandchildren. With the birthdate, like, of 2165.” “More than a century from now was the birth date.” “Because your birthday is in the future, the far future. Not like next year. This is either fraudulent or we have your birthday wrong.” Billions in taxpayer money—and no one bothered to check the dates.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel...or mine in this case. One of the most bizarre symbols of government inefficiency is a limestone mine in Pennsylvania—where retirement paperwork is still handled the old-fashioned way: on paper. Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb and now part of DOGE, decided to see it for himself. “I had a chance to go to the mine and so I took a golf cart through security down into the side of the mountain and I entered this whole space of caverns and roads. And we get to a metal door and I open it up and there in front of me is a sea of filing cabinets from the 1960s.” He painted the scene: “I’m walking around, it’s super chilly and smells like paper. I realize, for a mine, it’s a great mine. It’s secure, it’s well-lit. Temperature controlled——The question we why are we still using paper in 2025?” He even brought along replica folders to show just how outdated the system is. “I would rather do my taxes in the dark, than have to go through this.” But this story had a win. “What we are doing is we are bringing some process online with modern software. I’m excited to share that as of tonight we have 25 retirees going through an entirely online retirement process in the government for the very first time.”

And finally, we got to meet the legend himself: Big Balls. For months, he was a mysterious figure inside the DOGE operation—known only by his nickname. Then Jesse Watters asked, “Who’s Big Balls?” A voice from across the table answered without hesitation: “That’s me.” Musk leaned in: “That should be obvious.” The nickname, it turns out, started as a joke on LinkedIn. He wanted to stand out in a sea of suits who played it safe. He didn’t expect anyone to notice. They noticed. But there’s more to Big Balls than a meme. He plays a key role in the team, hunting down fraud buried in federal payment systems. “I’m working on some payment computer stuff,” he said. “We started looking into the payment computers to root out fraud and waste.” And what they found was staggering. In many cases, you could pull up a line item for $20 million—and find no record of where it went. No trail. No explanation. Just holes in the system. That’s what DOGE is trying to fix. And Big Balls is leading the charge.

Thanks for reading. If you appreciate this kind of reporting, follow me for more daily threads. —> @VigilantFox Looking for another 🧵? Victor Davis Hanson just revealed the real reason Trump’s enemies are spiraling.

The Vigilant Fox 🦊@VigilantFox · May 1, 2025

🚨 Victor Davis Hanson just revealed the real reason Trump’s enemies are spiraling. 1. The polls are a lie. 2. The Democrats have no backup plan. They’re trapped on a sinking ship—and they know it. Then VDH names the one weapon they’re still clinging to. And suddenly, everything makes sense. 🧵 THREAD