U.S. taxpayers are funding projects in China and Russia which include funding Chinese tech support for the U.S. military, a report said.
More than $1.3 billion in U.S. tax dollars were sent to Russia and China over the past five years, according to an analysis released on May 31 by Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst and OpenTheBooks.com auditors.
The amount "likely doesn’t reflect the total amount because federal agencies do not follow the trail of tax dollars to their final destination," OpenTheBooks.com reported.
Ernst and Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher are demanding transparency and accountability for the taxpayer dollars that are being handed out in China and Russia. They have introduced the Tracking Receipts to Adversarial Countries for Knowledge of Spending (TRACKS) Act that would require every penny from a government grant paid to any organization in China and Russia to be tracked and publicly disclosed.
Among the projects in Russia and China funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars already tracked down are:
• $58.7 million from Department of State, including $96,875 for gender equality through exhibition of New Yorker magazine cartoons.
• $51.6 million from Department of Defense, including $6 million for tech support of the military “deployment and distribution command” software – delivering equipment and supplies anywhere our military is deployed, even though the DOD Inspector General warned the Pentagon about using Chinese IT companies on DOD projects.
• $4.7 million to a Russian company for health insurance that was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022.
• $4.2 million from Health and Human Services, including $770,466 to a state-run lab in Russia to put cats on treadmills.
• $2.4 million on Russian alcohol and addiction research.
• $2 million funneled to China’s state-run Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct dangerous experiments on bat coronaviruses and transgenic mice.
• $1.6 million to Chinese companies from the National School Lunch Program, which means taxpayer dollars from the CARES Act meant for American farmers went to Chinese agriculture exporters.
• $1.45 million for pandemic virus tracking in Russia.
• Subsidies for the Russian space program by funding the Russia Space Agency and vendors.
Ernst and OpenTheBooks determined more than $490 million from U.S. grants and contracts were paid to organizations in China over the past five years and another $870 million were paid to entities in Russia.
"Holding firms responsible to publicly report where and how they use their grants and contract awards can deputize private citizens and make them part of the solution. Radical transparency is revolutionizing U.S. public policy and is the information machine for democracy. Everyone has a stake in a more transparent, effective government," said OpenTheBooks.com CEO and founder Adam Andrzejewski.
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