Once Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election, the politicized “lawfare” that had been waged against him for the previous few years quickly trailed off. But the 45th and now 47th president’s opponents were hardly going to give up. All they needed was a different approach, and they think they might have found it. Senate Democrats have created a new page on their official website to which a federal government employee can submit what they call a whistleblower complaint. The stated purpose of this is to “hold the [Trump] administration accountable.”
The so-called whistleblower portal encourages federal employees to report retaliation, wasteful spending, fraud, criminal activity, and “other.” Considering what Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is uncovering, it does appear somewhat ironic.
It is not yet clear what the Democrats plan to do with these complaints. Submit criminal referrals to the Trump Department of Justice, perhaps? Do some “judge shopping” and file lawsuits – maybe. Since they don’t have a majority in the upper chamber, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Co. cannot direct committees to investigate these complaints or convene hearings to take whistleblower testimony.
It’s worth considering that the real endgame is amassing evidence of a host of dastardly dealings for the underpinnings of articles of impeachment against Trump.
On Feb. 10, Schumer posted a link to the portal on X, proclaiming, “Today, I’m calling on our brave public servants: I’m launching a new portal for anyone who wants to expose corruption, abuses of power, and threats to public safety with the legal protections of being a whistleblower.”
The Convenience of a Whistleblower Claim
There are laws that protect government (and private sector) whistleblowers – even though the Joe Biden administration mostly seemed to show scant regard for them. These individuals are, in theory, shielded from retaliatory action and their identities cannot be revealed except in specific circumstances. Thus, Senate Democrats could stack up an ever-growing vault of allegations of all kinds of nefarious goings-on within the Trump administration – and cite whistleblower protections to avoid having to publicly validate any of the claims.
If nothing else, it’s a potentially lucrative fundraising tool, and that may indeed be its main purpose: bombarding the names on Democrats’ mailing lists with horror stories of what Orange Man Bad and his unelected “shadow president,” Elon Musk, are doing – all backed up by anonymous whistleblower claims.
Meanwhile, DOGE continues to peel the federal bureaucracy onion, revealing a truly staggering level of waste and fraud. The numbers seem to surprise even Musk. According to the live tracker on the Department of Government Efficiency website, the “DOGE clock,” the agency has so far saved more than 36.7 billion taxpayer dollars – though this bears a disclaimer that the numbers are not yet official.
Somehow, it appears to have escaped the attention of Senator Schumer and his colleagues that one of the reasons the American people returned Trump to the White House was his determination to expose and end government inefficiency and curtail the power of the Deep State – to “drain the swamp,” as he has long promised.
With their new whistleblower page, Senate Democrats have decided to enlist the Deep State to tattle on the administration’s every move. They could have conceded that the bureaucrats behind the scenes have been lavishing vast amounts of money on things no one ever voted for, and, it appears, no one was overseeing. They had a golden opportunity to repair, to an extent, their damaged image by throwing up their hands in horror at the waste and claiming they were not aware of the scale of the problem.
Instead, Mr. Schumer and his colleagues have chosen to resist any effort to expose and eliminate the staggering misappropriations. The whistleblower portal is a definite signal – as if any were needed – that they have chosen to stand with the Deep State and protect the wasteful and very possibly fraudulent activities of government bureaucrats.
