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Yesterday, William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Molly Redden, and Kirsten Berg of ProPublica published a blockbuster story reporting that the anti-corruption group of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) for engaging in a pay-to-play scheme in which defense contractor Navatek made illegal donations to her 2020 campaign and later got multimillion-dollar contracts from the government. Collins is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
And yet, the story continues, when he returned to the White House in 2025, Trump fired the investigators building the case and largely stopped investigating public corruption.
While the primary witness in the case was Martin Kao, the man who allegedly engaged in the bribery, the ProPublica journalists corroborated much of Kao’s account through legal records, FBI evidence, and interviews with people who worked with Navatek and the FBI.
Collins’s deputy chief of staff Annie Clark said Collins’s office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-to-play, but she did admit that “the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.” Emails suggest that, in fact, her office did know about the deal. After a $150,000 donation, a staff member from her office emailed a lobbyist for Navatek to ask for Kao’s phone number, writing: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”
Although the story’s authors report that Navatek never produced a product the military needed, it did, in fact, receive millions in defense contracts.
The bribery angle of this story is huge. So, too, is that the story suggests that Trump, at least, might perceive that he has something to hold over Collins’s head to keep her behind his actions, even when they have dramatically weakened her power at the head of Appropriations.
The 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain that gave the late nineteenth century its nickname was not about the riches of the industrialists who came to be known as robber barons. It was about the political corruption of the era. In the book, unscrupulous speculators bribed congressmen. “A Congressional appropriation costs money,” a railroad man tells a naive youth who wonders where a $200,000 appropriation has gone. He listed the bribes his project required and noted that the “high moral” lawmakers cost more than the usual ones.
It was an era in which lawmakers lived by the “spoils system,” as in “to the victor go the spoils.” Lawmakers at the time rewarded their business followers with government contracts and put supporters into political office. The businessmen and officials, in turn, would hire workers on the condition they voted for the party the boss supported. “Every good man looks after his friends,” as one politician put it.
The U.S. outlawed the spoils system in 1883 after a disappointed office seeker assassinated President James Garfield, replacing it with the merit-based Civil Service Reform Act, or Pendleton Act. Trump has ripped up those civil service protections, making much of the government staff again political appointees. Curiously, at the United Nations yesterday, Trump used the phrase “to the victor belong the spoils.”
The relationship between the MAGA Republican agenda and the misuse of tax dollars is becoming more and more obvious since ProPublica ran the story last November of how contracts from the Department of Homeland Security appeared to be going to those personally tied to then–Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and her ally Corey Lewandowski.
In July 2026, Tarini Parti, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal confirmed that Lewandowski “effectively controlled billions in spending at Homeland Security.” Lewandowski responded, somewhat halfheartedly, that the story was “just another example of the kind of anonymous-source, politically driven reporting that Americans have seen time and again,” and emphasized that he was “a volunteer in advancing this administration’s agenda.”
Stories of the Trump administration’s misuse of taxpayer money are starting to drop fast and furious.
Yesterday, Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. funded enhanced security for himself by taking funds from the department’s Office of Minority Health. Whyte notes that the Reagan administration created the Office of Minority Health after a landmark report showed that Black life expectancy in the U.S. was shorter than white Americans’ and that Black babies were more likely than white babies to die.
Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported today that, over the past year, Kennedy has also accepted $4 million in book advances and more than $270,000 in gifts from allies connected to the “Make American Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement interested in changes to government policies. Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, accepted $210,000 in consulting fees from a MAHA advocacy group.
On a far larger scale is the use of tax dollars to pay authoritarian governments to imprison immigrants from the United States who are not their own citizens.
On Monday, David Nakamura and Adam Taylor of the Washington Post reported that the State Department’s “Office of Remigration” has pledged at least $410 million to facilitate third-country renditions to expel migrants that U.S. courts say cannot be returned to their home countries for fear they will be harmed or killed. So the U.S. has sent more than 25,000 people to at least 28 third countries, including Eswatini, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, for a fee. That money includes $81 million in direct payments to 13 foreign governments, as well as funding for agencies that will then contribute to those countries.
Those countries either imprison the migrants or send them back to their home countries, a loophole that enables the administration to get around the prohibition on the U.S. sending them there. Last Friday, a federal appeals court found that this policy is unlawful. The administration will appeal to the Supreme Court.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has ordered the deals, and Christian Ehrhardt, a State Department official, has secured them.
Nakamura and Taylor explain that the Office of Remigration—the word “remigration” is popular with white nationalists who seek to expel racial minorities and immigrants through ethnic cleansing—reverses the previous U.S. emphasis on resettling refugees and instead focuses on expelling them, including into places where there is strong evidence they will be tortured. The administration is locking in these deals as quickly as possible, the journalists report, exercising “minimal oversight over how the money is spent and how the migrants are treated, even though some of the third countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes.”
A former State Department official who left the department over the policy told Nakamura and Taylor that the administration wanted “fast money, with no strings attached. The whole point was to circumvent [congressional] notification that money was being sent to a government known to be corrupt.” The plan appears to be to create such terror in migrant communities that people here self-deport, and others are afraid to come.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “Congress should demand answers from those responsible for diverting taxpayer funding intended to protect people from persecution to some of the world’s worst authoritarians, for purposes which clearly violate human rights.”
On Sunday an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a Venezuelan food delivery driver, in the back in Austin, Texas. With a bullet still lodged in his body, he was discharged from a hospital to ICE custody, where he spent the night in pain on a cold floor. Nick Miroff of The Atlantic reported yesterday that the officer was a recent hire who was not wearing a body camera, despite the promise of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that all ICE agents would wear cameras. News outlets reported that the officer had been issued one.
The Department of Homeland Security set out to add 10,000 new agents last year after Congress provided billions of dollars to double the ICE workforce. ICE ramped up its hiring by offering $50,000 signing bonuses and cutting normal vetting procedures, sometimes not even checking fingerprints or identities or conducting a job interview. David Brouillette, the ICE officer with a volatile history who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, in July, was also a recent hire. On September 15, Alex Horton, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Maria Sacchetti, and Ted Hesson of the Washington Post reported that ICE has been quietly firing some of those hastily hired.
ICE told the Washington Post reporters: “ICE is hiring the best of the best to go after the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens including drug traffickers, murderers, and pedophiles. When individuals fall short of that standard—personnel decisions are made. This is standard practice in almost every American workplace.”
Officials told Miroff that the agents who stopped Garcés Pérez used a commercial database and federal immigration file that identified the man’s plates as belonging to someone with an outstanding deportation order; his lawyer said he had a valid work permit and is an asylum seeker, and that the deportation order came because notice of his immigration court hearing was sent to the wrong address. After a public outcry, officials took Garcés Pérez back to the hospital on Monday.
Ryan Quinn of Inside Higher Ed reported Monday that the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality are running far behind where they should be in terms of funding for the fiscal year, which ends on September 30.
Trump fired the board of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in April, and the foundation is now effectively being run by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a former NSF board member told Quinn. The director of OMB is Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025. “And OMB is directing the agency to direct its grant-making dollars in ways that are very different from federal law as passed by Congress in its budget,” the former board member said.
Quinn noted that Nature attributed the funding shortfall mainly “to the agency keeping more than $1 billion in an account, much of which is for the White House’s Grand Research Challenges project, which is meant to support specific fields, including artificial intelligence.” The Trump family and the president’s allies are heavily invested in the AI sector.
And then there are Trump’s vanity projects. Even before Trump announced that the American taxpayer wouldn’t pay a dime for the White House ballroom project, the administration had already signed contracts that put the American taxpayer on the hook for more than $300 million for it.
Today Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported that James McCrery II, the first architect on Trump’s ballroom, resigned when Trump insisted on a design that did not meet fire codes. Normally, White House construction would be managed by federal agencies required by law to comply with building safety codes, but White House officials have routed the ballroom through the tiny Executive Residence office that is exempt from rules because it is not a federal agency.
McCrery warned that Trump’s design did not have enough emergency exits or measures to contain a fire, which could spread quickly from the kitchen below the ballroom to the event space above it, and pointed out that the design was not up to code.
Trump waved off his concerns. “I am the code,” he said.
Notes:
https://www.propublica.org/article/fbi-susan-collins-navatek-campaign-donations-investigation
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/21/ice-shooting-austin-texas-venezuelan-man
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/corey-lewandowski-influence-dhs-43d3fe03
https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-dhs-ad-campaign-strategy-group
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/rfk-jr-hhs-security-cost-minority-health-office-f1c7b62a