By all accounts, even those of liberal media outlets, the Democratic National Committee is broke. Under the leadership of newly elected chairman Ken Martin, the DNC is facing a full-blown financial crisis.
But how did it come to this?
Well, donor flight is one part of the answer. Since President Trump and J.D. Vance took office in a historic victory, the DNC's once-reliable donor class has slammed the brakes on contributions. But the bigger story, and one the mainstream press won't touch, is that a critical pipeline of cash has been shut off: the massive taxpayer-funded slush fund known as USAID.
For years, USAID was used by the Washington establishment to bankroll politically motivated nonprofits, foreign projects of dubious value, and leftist causes worldwide. We had a front-row seat to this here in Bulgaria for decades.
A vast network of NGOs, many of which had no accountability and little public visibility, received billions under the guise of "democracy promotion" and "foreign development." But in practice, this system served as a backdoor funding operation for the Democratic machine and its liberal friends around the world.
That changed almost immediately when the new administration, the Trump Administration, created DOGE, a bold new agency tasked with slashing wasteful spending and tackling fiscal abuse head-on. Conservatives in Bulgaria were thrilled to see this launch, knowing accountability was finally coming!
One of its first moves was to dismantle the opaque, unaccountable structures within USAID that had been misused for decades.
Thanks to whistleblowers, internal audits, and brave investigative reporting, Americans have learned what we've known for years about just how badly their tax dollars were abused. For example, millions were spent on gender ideology programs in deeply conservative regions like Guatemala and Egypt. Worse, American taxpayers unknowingly funded farming tools, irrigation, and fertilizer in Afghanistan, only to have them diverted to bolster heroin production under the Taliban. How is this in the interest of the American people? It's not!
Let that sink in. While American veterans struggle to get adequate care at home, your government was helping produce heroin in Taliban-controlled territory. True story.
Beyond the absurd waste, the deeper scandal is political. This entire ecosystem was propping up the Left. Here's how it worked: USAID money flowed to "development" groups, which then subcontracted to friendly NGOs, who in turn funneled money to progressive causes or recycled it through "approved" entities that made legal donations to the DNC. It was a laundering operation dressed up in foreign aid clothing.
Now that the spigot has been turned off, the DNC is flailing. The party that claims to represent "the people" can't survive without backdoor foreign cash and taxpayer subsidies. Without federal dollars being funneled through shadowy partners and ideological NGOs, there's no real donor base left. There's no grassroots support willing to foot the bill.
If the DNC truly had a nationwide army of enthusiastic supporters, it wouldn't be begging for loans. But it doesn't. That was confirmed again last week when new polling showed just 33 percent support for the Democratic Party, their lowest in 30 years. A staggering 63 percent of Americans view them negatively.
Why? Because I think the American people are sick of being force-fed a diet of open borders, gender confusion, radical climate alarmism, and racial division. That's the entire Democrat platform today. It doesn't resonate. And now, thanks to DOGE, Americans no longer have to subsidize their own cultural destruction.
This is more than a fiscal story. It's a philosophical one. The Left, as Margaret Thatcher once noted, always runs out of other people's money. And that's precisely what has happened here. The DNC's finances were never about grassroots democracy. They were about harvesting public funds through bureaucratic corruption and NGO middlemen.
The shutdown of this funding pipeline marks a turning point not just in exposing the rot within USAID, but in proving that the DNC has no independent capacity to fund itself. It was never a movement of energized citizens. It was a political pyramid scheme. And now that scheme is collapsing.
Our American friends are waking up. They're rejecting the idea that we must endlessly bankroll propaganda overseas while our own borders are open and our own people are struggling. They want efficiency, accountability, and America-first policies. That's exactly what President Trump and DOGE are delivering. We Bulgarians couldn't be happier!
The DNC isn't just broke. It's broken both financially and morally. And that might be the best news American taxpayers have heard and the worst news liberal NGO's around the world have listened to in years.
George Harizanov is the CEO of the Institute for Right-Wing Policies in Sofia, Bulgaria.
