I Interviewed DataRepublican. Here’s What I Discovered.

She’s been doxxed. Threatened. Attacked.

Not by the bureaucrats, but by regular people—activists, journalists, social media mobs—who hate her simply for lifting the curtain.

Why?

Maybe people don’t want to believe their favorite feel-good certified nonprofit could be a top-heavy money funnel. Or that “aid” might just be a shell game played by America’s richest corporations. Or that Sesame Street in Iraq is a $50 million scam.

It’s easier to be angry at the messenger.

Look, I’ve interviewed a lot of people.

Billionaires. Bestselling authors. Hedge fund managers. Chess champions. Psychologists. Comedians. Drug dealers. Inventors.

But I’ve never spoken with someone quite like DataRepublican (DR).

She’s deaf. She’s self-taught. She reverse-engineered a massive government maze using public data. And she might be the only person alive who can make foreign aid sound like a true crime podcast.

I’ll be honest. I had no idea what I was walking into.

But here’s why you should listen to the whole thing (link below).

Girl Scout Cookies

DR’s journey into this world didn’t start in Washington. It started with Girl Scout cookies.

She noticed local troops were getting shafted by the national HQ. Local troops got only a tiny fraction—just enough to meet technical requirements.

So she asked questions, got stonewalled, and built a tool to track where the money was going.

Then people in Washington noticed. They asked her to find specific “award IDs”—basically government payout receipts.

She built a platform where anyone can look them up and trace the connections. This system—that anyone can use today to do their own digging—went viral.

This is what led to her involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

What started with cookies grew into uncovering patterns in federal funding, grants, NGOs, and contracts. And what DR noticed in the Girl Scouts—lack of transparency, tiny returns to locals—mirrored what she later found in the government.

Now she has nearly a million followers and a digital army of waste-hunters.

The rallying cry: we’re $36 trillion in debt. And there’s no plan to stop it. In fact, the deeper the debt, the more they make.

More debt = more funding = more “advice” = more payouts.

Waste is the Business Model

USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development) doles out billions in foreign aid every year. On the surface, this sounds noble—"spreading democracy," "fighting poverty," etc.

But zoom in and you’ll find something weird: why is Land O’Lakes, a butter company, getting $100 million in foreign aid?

It gets weirder.

Yale got money to set up police departments in Mexico. Disney was paid to distribute films to the military. Walmart received foreign aid dollars. And nobody really knows why.

This isn’t an accident. It’s architecture.

At the center of it all is a group I’d never heard of before this podcast: USGLC, the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.

Sounds boring. Bureaucratic.

But USGLC is a private lobbying group loaded with ex-congresspeople, executives from companies like Pepsi, Walmart, and Pfizer.

Here's the magic trick:

• They lobby Congress for more foreign aid.
• Their members sit on the advisory boards of USAID.
• Then, they “advise” where the money goes.
• The money ends up going… back to them.

They write the laws, steer the cash, and collect the checks.

It's like a Monopoly game where the same five players keep passing Go and collecting $200 while the rest of us are stuck in jail.

DR calls it the “infinite money hack.”

It’s the reason, she says, Congress refuses to stop any of this spending.

But here’s maybe the scariest part:

This isn’t corruption in the Hollywood sense. There’s no smoking gun or sinister villain stroking a cat. It’s not Lex Luthor.

It’s worse. It’s normal.

The people involved? They generally don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. They believe they’re saving democracy from collapse. That if we don’t export “influence,” China wins. That butter in Botswana somehow keeps Beijing at bay.

But there are no brakes. No accountability. Just mission creep and endless spending in the name of virtue and security.

And when you follow the money, it doesn’t lead to starving children being fed. It leads to nonprofits growing rich off government grants, lobbying for more grants, and giving themselves raises.

Help Follow the Money

I don’t know if DOGE will work to cut the waste in government.

But I do know this: somebody has to follow the money. Sunlight is still the best disinfectant.

And right now, one of the most effective watchdogs in America is a woman with a homemade AI dashboard and a Twitter account.

I subscribed. My wife subscribed.

Listen to the full podcast to find out why you should too.

If you want to help, start here: go to her site. Learn how to search award IDs. Look up your favorite charity, your alma mater, that random NGO you saw on Instagram. Ask questions. Be annoying.

If even the cookie cartel’s rigged, how deep does this go?