The Patriot Post® · Your Tax Dollars at Work in Ukraine
Given the barbarous attack by Hamas terrorists on Israel this weekend, it’s safe to say that there are far fewer people thinking about Ukraine right now than there were 72 hours ago.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t do two things at once. It’s hard to know, for example, how much money we’ve spent in our proxy war with Russia, or what Joe Biden’s plan for victory is, or barring that, what his exit strategy is, or whether he expects us to help rebuild the awful wreckage that was once Ukraine. And the longer we’re engaged in helping to finance that war, the higher the tab.
And, it seems, the less lethal the spending. Would you be surprised to learn, for example, that we’re paying not just for ordnance, but for teachers and school workers? It’s true. As The Wall Street Journal reports:
The U.S. and other donor nations effectively pay the salaries of 150,000 civil servants in Ukraine and more than half a million teachers, professors and school workers, not to mention government expenses ranging from health care to housing subsidies.
Eisenhower rightly warned us to beware of the military-industrial complex, but he said nothing about the teacher-administrator complex. It’s one thing to supply Javelins and Harpoons and Switchblades, but it’s quite another to appropriate U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund Ukraine’s Department of Education. Ukraine, after all, has earned its reputation as one of the world’s most corrupt countries. It’s no wonder they love doing business with our corrupt president and his corrupt son.
Back in early February, a Fox News headline read, “US leads the rest of the world with $196 billion given to Ukraine amid war with Russia,” but that reporting seems to have been either inaccurate or inconvenient, as no other news service has reported that figure, including Fox News. A more widely recognized number, $113 billion, was reported by our Mark Alexander soon thereafter.
In any case, and although former Republican Senator Everett Dirksen may never have actually said it: A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.
Real money indeed. “That question has roiled the American political arena for a year and a half,” as our Nate Jackson wrote last month. “Republicans have uncharacteristically soured on such aid in large measure because it smells like swamp establishment and no one trusts Biden to manage it well. To put it mildly, his family’s ties to a thoroughly corrupt Ukraine are hugely problematic and come with national security consequences.”
National Review’s Jim Geraghty reports that we have all sorts of people on the job of tracking how American taxpayer dollars are being spent over there. “As of the end of March 2023,” he wrote recently, “the federal government has more than 160 personnel from 20 U.S. oversight organizations tracking and auditing the weapons, ammunition, equipment, and money sent to Ukraine, personnel who are primarily pulled from the Offices of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.”
Okay, fine. Weapons, ammo, and equipment. But, again, the Ukrainian educational establishment? And beyond that, any villas or dachas or fancy European vacations for Volodymyr Zelensky’s senior staff? Geraghty continues: “As of March, investigations ‘have not yet substantiated significant waste, fraud, or abuse,’ although it’s proven difficult to monitor weapons at the final stages, near the front lines.”
If the Biden administration really wanted to reassure the American people that their tax dollars were being judiciously spent in Ukraine, wouldn’t they have been wise to appoint a single Accountability Czar who could be called before Congress to testify about all these billions?
By now, it appears to be too late. The American people have long since soured on the blank checks we’re writing for Ukraine. And no one is happier about this prospect than Vladimir Putin.
Back in August, a CNN poll showed that the American people were against additional Ukraine funding by a 55-45 margin. It’s safe to say the sentiment hasn’t improved since then, especially given the ongoing catastrophe of our own southern border.
Here, it’s worth remembering what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said just 10 months ago, and how out-of-touch his comment now seems: “Providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians,” he said, “that’s the number one priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans. That’s how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment.”
These days, McConnell wouldn’t dare make such a statement. Heck, he can’t even hold Senate Republicans together on Ukraine. Last weekend, as The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reports, McConnell suffered a resounding defeat “when Republicans in the upper chamber disregarded his repeated calls for prioritizing Ukraine funding by passing the House GOP’s short-term spending bill, which included no provisions for the Volodymyr Zelensky regime.”
Boyd added that McConnell has “quietly acknowledged to his colleagues that any spending bill that included Ukraine funding was not a winning issue for the party.”
No, it isn’t. As a wise man once said, entangling alliances typically aren’t.