Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) project has helped to shine a light on the workings of power in the 21st century Western world. Most notably, the $50 billion a year USAID budget has been shown to be supporting causes that are, to put it kindly, difficult to justify to the taxpayers that fund them. In the UK, I and other sleuths such as the irrepressible Charlotte Gill, have long tried to find where both public and private funds are used and with what effect on democratic politics. Although some of this funding is, at face value, a waste of money, the problems go deeper than that. Indeed, the only reason it’s not called ‘dodgy’ is that it is, shockingly, entirely legal.
In the few spare moments I have, I’ve been trawling through the data relating to contracts between the UK Government and 130,000 service providers agreed over the last 10 years or so. Mainly, this has been an attempt to develop tools for making sense of the vast amounts of data. But along the way, some things have caught my eye. There are many manifestly absurd projects that are amply-funded by increasingly hard-pressed taxpayers. I frequently point out that these funding relationships are clearly intended to sustain ideological agendas favoured by government. But there’s more to be said. Because we want a deeper understanding of how the Blob works – how it uses private money to leverage public funds and policy – and more pertinently, why it works.
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