Elon Musk’s DOGE-project (1) is uncovering incredible wastes of government funds. You can read a few articles here on this website about how USAID was used to interfere in the internal affairs of Ukraine (2), Bangladesh (3) and Georgia (4). We even linked it to funds for the ‘gain-of-function’ research done in Wuhan (5).

One of the questionable items that were found was related to a 9 million dollar investment from the Department of Defense for Reuters with rather suspicious sounding names like ‘Active Social Engineering Defense‘ and ‘Large Scale Social Deception‘ (6).

THE REUTERS PERSPECTIVE
It was quite tempting for me to see this as another example of how the government paid for news agencies and media companies in order to mislead and deceive the people. I could have stopped there, but I thought it fair to also look at the point of view of the accused party.

On their website (7) you can read that it was not the press agency Reuters that got the deal, but another company with a separate board of directors, called ‘Thomson Reuters Special Services‘. The aim of the fund was not to deceive the public but it was intended ‘to protect the U.S. government from social engineering, which is a form of cyber threat in which people are tricked into divulging sensitive information‘ (7).

Further on in the article we can read: “The contract was awarded to TRSS by the Air Force Research Laboratory and funded by DARPA.

DARPA told Reuters that the ASED program, which ended in 2022, “was to develop tools to protect people from social engineering attacks.”

The term “Large Scale Social Deception” was the name of the “red team” proposal, DARPA said, referring to work by Thomson Reuters Special Services to simulate an adversarial attack by pretending to be the enemy.”

SOME REFLECTIONS
Although DOGE has uncovered huge examples of federal waste, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t look at individual cases. Not everything may be the way it appears to be. Even though I think Elon Musk and the Trump team are doing great work in draining the swamp, we mustn’t become blind followers of everything they do. They are only human and can make their share of mistakes. It’s up to us to remain critical too.

FOOTNOTES
(1) https://x.com/DOGE
(2) How US A.I.D. Stirred up the Conflict in Ukraine after Zelensky was Elected
(3) The US and the Coup in Bangladesh in August 2024
(4) USAID Interfered in Elections in Georgia for over $41 million
(5) On the CIA, USAID and the Wuhan-Virus
(6) https://x.com/RTSG_News/status/1887391325399711890
(7) https://www.reuters.com/business/us-defense-department-contract-inaccurately-represented-social-media-says-2025-02-13/
(8) Thomson Reuters Special Services – For more on Reuters and conflict of interests see (9)
(9) Meet James C. Smith who was both the CEO of Reuters (the press agency) and on the Board of Directors of Pfizer in the following article:
How FDA Regulators Switched to the Pharmacompanies they Used to Regulate – Revolving Doors
(10) https://x.com/realdogeusa/status/1890052876447457640

Image on top is from (10)