Imagine an investment bank owned by several generations of a family. This bank has been a profitable institution for the family, and the people it serves have viewed it as a trustworthy, knowledgeable institution for many years. Moreso, this family’s community knows it can trust the family’s bank as a fiduciary — an institution bound by law to make the best choices for the family’s clients’ assets on the clients’ behalf.

While this bank has been profitable in the past, there recently has been a drastic uptick in spending with few receipts presented. Since then, the family’s most recent generation of children have taken over the bank after the shareholders deposed their father from leading the business. These children learned that their father has been grifting for decades, and many of their employees, their employees’ friends, and even the children’s friends, have been getting a cut. And they found the receipts for each of these transactions.

Now, the new owners of the investment bank have informed the shareholders of the lack of financial stewardship, and the shareholders aren’t happy. And rightfully so; investment bankers have a fiduciary duty to protect their clients’ interests and to be good stewards of the money they have been entrusted with.

If you were one of those shareholders, would you be mad? I would be, and I am — because we just saw this play out with our own federal government. And we have receipts that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has made public with its work, detailing where each penny (rest in peace) was spent.

“Grifting” is a term that has become increasingly popular in the last decade. It refers to the immoral or unethical means of making money by taking advantage of people and situations — in other terms, petty swindling. Grifters are all around us in the news and online, and they are willing to say or do anything to get a paycheck with a lot of zeroes on the end of it. And the political world is full of them.

Worse, we’ve seen these grifters hit the government with their plays, funneling American tax dollars to nonsensical projects like transgender comic books to Peru and grants for “food justice,” and even enriching themselves from government jobs, including, apparently, from Cabinet members. These revelations will not help to reverse course on Americans’ cratering trust in the government, and it does nothing to bolster the Biden administration’s claims of being the most transparent administration in history. And, of course, I would be remiss to mention the biggest grift in American history: the “gold bars” from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent to a climate change group linked to Democratic operative Stacey Abrams.

To be clear: most federal workers aren’t grifters. In fact, most of them take their fiduciary duties seriously. But government work attracts grifters like flies to carrion, and the diseases they carry will only make where they land next sick. Unfortunately, these tsetse flies and their diseases only adversely impact the private sector after they have been credentialed by the public. 

The American people are angry about the federal government’s wasteful spending and blatant disregard of their stewardship of their taxpayer dollars. And we should be angry. We are the shareholders of the investment bank of American tax dollars, and we are learning from the new brass that our money has been mismanaged.

Yet, even in the face of efficiency and streamlining the government to benefit the American people, the legacy media doomsayers have instead elected to attack the actions mandated by the American people in November’s elections. What they fail to mention is that, regardless of the amount in savings to the American taxpayer, us taxpayers are being educated about the misuse of our trust.

In the Good Book, Jesus Christ famously cleansed the Temple of moneychangers and merchants making their home in God’s house. We should not be afraid to live by his example and do the same to our federal government, and it starts with allowing ourselves to embrace our righteous anger and demand change.