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You wanna do WHAT with 1.8 billion?
Date: 2026-May-18 Author: Rob Dennis
$1.8 billion.
That’s a decent chunk of change for most of us, but a tiny fraction of a U.S. federal budget that ran to $7 trillion last fiscal year.
Still, even that comparatively small amount can make a huge difference in people’s lives if spent wisely, rather than funneled into a slush fund to support your unsavory political allies.
For instance...
Sixty projects funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) cost $237 million - not billions. They included:
$9 million for Louisiana to tackle beach erosion after Hurricane Ida
$2 million for the Archdiocese of San Juan in Puerto Rico to buy and install generators in 23 schools to provide backup power during outages.
The Department of Transportation (DOT) at the end of the Biden administration announced $544 million in grants for 81 projects to help re-connect communities in urban, rural and tribal areas that have been cut off by transportation infrastructure.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is offering grants of $1 billion a year from 2022 to 2026 to modernize airport terminals.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is delivering a billion-dollar investment from 2022 to 2026 to help clean up the most environmentally degraded sites across the Great Lakes region.
Things we could have gotten - but didn't - include...
The Trump administration last year eliminated two U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs that helped schools and food banks to buy food from local farms. The combined cost of both programs was $1 billion.
A portion of the $1.8 billion could be used to pay the $260 million that the United States owes to the World Health Organization (WHO) but has refused to cough up since President Donald Trump announced last year that the U.S. was withdrawing from WHO and halting all funding.
The remaining $1.5 billion or so could be used to cover about another two years of payments to the organization. The U.S. historically has been one of the largest funders of WHO, which works to eliminate diseases, tackle health crises, and promote global health.
While it wouldn’t restore all of the $60 billion in funding stripped from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) last year, $1.8 billion could be used to give back some of the money. USAID in 2023 provided $1 billion for humanitarian and health aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example. Here is a list of other key projects that were eliminated.
Congress approved more than $650 million earlier this year for the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), restoring operations at Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other media organizations delivering uncensored news to audiences in repressive countries where free speech is under threat. The funding, however, is still $200 million less than USAGM was promised in 2025, before Trump moved to shutter the organization.
So where's the money going instead?
Instead of spending more money on these projects or others like them, however, the Trump administration announced this week the creation of a $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization slush fund to funnel money to his supporters, including the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump pardoned virtually everyone who participated in the attack, including thirty-three of rioters who subsequently have been rearrested, charged or sentenced for other crimes.
Six were charged with child sex crimes. Five were charged with illegal possession of weapons. Two were charged with rape.
One of these charmers, Andrew Paul Johnson, was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year for molesting two children – just months after he was freed by Trump’s mass pardon. Johnson told one of his victims he expected to receive $10 million as a result of “being a jan 6’er” and would put the child in his will to keep him silent, according to the police report.
You get what you pay for.