Calling DOGE: American Funding of Chinese Pandas Gets Spent on Everything BUT Pandas

Everyone loves pandas, right? The adorable, clumsy, endangered fuzzballs from China are always a hit whenever they are featured in zoos around the world. Their antics make us laugh while we wonder how this species could have ever survived in the wild.

Just be careful because sometimes those pandas ... aren't actually pandas.

But it's not surprising, given how cute the roly-poly balls of fur are, that Americans would be more than happy to open up our wallets to ensure their survival.

Well, guess what, America? That money you thought you were donating to preserve the beloved bears is being spent by China on everything BUT pandas. And our government knows this but keeps sending over the money anyway.

Light up the night sky with the DOGE-Signal because this sounds like a job for the Dynamic Duo of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

U.S. zoos sent millions of dollars to China to help protect wild pandas. But the Chinese government instead spent the money on apartment buildings, roads, computers, museums and other expenses, a New York Times investigation found. https://t.co/yvXndFg43V
— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 29, 2024

We're a little shocked that this report came from the corrupt and dying New York Times, but maybe they are trying to get with the DOGE program.

The Times used two decades of financial reports, internal correspondence, photos and archival records to track more than $86 million from American zoos to a pair of organizations run by the Chinese government ...

Zoos approve which projects get financed and then list them in annual reports to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Those records show that funds were allocated to build apartment buildings far from nature reserves. China also bought computers and satellite television for local government offices and built at least three museums with the money, according to the records ...

Regulators with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the payments, have for two decades raised concerns about this with American zoo administrators and Chinese officials alike. The U.S. government, on three occasions, froze payments to China over incomplete record keeping, documents show ... Ultimately, the regulators allowed the money to keep flowing and agreed not to check the spending in China so thoroughly, according to records and former officials. [emphasis added]

Wordplay aside, this is exactly the reason that DOGE is so desperately needed. Eighty-six million dollars might not sound like a lot of money in the big picture of the federal government, but some tens of millions here, some hundreds of billions there, and pretty soon we're talking about real money.

And somehow, even if we clean up the corruption and waste, we're pretty sure those wonderfully goofy black and white bears will still survive to chow on some more bamboo, fall off another swingset, or roll down another hill to our neverending delight.

Maybe pandas look at our government's corruption and waste and wonder how we ever survived in the wild.