Hello, I'm Michael Watson, and this is the Influence Watch podcast. The year 2025 has been

wild and disruptive in the world of policy and influence. With the new administration coming

to power with an aggressive agenda, a major reorganization of the left and Democratic Party's

most important dark money

network, and a worrying rise in political violence. Joining me to look back on the year are my

colleague Robert Stelson and Capital Research Center president, Scott Walter. Robert, welcome back.

Yeah, thanks, Mike. And Scott, happy to have you again. Always a pleasure. So let's start at the beginning of the year.

The Trump administration comes in in January with a lot of energy for the Department of Government

Efficiency program. We've got headlined by Elon Musk. Big move. We're going to come in and try to, you know, make the government work better.

What did Doge teach us, though, about the relationship between nonprofits and government?

And also, you know, to plug our own work on the Doge files, identifying some of those connections.

Robert? Yeah, I mean, this is something we had looked at

for years, the relationship between nonprofits and the federal government. And that's one of

contractor and grantmaker, right? It's a major source of funding. A lot of people don't realize

that charities receive, a lot of charities receive a significant portion of their

revenue from the taxpayer. And so when we say our Doge work, and we call it the Doge files, right?

And it was our, really, a continuation and an intensification of our examination of work we've

been doing, looking at government-funded nonprofits. And we tended to zero in on either grants or grantees that we thought might be particularly

wasteful, particularly ideological, stuff that might strike the ordinary American taxpayer as

something that at least deserves a little more scrutiny.

So we went through and we did department and agency-specific examinations of these grants.

We did some topical focused ones, and I think even one or two that were focused on particular grantees.

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