Biden Admin Spent $267M On Grants Mentioning ‘Misinformation’: Report

An astonishing report details how the Biden administration spent $267 million since 2021 on research grants whose proposals mentioned “misinformation.”

The report was issued by OpenTheBooks, a nonprofit organization founded in 2011 as a transparency group. Ironically, in 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama co-sponsored the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which permitted public access to federal spending. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) also co-sponsored the bill, later serving as the honorary chairman of OpenTheBooks before his passing in 2020.

Of the $267 million, “The feds have spent at least $127 million in grants specifically targeted to study the spread of “misinformation” — or to help people ‘overcome’ it, so to speak — by persuading them to go along with Covid-related public health recommendations and mandates,” the report states.

Further, a methodology note in the report states, “This likely does not cover all grants given to combat misinformation, because transaction descriptions may not include this keyword, but the trend in spending illustrates a sudden explosion of interest in misinformation starting in 2021.” The report adds that the Department of Health and Human Services issued grants totaling $185 million, the National Science Foundation total was $65 million, and the Stated Department $12 million.

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Last month, a report from the House Committee on Energy & Commerce’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations noted that in August 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services initiated the “We Can Do This” campaign — a campaign that ultimately cost more than $900 million — which was meant to affect the public’s response to the COVID pandemic. “The Campaign came to serve as a critical vehicle for disseminating the Biden-Harris administration’s messaging on mask usage, social distancing, vaccine effectiveness, the risks COVID-19 posed to children, and how to reopen schools, businesses, and civil society,” the report stated.

“It appears the administration most concerned with ‘misinformation’ itself trafficked in misinformation: on masks, on risks to children, on social distancing, and on the need to vaccinate even infants,” the OpenTheBooks report asserted.

In December 2022, then-former President Donald Trump stated he would “prohibit federal policing of lawful domestic speech” upon becoming the 47th president: “Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis’- or dis-information.’ And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship — directly or indirectly — whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.”