The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer

President Donald Trump unveiled a full slate of eye-popping tariffs on countries large and small last Friday, and the reactions over the weekend have been intense. Welcome to “Tariff Panic Week.” Many people have noted the precipitous drop in the stock market and their own IRAs since the tariffs were announced. One reporter who questioned Trump aboard Air Force One over the weekend even asked him whether he’d call off the tariffs if the Dow Jones index kept dropping. “That’s a stupid question,” Trump snapped.

What do Big Pharma ads on TV and Diet Coke have in common? Both are targets of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the new head of the Health and Human Services department. In his early efforts to press the “Make America Healthy Again,” Kennedy has singled out two seemingly different issues: those ubiquitous television ads for pharmaceuticals, and whether people on federal food assistance programs should be able to buy soda and junk food on the taxpayer dime.

The new administration of Donald Trump has been a whirlwind of activity in its first one hundred days but is running into resistance from men in black – activist federal judges.

As DOGE’s efforts shift to eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in social welfare problems including SNAP, Social Security, and Medicaid, The Drill Down podcast welcomes a nationally recognized expert in spotting how those programs are rife with fraud. Andrew McClenahan is, among other things, intergovernmental committee co-chair for an organization called the United Council on Welfare Fraud, and has investigated fraud in the food stamp program, including one bust several years ago that stopped a $100 million fraud scheme in South Florida. The group is made up of welfare fraud investigators from every state.

If you think you know how bad things are in California, you don’t. If you think you know how corrupt the state’s leading politicians are, it’s worse than that. Sticky-fingered pols pushing woke policies have turned the Golden State into fool’s gold. That’s the title of a new book out March 11 by two investigative reporters—Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics, and the Government Accountability Institute’s own Jedd McFatter. Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All exposes the shocking truth behind California’s fall from grace, and how progressives want to do it to the rest of the nation. The book exposes the corruption of California’s leading Democratic lights—Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Adam Schiff, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“Tooth and tail.” That’s the phrase new defense secretary Pete Hegseth uses to describe how money is spent (and wasted) by the Pentagon. It captures the difference between spending money to support warfighters and spending it on the mushrooming support operations that are supposed to keep the troops ready.

In the annals of government reform efforts, the efforts of Elon Musk and his task force of DOGE techies are more than tough love. Because the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has (mostly) been given access to the books of government agencies, it has spotted billions of dollars in questionable grants, make-work programs, and outright gifts to politically connected activists who provided political support to their government paymasters. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers discuss a few examples, but also address a deeper question: “So what?”

The New Face of Resistance - Lobbying Against Trump

“Big Balls,” Chris Coons and a “constitutional crisis.” For out-of-power Democrats and many in the press, the pace of Donald Trump’s new administration has them shouting, “It’s the end of the world as we know it!” Drill Down host Peter Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers feel fine, but as Elon Musk’s small posse of DoGE analysts, including a 19-year-old hacker who goes by the name of “Big Balls” online, continues to find large examples of fraud and wasteful spending in federal agency budgets, Eggers suggests another song by the band R.E.M. for angry Democrats: “Everybody Hurts.”

As the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. goes to the full Senate, healthy food activist and entrepreneur Vani Hari is thrilled by the attention his focus on “Making America Healthy Again” is getting.Through her blog, called FoodBabe, she and has been a relentless advocate for healthier, safer products from America’s largest food companies, and frustrated by the capture of the Food and Drug Administration by lobbyists for Big Food.