Republicans have touted numerous examples of what they consider frivolous, wasteful spending as the Department of Government Efficiency works to carry out President Donald Trump’s budget cuts.
Some social media users said a familiar target of Republican ire — Whoopi Goldberg, a cohost of ABC’s “The View” — received taxpayer money, too.
“Doge found a $6 million grant awarded to Whoopi Goldberg to ‘promote diversity on The View,’” read text above an image of Goldberg posted on Facebook March 7. Beneath the image, it said: “This is why we need these audits.”
A similar March 8 Threads post went a step further, adding: “No, this is why we need arrests.”
The posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)
The posts prompted nearly 100 “anger” emoji reactions on Facebook and on Threads people commented things such as “this is beyond sick,” “theft” and “arrest her.”
But the post’s claims aren’t real.
A spokesperson for “The View” told PolitiFact that Goldberg received no such grant.
We searched USASpending, the official open data source of federal spending, for grants awarded to Goldberg and found no grants matching this description.
The claim stems from a blog post on a website called The Dunning-Kruger Times, which described itself as part of “the ‘America’s Last Line of Defense’ network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery.” The site’s about page said, “Everything on this website is fiction.”
The site has a blog post titled: “DOGE uncovers $6 million grant awarded to Whoopi Goldberg to ‘promote diversity on The View.’” The text of the blog entry makes it clear that the article is not real, saying Goldberg “hired a parrot named ‘Ronald Reagan Jr.’” to promote “ideological balance.”
As it did in these posts, America’s Last Line of Defense often places a watermark in the corner of its images that includes the organization’s name along with a “Satire” disclaimer. People who encounter these posts often overlook the small and sometimes nearly illegible disclaimer and share the images to their own timelines as if they recounted real events.
Other fact-checking organizations including Snopes and Lead Stories also concluded this narrative emerged from the Dunning-Kruger satire site. PolitiFact has previously fact-checked several False claims stemming from the site.
We rate this claim False.
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
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