In a stunning revelation that has rocked the world of completely made-up scandals, the Department of Government Expenditures (DOGE) has officially canceled an alleged $11,000 monthly payment to Michelle Obama for “White House Garden Maintenance.” The payment, which apparently persisted for 16 years despite the small inconvenience of the Obama family not having lived in the White House for the past eight, has finally been shut down after a thorough investigation that consisted primarily of reading a viral Facebook post.
“This was blatant corruption,” declared Senator Joe Barron, who, like everyone else outraged by the discovery, never once checked the federal budget before now. “For too long, taxpayers have been footing the bill for Michelle Obama’s secret lettuce empire!”
Unfortunately, sources confirm that the White House Garden, once the crown jewel of the former First Lady’s healthy eating initiative, was unceremoniously removed in 2017 by Melania Trump to make room for what a leaked memo referred to as a “potato-themed aesthetic.”
“We have no official records of the garden existing beyond early 2017,” said one frustrated investigator. “So we are unsure what, exactly, we’ve been paying Michelle Obama for.”
Conservative news outlets, undeterred by this minor discrepancy, have labeled the scandal LettuceGate and are demanding that Michelle Obama personally return the alleged $2.1 million in payments. “If she was still receiving money for a garden that didn’t exist, where did the funds go?” asked Tucker Hannity Carlson Jr., a political commentator for News Whiz Daily. “Were they funneled into secret arugula farms? Was kale involved? The American people deserve answers.”
While official White House records confirm that Melania Trump removed the garden to accommodate an elaborate potato installation—sources claim a sculpture of a single russet potato was planned but later scrapped—the payments to Michelle Obama continued uninterrupted. Some speculate this was due to an archaic bureaucratic oversight, while others insist it was part of an elaborate deep-state conspiracy to fund a vegan uprising.
For her part, Michelle Obama seemed entirely unaware of the payments. “I had no idea the government was still sending me checks,” she said in a statement. “I assumed the money I was seeing was just Barack’s royalty payments from the one guy still buying The Audacity of Hope in airport bookstores.”
Melania Trump has remained silent on the issue, though an anonymous former aide disclosed that the potato garden was intended as a symbolic gesture of “strength and simplicity.” However, the same aide admitted that “no one ever actually planted the potatoes” because the First Lady found the process “boring.”
Despite the lack of a garden, the National Lettuce Association has already issued a public statement denouncing the scandal. “This is an attack on leafy greens everywhere,” the statement reads. “Americans deserve to know: Where is the spinach money?”
In the meantime, government watchdog groups have vowed to continue investigating other suspicious payments, including rumors that Jill Biden is collecting a secret stipend for maintaining the nonexistent White House Peloton Room.
