From Tammany Times article dated 5/22/1899. Not sure what their mission was or what kind of leanings they had. But here is a scathing writing. Politics as usual:

    And now it appears that the Krag Jorgensen rifles, just sent to the Phillippines, at this late day in the history of our warfare, when our troops have been fighting for months with the antiquated Springfield rifle, have been resting undisturbed in their original cases since 1897.
    Just think of the hideousness of this criminal neglect!
    All through the war with Spain, our soldiers in Cuba were framed in the smoke of their short-range Springfields, a target for an enemy that was using smokeless powder and the deadly long-range Mauser, while thousands of Krag-Jorgensens were lying unused in our arsenals.
    This responsibility is directly and absolutely Alger's!
If he did not know that these guns were owned by the Government, he certainly should have known it!   
    Knowing it, he must have known that their place was in the hands of the soldiers, instead of being packed away in some warehouse.
    Is there to be no end of the list of blunders of this infinitely worse than incompetent Secretary of War?
    Shall he be whitewashed constantly, during the rest of the months of the continuance of the present administration?
    Will the inevitable accession of a Democratic successor to McKinley find the long record of Algerisms unfinished?
    It looks like it.

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I suspect "Spanish Collusion"!!!

Tammany Hall Democrats and "Yellow Journalism" would certainly have no reason to misrepresent  events.

Let's see ... hmmm ... the next Presidents were Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. (I guess the male electorate didn't overly buy into the blame game).