Maybe it's time for you to catch up. There is scant sympathy at this juncture for this agency. First, watch a documentary called Poverty Inc to see how aid affects the people it is allegedly helping, Second, it appears a small percentage of the budget of this agency is actually for food for the hungry type programs. As is true for huge insitutions, its mission as expanded exponentially beyond 'aid' into very questionable acitvities some of which appear to be directed against this country. Institutions lose sight of their original purpose and become laser focused on the perpetuation of themselves and benefit to those associated with it. In other words, giant patronage slush funds. Time to dismantle, clean up and put priorities back where they actually serve the purpose intended.
I respectfully disagree. Not with the overarching metaphor of Donald Trump as a wrecking ball, which I think few people would disagree with, including Trump himself.
But the arguments here smuggle in some very partisan assumptions. Start with PEPFAR, a program that has inarguably been life-saving, humanitarian and miraculous. But is it fair to argue those 25 million saved lives over more than two decades is reflective of what PEPFAR is doing now, or in the future as the AIDS crisis continues to diminish and drugs move to the marginal cost of generics? I don't know, but has anyone asked with honesty?
Or take the fact that the USAID takes up on 0.2% of the federal budget. Something like that claim is made for every budget cut, and has been for the decades that our deficit has been mushrooming. Some program here is "only 1% of the budget." Some program somewhere else is just a pittance at 0.5% of the budget.
All of those tiny numbers add up, and each one viewed on its own misses the point of the arithmetic of this thing. The obvious political problem has been (with almost every president and congress in my lifetime) that as long as no one can cut a lot of small anythings because someone somewhere might be hurt (which is cruelly true), we won't, can't and never will cut things dramatically, and the budget deficit will never end.
But as Stein's law says, anything that can't go on forever won't. I have no love for Donald Trump, never voted for him, and found him laughable as a public figure as long ago as the 1980s when Spy Magazine made him one of their prime punching bags. He hasn't changed.
And he does -- always -- go too far. Sometimes further than too far. I have very deep concerns about some of his truly destructive plans (the list is long), as any reasonable citizen does.
But when it comes to the federal budget, someone has to act, and any act will mean somebody doesn't get something they are used to. Again that is a cruel truth. But is it possible that every single thing USAID and the Department of Education and so on is truly justifiable in 2025, and produces the results that it has long purported to? Is the top-line rhetoric always, or even mostly in line with what that money is actually accomplishing? Maybe. But who's been asking, again honestly, lately?
Even if so (and it seems a large majority of Americans tends to agree there are serious questions) what dynamic historically, short of a fully declared war, can force us to realign our expectations, maybe, possibly, do more with less, or even a little less with less?
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are not lovable or even for many of us tolerable as human beings. But fiscal responsibility is one of the best parts of the mandate (such as it is) that Trump earned, and it's one I agree with. And on that I wish them well. I honestly doubt that anything short of this dramatic housecleaning would be able to do the trick. What else is there that can overcome the politics of the legions of micro-advocates, who always claim the grannies and orphans the author here invokes? If we can move the conversation in the direction that allows more political freedom in the future to realign, that is fine with me. I am confident the courts will sort out the constitutional and unconstitutional actions Trump and Musk are taking, and there will be some room to move forward with real administrative reform. And who knows, maybe even Congress will be able to do something to clear up the statutes that created all of these good things that might no longer be as good as promised.
Fiscal responsibility is a fine thing. In most cases fiscal responsibility is achieved by balancing income and outgo. What I see happening under Trump/Musk, and have seen in the Republican playbook since at least Ronald Reagan, is massive reduction in federal income via tax cuts benefiting primarly corporations and the wealthy, coupled with calls for reductions in federal outgo in areas llike health and education, in other words, programs for everyone else. And not just Republicans. I believe it was Obama, after bailing out the banks in 2008-2009, who announced piously that as a result all would have to sacrifice. Trump's first term in office brought yet another budget-busting tax cut for the usual suspects; that tax cut is about to expire, doubtless to be renewed. So how about not renewing the Trump tax cuts and thereby increasing federal income? Issues polls, rather than horserace-based polls, show that across the board American citizens favor increasing taxes on the wealthy. Cancelling the Trump tax cuts and raising taxes on the wealthy would add to the federal income stream and create the appearance of greater fairness in taxation. It would provide more room to evaluate federal programs on their merits. I realize this isn't going to happen now, but it changes the argument in important ways. Anders Knosper makes a moral claim. Trump's moral claim seems to be that Elon Musk deserves his $300 billion even if that means poor people around the world lack medicine or food.
As Knospe argues, it would be perfectly reasonable to review and evaluate USAID programs as part of a general review of government spending. But such a review should be careful, and consider trade-offs. Surely one should take the national security argument into account, as well as the question of reputational damage. Perhaps the US, in preserving and even increasing USAID's medical and food aid to poverty-stricken regions of the world, would get more bang for its national security buck than by continuing its current level of spending on defense procurement, procurement that, not coincidentally, Elon Musk is not exactly incentivized to evaluate.
You apparently fail to realize that the Trump tax cuts reduced taxes proportionally more for lower-income taxpayers than for higher-income payers, who pay a vastly disproportionate share of their income in taxes anyway. Our system is already very skewed towards high taxation of higher-income people. Lower income people, especially families with dependents, pay little to no income tax now. How can we reduce taxes even further when they effectively pay none now? There aren't enough rich people to make much difference in total income tax receipts, even if the rates were raised to confiscatory levels which the Democrats would never tolerate since their base now is those wealthy people. The largest source of tax revenue for the government is the middle class since that's where the vast majority of the income is.
And raising business taxes also makes no sense since business actually pays no tax, everything it pays in taxes is a loss to its employees (lower wages), investors (lower dividends and stock prices) and to society as a whole (less money to invest in and grow their business). The most efficient tax rate on business economically is 0% but since the majority don't understand this business taxation goes on. But the total take from business is low compared to other tax sources.
Trump actually understands that the social safety net is very important to ordinary people and he has consistently said that he intends to preserve it. But there is a great deal of fraud in all of the entitlement programs and I think everyone who is honest can agree that we need to be much more focused and consistent about not paying fraudulent claims. There is a large amount of money in fraud and grift, and we need to do the audits that the DOGE team is conducting to end the fraud.
Your last point is a good one, and one I'm watching closely. The defense budget does seem to be the item that (a) is most substantial; (b) is the most badly managed (so, so much in it we don't know, and no one can seem to account for); and (c) likely the most abused by contractors.
That is going to be my test case for whether Musk is acting in good faith -- which I assume until proven otherwise; I don't like rooting against the people who have such a tight grip on the nation's purse strings. Most people assume that he is acting in bad faith, and that might be true, but this would be his proving ground. If he is able to do anything close to a substantial audit of the defense budget, as he is presumed to be doing audits of other sectors; and if he can identify items in that military-industrial morass that are suspect or approach downright criminality; and if he is able to achieve cuts (however that would happen...) then my charitable assumption will have saved me a lot of speculative worry.
But if I am wrong, then I will concede that his obvious self-interest, not to mention his business conflicts did prevail over any of his assertions that he is working in the public's interest. I very much want to believe he is not the crass, predatory, unscrupulous creep he so often appears to be. But only he will be able to provide the evidence one way or the other. And I don't think he'll be able to hide from the consequences.
Social Security is the biggest, and growing, item in federal spending. Medicare/Medicaid is next, followed by _service on the national debt_. Defense spending comes after that.
Economics is not a zero -sum game. Both sides of a transaction can win. An entrepreneur cannot possibly capture all the value they create.
Profit is confirmation from external reality that your output is worth more than the sum of your inputs; that you add wealth to the world. It is positively immoral to run a losing business. You destroy wealth in doing so.
While USAID has provided important health and welfare programs, it has also put a lot of money into regime change. Most recently against the democratically elected president of Georgia and the dictator in Bangladesh. The latter was successful while the former was not. A USAID official was recently recorded as bragging about the success of the program in "changing governments."
Fuck no. Sorry. Trump was elected by the majority wanting the foreign aid to end. Name a country that sends foreign aid to the US? None.
The Global Order is over. The cupboard is bare. For too long the US has funded global security at the expense of her own people. Elites craving opportunity to virtue signal their empathy, can do so on their own dime... and stop spending MY tax dollars on things I did not approve of.
It is far past time to turn our attention back toward our own country. Elites have been riding high on the hog with Wall Street and real estate returns while the socioeconomic circumstances for the bottom 80% has crashed.
And the list of USAID politic graft and corruption 98% benefitting Democrats.... that alone is justification for ripping the entire agency out by the roots and implementing 100% transparency for all the spending.
Respectfully, you are way behind with all this. There is little evidence that any USAID programs as they are currently structured do anything at all for purposes of "tackling poverty, strengthening economies, and promoting good governance" and quit a bit of evidence that the programs offer aid to our enemies, undermine legitimate governments, and contribute only minimally to local economies. Plus all of the silly leftist DEI and gender programs that other countries neither need or want and are a total waste of money, and the support for censorship of non-leftists and propaganda for the progressive Deep State, which are illegal and must end immediately. Your arguments wailing "what about the children? What about the AIDS victims?" are based, most likely, on the stated intent of the program, or on generalized leftist talking points, and not at all on the results, because no one ever looks at the results.
And when we are borrowing every dime we spend on these programs, or using taxpayer's hard-earned cash for them, they MUST be effective and prudent, there is no such thing as "pennies on the dollar, it's not that much money", etc. etc. It all counts.
So what would you have us do? Throw good money after bad while we try to figure out what programs have merit and which ones do not? As fast as the Trump team is moving, I think it will be fairly quick to identify the programs which are useful and/or could be reformed into being useful. Marco Rubio has stated that he intends to keep the worthwhile programs but align them with American interests instead of acting against us or promoting nonsense. We should all support this.
US aid should be given to countries which in turn support us. Disconnecting AID from State Dept to avoid the appearance of quid pro quo was foolish. We shouldn't put up with countries thumbing their nose at our interests and helping our enemies while pocketing our money no matter how worthy the cause.
"Many of the USAID programs under threat are very impactful. For example, the agency’s partner PEPFAR, an anti-HIV/AIDS initiative that pays for antiretroviral medicines and leads efforts to halt the spread of the virus, is estimated to have saved 25 million lives since its inception in 2003."
So, the US government encourages promiscuous sex through Gay Pride and Pussy Riot in order encourage people to engage in dangerous behavior. And, naturally, such dangerous behavior then leads to disease. As a result, government agencies then send billions of dollars to NGOs to “treat” the very problem created by them in the first place. Nice.
This is almost comedy gold: (1) no government spending is wasteful, (2) okay some of it is wasteful, but you should not be noticing that because you are not as virtuous and wise as I, (3) okay, most of it contains such perverse incentives that end up making the problem worse, but you should not be noticing that either because you are not as virtuous and wise as I, (4) if I can't stop you from noticing the waste and terrible results, then you should attempt to stop it using only means that can be thwarted by wise, virtuous me, (5) here is a picture of a sad puppy that we helped, ignore the mass of dead puppy bodies below it that resulted from our 'help', (6) why do you want to murder puppies? Puppy murderer!
Here is my favorite: "USAID is also a remarkably small slice of the national budget, making up less than 0.2% of total federal spending." It does not seem to occur to you that if we can find millions and millions of dollars of waste in a tiny fraction of the budget, just imagine how much we will find in the large parts of the budget.
No matter the virtue of any program, if you are in debt, you stop spending. You live on beans and rice. Foreign aid, *all* of it, is not beans and rice. When you spend decades successfully shutting down all attempts to rein in spending, people vote for a wrecking ball because they prefer chemotherapy to cancer. This is on you and your cartoonishly blind ilk. All of it. Without you, the chemotherapy would not have been necessary in the first place.
Maybe it's time for you to catch up. There is scant sympathy at this juncture for this agency. First, watch a documentary called Poverty Inc to see how aid affects the people it is allegedly helping, Second, it appears a small percentage of the budget of this agency is actually for food for the hungry type programs. As is true for huge insitutions, its mission as expanded exponentially beyond 'aid' into very questionable acitvities some of which appear to be directed against this country. Institutions lose sight of their original purpose and become laser focused on the perpetuation of themselves and benefit to those associated with it. In other words, giant patronage slush funds. Time to dismantle, clean up and put priorities back where they actually serve the purpose intended.
"A Government agency is the nearest thing to eternal life you will find on Earth." Ronald Reagan.
I respectfully disagree. Not with the overarching metaphor of Donald Trump as a wrecking ball, which I think few people would disagree with, including Trump himself.
But the arguments here smuggle in some very partisan assumptions. Start with PEPFAR, a program that has inarguably been life-saving, humanitarian and miraculous. But is it fair to argue those 25 million saved lives over more than two decades is reflective of what PEPFAR is doing now, or in the future as the AIDS crisis continues to diminish and drugs move to the marginal cost of generics? I don't know, but has anyone asked with honesty?
Or take the fact that the USAID takes up on 0.2% of the federal budget. Something like that claim is made for every budget cut, and has been for the decades that our deficit has been mushrooming. Some program here is "only 1% of the budget." Some program somewhere else is just a pittance at 0.5% of the budget.
All of those tiny numbers add up, and each one viewed on its own misses the point of the arithmetic of this thing. The obvious political problem has been (with almost every president and congress in my lifetime) that as long as no one can cut a lot of small anythings because someone somewhere might be hurt (which is cruelly true), we won't, can't and never will cut things dramatically, and the budget deficit will never end.
But as Stein's law says, anything that can't go on forever won't. I have no love for Donald Trump, never voted for him, and found him laughable as a public figure as long ago as the 1980s when Spy Magazine made him one of their prime punching bags. He hasn't changed.
And he does -- always -- go too far. Sometimes further than too far. I have very deep concerns about some of his truly destructive plans (the list is long), as any reasonable citizen does.
But when it comes to the federal budget, someone has to act, and any act will mean somebody doesn't get something they are used to. Again that is a cruel truth. But is it possible that every single thing USAID and the Department of Education and so on is truly justifiable in 2025, and produces the results that it has long purported to? Is the top-line rhetoric always, or even mostly in line with what that money is actually accomplishing? Maybe. But who's been asking, again honestly, lately?
Even if so (and it seems a large majority of Americans tends to agree there are serious questions) what dynamic historically, short of a fully declared war, can force us to realign our expectations, maybe, possibly, do more with less, or even a little less with less?
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are not lovable or even for many of us tolerable as human beings. But fiscal responsibility is one of the best parts of the mandate (such as it is) that Trump earned, and it's one I agree with. And on that I wish them well. I honestly doubt that anything short of this dramatic housecleaning would be able to do the trick. What else is there that can overcome the politics of the legions of micro-advocates, who always claim the grannies and orphans the author here invokes? If we can move the conversation in the direction that allows more political freedom in the future to realign, that is fine with me. I am confident the courts will sort out the constitutional and unconstitutional actions Trump and Musk are taking, and there will be some room to move forward with real administrative reform. And who knows, maybe even Congress will be able to do something to clear up the statutes that created all of these good things that might no longer be as good as promised.
Fiscal responsibility is a fine thing. In most cases fiscal responsibility is achieved by balancing income and outgo. What I see happening under Trump/Musk, and have seen in the Republican playbook since at least Ronald Reagan, is massive reduction in federal income via tax cuts benefiting primarly corporations and the wealthy, coupled with calls for reductions in federal outgo in areas llike health and education, in other words, programs for everyone else. And not just Republicans. I believe it was Obama, after bailing out the banks in 2008-2009, who announced piously that as a result all would have to sacrifice. Trump's first term in office brought yet another budget-busting tax cut for the usual suspects; that tax cut is about to expire, doubtless to be renewed. So how about not renewing the Trump tax cuts and thereby increasing federal income? Issues polls, rather than horserace-based polls, show that across the board American citizens favor increasing taxes on the wealthy. Cancelling the Trump tax cuts and raising taxes on the wealthy would add to the federal income stream and create the appearance of greater fairness in taxation. It would provide more room to evaluate federal programs on their merits. I realize this isn't going to happen now, but it changes the argument in important ways. Anders Knosper makes a moral claim. Trump's moral claim seems to be that Elon Musk deserves his $300 billion even if that means poor people around the world lack medicine or food.
As Knospe argues, it would be perfectly reasonable to review and evaluate USAID programs as part of a general review of government spending. But such a review should be careful, and consider trade-offs. Surely one should take the national security argument into account, as well as the question of reputational damage. Perhaps the US, in preserving and even increasing USAID's medical and food aid to poverty-stricken regions of the world, would get more bang for its national security buck than by continuing its current level of spending on defense procurement, procurement that, not coincidentally, Elon Musk is not exactly incentivized to evaluate.
You apparently fail to realize that the Trump tax cuts reduced taxes proportionally more for lower-income taxpayers than for higher-income payers, who pay a vastly disproportionate share of their income in taxes anyway. Our system is already very skewed towards high taxation of higher-income people. Lower income people, especially families with dependents, pay little to no income tax now. How can we reduce taxes even further when they effectively pay none now? There aren't enough rich people to make much difference in total income tax receipts, even if the rates were raised to confiscatory levels which the Democrats would never tolerate since their base now is those wealthy people. The largest source of tax revenue for the government is the middle class since that's where the vast majority of the income is.
And raising business taxes also makes no sense since business actually pays no tax, everything it pays in taxes is a loss to its employees (lower wages), investors (lower dividends and stock prices) and to society as a whole (less money to invest in and grow their business). The most efficient tax rate on business economically is 0% but since the majority don't understand this business taxation goes on. But the total take from business is low compared to other tax sources.
Trump actually understands that the social safety net is very important to ordinary people and he has consistently said that he intends to preserve it. But there is a great deal of fraud in all of the entitlement programs and I think everyone who is honest can agree that we need to be much more focused and consistent about not paying fraudulent claims. There is a large amount of money in fraud and grift, and we need to do the audits that the DOGE team is conducting to end the fraud.
Your last point is a good one, and one I'm watching closely. The defense budget does seem to be the item that (a) is most substantial; (b) is the most badly managed (so, so much in it we don't know, and no one can seem to account for); and (c) likely the most abused by contractors.
That is going to be my test case for whether Musk is acting in good faith -- which I assume until proven otherwise; I don't like rooting against the people who have such a tight grip on the nation's purse strings. Most people assume that he is acting in bad faith, and that might be true, but this would be his proving ground. If he is able to do anything close to a substantial audit of the defense budget, as he is presumed to be doing audits of other sectors; and if he can identify items in that military-industrial morass that are suspect or approach downright criminality; and if he is able to achieve cuts (however that would happen...) then my charitable assumption will have saved me a lot of speculative worry.
But if I am wrong, then I will concede that his obvious self-interest, not to mention his business conflicts did prevail over any of his assertions that he is working in the public's interest. I very much want to believe he is not the crass, predatory, unscrupulous creep he so often appears to be. But only he will be able to provide the evidence one way or the other. And I don't think he'll be able to hide from the consequences.
Social Security is the biggest, and growing, item in federal spending. Medicare/Medicaid is next, followed by _service on the national debt_. Defense spending comes after that.
Economics is not a zero -sum game. Both sides of a transaction can win. An entrepreneur cannot possibly capture all the value they create.
Profit is confirmation from external reality that your output is worth more than the sum of your inputs; that you add wealth to the world. It is positively immoral to run a losing business. You destroy wealth in doing so.
Agree. Take Trump seriously, but don't take him literally.
Don’t forget the puppies killed.
Where is the emoji for laughing out loud, but very, very grimly...?
While USAID has provided important health and welfare programs, it has also put a lot of money into regime change. Most recently against the democratically elected president of Georgia and the dictator in Bangladesh. The latter was successful while the former was not. A USAID official was recently recorded as bragging about the success of the program in "changing governments."
Fuck no. Sorry. Trump was elected by the majority wanting the foreign aid to end. Name a country that sends foreign aid to the US? None.
The Global Order is over. The cupboard is bare. For too long the US has funded global security at the expense of her own people. Elites craving opportunity to virtue signal their empathy, can do so on their own dime... and stop spending MY tax dollars on things I did not approve of.
It is far past time to turn our attention back toward our own country. Elites have been riding high on the hog with Wall Street and real estate returns while the socioeconomic circumstances for the bottom 80% has crashed.
And the list of USAID politic graft and corruption 98% benefitting Democrats.... that alone is justification for ripping the entire agency out by the roots and implementing 100% transparency for all the spending.
Respectfully, you are way behind with all this. There is little evidence that any USAID programs as they are currently structured do anything at all for purposes of "tackling poverty, strengthening economies, and promoting good governance" and quit a bit of evidence that the programs offer aid to our enemies, undermine legitimate governments, and contribute only minimally to local economies. Plus all of the silly leftist DEI and gender programs that other countries neither need or want and are a total waste of money, and the support for censorship of non-leftists and propaganda for the progressive Deep State, which are illegal and must end immediately. Your arguments wailing "what about the children? What about the AIDS victims?" are based, most likely, on the stated intent of the program, or on generalized leftist talking points, and not at all on the results, because no one ever looks at the results.
And when we are borrowing every dime we spend on these programs, or using taxpayer's hard-earned cash for them, they MUST be effective and prudent, there is no such thing as "pennies on the dollar, it's not that much money", etc. etc. It all counts.
So what would you have us do? Throw good money after bad while we try to figure out what programs have merit and which ones do not? As fast as the Trump team is moving, I think it will be fairly quick to identify the programs which are useful and/or could be reformed into being useful. Marco Rubio has stated that he intends to keep the worthwhile programs but align them with American interests instead of acting against us or promoting nonsense. We should all support this.
US aid should be given to countries which in turn support us. Disconnecting AID from State Dept to avoid the appearance of quid pro quo was foolish. We shouldn't put up with countries thumbing their nose at our interests and helping our enemies while pocketing our money no matter how worthy the cause.
"Many of the USAID programs under threat are very impactful. For example, the agency’s partner PEPFAR, an anti-HIV/AIDS initiative that pays for antiretroviral medicines and leads efforts to halt the spread of the virus, is estimated to have saved 25 million lives since its inception in 2003."
So, the US government encourages promiscuous sex through Gay Pride and Pussy Riot in order encourage people to engage in dangerous behavior. And, naturally, such dangerous behavior then leads to disease. As a result, government agencies then send billions of dollars to NGOs to “treat” the very problem created by them in the first place. Nice.
Do you know how many federal agencies there are? How many employees? How many _more_ contractors? (Contractors do jobs employees would otherwise do.)
The federal government needs serious pruning. I don’t think there is a way to do it in two to four years without taking an axe to it.
We probably need entitlement reform, too. _That_ will be a can of worms.
This is almost comedy gold: (1) no government spending is wasteful, (2) okay some of it is wasteful, but you should not be noticing that because you are not as virtuous and wise as I, (3) okay, most of it contains such perverse incentives that end up making the problem worse, but you should not be noticing that either because you are not as virtuous and wise as I, (4) if I can't stop you from noticing the waste and terrible results, then you should attempt to stop it using only means that can be thwarted by wise, virtuous me, (5) here is a picture of a sad puppy that we helped, ignore the mass of dead puppy bodies below it that resulted from our 'help', (6) why do you want to murder puppies? Puppy murderer!
Here is my favorite: "USAID is also a remarkably small slice of the national budget, making up less than 0.2% of total federal spending." It does not seem to occur to you that if we can find millions and millions of dollars of waste in a tiny fraction of the budget, just imagine how much we will find in the large parts of the budget.
No matter the virtue of any program, if you are in debt, you stop spending. You live on beans and rice. Foreign aid, *all* of it, is not beans and rice. When you spend decades successfully shutting down all attempts to rein in spending, people vote for a wrecking ball because they prefer chemotherapy to cancer. This is on you and your cartoonishly blind ilk. All of it. Without you, the chemotherapy would not have been necessary in the first place.