USAID does some outstanding work and is also very easy to demagogue. I’d add a couple things to Matt’s good analysis.
A lot of its programming falls under the nebulous rubrics of civil society development, women’s empowerment, and economic development. This can mean very useful projects, but it’s also how you wind up funding magazines for lesbian guitarists in Peru. The individuals (let’s be real: progressives) working on USAID grant allocation are not particularly focused on justifying their expenditures to the taxpayer, and it shows. They should be able to explain on a bumper sticker, not a treatise, why their grants are a good use of money.
Another problem is vetting in-country contractors and partners, to make sure the money doesn’t get diverted to radicals, criminals, or other bad actors. Aid agencies are notoriously bad at this and it’s not totally their fault. In a past job, I was responsible for verifying that none of the contractors or their employees appeared on the USG list of sanctioned terrorists. It’s a control-F exercise, which doesn’t work because there are a million alternative spellings and many common names. Better vetting would take a lot of time and money. There are also many places where it’s impossible to operate without some of the money ending up in the pockets of bad guys. Someone at some point in the supply and distribution chain is paying for “permits” or protection. I don’t know the solution to this, but the corruption and enmeshment with bad actors has been a talking point of USAID skeptics for ages.
It would have been wise for USAID to focus on some discreet, easily explained programs that have either (a) a concrete lifesaving function or (b) a very clear nexus to US interests (not eighteen degrees of separation).
You are absolutely right about bad actors and foreign aid. We recently saw this with UNRWA, which was ostensibly about helping Palestinian refugees but ended up with Hamas operatives in it.
Wasn't the head of the UNRWA teachers' union in Lebanon also a high-ranking member of Hamas? Hard to believe he made it that high in the UNRWA org chart if Hamas is only a very small part of UNRWA.
"The groups include Palestinian human rights organisations Addameer and Al-Haq, which document alleged rights violations by both Israel and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and which reject the charges.
In a joint statement, the foreign ministries of Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden said they had not received "substantial information" from Israel that would justify reviewing their policy."
ETA: For more evidence about how the Israeli military supported UNRWA before the political decision was made to kill it in early 2024: https://www.jns.org/the-unrwa-lobbyists/
"(Aug. 31, 2018 / Israel Hayom)
The Israeli defense establishment is the strongest advocate for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in the country. In the United States, UNRWA’s strongest lobbyist is Saudi Arabia. In recent months, both the Israeli defense and security apparatus and Saudi Arabia have been working, separately and uncoordinated, on behalf of a shared interest: stopping the Trump administration’s attacks on the organization.
Reports from the United States that the $200 million cut to American aid to UNRWA is only the beginning not only shook up the organization itself, they also came as a shock to the Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Israel’s main opponent to any punitive measures against the U.N. entity, as well as the Saudi royal family, which is the third-largest donor to UNRWA."
I don't think "Israel approved it" (especially given the footsie that Netanyahu's governments played with Hamas pre-10/7, because of their mutual interests in killing any 2 state solution) answers the issue that "terrorists shouldn't work for UN aid agencies".
And I also think it's ridiculous to even bring up criticisms of Israel when we are talking about Hamas. Hamas isn't a terrorist organization because Israel says it is. It's a terrorist organization because it commits mass murder and routinely attacks and even rapes Jewish civilians.
If Israel labels some other organization terrorist that is actually just a peaceful anti-occupation group, fine, that's bad, and if representatives of that group are in UNRWA, I don't care.
But Hamas' people were in UNRWA, and that was an outrage.
"UNRWA didn't bother to do any vetting whatsoever (or, far more likely, tacitly approved terrorist staffers) because Israel did some vetting" is not compelling. It is not Israel's responsibility to ensure that no terrorists are on the staff of a UN agency. Indeed, this is part of a deeper pathology wherein Israel takes on the job of something which is decidedly not its responsibility, and in response those responsible shrug their shoulders and don't bother doing their jobs.
The fact that UNRWA has people involved in October 7 as well as involved in housing hostages is unconscionable. But this doesn’t get into the heart of the problem with UNRWA.
UNRWA is a refugee resettlement organization that has not resettled a single Palestinian refugee. It tells the Palestinian people 76 years after the war that they and their descendants will remain refugees in perpetuity until Israel is dismantled. This is in contrast to any international standards.
For all other conflicts, refugees may return, be settled in place or be settled in a third country, depending on what is most practicable. Whatever the outcome of the conflict, the idea is for refugees to move on and have a better life, not to fuel the conflict. UNRWA does not allow settlement in place or in a third country, but only pushes for return. But the crazy part of it is that even Palestinians who can live anywhere within the Green Line and can return to the towns their grandparents left (ie those in East Jerusalem), are still registered as refugees. So even return is not a high enough bar. The only way that UNRWA will remove a single name from the refugee list is if Palestine is established from the river to the sea. The the effect is perpetuating the conflict.
Furthermore by providing services in a place like Gaza, it has the effect of relieving the government (run by Hamas) from actually having to govern. In that way, Hamas can focus all its efforts on fortifying Gaza for war and planning terror attacks. Because money is fungible, they have money to do it as international donations to UNRWA will fund services for the people.
But tying services to an ideology that the Palestinian people are forever refugees and will remain such until Israel is dismantled as the single Jewish state, UNRWA maintains a state of conflict.
The vast majority of Jews in Israel are also the descendants of refugees. Some live in towns and development cities developed to house these refugees. But they do not say that they are refugees until they can reclaim the property they owned in Egypt, Iraq, Romania, Russia, Yemen or Ethiopia. They do not maintain a state of war against these places, and expect a UN agency to pay for their schools and healthcare.
Instead they moved on and built a successful state. They settled where they were. Palestinians can do the same, but they need to change their ideology. Having a Palestinian run organization with the letters UN in it telling them that it’s no use to invest in where they are now because one day they’ll return to their great grandmothers house in a triumphant conquest of Israel does not help do that.
It goes way beyond individual terrorists working for UNRWA. The organization collaborates with Hamas hand in glove. Hamas interwove military infrastructure in UNRWA facilities. Hostages were held in UNRWA shelters. UNRWA removed Holocaust education from the Gaza curriculum when Hamas objected. Etc. Anyone with an UNRWA job is almost certainly connected to, if not a ranking member of, Hamas - Hamas is like the mafia or a Communist government in that respect, and UNRWA collaborates.
On a more fundamental level, UNRWA exists to maintain Palestinians’ perpetual refugee status. That’s a much longer conversation. But short version is that (without exaggerating) a UN agency whose goal is to destroy a UN member state… not great.
The whole apparatus is unsustainable and absurd. Hamas's official position is that it has no responsibility for providing human services; that's the job of the UN. Hamas's job is to enforce theocracy and attack Israel. How can the international community possibly expect peace while participating in this setup? It should force Hamas to actually govern the territory it claims to govern.
Do you have any source I can read supporting this claim? I’ve seen people talking as though they believe this, but I don’t know where they got this impression. I generally try to avoid Israel-Palestine news because it’s usually so full of noise and hot air on all sides, but if theres something that earnestly lays out this case I’d be interested to read one article.
The real answer here is just, like, Hamas was the authoritarian government of Gaza, so any organization operating at scale in Gaza had to be reasonably well aligned and integrated with Hamas.
There's not a lot of great sourcing because Hamas was an authoritarian government and there's no reason they'd produce negative propaganda about themselves.
Not true. If the UN insisted on independence from Hamas, Hamas would be forced to either allow it to work or explain to its population why it kicked the UN aid out.
UNRWA has to hire locals, who have to go home at night to houses in Gaza. The UN can insist on whatever it wants; the reality on the ground will be controlled by the guys with guns, which is to say, Hamas.
I'm not saying "Hamas is bad" or "UNRWA is dishonest". Just that this is the reality of working in an authoritarian state: any large organization is a de facto arm of the state.
The most comprehensive argument and evidence is probably the one in UN Watch's December 2024 report "The Unholy Alliance: UNRWA, Hamas and Islamic Jihad". There are also lengthy historical descriptions of the process of radical "capture" of UNRWA over the decades in many books, including The War of Return by Schwartz and Wilf.
UNRWA's response seems to me consistent with Dilan Esper's phrasing above, "[UNRWA] ended up with Hamas operatives in it." UNRWA claims both that the numbers were small and that it responsibly polices its units to eliminate this as much as possible. The UN Watch report (of which I've only read the executive summary) identifies specific cases, including some acknowledged by UNRWA, and projects a systemic malfunction in line with David R's comment. (https://unwatch.org/the-unholy-alliance-unrwa-hamas-and-islamic-jihad/)
Yes - I think UNRWA was more forthcoming in this report than it has been in the past. I also think the root problem is that this agency has persisted for decades and is unlike any other UN agency in its singular focus on catering to a group of people who have basically insisted on remaining "refugees" for political purposes, beyond any reasonable interpretation of the word. (The relevant comparison is to the Korean Reconstruction Agency that accomplished the relocation and establishment of millions of Korean War refugees within a few years, then went out of business when the work was complete). It's hard to imagine that an agency solely dedicated to this population and tasked with providing services to it while the Palestinian leadership actively discouraged the development of a civil society would not, eventually, become "captured". The model is a failure, whatever the sins of the agency itself.
Not to hand, no, it's been forever since I read anything on the topic myself. I wasn't reading Fox or anything similar when I was reading about this, is all I remember.
As I say above: "I think UNRWA had Hamas people in there because a lot of folks in the UN actually sympathize with Hamas and favor the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, and therefore don't really see anything wrong with Hamas, and that the UN could in fact play much more hardball with Hamas. But if that's wrong and there is no way to do aid without involving mass murderers in the program, then UNRWA should be dismantled and the UN should do nothing in Gaza until Hamas is wiped off the Earth."
Is this a general principle that humanitarian aid organizations should not cooperate with bad actors (frequently including armed groups that are guilty of mass murderer) in conflict zones around the world, or is Hamas uniquely bad because they target Israel?
I don't think this list of two options is remotely adequate to deal with actual situations. Humanitarian organizations should and do cooperate with bad actors as a necessary means to help people in distress. They should also be responsible for assessing when that cooperation entails negative consequences as severe as withdrawal, including the consequences of substantial cooptation by bad actors. There's no formula for determining that: it's a judgment call in the midst of emergent situations when there are no red lines that can be formulated to guide judgment. (I do, however, know that the UN World Food Program has faced this issue in the past and declined to cooperate on the terms of the "bad actors," which was an effective way to negotiate appropriate cooperation. UNRWA does have the leverage of greatly needed aid to use constructively in this respect.)
The basic question in this case isn't whether Hamas is uniquely bad, it's whether at this point it's possible to make judgments about the present value balance of engagement and about the trajectory going forward that will likely move that balance one way or another. The ancillary question is whether the leadership of UNRWA and the UN itself are assessing these issues with care, objectivity, and full attention to their complexity. For the general public, we can only consult competing judgments concerning these questions, and people will generally choose the partial data that confirms their biases.
There are bad actors and then there are bad actors. Hamas commits mass terrorist acts. There actually aren't that many organizations on earth that have the capability and record that Hamas does. Wherever the red line is, Hamas crosses it, and if the only way to deliver aid is to involve people who send a rape squad into Israel to masscare over 1000 Jews including teenagers and who shoot rockets at Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, then we should, in fact, not deliver the aid.
I strenuously object to the notion that all good things in life can be explained on a bumper sticker. The world and its problems are complicated, responses to complicated problems are going to be complex and multi-faceted. "Screw nuts and bolts together" doesn't explain how to fix a car, "take a knife and slice it open" doesn't explain how you treat cancer. The American people, at least more than enough of them, aren't just so stupid that they can't understand complexity or have it explained to them.
I think that's a pretty uncharitable reading of what was a good point by Leora. We're talking about people who I am sure consider themselves to be intelligent allocating public money. So sure there's complexity. But there's also obfuscation and beyond that a point of 'the right wing attack ads write themselves.' If a civil servant doesn't have some decent judgment about where those lines are, fuzzy as they may be at the margins, they should not have a job.
I'm not sure I get the idea that civil servants should be gauging their behaviors against a hypothetical median voter, or don't do something that self writes a right wing attack ad. If we take the frequent polls seriously the median voter objects to all foreign aid and civil servants would be constrained from even providing it.
Human rights around the world seem to me to be both in the US interests and worthy of providing some funding for. If it takes some explaining to get from that idea to a specific five figure grant I think that's fine. Just because it's not obvious on its face doesn't make it a bad idea, because again, not all ideas or actions can be explained simplistically.
I hear what you're saying big picture but I think you need to look more closely at what's going on. There are specific things that are pretty defensible on the merits like vaccination programs, medical care, and things of that nature. Plenty of conservatives or voters generally may and probably would still object to it for whatever reason. But at least it's defensible in a generalized good, self interested noblesse oblige kind of way.
But then there's the stuff Leora mentioned, that being 'nebulous' civic development type stuff. She used the (I assume exaggerated, made up) example of a magazine for guitar playing lesbians in Peru. One does not have to look hard to find actual examples of foreign aid projects involving things like trying to teach 3rd wave feminism to women in Kandahar. That sort of thing is self evidently not something tax payer dollars should be spent on.
Now, not being a conservative, I find this kind of thing mostly kind of dumb and funny, and the existence of that kind of foolishness, while regrettable does not cause me to question the value of all foreign aid. But for a lot of Americans it shows that these sorts of government programs are just as bad and absurd as their worst fears. And to the extent something like foreign aid requires a bipartisan consensus, it's important to be able to use some judgment about what is and isn't going to paint the entire project in a bad light.
So I reiterate, civil servants who lack that kind of perspective should be out of work. And given how things are playing out with this topic a lot of them probably will be soon anyway.
That's just it though. None of us would be surprised to find out that the government was in fact funding something that sounds like it came out of a farce about government incompetence. I don't think that in itself should be the last word on foreign aid but the fact that it exists isn't good. Those that want to use tax payer money to various better ends can't afford to appear as if they don't take it seriously.
Yes, and you are likely surprised at the rapid disintegration of USAID. Apparently because you refuse to accept that the use of taxpayer money will eventually be subjected to the political process in a republic of people who don’t want to pay taxes to fund projects no one can explain to them.
This is totally true, and I think it’s related to Matt’s persistent prioritization of malaria aid over more abstract things like checking authoritarian abuses abroad.
Not to dig into Givewell or similar exercises too much, but I always get the sense that they are trying to bumper-sticker complex ethical decisions into some apparently objective framework that lets you pick the right answer and not worry about it too much.
In the spirit of Matt’s argument that American policies should favor American interests, I think that checking authoritarian dominance of vassal state economies and the global order seems like a US-facing policy goal that should matter more to him than it appears to. I have it on high authority that living in the Soviet bloc was bad, actually!
There's a reason that public health causes are considered to be more cost-effective than anti-authoritarian ones: the best ones are important (e.g. life or death), tractable (e.g. via malaria nets or vaccines), and neglected (i.e. have room for more funding rather than being overfunded).
Vague causes like anti-authoritarianism score reasonably high on importance (though overthrowing a dictator does not, by itself, get you a good outcome), but often very poorly on tractability and neglectedness (e.g. the dictator does not want to be overthrown, which pits donor money vs. authoritarian money; whereas malaria fortunately doesn't have a lobby of its own).
This is all true as far as it goes, but doesn’t address the underlying point that cost effectiveness is not sufficient to address moral issues, which is at root the motivation for USAID. Human development is not the same as keeping as many humans alive as possible, which I think is obvious when you consider the many US policy goals that are at best indifferent to that outcome.
As Matt points out, the goal of USAID is more about cultivating a peaceful and productive democratic international order, and that inherently means spending money on things that are hard and contentious internationally.
Many people have chosen to face death in order to achieve freedom for themselves or others. "Give me liberty or give me death" is widely considered a noble idea.
Thanks* for posting this link. Just reread this and am struck by how timely it still is (and how utterly depressing it is that trust has crashed through the floor since this was written).
It depends at what level of abstraction you are operating under. The bumper sticker approach for cancer is now basically, "get checked regularly" (for the cancers we can now screen for, breast, colon, cervix, lung, blood, prostate, skin) and maybe "listen to your doctors and follow their advice"
I think we have a culture in this country of not spending the extra money to make sure a program is more effective or that money doesn’t end up in the wrong hands, the people u are trying to help actually end up better off, etc. When these kinds of inefficiencies are uncovered I think it’s a very American thing, with regard to welfare, foreign aid, unemployment benefits for example, to say “we should cut that program,” rather than “we should fix that program and if it costs extra and we have to raise taxes so be it.” I think this applies obliquely to police misconduct as well. I think it is clearly not just an important problem but one that requires money, upsetting special interests, trial and error and research to solve and I think we really do have a culture of shielding ourselves from this reality rather than facing up to it. We need to be able to explain it on a bumper sticker after all.
agreed. Same applies to education. If you want there to be public education, and not just 100% school choice, then you'd better fix the damn schools, and if that requires pissing off unions too freaken bad.
The is a social problem here. Almost everyone who works in this space is left of center. They don’t all support funding lesbian magazines. But they also don’t want to pay the social price for opposing it. They want to be accepted.
This leads us to where we are now. It’s not so different than the idea that if the political left doesn’t enforce the borders then there is a right leaning person who will. Again, that is where we are now.
I get that sometimes it's a waste of money to try to not waste money, but "stopping the money from going to terrorists" is a good time to do the digging.
(I don't know how long ago this was but there are services that will search the terrorist list for you. I've looked at the system at a few different banks.)
Agree with u there’s a musk post up right now Matt responded to. Musk is claiming vast fraud in Medicare ss etc. Matt responding to the post saying uh obviously this is just u advocating for annihilating help for the needy. Would be all for this loud theater about waste if the point was to call to getting rid of the waste not just axing the programs.
- if anyone hasn't read the article Matt linked about the impact the illegal US AID shutdown had on medical trials, read it. It's absolutely sickening. A source of national shame.
- I am trying in my communication and in my comments to writers to lead every description of a Trump action that is illegal by calling it "illegal" first and repeatedly. No "contested", not "controversial", but "illegal" when it is clearly illegal.
- I think inshallah if we win back power in 2028 we should absolutely throw the Justice Department at Musk. He's already committed a series of crimes related to federal standards on data handling. Due to SCOTUS Trump probably enjoys broad immunity as these can be construed as "official acts". But even then. If we regain oversight in 2026, we should be merciless.
- The more I've heard about the Spook CIA stuff US AID helped with the more I like US AID. Make Spooking Great Again
I think your final line says it all. This isn't actually an attack against aid money, but an attack against American intelligence operations, using "efficiency" concerns as cover.
Oh, yeah. When Musk talks with Putin, or gets to-do lists from Xi, you know this was towards the top of their asks. They are trying to destroy US overseas power and influence. And when Musk delivers hard drives full of data about names and contacts, those turn into kill-lists. People in foreign countries who helped the US are now going to die because of Musk.
If he stays in Trump's good graces. Musk is arguably taking actions that give Trump greater power over him in the long run. (Although in point of fact I don't think Musk would be all that easy for Trump to throw under the bus.)
Trump will be a lame duck who can't run for office again. Meanwhile, Musk will still be very wealthy and own X. Trump is one of a kind, but I wouldn't want to have to choose which way other Republicans are going to side in a dispute between them.
All to say, I think your sentence in parenthesis is apt.
I think the days of prosecuting public officials, at least federally, are over. Every president is just going to blanket pardon a long list of officials, friends and family members because we know the nasty people on the other team will weaponize justice. I wouldn’t hope for the DOJ to accomplish anything here, it will have to be done politically, or at the state level of a case can be made.
I remember when Russia and China were kicking out US NGOs for being tools of US intelligence and it was being reported as paranoia or a cover for anti-Americanism, but now I come to find it was a legitimate concern on their end?
They are tools of U.S. intelligence and they are also totally benign. It's just that because the United States is a force for moral good, and China and Russia are forces of historical evil, things like anodyne attempts to build civil society that would be seen as normal anywhere else become tools of the perfidious CIA fomenting color revolution (read: creating an educated and politically conscious bourgeois class, i.e., fundamentally good things)
You find it was a legitimate concern because it *was* a legitimate concern. I don't know enough about national security intel to judge whether or not it was a good idea for my country to mix foreign aid initiatives with intelligence-gathering. Maybe it's a good idea. Maybe it's a bad idea. Maybe it's inevitable. Maybe (probably!) lots of other countries do it, too.
I think we should give up on any notion of going after Musk. Trump can and will just pardon him in advance. The best possible outcome I think would be to make the other billionaires nervous Musk is going to use his massive influence to screw them over in business, leading to him being deposed as pseudo president. Dems should fight dirty and use whatever conspiracy theories they can come up with to get people to sour on Musk. Personally I still think it’s tragic that Biden pissed the guy off so badly by snubbing him for the sake of the UAW, Musk may have turned into a piece of shit but he is a genius and has done a lot of good before this but here we are.
I am torn. I agree with everyone else that Musk is going to be pardoned. It is important to have some sort of consequences for him to temper the actions of future would-be oligarchs. Unfortunately, the biggest lever we have is canceling his government contracts, but SpaceX is a legitimately great contractor with no real competitors. We could put a political enforcer type in at SEC and just have him start going after Musk for any securities violation we can find -- if we can't put him in prison, we can fine him to being a pauper. But, of course, that's also bad. Weaponizing enforcement functions for political reasons is bad. Then again, they are already doing it, and they will do more of it.
The norms of American liberalism are already in a death spiral. We would be foolish to simply throw our hands up and allow the GOP to slink closer to outright dictatorship with each election, but of course doing it ourselves only accelerates the problem.
I genuinely do not think there is any way this can end well. Either we foolishly pretend American liberalism as currently constituted has a future, or we abandon it ourselves to simply be the better side in a political order characterized by dueling political machines, something that itself has a pretty strong track record of ending in autocracy.
Ultimately this is all downstream of the fact that the American people genuinely couldn't care less about democracy or the fundamental American values. None of that matters to them on a substantive level. If you offered them dictatorship with improved material well-being for themselves and their families they would take it in a heartbeat.
I've been surprisingly angry with Musk and DOGE. I think this is because (1) I thought it was going to be a big joke and that's now clearly not the case but more (2) while I'm VERY supportive of trying to eke out greater government efficiency, the federal government isn't a software company and these people have no idea what they're doing so they're just burning it down out of spite at this point. The only silver lining is 2028 might look a lot like 2008 after Trump and his functionally incompetent team destroy what they can. That's a faint silver lining but I expect MAGA to capitulate.
I saw a SpaceX rocket launch yesterday and had incredible mixed emotions. This great achievement of human abilities is now tarnished by being so politically associated with the off-handed destruction of scientific and humanitarian progress.
I think you are wrong in projecting your views onto literally everyone else who saw that launch. You may not care about the deaths of tens of thousands of H.I.V. patients, but many people do.
Also people have different notions of "moral taint." Are you complicit in your country's actions just because you are a citizen of your country? Does Biden have some responsibility for not stepping down earlier and increasing Trumps odds of winning? Does Matt have responsibility for not pushing out more hardcore takes and influencing more people?
I can separate the technical achievement of the many engineers, including prior generations of engineers at other firms and in government that is now leading us to push the frontiers of space again. Musk doesn't taint that for me, and I can be separately pissed that his tantrum is going to cost lives.
Kenny - let’s say for the sake of this convo I don’t care about their lives. What are you doing besides wasting time in the comment section just me like that is making any difference. Your comment while people are losing their lives!
I don’t have any direct access to those people, or any easier lever to help them than to engage in the slow boring of hard boards, by helping to gradually steer American politics in a more productive direction. Engaging in meaningful political discussions with earnest conversation partners is a small part of that.
"Ultimately this is all downstream of the fact that the American people genuinely couldn't care less about democracy or the fundamental American values."
I don't think I agree with this. The problem is that both sides think the other side is the end of Democracy so they use "ends justifies the means" for their own side to keep and use power.
I think both sides would probably be okay with just proper congressional apportionment, we'd probably have a much stronger style of governance overall, but I'm not sure if either party even wants that.
This is where I basically am, as a former Republican voter. Voters have re-sorted along a low/high information gradient; the Democrats are now the "sometimes try to be competent at governance" party and Republicans are now the "IRL shitposting" party.
I share your concerns about autocracy. It's impossible to partition the US, as our political divisions don't follow neat regional lines. We have to live with Trump voters. I don't know of a realistic way to do that; the best might just be to try to pass Constitutional amendments to rein in some of the worst abuses that are quickly becoming standard (e.g. an amendment to require congressional approval of pardons).
I would hope that in 2028, Democracts run on limiting some executive power, and also getting rid of pardon power. Clearly it is being abused by all Presidents, and we need to get rid of it. No need for it in this day and age.
Well can't Musk still be held accountable for violating state laws related to consumer and personal data? Think CCPA or a class action lawsuit from farmers who depend on USAID contracts, etc? But to point, he is definitely getting pardoned. Blue Origin is still a couple years away from being a true Space X competitor....
You bring up a great overall point though, Americans no longer seem to actually care about our government functioning in a way that benefits everyone, or just democracy in general. I think if you offered them dictatorship with just a social hierarchy that made them feel better emotionally, hell not even materially a non-insignificant part of the country would be for it. We know from history and even under capitalism that autocracy never offers everyone improved material well being equally.
Trump will give Musk a blanket pardon, as he should at this point. Biden opened a can of worms with his ridiculous corrupt pardons and there is no closing it back up now.
Biden didn’t go after Trump. The justice department did, and several states did. But they messed up by doing it too slowly. Biden did the right thing by staying out of it, even though people keep claiming he was involved.
I think most things the Justice department does, the president tries to stay out of. It is supposed to be a relatively independent branch, precisely because so many of its investigations would pose a possible conflict of interest one way or another for the president.
Also, if the Democratic nominee in 2028 vows to exact revenge on his political enemies (as Trump did repeatedly in 2021-2024), the latter might well be justified to issue blanket, preemptive pardons. What do YOU suggest is the appropriate response to a President-elect who vows to nominate an FBI director who compiles an enemies list?
There's definitely the ability to close it back up now. Just because someone else did something bad, doesn't mean you or anyone else has to follow suit.
Nah, you're not being realistic. Look at the comments below to see why. Most dems seem to be 100% OK with Biden's pardons because it's Trump's fault. Watch the news from a few years ago when they thought Trump was going to do the same thing and the talking heads were all saying preemptive pardon mean guilt:
Do you think those pardons were bad? If you do then there is no requirement that you support further pardons. You can continue to oppose the Biden pardons and Trump pardons and hew to a consistent principle.
Or you can reverse your quote and instead of sarcastically saying "Right, it's Trump's fault Biden gave blanket pardons .... solid reasoning," you'll be out there saying "Biden's pardon's opened the doorway and now Trump has to do pardons so its really all Biden's fault."
Yes, I think the pardons were bad. I don't think Trump has to do the pardons, but I think he will (I hope he doesnt), but I'm also not dumb enough to think it's Trump's fault Biden did it.
Don’t just throw the book at Musk, but also all the high school grad twerps at DOGE who are helping him. If we make it out of this crisis, we must make clear that we aren’t just holding leaders accountable. Merely aiding such illegal and unconstitutional actions will carry severe penalties.
The dark side of me that I try to suppress has been fantasizing what a Dem President in 2028 could do to Musk. I'm assuming he'll get a pardon from Trump so straightforward DOJ stuff is probably out. I've been thinking revoke his citizenship and send him off to Gitmo. Certainly strip control of his companies from him. At maybe the simplest level, simply lay bare to all the world every single thing the US government knows about him --- taxes, business holdings, all the data we have about his government contracts, subpoena and publish all his personal emails and texts, etc.
I do not think that's a good idea: as poor of an actor as Musk is being, revoking citizenship would look very retaliatory during a time period we need to suppress political retaliation. There are also advantages to Musk being a US citizen; he pays a lot in taxes and employs a lot of people in the US, for example.
The best possible trajectory is the Musk/Trump bromance falling apart and Musk not getting the blanket pardon he'll need. At that point Musk has to do basically the best thing for America: get out of politics, keep his head down, and build cars/rockets.
Musk is never going back to just building cars and rockets. He has a vision of his place in the world that is far too megalomaniacal for that. He's had his taste of man-flesh (power) and I doubt he can resist it.
I was never bought in to the idea that every billionaire is a policy failure, but I'm beginning to think that any one person having virtually unlimited money is inherently bad. There are no limits short of criminal behavior that constrain what he can do to try to accumulate power.
That's unhealthy for our own and other countries' democracies, because they simply aren't designed or built to withstand that kind of unconstrained resources.
I worked for USAID contractors in Afghanistan, and then in the international humanitarian sector for a couple decades. USAID's system is deeply flawed--especially its contractor system, which is more or less what you end up with if you think "the profit motive" is the key source of market efficiencies independently of meaningful competition, low barriers to entry, and accountability for results. But the system still saves lives, and Musk/Trump gutting it wholesale is one more recklessly awful initiative of a recklessly awful administration.
That said, all the "value for money" talk of which Musk is a monstrous and Duflo or GiveWell a benevolent example is contributing to major negative trends in the sector as a whole: charities being pushed to spend an ever-higher proportion of their time and resources generating monitoring data, and risk aversion hiding behind the language of cost-efficiency/waste avoidance.
Andrew Natsios, a World Vision bigwig before W Bush tapped him to head USAID, wrote a scathing essay once he was out of govt on how the "counter-bureaucracy" created to prevent waste had pushed more and more USAID spending into projects that were highly measurable, whether or not they were highly transformative. He suggests that by and large, the two have an inverse relationship; and I think that's broadly right. Measuring impact in contexts of complex attribution is hard, and rarely possible without simplifying assumptions that a skeptical observer (whether the USG counter-bureaucracy or "effective altruist" organizations) can take to weaken or invalidate the whole study.
And the more we try to prove the effectiveness of our work, the less of the actual work we do. Back when the UK's new-minted Tory government was trying to conjure up a consensus about what "value for money" meant in the development sector, I went to a DFID-sponsored London workshop where CIFF (a foundation emerging out of the hedge fund world) was talking about its data-intensive approach to education programming. They were very open about the fact that they couldn't even work in most developing countries, because the quality of baseline data just wasn't there, and the demand for a constant flow of cost-benefit data they put on their local partners was unbelievable.
I put up my hand at the end and asked, "Have you ever done a cost-benefit analysis of your process of cost-benefit analysis? Because what you've just described is incredibly costly, and I find it hard to believe that it yields better outcomes than good-enough alternatives." Their response was commendably candid: "No, we just come from the hedge fund world and one of our priors is that more data is always better."
Don't get me started on the impact of all this on small local organizations, who we're training to feed us paperwork and buzzwords at the expense of the (irreplaceable!) strengths in local collective action which draws INGOs to them in the first place. Masooda Bano's "Breakdown in Pakistan," which describes this awful process through a rational choice theory lens, should be required reading for the whole aid sector.
Extreme risk aversion to failed spending has already been leading big organizations to steer away from some really exciting approaches. My worry about the bad death of USAID is that it's just going to further reinforce that--with inadvertent help from the effective altruists.
So because we don't trust the government employees to be good stewards of our tax money we spend a bunch more money trying to make sure they are being good stewards and don't do some really good things that we should do.
The problem of course is that government employees (and politicians for that matter) have proven again and again that we are right to by and large not trust the them.
See the long list of other crap USAID spends money on.
Matt Welch on the Reason Roundtable podcast this week made a good point re the USAID controversy -- much of this brouhaha is downstream from journalism collapsing. With so many people getting their news from social media, people are getting fed oppo research, so what is truly outrageous and what isn't is unclear.
This week I've seen people on the left freak out that Elon Musk is basically trying to give people HIV just to fire woke government workers, while I've seen people on the right freak out that the government is spending the GDP of a small island nation to subsidize Politico.
I try to stay reasonably informed and it's hard to know what's going on.
But they wouldn’t have read the reporting before. The total weird shit people believed about foreign aid budgets were regularly documented in surveys and studies showing people thought we were giving away mountains of money to nothing causes and we could balance the budget substantially out of this. Like I took public opinion and polling classes in college and studies have shown this for a long while.
I think that’s the Democratic Party making concessions due to popularism, not any serious leftist or even serious person looking at the math. That being said, while I totally would be down to pay higher taxes to fund a more generous welfare state, you have to at the very least tax billionaires out of existence first.
I think Americans have massively overestimated the scale of these programs ever since they started to get polled on them. It's just how parochial and paranoid we are as a people.
Functional innumeracy is a disaster. You see it everywhere. The craziest way it shows up is in population estimates. Black population estimates always come back at ~ 40%. One famous example had the NYC population estimated at 30% of the total US population (100m people).
I mean, I know the black population is something like 15% of the population (and growing), but being from Memphis it doesn’t feel like it. But culturally, black people are easily half represented these days. So much of the most iconic American music and art comes out of black culture, they dominate our most popular sports, and probably at least a quarter of TV is specifically marketed to the black audience. It’s a very understandable error.
Plus, and I don’t know the numbers per se, but I do know the “mixed-race” Census category has really ballooned. And while “one drop” is an offensive paradigm, some of those folks very much are part of black culture, and if you had to guess their race you’d say black.
In my many decades of work I've never once worked at a company with more than 50-100 people that didn't have a dumb program that cost a few million dollars. That seems a ridiculously stringent metric to use to cast doubt on an enterprise.
And it is one that people absolutely do not apply to their own jobs. Almost nobody is arguing that Private Equity should come in and wrecking ball their own company and lay THEM off because there is some program somewhere in the org that is stupid.
Like, using that metric literally every single public company in America -- in the world -- is now subject to "questioning the validity of the enterprise".
I can't remember where I read it but someone suggested the liberalism is doomed against authoritarianism because anything less than Platonic perfection in government and bureaucracy is taken as an argument in favor of authoritarianism.
This is both true, but also unsurprising. Taxes aren't a choice that you can choose to avoid if you don't think the organization is making good decisions. If the government holds a gun to my head forcing me to pay with the rationale that its good for society that I pay, the expectations that they will be responsible for the money go up.
Please define what amount = a bunch of money. Because USAID's overall budget isn't even like half a percent of the overall Federal budget. Additionally, what slew of programs at USAID should never even have been funded? Finally, even if all the above is correct, isn't the right process to go through the budget process in Congress?
To put it in perspective, americans thought foreign aid was massive and wasteful in 2000, even if they could, on average, not even name a 'dumb program', nor was there social media at the time.
I agree there's definitely hypocrisy there, but I don't think that framing is how rightwing Christians would define it.
There's opposition to USAID from the left (https://x.com/BootsRiley/status/1887917022102831391) -- I could say that leftists hate America and love communism so much they'd rather to see poor people die (or something).
It's important to be able to state one's opponents views in a way that would at least approach passing an ideological turing test.
Religious (and in particular Mormon and evangelical) Americans do on average give away a significantly higher share of their income than secular Americans, but of course a lot of the nonprofits they give to are churches. https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazine/less-god-less-giving/
It's hard to do an analysis that doesn't dissolve into arguing about what is and isn't a worthwhile donation.
Yeah, 25-30% just seems to be a number we like to use when we're just pulling one out of our ass. It's not that weird to be wrong like that, i just think it sucks that we have to deal with people who make decisions based on that.
They also underestimate the size of total government spending (and the size of the US economy), so have no idea how one bucket of spending compares to any another, how ratios of spending are changing, how to compare these rates to one another ... There is a profound ignorance about public finances across the American electorate (the left has similar if more "sophisticated" blind spots when it comes to deficits, MMT, etc.) that renders it nearly impossible to make sustained progress against any funding or financial problem (foreign or domestic) that cannot be reduced to a cartoon. Where is Schoolhouse Rock when we need them?
I was totally expecting this punchline in the article itself.
First Google hit, from Brookings.
> Opinion polls consistently report that Americans believe foreign aid is in the range of 25 percent of the federal budget. When asked how much it should be, they say about 10 percent. In fact, at $39.2 billion for fiscal year 2019, foreign assistance is less than 1 percent of the federal budget.
I’d say the freakout is warranted less because of the specific agency or program being targeted and more because the president is doing illegal things. He does illegal things, a judge says he can’t do those things, then he keeps doing them, the judge says he didn’t comply with the court order, and the president’s team says the president doesn’t have to comply with court orders so he keeps doing illegal things. That seems bad and worth being upset about. The president doesn’t get unchecked power but unless, I guess, congress is willing to stop him, trump will continue doing whatever he wants and ignoring the courts. The longer that goes on, the worse that gets for our country’s long term prospects.
Correct. It is bad when a president disobeys court orders and refuses to comply with the law. The more this goes on, the worse it gets for our country. As I said to Allan, Biden doing bad things doesn’t excuse Trump doing bad things. I don’t get a pass for doing small crimes just because someone else is doing big crimes and I certainly don’t get a pass for doing big crimes because someone else did big crimes.
I mean...no? This simply isn't true? Biden tried on student loans and when the courts told him no, he stopped and went back and tried a different solution, which was also struck down...that is a very different thing. I think Biden's priorities on this were bad, but it's not the same thing.
Right, they didn't stop him...because the way he found to actually relieve those loans was legal. They blocked his general forgiveness, but no one blocked the specific forgiveness to scammy colleges, which is what I believe he's referencing there. To be clear, there were two separate sets of actions, various general attempts to change how things work, which all got frozen, then struck down (which he complied with) and various specifically targeted loan forgiveness to the victims of scams, which were all upheld (so far as I know?) or not challenged.
I'm honestly not even sure what you're claiming about Title VII?
There is no "violation." I think the Title VII thing is a meme so conservatives criticizing Biden's "lawlessness" with respect to student loan forgiveness sounds more informed.
Like you said, Biden's student loan forgiveness is mostly two buckets, scammy college forgiveness ("borrowed defense forgiveness") and public service loan forgiveness. He also did some rule changes to make eligibility requirements for existing loan repayment programs less onerous. Biden can't really take much credit for PSLF; that was a law long before he came into office. It just happened to be 10 years after the program rolled out, so many people started qualifying for forgiveness.
You're not going to get an answer because there isn't one. It's just a "look Biden has unfavorable rulings in the courts, don't look too closely" play.
I don't think so. Ezra Klein had a good point that Biden broke the seal on this kind of lawlessness, enabling all kinds of false equivalence to justify what's happening now. I think that's largely right and I think it's also important that the perception of his corruption is just as damaging as whatever actual corruption took place.
The example of pardoning Hunter is a good one because the specific harms to the American people are probably zero but the precedential harms are significant. Randall said in a comment below that "I think the days of prosecuting public officials, at least federally, are over. Every president is just going to blanket pardon a long list of officials, friends and family members because we know the nasty people on the other team will weaponize justice". I think that's a very worrying possibility and it's definitely Biden who set us down that path, eroding the quality of governance we have going forward.
"[T]he judge says he didn’t comply with the court order, and the president’s team says the president doesn’t have to comply with court orders so he keeps doing illegal things."
Are there Trump administration actions that fit this pattern, without exaggeration or hyperoble?
They're clearly probing boundaries, but where have they crossed into open defiance of the courts?
Edit: my mistake, I posted too quickly. Here's the more relevant part, which does support James' assertion:
> [Judge McConnell] granted the attorneys general’s request for a “motion to enforce” — essentially a nudge. It did not find that the Trump administration was in contempt of court or specify any penalties for failing to comply.
> However, the judge was straightforward in his finding that the initial temporary restraining order that he issued Jan. 29 was not being followed.
[Original comment below]
Definitely worth watching but it doesn't support James' assertion. The article also says "It appeared that the administration was trying to win through the legal system’s established procedures, even as officials questioned the legitimacy of those procedures from the outside."
What Mike said, but also there’s a clear difference between complying with the court order to follow the law while a the case plays out and refusing to comply with the court order while the case plays out. And it’s not like there’s just one judge or one court order they’re not complying with. Several judges have ordered them to stop several different orders and it’s not clear they’re going to stop.
You may want to discount what administration officials say, but when they say something and also take actions that match with those statements - in this case arguing that courts more or less don’t have any authority over the president because of article 2 section 1 - it’s not crazy to believe them. What they say and what they do match. What they do is illegal and what they say is that they plan to continue to do illegal things.
My mistake: I read the article more closely and agree about McConnell's ruling.
I think it's important that this still doesn't rise to the level of open defiance: they argue the program in question was paused under a different memo than the one covered by McConnell's ruling. That's probably transparent bullshit, but they are still, at least, pretending that they are following the law, which is significant. (That is not a defense of their actions.)
What are the other examples you've got in mind? "it’s not like there’s just one judge or one court order they’re not complying with" I agree with all of the principles you're raising, but I'd like to see specifics.
Right but even this is an example -- is the scale of this illegality different than Biden deciding he can unilaterally cancel student loans? I have no idea who I should read to help adjudicate that in my mind, because one's opinion on that is almost certainly influenced by what political team they're on.
I think the difference is that when a judge said Biden couldn’t unilaterally cancel student loans, he didn’t unilaterally cancel student loans and attempted to find another more legally defensible version of forgiveness.
And, frankly, I think you should be capable of forming your own beliefs without looking to someone else to tell you what to believe.
1. Not to go too far down the epistemological rabbit hole but what is and is not happening vis-a-vis judge orders is also typically hard to follow. Like, Biden definitely did more targeted debt relief even after the supreme court ruling. Just as affirmative action is still in practice in some places despite that now apparently running afoul of the 14th amendment. My point is that if you say that those things are definitely not as illegal as what Trump is doing, you very well may be right! But I would also be able to predict with near certainty your position on other completely unrelated issues, which makes me less confident about your position here.
2. My writing isn't great so I apologize for being unclear, but forming my own beliefs typically involves evaluating the best arguments of others' sincerely held beliefs and determining which position is downstream from my values. "Other side bad"-style coverage doesn't help usually help with this. Perhaps if I was perfectly informed on every topic I wouldn't need to rely on others' analysis as much, but I'm a pretty average person so I feel like that's asking a lot.
I think you are confused about the debt relief ruling. The Supreme Court did not say that all student debt relief, in any form, was unconstitutional. They ruled on a challenge to a particular program that relied on the HEROES Act as legal justification. It was a matter of statutory interpretation and they concluded that Biden’s reading of the statute was too broad. Biden complied. But this ruling did not automatically implicate any conceivable debt relief based on any other statute. For instance, over the years the government has relied on other statutes (such as the Higher Education Act) to relieve the debts of borrowers who attended scammy for-profit colleges. To my knowledge, no court has ever said it cannot do so.
I think you need to think more clearly about where and how to assign confidence. What it sounds like is that you assign less confidence to people who hold opinions and express a point of view. What I think you’re asking for is how to navigate a complex media environment in which every media source is holding opinions and expressing points of view, therefore reducing your confidence in them. I can’t help you there. Expecting someone to come in and be truly objective and give you a god’s eye view of the situation seems fruitless but that also doesn’t mean you’re stuck in an unknowable morass. Like, if the NYT reports that the Trump administration is not complying with a court order and that a judge has said they are in violation of a court order, why discount that because the NYT is also left leaning? Media literacy is hard and we all do our best, I suppose.
Now, as far as degrees of what’s more illegal and what’s less illegal, why care about more or less illegal? Why does it matter if Biden’s debt relief was more illegal or less illegal than Trump’s impoundment of appropriated funds? If I shoot one person or ten people it’s still murder. If I steal a hundred thousand dollars or a hundred million dollars it’s still theft and still illegal. If I sell cocaine do I get to argue that, hey, at least it’s not fentanyl so what’s the big deal? Trump doesn’t get a pass because Biden did illegal things too. Does pardoning Hunter make it okay that Trump pardoned 1500 Jan 6 rioters or can both be bad?
"Why does it matter if Biden’s debt relief was more illegal or less illegal than Trump’s impoundment of appropriated funds?"
Because most of the people claiming outrage about Biden's actions aren't outraged about Trump's actions, and most people who are outraged about Trump's actions weren't at Biden's. Which suggests that most people aren't applying a legal or ethical principle, they are arguing partisan politics. Despite the desire for partisans to conflate the two, those are different things.
People attempt to refute this by bringing out the meme about the difference between good things and bad things, but if there wasn't disagreement about what is good/bad we wouldn't have these political disagreements in the first place.
Biden relied on a statue, passed by Congress, which expressly gave the Secretary of Education the power to waive or modify student loans in an emergency. This is what presidents are supposed to do when they take executive action: rely on legal authority that empowers said action. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden Administration was reading the statute too broadly, and blocked the parts of the relief program that were challenged. This is what we expect courts to do: assess executive action for its adherence to statutory authority. The Biden Administration complied with the ruling and did not carry out the blocked program, despite outrage from student loan activists. This is what we expect presidents to do when courts rule against them.
As a person of (presumably) normal intelligence, you should be able to see that the Trump Administration’s funding cuts and attempts to unilaterally shut down Congressionally mandated agencies are of a different category altogether. The administration is not even attempting to legally justify their moves, with certain officials even arguing a fringe theory which states that a president may cut spending in defiance of the constitution or congressional statute. If they continue down this road, defying all courts, including the Supreme Court, we will enter a constitutional crisis without precedent. And I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about how both sides do it.
"If they continue down this road, defying all courts, including the Supreme Court, we will enter a constitutional crisis without precedent."
I think everyone agrees with this. It's been Ezra's early litmus test that's now seemed to permeate the discourse. I think the challenge is we're still talking about differences in degrees not kinds until then. Nothing has reached the SC. They've rescinded how many orders now because they didn't spend a second to think the first thing through (e.g., maybe we shouldn't freeze Medicaid reimbursements). Perversely, the main thing keeping us on the rails is how incompetent they've been.
Yeah, to be clear, I am fine with holding off on calling it a constitutional crisi for now. I said this in another comment somewhere, but a federal agency slow-walking a court order, or even being held in contempt, isn't unprecedented. But the potential for crisis is there.
Hanania, nuts as he often is, is correct about the mainstream media being fundamentally reliable on most topics.
One of the relatively few about which it is not, now that critical reporting of gender, racial issues, affirmative action, etc... all seem to be back in vogue... is holding public-sector employees to account.
I think that this is more a lack of expertise to parse when they're being fed bullshit than anything ideological, but that's irrelevant. In either case it's extraordinarily difficult to tell if some of the stupidest shit that's going on is genuinely required because the GOP consists of morons who can't draft an EO, or because some of the bureaucrats are overcomplying specifically to make those in charge look like morons.
My guess is "a bit of both," but relative weights are very, very unclear at present.
>With so many people getting their news from social media, people are getting fed oppo research, so what is truly outrageous and what isn't is unclear.<
Unclear? This seems...a questionable dodge.
Yes, SOME people "are getting fed oppo research." Sure. But that hardly means straight reportage isn't *likewise* available.
It appears to be the case that the Trump-Musk regime is unambiguously trying to destroy a globally giant provider of critical services to hundreds of millions of vulnerable human beings, and doing so in illegal fashion (AND in the bargain is kneecapping a powerful exponent of American values and soft power).
The lamentable existence of fake news on social media need not blind us to reality.
Information about politics is more available now that at any time in American history. There is no empirical reason to think the US electorate is less informed than 20 or 200 years ago. It is more educated and richer and average IQs have increased since world war two.
100% -- we are smarter and have more access to info that at any point in history. My lament is that it's hard to contextualize what is and is not a big deal when no matter what happens, some side will always be crying wolf (and sometimes there are wolves!)
It is hard for me to read that as anything other than an attempt to sane wash Trump's administration. I can almost believe it is simple pearl clutching on their part, as I recall they were among the biggest group that used to love pointing out that we survived the previous administration. Still, acts largely as a way to try and sane wash the admin.
It also ignores that the USAID debacle is downstream of the 2025 chaos. Not just unrelatedly off to the side, but a direct aim of it. And any sane washing of Trump claiming he is not 2025 is going to be difficult to give any credit to, nowadays.
Matt's continued lack of an in-depth engagement with resisting Trump is increasingly weird IMO. "The administration's actions are flagrantly illegal, here's how to optimise a budget item that was 1% of the federal budget before they destroyed it" seems like a pretty grand case of missing the wood for the trees.
We're trying to provide content that you might not find anywhere else! Have written, I'd say, fairly extensively about how to counter Trump. But also, he's president and has a GOP majority, not much you can do to fight that on a blog.
Maybe his Substack does not need to do everything? There are lots of activist blogs and communities out there. SB has a more intellectual focus and tries to shape the trajectory of the Democratic Party longterm.
I feel like this too. My charitable interpretation is that these posts, along with his common sense agenda posts, are an effort to look ahead two-four years and figure out how to rebuild the government, some of it from scratch. I think Matt is also trying to think about how to do this while regaining public trust and protecting programs and agencies from future Trump-style meddling.
My less charitable interpretation is just that Matt has nothing useful to say. If Trump is determined to break the law in ways big and small, ignore the courts, and congress isn’t interested in removing him from office, what can Matt say to meaningfully impact anything? He is, at least, not naive enough to believe the norms fairy will save us but that also means there’s little help in pointing out how abnormal Trump & co are.
Yes, your latter point is quite right. There is basically nothing we can do other than smart litigation strategy, which Matt isn't really qualified to comment on. We are at the mercy of the fates.
1000 times this. Real resistance requires winning elections. As long as Trump controls the presidency, the house and senate he's going to have a pretty free hand.
I agree -- there aren't enough media members brave enough to write about how Trump is bad and there is way too much coverage of technical budget issues. Like we get it, budget optimization drives all the clicks but can we please get at least some coverage of Trump Bad?
How to resist Trump = what to do in response to "flagrantly illegal" actions. What should each of elected Dems, media, civil society orgs, private citizens be doing. To my knowledge that is not well covered at all, certainly relative to its importance (arguably #1 public policy issue in the world right now).
"Flagrantly illegal" actions will just be contested in court. Something like 20 cases have already been won. Matt isn't a lawyer. SB isn't 5-4. I can't imagine Matt is going to cover the rescinded OMB memo better than the NYT, Reuters, the BBC, the WaPo, etc. It's not like we're not getting full access coverage into what's going on.
1) My understanding is several court orders are very likely already being quietly violated.
2) Vance, Musk, Lee, Cotton et al have been tweeting in support of either openly violating court orders or suppressing the judiciary's ability to make rulings.
3) The legal system was not designed for flagrant illegality by the Executive. It moves too slowly. Winning a court case months/years after your agency was wound down or contract cancelled does not turn back time.
4) In particular, DoJ has declared cessation of enforcement of a number of offences. CFPB has declared cessation of all activities. Again, not something I think the legal system was designed for.
5) Matt discussed on Politix last week how Trump literally wrote in his book how to systematically stiff small contractors who will struggle to legally take on a large corporation. Taking on the federal government will be even harder.
6) I think it's going to be a lot easier for judges to function as a bulwark if the rest of society vocally backs them to do so.
I'm curious what you think that Matt could write that would be effective at addressing any of these?
He could write that they are bad, but his audience agrees so there not convincing involved. He's not a breaking reporter, so nothing he writes is going to be something not already reported in the NYT, Politico, WaPo, etc. I'm not sure Matt has some special strategy he can cook up that if we all do will solve for these outside of what Democratic politicians and the judiciary are already doing. I just keep seeing people say that Matt is not writing about the important things, but I don't see what exactly people are expecting him to write that would be novel.
I thought I addressed this already tbh, so to repeat: what should each of elected Dems, media, civil society orgs, private citizens be doing, in response to flagrantly illegal actions by the executive. If Matt's view is that the answer is "wait till the mid-terms" or "leave it to the judiciary to take care of", fair enough. I'd find it interesting to read that case made. But whatever his view is, I think it's important enough to go on the record over.
There is only one option: trust that the courts will block his illegal actions and if he chooses to ignore the courts that Congress finally wakes up and flexes its power.
Last time they lost an election they staged an insurrection!! Yes it didn't work, but now they're purging DoJ and FBI, hinting at purging the military, taking media intimidation to new highs, and placing electoral security staff on leave. I think "just wait for the election" is ignoring the crisis, not responding to it.
In Israel when Netanyahu tried his 'judicial coup', Israelis didn't wait for the next election, they flooded the streets and he reversed course. The judicial coup hasn't happened so far.
I think your last para is the real issue. Dems seem highly ineffective at getting voters mad at MAGA about all the terrible stuff it does. I think I saw some hospital director say he was going to have to cut treatment to sick kids, why aren't Democrats holding press conferences from the hospital? From the airports where the plane crashes occurred while FAA is on hiring freeze? etc
I heard Matt complain *a lot* that activists should swap protesting about Gaza for protesting about Dobbs so I think it's fair to expect him to opine on this. Independent voters do not support plane crashes or cutting medical care to kids.
"Matt's continued lack of an in-depth engagement with resisting Trump is increasingly weird IMO."
I find these kinds of utterly tedious complaints increasingly weird IMO. The answer is Donald Trump is President of the United States for the next 1400-some-odd days unless impeached or otherwise removed before then and Republicans control both houses of Congress for approximately the next 700 days (absent several special elections in the House swinging in the Democrats' favor). Your options for "resisting" if you aren't some form of government employee or federal judge are basically all extralegal in this configuration of affairs.
Keep in mind that Matt still has some audience on the right (maybe even among people like Rubio staffers) where liberal credibility is otherwise quite low. You can read between the lines and find an appeal for Rubio to save USAID.
Meanwhile, it's not hard to find people that will openly and deservedly call Trump a fascist and all sorts of things.
Thanks, Matt. Hopefully, the next time Democrats are in power, USAID can return as a stronger institution. I thought Samantha Power's quote about the benefits of USAID was excellent.
I think the U.S. needs to do a better job of making its aid more visible. I’ve been to many African countries, and despite billions in U.S. support for healthcare, farming, and education, anti-American sentiment is growing—even in nations that have benefited the most our aid.
Take Niger, for example. The U.S. invested heavily in its education and agriculture, yet after the recent coup, the junta expelled America’s Reaper drone base and turned to Russia’s Wagner Group for security. The country is becoming more anti-Western by the day.
I can say the same thing about Mali, CAR, and Burkina Faso.
Speaking of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara’s would frequently say he was doing social programs under the banner of "self sufficiency" even though he was incredibly dependent on Western(especially American aid). Even under Reagan, the U.S. was a major donor, yet many Africans believe Sankara implemented his programs without foreign aid. A quick look at World Bank records shows that aid to Burkina Faso increased during his rule, with the U.S. as one of the primary contributors. It’s frustrating that countries can take American money, use it to fund their programs, and then vilify the U.S. without acknowledging the support.
If U.S. aid were as visible as China’s or Japan’s—through large-scale infrastructure projects built by American firms(dams, plants, roads, airports)—Niger and other countries might have remained stronger allies. I'm Ghanaian, and I can tell you that the highway George Bush funded (it's literally called the George Walker Bush Highway in the capital Accra) has made Ghana a more "sticky" American ally. We named the highway after him, and I know that contributes to a positive view of America among local Ghanaians.
Overall, USAID is decent soft power, and when dems come back they should consider thinking about adding more tangible investments or making our investments more visible labeled as American backed to create more sticky allies rather than being more behind the scenes.
I wouldn't even call Chinese aid "debt trap diplomacy". Over the past decade, none of the African countries (Ghana, Congo-Brazzaville, Mozambique, Zambia, Ethiopia,etc.) defaulted on their Chinese loans, they defaulted on eurobonds, which is when governments borrow from private investors (fun fact eurobonds are usually denominated in dollars).
A plurality of Chinese loans are concessionary, which means they are below market in interest rates. If you read the book "Where Credit is Due" by Gregory Smith it does a deep dive into Chinese lending to Africa. Much of Chinese loans are concessionary (below market).
The China Export-Import Bank, China Development Bank, and the Agricultural Development Bank of China. Then sometimes the China Ministry of Commerce directly offers zero-interest lending. These banks offer loans at concessional rates (below market) with grace periods and extended maturities. Much of the "Debt trap diplomacy" is a lie.
In fact, China has been scaling back their lending in Africa because they are tired of African countries asking for concessions/relief.
As I said, debt-trap diplomacy isn't really accurate. Though I'll note that loan terms for their "near abroad" in S. and SE Asia are often rather less cuddly than in Africa.
What actually happened is that China spent 2012-2020 speed-running the entire history of US (to a lesser extent Euros) "development aid to the Third World" from 1955-1995, basically. All the same assumptions, all the same mistakes. Even the same fundamental motive: create export markets.
Everyone wants the Marshall Plan model to work... unfortunately physical infrastructure counts for way less than governance, as anyone involved in the US's efforts after 1970 could have told you.
The main difference, which isn't a very large one really, is that a lot of Chinese projects, especially closer to home, have had the ancillary (or main, it's hard to tell) intention of sopping up excess capacity in construction materials and sometimes even excess capacity in outright construction by dumping it abroad.
They've been trying to curtail white and grey-market credit growth at home for a long time, which made it impossible for LGFVs to build enough infrastructure to justify all the capacity which had built up, so they just started allowing immense credit growth on the books abroad. OBOR/BRI came into existence afterwards and, in time-honored tradition, every local administrator and SOE leader fell over themselves to say that their project abroad was part of it, haha.
Eventually it became clear that at even zero-percent interest the debt burdens to the recipient countries were often untenable, so they wound up owning some assets that they don't actually want, and the Western media called it neo-colonialism...
And here we are, where China is irritated at the concessions it's making, owns infrastructure it can't make money on for lack of local demand, has already made moves to pivot (back) from construction to manufacturing exports as a source of demand to cover domestic imbalances, and just wants to back away silently from this whole episode.
We don’t have the technical expertise to build infrastructure domestically anymore, and since we’re terrified of “corruption” when we try to do it abroad we hire WSP or bechtel from 2000 miles away to do it. They thankfully know how to rip off the American tax payer legally even if the price is astronomical.
I am pretty well convinced of everything Samantha Power says about this, and I say this as someone definitively not a fan of Samantha Power.
But there may be a somewhat larger truth in what Musk is doing, which is somewhat similar to a reaction I had to Brexit and to some extent the attacks on DEI. Which is I get the feeling that there's a sense in which the "liberals control the deep state" narrative of the Right is somewhat true. Essentially what happens is that once these programs get created, the liberals who run them figure the time for democracy is over and they can just run them the way they want and do everything bagel liberalism with them.
And that makes the programs vulnerable if someone later goes in and exposes them to sunlight, because nobody on the inside is really thinking "can I defend what we are doing to the public?".
I don't have a great solution to this, but it is a problem. If you believe in government you have to find a way that programs stick fairly closely to public opinion even when nobody is closely watching. Or else they are going to be vulnerable down the line.
There is something to this. Several of these agencies (EPA, Education) have been in GOP crosshairs for a while now. Their leaderships should have been focused on core mission and staying controversy free. And maybe they have. I think we'll find out shortly.
One of the things missing from US Brexit discourse was any honest accounting of just how sprawling and intrusive into domestic affairs the EU apparatus had gotten. It's run by the type of liberals who simply cannot help themselves - they MUST pursue ever more regulation and centralization. There are obviously many benefits to this, and I don't think I would've voted for Brexit if I were British, but I can understand the sense of overreach.
That last point was exactly what I was getting at with Brexit. British voters voted for EEC in the 1970's, but the people who went to work for what became the EU were world government activists looking to cede as much national sovereignty into transnational institutions as possible. And it turned out the British public didn't want that and turned against the whole project.
Sometimes it depends on what you define as controversial.
The EPA deciding to regulate carbon dioxide is I think conceptually totally acceptable within its remit. But that's gotten so politically controversial that I'm not sure how to avoid it.
Something of this is true, but also, asking experts to do all their work in ways that the public would understand if they see it is a way of telling experts not to use their expertise.
I don't think a lot of the stuff conservatives expose is a matter of expertise, any more than the "art experts" were right about the NEA funding the Piss Christ.
EDIT: to be slightly less flip, I think if it were just "expertise" it would be straightforward to defend it, as we see happening now with the contraceptive trials being interrupted. But a lot of this stuff is just stuff liberals like to do rather than stuff guided by actual expertise (someone above talked about Lesbian Peruvian Guitarists, which is a nice synecdoche for this).
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The collapse of trust in experts means the public is less likely to give experts the benefit of the doubt.
In general, if the public doesn’t like something funded by the government that is really important to experts, it’s on the experts to explain why they think it’s a good idea. I worry that many experts don’t have much practice explaining and persuading people who are not like them.
I think it's possible that 'the world' is moving towards a state where there's so much complexity that experts aren't as clearly better qualified than the normal person as they used to be, because there are so many moving parts that their field is affected by events and situations that they are *not* expert in.
We sometimes experience this as red tape, for pack of a better descriptor. "I don't understand why etc etc".
The next level might be experts who specialize in the study and implementation of expertise.
This reminds me of science writers--it's rare to find someone who can both understand the science at a high level and then translate it for broader audiences, but it's pretty dang important, right? I'm not sure what the political corollary is, but we need more and better quality of those.
I think it kind of excuses things somewhat to just talk of experts. A lot of these things turn out to be great political issues for Republicans not because only experts understand them, but because the public understands them perfectly well as sees them as the everything bagel liberalism they are (even if they don't use that term).
Just say it plainly, Matt. The reason Musk and his cronies are going after USAID has little to do with efficiency, and every to do with your item (4). They see countries like China and Russia where the oligarchs have all the power, and think they deserve the same here. To that end, they've listened to Russian and China propaganda, which attacks USAID for its own strategic reasons and has successfully won the US right over to their side in the global fight against democracy. And why not? The US Right doesn't want democracy here anymore either.
That may sound very sinister and dramatic (with a quasi-Churchillian faith in the good of democracy), but it's the only way I can make sense of what's going on.
I think like all such regimes there are competing agendas.
Russell Vought wants to establish Christian nationalism.
Elon Musk is a tech bro utopian-randian who's contemptuous of the state, establishmentarian expertise, and (yes) democracy.
Stephen Miller wants to reduce the slide of the White share of the population.
Steve Bannon (not in the administration, but a guru who exerts influence) is a general purpose America-Firster anti-globalist.
Rubio, who was no longer interested in serving in the Senate, wants to preserve political viability for the post-Trump era.
Vance is a hard-right, Nixonian cynic who wants to be the next president.
Trump is an increasingly cognitively impaired black hole of corruption who mainly wants legal immunity, young women, money, the adulation of his base, and revenge on his enemies.
It's hard to sort them out and know which agenda is driving which policy, and how they all intersect and interplay.
Yes, those are their competing sub-agendas. But it's their anti-democratic steak (ETA: that's a fun spelling error!) that brings them together as allies. (With the potential exception of Rubio, who mostly seems in it for himself.)
Do they get their anti-democratic steak well-done with ketchup?
(I wouldn't necessarily use all the same verbiage as you, but I think you're mostly right. At the same time, I do think that in the mix there's also a "principled" - if you want to call it that - opposition to the government helping poor foreigners, or the government helping poor people in general, or even simply to helping poor people in general.)
You're completely correct. Obviously the American right in its most extreme form hates democracy and thinks it is fundamentally bad -- their godfathers are all basically open about their authoritarian tendencies and their intellectual lineage from post-WW2 reactionary thought. Unfortunately, no one will believe us until its too late; even people who comment on this blog seem to somehow have convinced themselves that these are just conservatives reacting to liberal excess rather than people who sincerely, ideologically believe in the authoritarian project.
Assuming your interpretation of their motives is correct, I believe they are misinterpreting the power structure in both China and Russia. The oligarchs definitely move up a step in what they can get away with regarding the common folk, but they move down about fifteen steps in safety and security against the state/security forces. If Musk's doing this because he's mad about getting sued by the SEC...well, I don't think he'll like being disappeared by the new FBI after falling out with Trump over some random personal bullshit.
I think they're interpreting it in the sense that THEY are going to get to be the ones throwing folks who do not get with the program out of windows. (Even if only metaphorically.)
I don't think they're concerned about the government coming after them, because they are going to be the ones controlling the government. Trump is easily manipulated, as we all know. Maybe some future American leader is not, but we're not there yet.
I mean...Trump has fallen out with literally everyone he's ever worked with, eventually. The number of folks who think they'll be the consigliere and definitely not be whacked for trying to be the consigliere is certainly always high. It's also usually wrong. My point isn't that you are right or wrong, it's that if you are right, they are wrong.
Someone being easily manipulated does not make it safe to give them power unless literally no one else has access to them...which simply isn't the case.
They should look at the history of oligarchies. A significant fraction of the people who are involved in throwing people out windows eventually get thrown out windows themselves - in fact, probably a higher percentage of any group other than explicit opposition leaders.
"The US Right doesn't want democracy here anymore either."
That's a pretty broad brush you are painting with. Fun fact is that voters actually thought Dems were a bigger threat to democracy than Trump (see court packing)
"Slightly more than half of respondents that believe the US democracy is threatened (73%) voted for Trump. It's as if those voters for some reason perceived Harris to be a greater threat to democracy than Trump."
Just because some voters believe that Democrats are more of a threat to democracy than Republicans doesn't at all negate my observation about the US right. Multiple things can be true. Nor have you bothered to directly analyze the actual substance of the question.
Also, court packing says little about democracy because our courts, to a certain extent, are deliberately INSULATED from democracy (and for good reason). The right has happily exploited that important principle to pack the court as much as they see fit (see Kennedy's blatantly-timed resignation and McConnell blocking Garland). Meanwhile, the court packing proposals floated by some Democrats (but never widely embraced), can be understood, in part, as a misguided attempt to counter the anti-democratic nature of the Court.
"Just because some voters believe that Democrats are more of a threat to democracy than Republicans doesn't at all negate my observation about the US right."
Note it was just some voters, it was a majority of voters that voted on the democracy question (disclaimer, I didn't vote for Trump, but I can certainly understand why those that did. But trying to steal the election was a deal breaker for me).
What McConnel did with Garland was certainly political hardball. It wasn't a nuclear option like packing the court something FDR couldn't even do.
And guess what would happen after court packing. Republicans would then turn around and do it, and then Dems would do it again, next thing you know we have 200 people on the court.
The point of packing the court is to properly restrict the franchise to Democrats. That, and get rid of conservative news (lies) sources and also, ideally, all social media
And I get the frustration. Republicans were definitely frustrated by the changes from FDR on. But the solution was the federalist society, not packing the court.
Discussions of efficiency will either be tedious or inane. Take a huge program like Medicaid. It pays for hundreds of millions or billions of procedures a year. The granular question of which procedures are efficient is so complicated that even “relative elites” like Slow Boring commenters lose patience. You need, at a minimum, a small team of actuaries and efficacy data to know what is cost justified. No one will meaningfully engage this question without being paid. Yet any big program will create obvious instances of inefficiency which conservatives can attack, even if they are a small portion of the overall program.
Trusting big government means trusting leaders to hire actuaries to adjudicate efficiency questions too granular to enter the discourse. The Biden administration wasn’t really up to that.
The problem is that politics over the last few decades has largely involved all sides working to generally decrease trust in their opponents, rather than building trust in any group of experts. This isn’t particularly the Biden administration’s fault - it’s a problem that there is so much less trust for public figures now than there was a few decades ago, even though errors and incompetency haven’t changed in any notable way at all.
becoming and practicing as an attorney has made me trust elites much less. That makes it hard for me to calibrate my vibes about social trust, so I just defer to the statistics which show a decrease
“Of course it’s terrible that the terrorists have seized my grandmother and are threatening to kill her — their illegal means should be condemned. However, it is worth saying that not all of Grannies organs are equally valuable. The kidnappers should note that her kidneys work well and should fetch a decent price, but her corneas are too cloudy to be used for transplants.”
Don’t do this, Matt. Don’t negotiate with terrorists, or help them carve up their victims.
So, it's a hard line to walk, but I do think democrats need a somewhat more nuanced take on government, rather than purely reflexive defensiveness about Trump's attacks, because there genuinely are major problems and everyone can see them. It's like the line about 'if liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will.' If the only way to reform a system is to break the law, and people want the system reformed, they'll support breaking the law.
And when our argument is purely negative (that's illegal) I think it pushes folks in that direction.
You and a few others have been bitching incessantly that MY *dares* talk about things other than Trump/Musk's current actions for a week and a half.
Now he talks about the things they're doing and you're still kvetching.
"ReSIsT!%&^!#~! [Frothing at mouth]" did not work the first time, stop trying to will Trump's every off-hand comment into dominating the infosphere again and let people discuss other shit.
EDIT: To be clear, if this is you deadpanning a satire of the position you've taken, well done, I had no clue.
”At the same time, Russian propaganda has become increasingly influential on the American right, and Elon Musk has a warm relationship with the Communist Party of China. There is clearly some level of specific animus against this agency operating at an elite level.”
Russia and China love the idea of US leaving Africa for them to dominate through aid, soft power and hard power. Everything Trump does benefits Russia in the end, which is of course purely coincidental…
It isn't coincidental, but I don't think the main explanation for it is personal corruption or blackmail or anything like that (although I don't deny that those things exist). Rather, the main explanation is that American conservatives sincerely agree to a substantial extent with the leaders of those countries on basic questions of political philosophy, what system of government is best, etc.
American conservatives obviously don't perceive themselves to be anti-American, but they believe that "Real America" is distinct from de jure America. They correctly recognize that America's institutions are expressions of small-l small-d liberal democratic values, which in their view are alien to "Real America," so tearing those institutions down and destroying their hard and soft power is actually pro-American.
This whole thing reminds me of the problem of blue state governance. The lack of accountability and efficiency, not to mention the wastes of boondoggles and pet leftists causes destroys a lot of credibility.
If you want there to be public schools then you need to make sure they are the BEST public schools possible, and not protect bad teachers.
If you want there to be public transportation, then make it awesome, not a jobs project for unions.
And if you want to help people in other countries, then spend the money well and wisely not on DEI in Serbia.
If you want to be the party of government it's GOT to be good government. Otherwise people will get fed up and elect someone like Trump that just wants to tear it all down.
The point about Rubio is the most important thing going forward. The idea that America is a great country has always been a part of both parties view of foreign policy, and of policy more generally. That was there in the New Frontier that Matt mentioned, and in the space race, and in PEPFAR, and Matt's book. But the Trumpist right, despite their slogan, has abandoned that idea entirely. Instead their vision seems to be of a Giant Dubai, where we have a military that inflicts violence on anyone who attacks us but otherwise we let others run the world, while the rich can relax by the side of fancy-shaped pools.
"If courts force Trump to follow the law (which they should and, I think, probably will)"
Matt Y thinks that the courts will PROBABLY force Trump to follow the law.
Probably.
When I was preparing to take the test to become a US citizen in 2018, one of the question-and-answer combos I had to memorize was: "What does the rule of law mean?" "Everyone has to obey the law/no one is above the law."
I actually believed this and took it seriously.
I know this isn't the main point of the article, and I agree with Matt Y that USAID is valuable and ought not to be destroyed, and helping desperately poor people at a relatively low cost to ourselves is a good thing.
Just, I can't get over how casually Matt Y can slip "Probably the judicial branch can force the President of the United States to follow the law! But maybe not! Who knows! The rule of law is like a box of chocolates, you never know when it's gonna turn out empty!" into the article and everyone just kind of glides over it and shrugs and says, yep, that's our reality now.
How have we fallen so far? What has our country become?
The rule of law isn't magic. It requires the other branches in particular the executive to enforce it. it requires other parties to be good faith stewards.
Note this isn't a new problem. President Andrew Jackson is famously supposed to have said "The Chief Justice has made his decision now let me enforce it"
> Matt Y thinks that the courts will PROBABLY force Trump to follow the law.
My current thinking is that this can only be done by Men with Guns. I dont see a document-oriented way to get Musk's goons to stop deleting payments in the basement of the treasury. From there, I dont see any Men with Guns getting involved. nobody wants that and it probably won't work (they have Men with Guns too).
USAID does some outstanding work and is also very easy to demagogue. I’d add a couple things to Matt’s good analysis.
A lot of its programming falls under the nebulous rubrics of civil society development, women’s empowerment, and economic development. This can mean very useful projects, but it’s also how you wind up funding magazines for lesbian guitarists in Peru. The individuals (let’s be real: progressives) working on USAID grant allocation are not particularly focused on justifying their expenditures to the taxpayer, and it shows. They should be able to explain on a bumper sticker, not a treatise, why their grants are a good use of money.
Another problem is vetting in-country contractors and partners, to make sure the money doesn’t get diverted to radicals, criminals, or other bad actors. Aid agencies are notoriously bad at this and it’s not totally their fault. In a past job, I was responsible for verifying that none of the contractors or their employees appeared on the USG list of sanctioned terrorists. It’s a control-F exercise, which doesn’t work because there are a million alternative spellings and many common names. Better vetting would take a lot of time and money. There are also many places where it’s impossible to operate without some of the money ending up in the pockets of bad guys. Someone at some point in the supply and distribution chain is paying for “permits” or protection. I don’t know the solution to this, but the corruption and enmeshment with bad actors has been a talking point of USAID skeptics for ages.
It would have been wise for USAID to focus on some discreet, easily explained programs that have either (a) a concrete lifesaving function or (b) a very clear nexus to US interests (not eighteen degrees of separation).
You are absolutely right about bad actors and foreign aid. We recently saw this with UNRWA, which was ostensibly about helping Palestinian refugees but ended up with Hamas operatives in it.
Mu understanding was that they made up a very small part of the UNRWA staff. And for the most part they do important aid work in Gaza.
Wasn't the head of the UNRWA teachers' union in Lebanon also a high-ranking member of Hamas? Hard to believe he made it that high in the UNRWA org chart if Hamas is only a very small part of UNRWA.
So there's debates about UNRWA and how useful it is.
But it shouldn't have had ANYONE from Hamas working in it. Seriously, "terrorists shouldn't work for UN aid organizations" should be an absolute.
I would point out that UNRWA has for many years submitted lists of its employees to Israel for verification (https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-unrwa-united-nations-28a63ddef23efdc4b050b0bcbdb587ff), and it was basically a non-issue until post Oct 7th (perhaps in part because the Israeli military were happy to offload humanitarian responsibilities to UNRWA).
Also, while I agree about Hamas, I think everyone should be hesitant to simply accept Israeli determinations of what constitutes a terrorist organization, given their clear commitment to destroy civil society groups that oppose their occupation: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/nine-eu-states-keep-backing-terrorist-palestinian-civil-society-groups-2022-07-12/
"The groups include Palestinian human rights organisations Addameer and Al-Haq, which document alleged rights violations by both Israel and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and which reject the charges.
In a joint statement, the foreign ministries of Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden said they had not received "substantial information" from Israel that would justify reviewing their policy."
ETA: For more evidence about how the Israeli military supported UNRWA before the political decision was made to kill it in early 2024: https://www.jns.org/the-unrwa-lobbyists/
"(Aug. 31, 2018 / Israel Hayom)
The Israeli defense establishment is the strongest advocate for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in the country. In the United States, UNRWA’s strongest lobbyist is Saudi Arabia. In recent months, both the Israeli defense and security apparatus and Saudi Arabia have been working, separately and uncoordinated, on behalf of a shared interest: stopping the Trump administration’s attacks on the organization.
Reports from the United States that the $200 million cut to American aid to UNRWA is only the beginning not only shook up the organization itself, they also came as a shock to the Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Israel’s main opponent to any punitive measures against the U.N. entity, as well as the Saudi royal family, which is the third-largest donor to UNRWA."
I don't think "Israel approved it" (especially given the footsie that Netanyahu's governments played with Hamas pre-10/7, because of their mutual interests in killing any 2 state solution) answers the issue that "terrorists shouldn't work for UN aid agencies".
And I also think it's ridiculous to even bring up criticisms of Israel when we are talking about Hamas. Hamas isn't a terrorist organization because Israel says it is. It's a terrorist organization because it commits mass murder and routinely attacks and even rapes Jewish civilians.
If Israel labels some other organization terrorist that is actually just a peaceful anti-occupation group, fine, that's bad, and if representatives of that group are in UNRWA, I don't care.
But Hamas' people were in UNRWA, and that was an outrage.
"UNRWA didn't bother to do any vetting whatsoever (or, far more likely, tacitly approved terrorist staffers) because Israel did some vetting" is not compelling. It is not Israel's responsibility to ensure that no terrorists are on the staff of a UN agency. Indeed, this is part of a deeper pathology wherein Israel takes on the job of something which is decidedly not its responsibility, and in response those responsible shrug their shoulders and don't bother doing their jobs.
The fact that UNRWA has people involved in October 7 as well as involved in housing hostages is unconscionable. But this doesn’t get into the heart of the problem with UNRWA.
UNRWA is a refugee resettlement organization that has not resettled a single Palestinian refugee. It tells the Palestinian people 76 years after the war that they and their descendants will remain refugees in perpetuity until Israel is dismantled. This is in contrast to any international standards.
For all other conflicts, refugees may return, be settled in place or be settled in a third country, depending on what is most practicable. Whatever the outcome of the conflict, the idea is for refugees to move on and have a better life, not to fuel the conflict. UNRWA does not allow settlement in place or in a third country, but only pushes for return. But the crazy part of it is that even Palestinians who can live anywhere within the Green Line and can return to the towns their grandparents left (ie those in East Jerusalem), are still registered as refugees. So even return is not a high enough bar. The only way that UNRWA will remove a single name from the refugee list is if Palestine is established from the river to the sea. The the effect is perpetuating the conflict.
Furthermore by providing services in a place like Gaza, it has the effect of relieving the government (run by Hamas) from actually having to govern. In that way, Hamas can focus all its efforts on fortifying Gaza for war and planning terror attacks. Because money is fungible, they have money to do it as international donations to UNRWA will fund services for the people.
But tying services to an ideology that the Palestinian people are forever refugees and will remain such until Israel is dismantled as the single Jewish state, UNRWA maintains a state of conflict.
The vast majority of Jews in Israel are also the descendants of refugees. Some live in towns and development cities developed to house these refugees. But they do not say that they are refugees until they can reclaim the property they owned in Egypt, Iraq, Romania, Russia, Yemen or Ethiopia. They do not maintain a state of war against these places, and expect a UN agency to pay for their schools and healthcare.
Instead they moved on and built a successful state. They settled where they were. Palestinians can do the same, but they need to change their ideology. Having a Palestinian run organization with the letters UN in it telling them that it’s no use to invest in where they are now because one day they’ll return to their great grandmothers house in a triumphant conquest of Israel does not help do that.
It goes way beyond individual terrorists working for UNRWA. The organization collaborates with Hamas hand in glove. Hamas interwove military infrastructure in UNRWA facilities. Hostages were held in UNRWA shelters. UNRWA removed Holocaust education from the Gaza curriculum when Hamas objected. Etc. Anyone with an UNRWA job is almost certainly connected to, if not a ranking member of, Hamas - Hamas is like the mafia or a Communist government in that respect, and UNRWA collaborates.
On a more fundamental level, UNRWA exists to maintain Palestinians’ perpetual refugee status. That’s a much longer conversation. But short version is that (without exaggerating) a UN agency whose goal is to destroy a UN member state… not great.
The whole apparatus is unsustainable and absurd. Hamas's official position is that it has no responsibility for providing human services; that's the job of the UN. Hamas's job is to enforce theocracy and attack Israel. How can the international community possibly expect peace while participating in this setup? It should force Hamas to actually govern the territory it claims to govern.
"but ended up owned lock, stock, and barrel by Hamas' propaganda arm" would probably be more accurate...
Do you have any source I can read supporting this claim? I’ve seen people talking as though they believe this, but I don’t know where they got this impression. I generally try to avoid Israel-Palestine news because it’s usually so full of noise and hot air on all sides, but if theres something that earnestly lays out this case I’d be interested to read one article.
The real answer here is just, like, Hamas was the authoritarian government of Gaza, so any organization operating at scale in Gaza had to be reasonably well aligned and integrated with Hamas.
There's not a lot of great sourcing because Hamas was an authoritarian government and there's no reason they'd produce negative propaganda about themselves.
Not true. If the UN insisted on independence from Hamas, Hamas would be forced to either allow it to work or explain to its population why it kicked the UN aid out.
UNRWA has to hire locals, who have to go home at night to houses in Gaza. The UN can insist on whatever it wants; the reality on the ground will be controlled by the guys with guns, which is to say, Hamas.
I'm not saying "Hamas is bad" or "UNRWA is dishonest". Just that this is the reality of working in an authoritarian state: any large organization is a de facto arm of the state.
The most comprehensive argument and evidence is probably the one in UN Watch's December 2024 report "The Unholy Alliance: UNRWA, Hamas and Islamic Jihad". There are also lengthy historical descriptions of the process of radical "capture" of UNRWA over the decades in many books, including The War of Return by Schwartz and Wilf.
I think the most appropriate balance to the UN Watch report would be the Dec. 2024 update of UNRWA's own fact sheet on this question (https://www.unrwa.org/unrwa-claims-versus-facts-february-2024).
UNRWA's response seems to me consistent with Dilan Esper's phrasing above, "[UNRWA] ended up with Hamas operatives in it." UNRWA claims both that the numbers were small and that it responsibly polices its units to eliminate this as much as possible. The UN Watch report (of which I've only read the executive summary) identifies specific cases, including some acknowledged by UNRWA, and projects a systemic malfunction in line with David R's comment. (https://unwatch.org/the-unholy-alliance-unrwa-hamas-and-islamic-jihad/)
Yes - I think UNRWA was more forthcoming in this report than it has been in the past. I also think the root problem is that this agency has persisted for decades and is unlike any other UN agency in its singular focus on catering to a group of people who have basically insisted on remaining "refugees" for political purposes, beyond any reasonable interpretation of the word. (The relevant comparison is to the Korean Reconstruction Agency that accomplished the relocation and establishment of millions of Korean War refugees within a few years, then went out of business when the work was complete). It's hard to imagine that an agency solely dedicated to this population and tasked with providing services to it while the Palestinian leadership actively discouraged the development of a civil society would not, eventually, become "captured". The model is a failure, whatever the sins of the agency itself.
Not to hand, no, it's been forever since I read anything on the topic myself. I wasn't reading Fox or anything similar when I was reading about this, is all I remember.
Who will do all the work that UNRWA has been doing in distributing humanitarian aid?
As I say above: "I think UNRWA had Hamas people in there because a lot of folks in the UN actually sympathize with Hamas and favor the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, and therefore don't really see anything wrong with Hamas, and that the UN could in fact play much more hardball with Hamas. But if that's wrong and there is no way to do aid without involving mass murderers in the program, then UNRWA should be dismantled and the UN should do nothing in Gaza until Hamas is wiped off the Earth."
Is this a general principle that humanitarian aid organizations should not cooperate with bad actors (frequently including armed groups that are guilty of mass murderer) in conflict zones around the world, or is Hamas uniquely bad because they target Israel?
I don't think this list of two options is remotely adequate to deal with actual situations. Humanitarian organizations should and do cooperate with bad actors as a necessary means to help people in distress. They should also be responsible for assessing when that cooperation entails negative consequences as severe as withdrawal, including the consequences of substantial cooptation by bad actors. There's no formula for determining that: it's a judgment call in the midst of emergent situations when there are no red lines that can be formulated to guide judgment. (I do, however, know that the UN World Food Program has faced this issue in the past and declined to cooperate on the terms of the "bad actors," which was an effective way to negotiate appropriate cooperation. UNRWA does have the leverage of greatly needed aid to use constructively in this respect.)
The basic question in this case isn't whether Hamas is uniquely bad, it's whether at this point it's possible to make judgments about the present value balance of engagement and about the trajectory going forward that will likely move that balance one way or another. The ancillary question is whether the leadership of UNRWA and the UN itself are assessing these issues with care, objectivity, and full attention to their complexity. For the general public, we can only consult competing judgments concerning these questions, and people will generally choose the partial data that confirms their biases.
There are bad actors and then there are bad actors. Hamas commits mass terrorist acts. There actually aren't that many organizations on earth that have the capability and record that Hamas does. Wherever the red line is, Hamas crosses it, and if the only way to deliver aid is to involve people who send a rape squad into Israel to masscare over 1000 Jews including teenagers and who shoot rockets at Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, then we should, in fact, not deliver the aid.
I strenuously object to the notion that all good things in life can be explained on a bumper sticker. The world and its problems are complicated, responses to complicated problems are going to be complex and multi-faceted. "Screw nuts and bolts together" doesn't explain how to fix a car, "take a knife and slice it open" doesn't explain how you treat cancer. The American people, at least more than enough of them, aren't just so stupid that they can't understand complexity or have it explained to them.
I think that's a pretty uncharitable reading of what was a good point by Leora. We're talking about people who I am sure consider themselves to be intelligent allocating public money. So sure there's complexity. But there's also obfuscation and beyond that a point of 'the right wing attack ads write themselves.' If a civil servant doesn't have some decent judgment about where those lines are, fuzzy as they may be at the margins, they should not have a job.
I'm not sure I get the idea that civil servants should be gauging their behaviors against a hypothetical median voter, or don't do something that self writes a right wing attack ad. If we take the frequent polls seriously the median voter objects to all foreign aid and civil servants would be constrained from even providing it.
Human rights around the world seem to me to be both in the US interests and worthy of providing some funding for. If it takes some explaining to get from that idea to a specific five figure grant I think that's fine. Just because it's not obvious on its face doesn't make it a bad idea, because again, not all ideas or actions can be explained simplistically.
I hear what you're saying big picture but I think you need to look more closely at what's going on. There are specific things that are pretty defensible on the merits like vaccination programs, medical care, and things of that nature. Plenty of conservatives or voters generally may and probably would still object to it for whatever reason. But at least it's defensible in a generalized good, self interested noblesse oblige kind of way.
But then there's the stuff Leora mentioned, that being 'nebulous' civic development type stuff. She used the (I assume exaggerated, made up) example of a magazine for guitar playing lesbians in Peru. One does not have to look hard to find actual examples of foreign aid projects involving things like trying to teach 3rd wave feminism to women in Kandahar. That sort of thing is self evidently not something tax payer dollars should be spent on.
Now, not being a conservative, I find this kind of thing mostly kind of dumb and funny, and the existence of that kind of foolishness, while regrettable does not cause me to question the value of all foreign aid. But for a lot of Americans it shows that these sorts of government programs are just as bad and absurd as their worst fears. And to the extent something like foreign aid requires a bipartisan consensus, it's important to be able to use some judgment about what is and isn't going to paint the entire project in a bad light.
So I reiterate, civil servants who lack that kind of perspective should be out of work. And given how things are playing out with this topic a lot of them probably will be soon anyway.
> She used the (I assume exaggerated, made up) example of a magazine for guitar playing lesbians in Peru.
You know, I didn't even assume it was fake until you said it. And I still searched just to be sure. That's not a great look for them.
That's just it though. None of us would be surprised to find out that the government was in fact funding something that sounds like it came out of a farce about government incompetence. I don't think that in itself should be the last word on foreign aid but the fact that it exists isn't good. Those that want to use tax payer money to various better ends can't afford to appear as if they don't take it seriously.
Yes, and you are likely surprised at the rapid disintegration of USAID. Apparently because you refuse to accept that the use of taxpayer money will eventually be subjected to the political process in a republic of people who don’t want to pay taxes to fund projects no one can explain to them.
This is totally true, and I think it’s related to Matt’s persistent prioritization of malaria aid over more abstract things like checking authoritarian abuses abroad.
Not to dig into Givewell or similar exercises too much, but I always get the sense that they are trying to bumper-sticker complex ethical decisions into some apparently objective framework that lets you pick the right answer and not worry about it too much.
In the spirit of Matt’s argument that American policies should favor American interests, I think that checking authoritarian dominance of vassal state economies and the global order seems like a US-facing policy goal that should matter more to him than it appears to. I have it on high authority that living in the Soviet bloc was bad, actually!
There's a reason that public health causes are considered to be more cost-effective than anti-authoritarian ones: the best ones are important (e.g. life or death), tractable (e.g. via malaria nets or vaccines), and neglected (i.e. have room for more funding rather than being overfunded).
Vague causes like anti-authoritarianism score reasonably high on importance (though overthrowing a dictator does not, by itself, get you a good outcome), but often very poorly on tractability and neglectedness (e.g. the dictator does not want to be overthrown, which pits donor money vs. authoritarian money; whereas malaria fortunately doesn't have a lobby of its own).
"whereas malaria fortunately doesn't have a lobby of its own"
Secretary of Health & Human Services RFK, Jr.?
Touche, maybe. That said, what if anything can RFK Jr. even do to impede the activities of private charities like the Against Malaria Foundation?
This is all true as far as it goes, but doesn’t address the underlying point that cost effectiveness is not sufficient to address moral issues, which is at root the motivation for USAID. Human development is not the same as keeping as many humans alive as possible, which I think is obvious when you consider the many US policy goals that are at best indifferent to that outcome.
As Matt points out, the goal of USAID is more about cultivating a peaceful and productive democratic international order, and that inherently means spending money on things that are hard and contentious internationally.
Living in the Soviet bloc was bad, but was it worse than being dead from malaria? I'm very skeptical.
Many people have chosen to face death in order to achieve freedom for themselves or others. "Give me liberty or give me death" is widely considered a noble idea.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/making-policy-for-a-low-trust-world
Thanks* for posting this link. Just reread this and am struck by how timely it still is (and how utterly depressing it is that trust has crashed through the floor since this was written).
*I think!
A good read, but I wish it were less timely.
Agree. And now I will be scouring the parking lot of my medical center for that bumper sticker if I ever have to be treated for cancer...
It depends at what level of abstraction you are operating under. The bumper sticker approach for cancer is now basically, "get checked regularly" (for the cancers we can now screen for, breast, colon, cervix, lung, blood, prostate, skin) and maybe "listen to your doctors and follow their advice"
I think we have a culture in this country of not spending the extra money to make sure a program is more effective or that money doesn’t end up in the wrong hands, the people u are trying to help actually end up better off, etc. When these kinds of inefficiencies are uncovered I think it’s a very American thing, with regard to welfare, foreign aid, unemployment benefits for example, to say “we should cut that program,” rather than “we should fix that program and if it costs extra and we have to raise taxes so be it.” I think this applies obliquely to police misconduct as well. I think it is clearly not just an important problem but one that requires money, upsetting special interests, trial and error and research to solve and I think we really do have a culture of shielding ourselves from this reality rather than facing up to it. We need to be able to explain it on a bumper sticker after all.
agreed. Same applies to education. If you want there to be public education, and not just 100% school choice, then you'd better fix the damn schools, and if that requires pissing off unions too freaken bad.
The is a social problem here. Almost everyone who works in this space is left of center. They don’t all support funding lesbian magazines. But they also don’t want to pay the social price for opposing it. They want to be accepted.
This leads us to where we are now. It’s not so different than the idea that if the political left doesn’t enforce the borders then there is a right leaning person who will. Again, that is where we are now.
Funding lesbian magazines is good if we can ensure the money comes out of Republicans’ taxes
Did you drop the hand grenade?
Yes, having such a long screen name was interfering with page formatting in mobile browsing, making it even more obnoxious to read my comments
I get that sometimes it's a waste of money to try to not waste money, but "stopping the money from going to terrorists" is a good time to do the digging.
(I don't know how long ago this was but there are services that will search the terrorist list for you. I've looked at the system at a few different banks.)
Agree with u there’s a musk post up right now Matt responded to. Musk is claiming vast fraud in Medicare ss etc. Matt responding to the post saying uh obviously this is just u advocating for annihilating help for the needy. Would be all for this loud theater about waste if the point was to call to getting rid of the waste not just axing the programs.
Just some scattered thoughts:
- if anyone hasn't read the article Matt linked about the impact the illegal US AID shutdown had on medical trials, read it. It's absolutely sickening. A source of national shame.
- I am trying in my communication and in my comments to writers to lead every description of a Trump action that is illegal by calling it "illegal" first and repeatedly. No "contested", not "controversial", but "illegal" when it is clearly illegal.
- I think inshallah if we win back power in 2028 we should absolutely throw the Justice Department at Musk. He's already committed a series of crimes related to federal standards on data handling. Due to SCOTUS Trump probably enjoys broad immunity as these can be construed as "official acts". But even then. If we regain oversight in 2026, we should be merciless.
- The more I've heard about the Spook CIA stuff US AID helped with the more I like US AID. Make Spooking Great Again
I think your final line says it all. This isn't actually an attack against aid money, but an attack against American intelligence operations, using "efficiency" concerns as cover.
Oh, yeah. When Musk talks with Putin, or gets to-do lists from Xi, you know this was towards the top of their asks. They are trying to destroy US overseas power and influence. And when Musk delivers hard drives full of data about names and contacts, those turn into kill-lists. People in foreign countries who helped the US are now going to die because of Musk.
The odds that Musk gets a similar pardon as Fauci seems likely.
If he stays in Trump's good graces. Musk is arguably taking actions that give Trump greater power over him in the long run. (Although in point of fact I don't think Musk would be all that easy for Trump to throw under the bus.)
Trump will be a lame duck who can't run for office again. Meanwhile, Musk will still be very wealthy and own X. Trump is one of a kind, but I wouldn't want to have to choose which way other Republicans are going to side in a dispute between them.
All to say, I think your sentence in parenthesis is apt.
Additionally, Musk's actuarial time horizon is at least 25 years longer than Trump's.
I think the days of prosecuting public officials, at least federally, are over. Every president is just going to blanket pardon a long list of officials, friends and family members because we know the nasty people on the other team will weaponize justice. I wouldn’t hope for the DOJ to accomplish anything here, it will have to be done politically, or at the state level of a case can be made.
I remember when Russia and China were kicking out US NGOs for being tools of US intelligence and it was being reported as paranoia or a cover for anti-Americanism, but now I come to find it was a legitimate concern on their end?
They are tools of U.S. intelligence and they are also totally benign. It's just that because the United States is a force for moral good, and China and Russia are forces of historical evil, things like anodyne attempts to build civil society that would be seen as normal anywhere else become tools of the perfidious CIA fomenting color revolution (read: creating an educated and politically conscious bourgeois class, i.e., fundamentally good things)
You find it was a legitimate concern because it *was* a legitimate concern. I don't know enough about national security intel to judge whether or not it was a good idea for my country to mix foreign aid initiatives with intelligence-gathering. Maybe it's a good idea. Maybe it's a bad idea. Maybe it's inevitable. Maybe (probably!) lots of other countries do it, too.
Isn't the answer that some of them were tools of U.S. intelligence and some of them weren't?
Of course, everyone on TikTok or WeChat is a tool of Chinese intelligence these days
I think we should give up on any notion of going after Musk. Trump can and will just pardon him in advance. The best possible outcome I think would be to make the other billionaires nervous Musk is going to use his massive influence to screw them over in business, leading to him being deposed as pseudo president. Dems should fight dirty and use whatever conspiracy theories they can come up with to get people to sour on Musk. Personally I still think it’s tragic that Biden pissed the guy off so badly by snubbing him for the sake of the UAW, Musk may have turned into a piece of shit but he is a genius and has done a lot of good before this but here we are.
That all depends on whether he and Trump have a falling out.
Biden - unleashing an unfettered Muskovite and Joyful Kamala on the world.
I am torn. I agree with everyone else that Musk is going to be pardoned. It is important to have some sort of consequences for him to temper the actions of future would-be oligarchs. Unfortunately, the biggest lever we have is canceling his government contracts, but SpaceX is a legitimately great contractor with no real competitors. We could put a political enforcer type in at SEC and just have him start going after Musk for any securities violation we can find -- if we can't put him in prison, we can fine him to being a pauper. But, of course, that's also bad. Weaponizing enforcement functions for political reasons is bad. Then again, they are already doing it, and they will do more of it.
The norms of American liberalism are already in a death spiral. We would be foolish to simply throw our hands up and allow the GOP to slink closer to outright dictatorship with each election, but of course doing it ourselves only accelerates the problem.
I genuinely do not think there is any way this can end well. Either we foolishly pretend American liberalism as currently constituted has a future, or we abandon it ourselves to simply be the better side in a political order characterized by dueling political machines, something that itself has a pretty strong track record of ending in autocracy.
Ultimately this is all downstream of the fact that the American people genuinely couldn't care less about democracy or the fundamental American values. None of that matters to them on a substantive level. If you offered them dictatorship with improved material well-being for themselves and their families they would take it in a heartbeat.
I've been surprisingly angry with Musk and DOGE. I think this is because (1) I thought it was going to be a big joke and that's now clearly not the case but more (2) while I'm VERY supportive of trying to eke out greater government efficiency, the federal government isn't a software company and these people have no idea what they're doing so they're just burning it down out of spite at this point. The only silver lining is 2028 might look a lot like 2008 after Trump and his functionally incompetent team destroy what they can. That's a faint silver lining but I expect MAGA to capitulate.
I saw a SpaceX rocket launch yesterday and had incredible mixed emotions. This great achievement of human abilities is now tarnished by being so politically associated with the off-handed destruction of scientific and humanitarian progress.
Only for you. I saw the same launch and had no mixed emotions
I think you are wrong in projecting your views onto literally everyone else who saw that launch. You may not care about the deaths of tens of thousands of H.I.V. patients, but many people do.
Also people have different notions of "moral taint." Are you complicit in your country's actions just because you are a citizen of your country? Does Biden have some responsibility for not stepping down earlier and increasing Trumps odds of winning? Does Matt have responsibility for not pushing out more hardcore takes and influencing more people?
I can separate the technical achievement of the many engineers, including prior generations of engineers at other firms and in government that is now leading us to push the frontiers of space again. Musk doesn't taint that for me, and I can be separately pissed that his tantrum is going to cost lives.
I mean anyone who has met Musk and let him live past the encounter has *some* moral taint, at least within the past couple of years
Kenny - let’s say for the sake of this convo I don’t care about their lives. What are you doing besides wasting time in the comment section just me like that is making any difference. Your comment while people are losing their lives!
I don’t have any direct access to those people, or any easier lever to help them than to engage in the slow boring of hard boards, by helping to gradually steer American politics in a more productive direction. Engaging in meaningful political discussions with earnest conversation partners is a small part of that.
“You may not care about the deaths of tens of thousands of H.I.V. patients, but many people do”
I very much doubt anyone has died.
I think KE is talking about future HIV/AIDS deaths, which will definitely happen if PEPFAR is cut permanently.
"Ultimately this is all downstream of the fact that the American people genuinely couldn't care less about democracy or the fundamental American values."
I don't think I agree with this. The problem is that both sides think the other side is the end of Democracy so they use "ends justifies the means" for their own side to keep and use power.
I'll add a great example, court packing. Large parts of the left really think that's a good idea.
Parts of the right say OH NO. Guess we have to elect Trump.
Trump packed the court already
I think both sides would probably be okay with just proper congressional apportionment, we'd probably have a much stronger style of governance overall, but I'm not sure if either party even wants that.
This is where I basically am, as a former Republican voter. Voters have re-sorted along a low/high information gradient; the Democrats are now the "sometimes try to be competent at governance" party and Republicans are now the "IRL shitposting" party.
I share your concerns about autocracy. It's impossible to partition the US, as our political divisions don't follow neat regional lines. We have to live with Trump voters. I don't know of a realistic way to do that; the best might just be to try to pass Constitutional amendments to rein in some of the worst abuses that are quickly becoming standard (e.g. an amendment to require congressional approval of pardons).
I would hope that in 2028, Democracts run on limiting some executive power, and also getting rid of pardon power. Clearly it is being abused by all Presidents, and we need to get rid of it. No need for it in this day and age.
Well can't Musk still be held accountable for violating state laws related to consumer and personal data? Think CCPA or a class action lawsuit from farmers who depend on USAID contracts, etc? But to point, he is definitely getting pardoned. Blue Origin is still a couple years away from being a true Space X competitor....
You bring up a great overall point though, Americans no longer seem to actually care about our government functioning in a way that benefits everyone, or just democracy in general. I think if you offered them dictatorship with just a social hierarchy that made them feel better emotionally, hell not even materially a non-insignificant part of the country would be for it. We know from history and even under capitalism that autocracy never offers everyone improved material well being equally.
Trump will give Musk a blanket pardon, as he should at this point. Biden opened a can of worms with his ridiculous corrupt pardons and there is no closing it back up now.
Trump did basically demand that Biden do this by explicitly saying he would charge people with crimes for following the law.
Trump also said he was going to go after Hillary (who did clearly break the law) and didn't.
Biden screwed up by going after Trump legally, but not doing it with enough time to get a conviction.
Now I do expect Trump will go after people.
Biden didn’t go after Trump. The justice department did, and several states did. But they messed up by doing it too slowly. Biden did the right thing by staying out of it, even though people keep claiming he was involved.
Oh come on. Do you really think the justice department went after the former president without Biden's approval???
He surely could have said "no" , but that's different than saying "you must do this"
I think most things the Justice department does, the president tries to stay out of. It is supposed to be a relatively independent branch, precisely because so many of its investigations would pose a possible conflict of interest one way or another for the president.
Right, it's Trump's fault Biden gave blanket pardons .... solid reasoning.
Biden didn't open that can ("ridiculous corrupt") of worms. Trump did.
https://jabberwocking.com/lets-not-forget-donald-trumps-clemency-record-from-2020/
Also, if the Democratic nominee in 2028 vows to exact revenge on his political enemies (as Trump did repeatedly in 2021-2024), the latter might well be justified to issue blanket, preemptive pardons. What do YOU suggest is the appropriate response to a President-elect who vows to nominate an FBI director who compiles an enemies list?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/politics/kash-patel-critics-fbi-takeover/index.html
But Democratic presidential nominees don't roll that way, as you well know.
Yawn. Never forget you voted for this in 2020:
https://www.newsweek.com/sorry-bidens-pardons-are-much-worse-trumps-opinion-2018843
There's definitely the ability to close it back up now. Just because someone else did something bad, doesn't mean you or anyone else has to follow suit.
Nah, you're not being realistic. Look at the comments below to see why. Most dems seem to be 100% OK with Biden's pardons because it's Trump's fault. Watch the news from a few years ago when they thought Trump was going to do the same thing and the talking heads were all saying preemptive pardon mean guilt:
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--tBJZkU-S4
Do you think those pardons were bad? If you do then there is no requirement that you support further pardons. You can continue to oppose the Biden pardons and Trump pardons and hew to a consistent principle.
Or you can reverse your quote and instead of sarcastically saying "Right, it's Trump's fault Biden gave blanket pardons .... solid reasoning," you'll be out there saying "Biden's pardon's opened the doorway and now Trump has to do pardons so its really all Biden's fault."
Yes, I think the pardons were bad. I don't think Trump has to do the pardons, but I think he will (I hope he doesnt), but I'm also not dumb enough to think it's Trump's fault Biden did it.
I think Trump's actions and pre-election threats absolutely increased the pressure and justification for Biden do to the pardons.
Ultimately I still don't think he should have, and it was still his decision, but Trump added a lot of pressure to make that decision that way.
(EDIT: And claims like "as soon as we get a chance, let's go after Elon" are bad pressure the OTHER way)
This is correct.
Don’t just throw the book at Musk, but also all the high school grad twerps at DOGE who are helping him. If we make it out of this crisis, we must make clear that we aren’t just holding leaders accountable. Merely aiding such illegal and unconstitutional actions will carry severe penalties.
What illegal things have the DOGE dudes done?
Bret, grab that bag of Cheetos and head back down to your parent’s basement. the adults are having a discussion.
Can I help you?
>...we should absolutely throw the Justice Department at Musk.<
Unless he and Trump have a falling out, he'll be untouchable for any crimes he commits during Trump's administration, because of blanket pardons.
We need to amend the constitution, but until we do this is how the executive branch is going to roll.
Of course Biden already preemptively pardoned a bunch of people, so why wouldn't Trump pardon Musk et all?
He probably will. Unless they fall out. Hope springs eternal.
The dark side of me that I try to suppress has been fantasizing what a Dem President in 2028 could do to Musk. I'm assuming he'll get a pardon from Trump so straightforward DOJ stuff is probably out. I've been thinking revoke his citizenship and send him off to Gitmo. Certainly strip control of his companies from him. At maybe the simplest level, simply lay bare to all the world every single thing the US government knows about him --- taxes, business holdings, all the data we have about his government contracts, subpoena and publish all his personal emails and texts, etc.
How would his citizenship be revoked?
There have been arguments for a while that Musk may have lied in his immigration paperwork in a way that could result in his citizenship being revoked: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-citizenship-revoked-denaturalized/
Interesting, I didn't know that.
I do not think that's a good idea: as poor of an actor as Musk is being, revoking citizenship would look very retaliatory during a time period we need to suppress political retaliation. There are also advantages to Musk being a US citizen; he pays a lot in taxes and employs a lot of people in the US, for example.
The best possible trajectory is the Musk/Trump bromance falling apart and Musk not getting the blanket pardon he'll need. At that point Musk has to do basically the best thing for America: get out of politics, keep his head down, and build cars/rockets.
Musk is never going back to just building cars and rockets. He has a vision of his place in the world that is far too megalomaniacal for that. He's had his taste of man-flesh (power) and I doubt he can resist it.
I was never bought in to the idea that every billionaire is a policy failure, but I'm beginning to think that any one person having virtually unlimited money is inherently bad. There are no limits short of criminal behavior that constrain what he can do to try to accumulate power.
That's unhealthy for our own and other countries' democracies, because they simply aren't designed or built to withstand that kind of unconstrained resources.
This kind of fantasizing should be cultivated, not suppressed. We need a platform for ‘28!
“He's already committed a series of crimes related to federal standards on data handling”
What statute(s) did he violate?
Read the first line of 22 U.S. Code § 6563 - Status of AID. They definitely didn't do that.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/22/6563
I didn’t see anything in Title 22 that suggests it’s a criminal statute.
I would have asked what specific illegal acts.
I worked for USAID contractors in Afghanistan, and then in the international humanitarian sector for a couple decades. USAID's system is deeply flawed--especially its contractor system, which is more or less what you end up with if you think "the profit motive" is the key source of market efficiencies independently of meaningful competition, low barriers to entry, and accountability for results. But the system still saves lives, and Musk/Trump gutting it wholesale is one more recklessly awful initiative of a recklessly awful administration.
That said, all the "value for money" talk of which Musk is a monstrous and Duflo or GiveWell a benevolent example is contributing to major negative trends in the sector as a whole: charities being pushed to spend an ever-higher proportion of their time and resources generating monitoring data, and risk aversion hiding behind the language of cost-efficiency/waste avoidance.
Andrew Natsios, a World Vision bigwig before W Bush tapped him to head USAID, wrote a scathing essay once he was out of govt on how the "counter-bureaucracy" created to prevent waste had pushed more and more USAID spending into projects that were highly measurable, whether or not they were highly transformative. He suggests that by and large, the two have an inverse relationship; and I think that's broadly right. Measuring impact in contexts of complex attribution is hard, and rarely possible without simplifying assumptions that a skeptical observer (whether the USG counter-bureaucracy or "effective altruist" organizations) can take to weaken or invalidate the whole study.
And the more we try to prove the effectiveness of our work, the less of the actual work we do. Back when the UK's new-minted Tory government was trying to conjure up a consensus about what "value for money" meant in the development sector, I went to a DFID-sponsored London workshop where CIFF (a foundation emerging out of the hedge fund world) was talking about its data-intensive approach to education programming. They were very open about the fact that they couldn't even work in most developing countries, because the quality of baseline data just wasn't there, and the demand for a constant flow of cost-benefit data they put on their local partners was unbelievable.
I put up my hand at the end and asked, "Have you ever done a cost-benefit analysis of your process of cost-benefit analysis? Because what you've just described is incredibly costly, and I find it hard to believe that it yields better outcomes than good-enough alternatives." Their response was commendably candid: "No, we just come from the hedge fund world and one of our priors is that more data is always better."
Don't get me started on the impact of all this on small local organizations, who we're training to feed us paperwork and buzzwords at the expense of the (irreplaceable!) strengths in local collective action which draws INGOs to them in the first place. Masooda Bano's "Breakdown in Pakistan," which describes this awful process through a rational choice theory lens, should be required reading for the whole aid sector.
Extreme risk aversion to failed spending has already been leading big organizations to steer away from some really exciting approaches. My worry about the bad death of USAID is that it's just going to further reinforce that--with inadvertent help from the effective altruists.
So because we don't trust the government employees to be good stewards of our tax money we spend a bunch more money trying to make sure they are being good stewards and don't do some really good things that we should do.
The problem of course is that government employees (and politicians for that matter) have proven again and again that we are right to by and large not trust the them.
See the long list of other crap USAID spends money on.
Matt Welch on the Reason Roundtable podcast this week made a good point re the USAID controversy -- much of this brouhaha is downstream from journalism collapsing. With so many people getting their news from social media, people are getting fed oppo research, so what is truly outrageous and what isn't is unclear.
This week I've seen people on the left freak out that Elon Musk is basically trying to give people HIV just to fire woke government workers, while I've seen people on the right freak out that the government is spending the GDP of a small island nation to subsidize Politico.
I try to stay reasonably informed and it's hard to know what's going on.
But they wouldn’t have read the reporting before. The total weird shit people believed about foreign aid budgets were regularly documented in surveys and studies showing people thought we were giving away mountains of money to nothing causes and we could balance the budget substantially out of this. Like I took public opinion and polling classes in college and studies have shown this for a long while.
It’s very difficult to have basic math literate discussions with anyone. The left proposes
that we can fund Nordic social democracy by cutting defense and taxing some billionaires, which is obviously false.
I think that’s the Democratic Party making concessions due to popularism, not any serious leftist or even serious person looking at the math. That being said, while I totally would be down to pay higher taxes to fund a more generous welfare state, you have to at the very least tax billionaires out of existence first.
Well, they also want to damn the inflation, so funding it exclusively through taxes on billionaires would be plausible within my lifetime.
I think Americans have massively overestimated the scale of these programs ever since they started to get polled on them. It's just how parochial and paranoid we are as a people.
I believe Americans think we spend an average of 25% of our budget on foreign aid. Which, is obviously, absurd.
Functional innumeracy is a disaster. You see it everywhere. The craziest way it shows up is in population estimates. Black population estimates always come back at ~ 40%. One famous example had the NYC population estimated at 30% of the total US population (100m people).
https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1214&context=caselrev
I mean, I know the black population is something like 15% of the population (and growing), but being from Memphis it doesn’t feel like it. But culturally, black people are easily half represented these days. So much of the most iconic American music and art comes out of black culture, they dominate our most popular sports, and probably at least a quarter of TV is specifically marketed to the black audience. It’s a very understandable error.
Plus, and I don’t know the numbers per se, but I do know the “mixed-race” Census category has really ballooned. And while “one drop” is an offensive paradigm, some of those folks very much are part of black culture, and if you had to guess their race you’d say black.
I don’t think it’s numeracy, really.
Practically no one ever sits down and goes over the budget. What people do know is that people talk about it a lot, so it must be huge.
A few million dollars on a dumb program is a really easy way to ensure that people question the validity of the entire enterprise
In my many decades of work I've never once worked at a company with more than 50-100 people that didn't have a dumb program that cost a few million dollars. That seems a ridiculously stringent metric to use to cast doubt on an enterprise.
And it is one that people absolutely do not apply to their own jobs. Almost nobody is arguing that Private Equity should come in and wrecking ball their own company and lay THEM off because there is some program somewhere in the org that is stupid.
Like, using that metric literally every single public company in America -- in the world -- is now subject to "questioning the validity of the enterprise".
I can't remember where I read it but someone suggested the liberalism is doomed against authoritarianism because anything less than Platonic perfection in government and bureaucracy is taken as an argument in favor of authoritarianism.
This is both true, but also unsurprising. Taxes aren't a choice that you can choose to avoid if you don't think the organization is making good decisions. If the government holds a gun to my head forcing me to pay with the rationale that its good for society that I pay, the expectations that they will be responsible for the money go up.
Of course it's not just 1 or 2 programs there's a whole slew of them that should never have been funded.
Which just gives Trump a whole lot of ammunition.
If you want there to be government it needs to be efficient and not waste money on a bunch of BS
Please define what amount = a bunch of money. Because USAID's overall budget isn't even like half a percent of the overall Federal budget. Additionally, what slew of programs at USAID should never even have been funded? Finally, even if all the above is correct, isn't the right process to go through the budget process in Congress?
To put it in perspective, americans thought foreign aid was massive and wasteful in 2000, even if they could, on average, not even name a 'dumb program', nor was there social media at the time.
And yet it’s almost impossible to do anything with more than a few dozen full time workers that doesn’t spend a few million on a dumb program.
A nation of Christians freaking about aid to the poorest people in the world. It tells you everything you need to know about American ”Christianity”.
I agree there's definitely hypocrisy there, but I don't think that framing is how rightwing Christians would define it.
There's opposition to USAID from the left (https://x.com/BootsRiley/status/1887917022102831391) -- I could say that leftists hate America and love communism so much they'd rather to see poor people die (or something).
It's important to be able to state one's opponents views in a way that would at least approach passing an ideological turing test.
Words are cheap. But sure, if they give away significantly more money to charity than secular Americans it may reflect a coherent ideology.
Religious (and in particular Mormon and evangelical) Americans do on average give away a significantly higher share of their income than secular Americans, but of course a lot of the nonprofits they give to are churches. https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazine/less-god-less-giving/
It's hard to do an analysis that doesn't dissolve into arguing about what is and isn't a worthwhile donation.
I would be interested to see a breakdown of charitable giving. My guess is Mormons give away the most, but that may just be based on stereotypes
There are more pagans idolators than Christians in the U.S., there is a both a decline in practice and personal morality in this country.
Many secular conservatives now call themselves Christians only because the left is vocally anti-theist.
We're only anti-theist because there is no God, and we reject all calfs -- including golden -- because of the methane emissions.
Anti-theists have their own Godheads.
What is a pagan idolator?
Most MAGAs
Humans also have hard times with percentages.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population
Americans think 27% of US are Native American, 27% are Muslim, 30% are Jewish...
30% of us live in New York City, 30% in Texas, 32% in California...
I don't think is particularly American. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/12/14/most-countries-hugely-overestimate-their-muslim-population-infographic/ People over-estimate Muslim populations. The press tried to sell this as people being Islamophobic or something, but it's just basic inability to do percentages.
Yeah, 25-30% just seems to be a number we like to use when we're just pulling one out of our ass. It's not that weird to be wrong like that, i just think it sucks that we have to deal with people who make decisions based on that.
I mean, that sounds like an amazing version of the country. Think of the implications for the Electoral College...
They also underestimate the size of total government spending (and the size of the US economy), so have no idea how one bucket of spending compares to any another, how ratios of spending are changing, how to compare these rates to one another ... There is a profound ignorance about public finances across the American electorate (the left has similar if more "sophisticated" blind spots when it comes to deficits, MMT, etc.) that renders it nearly impossible to make sustained progress against any funding or financial problem (foreign or domestic) that cannot be reduced to a cartoon. Where is Schoolhouse Rock when we need them?
I was totally expecting this punchline in the article itself.
First Google hit, from Brookings.
> Opinion polls consistently report that Americans believe foreign aid is in the range of 25 percent of the federal budget. When asked how much it should be, they say about 10 percent. In fact, at $39.2 billion for fiscal year 2019, foreign assistance is less than 1 percent of the federal budget.
Exactly. I'm sure Elon is just identifying ways to increase aid 10x in order to better align it with public expectations.
I’d say the freakout is warranted less because of the specific agency or program being targeted and more because the president is doing illegal things. He does illegal things, a judge says he can’t do those things, then he keeps doing them, the judge says he didn’t comply with the court order, and the president’s team says the president doesn’t have to comply with court orders so he keeps doing illegal things. That seems bad and worth being upset about. The president doesn’t get unchecked power but unless, I guess, congress is willing to stop him, trump will continue doing whatever he wants and ignoring the courts. The longer that goes on, the worse that gets for our country’s long term prospects.
Biden did this with student loans and violating title 7 of the civil rights act — were you ok with him disobeying the courts?
Correct. It is bad when a president disobeys court orders and refuses to comply with the law. The more this goes on, the worse it gets for our country. As I said to Allan, Biden doing bad things doesn’t excuse Trump doing bad things. I don’t get a pass for doing small crimes just because someone else is doing big crimes and I certainly don’t get a pass for doing big crimes because someone else did big crimes.
Ok.
I mean...no? This simply isn't true? Biden tried on student loans and when the courts told him no, he stopped and went back and tried a different solution, which was also struck down...that is a very different thing. I think Biden's priorities on this were bad, but it's not the same thing.
It's only "not the same thing" because it's not your team. He bragged about it man:
https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1795969437595500905?lang=en
Arguably his violation is title VII is much worse, but you glossed over that one.
Right, they didn't stop him...because the way he found to actually relieve those loans was legal. They blocked his general forgiveness, but no one blocked the specific forgiveness to scammy colleges, which is what I believe he's referencing there. To be clear, there were two separate sets of actions, various general attempts to change how things work, which all got frozen, then struck down (which he complied with) and various specifically targeted loan forgiveness to the victims of scams, which were all upheld (so far as I know?) or not challenged.
I'm honestly not even sure what you're claiming about Title VII?
There is no "violation." I think the Title VII thing is a meme so conservatives criticizing Biden's "lawlessness" with respect to student loan forgiveness sounds more informed.
Like you said, Biden's student loan forgiveness is mostly two buckets, scammy college forgiveness ("borrowed defense forgiveness") and public service loan forgiveness. He also did some rule changes to make eligibility requirements for existing loan repayment programs less onerous. Biden can't really take much credit for PSLF; that was a law long before he came into office. It just happened to be 10 years after the program rolled out, so many people started qualifying for forgiveness.
What precisely did the court strike down and then Biden ignore the court striking it down?
You're not going to get an answer because there isn't one. It's just a "look Biden has unfavorable rulings in the courts, don't look too closely" play.
What Biden did was just politics. This time it’s a Constitutional Crisis.
I don't think so. Ezra Klein had a good point that Biden broke the seal on this kind of lawlessness, enabling all kinds of false equivalence to justify what's happening now. I think that's largely right and I think it's also important that the perception of his corruption is just as damaging as whatever actual corruption took place.
The example of pardoning Hunter is a good one because the specific harms to the American people are probably zero but the precedential harms are significant. Randall said in a comment below that "I think the days of prosecuting public officials, at least federally, are over. Every president is just going to blanket pardon a long list of officials, friends and family members because we know the nasty people on the other team will weaponize justice". I think that's a very worrying possibility and it's definitely Biden who set us down that path, eroding the quality of governance we have going forward.
Of course, because orange man bad. I’m not even a Trump supporter but the level hypocrisy is astounding
You’re not?!
No, I wrote in Preston!
Orange Man is so much worse, and what the Republican Party stands for is so wrong and un-American, that hypocrisy is totally ok here.
chad-no.png
Bot ^^^
"[T]he judge says he didn’t comply with the court order, and the president’s team says the president doesn’t have to comply with court orders so he keeps doing illegal things."
Are there Trump administration actions that fit this pattern, without exaggeration or hyperoble?
They're clearly probing boundaries, but where have they crossed into open defiance of the courts?
how about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/trump-unfreezing-federal-grants-judge-ruling.html
Edit: my mistake, I posted too quickly. Here's the more relevant part, which does support James' assertion:
> [Judge McConnell] granted the attorneys general’s request for a “motion to enforce” — essentially a nudge. It did not find that the Trump administration was in contempt of court or specify any penalties for failing to comply.
> However, the judge was straightforward in his finding that the initial temporary restraining order that he issued Jan. 29 was not being followed.
[Original comment below]
Definitely worth watching but it doesn't support James' assertion. The article also says "It appeared that the administration was trying to win through the legal system’s established procedures, even as officials questioned the legitimacy of those procedures from the outside."
What Mike said, but also there’s a clear difference between complying with the court order to follow the law while a the case plays out and refusing to comply with the court order while the case plays out. And it’s not like there’s just one judge or one court order they’re not complying with. Several judges have ordered them to stop several different orders and it’s not clear they’re going to stop.
You may want to discount what administration officials say, but when they say something and also take actions that match with those statements - in this case arguing that courts more or less don’t have any authority over the president because of article 2 section 1 - it’s not crazy to believe them. What they say and what they do match. What they do is illegal and what they say is that they plan to continue to do illegal things.
My mistake: I read the article more closely and agree about McConnell's ruling.
I think it's important that this still doesn't rise to the level of open defiance: they argue the program in question was paused under a different memo than the one covered by McConnell's ruling. That's probably transparent bullshit, but they are still, at least, pretending that they are following the law, which is significant. (That is not a defense of their actions.)
What are the other examples you've got in mind? "it’s not like there’s just one judge or one court order they’re not complying with" I agree with all of the principles you're raising, but I'd like to see specifics.
Right but even this is an example -- is the scale of this illegality different than Biden deciding he can unilaterally cancel student loans? I have no idea who I should read to help adjudicate that in my mind, because one's opinion on that is almost certainly influenced by what political team they're on.
I think the difference is that when a judge said Biden couldn’t unilaterally cancel student loans, he didn’t unilaterally cancel student loans and attempted to find another more legally defensible version of forgiveness.
And, frankly, I think you should be capable of forming your own beliefs without looking to someone else to tell you what to believe.
1. Not to go too far down the epistemological rabbit hole but what is and is not happening vis-a-vis judge orders is also typically hard to follow. Like, Biden definitely did more targeted debt relief even after the supreme court ruling. Just as affirmative action is still in practice in some places despite that now apparently running afoul of the 14th amendment. My point is that if you say that those things are definitely not as illegal as what Trump is doing, you very well may be right! But I would also be able to predict with near certainty your position on other completely unrelated issues, which makes me less confident about your position here.
2. My writing isn't great so I apologize for being unclear, but forming my own beliefs typically involves evaluating the best arguments of others' sincerely held beliefs and determining which position is downstream from my values. "Other side bad"-style coverage doesn't help usually help with this. Perhaps if I was perfectly informed on every topic I wouldn't need to rely on others' analysis as much, but I'm a pretty average person so I feel like that's asking a lot.
I think you are confused about the debt relief ruling. The Supreme Court did not say that all student debt relief, in any form, was unconstitutional. They ruled on a challenge to a particular program that relied on the HEROES Act as legal justification. It was a matter of statutory interpretation and they concluded that Biden’s reading of the statute was too broad. Biden complied. But this ruling did not automatically implicate any conceivable debt relief based on any other statute. For instance, over the years the government has relied on other statutes (such as the Higher Education Act) to relieve the debts of borrowers who attended scammy for-profit colleges. To my knowledge, no court has ever said it cannot do so.
I think you need to think more clearly about where and how to assign confidence. What it sounds like is that you assign less confidence to people who hold opinions and express a point of view. What I think you’re asking for is how to navigate a complex media environment in which every media source is holding opinions and expressing points of view, therefore reducing your confidence in them. I can’t help you there. Expecting someone to come in and be truly objective and give you a god’s eye view of the situation seems fruitless but that also doesn’t mean you’re stuck in an unknowable morass. Like, if the NYT reports that the Trump administration is not complying with a court order and that a judge has said they are in violation of a court order, why discount that because the NYT is also left leaning? Media literacy is hard and we all do our best, I suppose.
Now, as far as degrees of what’s more illegal and what’s less illegal, why care about more or less illegal? Why does it matter if Biden’s debt relief was more illegal or less illegal than Trump’s impoundment of appropriated funds? If I shoot one person or ten people it’s still murder. If I steal a hundred thousand dollars or a hundred million dollars it’s still theft and still illegal. If I sell cocaine do I get to argue that, hey, at least it’s not fentanyl so what’s the big deal? Trump doesn’t get a pass because Biden did illegal things too. Does pardoning Hunter make it okay that Trump pardoned 1500 Jan 6 rioters or can both be bad?
"Why does it matter if Biden’s debt relief was more illegal or less illegal than Trump’s impoundment of appropriated funds?"
Because most of the people claiming outrage about Biden's actions aren't outraged about Trump's actions, and most people who are outraged about Trump's actions weren't at Biden's. Which suggests that most people aren't applying a legal or ethical principle, they are arguing partisan politics. Despite the desire for partisans to conflate the two, those are different things.
People attempt to refute this by bringing out the meme about the difference between good things and bad things, but if there wasn't disagreement about what is good/bad we wouldn't have these political disagreements in the first place.
Yeah when the NYT reports something I believe it, because the NYT is very reputable.
My point is that if we get our news from social media and not reputable outlets like the NYT, then this makes things epistemically harder
Biden relied on a statue, passed by Congress, which expressly gave the Secretary of Education the power to waive or modify student loans in an emergency. This is what presidents are supposed to do when they take executive action: rely on legal authority that empowers said action. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden Administration was reading the statute too broadly, and blocked the parts of the relief program that were challenged. This is what we expect courts to do: assess executive action for its adherence to statutory authority. The Biden Administration complied with the ruling and did not carry out the blocked program, despite outrage from student loan activists. This is what we expect presidents to do when courts rule against them.
As a person of (presumably) normal intelligence, you should be able to see that the Trump Administration’s funding cuts and attempts to unilaterally shut down Congressionally mandated agencies are of a different category altogether. The administration is not even attempting to legally justify their moves, with certain officials even arguing a fringe theory which states that a president may cut spending in defiance of the constitution or congressional statute. If they continue down this road, defying all courts, including the Supreme Court, we will enter a constitutional crisis without precedent. And I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about how both sides do it.
"If they continue down this road, defying all courts, including the Supreme Court, we will enter a constitutional crisis without precedent."
I think everyone agrees with this. It's been Ezra's early litmus test that's now seemed to permeate the discourse. I think the challenge is we're still talking about differences in degrees not kinds until then. Nothing has reached the SC. They've rescinded how many orders now because they didn't spend a second to think the first thing through (e.g., maybe we shouldn't freeze Medicaid reimbursements). Perversely, the main thing keeping us on the rails is how incompetent they've been.
Yeah, to be clear, I am fine with holding off on calling it a constitutional crisi for now. I said this in another comment somewhere, but a federal agency slow-walking a court order, or even being held in contempt, isn't unprecedented. But the potential for crisis is there.
Hanania, nuts as he often is, is correct about the mainstream media being fundamentally reliable on most topics.
One of the relatively few about which it is not, now that critical reporting of gender, racial issues, affirmative action, etc... all seem to be back in vogue... is holding public-sector employees to account.
I think that this is more a lack of expertise to parse when they're being fed bullshit than anything ideological, but that's irrelevant. In either case it's extraordinarily difficult to tell if some of the stupidest shit that's going on is genuinely required because the GOP consists of morons who can't draft an EO, or because some of the bureaucrats are overcomplying specifically to make those in charge look like morons.
My guess is "a bit of both," but relative weights are very, very unclear at present.
>With so many people getting their news from social media, people are getting fed oppo research, so what is truly outrageous and what isn't is unclear.<
Unclear? This seems...a questionable dodge.
Yes, SOME people "are getting fed oppo research." Sure. But that hardly means straight reportage isn't *likewise* available.
It appears to be the case that the Trump-Musk regime is unambiguously trying to destroy a globally giant provider of critical services to hundreds of millions of vulnerable human beings, and doing so in illegal fashion (AND in the bargain is kneecapping a powerful exponent of American values and soft power).
The lamentable existence of fake news on social media need not blind us to reality.
Information about politics is more available now that at any time in American history. There is no empirical reason to think the US electorate is less informed than 20 or 200 years ago. It is more educated and richer and average IQs have increased since world war two.
100% -- we are smarter and have more access to info that at any point in history. My lament is that it's hard to contextualize what is and is not a big deal when no matter what happens, some side will always be crying wolf (and sometimes there are wolves!)
It is hard for me to read that as anything other than an attempt to sane wash Trump's administration. I can almost believe it is simple pearl clutching on their part, as I recall they were among the biggest group that used to love pointing out that we survived the previous administration. Still, acts largely as a way to try and sane wash the admin.
It also ignores that the USAID debacle is downstream of the 2025 chaos. Not just unrelatedly off to the side, but a direct aim of it. And any sane washing of Trump claiming he is not 2025 is going to be difficult to give any credit to, nowadays.
Matt's continued lack of an in-depth engagement with resisting Trump is increasingly weird IMO. "The administration's actions are flagrantly illegal, here's how to optimise a budget item that was 1% of the federal budget before they destroyed it" seems like a pretty grand case of missing the wood for the trees.
We're trying to provide content that you might not find anywhere else! Have written, I'd say, fairly extensively about how to counter Trump. But also, he's president and has a GOP majority, not much you can do to fight that on a blog.
Maybe his Substack does not need to do everything? There are lots of activist blogs and communities out there. SB has a more intellectual focus and tries to shape the trajectory of the Democratic Party longterm.
But I avoid those activist blogs because I don't trust them.
Noah had what looked like a good takedown but it was paywalled and I have subscription fatigue.
I feel like this too. My charitable interpretation is that these posts, along with his common sense agenda posts, are an effort to look ahead two-four years and figure out how to rebuild the government, some of it from scratch. I think Matt is also trying to think about how to do this while regaining public trust and protecting programs and agencies from future Trump-style meddling.
My less charitable interpretation is just that Matt has nothing useful to say. If Trump is determined to break the law in ways big and small, ignore the courts, and congress isn’t interested in removing him from office, what can Matt say to meaningfully impact anything? He is, at least, not naive enough to believe the norms fairy will save us but that also means there’s little help in pointing out how abnormal Trump & co are.
Yes, your latter point is quite right. There is basically nothing we can do other than smart litigation strategy, which Matt isn't really qualified to comment on. We are at the mercy of the fates.
I strongly suspect that making USAID moe effective will not be a major issue in the 2028 campaign.
Advising the incoming Democratic administration in 2029 on how to do that could be useful but this post will have been forgotten by then.
1000 times this. Real resistance requires winning elections. As long as Trump controls the presidency, the house and senate he's going to have a pretty free hand.
I agree -- there aren't enough media members brave enough to write about how Trump is bad and there is way too much coverage of technical budget issues. Like we get it, budget optimization drives all the clicks but can we please get at least some coverage of Trump Bad?
How to resist Trump =/= Trump Bad
How to resist Trump = what to do in response to "flagrantly illegal" actions. What should each of elected Dems, media, civil society orgs, private citizens be doing. To my knowledge that is not well covered at all, certainly relative to its importance (arguably #1 public policy issue in the world right now).
"Flagrantly illegal" actions will just be contested in court. Something like 20 cases have already been won. Matt isn't a lawyer. SB isn't 5-4. I can't imagine Matt is going to cover the rescinded OMB memo better than the NYT, Reuters, the BBC, the WaPo, etc. It's not like we're not getting full access coverage into what's going on.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/29/us/trump-federal-freeze-funding-news
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/us/politics/trump-funding-freeze-rollout.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-ordered-fully-comply-with-order-lifting-funding-freeze-2025-02-10/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyv48540n4po
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/29/white-house-budget-office-spending-freeze/
1) My understanding is several court orders are very likely already being quietly violated.
2) Vance, Musk, Lee, Cotton et al have been tweeting in support of either openly violating court orders or suppressing the judiciary's ability to make rulings.
3) The legal system was not designed for flagrant illegality by the Executive. It moves too slowly. Winning a court case months/years after your agency was wound down or contract cancelled does not turn back time.
4) In particular, DoJ has declared cessation of enforcement of a number of offences. CFPB has declared cessation of all activities. Again, not something I think the legal system was designed for.
5) Matt discussed on Politix last week how Trump literally wrote in his book how to systematically stiff small contractors who will struggle to legally take on a large corporation. Taking on the federal government will be even harder.
6) I think it's going to be a lot easier for judges to function as a bulwark if the rest of society vocally backs them to do so.
I'm curious what you think that Matt could write that would be effective at addressing any of these?
He could write that they are bad, but his audience agrees so there not convincing involved. He's not a breaking reporter, so nothing he writes is going to be something not already reported in the NYT, Politico, WaPo, etc. I'm not sure Matt has some special strategy he can cook up that if we all do will solve for these outside of what Democratic politicians and the judiciary are already doing. I just keep seeing people say that Matt is not writing about the important things, but I don't see what exactly people are expecting him to write that would be novel.
I thought I addressed this already tbh, so to repeat: what should each of elected Dems, media, civil society orgs, private citizens be doing, in response to flagrantly illegal actions by the executive. If Matt's view is that the answer is "wait till the mid-terms" or "leave it to the judiciary to take care of", fair enough. I'd find it interesting to read that case made. But whatever his view is, I think it's important enough to go on the record over.
There is only one option: trust that the courts will block his illegal actions and if he chooses to ignore the courts that Congress finally wakes up and flexes its power.
There is literally nothing else that can be done.
Last time they lost an election they staged an insurrection!! Yes it didn't work, but now they're purging DoJ and FBI, hinting at purging the military, taking media intimidation to new highs, and placing electoral security staff on leave. I think "just wait for the election" is ignoring the crisis, not responding to it.
In Israel when Netanyahu tried his 'judicial coup', Israelis didn't wait for the next election, they flooded the streets and he reversed course. The judicial coup hasn't happened so far.
I'm looking for that sort of response in the US.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cisa-election-security-officials-placed-143523793.html
I think your last para is the real issue. Dems seem highly ineffective at getting voters mad at MAGA about all the terrible stuff it does. I think I saw some hospital director say he was going to have to cut treatment to sick kids, why aren't Democrats holding press conferences from the hospital? From the airports where the plane crashes occurred while FAA is on hiring freeze? etc
I heard Matt complain *a lot* that activists should swap protesting about Gaza for protesting about Dobbs so I think it's fair to expect him to opine on this. Independent voters do not support plane crashes or cutting medical care to kids.
"Matt's continued lack of an in-depth engagement with resisting Trump is increasingly weird IMO."
I find these kinds of utterly tedious complaints increasingly weird IMO. The answer is Donald Trump is President of the United States for the next 1400-some-odd days unless impeached or otherwise removed before then and Republicans control both houses of Congress for approximately the next 700 days (absent several special elections in the House swinging in the Democrats' favor). Your options for "resisting" if you aren't some form of government employee or federal judge are basically all extralegal in this configuration of affairs.
Let's discuss the optimal placement of deck chairs on the Titanic!
Yes, less than 1% of the federal budget. But still 40+ billion dollars. So still a LOT of money. More money than many states entire budget.
edit list of state budgets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
How, exactly, do you envision he 'resist' Trump?
Keep in mind that Matt still has some audience on the right (maybe even among people like Rubio staffers) where liberal credibility is otherwise quite low. You can read between the lines and find an appeal for Rubio to save USAID.
Meanwhile, it's not hard to find people that will openly and deservedly call Trump a fascist and all sorts of things.
Amen
Thanks, Matt. Hopefully, the next time Democrats are in power, USAID can return as a stronger institution. I thought Samantha Power's quote about the benefits of USAID was excellent.
I think the U.S. needs to do a better job of making its aid more visible. I’ve been to many African countries, and despite billions in U.S. support for healthcare, farming, and education, anti-American sentiment is growing—even in nations that have benefited the most our aid.
Take Niger, for example. The U.S. invested heavily in its education and agriculture, yet after the recent coup, the junta expelled America’s Reaper drone base and turned to Russia’s Wagner Group for security. The country is becoming more anti-Western by the day.
You can read more about it here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/yawboadu/p/nigers-modern-economic-and-geopolitical?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=garki
I can say the same thing about Mali, CAR, and Burkina Faso.
Speaking of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara’s would frequently say he was doing social programs under the banner of "self sufficiency" even though he was incredibly dependent on Western(especially American aid). Even under Reagan, the U.S. was a major donor, yet many Africans believe Sankara implemented his programs without foreign aid. A quick look at World Bank records shows that aid to Burkina Faso increased during his rule, with the U.S. as one of the primary contributors. It’s frustrating that countries can take American money, use it to fund their programs, and then vilify the U.S. without acknowledging the support.
Read more about Sankara here: https://open.substack.com/pub/yawboadu/p/economic-and-geopolitical-history-642?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=garki
If U.S. aid were as visible as China’s or Japan’s—through large-scale infrastructure projects built by American firms(dams, plants, roads, airports)—Niger and other countries might have remained stronger allies. I'm Ghanaian, and I can tell you that the highway George Bush funded (it's literally called the George Walker Bush Highway in the capital Accra) has made Ghana a more "sticky" American ally. We named the highway after him, and I know that contributes to a positive view of America among local Ghanaians.
Overall, USAID is decent soft power, and when dems come back they should consider thinking about adding more tangible investments or making our investments more visible labeled as American backed to create more sticky allies rather than being more behind the scenes.
Calling what China does in building stuff abroad "aid" is rather a stretch.
Even "debt-trap diplomacy" implies a degree of prior planning and intention that doesn't exist.
"Jobs program for domestic construction materials manufacturers" is the heart of the matter.
I wouldn't even call Chinese aid "debt trap diplomacy". Over the past decade, none of the African countries (Ghana, Congo-Brazzaville, Mozambique, Zambia, Ethiopia,etc.) defaulted on their Chinese loans, they defaulted on eurobonds, which is when governments borrow from private investors (fun fact eurobonds are usually denominated in dollars).
A plurality of Chinese loans are concessionary, which means they are below market in interest rates. If you read the book "Where Credit is Due" by Gregory Smith it does a deep dive into Chinese lending to Africa. Much of Chinese loans are concessionary (below market).
The China Export-Import Bank, China Development Bank, and the Agricultural Development Bank of China. Then sometimes the China Ministry of Commerce directly offers zero-interest lending. These banks offer loans at concessional rates (below market) with grace periods and extended maturities. Much of the "Debt trap diplomacy" is a lie.
In fact, China has been scaling back their lending in Africa because they are tired of African countries asking for concessions/relief.
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/chinese-loans-africa-plummet-near-two-decade-low-study-2023-09-19/
China used to provide nearly $30B a year to the continent in 2016. By 2022, that number was around $1B.
I do agree that belt and road is a jobs program for many Chinese workers though.
As I said, debt-trap diplomacy isn't really accurate. Though I'll note that loan terms for their "near abroad" in S. and SE Asia are often rather less cuddly than in Africa.
What actually happened is that China spent 2012-2020 speed-running the entire history of US (to a lesser extent Euros) "development aid to the Third World" from 1955-1995, basically. All the same assumptions, all the same mistakes. Even the same fundamental motive: create export markets.
Everyone wants the Marshall Plan model to work... unfortunately physical infrastructure counts for way less than governance, as anyone involved in the US's efforts after 1970 could have told you.
The main difference, which isn't a very large one really, is that a lot of Chinese projects, especially closer to home, have had the ancillary (or main, it's hard to tell) intention of sopping up excess capacity in construction materials and sometimes even excess capacity in outright construction by dumping it abroad.
They've been trying to curtail white and grey-market credit growth at home for a long time, which made it impossible for LGFVs to build enough infrastructure to justify all the capacity which had built up, so they just started allowing immense credit growth on the books abroad. OBOR/BRI came into existence afterwards and, in time-honored tradition, every local administrator and SOE leader fell over themselves to say that their project abroad was part of it, haha.
Eventually it became clear that at even zero-percent interest the debt burdens to the recipient countries were often untenable, so they wound up owning some assets that they don't actually want, and the Western media called it neo-colonialism...
And here we are, where China is irritated at the concessions it's making, owns infrastructure it can't make money on for lack of local demand, has already made moves to pivot (back) from construction to manufacturing exports as a source of demand to cover domestic imbalances, and just wants to back away silently from this whole episode.
Sometimes when you build a highway, it just gives the rebels an easier way into the capitol.
One Weird Trick!
Isn’t this why roads in sub-Saharan Africa are so fucked?
We don’t have the technical expertise to build infrastructure domestically anymore, and since we’re terrified of “corruption” when we try to do it abroad we hire WSP or bechtel from 2000 miles away to do it. They thankfully know how to rip off the American tax payer legally even if the price is astronomical.
I am pretty well convinced of everything Samantha Power says about this, and I say this as someone definitively not a fan of Samantha Power.
But there may be a somewhat larger truth in what Musk is doing, which is somewhat similar to a reaction I had to Brexit and to some extent the attacks on DEI. Which is I get the feeling that there's a sense in which the "liberals control the deep state" narrative of the Right is somewhat true. Essentially what happens is that once these programs get created, the liberals who run them figure the time for democracy is over and they can just run them the way they want and do everything bagel liberalism with them.
And that makes the programs vulnerable if someone later goes in and exposes them to sunlight, because nobody on the inside is really thinking "can I defend what we are doing to the public?".
I don't have a great solution to this, but it is a problem. If you believe in government you have to find a way that programs stick fairly closely to public opinion even when nobody is closely watching. Or else they are going to be vulnerable down the line.
There is something to this. Several of these agencies (EPA, Education) have been in GOP crosshairs for a while now. Their leaderships should have been focused on core mission and staying controversy free. And maybe they have. I think we'll find out shortly.
One of the things missing from US Brexit discourse was any honest accounting of just how sprawling and intrusive into domestic affairs the EU apparatus had gotten. It's run by the type of liberals who simply cannot help themselves - they MUST pursue ever more regulation and centralization. There are obviously many benefits to this, and I don't think I would've voted for Brexit if I were British, but I can understand the sense of overreach.
That last point was exactly what I was getting at with Brexit. British voters voted for EEC in the 1970's, but the people who went to work for what became the EU were world government activists looking to cede as much national sovereignty into transnational institutions as possible. And it turned out the British public didn't want that and turned against the whole project.
"Their leaderships should have been focused on core mission and staying controversy free."
agreed. But no I don't think they were.
Sometimes it depends on what you define as controversial.
The EPA deciding to regulate carbon dioxide is I think conceptually totally acceptable within its remit. But that's gotten so politically controversial that I'm not sure how to avoid it.
Personally I think regulating CO2 would fall under the major questions doctrine. Such a big change that you would need congressional approval do it.
Something of this is true, but also, asking experts to do all their work in ways that the public would understand if they see it is a way of telling experts not to use their expertise.
I don't think a lot of the stuff conservatives expose is a matter of expertise, any more than the "art experts" were right about the NEA funding the Piss Christ.
EDIT: to be slightly less flip, I think if it were just "expertise" it would be straightforward to defend it, as we see happening now with the contraceptive trials being interrupted. But a lot of this stuff is just stuff liberals like to do rather than stuff guided by actual expertise (someone above talked about Lesbian Peruvian Guitarists, which is a nice synecdoche for this).
But is it a synecdoche?
If you have a pimple, is that a synecdoche for your body?
No. But "stuff liberals like to do when they get in charge of programs with little oversight" is not a pimple.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The collapse of trust in experts means the public is less likely to give experts the benefit of the doubt.
In general, if the public doesn’t like something funded by the government that is really important to experts, it’s on the experts to explain why they think it’s a good idea. I worry that many experts don’t have much practice explaining and persuading people who are not like them.
I think it's possible that 'the world' is moving towards a state where there's so much complexity that experts aren't as clearly better qualified than the normal person as they used to be, because there are so many moving parts that their field is affected by events and situations that they are *not* expert in.
We sometimes experience this as red tape, for pack of a better descriptor. "I don't understand why etc etc".
The next level might be experts who specialize in the study and implementation of expertise.
This reminds me of science writers--it's rare to find someone who can both understand the science at a high level and then translate it for broader audiences, but it's pretty dang important, right? I'm not sure what the political corollary is, but we need more and better quality of those.
I think it kind of excuses things somewhat to just talk of experts. A lot of these things turn out to be great political issues for Republicans not because only experts understand them, but because the public understands them perfectly well as sees them as the everything bagel liberalism they are (even if they don't use that term).
Just say it plainly, Matt. The reason Musk and his cronies are going after USAID has little to do with efficiency, and every to do with your item (4). They see countries like China and Russia where the oligarchs have all the power, and think they deserve the same here. To that end, they've listened to Russian and China propaganda, which attacks USAID for its own strategic reasons and has successfully won the US right over to their side in the global fight against democracy. And why not? The US Right doesn't want democracy here anymore either.
That may sound very sinister and dramatic (with a quasi-Churchillian faith in the good of democracy), but it's the only way I can make sense of what's going on.
I think like all such regimes there are competing agendas.
Russell Vought wants to establish Christian nationalism.
Elon Musk is a tech bro utopian-randian who's contemptuous of the state, establishmentarian expertise, and (yes) democracy.
Stephen Miller wants to reduce the slide of the White share of the population.
Steve Bannon (not in the administration, but a guru who exerts influence) is a general purpose America-Firster anti-globalist.
Rubio, who was no longer interested in serving in the Senate, wants to preserve political viability for the post-Trump era.
Vance is a hard-right, Nixonian cynic who wants to be the next president.
Trump is an increasingly cognitively impaired black hole of corruption who mainly wants legal immunity, young women, money, the adulation of his base, and revenge on his enemies.
It's hard to sort them out and know which agenda is driving which policy, and how they all intersect and interplay.
Yes, those are their competing sub-agendas. But it's their anti-democratic steak (ETA: that's a fun spelling error!) that brings them together as allies. (With the potential exception of Rubio, who mostly seems in it for himself.)
Do they get their anti-democratic steak well-done with ketchup?
(I wouldn't necessarily use all the same verbiage as you, but I think you're mostly right. At the same time, I do think that in the mix there's also a "principled" - if you want to call it that - opposition to the government helping poor foreigners, or the government helping poor people in general, or even simply to helping poor people in general.)
Problem for them is that they can't all get what they want. And the base is only loyal to Donald Trump. So the rest of them are playing themselves.
sure, the whole lot of them aren’t exactly Jeffersonians.
You're completely correct. Obviously the American right in its most extreme form hates democracy and thinks it is fundamentally bad -- their godfathers are all basically open about their authoritarian tendencies and their intellectual lineage from post-WW2 reactionary thought. Unfortunately, no one will believe us until its too late; even people who comment on this blog seem to somehow have convinced themselves that these are just conservatives reacting to liberal excess rather than people who sincerely, ideologically believe in the authoritarian project.
Assuming your interpretation of their motives is correct, I believe they are misinterpreting the power structure in both China and Russia. The oligarchs definitely move up a step in what they can get away with regarding the common folk, but they move down about fifteen steps in safety and security against the state/security forces. If Musk's doing this because he's mad about getting sued by the SEC...well, I don't think he'll like being disappeared by the new FBI after falling out with Trump over some random personal bullshit.
I think they're interpreting it in the sense that THEY are going to get to be the ones throwing folks who do not get with the program out of windows. (Even if only metaphorically.)
I don't think they're concerned about the government coming after them, because they are going to be the ones controlling the government. Trump is easily manipulated, as we all know. Maybe some future American leader is not, but we're not there yet.
I mean...Trump has fallen out with literally everyone he's ever worked with, eventually. The number of folks who think they'll be the consigliere and definitely not be whacked for trying to be the consigliere is certainly always high. It's also usually wrong. My point isn't that you are right or wrong, it's that if you are right, they are wrong.
Someone being easily manipulated does not make it safe to give them power unless literally no one else has access to them...which simply isn't the case.
They should look at the history of oligarchies. A significant fraction of the people who are involved in throwing people out windows eventually get thrown out windows themselves - in fact, probably a higher percentage of any group other than explicit opposition leaders.
Take off your tinfoil hat Anne…
What a cutting and original retort.
You use a lot of big words but have no clue what you’re talking about.
You have added nothing to the discussion here.
"The US Right doesn't want democracy here anymore either."
That's a pretty broad brush you are painting with. Fun fact is that voters actually thought Dems were a bigger threat to democracy than Trump (see court packing)
"Slightly more than half of respondents that believe the US democracy is threatened (73%) voted for Trump. It's as if those voters for some reason perceived Harris to be a greater threat to democracy than Trump."
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/89792/why-did-substantial-portion-of-democracy-voters-vote-for-trump
This is the courtt packing that the President of the United States Joe Biden explicitly rejected? That court packing?
Just because some voters believe that Democrats are more of a threat to democracy than Republicans doesn't at all negate my observation about the US right. Multiple things can be true. Nor have you bothered to directly analyze the actual substance of the question.
Also, court packing says little about democracy because our courts, to a certain extent, are deliberately INSULATED from democracy (and for good reason). The right has happily exploited that important principle to pack the court as much as they see fit (see Kennedy's blatantly-timed resignation and McConnell blocking Garland). Meanwhile, the court packing proposals floated by some Democrats (but never widely embraced), can be understood, in part, as a misguided attempt to counter the anti-democratic nature of the Court.
"Just because some voters believe that Democrats are more of a threat to democracy than Republicans doesn't at all negate my observation about the US right."
Note it was just some voters, it was a majority of voters that voted on the democracy question (disclaimer, I didn't vote for Trump, but I can certainly understand why those that did. But trying to steal the election was a deal breaker for me).
What McConnel did with Garland was certainly political hardball. It wasn't a nuclear option like packing the court something FDR couldn't even do.
And guess what would happen after court packing. Republicans would then turn around and do it, and then Dems would do it again, next thing you know we have 200 people on the court.
Madness.
The point of packing the court is to properly restrict the franchise to Democrats. That, and get rid of conservative news (lies) sources and also, ideally, all social media
And I get the frustration. Republicans were definitely frustrated by the changes from FDR on. But the solution was the federalist society, not packing the court.
Discussions of efficiency will either be tedious or inane. Take a huge program like Medicaid. It pays for hundreds of millions or billions of procedures a year. The granular question of which procedures are efficient is so complicated that even “relative elites” like Slow Boring commenters lose patience. You need, at a minimum, a small team of actuaries and efficacy data to know what is cost justified. No one will meaningfully engage this question without being paid. Yet any big program will create obvious instances of inefficiency which conservatives can attack, even if they are a small portion of the overall program.
Trusting big government means trusting leaders to hire actuaries to adjudicate efficiency questions too granular to enter the discourse. The Biden administration wasn’t really up to that.
The problem is that politics over the last few decades has largely involved all sides working to generally decrease trust in their opponents, rather than building trust in any group of experts. This isn’t particularly the Biden administration’s fault - it’s a problem that there is so much less trust for public figures now than there was a few decades ago, even though errors and incompetency haven’t changed in any notable way at all.
becoming and practicing as an attorney has made me trust elites much less. That makes it hard for me to calibrate my vibes about social trust, so I just defer to the statistics which show a decrease
I’m not loving today’s pitch, Matt.
“Of course it’s terrible that the terrorists have seized my grandmother and are threatening to kill her — their illegal means should be condemned. However, it is worth saying that not all of Grannies organs are equally valuable. The kidnappers should note that her kidneys work well and should fetch a decent price, but her corneas are too cloudy to be used for transplants.”
Don’t do this, Matt. Don’t negotiate with terrorists, or help them carve up their victims.
So, it's a hard line to walk, but I do think democrats need a somewhat more nuanced take on government, rather than purely reflexive defensiveness about Trump's attacks, because there genuinely are major problems and everyone can see them. It's like the line about 'if liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will.' If the only way to reform a system is to break the law, and people want the system reformed, they'll support breaking the law.
And when our argument is purely negative (that's illegal) I think it pushes folks in that direction.
You and a few others have been bitching incessantly that MY *dares* talk about things other than Trump/Musk's current actions for a week and a half.
Now he talks about the things they're doing and you're still kvetching.
"ReSIsT!%&^!#~! [Frothing at mouth]" did not work the first time, stop trying to will Trump's every off-hand comment into dominating the infosphere again and let people discuss other shit.
EDIT: To be clear, if this is you deadpanning a satire of the position you've taken, well done, I had no clue.
??? :)
This piece reads like the notes of a doctor doing an annual phyisical on a cadaver.
”At the same time, Russian propaganda has become increasingly influential on the American right, and Elon Musk has a warm relationship with the Communist Party of China. There is clearly some level of specific animus against this agency operating at an elite level.”
Russia and China love the idea of US leaving Africa for them to dominate through aid, soft power and hard power. Everything Trump does benefits Russia in the end, which is of course purely coincidental…
It isn't coincidental, but I don't think the main explanation for it is personal corruption or blackmail or anything like that (although I don't deny that those things exist). Rather, the main explanation is that American conservatives sincerely agree to a substantial extent with the leaders of those countries on basic questions of political philosophy, what system of government is best, etc.
American conservatives obviously don't perceive themselves to be anti-American, but they believe that "Real America" is distinct from de jure America. They correctly recognize that America's institutions are expressions of small-l small-d liberal democratic values, which in their view are alien to "Real America," so tearing those institutions down and destroying their hard and soft power is actually pro-American.
This whole thing reminds me of the problem of blue state governance. The lack of accountability and efficiency, not to mention the wastes of boondoggles and pet leftists causes destroys a lot of credibility.
If you want there to be public schools then you need to make sure they are the BEST public schools possible, and not protect bad teachers.
If you want there to be public transportation, then make it awesome, not a jobs project for unions.
And if you want to help people in other countries, then spend the money well and wisely not on DEI in Serbia.
If you want to be the party of government it's GOT to be good government. Otherwise people will get fed up and elect someone like Trump that just wants to tear it all down.
The point about Rubio is the most important thing going forward. The idea that America is a great country has always been a part of both parties view of foreign policy, and of policy more generally. That was there in the New Frontier that Matt mentioned, and in the space race, and in PEPFAR, and Matt's book. But the Trumpist right, despite their slogan, has abandoned that idea entirely. Instead their vision seems to be of a Giant Dubai, where we have a military that inflicts violence on anyone who attacks us but otherwise we let others run the world, while the rich can relax by the side of fancy-shaped pools.
"If courts force Trump to follow the law (which they should and, I think, probably will)"
Matt Y thinks that the courts will PROBABLY force Trump to follow the law.
Probably.
When I was preparing to take the test to become a US citizen in 2018, one of the question-and-answer combos I had to memorize was: "What does the rule of law mean?" "Everyone has to obey the law/no one is above the law."
I actually believed this and took it seriously.
I know this isn't the main point of the article, and I agree with Matt Y that USAID is valuable and ought not to be destroyed, and helping desperately poor people at a relatively low cost to ourselves is a good thing.
Just, I can't get over how casually Matt Y can slip "Probably the judicial branch can force the President of the United States to follow the law! But maybe not! Who knows! The rule of law is like a box of chocolates, you never know when it's gonna turn out empty!" into the article and everyone just kind of glides over it and shrugs and says, yep, that's our reality now.
How have we fallen so far? What has our country become?
The rule of law isn't magic. It requires the other branches in particular the executive to enforce it. it requires other parties to be good faith stewards.
Note this isn't a new problem. President Andrew Jackson is famously supposed to have said "The Chief Justice has made his decision now let me enforce it"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia
> Matt Y thinks that the courts will PROBABLY force Trump to follow the law.
My current thinking is that this can only be done by Men with Guns. I dont see a document-oriented way to get Musk's goons to stop deleting payments in the basement of the treasury. From there, I dont see any Men with Guns getting involved. nobody wants that and it probably won't work (they have Men with Guns too).
DOGE at CMS = Death Panels, right?
Use their own rhetoric against them. Waste = your doctor says you need it and the government says you don’t.