The contrast between Dubya and Trump at the top of this article is apt. You could disagree with his policies and politics, but George the Younger sincerely wanted to make the world a better place, and honest brokers have to at least admit that even if they think he was entirely wrong about his methods. Trump, on the other hand, would watch an African child die right in front of him and not bat an eyelash. He has no regard for anyone who isn't him and is demonstrating that he is the most morally bankrupt person to ever occupy the office.
One issue of USAID is that I basically never hear anything about it. I get that this is probably because of the point you made several times that helping foreigners is unpopular. But there has been very little singing our praise on these initiatives over the years. I've seen the dumb misleading map of all the nations that voted to make food a human right where only the US and Israel voted no but have never heard a peep about how we've apparently been saving millions of people from AIDS. Between the right's isolationist bent and the left looking for any misleading way to blame every international problem on US involvement no one seems to be cashing the PR check that our taxes are writing through these programs.
The actions taken by DOGE are not reckless but rather a long-overdue correction to an agency that has operated with little scrutiny for decades. Ensuring that USAID functions efficiently, serves national interests, and eliminates wasteful spending is not just within the president’s authority—it is his responsibility. Rather than a chaotic power grab, this should be seen as an executive finally taking the accountability of federal agencies seriously.
When the inteligenta are worried and in alignment with the mainstream media's "coverage", we are on the right path...
I agree with the point about dysfunctional contracting, but I also think it's misguided to just claim that less overhead is better. It can be, but it isn't obvious that the right amount of US-based overhead is actually low, especially for programs operating in countries where local conditions can make management and monitoring and implementation challenging.
All of this is happening because Congress under a GOP majority in both houses have decided to knowingly and intentionally[edit] abdicate their oversight responsibilities. The legitimacy of the judiciary is something that gets discussed, but what do we do when Congress' legitimacy is in question? Are there any laws that anyone has to follow if a "Special Government Employee" can change them on a whim and not be held responsible in anyway? This is an autocracy. .
I get that the median voter doesn't like foreign aid, and that given human nature this is in a way understandable. But let me just have my moment to say that the public is being a bunch of selfish jerks about this. Or more charitably, that they are uninformed and innumerate, thinking foreign aid is 25% of the budget. For morally good programs to survive in the long term, we need voters who are morally good, well-informed, and intelligent. Or else we need to sneak it past them with obscurity and/or clever messaging.
Okay, just to be clear - we need men to be angels or we sneak the good but unpopular stuff past the clueless voters. Doesn't seem like a stable governance model.
That was a lot of words for 'I like foreign aid, and therefore if you are going to try to cut foreign aid you should do so in a manner that allows me to prevent you from cutting any foreign aid.'
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.
"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).
I'm not sure the premise is entirely right: they are going hard after NIH too (universities being the actually target maybe?)
There are initial reports (https://x.com/JuddLegum/status/1889292507499962511 - fog of war, etc, etc) that they are in contempt of court. I truly hope it is wrong, because things get really, really dicey from here.
"If the United States had a reliable toolkit for getting countries to shift from the Guatemala trajectory to the Dominican Republic trajectory, that would be an incredible way to reward friendly countries and build strategic relationships. The problem is, we don’t have that kind of toolkit or anything close to it."
My understanding is that we don't even have good tool kits for much narrower development problems.
My mom worked for USAID back in the day on a project to advance farming practices in west Africa using American farming know how. Some of this worked; it turns out that you can indeed plow a field faster with a tractor than with a donkey. But a lot of the knowledge they tried to import simply didn't translate. American farming practices were developed for a different environment, and many techniques didn't work well in the west African climate. And even winning technology like tractors could be problematic without the knowledge and infrastructure to maintain them.
My guess is that if USAID still does this kind of work, they probably do a somewhat better job of it now, but improving farming/industry/government/whatever in a foreign country (especially a developing one) is intrinsically difficult. Some of the tools in the American toolbox will work well, some won't, and you can't always tell in advance. In principle, you can try to import third-party know how, but that's hard to do because you need to learn it first before teaching others.
Heck, it's hard enough to improve things in your own country. Nikita Khrushchev tried to get the USSR to grow corn like the USA, and it was a total failure. Development is hard.
When is the Team going after all the wasteful spending in the military budget? And farm subsidies. And how major corporations don’t ever pay the effective tax rate.
Congress passes laws that give numerous deductions and tax breaks to corporations for doing things congress wants (like investing money into capital equipment).
Corporations then use that deductions to reduce their tax bill. There's nothing nefarious about that.
I do agree farm subsidies need to be looked at, and military contracting as well. On the flip side, I think we don't actually spend enough on the military.
It's not illegal for the President to restructure a federal agency, it's illegal for them to refuse to spend money for an appropriated purpose. If his intent is to restructure and massively downsize the organization, but still spend the money, he is not breaking the law. I also suspect that once it's been restructured, they will file an impoundment request under the Impoundment Control Act for the amount they don't want to spend. But they don't have to do that until they've made a determination they don't want to or intend to spend a certain amount of money. There is no minimum headcount for USAID in the appropriations bill.
But meanwhile, they are stopping all spending without requesting an impoundment. You don’t just get to say “we feel like restructuring” and stop the departments for a few years while thinking about how you might some day restructure and hypothetically start the money flowing again.
If a "few years" pass, I agree it would be an illegal impoundment. There is a sliding scale over time as to whether and how this is clearly illegal. On day 1, it was completely legal. Three weeks later, it's still obviously legal because they may intend to repurpose the money for purposes aligned with the law and the President's foreign policy. Yes, "may", as in they may choose not to, but it is not provable 3 weeks into the new administration that they do not have such plans as decisions have yet to be made. The burden is not on the new administration to prove they do not intend to expend these funds elsewhere, the burden is on those challenging it to prove he will not, and that is unprovable.
There is also an interplay with Congress here. The current CR expires 3/14, and if Congress reduces the budget for foreign aid and rescinds the funds not expended, it becomes 100% unquestionably legal. If the current CR ended 9/30 and the President cancelled all programs, made no attempt to reallocate funding to his priorities for that entire period, and Congress did not act to rescind the funds, it would be pretty unquestionably illegal. But an incoming administration is entitled to restructure discretionary allocations of money, and that takes time, as officials need to be appointed, confirmed, brought up to speed, and start making decisions, none of which can be made all at once.
The President came into office with less than 2 months remaining in the CR period. The law does not bind him to spend the money on exactly the programs that the previous administration was spending them on unless Congress required it, which they did not. He has a right to pause and restructure them for a brief period. The courts, media, and the left are getting way ahead of themselves and of the law in thinking a new administration lacks the authority to restructure programs.
Wait til they hear about the World Bank! USAID 2024 budget was ~$22 billion. WBG 2024 disbursements were $117 billion!!
The contrast between Dubya and Trump at the top of this article is apt. You could disagree with his policies and politics, but George the Younger sincerely wanted to make the world a better place, and honest brokers have to at least admit that even if they think he was entirely wrong about his methods. Trump, on the other hand, would watch an African child die right in front of him and not bat an eyelash. He has no regard for anyone who isn't him and is demonstrating that he is the most morally bankrupt person to ever occupy the office.
One issue of USAID is that I basically never hear anything about it. I get that this is probably because of the point you made several times that helping foreigners is unpopular. But there has been very little singing our praise on these initiatives over the years. I've seen the dumb misleading map of all the nations that voted to make food a human right where only the US and Israel voted no but have never heard a peep about how we've apparently been saving millions of people from AIDS. Between the right's isolationist bent and the left looking for any misleading way to blame every international problem on US involvement no one seems to be cashing the PR check that our taxes are writing through these programs.
The actions taken by DOGE are not reckless but rather a long-overdue correction to an agency that has operated with little scrutiny for decades. Ensuring that USAID functions efficiently, serves national interests, and eliminates wasteful spending is not just within the president’s authority—it is his responsibility. Rather than a chaotic power grab, this should be seen as an executive finally taking the accountability of federal agencies seriously.
When the inteligenta are worried and in alignment with the mainstream media's "coverage", we are on the right path...
I agree with the point about dysfunctional contracting, but I also think it's misguided to just claim that less overhead is better. It can be, but it isn't obvious that the right amount of US-based overhead is actually low, especially for programs operating in countries where local conditions can make management and monitoring and implementation challenging.
All of this is happening because Congress under a GOP majority in both houses have decided to knowingly and intentionally[edit] abdicate their oversight responsibilities. The legitimacy of the judiciary is something that gets discussed, but what do we do when Congress' legitimacy is in question? Are there any laws that anyone has to follow if a "Special Government Employee" can change them on a whim and not be held responsible in anyway? This is an autocracy. .
I get that the median voter doesn't like foreign aid, and that given human nature this is in a way understandable. But let me just have my moment to say that the public is being a bunch of selfish jerks about this. Or more charitably, that they are uninformed and innumerate, thinking foreign aid is 25% of the budget. For morally good programs to survive in the long term, we need voters who are morally good, well-informed, and intelligent. Or else we need to sneak it past them with obscurity and/or clever messaging.
Okay, just to be clear - we need men to be angels or we sneak the good but unpopular stuff past the clueless voters. Doesn't seem like a stable governance model.
I'm sure they're reading today's post with rapt attention in the White House.
The sad fact is for the next four years talking about how to make government organizations work better is a waste of pixels.
The time for this post was February 2021.
That was a lot of words for 'I like foreign aid, and therefore if you are going to try to cut foreign aid you should do so in a manner that allows me to prevent you from cutting any foreign aid.'
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.
"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).
I'm not sure the premise is entirely right: they are going hard after NIH too (universities being the actually target maybe?)
There are initial reports (https://x.com/JuddLegum/status/1889292507499962511 - fog of war, etc, etc) that they are in contempt of court. I truly hope it is wrong, because things get really, really dicey from here.
"If the United States had a reliable toolkit for getting countries to shift from the Guatemala trajectory to the Dominican Republic trajectory, that would be an incredible way to reward friendly countries and build strategic relationships. The problem is, we don’t have that kind of toolkit or anything close to it."
My understanding is that we don't even have good tool kits for much narrower development problems.
My mom worked for USAID back in the day on a project to advance farming practices in west Africa using American farming know how. Some of this worked; it turns out that you can indeed plow a field faster with a tractor than with a donkey. But a lot of the knowledge they tried to import simply didn't translate. American farming practices were developed for a different environment, and many techniques didn't work well in the west African climate. And even winning technology like tractors could be problematic without the knowledge and infrastructure to maintain them.
My guess is that if USAID still does this kind of work, they probably do a somewhat better job of it now, but improving farming/industry/government/whatever in a foreign country (especially a developing one) is intrinsically difficult. Some of the tools in the American toolbox will work well, some won't, and you can't always tell in advance. In principle, you can try to import third-party know how, but that's hard to do because you need to learn it first before teaching others.
Heck, it's hard enough to improve things in your own country. Nikita Khrushchev tried to get the USSR to grow corn like the USA, and it was a total failure. Development is hard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
Food and famine aid seems like it’s probably both quite broadly useful and has a lot of elite consensus as a buyer of American crops, no?
When is the Team going after all the wasteful spending in the military budget? And farm subsidies. And how major corporations don’t ever pay the effective tax rate.
Congress passes laws that give numerous deductions and tax breaks to corporations for doing things congress wants (like investing money into capital equipment).
Corporations then use that deductions to reduce their tax bill. There's nothing nefarious about that.
I do agree farm subsidies need to be looked at, and military contracting as well. On the flip side, I think we don't actually spend enough on the military.
It's not illegal for the President to restructure a federal agency, it's illegal for them to refuse to spend money for an appropriated purpose. If his intent is to restructure and massively downsize the organization, but still spend the money, he is not breaking the law. I also suspect that once it's been restructured, they will file an impoundment request under the Impoundment Control Act for the amount they don't want to spend. But they don't have to do that until they've made a determination they don't want to or intend to spend a certain amount of money. There is no minimum headcount for USAID in the appropriations bill.
But meanwhile, they are stopping all spending without requesting an impoundment. You don’t just get to say “we feel like restructuring” and stop the departments for a few years while thinking about how you might some day restructure and hypothetically start the money flowing again.
If a "few years" pass, I agree it would be an illegal impoundment. There is a sliding scale over time as to whether and how this is clearly illegal. On day 1, it was completely legal. Three weeks later, it's still obviously legal because they may intend to repurpose the money for purposes aligned with the law and the President's foreign policy. Yes, "may", as in they may choose not to, but it is not provable 3 weeks into the new administration that they do not have such plans as decisions have yet to be made. The burden is not on the new administration to prove they do not intend to expend these funds elsewhere, the burden is on those challenging it to prove he will not, and that is unprovable.
There is also an interplay with Congress here. The current CR expires 3/14, and if Congress reduces the budget for foreign aid and rescinds the funds not expended, it becomes 100% unquestionably legal. If the current CR ended 9/30 and the President cancelled all programs, made no attempt to reallocate funding to his priorities for that entire period, and Congress did not act to rescind the funds, it would be pretty unquestionably illegal. But an incoming administration is entitled to restructure discretionary allocations of money, and that takes time, as officials need to be appointed, confirmed, brought up to speed, and start making decisions, none of which can be made all at once.
The President came into office with less than 2 months remaining in the CR period. The law does not bind him to spend the money on exactly the programs that the previous administration was spending them on unless Congress required it, which they did not. He has a right to pause and restructure them for a brief period. The courts, media, and the left are getting way ahead of themselves and of the law in thinking a new administration lacks the authority to restructure programs.