Yes, the American people, many of whom spend their days and nights "doing their own research" online, never seem to stumble across very basic and easy-to- unearth facts in their "research." Fact: we spend well under 1% of our federal budget on foreign aid, and well under 10% on this line relative to the military budget. Fact: no it's not been "over a hundred years" since we ran a budget surplus (I saw this in a comment on a NYT article recently); in fact, Bill Clinton delivered a budget surplus in his last two years, only for his hard won gains to vanish as W cut taxes and raised military and homeland security and Medicare spending. Fact: Joe Biden's 2020 popular vote margin was 3X larger than Trump's 2024 popular vote margin, and Trump's margin was one of the narrowest wins (percentage wise) in over a century. Fact: federal spending on things other than healthcare, Social Security, the military, homeland security, and debt service has been falling (as % of GDP) since 1980, even as (fact again) billionaires have blossomed.
The hill to die on isn’t foreign aid per se, it’s the sabotage of government. And for Axelrod and Rahm, “First they came for USAID, but USAID polled poorly… “
I wonder if anyone has bothered to tell President Musk just where USAID got all the food it distributed? Because the well armed people who produce that food are likely to be a bit miffed, and President Musk is very vulnerable to being kicked to the curb if his poll ratings in the gop base drop enough.
Indeed. The entrepreneurial class has always failed, or refused to understand that their capacity to engage in and profit from creative destruction is dependent upon (embedded in) an institutional framework that provides stability and continuity. In the domestic setting this is provided by the constitution, which is a deliberate break on creative destruction (as even Burke would have told you). It is deliberately hard to break and reform, is built for resilience, and is thus deliberately inefficient. The entrepreneurs however, perceive all institutions as bureaucratic restrictions of their freedom and productive dynamism, except those that protect their power to benefit from creative-destructive against those who suffer.
Musk et al suffer from the libertarian fantasy that markets and creative destruction can be dis-embedded from an institutional framework, that anarchy is some kind of utopia. Polanyi will tell you this, but so will Schumpeter (who popularized the terms creative destruction and entrepreneur).
And what about the distrust and ill will this dismantling has and will cause? Will the populations whose trust was hard won over years of convincing (to take HIV drugs, get vaccinated, participate in trials, send their daughters to schools) ever come back and trust us ever again?
America’s soft power, its generosity, its promise is what makes even the most cynical global intellectuals and other naysayers continue to send their kids to study here. Pax Americana was real.
For all that people are panicking about the threats to other institutions, the dismantling of USAID has actually happened. The others are either just threats or are being protected by the courts. I’m heartbroken.
This essay suggests that Elon is the first to ever question or push back on USAID. That is patently untrue…many congressional members have testified that USAID has been persistently uncooperative responding to questions and probes. Many people are unhappy with their non-humanitarian activities
State Dept: "it is now abundantly clear that significant portions of USAID funding are not aligned with the core national interests of the United States." Dr. Drezner: "how is this claim about USAID “abundantly clear”?"
It comes down to how you define "significant portions". The examiners did expose some rather comical boondoggles. Whether this rises to the level of "significant portions" is up for debate, showing the danger of using adjectives. These obscure and weaken a point more often than clarify and strengthen.
I looked one of the examples in the White House fact sheet. It links to an article at Breitbart which in turn is based on SIGAR report 18-52. The gist is that, between 2005 and 2008, USAID provided farm assistance to Afghan farmers to help them transition from growing poppies to growing legal crops. This wasn’t particularly successful because farmers tended grow legal crops and then switch back to growing poppies. As a result, some irrigation canals built to irrigate legal crops ended up irrigating poppy fields.
The White House claim reads: Hundreds of millions of dollars to fund “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,” benefiting the Taliban
The farming equipment and fertilizer are a Breitbart invention. The SIGAR report does not say that the poppy cultivation in question benefited the Taliban.
USAID was not responsible for counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan; it was tasked with providing aid to farmers as part of a larger strategy, and seems to have handled it’s portion of the strategy competently. This doesn’t remotely justify shutting down USAID sixteen years later.
My guess is they will not be "shutting down USAID". I don't even think changes will be all that dramatic. USAID has been around too long and done too much legitimate work to be shut down or dramatically changed, despite all the arm-waving and hot-air rhetoric by Trump.
Another hill to fight on is Trump’s ethos (borrowed from organized crime) of "It's better to be feared than loved." He has already done this to our closest allies in Canada, Mexico, and Europe and he is wreaking more havoc in the third world. The argument is 2-fold: it is better to prevent epidemics overseas rather than deal with them here and it is better to have more allies than fewer. Also put the moral outrage of stopped clinical trials in Trump’s face - he hates taking responsibility for anything negative and I don’t think he and his minions can spin that as anything but an unmitigated fuckup.
2028, just a prediction: the 82 year old (biological age only, not maturity or wisdom) will not be loved. And, having screwed allies and foes alike, as the clock winds down on his presidency (and maybe his life), he probably won't be feared, either. Time for a visit from the Ghost of Christmases Past, Scrooge!
Assume you are the head of a major international bank. You decide to call in someone who knows nothing about it. He collects some equally ignorant but tech savvy and arrogant young people. You tell them to sack anyone, give them access to all accounts and allow them to shut what they like.
In the future no one will want to work for you, the best people will just flee and the others will wish they could, customers will run from you as they won’t trust you and countless other horrors.
It would be utterly ridiculous. It has never happened and it’s a pretty good guess it never will.
Yet it has been done to one of the largest, most important and complex organisations in the world: the U.S. government.
"Can the President Abolish, Move, or Consolidate USAID?
"Because Congress established USAID as an independent establishment (defined in 5 U.S.C. 104) within the executive branch, the President does not have the authority to abolish it; congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.
"The Secretary of State established USAID as directed by Executive Order 10973, signed on November 3, 1961. The agency was meant to implement components of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (FAA, P.L. 87-195), enacted on September 4, 1961.
"Section 1413 of the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, Division G of P.L. 105-277, established USAID as an “independent establishment” outside of the State Department (22 U.S.C. 6563).
"In that act, Congress provided the President with temporary authority to reorganize the agency (22 U.S.C. 6601). President Clinton retained the status of USAID as an independent entity, and the authority to reorganize expired in 1999. Congress has not granted the President further authority to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID since."
There's a more recent example of a purge whose ill effects were long delayed. One might wonder: why is AI so expensive to run? Well, twenty years ago, when Bush beat Gore, there was a purge at DARPA. The new head, Anthony Tether, pulled a similar lightning-fast zero-based accounting putsch. It pushed out career program managers who had worked there for decades. They had supported an engineering tradition in the MIT computer science department following the example of Vannevar Bush from Los Alamos. That community took responsibility for infrastructure design through multiple technology cycles: the internet, hypertext (HTML and other web standards), and underpinnings of the smartphone revolution. Even twenty years ago, there was a group forming to design the underpinnings of "AI." But the Bush administration defunded it, and the unique culture who did that kind of design slowly strangled. AI is the first killer app running on infrastructure built after DARPA's "tethering." One might say "AI" is the first major advance not invented by Al Gore. Even with Silicon Valley's hype machine pumping it up, one can tell, right? If you want a more recent poster child for the valuable Humpty Dumpties that depend on government support, I can draw a poster-worthy portrait. The harm is not just sick or starving kids (not that they don't matter), but the technological and military competitiveness of the United States. Maybe we haven't quite realized how we are a roadrunner who has run off a cliff (though Deepseek might have been something of a wake-up call.) But there is nothing holding us up---and long way to fall.
Administrivia: your link to Jasmin Egger leads only to a "page not found" on this site. If you want to link to Jasmin's home page on Unsplash, use this:
Americans were gaslit by commentators who assured us that Trump would not be re-elected. I hope these commentators feel in their heart their share of responsibility for what the NY Times is reporting.
Yes, the American people, many of whom spend their days and nights "doing their own research" online, never seem to stumble across very basic and easy-to- unearth facts in their "research." Fact: we spend well under 1% of our federal budget on foreign aid, and well under 10% on this line relative to the military budget. Fact: no it's not been "over a hundred years" since we ran a budget surplus (I saw this in a comment on a NYT article recently); in fact, Bill Clinton delivered a budget surplus in his last two years, only for his hard won gains to vanish as W cut taxes and raised military and homeland security and Medicare spending. Fact: Joe Biden's 2020 popular vote margin was 3X larger than Trump's 2024 popular vote margin, and Trump's margin was one of the narrowest wins (percentage wise) in over a century. Fact: federal spending on things other than healthcare, Social Security, the military, homeland security, and debt service has been falling (as % of GDP) since 1980, even as (fact again) billionaires have blossomed.
The hill to die on isn’t foreign aid per se, it’s the sabotage of government. And for Axelrod and Rahm, “First they came for USAID, but USAID polled poorly… “
If Rahm and Alelrod are for something; chances are it's a bad idea.
I wonder if anyone has bothered to tell President Musk just where USAID got all the food it distributed? Because the well armed people who produce that food are likely to be a bit miffed, and President Musk is very vulnerable to being kicked to the curb if his poll ratings in the gop base drop enough.
Indeed. The entrepreneurial class has always failed, or refused to understand that their capacity to engage in and profit from creative destruction is dependent upon (embedded in) an institutional framework that provides stability and continuity. In the domestic setting this is provided by the constitution, which is a deliberate break on creative destruction (as even Burke would have told you). It is deliberately hard to break and reform, is built for resilience, and is thus deliberately inefficient. The entrepreneurs however, perceive all institutions as bureaucratic restrictions of their freedom and productive dynamism, except those that protect their power to benefit from creative-destructive against those who suffer.
Musk et al suffer from the libertarian fantasy that markets and creative destruction can be dis-embedded from an institutional framework, that anarchy is some kind of utopia. Polanyi will tell you this, but so will Schumpeter (who popularized the terms creative destruction and entrepreneur).
And what about the distrust and ill will this dismantling has and will cause? Will the populations whose trust was hard won over years of convincing (to take HIV drugs, get vaccinated, participate in trials, send their daughters to schools) ever come back and trust us ever again?
America’s soft power, its generosity, its promise is what makes even the most cynical global intellectuals and other naysayers continue to send their kids to study here. Pax Americana was real.
For all that people are panicking about the threats to other institutions, the dismantling of USAID has actually happened. The others are either just threats or are being protected by the courts. I’m heartbroken.
Begging for forgiveness?
Man, you sure as hell have the wrong president.
This essay suggests that Elon is the first to ever question or push back on USAID. That is patently untrue…many congressional members have testified that USAID has been persistently uncooperative responding to questions and probes. Many people are unhappy with their non-humanitarian activities
State Dept: "it is now abundantly clear that significant portions of USAID funding are not aligned with the core national interests of the United States." Dr. Drezner: "how is this claim about USAID “abundantly clear”?"
It comes down to how you define "significant portions". The examiners did expose some rather comical boondoggles. Whether this rises to the level of "significant portions" is up for debate, showing the danger of using adjectives. These obscure and weaken a point more often than clarify and strengthen.
I looked one of the examples in the White House fact sheet. It links to an article at Breitbart which in turn is based on SIGAR report 18-52. The gist is that, between 2005 and 2008, USAID provided farm assistance to Afghan farmers to help them transition from growing poppies to growing legal crops. This wasn’t particularly successful because farmers tended grow legal crops and then switch back to growing poppies. As a result, some irrigation canals built to irrigate legal crops ended up irrigating poppy fields.
The White House claim reads: Hundreds of millions of dollars to fund “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,” benefiting the Taliban
The farming equipment and fertilizer are a Breitbart invention. The SIGAR report does not say that the poppy cultivation in question benefited the Taliban.
USAID was not responsible for counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan; it was tasked with providing aid to farmers as part of a larger strategy, and seems to have handled it’s portion of the strategy competently. This doesn’t remotely justify shutting down USAID sixteen years later.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/at-usaid-waste-and-abuse-runs-deep/
https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/lessonslearned/SIGAR-18-52-LL.pdf
My guess is they will not be "shutting down USAID". I don't even think changes will be all that dramatic. USAID has been around too long and done too much legitimate work to be shut down or dramatically changed, despite all the arm-waving and hot-air rhetoric by Trump.
Another hill to fight on is Trump’s ethos (borrowed from organized crime) of "It's better to be feared than loved." He has already done this to our closest allies in Canada, Mexico, and Europe and he is wreaking more havoc in the third world. The argument is 2-fold: it is better to prevent epidemics overseas rather than deal with them here and it is better to have more allies than fewer. Also put the moral outrage of stopped clinical trials in Trump’s face - he hates taking responsibility for anything negative and I don’t think he and his minions can spin that as anything but an unmitigated fuckup.
2028, just a prediction: the 82 year old (biological age only, not maturity or wisdom) will not be loved. And, having screwed allies and foes alike, as the clock winds down on his presidency (and maybe his life), he probably won't be feared, either. Time for a visit from the Ghost of Christmases Past, Scrooge!
Assume you are the head of a major international bank. You decide to call in someone who knows nothing about it. He collects some equally ignorant but tech savvy and arrogant young people. You tell them to sack anyone, give them access to all accounts and allow them to shut what they like.
In the future no one will want to work for you, the best people will just flee and the others will wish they could, customers will run from you as they won’t trust you and countless other horrors.
It would be utterly ridiculous. It has never happened and it’s a pretty good guess it never will.
Yet it has been done to one of the largest, most important and complex organisations in the world: the U.S. government.
Just insane.
Professor Daniel W. Drezner: As you point out:
"Can the President Abolish, Move, or Consolidate USAID?
"Because Congress established USAID as an independent establishment (defined in 5 U.S.C. 104) within the executive branch, the President does not have the authority to abolish it; congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.
"The Secretary of State established USAID as directed by Executive Order 10973, signed on November 3, 1961. The agency was meant to implement components of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (FAA, P.L. 87-195), enacted on September 4, 1961.
"Section 1413 of the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, Division G of P.L. 105-277, established USAID as an “independent establishment” outside of the State Department (22 U.S.C. 6563).
"In that act, Congress provided the President with temporary authority to reorganize the agency (22 U.S.C. 6601). President Clinton retained the status of USAID as an independent entity, and the authority to reorganize expired in 1999. Congress has not granted the President further authority to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID since."
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12500
Bottom line: Lawsuits will draw out Trump's agony in the courts throughout his pathetic administration.
Trump is a "Full-Employment-Act" for trial-lawyers.
Lawyers are good for democracy.
Ergo, Trump is good for democracy.
No, no, no! That last sentence was SATIRE. This was mock Euclidian logic. There is no Q.E.D. here, but lots of satire.
Nevertheless . . .
Trump REALLY is a "Full-Employment Act" for trial lawyers. And trial lawyers are good for democracy.
There's a more recent example of a purge whose ill effects were long delayed. One might wonder: why is AI so expensive to run? Well, twenty years ago, when Bush beat Gore, there was a purge at DARPA. The new head, Anthony Tether, pulled a similar lightning-fast zero-based accounting putsch. It pushed out career program managers who had worked there for decades. They had supported an engineering tradition in the MIT computer science department following the example of Vannevar Bush from Los Alamos. That community took responsibility for infrastructure design through multiple technology cycles: the internet, hypertext (HTML and other web standards), and underpinnings of the smartphone revolution. Even twenty years ago, there was a group forming to design the underpinnings of "AI." But the Bush administration defunded it, and the unique culture who did that kind of design slowly strangled. AI is the first killer app running on infrastructure built after DARPA's "tethering." One might say "AI" is the first major advance not invented by Al Gore. Even with Silicon Valley's hype machine pumping it up, one can tell, right? If you want a more recent poster child for the valuable Humpty Dumpties that depend on government support, I can draw a poster-worthy portrait. The harm is not just sick or starving kids (not that they don't matter), but the technological and military competitiveness of the United States. Maybe we haven't quite realized how we are a roadrunner who has run off a cliff (though Deepseek might have been something of a wake-up call.) But there is nothing holding us up---and long way to fall.
I just wrote my latest article with a foreign policy twist, please check it out and let me know what you think ❤️
Administrivia: your link to Jasmin Egger leads only to a "page not found" on this site. If you want to link to Jasmin's home page on Unsplash, use this:
https://unsplash.com/@vitya_photography
The direct link to the photo you used is this:
https://unsplash.com/photos/white-egg-on-brown-wooden-tray-vWtfT-o-UOA
HTH
When did “own-goal” enter American English? I feel like I had never heard it (except in the context of English soccer) until the last year or two.
Americans were gaslit by commentators who assured us that Trump would not be re-elected. I hope these commentators feel in their heart their share of responsibility for what the NY Times is reporting.