Re: Gutting USAID

President Trump is moving faster than any president of my lifetime to get
things done.

It is astonishing. _Astonishing_.

I�ve never seen an administration move this quickly to do as many different
things as the Trump administration is doing right now.

Whether you�re talking about walking back support for the UNRWA, ending
support nationwide for transitioning children, ending DEI initiatives all
over the country, reconstituting the Defense Department (by the way,
recruitment immediately skyrocketed since the appointment of Pete Hegseth as
Secretary of Defense), or getting wins at the Panama Canal (where the
Panamanian government has now announced it is not going to participate in the
Chinese Belt and Road Initiative anymore), this administration is pushing so
hard, so fast on so many fronts, that it�s exceptionally difficult for any
opposition to truly form around any one issue.

The best the Democrats have done so far is mobilize around the end of USAID.
USAID is an agency that was originally brought into being by foreign aid
initiatives of Congress and then put into power by an executive order by JFK
all the way back during the middle of the Cold War. USAID essentially was
designed as a way of spreading America�s foreign policy tentacles all over
the world. That was the explicit purpose. It wasn�t just to do nice things;
it was to do nice things and also to support institutions in various
countries that were going to be a bulwark against communism.

Since the end of the Cold War, USAID has been transformed into supporting
trans pride flags in Africa or boondoggle projects that are designed to pay
millions or billions of dollars to Left-wing NGOs, both in the United States
and outside the United States, and keep up an entire employment line for
people who are out of power.

While Republicans are in power, USAID is still paying many blue organizations
to keep trains running on time and to make sure money continues to flow to
various organizations abroad that are willing to spread social leftism.

The idea of USAID is not wrong. The idea that you want to find non-
governmental organizations in countries that are teetering between China and
the United States and support them to make that country more pro-America is
not a bad idea.

The problem is that the USAID infrastructure has been hijacked by the radical
Left. What the Left has done with so many institutions � and USAID is only
one of them � is to take the original purpose of the institution, gut it, and
then wear the face around like Hannibal Lecter.

That is exactly what the Left has done with the university systems in the
United States. They did it with the mainstream press in the United States,
and they did it with USAID.

USAID has been participating in tremendous waste and fraud for a long time.
As Daniel Greenfield of the David Horowitz Freedom Center points out, USAID
has sent $9.3 billion to Islamic terrorist states collectively responsible
for killing over 3,000 American soldiers. There are an enormous number of
terrible organizations supported by USAID.

A wing of the Republican Party wishes to use the fact that these institutions
have been so thoroughly corrupted to go totally isolationist, which is a
mistake. Two things can be true at the same time: USAID has become a totally
corrupted institution, but that doesn�t mean that the best strategy for the
United States is to retreat from the world entirely and simply grant that
vacuum to the Chinese, the Russians, or the Iranians.

Elon Musk said that there basically is nothing left at USAID that�s worth
saving. The budget of USAID is somewhere between $40 and $50 billion. It is
an extremely large governmental program. So when people say things like,
�It�s only 1% of the American budget,� that�s true. But that�s just because
our budget is far too large. That doesn�t mean we should be wasting tons of
money on interests that are antithetical to American interests abroad.

The spread of social leftism in Zimbabwe should not be the goal of American
foreign policy. Flying �Pride Progress� flags outside the Vatican should not
be a goal of American foreign policy, and neither should supporting Left-wing
NGOs that are also supported by people like George Soros.

President Trump deployed Elon Musk and the Department of Governmental
Efficiency to go into USAID�s headquarters, dig through the personnel files,
and try to figure out where all the money is going. The acting heads of USAID
tried to resist. So President Trump fired them.

Many people on the Left got very upset about all of this for a couple of
reasons. First, they actually like the �Pride Progress� flag being flown in
far-flung African nations with American taxpayer dollars. They want America
to fund abortion abroad. They support precisely the things the American
taxpayers don�t want to do.

But there�s something else going on, too, which is that USAID, like so many
other federal government programs, is an absolute gravy train for Democratic
allies. It is a bunch of money that is being spent on various constituencies
that Democrats cultivate and use as the incoming State Department officials
if Democrats win office. It is not a coincidence that so many Democrats, both
elected and non-elected, worked at places like or funded by USAID. It�s a
giant grab bag of cash which has essentially become a handout mechanism for
the Left-wing.

The administration�s strategy seems to be to move fast and break things, to
make all of these cuts, to bring a chainsaw to the party.

The way an executive branch agency works is that everyone serves at the
pleasure of the president of the United States. If you don�t like that, there
is a way this could have been avoided: not having created a massive
administrative bureaucracy.

But since the beginning of the 20th century, the Democrats centralized
extraordinary power in the executive branch. And now they�re furious that the
person in charge of the executive branch is using that power to carve away
all of their permanent substructures.

What we are watching is a sea change in the way that government is done, not
because Trump is �dictatorial� or �authoritarian,� but because he is using
precisely the same power every Democrat has used so that he can carve away
the permanent root of the Democratic Party.

President Trump is seeking victories and attempting to minimize defeat.

The caterwauling from the Left is about the fact that the plaything of the
permanent Democratic Party, the administrative bureaucracy they built and
have lavished with trillions of dollars over the course of decades, is now
being redone by the Trump administration, and they are freaking out about it.

And when the Left freaks out about a thing, I tend to like the thing.

Very much.