Trump’s gift to Japan and Korea and the USAID mess

Trump’s gift to Japan and Korea and the USAID mess

Trump is imposing 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. I am still not sure why. However, last year nearly 4 million cars and trucks were imported from the two countries which is about 22 percent of total US vehicle sales. What is weird is that the tariff is not a comprehensive one. Japan and Korea are not included meaning a likely shift by US consumers from Ford and GM to Honda and Hyundai. Only Trump apologists understand the logic behind such an action.

I again wonder why Trump created DOGE. It must have been to give Elon Musk something to do in his spare time because agency heads could have done the DOGE thing themselves. Trump could have instructed them to eliminate all spending that he and the heads deemed as wasteful. He could have instructed the heads to trim their workforce. Lastly he could have told them to request much smaller budgets for the next fiscal year. How come he didn’t do this and instead gave the hatchet to Musk?

The mess at USAID is only a mess because the administration deems it so. Yes it seems that there was some wasteful spending but it amounted to only a fraction of the agency’s budget. And it was the type of spending favored by the previous administration. This is sort of “one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure” type of thing. The mission of USAID is to administer foreign aid and assist in economic development. The agency was created by President Kennedy and then codified into law in 1961 by Congress. This means that it can only be eliminated by Congress and not by the president. The likelihood of getting 60 votes in the Senate to eliminate the agency is zero meaning that a future administration could easily resuscitate USAID by restoring its funding. 

USAID sends aid to over 100 countries. I have long argued that US aid should always come with strings and should never go to our adversaries. Obviously that argument has been ignored. Trump has decided to shut down the agency and terminate its 10,000 employees and eliminate its $40 billion budget. I went to the agency’s website and it had been shut down. Musk has called USAID a “criminal organization.” Trump apparently agrees. The White House says “For decades, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.” In fact, Senator Joni Ernst had been rebuffed in her efforts to get an accounting of USAID’s spending and efforts to audit the Agency, giving rise to indications of spending abuse. Trump has also said that “George Soros received $260,000,000.00 from USAID and used this money to spread chaos, change governments and personal gain in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, India, UK, and the US.” I don’t think Soros needed the money.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt gave examples of agency spending: that she said were emblematic of “the waste and abuse that has run “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.” “I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going toward this crap.”

Interestingly, only the grant to a Serbian LGBTQ advocacy group was from USAID’s budget. The rest were funded by Biden’s State Department. USAID justified the grant when its mission director in Serbia said “At USAID, we know that inclusive development is important for driving economic growth and also for creating a healthier democracy.” Wasn’t this part and parcel of the Biden agenda?

Funding for the other examples came from the State Department and not from USAID. But the Biden agenda did not consider these as wasteful. More importantly to me is that USAID assistance has also flowed to anti-Israeli terrorist-tied groups. Millions have gone to such groups. USAID gave $100,000 to a Palestinian group whose leaders supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terror group. Just six days before Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel, USAID gave $900,000 to a charity in Gaza associated with the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Biden’s head of USAID, Samantha Power is anti-Israel and openly hostile to that country. Some of the staff at USAID had advocated stopping arms sales to Israel. Again these actions are consistent with those that ran through the Biden State Department and administration. So the funding to terrorist linked organizations should come as no surprise.

What about “abuse and fraud”? These accusations will likely be supported by an audit of USAID. Senator Joni Ernst has accused the agency of funding sex traffickers and the Wuhan lab. She says “The government agencies coordinating aid efforts should be eager to share details about how they’re using taxpayers’ money to make the world a better place. Yet the U.S. Agency for International Development, entrusted with disbursing tens of billions of aid dollars to other nations annually, is a rogue bureaucracy. I’ve uncovered that the agency often acts at odds with our nation’s best interests and uses intimidation and shell games to hide where money is going, how it’s being spent and why.” Further, she says “the agency is allowing grantees to skim significant amounts of money, up to and even beyond half of the total, for themselves.” 

Ernst’s statements are supported by a memo from inspector general Paul Martin that states that the agency “does not maintain a comprehensive internal database of subawardees.” In other words, the foreign entities that work with a primary grantee on a USAID project often go unreported, impeding the ability of agency investigators to vet fraud allegations.”

What a mess. But don’t be surprised if the same sort of thing has been occurring throughout every agency in the Federal government. USAID’s budget accounted for less than 1% of the total federal budget and its actions could have easily gone unnoticed. I remember the words of the late senator Everett Dirksen who said “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you are talking about real money.”

Not surprisingly the democrats want to save the agency and are introducing a bill to prevent Trump from shutting it down. One sympathetic news source reported that the effort was to stop Trump reporting that “Hundreds of programs covering billions of dollars worth of lifesaving aid across the globe came to a grinding halt after Trump on January 20 ordered a freeze of most U.S. foreign aid.” Note the phrase “lifesaving aid.” However, some republicans are on board with eliminating USAID pointing out that much of the aid goes for useful and strategic purposes and Trump should not “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) says “They were funding a lot of stupid stuff. That’s a fact, but they’re also doing a lot of good stuff, too.” Michael McCaul of Texas says that Elon Musk’s strategy of shutting the entire agency down is an overcorrection. “The problem with doing that with a lifesaving agency like USAID that administers lifesaving food and medications is that you’re putting on a stop-payment order that may have some unintended consequences”.

Once again what is one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. USAID expenditures were consistent with the policy objectives of the Biden Administration. I am certain that if the funding were left intact and now followed the priorities of the Trump Administration, that critics on the left would point to funding that would infuriate them. For me the more important issue is that of fraud. The observation that the grantees are allowed to rake off part of the grants for their own use, and presumably the use of their buddies point to fraud and abuse. To me this is an example of misuse of funds and not  that of sending a grant to help fund an LGBTQ program on integrating more gay Serbians into the workforce.

But, what a mess.