Why are Democrats going to the mattress over USAID, of all agencies? Ruy Teixeira, a long-time Democratic strategist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, criticizes much of the progressive left and wonders the same thing.
USAID is not 100% evil. A large part of its $40 billion budget goes to "teaching people how to fish." USAID programs don't just give food away. They teach people how to stay alive. Directly and indirectly, USAID feeds around 150 million people a day who otherwise might starve.
My argument is not that USAID shouldn't be destroyed. There needs to be some agency to project "soft power" to counter China's growing influence in several critical strategic areas. China is overjoyed at the destruction of USAID. They're already moving into areas being abandoned by the agency to the eternal gratitude of the governments and people.
Teixeira acknowledges the incredible waste, like idiotic grants to promote "diversity" in Africa and giving money to terrorists.
But Teixeira also points out that Democrats haven't learned the lessons from the November elections.
"If voters dislike anything, it’s bureaucracy and foreign aid. And USAID is a 10,000-employee bureaucracy—housed in a palatial building on prime downtown real estate—that spends $40 billion a year on other countries." He quotes former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch,” Emanuel told Politico. “And my view is—while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador—that’s not the hill I’m going to die on.”
That "hill" is mined and full of traps. In a 2023 AP-NORC poll, "69 percent of respondents thought U.S. government spending in this area was 'too much'; 20 percent, 'about right'; and just 10 percent 'too little,'" Teixeira notes.
Defenders of foreign aid usually respond to critics by lecturing them that it represents no more than 1 percent of federal spending, and therefore they should look elsewhere to balance the budget. This argument totally misses the point that taxpayers place a higher priority on unmet needs at home.
Americans are willing to help alleviate genuine suffering abroad, and to do so generously, but want to be assured the government has already done its best to take care of domestic needs. USAID’s budget would cover the $23 billion maintenance backlog at the national parks, for example, with money left over.
In response to such concerns, the “only 1 percent” line provides nothing but a patronizing non sequitur.
Trump's assault on the government has been so complete that Democrats are at sea in trying to figure out a way to fight back—other than screaming about "lawlessness."
“Democrats have become—in the minds of a lot of voters—an elite party, and to a lot of folks who are trying to scuffle out there and get along, this will seem like an elite passion," political strategist David Axelrod told Politico about the USAID fight.
They [Democrats] want to preserve the structure as is, not offer priority sets that would necessarily prompt scale-down decisions. They are using the time-tested and usually successful strategy of Victim Naming, or if you will, the Poster Child Strategy.
This was easily predictable, and exactly what I expected would happen when these USAID programs got exposed and shut down. The Democrats and Protection Racket Media (a redundancy) would cherry-pick a handful of worthy spending decisions as a way to defend the whole corrupt structure. And that's what we have seen, with references to a couple of medical trials -- which should have been managed by NIH, not USAID -- and poverty programs that will disrupt real humanitarian efforts. And that's assuming that the money reached those recipients in the first place; less than 5% of USAID's Haiti program spending reached Haitians, reportedly.
It's not that USAID's sins hadn't been exposed before. Several Republicans, including Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, had been highlighting the grants to terrorists and silly funding of DEI in places where it made even less sense than in the U.S.
Democrats are blowing it by concentrating their firepower on protecting USAID. It's what you would expect elitists to do.
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