There’s something odd about Musk’s attack on USAID. Mainly, that the focus was on USAID’s expenditures on woke shit and on journalists.
The woke shit amounted to a fraction of USAID’s total spending, I think less than $1 billion from an annual budget of $40 billion.
The journalist stuff was claiming that USAID controlled the news media because they purchased subscription for analysis programs offered by companies like Politico. It was also that USAID funded independent media operations outside the US and developed programs to counter misinformation. The guy leading the charge against USAID is Mike Benz, a former State Department employee during the first Trump administration. He really stresses the funding of independent media and organizations that work towards democratic reform in the world, like Internews and CEPPS. I have a suspicion that he is being paid by foreign adversaries, probably Russians, because he really tars and feathers USAID for the misinformation shit. Ignoring the majority of USAID’s spending on agricultural and medical aid.
My guess that we will see Musk, prompted by the MAGA accounts on Twitter, to have DOGE target the rest of the democracy development aid programs. They’ve brought up the National Endowment for Democracy, National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute before. They will pressure Congress to kill these programs under the dubious claim that they are CIA fronts or some other conspiratorial shit.
You're really running cover for an organization made for the CIA that's long lost it's purpose? I don't think we want to get into how much of that 39 billion you're talking about wasn't actually for such a good cause, if that's even close to accurate.
But Russia doesn't excuse shit, they do NOT have the money or military power to compete with the US on this. USAID was .7%, or so I've heard, of the federal budget and they're throwing around billions like it's nothing, building trans clinics in Vietnam and printing DEI binders for Afghanistan. You're also missing that it's not just been pointed out USAID funds went to left leaning orgs like Feminist Frequency,
you know, a major progenitor of Gamergate still being a talking point today, but also Turning Point, whom should be their supposed political opposition.
NO tax money should have gone to any of this shit, as far as anyone in the public knew, NPR and PBS were some of the small amount of institutions that money went to. If USAID stoked the fires of the culture war, then it does not deserve to exist, it's done far more damage to the nation in the last couple decades than foreign adversaries could, barring 9/11, but honestly the reaction to it did more damage than the event itself. Too much of USAID was being spent domestically for supposedly being for outreach, and for blatantly idiotic causes.
41 million just to this one center by the way. In LOS ANGELES. Excluding Journo and woke shit like this doesn't even get into how we were giving money straight to enemies of the US as well, or to help "rebels" topple other governments in the third world. I wonder how much of that was part of that
agricultural and medical funding you're acting as if was the bulk. USAID is an unmitigated disaster utilized to push whatever current politicians in the know want it to, and was also open to just being scammed out of thousands of dollars at a time by anyone with a half convincing 'charity'. I'd have cut it down years ago even if half of it's budget actually was going to help some poor smucks farm if it meant stopping the harm it was clearly doing. I also don't buy into the soft power bullshit, giving gibs to other countries just means you're basically creating a global welfare state, and there are strings attached. This is a failed experiment in economic manipulation at best. It is time it ended and I'm not upset it has, I'm glad.
l gladly accept my trashcans & puzzle pieces from the resident Fell For It Again Award recipients.
