By deagreez @Adobe Stock
Doing Far Less Good than Advertised
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has plans. Rubio’s plan is to reduce what USAID (US Agency for International Development) does so it can focus on the most important, notes the WSJ.
That’s what SoS Marco Rubio now says he plans to do, rather than shutting the agency down, as Mr. Musk claimed he wants to do.
Mr. Musk can’t shut it down in any case. Congress established it as an independent agency in 1998, under the supervision of State, and so it would require an act of Congress to close it down. That isn’t about to get 60 votes in the Senate.
Rubio will serve as the agency’s acting director, reports NRO. He claims to want to work with Congress to move some of its functions into the State Department with the aim of potentially abolishing the remaining parts.
According to NRO, ASAID has been a problem for decades. It asserted itself as its own power center, rather than a federal bureaucracy accountable to Congress and the president.
As Marco Rubio accused, “When we were in Congress, we couldn’t even get answers to basic questions about programs.”
According to WSJ editors, USAID has given millions of dollars to “organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas” and that recipients of the money have “called for their lands to be ‘cleansed’ from the ‘impurity of the Jews.’”
The Middle East Forum notes that money also often flows to anti-American groups through intermediary recipients that fail to vet local partners.
Surprised?
As the WSJ also notes, USAID is not full of Mother Theresa’s.
Inflicting even more damage, the Joe Biden administration injected its twin obsession of DEI and climate change. Does it make any sense for American taxpayers to support a $400 million digital technology project for LGBTQ people in Africa? Or to spend $53 million “to enable and empower local governments and vulnerable communities to realize their own resilient, low-carbon futures?”
None of this is a one-off, adds NRO. The problem isn’t just a handful of programs. The agency elevated its fight against climate change into a central pillar of U.S. development work akin to poverty reduction — a woeful distraction from its work in war zones and in countries suffering famine.
Shuttering Left Wing Propaganda
Some grants are dumb and wasteful. But dumb and a waste are not the real problems, especially when those in charge use OPM. As the WSJ notes, “USAID has given millions of dollars to ‘organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas’ and that recipients of the money have “called for their lands to be ‘cleansed’ from the ‘impurity of the Jews.’”
The Middle East Forum notes that money also often flows to anti-American groups through intermediary recipients that fail to vet local partners.
The USAID uproar is but a taste of the pushback that Messrs. Musk and Trump are going to face as they work to shrink and reform the executive branch.
What Ronald Reagan called the “iron triangle” of interest groups, Congress and the news media isn’t going to give up power or money without a fight. You can add career regulators to that triangle.
The Crux of Rubio’s Challenge
Secretary Marco Rubio is facing “a powerful ecosystem of development organizations that have a vested interest in preserving a status quo that doesn’t work and is unaccountable to the public, argues NRO.
This lobby has strong support among Democratic lawmakers, and even a few Republicans.
A Leaner USAID
As the WSJ notes, lawsuits are already flying. The courts, if Elon Musk is not vigilant, will derail Mr. Musk’s project before it even gets off the ground.
More oversight and transparency for a leaner USAID makes sense, and we wouldn’t mind if it vanished. But that takes more sustained political effort than a howling wind of tweets in the middle of the night.
A Republican administration is finally grappling with this runaway agency, discloses NRO.
Ultimately, fundamental changes will require congressional action, but the goal should be nothing less than a revolution in U.S. foreign-assistance efforts.
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