I’d bet you could guess the identity of the liberal analyst within three guesses, even before I mention the name. Why? Because at the moment, the number of liberal commentators with any sense of the moment at all can be counted on one hand, with a finger or two left over.
These days, the best of the potential guesses would be Bill Maher, James Carville, and Ruy Teixeira, all of whom tried to warn Democrats to get out of the Academia faculty lounge for the past several months. This time it’s Teixeira, writing at the always-interesting Free Press, warning his allies that they are marching themselves off a political cliff with their all-in defense of USAID’s unaccountable spending:
In policy terms, the Democrats have a point. The legality of DOGE’s strike on the agency is unclear. For the incredible amount of wasteful stuff in its budget—why did USAID grant $1.5 million for “diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities”—USAID also provides basic aid, like nutrition and health assistance, to needy countries.
But politically, none of that matters a whit. Trump occupies the high ground in this fight, which is probably why he and Musk picked it. 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. …
1. Democrats are unconditionally defending an obscure government institution at a time when even well-known and previously trusted institutions are regarded with intense suspicion. A key finding from New York Times polling in the 2024 election cycle was that voters overwhelmingly believe the political and economic system in America needs either major changes, or to be completely rebuilt.
2. This particular obscure institution does one of American voters’ least favorite things: provide foreign aid.
3. Finally, not only are Democrats blanket defending an obscure institution that does something American voters don’t particularly want to, they are defending it without explaining their own priorities.
You know who loves USAID and its unaccountable structure? The progressive Academia elite that run it and other less-than-responsive federal bureaucracies. Why? It appeals to their elitism, and the flow of money without accountability allows for massive manipulations and social engineering. David covered ‘Internews” earlier today, a $500M annual expenditure in what is in essence a propaganda operation, or more likely a multitude of such operations.
You know who hates USAID and other less-than-accountable federal bureaucracies? Everyone else. Almost literally.
To address Teixeira’s point three, it’s worth noting that Democrats have a different strategy altogether. They 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.
All of this ignores an obvious point: Congress could restore funding for any worthy efforts at USAID that the administration has terminated. They could earmark those funds in the State Department budget (now that Congress has re-enabled that process) or fund it with direct legislation. There are no legitimate reasons that the funds for worthy projects should have to come out of a slush fund that defeats accountability, both fiscal and political. That is precisely how spending is supposed to function in our constitutional system of self-governance, in fact.
So why aren’t Democrats in Congress stepping up with proposals to specifically fund any USAID projects? Because almost all of them would not just be unpopular, but a significant amount of them were corrupt from the start. They don’t want to put their names on most of these specific programs nor have their support for them on the record, which is why USAID got set up as an unaccountable slush fund in the first place.
And on a larger scale, that’s how we got the bureaucratic state too, or “deep state,” if you prefer. That goes back a century to the first wave of Progressive policies, when Woodrow Wilson helped create agency law to bypass the Constitution and aggrandize the executive branch at the expense of the legislative branch. Wilson argued that “experts” could craft laws better than elected representatives in the form of “regulation,” and legislators eventually embraced this dereliction of duty. Political accountability for governance has eroded to the point where Congress barely matters to almost all of the spending decisions and not much more in enforcement decisions. We have become a star-chamber republic rather than a self-governing republic. And no one benefits more from that than Democrats in the House and Senate.
Trump’s actions now leverage that overwhelming executive authority to dismantle at least some of the bureaucratic state, starting with the least popular outposts of the United Bureaucracies of America. Democrats won’t address foreign-aid priorities because they’re not defending foreign aid; they are defending the bureaucratic state. And voters will punish them more and more as they interfere with the process of dismantling it, no matter how many sob stories Democrats and their allies in the Protection Racket Media spin to stop it.
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