“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official.
I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most of its work through contractors. I’ve been a field guy, working in different locations around the world.
If you’ve been following the news at all, you probably know that Trump and Musk have decided to destroy USAID. There’s been a firehose of disinformation and lies. It’s pretty depressing.
So here are a couple of true USAID stories — one political, one personal.
The political one first. I worked for years in the small former Soviet republic of Moldova.
Moldova happened to be one of the few parts of the old USSR suitable for producing wine. The other was Georgia, in the Caucasus.
The Soviets, in their central planning way, decided that both Moldova and Georgia would produce wine — but Georgia would produce the good stuff, intended for export and for consumption by Soviet elites. Moldova would produce cheap sweet reds, which is what most Russians think wine is.
So for decades, Moldova produced bad wine and nothing but bad wine. But Russians liked it, so that was okay.
Then the USSR collapsed. And, well, Moldova continued to produce nasty cheap sweet reds, because that was all they could do. By the turn of the century, wine was Moldova’s single biggest cash export. And about 80% of that wine went straight to Russia.
This continued through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia. Back in 2003 or so, he wasn’t invading Russia’s neighbors… but he was already swinging a big stick in Russia’s “near abroad”, the former Soviet republics that he thought should still be under Russia’s thumb. Which absolutely included Moldova.
So whenever the Moldovan government annoyed or offended Putin… or whenever he just wanted to yank their chain… the Russian Ministry of Health would suddenly discover that there was a “problem” with Moldovan wine. And imports would be frozen until the “problem” could be resolved. Since wine was Moldova’s biggest export, and most wine went to Russia, this meant that Russia could inflict crippling damage on Moldova’s economy literally at will. 
This went on for over a decade, with multiple Moldovan governments having to defer to Moscow rather than face crippling economic damage.
Enter USAID. Over a period of a dozen years or so, USAID funded several projects to restructure the Moldovan wine industry.
They brought in foreign instructors to teach modern methods. They worked with the wine-growers to develop training courses. They provided guarantees for loans so that farmers could buy new equipment. They helped Moldovan farmers get access to new varieties of grapes… you get the idea.
(By the by, the wine project was not my project. But it was literally up the street from my project. It was run by two people I know and deeply respect — one American, one Moldovan — so I had a ring-side seat for much of this.)
The big one was, they worked with the Moldovans on what we call market linkages. That is, they helped them connect to buyers and distributors in Europe, and figure out ways to sell into the EU. I say this was the big one, because on one hand the EU is the world’s largest market for wine! But on the other hand, exporting wine into the EU is really hard. There are a bunch of what we call NTBTs — “non-tariff barriers to trade”. For starters, your wine has to be guaranteed clean and safe according to the EU’s very high standards. That means it has to consistently pass a bunch of sanitary and health tests, and also your production methods have to be certified. Then there are a bunch more requirements about bottling, labelling and packaging. 
The EU regulates the hell out of all that stuff. Like, the “TAVA” number? There’s a minimum font size for that. If you print it too small, it’ll be bounced right back to you. The glass of the bottle? Has to be a sort that EU recycling systems can deal with. The adhesive behind the label? It can be rejected for being too weak (labels fall off) or too strong (recycling system can’t remove it). There are dozens of things like that.
And then of course they had to do marketing. Nobody in Europe had heard of Moldovan wines! Buyers and distributors had to be talked into taking a chance on these new products. This meant the Moldovan exporters needed lines of credit to stay afloat. This in turn meant that Moldovan banks had to be talked into… you get the idea.
This whole effort took over a decade, from the early 2000s into the teens.
And in the end it was a huge damn success. With USAID help, the Moldovan wine industry was completely restructured. Moldova now exports about $150 million of wine per year, which is a lot for a small country — it’s over $50 per Moldovan. And it went from exporting around 80% of its wine to Russia, to around 15%. Most Moldovan wine (around 60%) now goes to the EU, with an increasing share going to Turkey and the Middle East. 
(If you’re curious: their market niche is medium to high end vins du table. Not plonk, not fancy, just good midlist wines. I can personally recommend the dryer reds, which are often much better than you’d expect at their price point.)
Russia tried the “ooh we found a sanitary problem” trick one last time a few years ago. It fell completely flat. Putting aside that it was an obvious lie — if something is safe for the EU, believe me, it is safe for Russia — Moldovan wine exporters had now diversified their markets to the point that losing Russian sales was merely a nuisance. In fact, the attempt backfired: it encouraged the Moldovans to shift their exports even further away from Russia and towards the EU.
So that’s the political story. Russia had Moldova on a choke chain. Over a dozen years or so, USAID patiently filed through that chain and broke Moldova loose. Soft power in action. It worked.
Nobody knows this story outside Moldova, of course.
Okay, that’s the political story. Here’s the personal one.
Some years ago, I moved with my family to a small country that was recovering from some very unpleasant history. They’d been under a brutal ethnically-based dictatorship for a while, and then there was a war. So, this was a poor country where many things didn’t work very well.
While we were there, my son suddenly fell ill. Very ill. Later we found out it was the very rapid onset of a severe bacterial infection. At the time all we knew was that in an hour or two he went from fine to running a super high fever and being unable to stand up. Basically he just… fell over.
Wham, emergency room. They diagnosed him correctly, thank God, and gave correct treatment: massive and ongoing doses of antibiotics. But he couldn’t move — he was desperately weak and barely conscious — and there was no question of taking him out of the country. We had to put him in the local hospital for a week, on an IV drip, until he was strong enough to come home.
If you’ve ever been in a hospital in a poor, post-war country… yeah at this point someone makes a dumb joke about the NHS or something. No. We’re talking regular blackouts, the electricity just randomly switching off. Rusting equipment, crumbling concrete, cracked windows. A dozen beds crammed into a room that should hold four or five. Everything worn and patched and held together with baling wire and hope. 
We’re talking so poor that the hospital didn’t have basic supplies. Like, you would go into town and buy the kid’s medication, and then you’d also buy syringes for injections — because the hospital didn’t have syringes — and then you’d come back and give those thing to the nurse so that your kid could get his medication.
In the pediatric ward, they were packing the kids in two to a bed. Because they didn’t have a lot of rooms, and they didn’t have a lot of beds. And kids are small, yeah?
But there we were. So into the hospital he went. Here’s a photo:
— Take a moment and zoom in there. Red-white-and-blue sticker, there on the bed? It says “USAID: From The American People”.
Every hospital bed in that emergency room had been donated by USAID. I believe they were purchased secondhand in the United States, where they were old and obsolete. But in this country… well, they didn’t have enough beds, and the beds that they had were fifty years old. Except for those USAID beds. Those were (relatively) modern, light and adjustable but sturdy, and easily mobile. The hospital staff were using them to move kids around, and they were getting a lot of mileage from them.
And of course, every USAID bed had that sticker on it. And so did some other stuff. There was an oxygen system that a sick toddler was breathing from. USAID sticker. Couple of child-sized wheelchairs. USAID stickers. Secondhand American stuff — USAID was under orders to Buy American whenever possible — but just making a huge, huge difference here.
As I said, it was crowded in there. Lots of beds, lots of kids, lots of anxious parents. So we got to talking with the other parents, as one does. A couple of people had a little English. And so my wife mentioned that we were here working on a USAID project…
…and god damn that place lit up like an old time juke box. “USAID!” “USAID!” People were pointing at the stickers, smiling. “USAID!” “America, very good!” “Thank you!” “USA! USA!” “Thank you!”
This went on longer than most of us would find comfortable. When it finally settled down… actually, it never really did entirely settle down. For the whole time our son was there, we had people — parents, nurses, even the hospital janitor — smiling at us and saying “USAID!” “Very good!” “Thank you!”
I’m not prone to fits of patriotic fervor. But I’m not going to lie: right then it felt good to be American.
Anyway, USAID stories. I could go on at considerable length. This is my career, after all! I could tell more stories, or comment and gloss at greater length on these.
But this is long enough already. More some other time, perhaps.
{ 56 comments… read them below or add one }
CityCalmDown 02.18.25 at 11:00 pm
Perhaps because it’s beyond the horror-pain threshold for many people to contemplate, but it seems quite clear that the trumpmusk tyranny are quite aware of the suffering and death that their swathing cuts will cause both domestically and internationally.
Not fully aware as authentic knowledge is an epiphanic, enlightened state of that both halves of the tyranny have been mentally and morally disabled from attaining for the entirety of their wretched lives. But they know enough that they fully aware that they can enact their neo-fascist eugenics program via these means. They know the suffering and death that they are causing and are enacting this death-squad policy, not by accident but as precisely their goal.
There will be blowback, including in the form of the terrorism of the sort that the CIA envisaged when they came up with the word “blowback”. But naturally trumpmusk possess such a supreme ignorance of the way the world works that such a possibility cannot have ever passed their benighted, abyssal minds.
The ease with which Musk bought his position, and the brutal simplicity of his program, is due to the fact this path of action is, after all, a simple extension of the reigning oligarchical neo-liberal slash-and-burn ideology. trumpmusk’s modus operandi carries with it all of the momentum of this neo-liberal historical-systemic weight. As a form of hyper-neoliberalism, this also indicts the Democrats whose socio-economic policies and ideology have been in lockstep with those of the GOP. As such, the Democrats are rendered the heavily compromised and morbidly feeble opposition that they have proven to be so far. This applies to both their pitiable fecklessness in these early months of the trumpmusk tyranny and a fortiori during the mentally sclerotic, morally moribund ancien regime admin. of Butcher Biden the Genocidaire of Gaza. Always overshadowed by the threat of trump, Biden had the choice of being an opposition or of being an open door. Senile demented old fool that he was, Biden lacked the dexterity for anything other than path-dependent bourgeois-liberal prize idiocy.
ljsjl 02.19.25 at 12:33 am
Thanks Doug. I could stand to read as many of these accounts as you could bear to write! They are valuable context to what most of us only encounter as headline figures situated in a political contest.
Matt 02.19.25 at 12:57 am
Back when I used to live in Russia (1999-2001) and later spend a fair amout of time in fairly regularly (2001 – around 2010), I drank a fair amount of Moldovan wine. Even early on, you could find dry wine from Moldova, if you looked. It wasn’t great wine, but it was cheap and typically not worse than bad French wine you could by for a lot more money. I had long hoped they’d be able to turn towards the EU, so I’m glad to see that they have been able to do so. I do remember at one point Russia saying they wouldn’t allow in Moldovan wine because it had too much pesticide on it, and the relevant Moldovan official pointing out that they had not been able to afford to buy pesticides since the fall of the Soviet Union, so this was obviously false. It was very typical – an obvious political ploy.
I have a friend – a former colleague from the Peace Corps – who had just started in a USAID position in Kenya at the start of the year, and had moved her family, including a school-aged kid, there. I think she’s a government employee, not a contractor, but I’m not completely sure. They are in total limbo now, for no plausible reason at all. It’s also so terrible and depressing.
paul beard 02.19.25 at 2:28 am
Perhaps the feckless Dems will understand how much power they have, should they ever regain control.
But this post documents the incredible wealth of intergenerational goodwill the US taxpayer has created over decades. The ROI on every dollar spent on USAID vs the DoD would be incredible to see, had we a way to measure the value of human lives improved vs assets/resources secured through “force projection.”
I have no idea how many will die from the Trump/Melon Husk onslaught, but whether it’s hundreds or millions, I want their names and faces to appear next to the lists of names. Someone in this community could write a historical précis from 100 years in tech future…let them know how they will be seen, as wreckers and vandals and murderers of millions.
dk 02.19.25 at 2:58 am
Billionaires get off on exploiting the suffering of others. That’s part of the selection process for becoming a billionaire.
Alan White 02.19.25 at 4:00 am
What wonderfully detailed and impactful stories. But of course this will mean nothing to MAGA, and USAID destruction. We are in the transformation of the USA to a dictatorship, and seemingly nothing can stop it. Blaming Biden is a non-starter–inflation and the merely mild discomfort of the American electorate brought us here. Of course aided by the Goebbels’ FOX-“News” distortions of facts. The US is doomed–and collectively we deserve it. I’m so very sorry that the collateral damage is all those helped around the world by things like USAID.
Edward Gregson 02.19.25 at 4:48 am
Trump’s a zero-sum guy. He likes the idea of gratitude in theory, but I think if he saw it directed to him in person, he’d assume he left some spoils on the table somehow.
Alex SL 02.19.25 at 6:22 am
What gets me again is the stupidity of destroying USAID that is revealed by these stories. As beneficial as it can be to the recipients, from the provider’s perspective, foreign aid is soft power projection and a subsidy to one’s own economy. And indeed I have, of course, read left-wing critiques of that since I was a teenager, to the effect of, “we only do this to open doors for our companies, not to help people” and “most of the money flows right back to our own economy because that is where the agency is obligated to buy the grain/machinery”.
Point being, there are two possibilities here. Either Musk and Trump deliberately want to weaken the global influence and economy of the nation that they are not only citizens of but that they right now are in control of, or they genuinely believe that USAID is full of marxist radicals whose mission is to weaken the global influence and economy of the nation that they are citizens of. Both possibilities are stupid. But the first one seems implausibly stupid – why would they knowingly weaken their own influence? That leaves the second; this is really what they believe, and they act on that belief.
They are not just cynically riding a movement of paranoid conspiracy theorising rubes to power but they are actually themselves some of the rubes caught up in believing the conspiracy theory. High on their own supply. Somewhere in Fox News or the Heritage Foundation must be a few people who currently say, wait, did nobody ever take them aside and explain that this is all just a story we tell the suckers so that they vote against their own interests? Wait, I thought you were going to do that… Oh no.
otto 02.19.25 at 11:16 am
Fun Wine-and-Hospital beds story combo.
And in a good cause. It will all need to be put back together again post Trump.
MisterMr 02.19.25 at 12:33 pm
@Alex Sl 8
“They are not just cynically riding a movement of paranoid conspiracy theorising rubes to power but they are actually themselves some of the rubes caught up in believing the conspiracy theory.”
I think this is something that happens quite often in extremist movement and in authoritarian regimes: there is a sort of echo chamber that is produced by the inner workings of the system.
So to take some famous examples, Stalin probably really believed that ukrainian farmers where hiding the produce (while they were starvating to death) because his system promoted people who told him what he wanted to hear (and killed the others); Mussolini likely greatly overestimated italian military prowess, in particular the navy, because the regime hid the damage done by autarky to italian productive capacity; Putin obviously overestimated Russia’s military might; probably Hitler really believed Germany was losing WW2 because of jewish influence and so on.
So this “the powerful drink their own kool aid” phenomenon is quite common.
Harry 02.19.25 at 2:35 pm
Thanks Doug. This is what CT is for.
In response to Alex SL, I think it’s fair to see what Musk and Trump are doing as accelerating the decline of America’s influence in the world outside the Americas, and the growth of Chinese, and other influence. Is it deliberate? Its very hard to think they’re dumb enough not to know what the effects of USAID have been over so many decades. Or what the effects of rewarding Russian aggression will be, or… If they don’t know it, for sure their enablers in the Senate and Congress do.
Lisa H 02.19.25 at 3:09 pm
Thanks for a wonderful read, which makes Trump’s decision all the more painful. It made me think of the reactions (very anecdotally) to EU money in Eastern Europe and Northern Africa. They seemed far less enthusiastic than what you describe. Do you know anything about differences in their approach? Is it maybe that the incredible bureaucracy of the EU that you describe has a negative impact on the effectiveness and its support programs? Just a thought…
Harry 02.19.25 at 4:00 pm
otto’s very brief comment is maybe more depressing than the post. I have no confidence at all that a post-Trump Democratic administration would have the will, let alone the competence, to put this back together.
John Q 02.19.25 at 8:47 pm
Doubling down on Harry, I can’t see anything being put back together, or even envisage a post-Trump Democratic administration, in the sense of a normal alternation of power. Unless/until Americans reject the Republican party so thoroughly and effectively that it ceases to exist, the US has ceased to be a functioning democracy.
And, unlike the quasi-democratic manoeuvrings that brought Hitler and Mussolini to power with minority support, a majority of Americans (all those who voted Republican, third party of not at all) have chosen this in full knowledge that they were doing so, or else as a result of deliberate self-deception.
Ogden Wernstrom 02.19.25 at 8:58 pm
They don’t want to think about blowback, they’re to busy thinking about kickbacks. They have people who have already created scenarios for post-blowback acts that will make us wistful about the freedoms we still had during the early part of the US’ final presidential term.
Cheez Whiz 02.20.25 at 3:19 am
The choice of USAID as the initial target doesn’t fit anywhere in the Trump revenge/Heritage demolition/Musk hack the government agendas. I’ve seen speculation it was Musk retaliation for some investigation in his businesses. That might have been enough to select USAID as a test run for a process to take over a legacy system and database that none of them had any experience or understanding. Who cares if you trash the USAID system? But they learned enough to move on to where the real money is.
Neville Morley 02.20.25 at 7:45 am
Many thanks for this. I now need to try some Moldovan wine – and I wonder if they produce rosé, as my wife has become a big fan of Bulgarian rosé (which in a vaguely similar manner seems to have enjoyed a post-1989 boom).
On the reasons for attacking USAID: this is pure unfounded speculation, but I’ve found myself wondering about the possible influence of Effective Altruism, in its Longtermism variant: we must prioritise the Future People, and our calculations show that money invested in taking humanity to the stars will bring far greater returns than helping a few African children in the present, so let’s clear away the barriers, like inefficient aid spending, state spending that doesn’t fund rocket ships etc.
novakant 02.20.25 at 8:39 am
Thank you, Doug. This made my day.
While US (and EU) soft power has always been a bit of mixed blessing, I think it’s been mostly a force for good (e.g. Germany!) and it is stories like this that are so important in showing its value. I think deontological ethics has a point maybe not explored enough, i.e. the motivation of the agents is inherent to the outcomes, an aspect consequentialists tend to ignore.
I think the attack on USAID can explained by a deep aversion among some voters to sharing with others and the strong feeling that those others are undeserving freeloaders – it’s just a facet of America First. The same happened in the UK by the way, it’s a pretty universal feeling:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/sep/18/uk-overseas-aid-cuts-ngo-warning
Peter Dorman 02.21.25 at 12:44 am
Like everyone else, I think this is a wonderful post, and I thank Doug for writing it. I wish I could get together with him and other CTers over a bottle of Moldovan red and hear some more stories.
As for the why of all this, I think Neville @17 is on to something, but IMO it goes a lot deeper than EA, which I think is just one symptom. I believe we are dealing with a cult, unorthodox in some respects but broadly in line with other cults past and present. I’ve posted a couple of Substacks on this (here and (here) which you can read if you want the longer version, but the one point that’s germane here is that if you believe the core idea of the cult that set up, staffed and is running DOGE, the future benefits of AI and kindred technologies are so immense over so many generations, that any costs incurred in spurring them are just overwhelmed. As Marc Andreessen assures us, for every Moldovan kid who dies for lack of medical care due to the extinction of USAID, there will be untold millions who will not only survive but live to ages we can barely imagine today. So the guiding principle becomes, destroy as much of the government as you can, especially anything that requires tax revenue that subtracts from money available for tech investment, and if it turns out you really do need some of it you can restore it later — and probably more efficiently with lots of the latest tech. I think DOGE especially has it out for any agency or program that smacks of social justice or redistribution, since in their view this is exactly the mindset and political impetus that obstructs the fullest and most rapid development of the tech that will save us.
Trump matters here only insofar as they bought him his return to office in exchange for the keys to the kingdom.
If, or to the extent, I’m right about the cult hypothesis, there are things we can do to counterattack these nutcases, some of which have been effective in combatting past cults.
JoeInCO 02.21.25 at 6:07 am
I can see no plans in Trump’s madness other than petty retribution. For plans and details he relies on Project 2025 and Elon Musk.* His inner circle, including Russian and Israeli influencers just whisper suggestions that are congruent with Trump’s simple-minded view of the world. I am convinced that he has some form of dementia. He seems to live in this angry/happy/deluded place that is disconnected from any sort of reality when it comes to actual consequences. Does it punish his growing list of enemies? Does it fit in with his stereotypical 1950’s view of America? Then it sounds good to him. Given the enablers in Congress he might actually be correct in his assessment that what he says BECOMES true, at least for the time being.
*Musks entry into the fray was the real October surprise, and in retrospect I think it was the biggest factor in Trump’s win. Certainly in the way he is governing. The other Tech Bros piled into the clown car and the rest is…..well the first time around it is tragedy, so this must be farce. Right?
Trader Joe 02.21.25 at 11:37 am
I too enjoyed the stories, but in the rush to 100% condemn the gutting of USAID, I think many are overlooking a different point, which is the degree of mission creep the USAID and other agencies have developed over decades of unchecked spending.
Its hard to be against hospital beds, so I view that anecdote as a spot on example of what USAID can and should do. I’d never cut such a program.
On the other hand, should the US (or anyone) really be spending time and money interfering in the Moldovan wine industry? While yes, there are some benefits as amply illustrated – a Trumpian would say why not spend the money developing the US wine industry or something similar – you know, spend American money on actual Americans who need it.
Lastly, I’d just add, while I don’t doubt parents who have a child lying sick in a USAID bed will sing some silent thanks for the US, in most countries where such aid is delivered the US, its people and its culture are at best tolerated and at worst openly distained. You chose not to mention the country associated with the second anecdote, but I have a good guess (based on one of your prior posts) and that’s certainly the case in that country. Perhaps the opponents of USAID are simply tired of the US gift horse being constantly looked in the mouth.
oldster 02.21.25 at 1:18 pm
When a battered wife gets help from a shelter to leave an abusive husband, the husband very often turns his wrath on the shelter and its employees.
That is why one of Putin’s first requests of Musk was that he destroy USAID — because of exactly the kind of story you told about Moldova. USAID helped them break free of Putin’s tyranny, and that was unforgivable.
Plus, when Musk gave him all of the data files internal to USAID, that gave Putin a list of collaborators and potential CIA collaborators all around the globe. Those people are being killed right now.
Russell Arben Fox 02.21.25 at 1:29 pm
Like others, Doug, I’m getting to this late, but it is wonderful, and I’m grateful to read it; thanks very much for taking the time to make it available.
As for Alex SL’s comment, I’m close enough more than a few of those left-wing (or, often, Laschian or left conservative, an orientation that I otherwise strongly identify with) perspectives that I’m obliged to take them seriously. And in so doing, what I almost always find, in my judgment, is just, at bottom, a stupidly warped anti-state or anti-American fetish: they can’t actually explain the supposed chain of undemocratic dependencies which, say, restructuring the Moldovan wine market created, but they believe they must be there, because their theory (or their tiny niche on social media) says it must be. Anarchist or socialist critiques of the state have great value, I believe, but those of us (maybe just me) who find ourselves working through those arguments have an obligation to work to prevent them from becoming simplistic calls to burn it all down; that way lies anti-anti-Trumpism, and unfortunately, we now have authoritarians in the White House who are, in some small way at least, calling our bluff.
MisterMr 02.21.25 at 2:10 pm
@Trader Joe 21
I don’t think there has been any “mission creep”. Looking on wikipedia I see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development
“United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. ”
“Development” clearly means economic development, and Moldova, as a post soviet country, clearly needed help in development (actually Russia too needed some, but this is a different story).
A cheap bed is more appreciated in Moldova than in the USA, but also the help USAID gave to the Moldovan economy would have been null in the USA where winemakers already know the ropes that the Moldovan ones, due to being formerly under communist administration, didn’t.
So in this sense there is no difference between spending a few buck in cheap beds (instead of funding the USA NHS, because those bucks wouldn’t be enough) and sending some experts to help the Moldovan wine industry (instead of helping the USA wine industry, because those experts would not have been enough).
Furthermore, a common accusation against this kind of help policies is that they are bad because they, so to speak, give the people fishes instead than teaching them to fish.
In this case, the “beds” are the fishes while the wine side is “teaching them to fish”.
At some point there is a question, that is: should the USA (or other country) do international goodwill operations? and if yes, how much?
Any dollar spent in these operations is a dollar that is not spent for the direct advantage of one USA citizen.
So the question is simply Yes/NO and if Yes then How much, not the specifics of the operation (that might give more or less bang for the buck, but this is another story).
mw 02.21.25 at 5:26 pm
dk@5: Billionaires get off on exploiting the suffering of others. That’s part of the selection process for becoming a billionaire.
With the exception of a very few actual sadists and serial killers, thinking that a group of people is motivated by enjoying the suffering of others is pretty far-fetched. What might be a better model of Trump/Musk?
They believe that the US budget deficit and national debt are much too large (this is hard to dispute).
They believe (as virtually all politicians do) that the major, big ticket entitlement programs (particularly Medicare and Social Security) are untouchable, so those are the last places they’re going to look for savings even though that’s where most of the spending happens.
They believe that government is vastly inefficient in what it does. Here Musk’s experience shapes their view. Consider SpaceX vs NASA and Boeing, Lockheed, and the other military contractors it has traditionally relied on. SpaceX has radically lowered the cost of space launches while dramatically increasing the frequency. Musk thinks DOGE can do the same with government agencies in general.
With respect to USAID, it is an easier target because 1) foreign aid has never been popular with voters, and 2) it is not quite a normal agency but was created by executive order (and what can be created by executive order, etc). Also Trump believes that USAID is full of woke lefties and that a huge portion of the money goes to sinecures for his political adversaries (and has even funded anti-Trump resistance efforts) with only a bit of foreign charitable work done as a cover story.
I see no hope of changing their minds on any of this. It seems that the work to be done is to make the USAID changes unpopular with voters by publicizing good work (as with this post) and by challenging the stream of ‘woke horror stories’ that are being peddled by Trump and DOGE.
Eszter 02.21.25 at 7:11 pm
A very engaging read, thanks so much for sharing!
MPAVictoria 02.21.25 at 9:06 pm
“With the exception of a very few actual sadists and serial killers, thinking that a group of people is motivated by enjoying the suffering of others is pretty far-fetched. ”
Oh you think?
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2025/2/19/white-house-trolls-with-mocking-asmr-video-of-shackled-deportees
Omega Centauri 02.21.25 at 9:15 pm
They are probably aware that blowback will happen. They think they can exploit it, as we’ve seen Putin do over and over again. It’s an opportunity the circle the wagons, and to declare that the nation needs them, as they are the only one’s nasty enough to smash the bad guys. Meanwhile opportunities for corruption multiply….
Alex SL 02.21.25 at 11:14 pm
Russell Arben Fox,
There’s both. There are those simplistic anti-imperialists who reflexively think that everything and everybody who is against the USA is an ally, and that we can build socialism after the current system has a severe enough crisis. But when I wrote my comment, I was thinking among other things of a book I read when younger, whose gist was the argument that foreign aid as it exists is not designed to make the recipients self-sufficient out of altruism but is half subsidy to the donor’s economy and half diplomacy in service of the donor’s foreign policy interests, with benefits to the recipients being more of a nice side-effect but also largely transient.
And that argument has something for it given what is happening at the moment and the reaction of the people in the waiting room described in the original post. The current discourse regarding the destruction of USAID as far as I see it, from Bluesky posts across opinion pieces to Youtubers, is virtually never about the impact on the recipients but instead about (a) US farmers being out of two billion dollars in grain sales (USAID is a subsidy to the US economy) and (b) creating room for a Chinese century (USAID is US foreign policy).
Anybody shutting USAID down must be aiming to weaken US interests or be very stupid. Same for cutting science and lowering vaccination rates, of course, not to speak of what might happen if Musk gets let loose on the Federal Reserve. I wonder if the Republican congresspeople realise that there are indeed “do not press this, it would completely destabilise the economy” buttons that he has to be kept away from, or if they are so ignorant and sheltered that they delude themselves the same way their voters do.
JPL 02.22.25 at 12:35 am
Peter Dorman @19:
Talk about grandiose ideas! (A characteristic tendency with so-called “conservatives” as a personality type. And EA is another crackpot idea.) But if the current political and cultural scene is seen as a critical or watershed moment in the historical unfolding of the human spirit (has it come down to this, after all the struggle?), then the current wave of stupidity and contempt for the scientific and humanistic search for truth indicates that it is indeed part of the eternal struggle between ways of thinking and ways of living and interacting with our fellow human beings. In the Trump MAGA wave there is a loss of a sense of reverence for ideals as part of that struggle to understand.
Matt 02.22.25 at 3:18 am
They believe that the US budget deficit and national debt are much too large (this is hard to dispute).
It’s actually not hard to dispute at all.
LFC 02.22.25 at 3:58 am
mw @25 writes:
[USAID] is not quite a normal agency but was created by executive order….
JFK set up USAID in 1961 to help implement the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, but Congress wrote USAID into statute as an independent agency in the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998.
dk 02.22.25 at 7:11 am
@25 mw
Anyone who’s spent a significant amount of time working for a living has encountered plenty of middle managers who are motivated by enjoying the suffering of others, and middle managers aren’t even billionaires.
mw 02.22.25 at 11:08 am
Matt @31 “It’s actually not hard to dispute at all.”
The debt is at around 120% of GDP and growing. Borrowing accounts for about a quarter of annual US federal expenditures. The growing debt and spike in interest rates have caused debt service to consume and large and growing portion of the budget. The national debt stands at about the level it was at the end of WWII but at that time, the US had a much younger, much faster growing population and all of its main economic rivals were just starting to clear away the rubble. The bottom line is that the fiscal situation is really not sustainable. You could reasonable argue that the US should increase its level of taxation (perhaps by implementing an EU style VAT), but you can’t reasonably argue that the the US can just continue indefinitely on the current path.
dk@33 “Anyone who’s spent a significant amount of time working for a living has encountered plenty of middle managers who are motivated by enjoying the suffering of others”
Then I guess I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in my career. I’ve met middle manager who were out of their depth, lazy, intoxicated with the latest management fad, and even unethical, but I’ve never run into no actual sadists who went out of their way to make people miserable for the fun of it.
Trader Joe 02.22.25 at 1:07 pm
@24 MisterMr
Maybe mission creep isn’t the right word, but I think conceptually there is a big step between handing out beds/meds, food and plain old money (i.e. the Marshall plan) and designing programs that more particularly intervene in an economy or impose our social values on it. I’m not saying these ideas are wrong or bad or shouldn’t be undertaken, but once one country decides they have the right to make these interventions it should be understandable why some might resent the intrusion.
The US has been running a $1 to $2 Trillion dollar deficit for nearly two decades and this is entirely unsustainable. Some things will have to be eliminated even if they are good. I don’t think 100% elimination of USAID is the right answer, but the number absolutely is not zero. I’d say the same of every other department in government.
Alex SL 02.22.25 at 1:32 pm
mw,
I believe that Trump, Musk, and various and sundry Republicans do have genuine beliefs. Depending on the person, those may include an evidence-free but strongly held gut feeling that government is inefficient compared to corporations(1), that there must be lots of waste in government(2), and that concerns about climate change are made up to destroy the economy.
Still, a lot of what is happening in the USA at the moment, and a lot of the impetus behind MAGA, is visibly enjoyment at the suffering of others. I have lately been reading the LeopardsAteMyFace Reddit, which, like it or not, is populated by Dem supporters who get some relief in these dark times from ridiculing Trump voters who regret their vote now they have predictably been betrayed and adversely affected by the cuts. The first observation here is that this is the enjoyment you doubt on the other side. But more to the point, a through-line of most of the screenshots they share is not, as one would expect, “I regret my vote because didn’t think he (and Musk) would do cuts/deportation/cruelty against minorities” but instead “I am still in favour of cuts/deportation/cruelty against minorities, but I regret my vote because I didn’t think it would affect my wife’s job/lead to my husband being deported/cost my disabled daughter her support”. There is a deep selfishness in conservatism. They want to see minorities lose their jobs, see foreigners deported, see poor people suffer, see those who step out of line be harshly punished, and so on, while always expecting an exception for themselves. Because they aren’t, like, those people. They are different.
But beyond that, the proof is plain to see all over. “Liberal tears”, “cry harder”, “daddy is back and will spank you”, revenge fantasies. They say all of that out loud, often in front of microphones. Decisions like letting 500 millions worth of food rot rather than ship it to feed the starving, deporting refugees who will likely be executed in their country of origin, and especially the entirely unnecessary cruelty towards transgender people, but even random nonsense like shutting down all EV chargers at government buildings or Trump trying to meddle with traffic regulations in New York. Those are not the decisions of somebody who wants efficiency and reduce the budget. They are only explicable as spite and pettiness. These people see something that Dems/Liberals value and want to destroy it, not for policy reasons or to increase efficiency, but simply because Dems/Liberals value it.
(1) If a public servant gets paid fifty money to dig a hole, that is inefficient. If a private company gets paid 80 money to dig a hole (fifty for the work, thirty to make a profit), it is efficient. That is just how things work! Government bad, me big brain.
(2) No, I didn’t mean education, of course we need that. No, I didn’t mean health care, of course we need that. No, I didn’t mean research, of course we need that. No, I didn’t mean pensions, of course we need those. No, I didn’t mean national parks, of course we want those. No, I didn’t mean the army, of course we have to defend ourselves. Come on, you know I mean all of those unnecessary bureaucrats that are paid to do nothing, I know they just exist because the angry man on the television says they do…
mw 02.22.25 at 3:38 pm
AlexSL @ 36 “those may include an evidence-free but strongly held gut feeling that government is inefficient compared to corporations(1)”
Compared to some corporations. Musk clearly doesn’t think Boeing has been an efficiently run corporation or that Twitter was one before he bought it and reduced head count by 80%. Musk apparently believes in his own personal management genius, not that private enterprise is automatically well-managed.
Still, a lot of what is happening in the USA at the moment, and a lot of the impetus behind MAGA, is visibly enjoyment at the suffering of others.
The tribal enjoyment in seeing your political adversaries routed is extremely common among otherwise ‘normal’ people, and I have not observed lower levels of delight in the political suffering of conservatives among progressives when they are on ascendant. This surely derives from the same place as enjoying the downfall of the rivals of your beloved sports team (and the lamentations of their fans). This may not be one of our more admirable human tendencies, but it’s not the same thing as sadism.
J-D 02.22.25 at 9:15 pm
A Republican Representative held a public meeting on Wednesday in an area that voted for Donald Trump by two to one.
The crowd did not shout ‘VAT!’
The crowd did shout ‘Tax Elon! Tax the wealthy! Tax the rich! Tax the billionaires!’
Matt 02.22.25 at 9:41 pm
Trader Joe,
That account won’t work in general, and clearly won’t work here. Foreign aid is a tiny % of the total budget, and USAID is only a percentage of that, so no one who was meaningfully focused on reducing the debt or budget deficits would go there for action. And, there is a good way to tell if someone is serious about reducing the debt bor budget deficit – see if they are serious about raising taxes on the wealth. (That’s where the money is, as the saying goes.) If not, the person isn’t serious about the debt or the deficit. Of course, the only time the deficit has been improved in recent years was under Clinton, when he raised taxes on the wealth (a bit.) Neither Musk nor Trump is, of course, considering raising taxes on the wealthy (though Trump’s tarrifs will raise them on consumers), so it’s clear they are not motivated by reducing the debt or the deficit. So, talking about those things in this context is either deeply confused or a distraction.
Kenny Easwaran 02.22.25 at 10:27 pm
I really don’t like the attempt to blame this on neoliberals or effective altruists – this group is the very opposite of neoliberals and effective altruists.
Neoliberals believe that technocratic government organized around effective use of markets is an effective way to provide a better life or more people. Trump’s central talking point for decades has been an opposition to free trade and open markets. He doesn’t believe in setting up effective programs that are governed through open markets – he believes in closing markets so that people with the right connections can use their power to profit.
Effective altruists believe that we should try to provide the most quality of life improvement for the most beings, as effectively as we can. While they have historically opposed some USAID activities (particularly the ones that are basically giveaways to American agribusiness, masquerading as food aid to the poor, despite destroying local agriculture in the target country), they’ve been some of the biggest supporters of many USAID programs, notably including PEPFAR. (For a while it was hard to find anyone other than EAs who had noticed that GW Bush had actually set up a good program, because it was too politically inconvenient for everyone in every political party!) There are some disagreements among effective altruists about whether humans currently living in poor countries are the ones we can most effectively help, or whether it’s animals, or future humans – but I don’t think you’ll find any effective altruist who thinks that suddenly yanking the funding from these programs is an effective means to some sort of altruistic end. (Musk has at times claimed to be an effective altruist, but I don’t think there is any investment or donation he has made under that label more recent than his 2015 investment in OpenAI – which he currently thinks was counterproductive.)
mw 02.22.25 at 10:53 pm
J-D @38. “The crowd did shout ‘Tax Elon! Tax the wealthy! Tax the rich! Tax the billionaires!’”
The general public is about equally deluded about the cost of foreign aid and the amount of money (in total) possessed by US billionaires (both are grossly overestimated). Even expropriating their entire fortunes wouldn’t cover the deficit more than briefly (it certainly wouldn’t make much of a dent in the overall debt). If the deficit is going to be brought under control primarily by tax increases, those taxes are going to have to be broad-based, like a VAT.
Alex SL 02.23.25 at 2:24 am
J-D,
Assuming the people shouting that aren’t all Democratic activists but disappointed Republican voters, I wonder who and what they thought they were voting for. The outcome of this last US election is a lot like somebody buying a vat of concentrated acid, and despite being told by the salesman that it is dangerous and corrosive and seeing the large “danger! corrosive!” label on it, now complaining how dangerous and corrosive the vat turned out to be. Are Trump voters all completely blind and deaf and never check in on Trump’s events, speeches, and interviews? (The answer is in my previous comment: they thought his policies would only hurt those people.)
mw,
You may be able to construct a non-sadistic story for most decisions (e.g., they genuinely believe that black people don’t deserve to have positions of influence, but it isn’t hatred), but at least the transgender panic is founded on sadism. There is no rational explanation otherwise for the relevant EOs and purging of their very existence from any document. One might say that conservative parents wanting to have complete control over their own children and not allowing them any agency and self-expression is an additional factor, but I would also fold that under deliberate psychological abuse.
Gareth Wilson 02.23.25 at 2:40 am
That company getting 37.5% profit margin on digging holes, is it publicly traded?
Alex SL 02.23.25 at 6:48 am
Gareth Wilson,
The fifty/eighty number is random, just like “digging a hole” is a random job. That being said, I have seen labour hire companies that would cost ca. 50% more per hour worked for a contractor than hiring somebody of the same skill level directly as a staff member. It is very widely known that contractors bill more than employees cost; a quick google will reveal everything from small business advice websites to thundering union statements against outsourcing, all discussing that reality.
The difference is not all profit, of course. Other aspects are economies of scale – a small labour hire company likely has higher overheads per person than a large government agency -, the need to have an advertising and lobbying budget that the agency doesn’t, and different leave, insurance, and superannuation arrangements that I will not waste everybody’s screen space with.
There may be arguments on the other side; for example, you may only have a short project for which hiring a full staff member is too long-term and more than needed. I once worked with a specialist who preferred to be a contractor for the project where he helped me, because he got to take home more salary at the cost of not getting as much superannuation as he would have as a staff member.
Whatever those trade-offs, the one thing replacing a public service with a for-profit company is guaranteed not to do is save money, because why would a for-profit company be willing to provide the service if it can’t make a profit on top of the base expense that is needed to provide it? The only ways around that conundrum are being allowed to pay starvation wages or running the services into the ground through perennial under-investment and lack of maintenance (cf., British water supply, or the German railroad currently operating as a corporation instead of a public service).
J-D 02.23.25 at 7:05 am
The general public is about equally deluded about the cost of foreign aid and the amount of money (in total) possessed by US billionaires (both are grossly overestimated). Even expropriating their entire fortunes wouldn’t cover the deficit more than briefly (it certainly wouldn’t make much of a dent in the overall debt). If the deficit is going to be brought under control primarily by tax increases, those taxes are going to have to be broad-based, like a VAT.I was only quoting the report. All I’m saying is that if it’s accurate it tells us what the crowd shouted, not what would be a good plan for reducing the deficit. If it comes to that, I don’t know whether reducing the deficit was that crowd’s concern. It’s not mine, I know that much. I expect higher taxes on the rich to produce improvements regardless of its effect on the deficit (for reasons I am happy to go in to if anybody actually wants to know, and which it’s just possible bear some kind of relationship to the crowd’s reasoning, although that can only be a guess).
As for VAT: are you telling me that in the absence of a VAT there must be deficits, or that in the presence of a VAT there can’t be deficits, or that there’s no effective way of broadening the tax base without a VAT, or what? Why would that be the very first tool you want to pull out of the box?
I don’t know who they were. Maybe all of them, or some of them, or most of them were Democratic activists. What I do know is that they were the people who turned up to the meeting, in a Republican-voting area. I don’t even know that they came from that area, but if they did all come in from outside that would have to mean that the locals from this Republican-voting area were avoiding turning up the meeting.
As for what they thought they were voting for: I don’t know how anybody decides how they’re going to use their vote (and I include in that Democratic voters, Republican voters, non-voters and everybody else). All the report tells me is what the people who came to the meeting chose to say when they came there.
Doug Muir 02.23.25 at 12:07 pm
OP, looping in a few things here.
“I think conceptually there is a big step between handing out beds/meds, food… and designing programs that more particularly intervene in an economy or impose our social values on it… once one country decides they have the right to make these interventions it should be understandable why some might resent the intrusion.”
— This is the sort of thing that makes development people sigh heavily.
First off, there’s a Thank You, Captain Obvious aspect. That’s because we go to a great deal of trouble to make sure that our programs are welcome, and are doing something the host country actually wants. We don’t fly down in a helicopter and start working on the wine industry or whatever. Every USAID program, without exception, is based on an agreement with the host country.
And then when you’re the guy who’s actually running the program — which is to say, me — you spend rather a lot of time going around and getting what we euphemistically call “stakeholder buy-in”. Which is to say, you talk to government officials, and the Chamber of Commerce, and industries or business that might be affected, and maybe labor unions too, and possibly local think tanks and NGOs and civil society. And then you spend more time negotiating and signing Memorandums of Understanding — I’ve long since lost track of how many of those I’ve signed over the years.
My last project in Moldova involved truckers. So I talked to a lot of Moldovan truckers! And individual trucking companies, and the /association/ of trucking companies, and freight forwarders, and customs brokers, and the local DHL office, and the “Transport” subcommittee of the Chamber of Commerce, and of course the Moldovan Ministry of Transportation. All of this was to make sure that we were delivering assistance that was both useful and wanted.
Having to chart a course that satisfied all these different stakeholders? A hard challenge! But encountering resistance or resentment because we were trying to “impose our social values”? A complete non-issue.
Second “why some might resent the intrusion” — I see people raising this a lot. As far as I can tell it’s some weird sort of psychological projection, because people in the host countries pretty much never do “resent the intrusion”. I mean, a USAID program decides to spend millions of dollars in your community. They’re hiring a bunch of local people and they’re paying lots of money to local subcontractors and vendors. They’re not spreading propaganda or supporting a particular political party or ideology; they’re working with the wine industry or truckers or upgrading the local hospital. They’re talking to everyone. They have an agreement with your government. And they’re being ostentatiously public and transparent about what they’re doing. So why exactly would ordinary people “resent” this “intrusion”?
“in most countries where such aid is delivered the US, its people and its culture are at best tolerated and at worst openly distained.”
— I’ve seen this one too. Again, it strikes me as some sort of weird projection, and it’s always from people who have zero experience actually living in developing countries.
It’s factually incorrect. I’ve worked in… oh, about twenty countries across three continents. In basically none of them were Americans “at best tolerated and at worst openly distained”. American government and politics — yes, absolutely. But “the US, its people and its culture”? Hard no.
“You chose not to mention the country associated with the second anecdote, but I have a good guess (based on one of your prior posts) and that’s certainly the case in that country.”
— You would guess completely wrong. The country in question was then, and remains today, firmly pro-American.
“Perhaps the opponents of USAID are simply tired of the US gift horse being constantly looked in the mouth.”
— I can’t claim to read minds, but this does not seem to be why the Trump administration is dismantling USAID.
Doug M.
mw 02.23.25 at 1:00 pm
J-D @45 “As for VAT: are you telling me that in the absence of a VAT there must be deficits, or that in the presence of a VAT there can’t be deficits, or that there’s no effective way of broadening the tax base without a VAT, or what? Why would that be the very first tool you want to pull out of the box?”
Of course not. Budgets could be brought into better balance by reducing spending as well. Historically speaking, right now the US tax revenues are at 17% of GDP. This is slightly below the historical average since the late 60s and is on par with lower taxing European countries, but well below the European average of 26%. I mention VAT first only because VAT is how the higher-taxing Europeans have done it.
AlexSL @44 “You may be able to construct a non-sadistic story for most decisions (e.g., they genuinely believe that black people don’t deserve to have positions of influence”
What should lead us to think that the Trump administration believes that ‘black people don’t deserve to have positions of influence’? Or the same for non-white people generally?
“but at least the transgender panic is founded on sadism. There is no rational explanation otherwise”
During just the past decade, the percentage of 18-24 year-olds identifying as transgender has quintupled. This is obviously a pretty extraordinary rate of change. As far as I can tell, conservatives believe that this has resulted from social contagion abetted by active encouragement by progressive educators. While these beliefs about the causes may be completely wrong, they are neither inherently crazy nor sadistic.
Trader Joe 02.23.25 at 1:07 pm
@46 Doug
Thank you for your patient response to my various comments. Obviously your experience is your experience and I don’t mean to denigrate the work you and your colleagues are/have been doing. As I mentioned in each of my posts, I don’t think what is being done to USAID is correct in its entirety, but I think programs across the board need to be reduced in size and in scope to fit a US budget which can no longer embrace every possible good program. A similar axe is being taken to many departments, USAID was just the first (and I doubt it was chosen at random).
The one place I would push back is the concept of where Americans are liked or not – Moldova, clearly as you said, not an issue but the top 5 USAID recipients are as follows:
Ukraine
Ethiopia
Jordan
Afganistan
Somalia
I could argue all 5 of these disdain America and Americans but at a minimum 3 of them do. Perhaps I’ve overgeneralized down the list, but the top 5 are what people see and react to and what gives rise to the “Why are we giving Afghanistan money, they hate us” reaction I spoke of.
Again, thanks for your response and the piece itself.
Doug Muir 02.23.25 at 4:40 pm
I’ve worked in four of those five countries. I really don’t know where you’re getting “I could argue all 5 of these disdain Americans”.
Hostile governments? Sure. Afghanistan’s government is virulently hostile to the US. Public dislike of US policy? Absolutely — every third Jordanian has a cousin in the West Bank.
But hostile /people/, who “barely tolerate or openly disdain” Americans? Yeah no. I’ll set Afghanistan aside because I only went there a couple of times — although I met and dealt with a lot of Afghans, and never had any problems. Jordan, though? I went there a bunch of times, never had any issues. (True, there was this one guy in Amman who wanted to confront me about religion and just wouldn’t let it go. But he was American, a Baptist from Georgia.) And this is not because Jordanians are sweet and kind. Jordanians definitely have strong and not entirely positive opinions about (for instance) Israelis, Egyptians, Iraqis and Saudis. But Americans? Eh, not really.
Ethiopia, much the same. Ask an Ethiopian about Somalis and, umm. But Americans? “My cousin has a restaurant in Chevy Chase!” Zero issues.
Ukraine? I went there a bunch of times before 2022, and everyone was already arms-open friendly to the American. Brought my family on my very last trip, which was right before the pandemic. The kids still talk about it: everyone was so nice!
And this isn’t because I don’t recognize hostility and disdain towards Americans. I’ve encountered it a number of times.
But the worst hostility towards Americans I ever encountered wasn’t in a developing country. It was in a western European city that was a major tourist destination. The second worst was in Serbia in 2001, which — yeah okay, the dust was literally settling from the American bombing of Belgrade. Third worst was an African country that shall remain nameless, but when I mentioned it to another African from a neighboring country he laughed: “Oh, they hate /everybody/!”
Is it just me? Well, there was a Pew poll a couple of years back, checking attitudes towards the US around the world. Unfortunately it only covered a few countries in the developing world. But Indonesians really like us (56% positive to 24% negative), as do Indians (65-26), and Kenyans (71-22), and Nigerians just think we are the bees knees (74-20).
(The ones who aren’t entirely sure whether they like us or not? Canadians, of course.)
So, it doesn’t seem to be just me. Despising and disliking Americans is a thing, but it’s definitely not the default. Nevertheless a lot of Americans will stubbornly insist that, no, they really must hate us. As I said, I’ve run into it before.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 02.23.25 at 4:49 pm
As to “why are we giving Afghanistan money, they hate us” — on one hand, yes, I get why people think that.
On the other hand, it’s simplistic and stupid. The Taliban are not a popular government. About a third of the country hates them — that’s the ethnic and religious minorities, all of whom are being brutally oppressed — and at least another third heartily dislikes them. If no-kidding free elections could be held in Afghanistan tomorrow the Taliban would be voted out instantly.
Unfortunately the Taliban have all the guns right now. Also, after 40+ years of war everyone is just tired. (This is the Taliban’s biggest selling point: they’ve brought peace. It’s brutal and oppressive and the economy is stagnant, but it’s peace.) Even people who loathe them are not willing to start the shooting again. So the Afghans, and the world, are stuck with the Taliban, probably for many years to come.
Pretty much all USAID programs in Afghanistan these days are humanitarian, providing food and medical care to Afghans. The Taliban don’t much like USAID, but they sullenly allow aid to continue because they can’t do that stuff themselves. Shutting down USAID will mean some combination of “lots of Afghans die, mostly women and children” and “China moves in”.
Now, you can argue with a straight face against aid to Afghans on various grounds — moral hazard (if we keep providing aid the Taliban will never bother to do it themselves), implicit support for an evil regime, not the most effective use of limited funds, whatever. Those arguments have been thrashed out, at length, inside USAID and State. And maybe they got it wrong. But they’re grappling with a complicated situation with no good choices.
Or they were. Most of them have been fired now, of course.
Doug M.
joeyjoejoe 02.23.25 at 9:19 pm
Why is everyone avoiding the obvious response? This anecdotal story about USAID is nice. Similarly, there are similar anecdotal stories about USAID that are simply absurd. You have all read them, you all know them.
It would be nice to cut the silliness and retain the good stuff (hospital beds for the poor, affordable wine for hipsters I guess). I am sure that good stuff will come back. But as someone said: the current government spending is utterly unsustainable. And the absurd USAID anecdotes absolutely deserve to be cut.
Fascism isn’t cutting government, and fascism isn’t attempting to live within one’s means. Fascism isn’t cutting the USAID projects that we all know about but don’t want to admit. Fascism isn’t replacing the previous administration’s people with the new administrations people.
You are supposedly academics. Try to be better than reddit, folks.
Joe
Alex SL 02.23.25 at 9:52 pm
mw,
We can go around in circles here, but I will make this my last one. If you can look at, for example, event speeches by Trump and his assorted hangers-on, starting with the one where he famously mimed a caricature of disability for the amusement of his followers, and not understand what is going on there, we are unlikely to find consensus. Still:
What should lead us to think that the Trump administration believes that ‘black people don’t deserve to have positions of influence’? Or the same for non-white people generally?
DEI means making sure that minority members get hired when they are qualified. These people are currently wiping away all DEI. They are creating conditions where white males can be hired even when they are less qualified than the minority candidate. What is not computing for you here?
It was also just in the news that the Trump government fired a four star black general and replaced him with a three star white general who was so unqualified that he needed a waiver to be appointed. Not in theory or some idea that was tossed around in a speech, it was in the news just now, a thing that happened.
As far as I can tell, conservatives believe that this has resulted from social contagion abetted by active encouragement by progressive educators. While these beliefs about the causes may be completely wrong, they are neither inherently crazy nor sadistic.
These belief that any significant number of people would undergo something as intimate, transformative, and socially dangerous as gender transition because of “social contagion” is inherently crazy. It is just nuts. It makes no sense whatsoever. One could just as well argue that gays only start to exist when they aren’t violently suppressed oh wait it is the exact same thing isn’t it
The sadism is in how that inherently crazy belief is then acted on. Making it illegal for them to go into the gendered toilet that matches their outward presentation and creating a climate that leads to harassment for going into the toilet that doesn’t match their outward presentation. Withholding treatment when they are “too young” and then ridiculing a trans woman as “obviously a man in a skirt” when, because treatment was withheld when they were young, they only received treatment when they had already gone through puberty. Or withholding treatment entirely, leading to life-long misery and potentially suicide. Those are not the actions of a movement that has “legitimate concerns” about social contagion or women’s rights but is otherwise empathetic. They are the actions of a movement that revels in creating tails I win, heads you lose scenarios and will not rest until transgender people are eradicated from the public. Hatred and sadism.
Trader Joe,
This “I think programs across the board need to be reduced in size” and oopsie, now that you explain it based on your direct experience, my argument falls apart is exactly what I was trying to poke fun at in earlier comments. Be it foreign aid or research or consumer protection, the areas that Musk is currently going after all have three things in common: they are a rounding error in the budget, which is largely social security, pensions, army, and interest payments; they provide benefits much larger than what is gained from cutting them; and they are so heavily regulated and audited that there is virtually no possibility of waste and fraud except in how complying with the heavy regulations against fraud and waste wastes a lot of employee hours that could be used instead to do something productive if we applied a bit more trust and common sense.
The entire idea of finding meaningful amounts of waste in those areas is misguided. In your case it seems there is a good-faith belief that is sadly based on misunderstanding; in the case of Musk the question is still open whether he is so innumerate that he actually believes he will reduce waste and find fraud or whether he is only using those buzzwords as a cover to take revenge for his companies having been accused of fraud and to destroy the regulatory state for his own short-term personal benefit. The way he publicly shouted about the year 1875 issue in COBOL and duplicated social security numbers (because people change their names) suggests that innumeracy is at least part of the explanation; he truly believes he will find hundreds of billions in fraud because he doesn’t understand how government agencies work, he doesn’t understand how programming works, he has never looked at budget numbers, and he has no theory of mind for other people.
J-D 02.23.25 at 9:53 pm
No, I have not.
You are wrong.
J-D 02.23.25 at 11:22 pm
There are eight members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Donald has dismissed the one who was a woman and the one who was black. He has not (yet, at least) dismissed the six who are white men.
Somebody who wants to construct alternative explanations for this development will, I am confident, find ways of doing so.
J-D 02.23.25 at 11:30 pm
Suppose, just for a moment, that it were true (which it isn’t) that people who would not otherwise identify themselves as trans are being induced by the influence of others to identify as trans and also that people who would not otherwise identify themselves as gay are being induced by the influence of others to identify themselves as gay. Well, so what? Why would that have to be something the government has to intervene to prevent? People who would not otherwise identify themselves as Christian, or as ‘born again’, or as Republicans, or as conservatives, are induced by the influence of others to identify themselves in those ways. I will say unambiguously–I have said before–that there is no good reason to be a Republican, but I would be unambiguously opposed to any government attempt to restrain people from using their influence to induce others to identify themselves as Republicans (or as conservatives, or as Christians, or as ‘born again’). If people are actually trying to influence others (by non-coercive means) to change the way they identify, then the government should stay out of it.
All the more so, emphatically, when that’s a mischaracterisation of what’s actually happening.
Edward Gregson 02.24.25 at 7:13 am
mw @47
We know that the Trump administration believes black people shouldn’t have positions of influence because they appoint guys like this to important roles, who say things like “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-taps-right-wing-ideologue-senior-state-dept-job-2025-02-04/
We know the Trump administration is motivated by sadism on trans people because they do things like ordering that all transgender female prison inmates be denied proper medical care and moved to men’s prisons, where they will be at enormous risk of sexual assault, despite such a policy having no credible benefits to budgets or outcomes.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/30/nx-s1-5277164/trump-executive-order-trans-inmates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights_in_the_United_States#V-coding