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Merged USAID: is it really a bunch of crazy leftists? / Trump Was Absolutely Right to Shut Down USAID

In the 27 March edition, The Economist stated, "Curbing infectious diseases creates benign spillovers. An Ebola outbreak that is spotted fast and scotched at source does far less harm than one that is allowed to spread. The donor-funded drugs that keep hivpatients alive also prevent them from passing on the virus. The benefits extend to the rich world, too, since bugs respect no borders and treatment is far more expensive in rich countries than in poor ones. In America just two cases of Ebola cost one hospital over $1m in 2014; each extra hiv infection costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat over a patient’s lifetime...However, even Gavi struggles to raise enough money. It needs $9bn to help inoculate 500m children over the next five years, and to save hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa with the new malaria vaccines. Yet it had to postpone a recent refinancing meeting because donor countries were busy, and a leak to the New York Times suggests that America plans to cut it off." Although this story is broader than the USAID issue, some of the comments made above are pertinent to the question of what USAID did.
 
www.cbsnews.com

CDC denies help for lead poisoning in Milwaukee schools due to layoffs

The CDC rejected a request for help "due to the complete loss" of their lead poisoning experts.
www.cbsnews.com www.cbsnews.com

milwaukee denied assistance from cdc with removal of hazardous levels of lead in schools because the cdc laid off entire lead poisoning team. a number of other teams laid off as well, like chemical spills and radiation experts
 
dirtywick said:
www.cbsnews.com

CDC denies help for lead poisoning in Milwaukee schools due to layoffs

The CDC rejected a request for help "due to the complete loss" of their lead poisoning experts.
www.cbsnews.com www.cbsnews.com

milwaukee denied assistance from cdc with removal of hazardous levels of lead in schools because the cdc laid off entire lead poisoning team. a number of other teams laid off as well, like chemical spills and radiation experts
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The stupity of this administration is never ending.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
I found a pro-trump rant on social media, and I am quoting the last two sentences, along with my response: "For 4 years you watched this country get run into the ground on all fronts and you said nothing! Now, it’s our turn!!!!" To take one example, when Elon Musk fed USAID to the wood chipper (his words), ongoing clinical trials were cancelled before they were completed. In one sense, this is as bad as building 80% of a bridge and then quitting. In other ways, it is worse. A bridge can be completed, but a clinical trial cannot be stopped and then restarted later. Furthermore, there are clear ethical rules about when a clinical trial may be stopped, and Mr. Musk and Secretary Rubio lack the medical knowledge to make such a call. I wish this were the only such example of what "our turn" means in practice.

I also wanted to come back to the issue of the 90 day pause: "Sec. 3. (a) 90-day pause in United States foreign development assistance for assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy. All department and agency heads with responsibility for United States foreign development assistance programs shall immediately pause new obligations and disbursements of development assistance funds to foreign countries and implementing non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors pending reviews of such programs for programmatic efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy, to be conducted within 90 days of this order. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) shall enforce this pause through its apportionment authority."

By 10 March (well before 90 days had transpired), and USAID was 83% gone with the rest moving to the state department. Hmmm....
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USAID, I didn't.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
In the 27 March edition, The Economist stated, "Curbing infectious diseases creates benign spillovers. An Ebola outbreak that is spotted fast and scotched at source does far less harm than one that is allowed to spread. The donor-funded drugs that keep hivpatients alive also prevent them from passing on the virus. The benefits extend to the rich world, too, since bugs respect no borders and treatment is far more expensive in rich countries than in poor ones. In America just two cases of Ebola cost one hospital over $1m in 2014; each extra hiv infection costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat over a patient’s lifetime...However, even Gavi struggles to raise enough money. It needs $9bn to help inoculate 500m children over the next five years, and to save hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa with the new malaria vaccines. Yet it had to postpone a recent refinancing meeting because donor countries were busy, and a leak to the New York Times suggests that America plans to cut it off." Although this story is broader than the USAID issue, some of the comments made above are pertinent to the question of what USAID did.
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In summary: Let the poor and the brown people die first.
 
dirtywick said:
www.cbsnews.com

CDC denies help for lead poisoning in Milwaukee schools due to layoffs

The CDC rejected a request for help "due to the complete loss" of their lead poisoning experts.
www.cbsnews.com www.cbsnews.com

milwaukee denied assistance from cdc with removal of hazardous levels of lead in schools because the cdc laid off entire lead poisoning team. a number of other teams laid off as well, like chemical spills and radiation experts
Click to expand...
I would note that it was not the CDC that laid off teams - it was direct intervention by the US HHS headed by Kennedy
 
The NYT reported, "Even that figure [150 billion] may be too high, according to a New York Times analysis of DOGE’s claims. That’s because, when Mr. Musk’s group tallies up its savings so far, it inflates its progress by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year — and by making guesses about spending that might not happen at all...Mr. Musk’s group has now triggered mass firings across the government, and sharp cutbacks in humanitarian aid around the world." An earlier NYT article reported, "This month, recipients of U.S.A.I.D. funds were asked to justify their value to the administration through questionnaires that asked, among other things, whether their programs helped to limit illegal immigration or secure rare earth minerals." This article also has a timeline of the first hundred days of this administration's actions toward USAID.
 
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dirtywick said:
futurism.com

Elon Musk Admits That His Efforts Have Been a Dismal Failure

Elon Musk told president Donald Trump that DOGE anticipated to save $150 billion, falling well short of the original goal of $2 trillion.
futurism.com futurism.com

anyone still arguing the government is inefficient, private equity can do a better job? article about the failure of doge to find fraud and waste
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What are the odds that the $150bn is itself a massive over-exaggeration? And that's before we factor in the added costs of the DOGE destruction.
 
dirtywick said:
futurism.com

Elon Musk Admits That His Efforts Have Been a Dismal Failure

Elon Musk told president Donald Trump that DOGE anticipated to save $150 billion, falling well short of the original goal of $2 trillion.
futurism.com futurism.com

anyone still arguing the government is inefficient, private equity can do a better job? article about the failure of doge to find fraud and waste
Click to expand...
By rights, Muskrat owes the USA $150 billion in reparations for damage done to the US government. Plus whatever remains of his personal fortune in payment for "the immense hurt and suffering he and DOGE has inflicted on the US public".

And he and the DOGE team should be in jail for the rest of their lives for all the illegalities they have committed, such as purporting to be government operatives without congressional authority, breaking into government databases, violating statutory privacy provisions on numerous occasions, stealing personal and financial data from government sources, destroying critical database contents, and being absolute arseholes to boot. But that's just a personal feeling. ;)
 
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dirtywick said:

whistleblower accuses doge of stealing a bunch of sensitive data, covering their tracks
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"Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do." Something is not making sense, yet.
 
From an article at National Public Radio that was updated on 3 February 2025: "Musk has voiced numerous criticisms of the agency on X, citing "corruption and waste." He has asserted that only 10% of funds reach communities abroad and that USAID pays for undocumented crossings into the U.S. and funds abortion services." CNN wrote on 3 February, "the X owner [Mr. Musk] called USAID “incredibly politically partisan” and said it has been supporting “radically left causes throughout the world including things that are anti-American.”" In searching for these and other articles, I had hoped to gain insight into the core of Mr. Musk's animus toward USAID, but I am not sure I have arrived there yet.

Here is one additional quote from the NPR article: "President Trump temporarily halted foreign assistance in that order on the first day of his presidency, writing that foreign aid serves to "destabilize world peace."" I would respectfully ask the president for an example.
 
In early February Fox News reported, "He [Mr. Musk] also wrote several other posts about the agency, saying things like, "USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America" and "USAID is evil."" One wonders what Mr. Musk actually thinks.
 
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