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

Chris_Halkides said:
You did not substantiate your claim of something's being a slush fund. Reporter Conor Murray at Forbes examined some of the claims and found them false or misleading. Mr. Murray wrote in part, "There’s no evidence to suggest USAID has engaged in money laundering. On Saturday afternoon, Musk reposteda claim on X that suggested USAID was a “form of money laundering tax payers money into far-left organizations,” adding: “Absolutely,” though neither poster offered sources or factual information. Although Republicans have criticized the organization for alleged wasteful spending, there’s no evidence that USAID was engaging in criminal behavior to support left-wing organizations." You can also find an article at The Economist newsmagazine, which gives some indication of what USAID does, and from which I quoted (without the search function here, I realize that one has to do some scrolling to find this link).

If one is serious about rooting out fraud and waste, one hires forensic accountants. One does not bandy unsubstantiated allegations about on X. Mr. Musk does the latter, and I see no evidence that he has done the former. Make of that what you will.
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I had no idea that "slush fund" connoted "money laundering". That kind of criminality is not what I intended to imply, nor what I believe has been going on.

ETA: Also, I don't think money laundering as a concept makes sense, in the context of federal funds being spent by the federal government.
 
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Ziggurat said:
Which also suggests it's one of the most pork-laden agencies in the government as well. You do know that earmarks are often essentially political payoffs to supporters, right?
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No, "ear marks" means the money has been allocated for a specific purpose or program.

Can you provide any evidence whatsoever that USAID is "one of the most pork-laden agencies in the government" at all? Any supporting documentation? Again "I don't understand/like this program" is not pork or fraud.
 
Donal said:
No, "ear marks" means the money has been allocated for a specific purpose or program.
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No. Earmarks specify the recipient, not simply the purpose. If it's just allocated to a purpose but NOT a recipient (ie, it's going to have a competitive bid), then it's not an earmark.

And the reason that Congress specifies the program, rather than set out requirements and have suppliers/providers bid on the basis of cost or quality, is that they're paying off supporters. That's why the money has to go to that recipient, and not just whoever can do or provide what the government wants best.
Donal said:
Can you provide any evidence whatsoever that USAID is "one of the most pork-laden agencies in the government" at all?
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Chris just did, by noting that it's got one of the highest rates of earmarked spending. You really don't seem to understand earmarks.
 
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Ziggurat said:
No. Earmarks specify the recipient, not simply the purpose. If it's just allocated to a purpose but NOT a recipient (ie, it's going to have a competitive bid), then it's not an earmark.

And the reason that Congress specifies the program, rather than set out requirements and have suppliers/providers bid on the basis of cost or quality, is that they're paying off supporters. That's why the money has to go to that recipient, and not just whoever can do or provide what the government wants best.

Chris just did, by noting that it's got one of the highest rates of earmarked spending. You really don't seem to understand earmarks.
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Did you know that a lot of these "earmarks" were approved during Bush 2 and the fat clown's term (not just Biden and Obama's), like for instance the 50-million-dollar condoms for gaze deal? That was during Bush 2's term.


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AmyStrange said:
Did you know that a lot of these "earmarks" were approved during Bush 2 and the fat clown's term (not just Biden and Obama's), like for instance the 50-million-dollar condoms for gaze deal? That was during Bush 2's term.
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And? You think this is a point in their favor? It isn't.

One of the biggest problems with the first Trump term is that he didn't get serious about cutting spending. The fact that he's starting to now is still a good thing. Sure, I would have liked him to have done this 8 years ago, but now is better than never. And don't even get me started on Bush 2 spending.
 
Ziggurat said:
No. Earmarks specify the recipient, not simply the purpose. If it's just allocated to a purpose but NOT a recipient (ie, it's going to have a competitive bid), then it's not an earmark.
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and? How does that support your assertion?
Ziggurat said:
And the reason that Congress specifies the program, rather than set out requirements and have suppliers/providers bid on the basis of cost or quality, is that they're paying off supporters. That's why the money has to go to that recipient, and not just whoever can do or provide what the government wants best.
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Or these programs were already bidded out and these earmarks are the agreed-upon money.
Ziggurat said:
Chris just did, by noting that it's got one of the highest rates of earmarked spending. You really don't seem to understand earmarks.
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You're conflating earmarks with pork. You haven't demonstrated one instance of pork, much less proving USAID is "one of the most pork-laden agencies in the government"
 
Donal said:
Or these programs were already bidded out and these earmarks are the agreed-upon money.
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No. That's not how it works. You don't bid out projects for which you don't have funding, so if you bid it out, you already have funding that wasn't earmarked. The ONLY reason to earmark anything is to bypass the bidding process. Advocates of earmarking will say that sometimes there's only one qualified contractor and so you might as well bypass a bidding process that's just going to end up at the same place. Which might be true sometimes, but still doesn't change the fact that if the spending was bid out, it wasn't earmarked. And conversely, if you earmark it, you didn't bid it out.
Donal said:
You're conflating earmarks with pork.
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Do you even know where the term "earmark" comes from? It's a metaphor, but in the metaphor, whose ears are being marked? Pigs' ears. The connection between earmarks and pork is in the name.
 
Did you know words and phrases can expand and change their meaning over time?

For instance "grandfather clause" or "grandfathering" originally meant white folks whose grandfathers could vote in Jim Crow states were exempted from things like poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, it means just about any time an old rule applies to existing cases while a new rule applies to future cases.

In this case "ear marked" has come to simply mean money already allocated for a specific purpose.

and "pork" has come to mean "budget items I don't like".
 
Bravo to Bill Maher for admitting that USAID was wasting a lot of money. You know, being progressive does not mean you have to support wasting tax dollars, nor does it mean you have to automatically, reflexively oppose everything Trump does.
 
mikegriffith1 said:
Bravo to Bill Maher for admitting that USAID was wasting a lot of money. You know, being progressive does not mean you have to support wasting tax dollars, nor does it mean you have to automatically, reflexively oppose everything Trump does.
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I actually like that he picked Sean Curran to run the Secret Service, and I'm also not a big fan of using animals in testing, but what do you think?


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bill maher hopped on the grift the right wing dupes podcast tour a few years ago
 
Sometimes measures that are intended to reduce waste increase it.

I recall my first boss saying he was reluctant to hire engineers that had significant employment in government contracting. This didn't make any sense to me until decades later.

One day our company was approached by a large contractor for a very specific job they had determined we likely had the expertise to do. It involved decoding some recorded signals that had apparently been recovered from underwater sensors decades earlier. We did have that expertise. It would have cost us about 3 months of time with a mix of engineers and techs and we estimated it would cost us about $300k. However, because of the opportunity cost lost that the people would otherwise be working on, we figured we would need to charge at least $500k for the job.

This was not doable because the contractor said we would be limited to 10% profit above cost by government regulation. We were not willing to do it for $330k.

The contractor then explained that we could just require that the decode job needed another 1.7M$ or so of instrumentation for the job. That way we could get the $200k profit we needed. We bailed as it seemed pretty unethical.

At that point I understood more intuitively my first boss's viewpoint.
 
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