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

Forbes reported "There is no evidence USAID paid celebrities to visit Ukraine. Several viral social media posts accused USAID of paying Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn and Orlando Bloom to travel to Ukraine and take pictures with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Forbes has reached out to Stiller, Jolie, Penn and Bloom for comment). Stiller called the claims “totally false” and “untrue” in a post on X, clarifying he self-funded his trip to Ukraine and has not received money from USAID, and Penn’s litigation attorney Mathew Rosengart told Forbes the claims are “completely false,” noting Penn self-funded his visit and threatening to take legal action if the “defamatory statements continue.” Musk amplified these false claims on X, reposting a video that was fabricated to look like it had been reported by E! News (E! News denied in a statement to AFP that it created the video)." Forbes reported on a number of other misleading or false claims, as I previously indicated.

Regarding the claim by supporters of President Trump concerning alleged money laundering, I have no idea how to apply this term to the US Government (it makes no sense to me). This is another example of Mr. Musk throwing out groundless charges. It is a poor way to improve efficiency, but it is an efficient way to impoverish a civil debate about what USAID is doing that is beneficial or not.
 
Puppycow said:
Bottom line is, you can't just pause it and pick up again later where you left off. You'll create more drug resistance and ultimately a lot more new infections and deaths.
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The problem is that we see this outcome as wrong and inhumane, whereas people like Muskrat and Trump totally lack one iota of empathy and so simply do not care in the slightest. It's a disaster for somebody else and not them personally. So they see it as a "win".
 
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Chris_Halkides said:
Forbes reported "There is no evidence USAID paid celebrities to visit Ukraine. Several viral social media posts accused USAID of paying Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn and Orlando Bloom to travel to Ukraine and take pictures with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Forbes has reached out to Stiller, Jolie, Penn and Bloom for comment). Stiller called the claims “totally false” and “untrue” in a post on X, clarifying he self-funded his trip to Ukraine and has not received money from USAID, and Penn’s litigation attorney Mathew Rosengart told Forbes the claims are “completely false,” noting Penn self-funded his visit and threatening to take legal action if the “defamatory statements continue.” Musk amplified these false claims on X, reposting a video that was fabricated to look like it had been reported by E! News (E! News denied in a statement to AFP that it created the video)." Forbes reported on a number of other misleading or false claims, as I previously indicated.

Regarding the claim by supporters of President Trump concerning alleged money laundering, I have no idea how to apply this term to the US Government (it makes no sense to me). This is another example of Mr. Musk throwing out groundless charges. It is a poor way to improve efficiency, but it is an efficient way to impoverish a civil debate about what USAID is doing that is beneficial or not.
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Does Muskrat think he is impervious to legal action for defamation? Or has he surrendered to the Trumpian disease of "what I say out loud is reality for everybody else, regardless of consistency or even logic"?
 
Norman Alexander said:
Does Muskrat think he is impervious to legal action for defamation? Or has he surrendered to the Trumpian disease of "what I say out loud is reality for everybody else, regardless of consistency or even logic"?
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I don't know if he is completely impervious, but he's got plenty of money for lawyers, and proving defamation can be a somewhat high bar to clear. I don't think it's enough to prove that the statement is false in most cases. You also have to prove that you suffered real reputational damage and losses because of the statement. If, for the sake of argument, USAID had paid celebrities to visit Ukraine, would that cause harm to the celebrities' reputations? So it has to be not just false, but false in a way that damages someone's reputation. And in the worst case he is probably wealthy enough to pay an award that might be millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars if forced to.
 
Donal said:
That's a tautology, not an actual law. Remember, economics isn't science. At best, it is a type of history. Maybe some sociology thrown in.
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Good point, it's why economics is a technically considered a social science. A lot of people think it's about just numbers and math, but it's mostly about predicting human behavior at a consumer level.
 
Ziggurat said:
Nope, not my framing at all. You are very much missing the point.

I wouldn't say necessary, but I'll stipulate some of their spending is desirable. Zooterkin used the baby/bathwater analogy to object to cuts in USAID despite agreeing that some spending was undesirable. The point of my twist on his analogy is that nobody was cutting that undesirable funding in a way that would satisfy him. So I'd rather have it cut imperfectly than not cut at all. Because that's the choice I was actually offered. Nobody offered the clean, tidy trimming that he wants.

Didn't say that either. I was adamant that a lot of their spending is opaque. Never said all of it was.
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False dilemma. There is enough staff to review every program. There is no need to do it immediately without an attempt to implement a change of policy rationally.
 
I'm fascinated with some of the stuff turning up on youtube now, including American farmers wailing because USAID is a major purchaser of US agricultural output.

To save you all watching the videos, they boil down to:

"I didn't think the face-eating leopards would eat my face!"

Trump being so breathtaking stupid, that he doesn't understand that USAID buys American stuff, and hires American companies to do things abroad, is just par for the course.

MAGA!!!
 
Came across this fact-check from Snopes that sort of illustrates part of the problem:

USAID sent $2M to Guatemala, but not just for gender-affirming health care

They are rating it a "Mixture" but the part that is true is:
In 2024, USAID awarded a $2 million grant to an LGBTQ+ rights organization in Guatemala called Asociación Lambda. That grant was issued to "strengthen trans-led organizations to deliver gender-affirming health care, advocate for improve quality and access to services, and provide economic empowerment opportunities."
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And then they seem to be splitting hairs over the fact that not every dollar of that went to pay for operations.

They are pointing to stuff like this as a reason to just eliminate the whole agency, including things like medicines for tuberculosis.

The description of the grant itself, according to Snopes:
The description of the grant reads as follows:
ACTIVITY TO STRENGTHEN TRANS-LED ORGANIZATIONS TO DELIVER GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE, ADVOCATE FOR IMPROVED QUALITY AND ACCESS TO SERVICES, AND PROVIDE ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OPPORTUNITIES.
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I'm not for burning the whole thing to the ground, but I scratch my head when I see things like this being paid for with taxpayer money. Medicines and food, sure. I'm very skeptical that "gender-affirming health care" is something that taxpayers should be paying for.
 
The logic to support minority groups, especially those consisting of mostly young people, in countries with a mixed or low approval of the US has been the strategy of soft US power since forever: that nowadays it's LGBTQ+ related is immaterial for why it is done: it's a very effective, very cheap method to ensure that the next generation in power will have good mental associations with the US.
Of course, now, it will be the reverse.
 
I find it interesting too that the people in this thread complaining that (part of) USAID may have been kickbacks to politicians are totally fine with a single unelected person now having access to all that money with exactly zero accountability.
But he promised not to steal it, so I guess that's allright?
 
Since it can be difficult to keep track of in the trump/elonia hurricane of lies: The "$50 million worth of condoms to Gaza" story is a blatant lie. There is literally no proof that it happened nor that it was going to happen.

www.bbc.com

Fact-checking Elon Musk's claims in the Oval Office

The billionaire has made a number of exaggerated or unevidenced claims during a White House event.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
 
KDLarsen said:
Since it can be difficult to keep track of in the trump/elonia hurricane of lies: The "$50 million worth of condoms to Gaza" story is a blatant lie. There is literally no proof that it happened nor that it was going to happen.

www.bbc.com

Fact-checking Elon Musk's claims in the Oval Office

The billionaire has made a number of exaggerated or unevidenced claims during a White House event.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
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i'm sure it's the same for the $30m for sesame street for the taliban claim i keep hearing as well.

these guys, once again, just make things up and the conservatives buy it because they want it to be true. well, i'm here to tell you these billionaires are the guys causing all the problems, paying the lobbyists for the government to work for them, not for you. they're not interested in turning around and fixing all the problems they created.
 
marting said:
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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That's exactly the reason why private companies shouldn't be allowed next or near public goods, services or enterprises.

What you describe is a public body infested with private company thinking.
 
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