Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. And to set a price floor for agricultural products.
Did you look at specifically some of the items the money was being wasted on?
It's quite likely that, sprinkled in among the idealistic helpers of the third world, were some number of CIA agents. For good or ill.
(the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)
USAID is considered instrumental in ending Apartheid in South Africa.
Given the timeline of the Musk family's arrival and departure... one might believe they viewed the end of Apartheid as a bit troublesome.
It's also quite likely that the reincarnations of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Jesus are sprinkled among the same idealistic helpers.
> the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of...
...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you.
Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).
Do you have any source for any of this?
NPOs are traditional places for CIA agents.
Tends to make them targets of suspicion.
Source: My father[0] was in the CIA, and worked at an NPO, in Africa.
If nothing else, the "Political Operations Abroad" section of USAID's wiki has some links and background.
Source for Top Secret info? No, but I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_... (not USAID, a different organization)
The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman.
Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.
The most compelling explanation for US soft power is balance of threat theory[0]. Soft power comes from you not being seen as a threat, and you being seen as a way to prevent other threats. Because above all, countries prioritize security.
The status quo in US foreign policy was that as long as you're pliable to US interests, then the US was nice to you. You get democracy and get bounded autonomy, more autonomy than was afforded to subjects under any previous empire, to the extent that people would question whether the US even was an empire. Despite US being incredibly powerful militarily, the US was seen as non-threatening to friendly countries. That was an incredible magic trick, since those two things are usually correlated. This drew countries into its orbit and expanded its influence.
Countries could see the contrast to being in the Soviet Union's orbit and having your grain stolen, your people getting kicked out (Crimea) or being put into a camp.
This theory is a way to conceptualize the problem with Trump's bellicose and volatile attitudes towards Canada and European countries. If everyone sees you as a threat, this theory predicts that they will balance against you. In concrete terms, this theory predicts that countries who aren't threatened by China (due to being far away) will become closer to China if they feel threatened by the US.
"politically impossible" is giving up on Americans ability to perceive the national advantage as well as the moral good.
Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side.
This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.
Probably the most egregious violation of the Chesterton's Fence principle[1] we'll ever see. Not only has USAID's destruction permanently destroyed US reputation in many place and will be responsible for the deaths of millions, including children, but many US farmers were USAID farmers. 100% of their crop and all of their income was tied to USAID.
Of course, most if not all of these farmers voted for Trump so it's hard to have much sympathy for them given the damage that vote is actually causing.
>but many US farmers were USAID farmers 100% of their crop and all of their income was tied to USAID.
Got a source for this? I wanna read on this.
It's about USD 2B worth of purchases:
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2...
* https://theconversation.com/american-farmers-who-once-fed-th...
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2025/02/13/mus...
* https://betterworldcampaign.org/blog/what-us-farmers-get-fro...
And in addition to farmers, a lot of companies/non-profits (for, e.g., logistics) were paid by USAID programs, as well as researchers for things like global health initiatives.
Googling turns up a multitude. Quick Look says in 2025 $2B worth of us crops went to USAID.
More info here.
https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/usaid-dismantling...
There are crops that USAID bought that have literally no other market, like milo.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5296876/trying-to-keep-...
The #1 recipient of USAID assistance was Ukraine. Hmmm…….
If you take a look at the data[1] you can see that it was nowhere near the top, then there was one big chunk in 2022-23 then it came back down again, and that aid was 67% military with the DoD providing 13B. So whatever you're trying to insinuate, the simple explanation is they received a lot of aid (mainly military) because they had been invaded. That's is fully supported by the evidence.
> The #1 recipient of USAID assistance was Ukraine.
UA started being at the top in 2022: care to guess what humanitarian disaster started at that time?
After them, we have DRC, Jordan, Ethiopia, West Bank and Gaza, Sudan, ….
The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.
This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen end up also not getting any credit to the institutions and regulators, so on the budget it feels (to uninformed voters) that these departments are simply wasting taxpayer money.
> This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
> On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen […]
Michael Lewis (of The Big Short fame) has two books on the things that government(s) do that no one else (often) can, either because they're too big, too expensive/unprofitable, or a co-ordination problem where it effects many actors simultaneously:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Risk
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788713/who-is-govern...
I'm looking forward to 2038.
After all, Y2K came and nothing happened. What a hoax! /s
It's nicely timed that I can spend the last few years before my retirement charging people inflated amounts to convert int to long.
I like the layout of this site. However I feel it should be stated more prominently that the primary source of data are online news articles.
To me improving "government efficieny" is unattainable for large states. Who claims to achieve this is a fool or a bad actor.
Basic knowledge of civic history and political science makes this point very salient. Anyone with a clue would know this from the beginning - that's why it was so terrifying to see what actually was motivating people, feels like the ultimate recipe for unchecked power and disaster with bad actors employing fools to do their bidding.
Lots of organizations have massively increased government efficiency in the USA. 18F comes to mind as one.
I think it is really important from time to time to shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives and form a somewhat subjective overpromise/underdeliver judgement (also looking at where, why and how they succeeded or failed).
To me, the whole Doge initiative scores quite poorly in this regard: Initial promises appear not realistic (or even worse: deceptive), while the (preliminary) results are lackluster, too.
My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
I think promises along that exact line deserve extreme skepticism: "Simply" slashing regulations/public budget for "easy gains" is just not credible, and if anyone is gonna bring up the same arguments in favor of nuclear power or similar things I'm just gonna label them "liar/idiot" and watch reality endorse my view...
If you did that at all Trump would never have been elected much less re-elected. The Doge thing was just a big fuck you to everyone that they didn't like, a way to steal information and start violating laws with impunity to support their very dumb egos. There's no policy or objective besides harm, its too obvious that it would never work to literally anyone on the street and they went ahead with it anyway.
If you wanted to do this for real, your would double the size of 18F (which was doing extraordinary work), and given the Inspectors General a blank check to eliminate fraud. These are both apolitical entities. Frankly the only people this would upset is the legacy government contractors.
So obviously they eliminated one and gutted the other.
Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization
This site is great.
But needs some overall graphic, some charts or something, to tell a story. Something like dollars spent versus saved, to show how this whole effort was in-efficient.
And. I'd like to see something similar for Project 2025.