This is certainly a take but it feels like a knee-jerk and unreflective defense of the status quo. I would encourage the author to make a noble attempt at understanding the rationale behind this flurry of executive orders. On the confusingly named USAID--which isn't an aid organization--I'd recommend any of the long interviews with Mike …
This is certainly a take but it feels like a knee-jerk and unreflective defense of the status quo. I would encourage the author to make a noble attempt at understanding the rationale behind this flurry of executive orders. On the confusingly named USAID--which isn't an aid organization--I'd recommend any of the long interviews with Mike Benz. He did a good one on (*gasp*) Rogan a few months ago.
Might some people die when aid is cut? Yes. But this ignores the opportunity cost of this aid. IOW, there are good things we could do with federal money that we currently aren't because we're sending it elsewhere. You can't condemn cutting aid without considering the alternatives. "But what could be better than saving babies' lives?" Ask yourself the same question about the $6.7 trillion currently not being spent on saving babies' lives. This shows that you too accept that the US gov is not an international humanitarian organization. The question is just where to draw the line.
I'm not going to reflectively defend USAID, though I do think it does a lot of good. But I think Chesterton's fence is in order here: why do we have it and what would happen if we just cut things off abruptly?
The US government isn't a humanitarian agency, but it does believe in projecting soft power that might help other nations decide to support us. Abandoning them could mean that nations might turn to the "benevolent" arms of China or Russia.
As a Cold War agency maybe those functions can be administered through the State Department. I think we can talk about that. But the way that DOGE is doing this by just stopping an agency without warning, forcing programs around the world to stop their work, is reckless at best and cruel at worst. I am enough of a Reaganite to argue for a smaller government; what I'm not willing to defend is gleefully kicking people out of their jobs because people perceive them as not being on the MAGA team.
Dennis has saved me from having to write out my answer— thanks.
Also: “Might some people die when aid is cut? Yes.” I marvel (negative) at your dismissiveness!
My reading of the emotion animating your comment might be wrong, but the normalization of that callousness is part of the cultural shift I worry about.
Few if any of the nations have complained about the cuts, and in fact they often complain about the "aid" being given in the first place. Why? Because it's often tied to the US meddling in their politics. Also, there are numerous dedicated intl. humanitarian orgs given billions who can step into any immediate needs. If you can show evidence that anyone has died due to these cuts, it would be good to see that. But in general it is misleading in the extreme to see USAID as an unalloyed humanitarian org. By *far* the biggest recipient of USAID funds of late has been Ukraine, where we're helping with wounds we're in some sense responsible for by funding a proxy war against Russia on their soil. We give them weapons and funds to hurt themselves, then give them money to tend their wounds. At every level, these initiatives are soft power plays wrapped in aid packages. This isn't callousness; it's recognition of often anti-democratic manipulation.
I can see the wisdom of greater caution here. That said, the outcry against the cuts seldom seems to reckon with the rationale behind them. The agencies have acted more or less with impunity for years now, and we may be facing a bigger problem than losing strategic positioning internationally. Specifically, people increasingly don't believe the govt is acting in the interests of the people--the agencies and by extension the govt is losing legitimacy. This is a very big deal, but one that defenders of the status quo seem unaware of.
As I said above, the public health interventions that take up most of USAID spending are some of the most studied public health policies in history. We know for a fact that the freeze and dismantling will kill hundreds of thousands, maybe millions over time, of people a year, mostly destitute children in Africa.
If you "know for a fact," then don't hide your light under a bushel; give us some links. But even so, the prior question is to what extent the US govt ought to be in the humanitarian aid business. Couldn't another $50 billion/year save a lot more people?
Off the top of my head I won't come up with better lit reviews than Givewell's blog posts, so I'd check there. USAID of course does other stuff than humanitarian aid which I know less about and won't make any claims about. But for that part of it, the short answer to your question about saving more lives is no. The EAs have spent a ton of time trying to quantify lives saved per dollar and the highest return stuff they advocate overlaps very strongly with what USAID does on the humanitarian side (well in terms of dollars per life acute crisis resonse tends not to score as highly and I'm not sure how much USAID money goes to that, but I know many billions are spent on the you can't save more lives with this money stuff. Trump is literally trying to directly kill millions of destitute children over his coming term for savings of 0.3% of the federal budget)
I’m totally fine having $3 a year in taxes go towards saving babies lives. That is a fair trade off, and one that the richest country in the history of the world should be happy to make.
And if you don’t think that trade off is fair, if you do think it’s justifiable to provide that aid, then close down these programs on a reasonable timeframe. Give the people working them a chance to continue that care while offloading onto somebody else. Btw, the people working those programs are good people, despite what you’ve been propagandized to believe. (Nah uhh they a bAll of WOrmS!!)
In the meantime, I would encourage you to make a ‘noble’ attempt at understanding the rationale for people’s outrage. Lay off the podcast slop (Mike Benz is a self aggrandizing liar) and engage with something that challenges your priors.
What, in your mind, are the top two or three most egregious USAID programs spending American money?
Even among the commentators here defending the Trump admin I don’t see people pointing to anything specific. You listened to Benz talk for hours on Rogan so presumably you can point us to a handful of specific programs.
It appears that USAID has functioned as a sort of shell organization for IC operations designed to promote a certain vision of US interests abroad. The trouble with this sort of surreptitious enterprise is that is has led to agencies believing that they are above democratic principles and even seeing elections as enemies of democracy. For many reasons, public trust in these agencies is very low, and the current administration is acting in accord with these perceptions.
1) I take it that you don’t object to any particular program then?
2) Can you point to a specific program, action, memorandum, or something else that indicates USAID or its leaders think they are “above democratic principles”?
I see a lot of conclusory statements, here and elsewhere, and practically nothing specific.
Based on my skim of the Rogan transcript, it seems that Benz is accusing USAID of being a wing of the CIA because it funds things like “literacy” in other countries. Can you explain why this is anti-democratic rather than democratic? Maybe “democracy” is the wrong word here? It seems like there’s some conceptual confusion, making it hard to understand what, specifically, is being asserted.
Take this bit for instance:
[00:59:56]
“So we can't be seen to look like the autocracies we're trying to overthrow. We want the autocratic outcome, but we can't be seen to use the autocratic process. So they came up with a really.”
So we are trying to *overthrow* autocracies but we “want the autocratic outcome.”
I suppose the assertion is that the US wants democracy elsewhere as long as it gets the democratic outcome it wants? Cue Shadi.
My point isn't to push for my specific views. It's to show how far even a little bit of an effort to understand the motivations for these EOs can take us. That said, I think it's reasonable to object to *every* USAID program given the way it's been operating: without much oversight and autocratically meddling in democratic processes both at home and abroad.
But here's something specific that I find sinister in the extreme:
Anytime an organization arrogates to itself the prerogative to label and censor mis/disinformation, this is epistocracy and is antithetical to democracy. We can't have govt agencies deciding what is appropriate for people to see at this level.
This looks like an information campaign, aimed at persuasion, not direct censorship of speech.
I didn't realize that shutting down USAID was really about anger at Fauci and covid-era censorship of social media posts related to vaccination. But I guess I should have known, since Benz in that Rogan interview mostly talks about covid and media censorship. Censorship that, as far as I can tell, is totally unrelated to most of what USAID actually does.
This isn't a "guilt by association" thing: just search the transcript to the Benz interview for 'usaid'. Lots of examples there unrelated to covid. But yeah most of what USAID does is attempt to manipulate people to achieve the ends of state...as they understand them.
Not to engage too deeply in labeling disinformation, but I did do some cursory research, and why do you believe that this person has any deep expertise around USAID at all?
“Benz worked in the first Trump administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under then-Secretary Ben Carson and later at the State Department as deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy. Before that, Benz was an alt-right influencer operating under the pseudonym Frame Game, where he often railed against social media moderation and extolled the value of White identity politics. Benz parlayed his outspoken critiques of social media moderation into the Foundation for Freedom Online, a group that serves largely to promote Benz’s views of what he calls the censorship industrial complex.”
Thanks for your response. Almost all of our knowledge from news media is by way of testimony on matters we ourselves cannot verify first-hand. So when someone makes a newsworthy claim, we try to get corroborating accounts, see what oppositional accounts say, make an assessment on whether the speaker is reliable, etc. I have looked for people disputing Benz's testimony, but all I can find are people disputing his value claims, i.e. disputing whether using propaganda and censorship to influence politics in the US and abroad is actually bad. It appears he's right on the facts. If you listen to or read his interviews, it seems that he knows what he's talking about from his experience at fed agencies and from his non-profit work against censorship. But I have to say, I don't see what is accomplished by pointing out that Benz supports identity politics given that the source, WaPo, is about as deep into that game as one can go. And I think it's fair to exercise caution in trusting establishment media on Benz, given that Benz's initiative is aimed at identifying censorship in the establishment media. Extreme example, but by analogy, could we trust communist media to give us the facts on Hayek?
This is certainly a take but it feels like a knee-jerk and unreflective defense of the status quo. I would encourage the author to make a noble attempt at understanding the rationale behind this flurry of executive orders. On the confusingly named USAID--which isn't an aid organization--I'd recommend any of the long interviews with Mike Benz. He did a good one on (*gasp*) Rogan a few months ago.
Might some people die when aid is cut? Yes. But this ignores the opportunity cost of this aid. IOW, there are good things we could do with federal money that we currently aren't because we're sending it elsewhere. You can't condemn cutting aid without considering the alternatives. "But what could be better than saving babies' lives?" Ask yourself the same question about the $6.7 trillion currently not being spent on saving babies' lives. This shows that you too accept that the US gov is not an international humanitarian organization. The question is just where to draw the line.
I'm not going to reflectively defend USAID, though I do think it does a lot of good. But I think Chesterton's fence is in order here: why do we have it and what would happen if we just cut things off abruptly?
The US government isn't a humanitarian agency, but it does believe in projecting soft power that might help other nations decide to support us. Abandoning them could mean that nations might turn to the "benevolent" arms of China or Russia.
As a Cold War agency maybe those functions can be administered through the State Department. I think we can talk about that. But the way that DOGE is doing this by just stopping an agency without warning, forcing programs around the world to stop their work, is reckless at best and cruel at worst. I am enough of a Reaganite to argue for a smaller government; what I'm not willing to defend is gleefully kicking people out of their jobs because people perceive them as not being on the MAGA team.
Dennis has saved me from having to write out my answer— thanks.
Also: “Might some people die when aid is cut? Yes.” I marvel (negative) at your dismissiveness!
My reading of the emotion animating your comment might be wrong, but the normalization of that callousness is part of the cultural shift I worry about.
Few if any of the nations have complained about the cuts, and in fact they often complain about the "aid" being given in the first place. Why? Because it's often tied to the US meddling in their politics. Also, there are numerous dedicated intl. humanitarian orgs given billions who can step into any immediate needs. If you can show evidence that anyone has died due to these cuts, it would be good to see that. But in general it is misleading in the extreme to see USAID as an unalloyed humanitarian org. By *far* the biggest recipient of USAID funds of late has been Ukraine, where we're helping with wounds we're in some sense responsible for by funding a proxy war against Russia on their soil. We give them weapons and funds to hurt themselves, then give them money to tend their wounds. At every level, these initiatives are soft power plays wrapped in aid packages. This isn't callousness; it's recognition of often anti-democratic manipulation.
I can see the wisdom of greater caution here. That said, the outcry against the cuts seldom seems to reckon with the rationale behind them. The agencies have acted more or less with impunity for years now, and we may be facing a bigger problem than losing strategic positioning internationally. Specifically, people increasingly don't believe the govt is acting in the interests of the people--the agencies and by extension the govt is losing legitimacy. This is a very big deal, but one that defenders of the status quo seem unaware of.
As I said above, the public health interventions that take up most of USAID spending are some of the most studied public health policies in history. We know for a fact that the freeze and dismantling will kill hundreds of thousands, maybe millions over time, of people a year, mostly destitute children in Africa.
Did you know the USIAD has refused audits from Congress and think they answer to no one not even taxpayers?
If you "know for a fact," then don't hide your light under a bushel; give us some links. But even so, the prior question is to what extent the US govt ought to be in the humanitarian aid business. Couldn't another $50 billion/year save a lot more people?
Off the top of my head I won't come up with better lit reviews than Givewell's blog posts, so I'd check there. USAID of course does other stuff than humanitarian aid which I know less about and won't make any claims about. But for that part of it, the short answer to your question about saving more lives is no. The EAs have spent a ton of time trying to quantify lives saved per dollar and the highest return stuff they advocate overlaps very strongly with what USAID does on the humanitarian side (well in terms of dollars per life acute crisis resonse tends not to score as highly and I'm not sure how much USAID money goes to that, but I know many billions are spent on the you can't save more lives with this money stuff. Trump is literally trying to directly kill millions of destitute children over his coming term for savings of 0.3% of the federal budget)
I’m totally fine having $3 a year in taxes go towards saving babies lives. That is a fair trade off, and one that the richest country in the history of the world should be happy to make.
And if you don’t think that trade off is fair, if you do think it’s justifiable to provide that aid, then close down these programs on a reasonable timeframe. Give the people working them a chance to continue that care while offloading onto somebody else. Btw, the people working those programs are good people, despite what you’ve been propagandized to believe. (Nah uhh they a bAll of WOrmS!!)
In the meantime, I would encourage you to make a ‘noble’ attempt at understanding the rationale for people’s outrage. Lay off the podcast slop (Mike Benz is a self aggrandizing liar) and engage with something that challenges your priors.
What, in your mind, are the top two or three most egregious USAID programs spending American money?
Even among the commentators here defending the Trump admin I don’t see people pointing to anything specific. You listened to Benz talk for hours on Rogan so presumably you can point us to a handful of specific programs.
It's much bigger than specific programs; it's the very objective of the agency and its activities that support that objective. (Here's the transcript for easier reference: https://www.happyscribe.com/public/the-joe-rogan-experience/2237-mike-benz )
It appears that USAID has functioned as a sort of shell organization for IC operations designed to promote a certain vision of US interests abroad. The trouble with this sort of surreptitious enterprise is that is has led to agencies believing that they are above democratic principles and even seeing elections as enemies of democracy. For many reasons, public trust in these agencies is very low, and the current administration is acting in accord with these perceptions.
1) I take it that you don’t object to any particular program then?
2) Can you point to a specific program, action, memorandum, or something else that indicates USAID or its leaders think they are “above democratic principles”?
I see a lot of conclusory statements, here and elsewhere, and practically nothing specific.
Based on my skim of the Rogan transcript, it seems that Benz is accusing USAID of being a wing of the CIA because it funds things like “literacy” in other countries. Can you explain why this is anti-democratic rather than democratic? Maybe “democracy” is the wrong word here? It seems like there’s some conceptual confusion, making it hard to understand what, specifically, is being asserted.
Take this bit for instance:
[00:59:56]
“So we can't be seen to look like the autocracies we're trying to overthrow. We want the autocratic outcome, but we can't be seen to use the autocratic process. So they came up with a really.”
So we are trying to *overthrow* autocracies but we “want the autocratic outcome.”
I suppose the assertion is that the US wants democracy elsewhere as long as it gets the democratic outcome it wants? Cue Shadi.
My point isn't to push for my specific views. It's to show how far even a little bit of an effort to understand the motivations for these EOs can take us. That said, I think it's reasonable to object to *every* USAID program given the way it's been operating: without much oversight and autocratically meddling in democratic processes both at home and abroad.
But here's something specific that I find sinister in the extreme:
https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USAIDHQ/bulletins/345e121
Anytime an organization arrogates to itself the prerogative to label and censor mis/disinformation, this is epistocracy and is antithetical to democracy. We can't have govt agencies deciding what is appropriate for people to see at this level.
This looks like an information campaign, aimed at persuasion, not direct censorship of speech.
I didn't realize that shutting down USAID was really about anger at Fauci and covid-era censorship of social media posts related to vaccination. But I guess I should have known, since Benz in that Rogan interview mostly talks about covid and media censorship. Censorship that, as far as I can tell, is totally unrelated to most of what USAID actually does.
This isn't a "guilt by association" thing: just search the transcript to the Benz interview for 'usaid'. Lots of examples there unrelated to covid. But yeah most of what USAID does is attempt to manipulate people to achieve the ends of state...as they understand them.
Not to engage too deeply in labeling disinformation, but I did do some cursory research, and why do you believe that this person has any deep expertise around USAID at all?
“Benz worked in the first Trump administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under then-Secretary Ben Carson and later at the State Department as deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy. Before that, Benz was an alt-right influencer operating under the pseudonym Frame Game, where he often railed against social media moderation and extolled the value of White identity politics. Benz parlayed his outspoken critiques of social media moderation into the Foundation for Freedom Online, a group that serves largely to promote Benz’s views of what he calls the censorship industrial complex.”
—https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/06/musk-doge-usaid/
Thanks for your response. Almost all of our knowledge from news media is by way of testimony on matters we ourselves cannot verify first-hand. So when someone makes a newsworthy claim, we try to get corroborating accounts, see what oppositional accounts say, make an assessment on whether the speaker is reliable, etc. I have looked for people disputing Benz's testimony, but all I can find are people disputing his value claims, i.e. disputing whether using propaganda and censorship to influence politics in the US and abroad is actually bad. It appears he's right on the facts. If you listen to or read his interviews, it seems that he knows what he's talking about from his experience at fed agencies and from his non-profit work against censorship. But I have to say, I don't see what is accomplished by pointing out that Benz supports identity politics given that the source, WaPo, is about as deep into that game as one can go. And I think it's fair to exercise caution in trusting establishment media on Benz, given that Benz's initiative is aimed at identifying censorship in the establishment media. Extreme example, but by analogy, could we trust communist media to give us the facts on Hayek?