Scott Brown: Point
Trump’s USAID overhaul faces Democratic opposition
The opening month of the second Trump administration has been marked by incredible speed and progress, especially toward their goal of scaling back the bloat of the federal government. The pace has left an out-of-power Democratic Party reeling. Rather than propose their own spending cuts, most Democrats have decided to oppose reflexively everything President Donald Trump is doing.
They have directed their loudest opposition toward the administration’s merging of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a little-known Washington organization, with the Department of State.
On the list of pressing issues facing the country, most Americans would not identify the future of USAID, something many had likely never heard of, as top of mind. In fact, according to polling from the Associated Press, seven in 10 believe the government is spending too much on “assistance to other countries.”
Yet, to hear the Democrats’ bellyaching and complaining, you’d think the sky was falling.
Much of the fallout has focused on the more egregious examples of USAID waste. Items like $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities,” $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia, and $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, according to the White House.
The list goes on and can be as amusing as outrageous. For Americans sitting down to complete their taxes, the time of year when families tally their bills to the federal government, hearing these examples of misplaced spending is infuriating and makes the case for the new Department of Government Efficiency created by Trump and run by Elon Musk.
In other instances, the misplaced spending is more sinister. Specific USAID spending appears to support terrorism. According to the Washington Free Beacon, six days before Hamas executed the worst terror attack in Israel’s history on Oct. 7, 2023, USAID awarded $900,000 to a Gaza charity connected to the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. The Beacon also reported that USAID funded a Gazan “educational and community center” controlled by an association whose leader once said that Jerusalem needed to be cleansed “from the impurity of the Jews.”
The federal budget will not be balanced by streamlining USAID. Its 2023 spending ($38 billion) was less than 1% of the federal budget.
However, that doesn’t make it — or any other federal line item — immune from scrutiny or belt-tightening. If the federal government were a business, it would have shuttered its doors long ago. In 2010, the national debt was $13 trillion. Today, it’s $36 trillion. Try applying that math to your household budget over the last 15 years and see how it works out.
The current trajectory is unsustainable. Half of every dollar we borrow today goes to pay down the debt. Within five years, interest payments on the debt are projected to exceed our annual military budget. This bill isn’t going to come due in my lifetime. It will fall to my grandkids and their kids to dig out of a fiscal mess.
Where are the Democrats on this pressing issue? With their heads in the sand, pretending all is well and spewing venom at Musk for daring to shed long-overdue sunlight on the rot and corruption of the federal government. The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker recently observed, “Many strange battle lines the Democratic Party has chosen to defend these past few years: illegal migrants over citizens, teachers unions over parents and children, criminals over victims, men-turned-women over girls.”
Add the spending crisis to that growing list.
No doubt, USAID has done some good on the world stage since its creation in 1961. Folding its responsibilities underneath the broader umbrella of the State Department can allow that positive output to continue in time.
Even more glaring is the need to get tough on spending, a principle that used to be bipartisan. Remember Bill Clinton’s 1996 promise that the era of big government is over? Even Barack Obama launched a “Campaign to Cut Waste.”
Today’s Democratic Party is far from those days and even further from common sense. They believe that the status quo and spending money like a drunken sailor, as the late Sen. John McCain was fond of saying, is perfectly acceptable.
Every long journey starts with a first step, and streamlining USAID is a sensible place to begin.
Scott Brown is chair of the Competitiveness Coalition. He is a former senator and ambassador. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
Diana Ohlbaum: Counterpoint
Americans must speak out before it’s too late
It wasn’t until after Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor, ended up in a Nazi concentration camp that he realized he should have done more to help Hitler’s victims. He saw what was happening but he never thought they’d come for him.
Of course, they eventually did. And that’s what Americans need to understand about what’s happening under the Musk-Trump administration today; the attacks on refugees and immigrants, transgender people, federal workers, journalists, courts and unions aren’t one-offs. They are attacks on all of us, our Constitution and our system of democracy. And they won’t stop until people stand up and speak out.
So far, President Donald Trump isn’t talking about extermination camps. However, he has echoed Nazi language and imagery and apparently has no objection to aggressive threats and campaigns of intimidation. Today, lives are at extreme risk as a result of actions taken by Elon Musk, with Trump’s blessing, that violate federal law and constitutional principles. Cutting off all foreign assistance — even payments to U.S. businesses that have already provided goods and services under federal contracts— has meant that people with HIV and AIDS have lost access to life-saving medications, efforts to contain the spread of deadly diseases have ground to a halt, and children have gone hungry as food wastes away in warehouses. Under the Constitution, Congress, not the White House, holds the power of the purse. Congress specifically authorized and appropriated funds for these purposes.
This is not a policy disagreement; every administration has made its mark on foreign aid, shutting down some programs and initiating others. The problem is the administration’s utter contempt for laws that protect civil and worker rights and its total disregard for constitutional checks and balances.
Standard rules and procedures exist for reorganizing agencies and firing, reassigning and laying off federal employees. These are not being followed. We depend on professional civil servants to ensure that essential functions of government are being carried out without political favoritism; these jobs are being handed to Trump’s acolytes and cronies.
We have ethics and conflict-of-interest rules to prevent graft and corruption; Musk, a major government contractor with an enormous financial stake in the outcomes, has gained direct access to U.S. government payment systems and sensitive personal data.
The judicial branch is supposed to enforce the law; judges who rule against the administration are threatened with impeachment (and worse), and their orders are being flouted. Presidential advisers openly advocate that the administration defy judicial rulings.
What happened to USAID will not stop there, absent Republicans willing to break with the administration. Similar attacks have been launched against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Election Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. Plans are in the works for the Department of Education, the Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Don’t care about any of those? How about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures your bank savings? The Federal Aviation Administration, which is charged with increasing the safety of our nation’s skies?
Will Musk and Trump stop paying Social Security benefits to registered Democrats or withhold salary checks for members of Congress who oppose him? Declare a state of emergency to justify postponing elections or suspending civil rights?
Fortunately, we have seen shining examples of courageous action by people who are willing to risk their jobs, careers and personal safety to do what is right. David Lebryk, the Treasury Department official overseeing the nation’s payment systems, resigned rather than implement the order to halt all foreign aid payments, which he considered illegal. USAID inspector general Paul K. Martin was fired after releasing a “blistering” report about the impact of cutting off humanitarian aid. And, of course, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who pleaded with Trump to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” including migrants, refugees, and gay, lesbian and transgender children.
If we don’t speak out for those targeted now, who will be left to speak for us?
Diana Ohlbaum is chair of the board of the Center for International Policy. She oversaw U.S. foreign aid programs for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee for nearly two decades. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.
