The Treasury Department, USAID, the Education Department, the Office of Management and Budget, etc.
These are the Departments Elon Musk and his whiz kid software engineers have already wormed their way into and, in important ways, taken over. They wouldn’t have been able to even get in the doors if Donald Trump’s acting, and in some cases already confirmed, Secretaries and Directors had not made it possible by ordering cooperation from the senior staffs.
At the Treasury Department, Musk and his software mafia now have access to the humongous $6 trillion American payment system. That means all the financial information of Americans and American businesses. That means social security, Medicare, Medicaid, the IRS, and more. That means you and me.
It’s likely none of this is legal. Donald Trump advertised that Musk’s off-the-books, unfunded Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would be like your local town volunteer audit committee. Unelected volunteers trying to make things run better.
That is not the way things are working out. Musk and his proteges are human wrecking balls, unguided missiles intent on destruction from the bottom up.
For example, over at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, the headquarters for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Musk and his barbarians have come over the wall and are hard at work dismantling the principal humanitarian U.S. agency that gives assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, seeking better medical care, and engaging in democratic reforms.
A little history would help.
After World War II, the U.S. adopted the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. The Plan was so successful, both the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations realized that bringing humanitarian aid to countries in need was good policy and served America’s interests. Consequently, a number of separate governmental organizations began to provide relief where needed, such as the Mutual Security Agency, the Foreign Operations Administration, and the International Cooperation Administration.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy saw the need to unite humanitarian development into a single agency responsible for administering aid to foreign countries to promote social and economic development. Thus was USAID born. When Kennedy proposed the idea of USAID, he said:
“There is no escaping our obligations: our moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor in the interdependent community of free nations – our economic obligations as the wealthiest people in a world of largely poor people, as a nation no longer dependent upon the loans from abroad that once helped us develop our own economy – and our political obligations as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom.”
Kennedy first created USAID by executive order, but shortly thereafter, Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, cementing USAID as a congressionally approved and funded U.S. agency.
For 64 years, USAID has brought vital humanitarian assistance to those in need around the world. According to the Agency, its work “includes steps to diversify the streams of capital that finance development, improve the way progress is measured and invest in force multipliers like science, technology, innovation and partnership to accelerate impact.”
This is the Agency Elon Musk calls “a criminal organization.” Musk compares foreign aid to “money laundering.” He calls USAID employees an “arm of the radical-left globalists” and brags he has been “feeding [it] to the wood chipper.”
Donald Trump, the man who gave Musk the keys to the kingdom says the agency is “run by a bunch of radical lunatics.” One of his first executive orders was to order all foreign aid stopped.
In the last week, dozens of USAID’s top leaders were placed on immediate leave. Hundreds of support staff were let go, and those remaining were told not only to stop funding development work, but also to cut off communication with partner organizations. USAID employees were told to stay home and the agency’s website was taken down.
Then, Musk’s DOGE kids showed up at the front door demanding access to personnel records and classified material. Security officials who tried to stop them were placed on administrative leave.
In the next blink of an eye, USAID ceased being an independent agency when Trump ordered it to be moved into and under the State Department.
None of this is legal, not one little bit, and it has deep and severe, even catastrophic, ramifications all over the world. For example:
- Malaria kills 14 children under the age of 5 every day in Uganda. USAID provides assistance to Uganda’s Malaria Council for insecticide spraying and shipments of bed nets, one of the most effective tools in limiting the spread of the disease. This has stopped.
- Medical supplies to help pregnant women and save babies from dying of diarrhea are no longer reaching villagers in Zambia.
- Throughout Africa, efforts to eradicate polio and stop an outbreak of the Marburg virus, which is similar to Ebola and has a death rate of up to 90%, have stopped.
- One of the most popular and effective U.S. government health programs, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved tens of millions of lives from the scourge of AIDS, is also halted. This includes the delivery of daily medications that are keeping alive 20 million people in 50 countries who are HIV-positive.
I could go on.
There are justifiable criticisms of USAID. What large organization, governmental or in the private sector, doesn’t have a few warts? Critics contend USAID is too reliant on for-profit contractors when it should be working more closely with local groups in the countries it serves. Fine. Let’s everyone agree management could work to make things run smoother and better.
Meanwhile, how much does all this cost?
The U.S. annually spends $68 billion on foreign aid. USAID gets $40 billion of that. The DoD’s budget, at $815 billion, is twenty times larger.
However, as the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, noted, “USAID’s efforts can do as much — over the long term — to prevent conflict as the deterrent effects of carrier strike group or a marine expeditionary force.” Or, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it, “Development is a lot cheaper than sending soldiers.”
Until now, Republican leaders in Congress have avoided saying anything critical abut any of this. Everyone knows the number one mortal sin in D.C. that will send you immediately to the ninth circle of political hell is to criticize Donald Trump in any way. Yesterday, however, Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) dared raise their heads to suggest it would be nice if somebody asked Congress about all of this. It wasn’t exactly an I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore moment, but at least it was something. One small breath in a hot desert.
John Thune, the Republican leader in the Senate, insisted yesterday that Musk has not closed USAID, but merely paused operations to examine its spending, as if Musk has any congressional authority to do any of that.
For some strange reason, inexplicable to me, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, with Republican acquiescence, are hell-bent on burying 64 years of good work and good will in a place so deep and remote no one will ever find it.
With all this tearing down of what took so many so long to build up, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had Kamala Harris won the presidential election three months ago. The country would be just as politicized and just as rancorous, but the tone and pitch of the political fray would be monumentally more civilized, presuming the transfer of power had been peaceful. Elon Musk would be back in California selling cars and sending rockets into space.
Harris and what she represented now remind me of a comet that had come close enough to earth to be faintly visible, but had then been flung into a new orbit and was last seen hurtling away into the frozen wastes of space and dwindling to a pale speck of light, soon to vanish forever.
Decency, like that comet, is quickly disappearing.
