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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35713 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Someone's wrong on the Radio: Internal contradictions in the narratives on USAID

I was listening to NPR today. The main story seemed to be that Elon Musk's DOGE is seeking to shut down (or severely pare down) USAID, the US Agency for International Development. This would probably not be very interesting to me, except that the NPR narrative made two seemingly conflicting statements within a ten-minute time frame.

  1. "Later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was now the acting administrator of USAID — which has long been an independent body — and that a "review" is underway aimed at the agency's "potential reorganization."

  2. "You know, over the weekend, there were reports of two security officials at USAID who were put on administrative leave for refusing DOGE access to certain systems. Democrats have accused DOGE of inappropriately accessing, you know, classified materials, which the lawmakers are saying they're going to investigate.".

(This is being stated much more unequivocally by other outlets: "The Trump administration has placed two top security chiefs at the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave after they refused to turn over classified material in restricted areas to ...".)

So on the one hand, USAID is described as an independent nonpolitical agency and should not be subsumed into Rubio's State Department. On the other hand, they have troves of classified materials that should not be accessed by staff of another agency. ... Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material? I recognize that I am confused...

So I looked at the Foreign Aid Act of 1961, as amended up to 2024. It looks like amendments are added several times per year, so this is not necessarily up to date, but such is the version of the law which is easy to read, "with amendments." It is 276 pages, so I didn't read more than the first five. Searching for "indep" turns of several uses of the term "independent," but they are for functions of USAID like "support for independent media" and "independent states of the former Soviet Union" (with four hits for "independent audit[or]). So the department isn't "independent" under the law, at least not in those terms.

Surprise surprise, on page 2 or 3 USAID is defined as "Under the policy guidance of the Secretary of State, the agency primarily responsible for administering this part should have the responsibility for coordinating all United States development-related activities," and is headed by an "Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development." There is no mention of whether this is a cabinet-level position. So Rubio taking over as the director of the agency and delegating actual responsibility to someone else appears totally legal, quotes from guests on NPR to the contrary notwithstanding.

Also, USAID is tasked with funding the International Atomic Energy Agency, for "civilian nuclear reactor safety" in former Soviet states, for limiting aid to countries engaged in nuclear weapons development, and for "nonproliferation and export control assistance." So that seems to explain why classified information may be found in its headquarters.

The claims of Elon Musk and NPR actually align on the topic of aid for LGBT causes, with NPR guests stating that the loss of USAID will be a disaster for gender nonbinary people. The MAGA narrative is also supported by the Act when compared to archives of the agency's website: there are only 12 mentions of "gender" in the law, and they are exclusively for "gender-responsive interventions" for HIV/AIDS, for "gender parity in basic education", "performance goals, on a gender disaggregated basis" and for statistics about who has received how much aid, again "disaggregated" by gender. In contrast, USAID's website used to contain pages with text like "USAID proudly joins this government-wide effort with its own commitment to advance the human rights of LGBTQI+ people around the world, including members of its own workforce, and supports efforts to protect them from violence, stigma, discrimination, and criminalization.". There is a Trans angle, with text like "In Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, and Nigeria, transgender-led CSOs delivered health services (including transgender-specific health and HIV services), emergency housing, and economic empowerment programs. In Burma and South Africa, the first transgender health center was organized, drawing upon best practice from Thailand." (ibid)

Then there is the pandemic angle, of which I am skeptical, but Musk did retweet that USAID provided $38M in funding to Ben Hu for "bat coronavirus emergence" research from 2014 to September, 2019, from a document which appears to have been obtained under FOIA by the White Coat Waste Project. Ben Hu was a PI with EcoHealth alliance and was previously alleged to be one of the first three Covid patients according to "sources within the government," although an intelligence community report mandated by Congress later denied that any Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists were known to have been among early Covid patients.

If the FOIA document about funding is true, that funding appears to have been outside of its mandate and potentially a misuse of public funds: the only mentions of "pandemic," "epidemic," or "virus" in the Foreign Aid Act concern HIV/AIDS.

I'm left with the impression that Musk and MAGA are being more truthful than NPR, and maybe the Agency does deserve to go into receivership.

On the other hand, they have troves of classified materials that should not be accessed by staff of another agency. ... Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material? I recognize that I am confused...

You know, I accept just about all the rest of the post. But this is silly. A US agency needing to distribute food in the Ivory Coast needs to understand the actual (unvarnished truth of) the situation on the ground there, at the very least so they don't hire a boat to go dock in a harbor right before the rebels grab it or try to truck it through some area where the government has (in fact, but not avowedly) lost control.

That kind of up-to-date intelligence is rightly classified. Probably the most rightly-classified as compared to the median bullshit that gets the stamp.

Anyway, this is not the thing to be confused about.

You know, I accept just about all the rest of the post. But this is silly. A US agency needing to distribute food in the Ivory Coast needs to understand the actual (unvarnished truth of) the situation on the ground there, at the very least so they don't hire a boat to go dock in a harbor right before the rebels grab it or try to truck it through some area where the government has (in fact, but not avowedly) lost control.

I see no reason why this requires keeping secrets from the American public. If the unvarnished truth is inaccessible to the public, how can they meaningfully exercise democratic control over these expenditures?

Ok, well if, to you, democratic control means the military and spy agencies can’t have classified sources, methods and documents, then you’ve lost the plot. Should they just up and publish the as-yet unknown capabilities of our weapons systems? Should they have published the details of operation overlord to the Germans?

I’m all for oversight, which is why there’s a select committee in Congress, chosen by Congress, that looks at this stuff. If you want to strengthen that system on the margins, I’d join you. But an unqualified statement is unserious.

Ok, well if, to you, democratic control means the military and spy agencies can’t have classified sources, methods and documents, then you’ve lost the plot.

We are not discussing the military and spy agencies. We are discussing the department of funding Trans Opera in Ecuador. I defy you to argue why USAID needs to keep secrets from the American public.

You're being purposefully dense. The classified documents were originated by the military and spy agencies and then utilized by USAID to help them assess & plan operations in unstable parts of the world.

There is an obvious reason why such materials were classified at inception and an obvious reason why USAID would benefit from using them.

Only in the most fever-dreamed imagination could this be fairly construed as "USAID keeping secrets from the American public" as opposed to "USAID making us of existing government secrets".

I've made clear I'm not even a fan of USAID and I'd vote to abolish it or fold it into State or whatever else. But this is an idiotic line of reasoning.

Aid agencies probably do need some classified political intelligence.

This feels like a fully general argument against government secrecy.

Then your feelings need calibration, because it is actually an argument against government secrecy regarding the distribution of foreign aid. I am actually not that fond of the other sorts of Government secrets either, but I can recognize that with regards to war and espionage, unilateral disarmament would be unwise. But this is not war or espionage. This is the expenditure of taxpayer's money, purportedly for straightforward humanitarian purposes.

There is no actual need for the people in charge of distributing food to the Ivory Coast to be provided with super-secret-squirrel information about "the actual situation on the ground", given that they are supposed to be directed by the State Department under the leadership of the President. If secret information indicates that they should do things in a specific way, they can be directed to do things in that specific way with no explanation as to why.

There is no actual need for the people in charge of distributing food to the Ivory Coast to be provided with super-secret-squirrel information about "the actual situation on the ground", given that they are supposed to be directed by the State Department under the leadership of the President. If secret information indicates that they should do things in a specific way, they can be directed to do things in that specific way with no explanation as to why.

This is just kicking the can down the road.

At some point, a civil servant learns about the secret information and directs USAID to distribute aid things in a particular way or avoid particular things. That person is (a fortiori, since he is directing them!) in charge of distributing food to the Ivory Coast.

At most, you're saying that the administrative or personnel boundary between USAID and State should have put more analysis and decision making on State and less on USAID such that the guy in charge of distributing food that also has secret information happens to be on the State side and not on the USAID side. That's fine, but that really doesn't change much except shuffle roles around an organizational divide.

Anyway, this is not the thing to be confused about.

It is, though, if you then question why USAID is upset about the SoS/DoGE having access to these supposedly insignificant and/or perfectly normal classified materials. Whether they are up to no good or just reacting politically to the change in admin, it looks like bad faith on their part and completely legitimate for the Trump admin to audit the fuck out of them.

I’d imagine they just need DOGE personnel to be gee anted the right clearances.

I’m all for auditing them and I’m sure they’ve done a ton wrong. But this one particular thing is totally explicable.

Why should doge have access to any classified information? Does Musk have a security clearance? Did congress vote to create doge and decide what its powers will be?

Classification authority resides in the Executive. For better or worse, the President doesn't need Congress to classify anything and doesn't need Congress to disclose classified materials to anyone.

Yes Musk has a security clearance. As do his lackeys.

More importantly, the president is the final authority on classification, not counting a few nuclear secrets. If Trump declares a document is unclassified or a particular person is granted a special dispensation to view it, then it is so.

The security clearance process is almost (with a few nuclear exceptions) entirely defined by executive order, not by Congress. I've heard suggestions that Congress codify it, but it hasn't actually done so.

Congress could not do their jobs if their job depended on it.

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