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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.
"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."
"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.
The outcry from the purple blob over USAID is insane. By sheer luck Elon hit a bullseye. I really hope that there will be a lot of declassified info leaking about who is getting the money.
A lot of the people panicing aren't concerned about bribes and corruption being unconvered. There are plenty of people panicing over that but they are fewer than the number of people freaking out online and those who actually risk having crimes uncovered are probably less vocal. The big fuss is about the recession that is about to hit upper middle class people who only are employable in the public sector. They react in horror seeing George town pol sci graduates being tossed out and told to "learn to code". The Chief diversity officer, or the person with a cushy high status USAID job that allows them to fly business class to Tanzania twice a year doesn't want to learn about all the new exciting opportunities in nursing. This can be compared to the freakout over lots of PMCs being tossed out of twitter. Those people aren't supposed to be treated like factory workers who get laid off.
With 4 years of Trump we could really see a 10-20% reduction in public sector cushy PMC jobs. That is a sizeable downshift in employment equivalent to a proper recession. I would be freaking out as well if I thought it was realistic that there would be a 20% reduction in employment in my field over the course of the next four years.
I don't know what makes you think these jobs are cushy. The benefits are good and it's hard to get fired, but the pay is low and there's a certain rigidity compared to the private sector. As I recently mentioned in a prior post, I worked for the state when I first got out of law school, and it wasn't for me. The pay is decent enough that you're not going to starve, and if you save your pennies you can put your kids through college, but if you want to see Europe, it better be on your television set. You can look at the schedule provided with your orientation materials and know how much you'll be making every year for the rest of your career, which may give a certain peace of mind but also resigns you to knowing that there is absolutely zero chance you'll ever make more than that. Want to make 100k? You'd better be a doctor or have some other highly specialized degree where you could easily make double what the state's paying you on the outside without them looking twice at your resume, or have a title like "Senior Administrator" or "Director" and I'm talking like running an entire state agency. You can of course work your way up the ranks through promotion, but unless you get that every few years you're taking a pay cut, since you start out at the bottom of the scale again. When I left and went to the private sector my pay increased by 50% despite having no experience in the field I was going into.
But the real bitch of it is the lack of flexibility. As a normal salaried employee, no one pays too much attention to where I am as long as I get my work done. With the government, I had to sign in at the beginning and end of each day, and when I left for lunch. If I was more than 15 minutes late, I'd get vacation time docked. When I first started, I didn't have enough leave accrued to take two days off and my request for unpaid leave had to be approved by the HR people in Harrisburg. Every aspect of your work is micromanaged. They monitor internet usage. If you don't have any work to do they actually make you pretend to look busy, which is true of everybody when they first start and don't have a high caseload. The pointless drudgery weighs on you more when the government is involved; if a client insists I do something pointless now at least I can take pleasure in the fact that they're willing to pay by the hour for it and I can use the work to pad my billables and get a nice bonus. When I had to do it for the government it was because it was part of some internal policy memo that no one has actually looked at in 20 years but has become customary to the point that not doing it is a fireable offense.
This may seem like the exact kind of inefficiency that Musk et al. are trying to prevent, but it's a balancing act. If a private company wants to make a business decision that the constant logging calls and diary entries and filling out timesheets is a waste of time that prevents employees from being productive, it's one thing. But if it's not done then the DOGE people come right back at you with the opposite argument of asking you to justify what you do all day and them saying "how does it take all day to do that", and politicians wondering how taxpayer money is being spent, and the people claiming disability wondering why their claim was denied, and Elon Musk wondering why the other claim was approved, so it's better to just have a bunch of comprehensive reporting requirements so that when people ask questions you actually have answers.
Like I said, it's annoying, and it wasn't for me, but some people like the stability and predictability of government employment. By threatening that stability what they're doing is removing all the advantage of government employment. If you want government workers to be like private sector workers, now you'd better plan on paying them like private sector workers, since you can no longer convince them that they have their jobs for life unless they seriously fuck up. If this goes as far as Trump seems like he wants to take it, you may pare down the Federal workforce, but there are still critical jobs to be done, and the only people willing to do them will be the kind of people who are willing to work for a fraction of the going rate and don't care if they get fired in four years.
Did you work for the federal government or state?
I have friends in DC. Yes I make more money compared to them but my hours are significantly worse. In many ways their lifestyle is better. If you are married and you both work these relatively cushy DC jobs you’ll be doing just fine.
Sort of both. Social Security is a Federal program, and most employees (e.g., if you work at the Social Security office) are Federal employees, but disability determinations were done by the state Department of Labor, so I was employed by the state, but was administering a Federal program. I'm in Pennsylvania, which pays its employees more than other states, and if I had been doing financial determinations on the SSA side my salary and benefits would have been similar. I didn't mean to imply that you couldn't do reasonably well working for the government, just that these jobs aren't cushy by any stretch of the imagination. Like anything else in life, there are tradeoffs, and when Republicans talk about eliminating the advantages of Federal employment without addressing any of the disadvantages I think they're making an unfounded assumption that this is going to make things more efficient.
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