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Scott-featured global health philanthropist and activist John Green made a video about TB treatment and USAID. tl;dw, TB is the brick-shithouse of bacteria, so treatment takes 4-6 months, but the good news is that people mostly aren't contagious during treatment. Stopping treatment increases the risk of treatment-resistance, including the spread of newly-treatment-resistant strains, so interruptions in the supply chain are a major global health problem. Yes, it's bad that global health was overly reliant on the USA, but it requires government-level funding and logistics. (Unsaid, his family pledged $1m/year 2024-2027 for a USAID TB program in the Philippines, in addition to $6.5m for Partners in Health, so he's literally put his money where his mouth is.) His contacts in confirm that drug supplies are being interrupted.
Even if one wants to cut USAID, a stop-work order, rather than a phase-out, was likely a net-negative by most measures of utility.
The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped. If you let them slow you down they'll keep finding reasons to do it until the whole thing grinds to a halt.
There was a limited supply of veto power and it has been squandered on less important issues. Don't blame the bartender for cutting you off, blame yourself for drinking too much.
Are there any previous examples? Trump has a pretty wide open range of options, and I don’t see why there is a rush on it.
Unless the point someone is making is that absolutely zero dollars should be spent in foreign aid, I feel like it would be useful to come up with an objective approach and do at least a basic combing through.
There is a long history of government “efficiency” initiatives spinning up, wasting unimaginable gobs of taxpayer money, and ending up with nothing usable to show for it. Elon mentioned from the Oval Office yesterday that the government stores and processes retirement records on paper inside an underground mine. Here is an old GAO report detailing past attempts to modernize the process. The theme of the piece is repeated abject failure.
You can’t waste time on planning, outreach, and meetings. You either do the thing, or the thing never gets done. Existing governmental organizations are not going to give you what you need to do the thing. You have to make them accept a fait accompli
If previous attempts failed, I assume it’s because they lacked a real focus and drive. What you highlight, I’m guessing b/c the link is broken, is more about a process change. Embarrassing to fail at fixing it for so long, but that’s at least a difficult problem. You’re making repairs to a moving vehicle.
In comparison, choosing which USAID programs are worthwhile and which aren’t should be fairly simple, at least at a surface level, and there currently an enormous push to make cuts and authority to do it. If it’s easy for them to shut down the whole thing, why wouldn’t it be similarly simple to cut off only parts of it?
Start by cutting and popularizing the obvious cases, I’m sure there’s easy instances where even the average Kamala voter would agree that it’s wasteful. Then get into the more ideological stuff. Continue extending as ideology and politics permit, until you’re left with useful programs. You could do this in a month or two, and I think it would actually change minds about the situation.
Thats what efficiency means to me, and the fact that the administration isn’t doing that leads me to that that either they aren’t very component or they really don’t care and just want to burn it all down.
Why didn't Alexander just unwind the Gordian Knot?
I guess he just wasn't competent and lacked real focus and drive.
Well if I’m not given specific examples I can’t exactly respond in specifics. But it does seem like the first time in my lifetime that government ‘efficiency’ is actually top of the president goals, so I do think it has real focus and drive unlike, say, a house report or something.
Unwinding the knot is impossible because it was designed to not be unwound. When the millionth competent person walks up to the Gordian Knot and fails to unwind it, it's not because they're all actually just dumb and incompetent, it's because the Gordian Knot is designed to not be unwound. It must be cut.
The federal worker retirement system is literally bureaucrats toiling in a mine underground and shuffling manila folders back and forth between caverns. It takes months for retirement paperwork to be done. There is a hard limit on the physical ability of the toiling bureaucrats to process retirement claims. Meanwhile, it takes the stroke of a key to send dozens of millions of dollars illegally to a Hotel operator to house illegals.
This is a purposefully designed Gordian Knot in order to make what Trump is doing impossible. It's hard to not notice that most critics actually don't want the Gordian Knot to be unwound and/or they don't like Trump and that was he's doing is at the very least moving the needle and the various criticisms about Trump not doing it "the right way" and whatever else are just soldiers in that war.
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