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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.
My thoughts throughout this Presidency (all three weeks of it) has been a mix of:
Damn, Trump is reckless, unprofessional, and vain.
How the fuck does he have so much ammo?
There's a plane crash? Air Traffic Controllers were hired under a racist system. Foreign aid? Transgender operas in Colombia. Funding basic science? >60% "administrative overhead" tacked on. Threaten Canada with tariffs? Suddenly our border security is a valid issue. Random whatever? $20M in subscriptions to the Associated Press, and another $1.6M to the NYT.
It feels like a weird mirror to the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy: He gives every indication of shooting blindly, but there has actually been a bullseye where he hits all along. That could be luck or good spin, but the most compelling story is that everywhere is that bad.
(Related joke: There has been a shooting at a peaceful protest! A child molester, a sexual assaulter, and a convicted felon illegally carrying a gun are the only people injured.)
I still don't think he's doing a good job, but damn does he have a strong narrative.
General rule of politics is that systems will be about as corrupt as they can get away with. One would presume that DOGE was not baked into the calculations of how much they could get away with.
The top level comment is about the hostage puppy of tuberculosis treatment. Which suggests how it works. Corruption grows, shielded by hostage puppies. The puppies are very effective at shielding corruption. Corruption grows: 10% corrupt, 90% puppies; 50% corrupt, 50% puppies; 90% corrupt, 10% puppies; 99% corrupt, 1% puppies.
Eventually the anti-corruption campaigners have a vast amount of ammo; there just aren't enough hostage puppies to provide cover for all the corruption. The level of corruption at which the anti-corruption campaigners can break through is determined by how sentimental the general public is. The more sentimental they are, the better the hostage puppies work at shielding corruption, and the more complete the corruption has to be before the dam breaks.
I doubt anything's 99% corrupt, at least with regard to its stated mission (obviously there are departments whose stated mission many think is evil). 1% puppy, sure, but there's usually quite a lot of stuff that's fulfilling the stated mission (so not corrupt) but also not puppy. I'd expect corruption levels to usually top out somewhere between 20% and 70%, depending largely on scrutiny levels (I developed this rule from experience in Australia; our local governments are typically shockingly corrupt but state and federal ones far less so, and the obvious reason why is that media and electorate attention focuses on state and federal politics).
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