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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   33991 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Reuters (with links to documents): Trump’s foreign aid freeze stops anti-fentanyl work in Mexico

All of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) programs in Mexico are currently halted due to the funding freeze, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters. These programs focus heavily on dismantling the fentanyl supply chain, according to State Department budget documents reviewed by Reuters. Their activities include training Mexican authorities to find and destroy clandestine fentanyl labs and to stop precursor chemicals needed to manufacture the illicit drug from entering Mexico.

In Mexico, INL also donates drug-detecting canines that helped Mexican authorities seize millions of fentanyl pills in 2023 alone, according to a March 2024 INL report.

“By pausing this assistance, the United States undercuts its own ability to manage a crisis affecting millions of Americans," said Dafna H. Rand, former director of the Office of Foreign Assistance at the State Department from 2021 to 2023. “U.S. foreign assistance programs in Mexico are countering the fentanyl supply chain by training local security services and ensuring maximum U.S.-Mexican cooperation in the fight against this deadly drug.”

...

Through INL projects, the U.S. partners with Mexican authorities operating on the counternarcotics frontline, including the military, prosecutors and police. Beyond narcotics, INL in Mexico also provides support to combat illegal migration and human smuggling.

Hundreds of projects covering billions of dollars in assistance around the world came to a halt, including much of INL’s work globally, after Trump on January 20 ordered a freeze on most U.S. foreign aid, saying he wanted to ensure the spending was aligned with his "America First" policy.

While U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued waivers for what he called “life-saving humanitarian assistance” to be exempt from the freeze, aid workers and U.N. staff have said most of the programs remain shut and that confusion persists as to what is or isn’t permissible.

One source familiar with the situation said the administration was considering a waiver to permit funding for some foreign anti-narcotics programs, but it wasn't clear if INL’s Mexico projects were among them. Two of the sources said INL’s Mexico projects have not at present been given exemptions.

The funding freeze really seems to have generated many foreseeable problems. This one seems to go pretty directly against the administration's stated policy goals, and I'm having trouble coming up with good defenses of it:

It should have been done by the DEA, not the State Department? Setting aside whether or not this would have been organizationally superior, the way to correct the error of having this be done by the State Department would be to transfer the INL to the DEA... which is apparently not being done.

The administration couldn't have expected this to be done by the State Department, not the DEA, setting aside which is organizationally superior? This would be tacitly conceding their incompetence, and they haven't fixed the problem, despite now being aware of it.

We shouldn't be devote resources to combating drug trafficking on the other side of the border, on principle? Mexico could just as easily say that international drug trafficking is a problem of the recipient country's making, since the recipient country is the one with illicit demand, so Mexico has the principled reason to not devote resources to it.

Anyone have better ideas?

The funding freeze it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”.

It feels like a lot of people here are doing the same thing progressives do when asked to defend affirmative action - they just come up with reasons why it might be a good thing, don't think about if it makes sense in context, and then argue it. Yeah, we need diversity because it makes teams more effective, diversity means different backgrounds and experiences, and look at this n=25 study from 2008!

In this case, Trump could have just said 'this funding freeze will go into effect in 90 days', and the agencies and departments would've all started begging for their money pretty quickly, without actually being defunded. Or just, like, used any other method of investigating what the government's spending money on, such as Google or the large amount of public data. These programs weren't secret, all the info was on the web! Actually shutting it all down immediately doesn't accomplish much, other than making a lot of people mad or enthused on twitter.

These programs weren't secret, all the info was on the web!

Assuming you trust what's on the web, which maybe you shouldn't given that USAID has channeled funds ostensibly meant for Pakistan into "making Cuban Twitter" as part of a scheme to somehow undermine the Cuban government.

One potential benefit of these sorts of purges is that it helps consolidate US spending into something that's more legible to the executive branch (and Congress). Now, given that the executive branch has a history of lying, not only to Congress but also to the Executive himself I think it's good that the entire system is flushed from time to time and programs restarted from scratch to ensure that there can be proper oversight and accountability. I mean, think about it - if we just wanted Good Government Programs to run with minimal confusion, we'd get rid of democracy and elections and call it a day.

However, frankly, it is hypothetically possible that every single program is doing something Good And Useful. It does not then follow that no programs should be cut. If the national debt is actually going to be a problem (and probably it is) we should not spend beyond our means. Just as in our personal lives, that means that there will be some good things that we can't have. I won't be particularly sad about INL (which is a shady bunch in my book) being temporarily shut down in Mexico. Possibly the US government would want to shut it down any way as they might be approaching the problem of drug flow from Mexico a little differently, I'm not sure.

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