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Reuters (with links to documents): Trump’s foreign aid freeze stops anti-fentanyl work in Mexico
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.
And what would that accomplish? You think USAID would say "Ok, you got us! We won't sponsored subversive operations in Eastern Europe anymore, and will focus on vaccines for Africans"? I think they'd use the 90 days to set up more NGO's that fund NGO's, to pretend that they never sponsored subversion to begin with.
I also think the only reason people are protesting his actions is that they know this is the only thing that would work.
... From the OP: "forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”, without also shutting down the anti-fentanyl work in mexico. obviously?
It is not working yet! Judges have blocked almost all of his big cuts. Because they aren't legal by established law and precedent (Impoundment Control Act). If I thought govt spending was about to permanently decrease by more than 20%, I'd be saying very different things (even though I also don't like the focus on cutting spending vs making govt better, more effective)
And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing, and nobody knowing there's anything that should be cut. Again, what good is letting them do that? Or put another way: how does that plausibly lead to cutting away the waste?
So? It already exposed who needs constant o be cut. When the Supreme Court ruling comes around, they'll know exactly where to take the hatchet to.
Because the programs will have to actually explain how they're supposed to be worth the money spent, and useless ones trying to obfuscate their uselessness can simply have their request for an extension denied. The denial process can be unilateral and impossible to appeal, if we want, and that would still be much better than freezing everything Day One while giving grifters no more of an out.
This implies that the programs did not have to actually explain before they were given money to spend.
If they never actually explained in the first place, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it?
In the alternative...
If they were useless from the start but also able to obfuscate to both get initially funded and re-funded since, why should a proposal to rely on detecting known liars after their repeated success?
Especially if the system's managers are- by the fact that they were persuaded by the corrupt lies in the first place- either unable or unwilling to screen fraud programs from legitimate programs from the start?
There are certainly reasons not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but your proposals are structured to keep the grifters in, not least because the grifters were clearly not being successfully caught by the people who were supposed to be checking for grifters.
No, it implies that they were explaining to themselves or a very friendly review board why this spending was needed. The relationship between the groups handing out the funds and the people using them isn’t like a normal business relationship. The funding group has no reason to care whether or not the program actually works. They are obligated to spend $XK on grants in a certain period, and they actually get punished for not spending the money. So if you follow tge procedure and say tge right sorts of things about your project, you get money — no matter how bad your previous track record is, no matter how obvious it is that the program you’re proposing wouldn’t work, no matter how obviously you are going to go over budget.
The only answer is to shut it down and have a complete outsider look over these grants. If they can’t explain why Iraqi Sesame Street will improve the security of the Middle East, then is needs to go.
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They previously had to explain it to DEI bureaucrats who thought "we will abide by such-and-such buzzwords" was a good justification. The standards have changed. There is no reason to think the grifters are able to fool people who do not think "but [woke value]!!!" is a conversation-stopper; they've never had to.
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