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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.
I really don't know if what Trump and Musk are doing is good or right, and I'm far from Trump's ardent defender and fan, but I also don't think it's that ridiculous what they're doing. They're using the big tech playbook, which is what Musk is used to. Slash budgets, break stuff, and the stuff that's really needed will become apparent as a result. It's what people who want to actually make change and make their companies better will do, not what people who want to preserve the status quo at any cost. (Read: it's what actual businesses do, not governments, because businesses care about cutting out waste, and governments don't really).
Maybe it's completely the wrong tactic to take. Maybe that playbook should never be employed for government because the programs are too important to have even a temporary gap. I don't know what the right answer is. But it's certainly interesting that they're trying something so unique. Where every other politician has claimed to want to make changes and failed to do so, this strategy might succeed, because it's never been tried before in government.
I've said this before, but I have to reiterate: applying the logic of business to government is a mistake. The difference is not that governments don't care about waste and private businesses do; there's significant political incentive to crack down on (perceived) waste. Rather, governments and businesses are not subject to the same feedback mechanisms.
The first and biggest distinction is that governments cannot (except in truly extreme circumstances) fail. Firms which make subpar decisions (I won't say 'bad', because you only need to outrun the bear) will eventually go out of business as you're outcompeted and profit/credit/investments dry up. Governments can keep spending money forever because revenue derives from taxes, not sales, and they are (usually) not trying to make a profit. You can't count on "what's really needed" emerging because your feedback mechanism doesn't respond like that. You can just break something important and never fix it.
The other big distinction is scope of interest. Businesses usually represent a narrow group of people (shareholders) with fairly straightforward interests (money). Governments not only aren't trying to make money, they represent the interests of countless vying groups. There's a great deal of disagreement on the margins about what they ought to be doing and how. You're going to get contradictory feedback on almost anything you do. One man's waste is another man's critical program.
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