site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   35621 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom New Old Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

NYTimes article that wasn't paywalled for me, with my browser extensions: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html

In more bad-things-happening-due-to-USAID-stop-work-order-news*, it turns out that USAID participated in clinical trials. ("The Times identified more than 30 frozen studies that had volunteers already in the care of researchers...") Interrupting clinical trials is bad:

Asanda Zondi received a startling phone call last Thursday, with orders to make her way to a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection.

The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her. The device, a silicone ring inserted into her vagina, needed to be removed right away.

When Ms. Zondi, 22, arrived at the clinic, she learned why: The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded the study, had withdrawn financial support and had issued a stop-work order to all organizations around the globe that receive its money. The abrupt move followed an executive order by President Trump freezing all foreign aid for at least 90 days. Since then, the Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the agency entirely.

Ms. Zondi’s trial is one of dozens that have been abruptly frozen, leaving people around the world with experimental drugs and medical products in their bodies, cut off from the researchers who were monitoring them, and generating waves of suspicion and fear.

The State Department, which now oversees U.S.A.I.D., replied to a request for comment by directing a reporter to USAID.gov, which no longer contains any information except that all permanent employees have been placed on administrative leave. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the agency is wasteful and advances a liberal agenda that is counter to President Trump’s foreign policy.

In interviews, scientists — who are forbidden by the terms of the stop-work order to speak with the news media — described agonizing choices: violate the stop-work orders and continue to care for trial volunteers, or leave them alone to face potential side effects and harm.

The Declaration of Helsinki, a decades-old set of ethical principles for medical research that American institutions and others throughout the world have endorsed, lays out ethical guidelines under which medical research should be conducted, requiring that researchers care for participants throughout a trial, and report the results of their findings to the communities where trials were conducted.

Ms. Zondi said she was baffled and frightened. She talked with other women who had volunteered for the study. “Some people are afraid because we don’t know exactly what was the reason,” she said. “We don’t really know the real reason of pausing the study.”

The stop-work order was so immediate and sweeping that the research staff would be violating it if they helped the women remove the rings. But Dr. Leila Mansoor, a scientist with the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (known as CAPRISA) and an investigator on the trial, decided she and her team would do so anyway.

“My first thought when I saw this order was, There are rings in people’s bodies and you cannot leave them,” Dr. Mansoor said. “For me ethics and participants come first. There is a line.”

Setting aside that we now won't get the scientific results of these studies, fucking people over like this** seems like counterproductive foreign policy.

*I'm posting this, because I didn't recall clinical trials coming up in the other discussions (I only learned of it this morning), so it's presumably also news to others and I thought it was different in a key way. (see footnote 2)

**I say "fucking people over," because it's not a situation in which receiving something is better than nothing, even if you didn't receive everything you expected/were promised; these test subjects risked their own health on the basis of guarantees from the trials and the USA reneged on its part of the deal. (I.E., if you're too hard-heartened a libertarian to believe in Kantian medical ethics, the USA is still in the wrong, due to not following the terms of contracts it entered.)

So USAid is sponsoring a study that will benefit a foreign drug company and may develop a treatment that at best Americans will have to pay eye watering prices while [that] foreigners get it for free? For a disease that I'd really prefer not a single tax dollar went to treat in the first place. Call me heartless, but I'm strongly in favor of shitting this trial down.

Let's let quarter trillion dollar firms pay for their own medical studies and let's let foreign nations who use monopsony to bid down their fair share of treatment development costs accept that that means fewer treatments get developed.

a study that will benefit a foreign drug company... quarter trillion dollar firms...

Which foreign company is benefiting from this?

Americans will have to pay eye watering prices while foreigners get it for free?

Americans can already get PrEP and it's even covered by Medicare and Medicaid, much to the chagrin of members of this forum who would rather people did not have HIV treatments.

Not to mention that other members of this forum were railing against USAID because they are "propping up" unsustainable populations of Africans. This trial was for a birth control device which would directly reduce the number of future Africans and yet I don't see those members defending this as a worthwhile expenditure. It makes me think that objections founded on population growth aren't really the crux of the objection.

I misread the participant's name as AstraZenica, my apologies.

Americans can already get PrEP and it's even covered by Medicare and Medicaid, much to the chagrin of members of this forum who would rather people did not have HIV treatments.

I am quite happy with people getting whatever treatments they wish to pay for, but I'd strongly prefer HIV treatments from taxes be limited to children born with it and transfusions.

Not to mention that other members of this forum were railing against USAID because they are "propping up" unsustainable populations of Africans. This trial was for a birth control device which would directly reduce the number of future Africans and yet I don't see those members defending this as a worthwhile expenditure.

Presumably I’m one of the posters you have in mind here. For the record, I do think that researching birth control methods (experimental or otherwise) in Africa is a very worthwhile expenditure.

Now, should that expenditure come from USAID specifically? I’m less sure about that. I can see a good argument for it, which is basically: Efforts to drive down Sub-Saharan African fertility cannot be conducted openly and for explicitly eugenic/racialist reasons. Not only would many Africans themselves understandably perceive this as a colonialist affront, but a great many westerners would also be made very uncomfortable by this and would not want their tax dollars employed in such a way. Therefore, laundering this mission through an ostensible charity organization creates the veneer (and, in fairness, also in some sense the reality) of both benevolence on our part and voluntariness on the part of the Africans.

Now, this attitude is directly at odds with the ethos of transparency and legibility which is motivating DOGE’s cuts to things like USAID. They don’t want the government doing things that look like one thing but are actually a totally different thing. They don’t want to continue to countenance the surreptitious laundering of funds for misrepresented ends. This is a respectable motivation, but I do wonder whether it is necessarily at odds with the important work that advanced nations need to be urgently performing in order to find every way imaginable to drive down third world fertility.

Efforts to drive down Sub-Saharan African fertility cannot be conducted openly and for explicitly eugenic/racialist reasons.

They can be and are conducted openly. Yes, they don't openly do this because they think subsaharans are inferior, but that's because they don't and I don't see why that's a bad thing.

Obviously I’m aware of the work the Gates Foundation is doing in this arena, and I applaud it. What I mean is simply that if the Gayes foundation did exactly the same work, but instead of presenting it as a fulfillment of liberal principles of female empowerment they presented it as a work of paternalistic technocratic imposition on a less-developed society for the protection/betterment of a higher civilization, that work would be utterly rejected by both the African populace and the donors. That the Gates Foundation, as far as I’m aware, does sincerely believe in the aforementioned liberal principles is simply the cherry on top.

To be clear, I do absolutely think it’s true that most African women who are currently having six or seven children would prefer to have less than that. (I had a previous post about declining fertility in advanced countries, in which I said that most women simply do not instinctively desire large families, and given the option to have a small number of children, the revealed preference of the average woman is to do so.)

Lowering African fertility is indeed a boon to those women, and to the countries in which they live, which do not have the economic infrastructure to provide gainful and productive employment to their current masses of young people. To the extent that African countries can be made less unstable and less likely to export tens of millions of unemployed and restless young black men to First World countries, the efforts of the Gates Foundation, and of USAID insofar as their efforts have been similar, are a net good for humanity.

However, my hope is that behind the curtain, at the upper echelon of organizations like the Gates Foundation and USAID, there is also a covert understanding of additional eugenic principles and that their work can be targeted, under the guise of charity, to take specific interest in improving the genetic stock of the relevant countries; to not only produce less Africans but also, in the long run, better Africans. Africans who are better equipped to be peer-level participants in the global order as their countries are further integrated into a global political infrastructure.

In patriarchal societies(like most of Africa), women typically desire multiple grown sons. African fertility preferences are genuinely high.

Despite having the highest fertility rate in the world, women and men alike in Niger say they want more children than they actually have – women want an average of nine, while men say they want 11.

—Jill Filipovic, "Why have four children when you could have seven? Family planning in Niger," Guardian, March 2017

Even in that article, the family planning clinic is funded by USAID, huh.

More comments

For a disease that I'd really prefer not a single tax dollar went to treat in the first place.

Yeah, there's been a growing awareness how badly we've been lied to about HIV.

HIV doesn't readily spread from heterosexual sex. There is essentially zero risk from vaginal intercourse the way that 99% of Americans will experience it. In the Western world, it spread in the gay community because of anal sex and extreme promiscuity.

So what happened in South Africa? 1) The common practice of "dry sex" in which women rub abrasives into their vagina 2) Huge rates of child rape.

Those problems might be intractable. Apparently there was a billboard in Eswatini that said "don't rape kids".

HIV doesn't readily spread from heterosexual sex. There is essentially zero risk from vaginal intercourse the way that 99% of Americans will experience it

This is a heck of a non sequitur. Whether you like it or not, a lot of straight men like anal sex - with women. The first Google hit found that in 2013 about a third of heterosexuals in 20 US cities they polled admitted to having had anal sex in the past year. Now, I've never seen the appeal myself, and you're welcome to say it's against nature for all the same reasons as gay sodomy if you want to be all Catholic about it - but it's a thing, massively so. Promiscuous gay men might be a small minority of the American population, but it doesn't follow that the remainder only have wholesome church-approved missionary sex, and you'd have an even harder time trying to change that than trying to walk back gay acceptance.

Probably something like 99% of the anal sex is being had by gay men. Straight people might try it occasionally (not sure why) but it's not really on the menu like it is for gay men. The average N count for straight people is also tiny compared to gay men.

HIV has never really spread in a western heterosexual population.

Probably something like 99% of the anal sex is being had by gay men.

The poll I linked specifically polled heterosexuals. Thirty percent of male respondents would have to have lied about being straight (and thirty percent of female respondents would have to have lied about having had it at all) for this to fit the data.

Probably something like 99% of the anal sex is being had by gay men.

The poll I linked specifically polled heterosexuals.

Your link doesn't contradict his claim. It's a question of frequency within each population.

If you think HIV does spread readily from heterosexual sex, then why hasn't it?

Last time I ran the numbers (several years ago. It might be time for an update), gay men got HIV at >80x the rate of the rest of the population. This was reported like "20x the general population" or something, which neatly hides the fact that people-who-aren't-gay-men get HIV at less than half the rate of the general population.

I don't think your mechanism of action can dismiss such stark differences.

If you think HIV does spread readily from heterosexual sex, then why hasn't it?

I'm not particularly invested in proving that it does, I just specifically wanted to point out what I believed to be a really weird jump in reasoning.

If you think HIV does spread readily from heterosexual sex, then why hasn't it?

Frequency and the amount of partners would be an obvious alternative explanation.

Last time I ran the numbers (several years ago. It might be time for an update), gay men got HIV at >80x the rate of the rest of the population.

That does not indicate that anal sex is more risky in itself, by that factor. I haven't looked into it, it's just something that popped up on twitter, but I see "only" a 10x difference between receptive anal, and receptive vaginal intercourse. The base rate is so low in any case, that I struggle to understand how anything but higher promiscuity could explain the difference between gay and straight people contracting HIV.

I see "only" a 10x difference

That's a shockingly huge difference that could explain the entire disparity and then some.

Masking for COVID is still poorly studied (or at least poorly publicized), but the range I saw was between 1.05x - 6x difference compared to unmasked. I have no problem believing that a 90% effective intervention could stop an epidemic in its tracks.

(As an aside, I'm pretty sure that tweet is comparing the 1.11% risk of HIV per exposure to the 2% risk of pregnancy per year.)

I have no problem believing that a 90% effective intervention could stop an epidemic in its tracks.

We are talking about a 1% transmission rate vs 0.1% transmission rate. You're not getting an epidemic from either, without massive promiscuity.

(As an aside, I'm pretty sure that tweet is comparing the 1.11% risk of HIV per exposure to the 2% risk of pregnancy per year.)

What am I missing?? It says "estimated median risk of HIV transmission per exposure". Where did you get anything about pregnancy?

If you assume weekly sex and other simplifications, then a 1% rate of transmission doubles the infected population every two years. A 0.1% rate doubles it every 20 years. That's moderate promiscuity IMO, particularly since it still mostly works if they change partners annually (as opposed to weekly).

What am I missing?? It says "estimated median risk of HIV transmission per exposure". Where did you get anything about pregnancy?

The first sentence of the tweet (emphasis added):

Even gay sex per se is less risky than people think - comparable to female pregnancy risk with a condom

More comments

then why hasn't it

It has in Africa and it did to an extent at the height of the HIV pandemic in Russia (mostly intravenous drug fueled, but it spilled over into the straight population for a time) in the late 90s and early 2000s. In almost all cases prostitutes form the reservoir population, such that even though the risk of an individual customers getting infected was very low, there are so many customers that it can still spread.

So what happened in South Africa? 1) The common practice of "dry sex" in which women rub abrasives into their vagina 2) Huge rates of child rape.

It’s part of it, but it’s also much more frequent prostitution in these places. In any case, there were heterosexuals did get HIV in the West unless you think they’re all lying, and anal sex is increasingly common among heterosexuals (a joke about it is, for example, the opening scene in the very popular PMC lib comedy ‘Fleabag’), probably more so than it was in the 80s.

As experimental treatments, none of these treatments have been shown to be safe and effective. If your doctor gave you one of these treatments, he would be disgraced, disbarred, and possibly improsoned. If any of the trial subjects dropped dead due to the treatment, nobody would bat an eye.

As a matter of ethics these patients were making a sacrifice in the name of science, and it's a shame the science is lost. But it's disingenous to call it lifesaving treatment, because it's not.

That sounds like another entry into more bad things happening because USAID was doing things they shouldn't have been, in this case conducting medical trials.

Why shouldn't they have been participating in clinical trials? Couldn't the problem have been avoided by the stop-work order having specific previsions for per-protocol discontinuation of trial interventions, as applicable?

It's not what I hoped they were doing, anyway. I'm a bit surprised that experimental contraceptive methods is even something that countries are still accepting from the US. South African TFR: 2.3 -- apparently they are already utilizing birth control adequately. Perhaps they should stop engaging in activities that spread HIV.

I'm not really sure how the executive office works, but my impression is that, somehow, they can't do that, the study in question just finds endless ways to file extensions, are forgotten about, and continue operating as usual until the next administration comes into power. My first guess would be that it's relatively hard to figure out what any specific program is actually doing, until they go complaining to the New York Times about it, since there are so many of them, and they have an incentive to look important but also non controversial.

Maybe the pharmaceutical companies that hold the patents and stand to profit hand over fist if these experiments work should chip in a bit.

@OilFieldRando posted about the first person to die because of Trump's funding cuts.

A poor woman in Thailand died because her hospital couldn't afford the oxygen to keep her alive.

Except that the NGO whose funding was cut off has $630 million in assets, a stock portfolio of $98 million, and it's CEO (a former member of British parliament) makes $1.2 million a year. They have $1.3 billion a year in revenue, and spend some of that helping people illegally immigrate to the United States.

Might this incredibly wealthy organization spare just few hundred dollars to keep a poor woman alive?

I'm sure there's more to the story, but it begs the question. How much baby? How much bathwater? It's not imperative on the U.S. to fund these bloated, corrupt, and biased NGOs just because they might occasionally do some good things.

its not just the funding but also stop-work orders

CAPRISA appears to be an NIH partnership, FWIW. I'm open to the possibilities she was incorrect or lying, but it seems Dr. Monsoor believed the stop-work order applied to discontinuing interventions per-protocol. (Even if she, herself wasn't employed by USAID, it wouldn't be surprising if it was practically impossible to do so without using any USAID resource.)

It's just like when there are cuts to school budgets: the affected orgs, who oppose the cuts, make sure that the effects of the cuts create maximum sympathy as a PR campaign against the cuts. Meanwhile, none of the org administrators suffer a salary cut.

Does this emotional blackmail work? It just makes me harden my heart. I feel like from a game theory standpoint, one must never submit to these kind of tactics, otherwise the other person just gets whatever they want.

Earlier, I expressed disappointment about cutting these programs root and branch, preferring instead a more surgical method.

Now I realize I was wrong. USAID must be pulled up by its roots and rebuilt with people who care about their mission more than their paycheck. Imagine how much good could be done without all the grifters and ideologues in the way.

The conservative in me wants slow, methodical cuts that do the least damage to the good parts. But I also understand that those cuts are easier to block/mitigate, and maybe the best thing is to destroy and rebuild the good parts. People will suffer in the process, but that's true of all change.

Does this emotional blackmail work?

Yes. It works on most of the normies most of the time.

Silicone rings in vaginas are commonly self inserted and removed.

NuvaRing is a fairly common birth control drug with this delivery method.

Can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs.

We have a massive problem. 2T deficit p.a. We have an NGO network funded by our own government working against us. And indeed, it is almost certain that any of these stories are being coordinated by current USAID employees (in part why it was absurd for the judge to issue a TRO re thr admin leave). That is, we are paying the American executive to try to undermine the American executive.

No sorry I don’t care about this. Sorry it sucks but we can’t afford it and it needs to be cut. This is the way.

I can't take Trump seriously about the deficit when he openly plans on insulting massive tax cuts that will massively outdo whatever nibbling around the edges DOGE manages to accomplish.

I mean, do you not count tariffs as taxes? If you eliminate the 25% tax on the profits of China-to-Amazon Inc, but instead charge them 25% on everything they bring from china, are you cutting taxes? Or just shifting the tax burden?

Yeah, Trump's tariff announcement today was good actually. Certainly much better than his previous ideas.

  1. Reciprocal tariffs. We charge others what they charge us.

  2. VAT offsets. If European countries average 20% VAT and we average 6% sales tax, that's the equivalent of a 14% difference in tariffs that need to be accounted for.. Edit: I am wrong. Thanks to @The_Nybbler.

There's a good chance Trump could lower taxes in the US in a revenue neutral way.

Reciprocal tariffs. We charge others what they charge us.

Except that others don't charge us tariffs, we charge ourselves tariffs. It's more like "we charge ourselves what others charge themselves". When you formulate it that way it becomes clear why this is a losing proposition.

The whole "the consumer pays 100% of the tariff" has ben debunked a million times. The cost is never passed on 100% to the consumer.

I don't see what that has to do with what I wrote.

Can you provide more information on this? I'm curious what proportion is, as I'd assume it'd be fairly close intuitively, and I've never seen anything otherwise.

A quick peruse of google scholar give this paper: https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1814161

It suggests that for a change in tariff rates, less than 1/3 is reflected in end consumer prices.

Sorry I don't have more sources, I haven't read many econimics papers even though I'm an economist 🙃

More comments

If it's purely self charging then why are there retribution tariffs? Obviously when you raise the price of a good when produced by foreigners such that you give your internal market an advantage it is bad for those foreigners. They need to pass the cost to the consumer but that would make them uncompetitive. The winner of tariffs is special local interests, the loser are general internal interests and foreign competitors. The only interests influential in foreign states are the foreign competitors thus foreign states oppose it.

i still dont get why people think VAT is comparable to tariffs? is trumps idea of "fair" that we keep taxing our own products with VAT but make an exception american imports?

I've always thought reciprocal carbon taxes on imports would be an amazing scissor-wrench to throw in the works.
Get the free traders arguing with the greens about why you can import silicon made with coal in China at 0% tax, but silicon made with coal in the US gets taxed and regulated to death.

A VAT isn't similar to a tariff at all, and reciprocating Euro VAT with American tariff is harm to Americans with no purpose. The way VAT works is an American hammer costs e.g. $10 in the US and $12 in Europe because of VAT... but a European hammer of the same base price ALSO costs $10 in the US and $12 in Europe. There's no unfair practice there.

If you set the tariffs off against sales tax, you've made a truly horrible incentive; it makes it easier for states to raise their sales taxes up to Euro/Canadian VAT levels.

Sloshing tariffs and corporate tax around is well and good, but what about the rest of the tax cuts promised, amounting to a fiscal hole somewhere in the neighborhood of $5T?

Overtime pay tax cut could be anywhere from .25 trillion to 3 trillion? Sounds like they just wanted to throw a few extra trillion in there.

I'm upset he wants to expand salt deductions though. Reducing those last time was a huge coup. Guess tech bending the knee means he needs to give something back.

The analysis seems pretty reasonable to me. It's hard to put an exact number accounting for how people will react to the new rules environment. But it's even harder to imagine this all penciling out.

A lot of that is make believe. There are a ton of expiring provisions that will “cost money” to extend but won’t raise or lower current taxes. At the same time, there are some tax relief they want.

It's not necessarily just nibbling around the edges. There are some indications that the amount of fraud in the larger programs such as SSI, Medicare/caid, and defense might be significant. If so, the savings could easily amount to $1 trillion per year. I guess we'll see.

DOGE started with USAID because the spending was so ludicrous and so obviously geared towards sinecures for the uniparty political machine.

It's been what, 3 weeks. They've cut $100 billion so far. Give it time. If they're allowed to cook, it's going to be a lot, lot more.

Even if they do find $1 trillion in fraud, he’s proposed five trillion in tax cuts. That math is harsh.

Total government revenue is less than 5 trillion. You are comparing annual vs total numbers.

There are some indications that the amount of fraud in the larger programs such as SSI, Medicare/caid, and defense might be significant. If so, the savings could easily amount to $1 trillion per year. I guess we'll see.

SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense amount to amount to $3.5T. do you really believe that "easily" 30% of that is waste?

They've cut $100 billion so far.

Have they cut or have they just put a temporary stop on expenditures? How many programs have actually been durably cancelled, either by the executive or by Congress?

SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense amount to amount to $3.5T. do you really believe that "easily" 30% of that is waste?

The US is definitely getting as least bang for their buck with military contracts. Any reason to believe that the other are different?

The military presumably wastes money on slow rolling procurement and other things of that nature. A full quarter of defense spending is salaries, and perhaps there are people drawing a salary that don't need to be there.

SS is a cash transfer program that spends less than one percent on administrative overhead, so savings from firing useless employees would be minimal. The only possible avenue for waste would be actual fraud on the part of the recipients. I doubt that this is anywhere near 30%, but I don't expect either of us could convince the other on this point. However, the longer DOGE goes on without announcing finding this fraud, the more skeptical we should be.

A full quarter of defense spending is salaries

I would go the other way. Salaries should be a bigger fraction of the military budget.

There could be massive savings also in Medicare and Medicaid if they only stomp their feet and use their massive scale to cut costs.

They've cut $100 billion so far.

doge-tracker.com/ gives 45.6 billion, of which 37.5 billion comes from counting the full annual salary and benefits of the staff accepting the voluntary retirement scheme as a saving, even though they are still being paid for another 8 months. Given the number of staff involved compared to normal Federal employee turnover, the real saving here may be negative. And of course, this saving goes away if the government can't eliminate the work the retired employees were doing.

That leaves about $8 billion in unambiguously real savings, of which $4 billion is the illegal cut to the overhead on NIH grants.

I think the difference between the $100 billion being bandied about and the doge-tracker numbers comes from assuming that the entire USAID budget is zeroed out, and that this counts as a DOGE saving.

Here's the doom loop chart

For those of you too lazy to click on the link; the CBO has crunched the numbers and the net effect on income due to transfers (i.e. medicare, medicaid, SS, etc.) beings to be a net negative starting at the middle quintile.

Phrased differently: the top 60% of Americans have less income, on net, because of the massive transfers to the bottom 40%.

Culture war angle: Which quintiles are the sources of new business formation, full time employment, responsible family practices etc?

60+ years of Great Society-ism and horrific perverse incentives for family formation and work mean that we now have a situation where 40% of the population can be - indelicately - called a drag on growth and prosperity. 40%.

Even Sarah McLaughlin can't save this DOGE, and this DOGE can't save America.

What is surprising about that chart? What did you expect? Obviously the transfers benefitting the poor come from the rich. People have been voting for this for the last century, and will keep voting for it. The state's share of the economy will keep growing, first to european levels, then beyond. And it doesn't matter to people how rich in absolute terms "the poor" are, or how much wealth gets destroyed in the process. I find the impulse difficult to understand, perhaps an extreme rawlsian risk aversion (like an insurance against relative poverty) coupled with the egalitarian ideal of equal social status leading to a demand of equal income.

Did you intend to offer a serious reply, or just use my comment as a way to jerk the spotlight towards yourself?

The former. Of course there's always a status element in the background, but in the spirit of collaborative discussion, it should be ignored. Pretend I'm not a person, just a collection of positions, and I will do the same for you.

First time I’ve ever heard of tax cuts being insulting

OP isn't talking about whether these things needed to continue to be funded indefinitely. The problem is that instead of "we will fund no further studies, no argument" the order literally caused studies to be halted midway through. Which would be fine if the study was a passive observation of the mating habits of roofing bats in the wild; less fine when it means the volunteers have already begun potentially dangerous treatment regimens, and are now being dumped out into the world. (It's not even as though they can continue taking experimental drugs on their own dime to avoid withdrawal; if the study's over the study's over.)

Lots of people answer this kind of talk with "it was a clean break, or the tiniest amount of leeway being used by everyone and their dog until the whole DOGE died by a thousand paper cuts". But come the fuck on. Leaving clinical-study volunteers hanging is ridiculously evil in principle, and I just can't accept that it was this or setting such a precedent for leniency as to scuttle the entire DOGE endeavor. Really now. The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?

The argument against that is that if I have funding and I think I won’t next week, if I get a reprieve by “putting medical devices in bodies”, then I might just do that. Or maybe a drug that needs to be strictly monitored, again, if I will lose everything if I don’t and I get to maintain funding and my job if I just start the trials and hope that the funding doesn’t dry up, why not?

And this would actually be worse for those patients who are being asked to start said trials knowing that the funds might not be there to finish. I’ll be honest, any doctor at the moment trying to recruit people for a NIH trial on a serious disease like cancer knowing that the funding won’t be there should have his license yanked. We know these trials will be stopped, and we know that those recruits will waste time and possibly risk health doing a trial that will stop. And those patients lose time for treatment.

That’s where ripping off the bandage helps. We know the trials are stopping mid trial so people signing up now should know better.

We're talking about months-long trials that were already ongoing when everything was suddenly put on hold with no forewarning. Obviously no one should be starting any more trials for the time being; and doubly-obviously, any doctors trying to blackmail the government by suddenly adding dangerous procedures to an ongoing trial should be sued with extreme prejudice. (They shouldn't be hard to catch, the whole deal with clinical studies that get government funds is that you register what you said you were going to use the money for in advance.)

We have very rich liberals in Washington. And wiring money takes less than 24 hours. If people cared as much as they whine about it - someone would have picked up the slack already.

Coordination is hard. I think it's unsurprising for liberals' position to be "we have a coordination machine, it's called the government, please give it back instead of making us build a second one for no reason". (Even if there are obvious rejoinders.)

please give it back instead of making us build a second one for no reason

The conservative then proceeds to holds up a mirror. "Just build your own foreign aid organization."

I'm honestly surprised they don't. It would be such an obvious PR win, even if they don't actually care about the affected people.

If you prove it can be done without the state, then you'll have a much harder time arguing that it should be the responsibility of the state.

The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?

No, it's literally impossible. Remember, you're dealing with people with sufficient motivated reasoning to pretend to be confused about words like "man" and "woman". People with years of critical theory training that teaches that meaning is subjective, and concepts constructed.

The place where Elon's people draw the line doesn't have to be accepted by the woke activists, though. DOGE can just come up with a common-sense criterion that makes sense to them, and if someone tries to argue in obvious bad faith that their bullshit study is on the right side of the line, they can just say "no it isn't; you may not appeal this decision; goodbye, please don't email us again". This would undoubtedly still cause a ruckus, and it might even have a few false positives, but it would still be immeasurably better than not having common-sense exceptions at all, and I genuinely think it should be trivial for DOGE to implement if they really have the stuff.

Like, why are you acting as though trivial word-salad smoke-and-mirrors would leave them helpless and befuddled? Isn't cutting through the obfuscation and identifying the good government programs from the woke hustlers supposed to be what they're for? If they're not up to this then one wonders why an elite crack team led by one of the most successful men in the world is needed for this job. You could get the same effect if you told an AI to cut all government programs no matter what, gave it access to a government email, and let it loose.

The DOGE (and Trump more broadly) is fighting a bureaucracy hostile to them. The activists are the people carrying out the orders.

Doing it before-the-fact rather than after-the-fact enables what is essentially a DDOS attack on the decision-makers. Doing it in this order makes a flood-the-zone-with-appeals strategy work in favor of DOGE instead of against it.

Because you aren’t working with people who want to cut. So every carve out you give will be expanded beyond belief. Half measures rarely work against an entrenched enemy.

Why are we funding birth control and HIV prevention research in South Africa? We already know how they have babies and get aids and we know how they can avoid those things. That they choose to rape virgins instead of taking hiv medicine is irrelevant to the effectiveness of condoms.

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?

These posts are tiresome. Are you going to continue to post each one you can find? It is clear the strategy implemented. It has some pluses and has some minuses. Everyone understands the blunt force approach would be over inclusive but harder to game and faster to implement.

We get it that you don’t like it, but simply posting “here is another thing I don’t like about the freeze” from sources ideologically against the freeze would be akin to me posting “here is another waste of your tax dollars” from the DOGE.

The outcome of the freeze will be measured in the coming years; not days. But will you come back and check to see if there was any more fentanyl in the US in the next year to see if your “chicken little” story comes to fruition? Or are you just finding stories to try to discourage the blunt force approach?

Are you going to continue to post each one you can find?

If there are more which I think are interesting and CW-y. Also note that the top level comment below this is me pointing out the conspicuous lack of intervention at the BATFE, despite that being an agency that commits a whole lot of fuckery that could legitimately be stopped by executive order.

While they talk a big game about fentanyl, realistically there’s nothing that can be done to stop the supply getting in. I think the fentanyl fighting rhetoric is just an excuse to enforce tighter border security.

I think the fentanyl fighting rhetoric is just an excuse to enforce tighter border security.

Are training counterparts on the other side of the border and donating drug-detecting dogs not means to the end of "enforce tighter border security?"

I've heard that fentanyl is strong enough that there if even a single truckload gets through the border, that's already enough doses to saturate the market. This was from a podcast, probably Freakonomics, but I'd have to double-check.

Yeah, fentanyl is tiny. A "lethal" amount is 2 mg, so a single pound could theoretically depopulate a small city. I don't know the exact usage rates but it can't be that fast.

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.

When has this slow and gradual reform worked in history, especially for something hard like shrinking government or anti-corruption efforts.

I don't understand what you mean. 90 days is not 'slow and gradual'. Slow and gradual reform by the standards of history is decades. Trump's in power for four years.

Also, under the current strategy all of Elon's big cuts have been blocked by judges, because they go directly against the Impoundment Control Act (passed the senate 80-0 in 1974 and affirmed by SCOTUS at the time), among other things. Courts are slow, 90 days is a reasonable timeframe. So the current strategy isn't actually working better.

This is just incorrect. They do not get directly against the Impoundment Control Act. Take USAID. The appropriation by Congress doesn’t say “spend X dollars on items A through AAA every week.” No there is a broad grant for the president and his delegate to use broad discretion.

Thus the president pausing payments isn’t impounding the money; it is the president figuring out what he wants to do with the broad grant given to him.

The Impoundment Act doesn’t come up until after a long while the president eschews spending anything. Of course with a Republican congress hopefully he can get a simple vote and the money is returned.

Now you might say “then why is he blocked.” The answer is forum shopped handpicked judicial activists have issued TROs where they don’t really need to justify their arguments and they don’t really expect to win on appeal but the hope is that delay favors the bureaucrats which it does.

I think this ultra vires judicial activism should be grounds for impeachment.

They do not get directly against the Impoundment Control Act. Take USAID. The appropriation by Congress doesn’t say “spend X dollars on items A through AAA every week.”

This would be more convincing if Elon hadn't attempted to pull almost all USAID workers off of their jobs, sending many of them back to the United States? Which is one of the things a judge blocked. Also if Elon and Trump weren't publicly clear about their desire to dismantle USAID. Judges observe the words you say online.

I agree that if Elon and Trump were smarter, they could've been creative, and tried to massively change the missions of agencies like USAID while still appearing to fulfill the requirements of legislation. He isn't doing that though.

No putting people on admin leave is crucial. It is what happens when you think a business is doing crazy shit because you don’t want those people to continue to do crazy shit.

And firing the people who you think are doing crazy shit doesn’t mean you intend to not do anything with the cash. Hell Rubio was instructed to think through things.

Maybe the problem is the judges were listening to the wrong media.

No putting people on admin leave is crucial. It is what happens when you think a business is doing crazy shit because you don’t want those people to continue to do crazy shit.

I do not understand what you are saying here. How is putting them on leave now, vs in 60 days, "crucial"? They have been doing that "crazy shit" for decades.

(And, again, judges have blocked all his big moves here, as was entirely predictable, so he hasn't even actually stopped them.)

You're doing the thing I mentioned in the above comment where you come up with post-hoc justifications for things Trump/Musk have done that are smarter than what they're actually doing.

From Musk on twitter: "We spent the weekend feeding USAID to the wood chipper." "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.". Trump on TruthSocial: "USAID IS DRIVING THE RADICAL LEFT CRAZY ... CLOSE IT DOWN!"

If you say that, and then fire all the employees, I can reasonably conclude they're not planning to spend the money on different kinds of foreign aid. If they were planning to do that, they could just Tweet/Truth it. Instead of that. They aren't.

I agree that Musk and Trump could be effectively accomplishing their goals and improving the government on net if they did different things than they are currently doing.

I also still consider it entirely possible Musk, who is very smart and capable, will realize the current approach isn't accomplishing as much as he thinks and do something else. But he hasn't done that yet.

More comments

Slow and gradual reform by the standards of history is decades.

I'm not so sure. Justinian reforms took less than 10 years from start to finish. They were so successful that they're still in use today.

Unless you count "slow and gradual reform" as "the entire government collapsed and reformed, but the country's name didn't change"- and seeing as how most countries (or rather, the government that claims those same borders and the same name) have only existed for 30-70 years I think "no reform, then massive radical reform" matches history a little better.

When private sector orgs want to do a zero-based reboot, they give everyone 1-3 months' notice and tell them to reapply for their own jobs while working out their notice. (And even that is a desperation move that you wouldn't do in an underperforming company that wasn't in imminent danger of failure) They don't fire everyone and invite them to reapply for their own jobs from the outside. Private sector orgs who did do that would find that everyone competent applied for a job at a competitor instead.

Private sector orgs who did do that would find that everyone competent applied for a job at a competitor instead.

Isn't this the key, though? The public sector is the public sector, it doesn't experience competition in the same way. If you were going to lose your US Government job, where the fuck would you go? Who competes with the US Government from a talent-recruiting perspective? State governments? Other countries' governments? Neither of these are run like privately-owned corporations, and some of them have way more friction for joining.

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

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.

And what would that accomplish?

... 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?

I also think the only reason people are protesting his actions is that they know this is the only thing that would work.

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)

i don't know how blocking these cuts using the judiciary will work in the long term. unless this funding has very explicit earmarks from congress then the administration should be able to just redirect it to fund Trump allied NGOs. For example lets say judge decides you can't cut USAID funding overall then Trump just funnels funding away from basket weavers in Afghanistan to pro-life groups in China. Basically just do turnabout and then when people complain Trump is being a hypocrite by carrying out the same corruption he criticised others of doing he can claim he tried to cut the funding cleanly but the judiciary tried to stop him.

unless this funding has very explicit earmarks from congress then the administration should be able to just redirect it to fund Trump allied NGOs

Yes, I suggested doing things like this earlier. It might work. (It'd be harder for the programs other than USAID they're trying to cut, USAID is very small compared to rest of the federal government). My big criticism here is that, whatever Trump and Elon are currently doing, they're not optimizing for it working, they're trying to make it big and splashy.

... 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?

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?

It is not working yet! Judges have blocked almost all of his big cuts

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.

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?

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.

If it's so simple, howcome literally no sense be died that until now?

Because the programs will have to actually explain how they're supposed to be worth the money spent,

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...

and useless ones trying to obfuscate their uselessness can simply have their request for an extension denied.

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.

This implies that the programs did not have to actually explain before they were given money to spend.

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.

More comments

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.

And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing

... what? Some programs will say "we are destroying fentanyl labs in Mexico", and not get frozen. Others won't say that, because they're funding womens' organizations in myanmar, and will get frozen. It's the exact same thing that's happening now, except the fentanyl one doesn't get frozen.

So? It already exposed who needs constant o be cut

I don't think your logic here makes sense? How does the instant freeze help Musk distinguish between programs that do and don't deserve to be cut, vs just collecting the information without doing the freeze?

... what? Some programs will say "we are destroying fentanyl labs in Mexico", and not get frozen. Others won't say that, because they're funding womens' organizations in myanmar, and will get frozen

Except "women's organizations in Myanmar" will be under an "if you cut this, billions will die" item, and it will look like there's really nothing to cut.

It's the exact same thing that's happening now, except the fentanyl one doesn't get frozen.

Are you implying that all these programs clearly star what they're actually doing, and no one will try to hide their operation under a title that's more palatable to the current administration?

don't think your logic here makes sense? How does the instant freeze help Musk distinguish between programs that do and don't deserve to be cut, vs just collecting the information without doing the freeze?

How do you collect that information without the freeze? USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, that's the entire reason their funding was frozen. It was only then that we discovered that all the "independent" media in Ukraine were funded by them. You know this. How do you propose anyone finds out where all this money ends up without the freeze?

I do not think you're thinking clearly about this. Elon does not get different information if he cuts everything now, vs sending out an order to cut everything in 60 days. In both cases, he has to make factual determinations about how important the womens' organizations in Myanmar are.

Are you implying that all these programs clearly star what they're actually doing, and no one will try to hide their operation under a title that's more palatable to the current administration?

I don't understand how immediately freezing funding makes it easier to collect this data, I think that's something that was imagined after the fact to justify the freezes. (And, again, most of the freezes have themselves been blocked, so...)

How do you collect that information without the freeze? USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, that's the entire reason their funding was frozen

I do not think this is true? DOGE staff were inside the USAID building and had access to their computer systems. Freezing USAID doesn't affect their ability to do that.

More comments

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).

NGOs have run to DC and SDNY to get blocks because those are the most politically corrupt districts. The problem for them is that the TROs are so unprecedented and off the rails that higher courts are going to need to step in quickly.

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.

Making a lot of people enthused is important in politics. You have to ride the wave and short-circuit resistance. Blitzkrieg is a strategy for a reason.

Giving fundees 90 days to saturate the media and hide all the bad spending wouldn’t work. Trump would have failed just as every cost-cutting politician I ever voted for failed. The Cathedral likes long drawn-out detail-oriented battles, and the first rule of warfare is not to give the enemy what they want.

(Yes, this is conflict mindset not mistake mindset. With mistake mindset it looks stupid and damaging to do it this way, naturally.)

EDIT:

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.

I’ll cop to this in individual cases.

Trump would have failed just as every cost-cutting politician I ever voted for failed.

When Congress wants to cut discretionary spending, discretionary spending gets cut. (Obama-era sequestration was the most recent example). Even Moldbug agrees that the bureaucracy is effectively accountable to Congress*, should Congress care to exercise its power. And in the specific context of non-defense discretionary spending, Congress routinely do care to exercise that power. Discretionary spending isn't bankrupting America, entitlements are. See for example the charts in [this report] showing overall discretionary spending growing slower than the economy over decades, and barely keeping pace with inflation in the decade leading up the the pandemic.

The reason why cost-cutting politicians fail is that entitlements (and old-age entitlements in particular) grow faster than they can cut discretionary spending. You don't need shock-and-awe to cut discretionary spending, which is all Musk is doing so far. If Musk makes a serious dent in Medicare fraud (which he hasn't even started trying to yet, and won't be able to do by grepping lists of payees for woke keywords) he will save far more money than he could

Incidentally, in countries that haven't become pensioner-gerontocracies, you can really cut spending (including the equivalent of entitlement spending) the normal way. Canada and Sweden both cut spending by 7% of GDP in the 1990's, in both cases all that was needed was an electorate which cared about deficit reduction (which the US electorate claims to). The problem in the modern day (not just in the US) is that there are a lot of pensioners, and they vote. And the experience of the UK from 2010 through Brexit is that if you try to cut everything else faster than the welfare-state-for-the-old grows due to population aging, things start falling apart.

* In the sense that Congress can control budget, and has the ability to punish individual Deep Staters who defy it in a way the President does not because being criticised by name in a Congressional committee report is career-ending for a senior career civil servant.

Making a lot of people enthused is important in politics. You have to ride the wave and short-circuit resistance. Blitzkrieg is a strategy for a reason.

The resistance doesn't feel particularly short-circuited to me. Judges have blocked most of DOGE's biggest cuts.

Giving fundees 90 days to saturate the media and hide all the bad spending wouldn’t work

What does 'hide all the bad spending mean'? How would they even do that? All of the data on their spending is, and was already, public.

The Cathedral likes long drawn-out detail-oriented battles, and the first rule of warfare is not to give the enemy what they want.

IMO, the first rule of warfare is to destroy your enemy, or at least their capacity to wage war. That isn't currently happening. (USAID funding is not even a percent of the reason the liberal media exists). "Not giving the enemy what they want" is, in this context, the first rule of being mad at your enemy on twitter.

(Yes, this is conflict mindset not mistake mindset. With mistake mindset it looks stupid and damaging to do it this way, naturally.)

This isn't about conflict vs mistake! I'm not entirely against all the libs spontaneously combusting. It's about, like, winning the conflict, which is harder than making a lot of awesome posts.

The resistance doesn't feel particularly short-circuited to me. Judges have blocked most of DOGE's biggest cuts.

I'm willing to hear arguments otherwise, but from where I'm standing this is good.* To the extent that the blocks have an effect at all, it forces more and more of the apparatus and legal precedence that needs to be cut down and replaced onto the side of wasteful spending. If my experience of Brexit is any guide, people aren't going to say, "well, judges blocked it, it must be bad," they're going to say, "why is a judge able to block my elected president, let's get rid of this".

*Obviously, it would be best if the cuts had been carried out quickly without being blocked, but that was never on the table.

What does 'hide all the bad spending mean'? How would they even do that? All of the data on their spending is, and was already, public.

Given the complexity of spending on any serious scale, it is totally impossible to request information in a way that is: (1) readable on any practical time scale, (2) comprehensive enough to allow detailed audit. So you have to rely on people to provide honest summaries of what they've been doing, and nobody ever does when their career and budget are on the line. Impounding the money first switches the focus to "prove we need you, stat" rather than "find a good excuse for the stuff you've done so we don't cut you". EDIT: that is, it gets status quo bias on your side, forcing recipients of grant money to work harder to earn your approval rather than merely avoid drawing your attention.

the first rule of warfare is to destroy your enemy, or at least their capacity to wage war.

That is the goal of warfare. Obviously destroying your enemy's capacity is important but to do that you have to attack in ways they find difficult to counter. That means NOT allowing them to find reasons to stall you, and it means backing them into positions that are difficult to defend. In this case, that it is not legally possible for an incoming president to halt using taxpayer money to fund trans operas in Colombia. And cutting the left-wing patronage network off at the knees is destroying a big part of their capacity, even if you don't save that much money.

Yes Minister is a classic in the art of bureaucratic stalling, and in the hiding of incompetence and corruption, written using real (secret) interviews with top-level politicians. Basically it boils down to the fact that the bureaucracy only has to stall you for a relatively short time before you're snowed under with crises and no longer able to be proactive. That's why speed and optics matters more than efficiency right now - you want to be on the front foot for the hard part of the campaign. Most effective politicians seem to work in this way: Teddy Roosevelt, Tony Blair. You have to get public support and a feeling of momentum, and then you will have the leverage to force your way through.

Stalling Technique

The Five Standard Excuses

Of course, all of this could still fail. But it's looking good right now, and it's looking far better than everyone who's tried to achieve spending reductions.

If my experience of Brexit is any guide,

If my experience of Brexit is any guide, the people who told the necessary lies to get the median voter to believe that the government was their enemy and the system that had delivered decades of peace and prosperity should die in a fire are high on their own supply and it is going to end in avoidable harm to the country, landslide election defeat, and wailing and gnashing of teeth in opposition.

To take an obvious example, if DOGE and its supporters believe what they are saying on social media about how closing down USAID is successfully defunding a vast left-wing conspiracy then their OODA loop doesn't have ground truth in it.

I'm sorry, but the reason Brexit ended in landslide defeat for the Tories is because the Conservatives removed the shield that had allowed them to lie about wanting to stop immigration, and then tried to keep lying anyway. It was absolutely 100% avoidable. An own goal the likes of which politics has rarely seen. The only thing I regret about Brexit is believing them when they said, "we would like to do what you want, but the EU won't let us". That's clearly not a problem here because Trump is just going ahead and doing what he said he was going to do.

To take an obvious example, if DOGE and its supporters believe what they are saying on social media about how closing down USAID is successfully defunding a vast left-wing conspiracy then their OODA loop doesn't have ground truth in it.

Yes. That's an inherent difficulty when you are actually trying to defund a vast left-wing conspiracy. Ideally it wouldn't have come to that, but it has.

I'm sorry, but the reason Brexit ended in landslide defeat for the Tories is because the Conservatives removed the shield that had allowed them to lie about wanting to stop immigration, and then tried to keep lying anyway.

That is certainly part of it, but the Conservatives lost as many votes to the left as they did to Reform, and a party which picked up all the Tory and Reform votes* would still not have won a majority. The Conservatives defeat in 2024 was extremely overdetermined, and the fact that they had screwed up everything possible about the implementation of Brexit was most, but not all of it.

* Which they couldn't have done because Reform was mobilising 2019 non-voters with an anti-system message in a way an incumbent party couldn't.

More comments

It seems relevant that the tories won in a landslide after brexit and only lost after several elections and mismanaged leadership changes.

The 2019 election was before Brexit. The reason why the Tories won in a landslide was because Parliament was seen as holding up Brexit, and the central campaign pledge was to "Get Brexit Done".

It’s also why the absurd TROs are so undermining—delay plays to the bureaucracy’s advantage

One thing I haven’t heard brought up in all this shutdown talk is I that I think I remember Janet Yellen talking about needing to enact extraordinary methods about two weeks ago to stall a federal shutdown due to the debt ceiling. https://apnews.com/article/treasury-debt-limit-janet-yellen-7e598f2811d75ad5159f9338f7cdce16

So okay yeah Jan 27th. Hypothesis here, trump anticipates the dems using this as a way to hit him in the face with a metaphorical shovel, something along the lines of “republicans won’t agree to any reasonable deal and they’re the reason and this is bad” so preemptively chooses to do effectively a shutdown but on his own terms. Now the conversation isn’t republicans hit debt ceiling and can’t broker a deal but republicans have shut down these wasteful programs. Arguably the best management of the narrative I’ve seen from them in the last 20 years.

None of this is a comment on whether this or that program being shutdown is good or bad, simply that from that narrative, it’s arguably going great, and so far we haven’t hit the debt ceiling. Maybe I’ll eat my words in a few days but still so far I haven’t been hearing much about the debt ceiling being a problem since he started cutting these programs.

Government shutdowns are politically problematic because they cause government services voters care about to pause. Having this kind of narrative doesn't really help with that. The median voter's not super smart, and not super plugged into politics, but one consequence of that is they won't fall for this like 'this is good because covid' when prices o up, or conversely 'this is good because we're cutting woke government waste' when services start freezing.

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.

Read: it's what actual businesses do, not governments, because businesses care about cutting out waste, and governments don't really

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.

but I also don't think it's that ridiculous what they're doing

I actually love the principle of it! Take a competent man, maybe CEO of a successful startup, make him the CEO of the government, and have him improve it. The FDR analogy is apt. It should work.

But that requires the attribute 'competent'. Elon should be competent. And yet. I see a lot of evidence that DOGE is swinging wildly, not thinking through the consequences of their actions or how they connect to their long-term goals. The executive orders really have been poorly worded, many appear to have been hastily drafted and made with ChatGPT (even cremieux agrees with that). These were not designed to be good test cases to get a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court on impoundment. Judges don't like seeing chaos and poorly written, immediately retracted orders in a case about extending executive power. For a smaller-scale but illustrative example, cancelling Bloomberg terminals and politico pro because people posted about it on twitter was absurd. Those things are incredibly useful, and Elon is capable of knowing that.

And, as a political strategy, it's just as questionable. You can't cut the federal budget 20% by cutting DEI contracts, you'd need to cut special ed programs, student aid, social security, medicare, the military, etc. Other than the military, all those things are good! (edit: this was ambiguous - I meant cutting all of those things, other than the military, would be good). But it's going to be incredibly difficult to cut those without Congress, that's even farther out there than cutting USAID. And Trump isn't really doing anything to appeal to the swing votes in the narrow Senate or House majorities. So we're going to get small cuts, unless something else unexpected happens. And any plausible funding bill seems likely to cut taxes much more than DOGE's savings will be. The deficit keeps increasing. Voters won't notice DOGE's savings in the noise. So all you get, in terms of building political power, are the headlines about how DOGE CUTS $100M CONTRACT FOR VENEZUELAN TRANSGENDER HOMELESS SHELTER. it's good to cut that, but nobody's going to remember it four years from now during the next election.

What I'd want to see from DOGE are things like - streamline the TSA. Build a hundred nuclear reactors on federal land. Prosecute a lot more PPP fraud. Radically restructure the NIH to fund science better. This is building! I don't expect anything like that though. (That'd take more than a few months, and Elon said he'd only focus on DOGE for a few months).

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.

It has been tried. The thing that got us the Impoundment Control Act was Nixon impounding!

And even ignoring that, given all the above, how new is this really? This administration wouldn't be the first one to try and trim government waste.

Your comment reads like someone who would also object to a slow and orderly offramp for these same programs.

Is that true? As of last year, were these activities in need of more funding, in your opinion? Or was it the exact right amount of money the Mexicans were getting to learn how to kick down doors in slums? Or did you think they only needed about half?

I'm agnostic about the optimal funding for this program. I find it noteworthy, due to it being in support of a stated priority.

This might be a little meta, bit here's a theory about what's happening with Trump et al, and why I'm dubious about reasoned debate even being particularly clarifying.

I remember, back when Tumblr grew popular, being struck by the rise of a specific rhetorical tone. It was a kind of outraged, indignant, wounded "How DARE you defend yourself while I was attacking you!" It was the cry bully tone. I found it deeply infuriating, and it leaked out into all sorts of social media spaces and even into more mainstream media. And in the background, all the various intersectional theories were key to justifying it, because those theories were the basis for the attackers feeling, really and truly, that they were just fighting back and calling out injustice - hence the wounded tone on encountering resistance. There was a strong, assumed element of moral grievance backing it all up. But if you weren't actually onboard with all the foundational intersectional theories, it was enormously off-putting.

And then, despite all that, it was incredibly effective for about 12 years, and cancel culture rose, and 2020 happened, and DEI happened, and Woke Hollywood and Wokeness in games happened, and insanity at universities happened (and is still deeply entrenched), and after a while it became clear that, at least in the short term, people doing the cry bullying stuff actually knew what they were doing, at least in some tacit sense... or at least the people who developed their foundational theories did. Because it turns out that most normal people want to engage with reason and discussion when faced with conflict, and most normal people are very conflict averse and very cowed by public claims of public morality and public offense. And so, it turns out that being extremely unreasonable, confrontational, and obnoxious can be surprisingly effective. It's an accurate read about a weakness in how normal people react to drama. Actually, even more so, in this particular case, it's also an especially accurate read of the dynamics between radical "marginalized" activists and normal well-credentialed liberals who want, more than anything in the world, to publicly show that they're not low status conservatives, at any cost.

The dynamics here remind me of why people buy guard dogs. At least as far as I understand, and this is obviously not from experience, it is (relatively) easy to threaten people with weapons like guns. You point the weapon at someone, you use loud and menacing tones with specific instructions to push people around and force them to do things so they can avoid being hurt. Threatening dogs, on the other hand, especially if there are a few of them, especially if they're bred to be guard dogs, is an entirely different matter. The dogs are, in some deep sense, unreasonable. They literally can't be reasoned with. So they function as facts about the world that have to be navigated around, rather than as potential debate partners. And I think that's the logic that unreasonable activists have latched on to. They understand the power of being willing to gun the engine, tear the steering wheel out of the car, and lean in hard to being totally unreasonable. And in the short term, that works great - until the circle firing squads start forming once you've run off everyone who wants to be reasonable, and until enough opponents recognize the trick and then coordinate to massively punish this illiberal defection.

Power in the business world works like this all the time, too, of course - higher management slashes jobs or unceremoniously kills even promising projects for all sorts of reasons, little people get randomly punished through no fault of their own, and being willing to be seen as dicks is actually a major part of the job, because, well, that's just sort of what business is, right? Such people might need to project a certain amount of public reasonableness, but internally, in the hierarchy, saying "no" doesn't need justification, mostly. That's what power is. You get to be the immovable fact of the world, and someone else has to compromise and reason their way around that fact and make the best of things.

Republicans and conservatives have had it hammered in to their heads, the last decade and a half, that preemptively being reasonable, when your opponents have been supine to deeply unreasonable, monstrous people who hate you and are taking active steps to harm you, is a losing game theoretic move. Being willing to be unreasonable and confrontational, to be seen as a dick, to be the immovable fact of the world that other people have to compromise and reason their way around, is a super power and the only sensible move, at least in certain contexts. And in large measure, this is because being that unreasonable forces other people, through their actions, to reveal the actual distance between their rhetoric, on the one hand, and their actual capabilities, values, and priorities, on the other. It makes other people make hard choices. And lurking in the background is something even deeper; it's the willingness to say, "When you were doing something ill-advised, and then I stepped in and said no, I'm taking responsibility for saying no, but I'm not taking responsibility for you getting things to this situation in the first place. The damage that is about to happen is on you." That dynamic has played out especially in relation to the immigration crisis.

Anyway, that's my meta read on the current Trumpian moves, and that kind of flipping over the tea table always generates collateral damage.

Threatening dogs, on the other hand, especially if there are a few of them, especially if they're bred to be guard dogs, is an entirely different matter. The dogs are, in some deep sense, unreasonable. They literally can't be reasoned with. So they function as facts about the world that have to be navigated around, rather than as potential debate partners.

There is an additional factor here- if your threatening dog menaces someone, and you didn't sick it on anyone, the dog may be confiscated and euthanized, but you will not go to prison. On the other hand even holding a gun or knife in your hand while issuing demands is legally fraught(even in self-defense friendly jurisdictions, the rule of thumb is generally that if you weren't threatened enough to kill you weren't threatened enough to pull a gun). "Get off my property!" while holding a gun is de jure a serious felony; a loud and threatening dog is a matter for animal control at worst. If your dog actually attacks somebody it will probably be euthanized, but again, you are unlikely to be in legal trouble- unless somebody can testify that you yelled out 'sick!'- and even then, the legal trouble will be far less than that of even holding a gun in your hand.

Dr. Strangelove, DVM: Yes, but the... whole point of the dog... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you put up the sign eh?

Boy DeSadeski: It was to be announced at dinner on Monday. As you know, our father loves surprises.

To deepen the metaphor even further, while buying into the market of poorly-bred attack dogs does earn you social disapproval, that doesn't seem to amount to much in the end--people keep breeding and buying them, and dogs continue to end up unfit to live in normal human society (and thus, sometimes being put down).

Anyone know of Trumpian "reform" of the BATFE, thus far? Doing an internet search for "Trump BATFE" with a one month time limit doesn't turn up anything. Anyone else wondering why the BATFE should/would be spared? It seems to me that the BATFE should be near the top of the list of federal agencies the base wants "reformed." Some ideas for possible reasons:

The base doesn't actually care about BATFE fuckery, unlike libertarians and policy wonks. (Anyone know if this is true?)

Donald "Take the guns first, and do due process later"/bump stock ban Trump is (mostly) secretly pro-gun control (for little people, of course; not VIPs. Perhaps supported by his general lack of comment on the issue, this election

Some strategist decided that, unlike the FBI, the BATFE would be perceived as "legitimate law enforcement" and, thusly, is off-limits.

Doing an internet search for "Trump BATFE" with a one-month time limit doesn't turn up anything.

Try "Trump ATF".

There has been some, though it's both indirect and likely to be low-impact outside of the courts.

Some amount of it's probably just that Trump isn't very pro-gun, and doesn't really want to spend the political capital on it. Same reason that he's not drawing a lot of lines in the sand for abortion law. Some amount is probably procedural -- as much as the lawfare is being rough for DOGE, most of what DOGE's going after doesn't have the nice clear-line text, while a lot of the ATF funding does, or it has civil service protections in a way that's harder to argue violates separation of powers -- similar to how Brigadia v. Buttigeg wasn't going to get settled before (and likely not after) it got renamed. Some of it's that the malefactors don't have names, where even someone that obsesses over trying to identify specific bad actors or bad behaviors just gets organization or sections or groups that would need a forensic accountant and a lot of luck to actually figure out who called the code red made decisions.

Some of it's just the scope of the problem, in the same way that Trump isn't throwing the FBI out despite the arguments in favor. It's one thing to bite the bullet on throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's another to actually take that process on, at this scale.

Thanks. I saw the executive order, but I interpreted it as lip-service-until-proven-otherwise - the faithful implementation of the stated goal would be to eliminate all BATFE rules about regulated firearm components and disallow Federal prosecutors from pursuing charges for anything but the clearest violations of statutory language, which doesn't require 30 days of review.

I miss your effort-posts on law stuff, btw.

Some amount of it's probably just that Trump isn't very pro-gun, and doesn't really want to spend the political capital on it.

There's different things here. I think he's reasonably pro-gun, he just thinks he's fulfilled his obligation to the NRA and friends by getting Bruen done for them (and likewise for the pro-lifers and Dobbs).

Trump is a lot of things, but he's not the kind of person to consider an obligation like that as open-ended.

Trump did hand out stuff to pro-lifers. It was mostly minor stuff like pardoning FACE act violations, but he did.

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.

Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.

Conservatives, particularly MAGA conservatives, must harden their hearts as such. In the coming months and years, there will be no end to the wailing. They will beg you in the name that all that is decent and humane to give them the one exception and save many lives. The rationalist crowd will come to you with spreadsheets and lives per dollar and give logical arguments to save lives. You will be constantly bombarded with propaganda designed to psyop you to support the return of the old status quo.

Put on your biggest smile and say no. That's your cross to bear. Resist the temptation to give in, and to be seen as 'one of the good ones'. Mercy and compassion are the luxuries of the victor, and you have not won yet. This is but the first of many battles in a long war. If your opponents say that your proposals will cost millions of lives, say to them: "Billions." And do what you intended to do, and do it so throughly and completely that it does not have to be done again. Embrace the virtue of Lycurgus and destroy what you must to save what you can.

This kind of posturing is very hard to take seriously absent a compelling case that USAID funding is a meaningful obstacle to conservative victory as such. Your pro-life vs pro-choice analogy doesn't work because the pro-choicers' victory necessarily depends on pro-lifers' defeat.

I believe that the entire US federal government and civil service is an obstacle to conservative victory. There's only so many times you can play kayfabe and watch your politicians be devoured by DC and come out as creatures of the American imperium. It was a mistake to believe that the institutions would abide by the popular will and not act in their own self-interest. At some point Elrond has to push Isildur into the volcano instead of hoping he won't be tempted.

Except Tolkien's point is that no-one had the strength of will to do that. Not even Elrond, not even Gandalf. The ring could only be destroyed by someone not trying to destroy it but to possess it and destroy it by accident (or by divine intervention).

"Tolkien wrote that no one could have willingly destroyed the Ring, no matter how good their intentions were. He also wrote that the Ring was "beyond the strength of any will to injure it, cast it away, or neglect it"

Elrond would have rationalized why he should not push Isildur because he would not have the will to destroy it. Indeed, that might exactly be why he didn't! (well in the book they don't even enter Mount Doom so even more effort would have been required). Note that Isildur in the book is in fact on his way to destroy the ring when it betrays him and falls off his finger so he can be killed. But Tolkien is clear when it came down to it, no-one on Middle Earth had the will to destroy the ring.

Everyone will be tempted. Everyone will succumb at the end. Even the wise, even the pure. If you think the federal government is like that, then logically your prediction should be that Trump/Elon will not destroy it, but instead take it for their own. Or that Isildonald, heir of Fred and Elond of Tesla will turn against each other and in fighting over it, one will fall into the volcano and be lost with the government.

Hopefully in this analogy the volcano is not one of nuclear fire!

To continue the analogy, what we have here is a case where the ring betrays Isildur... but he survives! Then the ring tries even harder to finish Isildur off, lest Isildur ever get it back again and finish what he was talked out of the first time. And somehow, someway, Isildur just doesn't stop, and just keeps winning. Now he has the ring, and he's hammering away at it with every tool and faculty, because a judge told him he can't just cast it into Mt Doom without a 4 year comment period.

Will a wiser, more battle hardened, once betrayed Isildur let the ring go undestroyed a second time, after all that?

I mean, sure, Tolkien would say "Yes" because that's the mythology he wrote and it's his world and he defined the metaphysical parameters of it to be exactly that way. Analogizing to Trump's current destruction of the deep state, hopefully they have not been created to have such absolute authority regarding the nature of reality.

Although Mike Benz has been going off about how USAID has basically created an entirely false Truman Show-esque reality we've all been living in. So I guess there might be that.

I guess the analogy falls apart a bit here, I don't think they are actually trying to destroy the federal government, just size it down.

So I suppose the better analogy is the ring is at the jewellers getting resized. Which isn't really as dramatic. Unless the jewellers is Sauron's Discount Rings and Gems of course.

A reveal that Musk was part of the deep state all along would be a shocking twist worthy of Sauron deceiving Celebrimbor.

One DOGE to rule them all, one DOGE to find them, one DOGE to bring them all and in the Deep State bind them. In the Land of D.C. where the bureaucrats lie.

I wonder. Maybe it's performative, but Trump seems to angrily blurt out things from time to time indicating he believes the deep state tried to murder him. The axe he's been taking to various departments seems to be driven by vengeance. And the array of ideologically heterodox misfits he's arrayed around him have one thing in common, the destruction of various tentacles of the deep state they've spent their lives combatting.

I don't think he's resizing the ring. I think this is more deeply personal than we appreciate. This is Caesar returning to the pirates who ransomed him and crucifying them to the man.

But the ring in the OP's post is the entire federal government not just the deep state. I simply don't see Trump trying to destroy what lets him govern. Downsize it sure, target the bits that have been problematic for him, absolutely. Take a chainsaw to agencies and NGO's? Yes.

But taking the whole thing down? Shuttering every three letter agency? Getting rid of the military, national parks, ICE?

I really do not see Trump as wanting to be the President who essentially ended the United States of America by delegating every single power to the states, including his own, somehow. Does he really want New York or Portland having control of immigration in their state?

Draining the swamp still leaves you with the land under the swamp. If you didn't want that, you wouldn't have to drain the swamp at all, just blow the whole thing up. And I don't see evidence despite much outrage, that he wants to do that.

More comments

I think it’s a good strategy because the left has long since weaponized empathy to the point where any cut to government anywhere is going to hurt the empathy puppy. Which effectively means that if you start acknowledging the “do no harm” principle, you effectively cannot ever cut spending. So heartlessness is the only defense against the weaponized empathy. It doesn’t work on people who state openly that they don’t care about the empathy puppy.

And at this point, we have no choice. We cannot sustainably be the world’s sugar daddy, protector, doctor, infrastructure manager and nature conservator. We probably have many more domestic programs than we can actually afford to sustainably support. If we keep that up, we’re going to end up in a mess when we can no longer produce enough value to support this. We might already be there.

We cannot sustainably be the world’s sugar daddy, protector, doctor, infrastructure manager and nature conservator.

Are you really suggesting that the <1% of GDP the US currently spends on foreign aid is some kind of unsustainable luxury? It's a rounding error as far the deficit is concerned.

Which effectively means that if you start acknowledging the “do no harm” principle, you effectively cannot ever cut spending. So heartlessness is the only defense against the weaponized empathy. It doesn’t work on people who state openly that they don’t care about the empathy puppy.

How exactly did not eliminating something like PEPFAR prevent any further cuts to spending? The State Department did exactly that weeks before your comment and Rubio still managed to fire the majority of USAID's workforce.

No one, as a matter of the practical reality, has ever had to commit to some totalizing "do no harm" principle, you can simply (to the extent "you" have discretion over the matter) weight the cost of aid cuts against the benefits of doing so. Those benefits certainly include the strictly political and strategic value that defunding partisan enemies involve, but if those are being alleged they need to be specified in concrete terms. "The left will use any morsel of moral thinking against you in some unspecified and indeterminate way" is a useless thing to say without information about what this amounts to in concrete legal or organizational terms, and nobody insisting that we desperately need to halt every last cent of aid has given such an account here.

Also we have seen decades of it all going one way and understand momentum is easy to arrest. We understand time is short and the iron must be struck while it is hot.

America is not responsible for saving the world and even if cutting some funding causes some harm we never had a duty to mitigate that harm in the first place. I would even be open to redressing some of those harms after we get our own house in order; not before.

I see this somewhat regularly and I really dislike this style of comment, written like a Roman general giving a speech to the senate.

On a surface level, get a grip! You aren’t fighting a war. Most anybody here engages with politics to is to squabble on the internet and maybe vote.

On a deeper level, I think it really reflects a polarized view. The battle-lines are drawn, and you’re rallying for a cause. But in reality these issues are often not as polarized in the public as you might think. There is room between ‘change nothing’ and ‘blow it all up’.

You aren’t fighting a war

On the contrary, they are fighting the culture war, and what's a war without some war crimes?

I see this somewhat regularly and I really dislike this style of comment

get a grip! You aren’t fighting a war

you’re rallying for a cause. But in reality these issues are often not as polarized in the public as you might think.

It is interesting how self-unaware this comment is. You are doing what you incorrectly accuse the OP of - only worse.

My point was that you should have a sense of perspective, and not frame things like you're leading the frontline into battle. I don't see how I'm guilty of that.

I don't think you wrote it in that spirit but I can see how georgioz would interpret the tone of "get a grip!" as an officer dressing down his men.

You flatter me. I have a sophist's love of rhetoric: but if politics is serious - if it is about human life - then it should be taken seriously. I find it less moral to equivocate, to pretend that there is a difference between 'save some lives' and 'save all'. Removing the room for argument is the only way to reduce the size of government otherwise you are merely a ratchet on Leviathan's appetite.

‘Removing the room for argument’

That’s already been done. I don’t know all the details, but Trump seems to have direct authority over USAID. In theory, he/DOGE could take even a cursory look at what programs they fund and make some decisions from a rational basis. But it doesn’t seem like they have a real methodology, it’s just ‘XYZ is corrupted by the woke left, burn it all down’.

I’m fine with making things more efficient, when it comes to aid programs, grants, and regulations, I want people to be arguing over the merits. What I don’t want is for it to be all-or-nothing situation. It doesn’t have to be that way, it would be better if it wasn’t, and I simply don’t agree with your framing.

Ironically, DOGE and Musk open themselves and the administration up to a lot more attacks by doing things this way. What should have been a slam dunk - cutting wokeness out of USAID by defunding drag shows in South America, ceasing to fund opposition magazines in Eastern Europe, yada yada - has turned into stories of children dying because they were denied life-saving treatment so we can save less than 1% of the federal budget by dismantling an agency 99% of voters had never heard of and the dismantling of which has zero effect on their daily lives.

After living through the first Trump presidency, this falls on deaf ears. The standard arguments as soldiers rebuttal to anything Trump did, no matter how reasonable, no matter how within the norms of his predecessors, no matter how legally justified was "He's opening himself up to a lot more attacks by doing things this way." But that's just how it looks with you have a media ecosystem that is basically an extension of the DNC, Judges in the middle of nowhere who feel they can exceed their authority issuing national injunctions on spurious grounds, and a bureaucracy hostile to the President as a person, much less his agenda, and a security state that spreads misinformation about it's own commander in chief.

Trump 47 is basically doing things completely different than Trump 45, and still that tired old soldier of an argument "He's opening himself up to attacks by doing it this way" gets trotted out.

There is no counterfactual where Trump is not "opening himself up to attack", except perhaps if he didn't walk away from Butler PA. But it turns out, the best defense is a strong offense.

Ironically, DOGE and Musk open themselves and the administration up to a lot more attacks by doing things this way. What should have been a slam dunk - cutting wokeness out of USAID by defunding drag shows in South America, ceasing to fund opposition magazines in Eastern Europe, yada yada

How was it supposed to be a slam-dunk? You know that USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, and the only reason we know any of this, is from who started complaining when they lost their funding.

Wait, why are my grocery prices still high?

There are some psy-ops to this effect, but I'm yet to see anyone express this sentiment organically.

Aren’t USAID programs and their funding all a part of the public record? The websites not working, but I believe you could previously just search stuff up.

So, Mike Benz has been doing a victory lap over USAID. He did this Joe Rogan episode like a year ago before it was in the spotlight, and he's been slowly plodding along over the last who knows how long with his own dinky little podcast or substack or whatever.

To say his profile has exploded is an understatement.

But the thing listening to Mike Benz makes clear, is none of this is as simple as reading the public records. I might only be able to summarize the shenanigans with lots of they, like we know who they are. Mike Benz dives into memos, NGOs, executives, revolving doors between organizations, etc, etc. And somehow, when you stop summarizing everything with they like you are talking about a secret cult, and start naming names and citing specific policy directives, it sounds even more schizophrenic.

Because none of this shit has "Destabilize Hungary" in the memo field of the check. It has nice sounding things like funding the arts, or health, or "training". But then it turns out absolutely all of it actually goes towards people critical of Victor Orban, and attempting to change the culture out from under him such that his positions are unthinkably evil.

"Politics is downstream of culture" often gets attributed to Andrew Breitbart. But it turns out the CIA and USAID have been playing that game longer than Andrew was even alive, including in our own country.

There's a lot of information that gets messy when you try to get more than surface-deep into it. There was a big deal about a USAID grant for 45m to Burma/Myanmar scholarships after DOGE tweeted about it, and these are things you can look up!...

But while there's some funny punchlines involved, it doesn't really tell you that much. IIE got the grant -- which is better than some cases, since domestic grantees in some categories can receive anonymity -- but outside of some joking-not-joking CIA links, that doesn't actually mean much. They're 'just' a cutout, and while they've got a lot of staff, their day staff aren't the ones doing most of the actual spending and day-to-day education stuff.

You can kinda piece together a rough outline by seeing who publicly announces that they've gotten onto a grant with similar numbers around the same time, but even a lot of that falls off the internet pretty quick. It's really easy to go full Pepe Silvia, too.

The other side of that is that leaving room for arguments just leads to the deed never actually getting done.

Imagine a situation where a patient is morbidly obese. He weighs 500 lbs. if he doesn’t lose weight, he dies. Do you start by “negotiating” about how many cheat days he gets? How many sugary drinks he’s allowed to have? How many times he gets to eat dessert? Or do you hand him a strict diet plan that tells him that if he wants to see 2035, he needs to drink only water, not eat more than 2200 calories a day, and he can’t go over. When you start from the position that the cure is negotiable, you end up coming up with excuses to continue the behaviors or in this case the spending habits because if there are loopholes, then you’ll tend to find ways to squeeze more and more programs into the loopholes and not end up doing any actual cutting. If things that are national defense are okay, everything becomes national defense. Just like if you start allowing people to declare cheat days, every day will eventually meet the criteria for a cheat day.

I take this point, and it’s certainly true that this kind of decisive action can be gummed up, but I’m not sure it applies here. It seems like the administration has free rein on program approval, they don’t have to negotiate with anybody.

To extend your metaphor, it’s like if the doctor, instead of establishing a strict calorie limit and diet plan, simply said ‘Stop eating!’. You don’t have to be that harsh, you can take a second to come up with a plan that makes sense to you, and enforce it with an iron hand.

Except that “doing it on a rational basis” means getting information about the programs, having public criteria, and sitting down with the heads of the various programs. Word of mouth will quickly out what kinds of programs (say defense) that Trump won’t cut. Then suddenly for no reason at all, everything in USAID is defense related. If you cut than later perhaps restore, there’s a good chance of most of the cuts sticking because you didn’t start out negotiating, you started by laying down the law.

This is why metaphors are overrated outside of poetry. They tend to obscure at least as much as they illustrate. If you want to stick with the fat guy metaphor, DOGE's "economy" drive is hectoring the patient for eating a salad for lunch while ignoring that he eats two pounds of bacon for breakfast and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts for dinner. You would discuss dieting plans where you step down food consumption and coming up with a plan the patient could actually follow and doesn't harm them. You wouldn't just say "you're going on a starvation diet now, figure it out."

But in actual fact the USG is not a fat guy. Spending is not food. It's not going to drop dead of a heart attack if it has irresponsible fiscal policy. The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, but the US isn't going to collapse because social security becomes insolvent.

Moreover, the US has a lot of tools with which to solve its fiscal problems, but no one wants to use them. Conservative elites are primarily focused on cutting taxes for conservative elites and weakening consumer/labor protections; electoral success dictates protecting transfers to elderly and rural voters. So the obvious solution of trimming entitlements and raising taxes is a nonstarter and instead we get a pantomime of cost savings* as a cover for re-legalizing banking scams.

*high confidence prediction: these will not result in meaningful government savings over the long run and will incur higher social costs
*intermediate confidence: they will actually increase government costs over the long run as even more Federal staff are replaced with more expensive, less efficient contractors

I would contend that we are headed for an economic collapse simply because we are spending so much more than we produce in GDP, often by simply printing more dollars. To an extent, we can get away with it for now, simply because we’re the World Reserve Currency and oil is traded in Petrodollars. I don’t believe that’s going to last as long as we think it will, and large amounts of liabilities are going to make the process much harder because we’ll be dealing with several crises at once.

First, Theres the inflation from trillions of dollars that will be eventually dumped when the world switches to Petroleum-Yuan or whatever currency we eventually trade oil in. Then you have people and even entire countries suddenly not getting the expected benefits as they’ve long since become dependent on them. You also have millions of people who have been doing essentially make-work jobs and have few marketable skills.

The combination is going to be a poly crisis that will probably crater the US economy and possibly the world economy as well. Add in people used to the government tit no longer getting their benefits, government workers looking for work with no skills that mean anything outside of the government/NGO environment, now needing help or working minimum jobs, needed services no longer happening because the costs are too high to justify showing up. Teachers get low wages now, but if we have 20% inflation and no teacher can afford to be a teacher.

I would contend that we are headed for an economic collapse simply because we are spending so much more than we produce in GDP, often by simply printing more dollars.

"Economic collapse" covers a range of outcomes from Mad Max to austerity. If this economic apocalypse described really is looming, then DOGE is in chair of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. A project to streamline federal bureaucracy - even if successful - is not going to cover budgetary shortfalls, reverse the rise of China, or bring back the 60s US manufacturing dominance. It's not even going to cushion the fall. Neither is cutting foreign aid to zero.

Which bring me back to my point: the US has the tools to manage its fiscal issues, but there is no good faith fiscal conservatism in the US when it comes to Federal politics. There are serious conservative proposals for bringing spending under control, but they have no traction with actual politicians. If you think harsh fiscal discipline is the only way to save America from economic disaster, you should be yelling at your leaders to stop grandstanding over trivial savings and a) raise taxes b) cut entitlements. The 'every little bit helps' excuse is, in fact, wrong.

To illustrate what I mean, we have the current House GOP's budget proposal. Now, it's just a proposal and it probably undergo major changes, but it does demonstrate what I am talking about. Johnson has floated cuts to Medicaid (hey, something substantial!) among other things, but not in aid of deficit reduction. No, the plan is to cash in all of the savings (and likely then some) on tax cuts that will increase the deficit.

So let's not pretend DOGE is about radical measures to save money.

To an extent, we can get away with it for now, simply because we’re the World Reserve Currency and oil is traded in Petrodollars

If this analysis is correct, it is a huge argument in favor of US foreign involvement. It suggests we are getting absolutely staggering returns for our role as global hegemon and the fact that it isn't coming in the form of annual tribute is immaterial. Pretty much the last thing you'd want to be doing is running around alienating people by abruptly cutting off trade and aid.

Teachers get paid fine and they’re always going to to be first in line for government backed pay increases. They’re just a big and sympathetic constituency that thinks they should be paid like doctors and lawyers.

If we can break the katascopocracy and stop funding foreign coups and dictators that's good enough for me.

The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, but the US isn't going to collapse because social security becomes insolvent.

The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, in a social context where the taboo on political violence has been trampled to nonexistence. Many millions of people are openly cheering for political assassins at this present moment. Many millions more have already demonstrated their willingness to shred the basic constitutional, legal and social protections of those fellow Americans they consider their outgroup, without apparent limit.

If you think "a lot of economic turmoil" is survivable under these conditions, it seems to me that you are stretching optimism beyond the bounds of credibility.

a pantomime of cost savings* as a cover for re-legalizing banking scams.

Sorry, what banking scams are being legalized? (asking for a friend)

The story I'm seeing, is that with the CFPB getting destroyed, banks have free reign to do whatever they want. The fact that banks can't reorder your transactions to extract the most fees from you is attributed to the CFPB. They've also been the ones up Silicon Valley's ass about their crypto projects. The accusation is that the CFPB debanked SV startups trying to get some sort of blockchain based crypto banking off the ground.

The fear is that SV will reinvent banks, but on a computer and with crypto (and hookers and blackjack), but without all the "protections" that normal banks have to provide. Like FDIC insurance, or making sure their mortgage backed securities aren't fraudulent... anyways. They'll all run FTX style scams with their customer's money because they can, and then everyone is worse off, the economy is wrecked, and everyone loses all their money.

I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I also just don't trust the people making it they've so bankrupted their credibility with me, and the things they are willing to spend their political capital on are straight out of a Slaaneshi cultist meeting. So even if they are right, it's just the bad I've accepted I'll have to take with the good.

More comments

From Tucker Carlson’s interview with former State Dept. guy Mike Benz, it sounds like USAID was some unholy combo of CIA and the State Department, doing state-destabilization work neither of those relatively above-board organizations wanted to do.

DOGE is basically a Scooby Doo episode where four hackers pull a lever and fall through a trap door into the secret basement of a charity, where they discover the Illuminati are running The Matrix.

“Well gang, let’s pull the mask off this monster and see who it really is…”

“Gasp! It was old Man Kristol all along!”

All sardonic takes aside, it looks like State is bringing all the non-woke USAID charities under its purview.

There is a number of people on this forum who clearly would like to see it as a place for smart right-wingers to organise and rally, rather than a carefully tended neutral ground. Unfortunately, the mods don't seem terribly interested in acting against it unless directly called out for inaction, so the only way to reduce it would probably be to persuade the majority on a grassroots level that it is not in their interest either.

Indeed, it's quite disappointing what this place has become. Good posters like TracingWoodgrains have been banned or moved on. Shitposters from CultureWarRoundup have moved back in, telling us constantly how we have to hate the outgroup with every fiber of our being, and any notion that we should try understanding them is akin to betrayal. The mods are apparently asleep at the wheel. Zorba, the original creator of the site, hasn't posted in 3 months, and hasn't really participated that much in nearly a year.

and any notion that we should try understanding them is akin to betrayal

Do you think you made a good attempt at understanding the outgroup you described in your post?

Yes, they're fully in the tank for conflict theory. Look at a post like this and try to disagree.

Aside from FC's point, how does conflict theory see any notion that people should try understanding their opponents as akin to betrayal?

Did you read Kulak's post? His general idea is that allowing for discussion just legitimizes evil people who think things like that it's OK for people to rape white girls.

More comments

...Kulak is your example of a typical poster? With a post about how he doesn't post here any more?

Kulak is a particularly blatant example but plenty of people here are working off the same template.

More comments

The shitposters from the CWR never left, although I suppose they used to be better behaved.

Yeah and I don't do it constantly.

I agree with this sentiment. I broadly align with the right wing but don't like the turn this place has taken since the move off of Reddit. I think we would all be much better served by actually looking more for heat than light, and having less right wing applause lights.

Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.

The crux of the abortion debate is the moral status of the fetus, and the moral permissibility of ending life support to the fetus. It's not that activism did not swerve the opposition's resolve - the opposition has a fundamental disagreement of fact with the pro-life activists.

The situation is more similar to animal rights activism (in that it is a debate over the moral status of a living being not everyone considers morally important/relevant) rather than the foreign aid debate (where almost nobody assigns literally zero moral value to foreigners, even if they assign less moral value to them than their fellow countrymen.)

It's fine on the object level if an election result means a federal program is gutted, even one that a lot of people like and which does a lot of good in the world. Even so, I think it would be better to advance the principled reasons for stopping such a program, instead of reveling in how much you're owning the libs or whatever.

All I am asking is for conservatives to put the same level of value on the lives of foreigners as their domestic opponents do on fertilized human embryros. That is the level of commitment that they will need to win. If they can endure that level of opprobrium then the battle is already won. Do you believe that pro-choicers support abortions to 'own the cons'..? On some level, maybe. But they have a genuine belief in the liberty of women, unshackling them from the tyranny of biology. We must similarly have cruel principles that put our own well being over the needs of others.

All I am asking is for conservatives to put the same level of value on the lives of foreigners as their domestic opponents do on fertilized human embryros.

Is that really all you're asking for?

The conservative position on fertilized human embryos is "Don't kill them." I would assume this position also applies re: the lives of foreigners. The conservative position on fertilized human embryos is NOT "The government must provide all the food/medicine/trans operas/LGBTQIA++ comic books required to get that embryo through life."

This sounds like the old canard that by not providing a womb-to-tomb welfare state, you are in effect murdering the weak.

What am I missing?

I was speaking circuitously: what I meant is that 'conservatives should act as if the value foreign lives at zero'.

This serves a tactical purpose, as to defang reflexive knee-jerk appeals to sympathy.

But also strategically, in shining a spotlight on the revealed preference of their enemies as to the value of foreign life. If foreign lives are valued at one to one, and conservatives are through inaction killing them, then liberals are put in a moral dilemna to overthrow the government or reduce their valuation in contrast to their rhetoric. More likely, however, there will be a downward correction: and then the true work of negotiation begins.

But I don't think basically anyone is claiming they value foreign lives at a 1-to-1 ratio to domestic lives.

Given that the programs were 0.2% of the federal budget, I'd be okay with saying that I value America lives the ~450 times more than foreign lives that that implies, at least as far as US federal foreign policy goes.

John Green is a good point of discussion in philanthropy apropos USAID. The mediocre king of YA and man who appears truly convicted in his beliefs has, in addition to his tuberculosis charity, also contributed in fighting maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. He uses some of his money to, he believes, improve the world.

Does he? Are we a net positive when we spend money on maternal mortality and tuberculosis in the third world?

You ask John and the NGOs involved in these efforts what the causes are and they'll rifle off a list of things money fixes. For Sierra Leone, if they had better infrastructure, more hospitals, more trained medical workers, antenatal care and all the supplements in the world, their rates would fall. For tuberculosis, the relevant parts of the above and also staff ensuring patients complete their regimens. Americans regularly fail to complete antibiotic regimens, what of those in far poorer, far less equipped nations? Their failures are prolific. They use the wrong medications, or the right ones at the wrong amounts, and either way the patients at unacceptable frequency fail to complete their regimens.

Add to this pharmaceuticals in countries like India pumping out genericized versions of American pharmaceutical products under government license and we reach the outcome of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.

And all this happened under robust US aid spending. More money in a year than John Green, who does well for himself, will make in his lifetime and beyond with the royalties of his estate. We can no longer afford to tolerate these practices. The solution is not more money, we've tried that, it's not infrastructure, health workers, medication access. The solution is those countries cease public treatment of tuberculosis, it is travel bans, and it is drone strikes on factories making knockoffs.

This is where John Green, Scott and EA utterly fail. It's true that with first-class western medicine far fewer mothers in Sierra Leone would die, but the root cause is population health, it's the genetic basis for particular risk and susceptibility to postpartum hemorrhaging. Throwing money at Sierra Leone will not solve that population health issue, it will also not improve its socioeconomic conditions. Nigeria is far wealthier, similar rates. Liberia at least for a time, far lower rates. Haiti, same as Liberia. When those mothers live through one birth, what happens? More children, more daughters, more future mothers, more future aid necessitated. But at least with Sierra Leone and broadly with efforts to lower maternal mortality you can't say an obvious externality is superbugs. With tuberculosis we know outright the process is creating superbugs and the response somehow has been "give even more money."

No, it is no longer time for that. If India cannot manage its tuberculosis issue for itself, if India has to keep on stealing American weapons against illness only for their population to dull them flat through misuse, they don't get help anymore, they don't get to make our drugs anymore. They must live or die on their own mettle, because they aren't playing a domestic game with domestic consequences, they're toying with a pandemic. Every dollar spent "fighting" TB in the third world is a dollar spent adding fuel to the fire of a real global health crisis. I can't blame John, he's so charmingly naive that he's constitutionally incapable of considering the solution is doing nothing at all. I can blame Scott, he knows better.

Directionally I agree with EA and with the moral judgment of value in eradicating disease. I believe it in completely, but lifetime treatments, fighting and suppressing and temporary cures, these do not constitute eradication. When we can engineer treatments that do eradicate, when we can target population health through genetic engineering, such as in reducing the risk of postpartum hemorrhaging, when we have the panacea that can wipe out AIDS and TB and whatever else, it won't be merely worthwhile but our true moral obligation to see it through the world over.

But efforts that increase suffering -- like increasing populations by creating more mothers at risk in Sierra Leone, creating more people throughout sub-Saharan Africa who will ultimately become infected with HIV in excess of those spared of mother-to-child transmission, and separately causing the emergence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, these are not actual charity and they are not love. Blindness to the consequences of your actions from whatever flavor of naivety is not love, knowing what is truly best for someone and acting in accordance with that is love. Love would be making treatments in Sierra Leone dependent on subsequent sterilization, same for PEPFAR. Love in India would be establishing secure facilities where under no circumstances are patients permitted to leave during their entire course of their regimen. Call it Directly Observed Treatment, Until Cured. It may sound cruel, but our current "kindness" is leading many of these countries straight to hell.

If the United States tells the people of the Global South "We have the ability to save you from a painful death, but we are choosing not to For The Greater Good", the survivors will be fertile soil for Usama bin-Ladin 2.0 or some other radical cultists. They will be much more sympathetic to the Peking Clique, if and when they decide to demand something Washington is unwilling to concede. No fortress you can build will be strong enough to keep them out, when, like Belshazzar, you are numbered, weighed, and divided.

The cost of indefinitely providing medical care to people who cannot care for themselves may seem steep, but it is trivial compared to the cost of not doing so.

The US would never implement such a policy, not without an effective or actual revolution in governance. The brutal pragmatism wouldn't stop at "Good luck with that," it would be a fully isolationist US or West. We're talking a mined, milecastled and turreted border wall with Mexico with no entrances, boats flying unacceptable or no flags being sunk, no flights to those countries, no business in those countries, no telecommunications access permitted from those countries. We're talking skin color as a reason for detainment and summary deportation. It's a nightmare scenario.

The position was hyperbole in service of my conclusion: we do have an ultimate obligation to help these countries but what we're doing right now is hurting them. Hurting them so much threatening them with drone strikes would be superior than our "aid." It's not charity to think of every human as a blank slate, it's confusing what ought to be for what is, and profound differences in human behavior is what is. Just health differences, that our discourse has devolved so far that in another environment I might have to heavily couch myself to avoid the impression of wrongthink when all I'm wondering about is a genetic propensity to PPH, this isn't right, good, truthful. Now instead we're in decades of a geopolitical implementation of the trope of the pageant girl's vapid "I'm going to work for world peace." Charity must be tailored to the target, it must be undertaken with knowledge of the recipient's strengths and shortcomings, all of them. In other words, it must be undertaken out of actual love. John Green wants to show love, he grew up Christian in whatever surely protestant environment that didn't teach it right, though anymore, what churches do? But when he donates to fighting maternal mortality he isn't thinking as hard as he needs to be, he isn't asking, okay, well, what if this just means a lot more girls will be born who wouldn't be, what if they grow up and they need all this, and what if the money isn't there, and they die? The most important questions with these kinds of charitable projects must be above all others "What is our plan for obsolescence?" — "What is our plan if we have to stop?"

The cost of indefinitely providing medical care to people who cannot care for themselves may seem steep, but it is trivial compared to the cost of not doing so.

The US budget and financial system is extremely overburdened and the nation has a vast amount of debt, to the point that the costs of servicing it are an increasingly significant cost in the budget. Your options are to rip the bandaid off now, or to let things get worse by subsidizing the creation of more aid consumers until the US actually does collapse (or the populace gets desperate enough to elect a strongman) and there's no aid to anyone anywhere.

One of the arguments in the post you are replying to would require tens of thousands of 9/11s to get close to rebutting .There are already billions of wannabe Bin Laden's in the global south, most currently don't have the resources or skills. If anything, propping them up makes the terrorism and future war problem worse...

survivors will be fertile soil for Usama bin-Ladin 2.0 or some other radical cultists.

That's fine, as long as we don't have our very own glowies issuing passports/visas to known fighters so they can come train how to fly airplanes in the US. And also if we don't import half-their country to a single US state, we'll be fine.

To be crude: Those folks will become fertile soil for MOAB 2.0. Like the people unlucky enough to have shared a slice of continent with Osama bin Laden.

The cost of indefinitely providing medical care to people who cannot care for themselves may seem steep, but it is trivial compared to the cost of not doing so.

My gut tells me this isn't true at all. Where is the direct negative for the western world to not giving free stuff to an infinitely growing third world?

It feels like you are hoisting the western world on its own petard. Leveraging the massive amount of sympathy and charity it has given, which has driven it to its knees, in order to justify it continuing the practice to not face the wrath of the people it has been saving for the past century.

"Better keep giving charity to us or we will kill you."

Whenever I hear an argument along the lines of "We have to engage in leftist policy X, or else terrible thing Y that right-wingers fear will happen!", I reach for my tired disappointment.

Be honest with me now: you don't want to provide aid to the people of the Global South to prevent radical cultists; you want to provide aid to the people of the Global South because you think it's the right thing to do, and Osama 2.0 is a convenient argument you came up with.

I do favour providing aid to the Global South because I believe that it is the right thing to do, and wish everyone else supported it for the same reason.

However, as many people here do not share that moral instinct, I am left only to appeal to their self-interest.

The fact that they point in the same direction is not a coincidence but the working of karma. If you harden your hearts towards the suffering of the least fortunate among you, it will come back to bite you in the rear end.

I am left only to appeal to their self-interest.

Do you prioritize defending against the future foreign enemy, or the current domestic one?

If we prioritize defeating the domestic one, we will at least have the resources and the willing soldiers (and industry to support those soldiers) to defeat the foreign one if and when he appears.

The reverse is not as true; if we refuse to defeat the domestic one we will not have the resources or the personnel to defeat the foreigners we simply prioritized less.

Also,

If the United States

The NGOs are more than capable of funding these operations on their own (perhaps with fewer administrative staff if they want the altruism to actually be effective). The fact they will not suggests they just want it done with the tax dollars- and if they wanted it done with the tax dollars they should have adjusted how much of a domestic enemy they wanted to be (which they didn't).

If you harden your hearts towards the suffering of the least fortunate among you, it will come back to bite you in the rear end.

The trans-Sarahan slave trade was at least as large as the trans-Atlantic, but one observes that there's no class of descendants begging for reparations in the Middle East. In large part because they castrated male slaves to prevent that issue.

Hardening your heart does not tend to bite you, if you harden it enough. Being charitable is good, being hard-hearted is advantageous, it is the mushy middle that bites you. History makes many arguments that moral improvement comes with surprisingly high and enduring costs. Europe is steadily learning that lesson.

The fact that they point in the same direction like this is a sign of motivated reasoning. Karma is not real.

If the United States tells the people of the Global South "We have the ability to save you from a painful death, but we are choosing not to For The Greater Good", the survivors will be fertile soil for Usama bin-Ladin 2.0 or some other radical cultists.

You are making the classic mistake of presenting the status quo as the undesirable alternative to the status quo.

Notably, bin Ladin did come from the Global South, which was/is already fertile soil for various radical cultists, however you decide to define the term. Moreover, this occurs despite the status quo already being the funding line, as opposed to the supposed consequence of not funding.

The mistake in the framing is presenting the lack of preferred policy as a difference in nature, as opposed to a difference of degrees. This creates a discrediting effect- 'why should we keep paying for the thing we'll get regardless of if we pay'- rather than a cautionary effect 'things will be worse if we don't pay.'

The issue/weakness of the later, of course, is that an argument of efficacy has to prove it's efficacy, and that has the burden of being coupled with what's being paid for in practice and not just in objective. Like, 'USAID is spending money on life-saving things... but does so by also paying for gay operas.'

You can like opera. You can approve of gay operas even. But a medical cause that is spending on gay operas is not a compelling medical cause, even if people would be- in theory- willing to support medical causes.

(This is a classic weakness of government agencies that lose their sense of purpose / mission and get scope-creeped into fields outside their focus. The consequence of losing public legitimacy and political support isn't losing the scope-creept stuff, but also the efforts that were the nominal original focus.)

But from what I hear USAID has been making the Global South more sympathetic to the Peking Clique, as you call them, by showing up and demanding to know how the sexual minorities are being treated. Eliminating USAID is not a commitment to forever forsaking the Global South and banning all foreign aid forever, it's shutting down an organization that's served as an arm of US coercive diplomacy.

And, from what I hear, an arm which didn’t coordinate with the state department.

Radical Islam is already running wild in Africa and getting worse by the day, partly because of how ineffective US military aid is. African countries have already been turning away from the United States by the dozen because of the US’s inability to help them fight it. America’s help is weak and ineffective partially because the aid is conditioned on a bunch of stupid aesthetic requirements like “respecting bizarre western sexual practices” and “not being a military dictatorship”. The Russians and the Chinese don’t make these totalizing demands. They are more than happy to trade guns and effective military advisors for mineral rights on a transactional basis. The Africans like that better because relationships with Russia and China, while mercenary, actually allow the Africans to govern their own countries and don’t turn into a clingy codependency where they have to live and rule according to what makes American liberals feel good.

Do you have evidence of USAID unjustifiably deviating from best practice or Sierra Leonians having a genetic susceptibility for postpartum hemorrhaging?

Postpartum Hemorrhaging as leading cause of maternal deaths in Sierra Leone.

Particular disposition to hemorrhaging is my speculation, but when Sierra Leone at least was the world capital of obstetric mortality with >1000/100K while Haiti had <500/100K, a genetic basis is the rational guess.

Sierra Leone is less genetically homogenous than other similar-sized African countries because it is where the British released the slaves seized by the West Africa Squadron. This points against a genetic basis.

Uh, what does India stealing medical patents have to do with anything? Are their knockoffs less effective? Pardon my ignorance, but it would seem that a stolen antibiotic is, in terms of effects, identical to a purchased one.

Not OP, but if we were giving them antibiotics we might at least hope to suggest they use them responsibly. If they just steal them instead, they can hand them out like candy.

(Again, not OP, and I have no stake in this issue, just suggesting a possible connection).

While the factories likely have purity issues, the main issue is the antibiotics are culturally ineffective. That is, people routinely do not complete their regimens, which is a primary driver of antibiotic resistance. There are subpopulations in America where this is also true, but it is believed to be a widespread problem in India.

How would making India buy antibiotics from the US do anything about this?

The implication is that they are not allowed to have them except under conditions strictly administrated by American doctors, probably few at all.

It is not clear that finishing the course prevents resistance.

I was going to post this, and it seems correct for antibiotics in general, but it may not be true for TB, due to the nature of the illness and the fact that it takes megadosing on antibiotics for months to make a dent in the infection.

No, opposite problem. They are effective, they aren't utilized properly. Prescribed wrong, treatment regimens not followed, both kinds of failure cause TB to gain further drug resistance.

Again, has nothing to do with who makes the antibiotics.

  1. America develops new TB treatment
  2. India, South Africa, et al., misuse it
  3. Misuse drives further drug resistance in TB
  4. New treatment doesn't work anymore

Whether it's made locally or shipped to such nations the solution remains prohibiting methods of treatment that risk further drug resistance, e.g., changing to requiring the locking down of patients for the entire duration of treatment.

The point he's making is "if Indians misuse antibiotics then they shouldn't be allowed to have the ones we're trying to keep in reserve; since they'd respond to a refusal to licence by seizing the patents, blow up the physical factories".

Sure, but, India is not asking permission. They get ahold of a new American made drug and cheaply copy it. Once you already know the molecule, making copies is easy. It is discovering and testing potential drugs that is enormously expensive. Europe and India leave that Herculean task to America.

This is not responsive to @jake's suggestion. He was suggesting that the West respond to Indian misuse (e.g. feeding to animals, or rampant failure to finish courses) of in-reserve pharmaceuticals (i.e. those we're trying to keep microbes from becoming resistant to) by not only revoking their patent licences and embargoing India, but literally blowing up Indian generic factories producing these drugs with airstrikes.

I reiterate that this is Jake's suggestion, and not mine; while his suggestion avoids your objection, there are others it does not avoid, such as "acts of war against a nuclear triad power are a bad idea".

Hold up. India is catching strays here for no good reason.

We have DOTs programs. They're paid for domestically, and while I'm sure donations are accepted, the largest source of foreign aid I could see is a $400m loan from the World Bank. I believe USAID has spent about $140M since 1998.

TB treatment is a national priority, and immense amounts of effort are put into DOTs, surveillance and follow-up.

India has a compulsory licensing scheme for life-saving drugs, which you're free to disagree with (good luck coercing a nuclear power or directly attacking it). It sells generics for about 10% of the retail price in the States.

I did some napkin maths:

The Indian state saves about $1 billion through CL a year, so about 5 billion USD by 2030. The US would lose a maximum of around 3 billion a year on pharma revenue, but that's with the unrealistic assumption that there wouldn't be any cost-negotiation or the availability of generics.

The CDC shows that TB treatments in the US can cost tens of thousands for normal TB, 150k for MDR and >500k or more for XDR.

You guys have around an order of ~100 MDR cases a year already. That is despite screening for immigrants and travelers being put in place.

If India paid standard prices, they're looking at about $100 billion for the same level of care. This would be untenable in practice, and TB incidence would soar. This would have knock-on effects, both globally, and in the States, existing screening is already rigorous, so God knows how much you'd end up paying when more MDR and XDR TB cases pop up. I'm not qualified to put firm numbers on the expense, but it ranges from anywhere between 10 million USD to 1 billion USD a year in treatment costs.

You'd be looking at quite serious economic fallout from sanctions, and the theoretical gains of about $2B USD PA are unlikely to manifest, since if India somehow was forced to stop using generics, they'd likely just spend less and then face an explosion in TB cases that wouldn't particularly respect borders. If the US really put the squeeze on, then India could well retaliate by flooding international markets with generics for other drugs.

And of course, do you really want to piss of another >billion strong nuclear power which is a willing partner against China? From a pragmatic point of view, I'd wager not.

This is a hostage puppy, which has been discussed here before.

It's not a hostage puppy, it's collateral damage. There's no evidence that USAID was shut down and the bureaucrats decided to stop TB treatment first. Everything got axed, the good with the bad.

It's still a hostage puppy, if it was so important to have these millions for the poor people dying of TB then maybe soros or the whole of the EU can pitch in a few millions to go cure people, hell, go ask China for a belt and road initiative to fund some medical relief.

I never understand this argument - the "if it was really so important then surely someone else would already be dealing with it" thing. "Someone has to do it, and it happens to be the United States that has, as a matter of fact, taken up the slack" is a perfectly logical proposition. This is like saying "why are you jumping into the water to save that kid? if he was really drowning, someone else would have already jumped in". It's meaningless.

By all means, you can say "even if it is important, the US shouldn't be bearing the cost, someone else e.g. the EU should take care of it". That's very different. And I'm not even making a positive claim as to whether it is as a matter of fact important (though I'm concerned about the kind of global Bystander Effect this kind of bucket-passing might lead to). But I just don't see how 'nobody else is stepping up to do the hard thing that someone is already doing' supposedly proves that the hard thing isn't worth doing and the second guy is a chump for bothering.

But I just don't see how 'nobody else is stepping up to do the hard thing that someone is already doing' supposedly proves that the hard thing isn't worth doing and the second guy is a chump for bothering.

You never know if someone else will step up until the person already doing it steps back and opens up that opportunity.

In my view, if any truly important program is shut down along with USAID, someone will step into that vacuum, whether it's a non-profit or a private philanthropist or a religious organzation. Maybe there will even be a new federal program created if such a need is identified.

But this idea that the U.S. government is responsible for all charity throughout the world is not only a logistical problem but also a conceptual problem, neither of which will ever be corrected as long as the US govt continues to enable it.

The problem is that because we’re stepping in all the time, first of all, it’s just expected that every global problem is our responsibility to fix. And it isn’t sustainable to keep doing this. We have finite resources, limited by not only how much we can produce, but how much our own people need.

Secondly, it’s actively working against getting countries to clean up their own messes. Why would Africans demand their government give them better education or health care when Americans show up and do it for them? For that matter, why would Ghanaian government officials bother to not steal education money when we’ve already given them money to build schools and buy books? Why spend money you could put in a Swiss bank account to buy TB drugs when Uncle Joe Biden will just give them to you for the asking?

It doesn’t even give us good will. The programs don’t seem to make other countries respect us or even like us. They see us mostly as the stupid people who give them stuff no strings attached. We’re suckers. Iraq hates us, but despite that, and despite the fact that they don’t like us, don’t like democratic values, we’re going to fund them.

All this is sensible. I'm not trying to debate its merits as a coherent position.

I was specifically complaining about FistfullofCrows' pithy "if it was so important to have these millions for the poor people dying of TB then maybe soros or the whole of the EU can pitch in a few millions to go cure people", which I think is a bad and kind of baffling way to frame the question. It's really the "if it was", as opposed to "if it is", that sticks out to me. It seemed to be saying "we can prove, right now, that all this foreign aid isn't actually important, because the EU & Soros aren't taking up the slack". Which is bonkers and not the point. It can be genuinely important and still not a reasonable burden for the US to shoulder indefinitely, for all the reasons you cite. Or indeed the EU's or Soros's. People's unwillingness to do a hard and costly thing might be circumstantial evidence that it is indeed intractably hard and costly (duh) but it's just not some kind of gotcha that proves that the hard thing was never important. At the end of the day humanity can just collectively and intractably fail at doing an objectively important thing, because it's too hard and coordination problems are a bitch. That's life.

I don’t think you’ve fully understood the objection. It’s not “somebody else would already be dealing with it.” It’s “Somebody else should now start dealing with it.”

A man jumped into a pond to save a drowning child. Halfway to shore, he stopped swimming and let the child go. From the shore, no one knows why—maybe he cramped up, maybe he decided he hated the kid, maybe there was some other reason—all the bystanders know is that he’s not going to keep helping the kid to safety. From that point on, it’s quite reasonable to ask why none of bystanders will jump in to take the man’s place instead of just standing around hurling abuse at him. If the kid’s safety is their true concern, they should do something to prove it. Otherwise their criticisms of the man ring hollow.

I see what you're going for - but this seems to start from the premise that it's the other countries slash charitable billionaires who are positioning themselves as moral arbiters and saying the US should keep doing what it's doing. This seems… wrong? It's mostly American liberals and centrists writing the think-pieces, angry tweets, open letters, and so on. So within the drowning-child scenario I am picturing all of this as an internal debate within the swimmer's warring conscience.

And anyway, the important question is surely whether it is as a matter of fact important to save the child; not whether the outside observers who may or may not wail about it are cowards. As a hypothetical, "The bystanders are, to a one, a bunch of sanctimonious dicks who won't, actually, take over if the swimmer stops in his efforts to save the child" is many things, but it's not exactly a moving reason for the swimmer to stop what he's doing.

not whether the outside observers who may or may not wail about it are cowards

You misunderstand.

That wailing is not genuine; it is merely an exercise of power to force you to serve their moral ends.

Whether their moral ends are objectively correct in this case is not relevant (stopped clocks right twice a day, and all that)- the rescuer is perfectly justified in refusing their request on those grounds. And yes, that means it is the bystanders wagering the kid's life, if that bluff is called he dies, and that's the way it is; shame on the bystanders for using a drowning kid as such a bluff.

"Won't someone please think of the children?" is never about the children and never has been: it's about the power.

the rescuer is perfectly justified in refusing their request on those grounds

Well yes, but this is my sticking point: since when is it the outsiders' request at all? The people complaining about USAID are not foreigners in a position to step up to replace it, even if they wanted to. They're American liberals. That's where the wailing is coming from. (Whether because they sincerely think it's import or because it was a useful power-seeking ploy for them; doesn't matter here.) The people complaining about cutting USAID are not people who could take up the slack once America pulls out, because they are Americans. This is why I am saying that what the EU does or does not do about this has no bearing on the validity of the claim.

More comments

In what sense is this a collateral damage? It is not as if the government wants to send an airstrike for military installation and kills an innocent janitor. They are defunding a corrupt organization and money spent are saved. In fact I would say that the DEI and grift is the airstrike in question, it is those corrupt people who in their greed caused people to suffer now.

As an analogy - basically all the companies have some sort of charity pledge to send 1% of the profit from a good you buy to spend on saving poor children in Africa. So if you personally decide no longer to buy that product, are you an evil man who just collaterally damaged kids?

People dying of TB is bad. But it's net negative only for the countries with the TB problem. Why should US subsidize this?

Because while the NGO's left hand is open demanding money, the NGO's right hand has boatload after boatload of diseased "asylum seekers" poised on your border. One way or another, they will make it your problem.

The selfish motivation is that pathogens don't respect borders. Travel between the US and the Philippines is relatively common, almost a million Americans visited the country in 2024. Any one of them can pick up a new antibiotic resistant strain of TB and bring it home, at which point it's our problem. Solve the problems where they are so we don't have to solve them here in the future.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to:

  • Ban immigration from and travelling to the countries with this problem
  • Treat your own citizens if this issue arises

After a while these poor countries find new sponsors who will solve their problems. Or solve it by themselves.

  1. Poor countries find new sponsors, like China or Russia

  2. Poor countries start advocating for China and Russia and against the US on the world stage

  3. Europeans, who think of poor countries as intrinsically virtuous, pick up the tune

  4. Europeans become more anti-American and wrestle their governments into reducing support for US plans and military logistics

  5. Core US interests abroad, such as supporting Israel, suffer or become significantly more expensive

  6. More money winds up being spent on workarounds than it would have cost to continue bribing the poor countries

Europeans become more anti-American and wrestle their governments into reducing support for US plans and military logistics

Trump's stated policy of ”we take what we want from you, no matter if you’re allies or not” is already speedrunning this with little need for anything related to the third world.

If anything, those of my British friends and relations who are not card-carrying anti-Trumpists actually seem to be sneakily impressed.

Part of it is that it seems nice to have a forceful leader who actually tries to do things rather than put all his time and energy into long, boring attempts to explain why he can't do anything. Part of it that in many ways soft power is more insulting than hard power.

"Do what I say because I'm bigger and richer and stronger than you."

has a certain honesty about it.

"We're all friends, right? Obviously we're much bigger than you, but you know what, that doesn't matter. We'd never dream of using our overwhelming military and economic advantage to compel our friends. Oh, btw, can you close this guy's bank account for us? No, we're not going to tell you why. Just trust us. We're all friends, right? Allies, even. You like having our soldiers in your country to protect you from all the other powers who totally aren't selfless like us, don't you? It's such a shame, really - we did everything we could to support countries like China, and they paid us back by trying to be independent. That's not a worry with you, of course. Isn't it nice that we all get along?"

seems nicer on the surface but really isn't.

If anything, those of my British friends and relations who are not card-carrying anti-Trumpists actually seem to be sneakily impressed.

Having as contrast Keir Starmer, who is desperately trying to give away pay Mauritius to take away the British Indian Ocean Territory for no reason other than that a court controlled by enemies of the U.K. said they should is probably helpful here.

Well, yeah. The bar is low.

Has there been a CW post about this that I've missed? Feels like the sort of thing that would get discussed here but I haven't seen any mention of it.

More comments

An appealing offer, but I'm still waiting to hear the downside.

Banning all travel to and from places millions of Americans visit each year would be costly to the economy so while it might be cheaper for the government it would surely be more expensive for the country. Also, I want freedom to travel where I please. We shouldn't impose travel bans that aren't actually necessary.

Will we have to have another World War (or perhaps two as last time) to prevent the American relapse into the fiction that they shouldn't care about anything or anybody abroad?

Cheaper maybe, but more authoritarian than I'd think most would be comfortable with especially considering that immigration isn't necessary here, just travel. TB is incredibly infectious. Even if you ban travel to affected countries, it still leaves you open to second order infections (American travels to e.g. Japan, Japan isn't restricting travel to the Philippines, American contracts antibiotic resistant TB from a Japanese traveler who visited the Philippines). As others have said, there's no guarantee that this antibiotic resistant strain of TB will be treatable without novel antibiotic research (which is expensive as well, and results are not guaranteed).

It'd be interesting to compare the cost-effectiveness of USAID's reduction in pathogens brought to the US and quarantining all international travelers and cargo ships, including economic impact, but the counterfactual in the comment you replied to was "phase-out," not indefinite continuation.

Ah, thank you for pointing this out. It's already paid for and thus unnecessarily cruel - this is the main point. IMO good faith interpretation, from the US government perspective the management of the drug supply chain isn't free, so they are just saving on that.

Because doing good things is good!

You know how every time there's a new potential pandemic you hear about how new diseases are deadlier because the pathogen is not adapted to human hosts? And how a well adapted pathogen doesn't want to kill the host, it wants to live in the host long enough to propagate to other hosts?

TB is arguably the most human adapted pathogen out there. It has our immune system beat six ways from Sunday, kills slowly over an extended period of time, and can lie dormant for years before becoming active again (which means healthy people you let through customs may have a passive infection, and will only turn active and contagious later when they're already in the country). It is also arguably the most difficult bacterial infection to cure. You need to be on multiple powerful medications with significant side effects (including potential blindness) for 6-9 months in order to cure it.

If a TB strain managed to become resistant to one of those medications then it may not be possible to cure it, not without new drug development. In the US we've managed to mostly extirpate the disease at great cost over many years of effort. If an antibiotic resistant strain showed up it could undo decades of progress in US health.

I think a good way to avoid that trojan horse scenario would be to only permit entry to high achieving people from that region of the world as I would assume they are more likely to follow medical advice.

Maybe you shouldn't let people through immigration at all. Maybe the people you do let in should stake a good X amt of currency denominated in USD for the privilege of entering. They can have their money back when they leave if they don't suffer from TB on their way out.

Most people with dormant TB don't know that they have TB: getting to keep their money isn't worth them spreading antibiotic resistant TB.

Stopping treatment increases the risk of treatment-resistance

How many people are affected by this order versus the number of noncompliant patients who get their jar of pills and just never show up again or just forget to take the pills?

A quick nih search gives me:

93% of MDR-TB patients interrupted the treatment at least for one day during follow up period in Philippines

...

a meta-analysis recently published showed that 20% of MDR-TB patients are non-adherent

So maybe the US money helicopter stopping for a few days doesn't matter as much as you're making it out to be. And maybe the Philippines can scrape together enough money to buy the pills themselves, and maybe do all the other supporting activities a bit more efficiently.

The libs keep saying that foreign aid is only 1.2% of Federal spending. Well the TB aid is only 1% of the Philippines national budget so maybe they can afford to pay for it themselves. Don't forget that the US helicopter money is also redirected to promote equity and inclusion, spend on sinecures for connected people, and otherwise wasted.

To GP's point, "we are cutting funding at the end of 2025, figure it out" would have still been a better way to do this then an immediate stop work order (at least if it could be made to stick, which is perhaps not something the Trump administration could actually do).

Almost every time I've seen government make a promise like that, the "end of 2025" gets pushed out 3 months, then to September for the federal Fiscal Year, then delayed indefinitely. The Sequester is maybe the only time I've actually seen something like that go into effect. Not to say it couldn't be done, but I think it'd be much less likely to go into effect that way -- independent of my feelings about whether or not it's a wise choice to do so.

Yeah, it's sadly plausible to me that "shut the program down in an orderly fashion" is a fabricated option.

The trouble with simply cutting funding is that it leaves the agency with the ability to keep the sinecures and DEI spending, axe the TB drugs and food aid, and then wail to the press that Trump's budget cuts are killing people. You can't prove they're lying unless you actually obtain the details of where exactly all their money is going.

1% of a national budget spending on strong antibiotics, that would terrify me. Clearly that cannot be right.

Obviously costs include much more than cost of drugs but workforce, transportation, storage in Philippines most likely are cheap. Drugs for treating resistant TB are expensive but not that expensive to be 1% of the national budget.

Maybe they are, I don't know. My intuition is that USAID probably spends 5% on medicines and 95% on everything else, salaries to western volunteers, rent etc. that are normal for the US but very high compared to local prices. The local government could probably do it for a fraction of cost.

In India, we have TB treatment protocols that mandate observation by a doctor or nurse when the medication is dispensed, and the patient has to take it while they're watching. That's the only real way to deal with poor adherence, which often leads to MDR or XDR TB.

They'll chase you to your home if they have to, though I don't think they have any legal recourse beyond strongly insisting you take your damn medicine.

At any rate, the generic drugs are dirt cheap, and within the budgets of even most third world countries to begrudgingly dole out even if the aid tap is cut off.

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.

Previous attempts failed because they were sabotaged with the exact same appeals to decorum and proper conduct and empathy and compassion and coincidence and fortune and anything else that would fucking stick, and all of it topped with a heaping helping of 'while I've never looked into it or even thought about it you probably can't do anything about it and therefore shouldn't even try' as you peddle here.

Yes there are better ways to do things. Considering what has already been uncovered, the amount of graft and waste and just plain corrupt and autocratic bullshit we have already learned has been done in the name of the American people ENTIRELY in the dark, I prefer "incompetence". At least we can see when they fuck up.

What previous attempts you referring to?

Also, what am I supposed to be peddling? I never said you shouldn’t look into it.

You might not be doing it deliberately, but you are pushing the same line and attitude mate. Even with the revelations of the circuitous and incestuous nest of payola and corruption that has USAID funding the media to push its propaganda, and working as a cut out for the CIA to overthrow democracies (then bringing those tactics back home) your assumption is that any previous failed attempts must have lacked focus and drive, not deliberate sabotage by the people who would lose their job if it succeeded. And on top of that, you also don't like the attempt with focus and drive.

And the previous attempts I am referring to are all of them. Trump's first term, the tea party movement, Buchanan's attempt to rein in the neo cons - they always have heaps of momentum at the start, but because they are asking bureaucrats to reduce bureaucracy they get stymied by malicious compliance and feigned incompetence at every turn. Meanwhile the media - these days especially - fixates on every error and ignores any positives, ginning up hysteria and painting a false view of the world because their own bottom line is in peril too.

https://x.com/realdogeusa/status/1889885247787217374

The operational strategy is that of Blitzkrieg: by forgoing careful, methodical advances in favor of moving as quickly as possible, you incur substantial tactical penalties, but this is more than made up for by disrupting the abilities of your opponents to respond effectively. If your advice were followed, it would give the defenders of USAID ample time to challenge every single cut to the maximum ability possible, likely with multiple consecutive injunctions, as well as reorganize and potentially reroute funding to prevent the next most likely targets. Then, when those programs are cut, even if they have not already been rerouted elsewhere already, they will be well-prepared to immediately mount a defense-in-depth. The effort would be halted in a quagmire of legal proceedings and public propaganda for so long with so many challenges that the public would despair of any change and the political support would evaporate. That's why the only effective strategy can possibly be to cut as much as possible as quickly as possible, then give back only where it is tactically prudent to do so.

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped.

Can you give examples of past attempts? As a cynic, it wouldn't surprise me, but this is The Motte, not The Bailey, so I don't want to assume that what wouldn't surprise cynical, old me is correct.

Reagan is the classic example. But pat Buchanan in the 90s is an additional attempt. Government grew over the time period.

Afghanistan and Syria withdrawals last Trump term come to mind. Generals bragged about playing shell games in Syria with troop numbers.

https://nypost.com/2020/11/13/diplomat-says-officials-misled-trump-on-troop-count-in-syria/

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” James Jeffrey, US special representative for Syria engagement, said in an interview with Defense One.

Different branch of gov, but basically the same idea. Leave wiggle room and you leave them room for to wiggle out of the order.

Relatedly, pulling out of Afghanistan. We finally did it, but the military leadership insisted on dragging their feet and doing it in an incompetent fashion to undermine Biden and it worked.

No, Biden absolutely owned that one, on multiple levels. From the decision to delay the American withdrawal in an attempt to renegotiate with the Taliban to the choice to putting the formal American withdrawal to the anniversary of 9-11, which was the peak of the Afghan fighting season, was an American political decision to try and wrap a bow on it for the american electorate.

Why would delaying the withdrawal or specifying the anniversary of 9/11 for the pullout date cause the specific failures we saw?

I'm not a Biden fan, but I do praise him for actually getting us out of Afghanistan. Likewise, my prior is that the US military should be able to pull out of Afghanistan in good order on a specified date more or less regardless of what the Taliban or the locals do. To date, I've seen no reason not to assume malicious compliance on the part of the military brass, something they very clearly are willing to do given the bragging about straightforward insubordination and deceit under Trump.

It was a Presidential level, or at least cabinet level, decision to trust Afghani security forces ability to protect Kabul airport and rely on that for the exit as opposed to maintaining Bagram airfield and staging the exit from there. As was the exact timing. Others have pointed out that there are more advantageous seasons to stage a withdrawal. 3 months later an exit from Bagram would have likely been fairly orderly.

The Taliban actually have a fighting season (weird I know). The original plan was to pull out when the Taliban weren’t in their fighting season which would’ve meant less chaotic exit (eg abandoning a bunch of perfectly useful tech at Bagaram).

Why would delaying the withdrawal or specifying the anniversary of 9/11 for the pullout date cause the specific failures we saw?

Because in August you can still more or less drive freely in Afghanistan, and in February you can't because the mountain passes are still snowed in.

Due to the elevation, topography, and regional climate, the term 'fighting season' in Afghanistan was literal, not just figurative. Fighters would literally drive / ride / walk out of Afghanistan before the winter snows, because if they didn't before they were liable to be unable to (or risk death if they tried, because no help is coming on those roads or in those passes). Civilization basically shuts down, and while there is no hard dates, the fighting season is typically over in October and doesn't start again until March-April, once the passes free of snow and you can get people in

In turn, this made the summer season an escalating tempo, as more reinforcements / seasonal fighters would enter the country, prepare for major attacks in the country, and so on. Typically the there would be a peak during whatever the last major islamic holiday was of the fighting season- basically islamist theology that virtuous actions are holier then- and then the tempo would fall off as militants began to move out for the winter.

In 2021, when Afghanistan fell in August, the offensives that started building the pressure were basically timing to such religious holiday offensives. Specifically, while Kabul fell on 15 August, in 2021 that was 3 days before the Day of Ashura, a week after the Hijra, Islamic new year, and Eid-al-Adba, was 20 July, less than 4 weeks before.

Put another way- the Taliban took over in the middle of a series of obvious, typically, and routinely foreseen religious holiday offenses at the height of the fighting season. These offensives were going to occur because they'd occurred yearly for the previous decade, almost two. The offensive was as fast as it was because you could literally drive from a village that had just flipped to the next village, with the village leader who flipped, and make the point that if he flipped, maybe you should to, and anyone who was familiar with Afghan tribal / clan based politics could have told you the implications that had- which were forewarned more than once.

In the original Trump-era plan, the plan was for the US forces by 1 May 2021. Since the American troops don't literally board the plane the last day, but typically do so over weeks and months, the actual pullout would have been in the preceeding months. That means March and April on the final combat units, before the fighting season is in full swing, and January February for everyone else, still in the winter lull.

Which is to say, the Americans would have stayed in force for the climax of the last fighting season, had an uncontested winter non-fighting season to withdraw in good order, and have the opening months of the first fighting season (March/April) to make a decision of re-surging if necessary before a major Taliban offensive could get the people and material in-country for a country-wide offensive.

That, in turn, would have given the western leaders who wanted to more time to decide to send in a relief force to secure Kabul, rather than be overtaken by events on the ground, and given the Afghan government a gradual escalation of enemy activity rather than a sudden shock of attacks everywhere. Because the situation would have taken longer to unfold, the nature of the system shock that enabled / incentivized the domino cascade would have differed, in part because, again, you couldn't just drive from Pakistan to Kabul.

Kabul might still have fallen, but it would have taken considerably longer without the political cascade effect, and most notably well after the Americans had mostly withdrawn, without the Taliban able to claim the momentum of an uncontested crescendo.

In the Biden plan, which became a thing because Biden tried to abandon the Trump plan but then wasn't able to secure another full year for withdrawal, the Americans withdrew in the middle of the fighting season. Which, of course, the Taliban knew, and the Afghan government knew, and all the tribals elders knew. This, in turn, set the conditions for the sudden offensive shock that saw the rapidity of the cascade we saw in history, as American forces ceased combat support operations in preparation for the multi-month pullout process.

What this also did was mess with the coalition evacuation plans. Up to the year before, the plans to leave Afghanistan if necessary relied on using Bagram Airfield, the major American military airbase in the capital. As long as the US was in Afghanistan, it was the safest / most defensible / easiest to access route for any entry or exit movement. When it was abandoned- because of the summer pullout schedule- various states and organizations hadn't actually updated their plans on how to leave Kabul. Which left Kabul airport, with the results you saw of the American airborne basically flying in to occupy from the inside while the Taliban controlled the gates, rather than having American and their Afghan partners at the guard points.

Further, the nature of the speed- and thus shock- is what led to the American embassy implicitly burning all its Afghan personnel records in the 'burn it all / don't let anything get captured' continency that most warzone embassies have. Except... in part because the embassy hadn't actually had to follow through on the evacuation according to the earlier timetable, the US Embassy in Kabul was the only location with the various documents such as the pre-approved visas for Afghan partners who were intended to be pulled out last moment. Which were supposed to be what cleared Afghan friends and partners to get on the planes to get out.

So when those went into the burn pit, you had literally nothing distinguish -person who helped US soldiers for decade at great risk to themselves- from -person who sees opportunity to get into US / flee the Taliban-. Which is how you got the stories of afghans calling American soldiers they worked with years ago, who called actively serving soldiers at the airport, to guide people to sneak in side doors, using nothing but 'I know a guy who knows a guy' levels of trust and coordination.

Because the partner document packets were burned in a panic that wasn't necessary.

Because the Embassy thought it was going to be overrun in an offensive that wouldn't have been possible 6 months earlier or later.

Because the Embassy thought it had several more months to get around to dispersing the documents because Biden pushed the pullout date back to the end of the fighting season.

Because anything but Trump was the order of 2021, and after his election in 2020 Biden was signaling he was going to redo the pullout (but was 'convinced' not to by his opposite negotiators).

Because Biden wanted a big ceremonial 9-11 anniversary rather than an unceremonious pullout that would have been a minor political critique in his first year.

I'm not a Biden fan, but I do praise him for actually getting us out of Afghanistan.

I, too, approve of actually getting out of Afghanistan. I don't think that was a mistake. I even think biting the bullet and accepting the humiliation was the correct move. History would be significantly different had Biden doubled-down, and had a major military force in Afghanistan when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Likewise, my prior is that the US military should be able to pull out of Afghanistan in good order on a specified date more or less regardless of what the Taliban or the locals do. To date, I've seen no reason not to assume malicious compliance on the part of the military brass, something they very clearly are willing to do given the bragging about straightforward insubordination and deceit under Trump.

What reason would you need to see to convince you that the military was simply compliant as opposed to maliciously compliant, particularly for an order to withdraw at a date that practically guaranteed bad order in pursuit of domestic political advantage?

The American military was not responsible for the decisions to re-adjust the military pullout to the middle of the fighting season. They were not responsible for the decision to handover Bagram, the main military airbase to be used for emergency evacuation plans, or the timeline to do so. They were not responsible for the decision by the Embassy to destroy partner national documentation, or to only have the copies literally in Kabul. They weren't even responsible for sending the airborne to into Kabul airport at the end, where the world then got to see Afghans falling to their deaths off of military aircraft.

And I do not even believe those were all bad decisions to make. Once the offensive was clearly racing forward, embassy purge was not an unreasonable choice to make. Having already given up a military airbase, a civilian airport is not the worse substitute. The Afghan pullout, as much as it is remembered as a shameful defeat, was an unprecedented logistical effort that, coincidentally, got a lot of people- including non-Afghan partners- safely out of Afghanistan when the Taliban took over. Many of the ISAF partners were in more or less the same boat of having no backup plan to Bagram, because they, too, thought ISAF would have time to muster a relief force.

But the Biden administration, including Biden himself, made a significant number of political decisions with easily predictable- and predicted- consequences that led to those reasonable-in-context decisions. Consequences that- had the administration struck to the start-of-the-fighting season pullout- would have substantially reduced the various costs, reputational and otherwise, to the americans in general and to the Biden administration in particular (which certainly did itself no favors by claiming no one warned them and claiming that a 9-11 anniversary just happened to be necessary for a well-ordered pullout).

Thanks you for the effortful post, and Jesus Christ on a cracker, what a mess.

What reason would you need to see to convince you that the military was simply compliant as opposed to maliciously compliant, particularly for an order to withdraw at a date that practically guaranteed bad order in pursuit of domestic political advantage?

This is not an easy question to answer. Complicated opaque processes require trust, and if trust is broken, you're left with a question of balance between false positives and false negatives in your oversight.

First, it's worth pointing out that, at least in my view, trust has been broken here. The DoD is a bureaucracy, with all the attendant moral hazard that label implies. We know they can be incompetent. We know they cover their incompetence when they can. We also know they can be malicious: we have the papers out of Afghanistan showing that DoD leadership was lying to the public for two decades, and we have numerous examples of them lying to Trump to circumvent his direct orders, and even bragging about it publicly.

More abstractly, at some point, "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" ignores the fact that malice is easily disguised as incompetence in a complex, opaque environment, and also the fact that sufficiently advanced incompetence is isomorphic to malice, and the DoD over the last few decades has, in my view, cleared this bar.

There's been several threads of discussion above about the DOGE versus USAID; one side of those threads is "why not just do cuts in an orderly fashion?" The answer that keeps emerging is "we don't trust the bureaucracy to cooperate in good faith, so it is better to treat them as hostile and simply cut everything." You seem amenable to that explanation. If I asked you "what would convince you that USAID is simply compliant rather than maliciously compliant", what would your answer be?

Or maybe it's a bit simpler. If someone can present a DoD planning document stating "if you issue these orders, here are the negative consequences", and Biden signed it saying "do it anyway", that would be a pretty open-and-shut case of this being Biden's fault. Only, I'm pretty sure that document doesn't exist.

Further, reading through the description you've provided, I find a lot of the items seem to simply kick the can down the road. Okay, the Taliban has a known fighting season. We could have avoided the known fighting season, but that's been scotched. But by your explanation, what happens next should be predictable, which means our extraordinarily-well-resourced DoD should adapt to the change in circumstances. That adaption doesn't appear to have materialized. I understand that the enemy gets a vote, that the DoD and our military personnel are also human, that morale on the very end of a twenty-year mission was probably not high, and that requests for additional resources for an operation explicitly aiming at reducing resources to zero is not going to work well. All of these are plausible forces pushing against success.

But at the end of the day, our military's job is to take a mission assigned and execute it done with a high degree of professionalism, and that very evidently did not happen here. To the extent that constraints complicate matters, it is their job to work the problem and deliver a solution. To the extent that the mission was simply not possible within the given constraints, they need to say so (and I don't expect they actually will; Yes-Manning seems to be endemic throughout the officer corps of at least the army and navy, from what I've observed.)

Likewise with the paperwork. Why is all this paperwork being kept in an office in Afghanistan? We have telecommunications. There were no backups in Washington? Those backups weren't integrated into the bugout plan? There was no way to keep this important data other than in paper files in a cabinet in Kabul?

I am not inclined to hold Biden accountable for the outcome because he is neither a tactician nor a strategist nor a bureaucracy expert. I can readily believe he imposed restraints: get out of Afghanistan by one year from now, in time for the 9/11 anniversary. A year is a pretty damn long runway for an event that should have been pre-planned in detail twenty years ago. If there was not a plan on a shelf for this eventuality, that seems like a failure on the part of the planners. What if an actual hot war kicked off, and we needed to pull our forces out of Afghanistan not in a year, but by the end of this week? There was no plan for that?

And again, I appreciate that hindsight is 20/20, and it's all very easy for me to say, having never been involved in the un-invasion of Afghanistan. But I don't actually trust the DoD, and that lack of trust arises from what seem to me to be sound reasons. If I'm expected to blame political leadership, I want a paper trail of explicit warnings that the leadership explicitly ignored and efforts to compensate that the leadership explicitly overruled. If the system is, as I suspect, built more or less entirely around preventing such things from existing, well, that's one more reason why I don't trust it, and why you shouldn't either.

Alternatively, maybe that paper trail does exist, in which case I'll be happy to update.

More comments

This argument is constantly advanced and it's ridiculous - it's basically blaming the left for the right having a) a stupid base and b) being rubbish at politics. Plenty of politicians/movements have proven capable of picking their way through hostile bureaucracies without tearing the whole thing down. That Trump is too stupid or impulsive to do this is no-one's fault but his own.

  • -10

Plenty of politicians/movements have proven capable of picking their way through hostile bureaucracies without tearing the whole thing down.

Could you give some examples?

Deng, De Gaulle, Thatcher, Feng Guifen, Attlee

Please correct me if my history is off, but AFAIK Thatcher is the poster child for tearing it all down. That's why she privatised everything she could get her hands on, destroyed the unions and ended British coal mining. It's also why the Left burns her in effigy every chance they get. Her most famous line is "The lady's not for turning."

Harold Wilson, on the other hand, is famous for trying to come to a civilised accommodation with hostile unions and failing utterly:

For 16 months Prime Minister Harold Wilson has cajoled, wheedled and haggled with Britain’s powerful labor unions in a vain effort to stop their rampaging wage demands. The basis of his policy was the “social contract,” a formal deal (although never written into law) between the government and the labor unions. The government would deliver social welfare benefits in exchange for voluntary restraints in pay settlements. Purpose: to keep workers abreast of—but not ahead of—inflation.

But the unions have welshed on the deal. One major union after another won pay raises of 30% and more; during the past twelve months, average weekly wage rates for manual workers rose 32.6%, leapfrogging ahead of the 25% inflation rate for the same period. Last week, after inflation had worsened and the pound sterling had hit a new low, Wilson and his Cabinet took a deep breath and finally scrapped the tattered social contract.

Time Magazine 1975

(And Attlee came from before the time of entrenched hostile bureaucracies. Indeed, he founded many of them, including but not limited to the NHS and the various local planning committees).

but AFAIK Thatcher is the poster child for tearing it all down

This is rather overwrought, deindustrialisation and the drawdown of employment in SOEs was well underway under Wilson, but in any case the relevant point here is in her interactions with the bureaucracy, which is the particular point of discussion in this subthread. The point is that whatever changes Thatcher was in fact able to make re: privatisation and retrenchment (though bear in mind she increaseda a range of taxes (especially early on) because unlike Republicans she actually believed in austerity, for better or for worse) she did so without tearing apart the Civil Service, even though prevailing governmental consensus was for a mixed economy and national and regional planning.

And Attlee came from before the time of entrenched hostile bureaucracies.

This is silly - just because the scale of governmental employment was not what it is now, he still was dealing with an e.g. Treasury which, though changed by the dual experiences of depression and war, was still not inclined towards his agenda.

One analogy I heard somewhat recently that I keep thinking about when seeing all this DOGE-related news is that, when you amputate an infected limb, there's almost undoubtedly lots of cells in that limb that are perfectly fine and perfectly functional, but it's just not viable to go in there and surgically (literally) remove only the bad cells and leave the good ones behind. Perhaps it might have been possible earlier on when the infection was small, but at some point, the infection became large enough such that, if we don't remove the limb along with the good cells, the host itself will die.

There are many issues with the analogy, such as the fact that the host in this case probably won't die and the fact that the good cells in the limb are humans with suffering, free will, a voice, and a vote, and the fact that whether the infection has gotten so bad that amputation is the only viable option isn't something we can determine with the same level of confidence as a doctor looking at an infected limb. But I think it's a reasonable enough position to have with respect to the current circumstances.

And I think it points to the fact that, if the "good" cells in a metaphorical infected limb wants to survive, then it's incumbent on them to take control over the infection within and take active steps to credibly signal that it's in control, if not rooted out entirely. I think the past couple decades of escalating DEI (I think the term "DEI" becoming a popular catchall term for this is more recent, but certainly the push for that exact sort of ideology has been around and quite strong at least since the 90s) is one part of this that shows the utter failure of many institutions, both within and out of the government, to make credible signals that they have the infection under control.

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped.

My thoughts throughout this Presidency (all three weeks of it) has been a mix of:

  1. Damn, Trump is reckless, unprofessional, and vain.

  2. 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.

Funding basic science? >60% "administrative overhead" tacked on.

"Indirect costs" are overhead, and 60% is too high (much higher than average in the US right now), but it's not all administrative overhead. Everything from lab equipment and computers to the lights and air conditioning in the research buildings is being paid for by that indirect take. You could make grant recipients itemize instead, but then you either have administrators (more administrative overhead!) do the itemizing, or you have often-highly-paid researchers wasting time on figuring out what fraction of their PC upgrade needs to come out of grant A vs grant B.

This feels like the ivory tower version of "What do you mean the plumber is charging $200! He worked for an hour to replace a $50 part!" You might want to look for a cheaper plumber next time (and in this analogy, I do think it's a problem that spending other people's money doesn't give grant committees so much incentive to price shop), but if you can't find any cheaper plumbers then it might just be possible that you're not considering his whole cost accounting.

I've seen "the PI is barely getting paid" budgets before, but they weren't lies, they were common cases where the bulk of the work was being done by a postdoc or one or two grad students, with a faculty member PI just providing supervision and answering questions for a couple hours a week for each such project. Arguably the most important thing the PI was doing in those situations was "having the paper qualifications for the bureaucracy to allow them to be a PI", and maybe that should raise some eyebrows, but about bureaucratic requirements rather than funding. Even then I'm not sure changing requirements would change much, because the second most important thing the PI was doing was acting as a guarantor, using their track record of good collaborative work to indicate that they were good at picking successful postdocs and students and that they'd help keep that record up if the current project ran into problems.

I might have just been lucky enough to be around honorable people, though. E.g. these were the sorts of PIs who would insist on a paper's first author being the lowly student who did most of the work, whereas I've heard that "the first author is the one with seniority" is sometimes the rule elsewhere.

I just don’t have much belief in price discovery where the main buyer is price indifferent

Corporate security at my job keeps referencing "attack surface". How much vulnerable and hypothetically open to malicious action "surface" are we exposing to the world? They go a bit far in fearing this, in my opinion. Saying we shouldn't be handing out business cards on foreign trips, etc. But their larger point is valid. If you go around leaving possible vulnerabilities exposed to the world, then someone is going to exploit some of them.

Millions spent on transgender animal research, millions on Central American gender assessment clinics, etc, etc. They are hanging targets for a Republican Texas sharpshooter to accidentally hit while making broad cuts. The attack surface was massive so even blundering unfocused "attacks" happen to stike it again and again.

How the fuck does he have so much ammo?

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).

I've been digging into some of these laws and regulations. I'm coming away more convinced than ever that democratic governance is a myth. No regular person could possibly comprehend the byzantine labyrinth of rules, regulations, and case law required to competently evaluate government decision making.

Every spigot of federal funds grows into a hydrothermal vent of highly-specialized fauna perfectly adapted for siphoning-off those sweet sweet grants. Congress can't fix the problem, because all they are able or willing to do is appropriate more funding for things.

At least in the US, Trump has demonstrated that democratic governance is not a myth. You can in fact elect someone to take an axe to everything and they can take an axe to everything.

Robert Michels eternally vindicated. To say organization is to say oligarchy, where the people who care about the organization inevitably rule over the people who care about the goals of the organization.

The name of the concept you're reaching for is "target-rich environment".

What amount of money do we speak about and how many people are treated?

The problem, for me, is that my options are not between an orderly phase-out and a stop-work order, but between a stop-work order and the status quo. I firmly believe that doing this in a slow, orderly fashion would just result in caterwauling about how we're killing the children in the future and that this caterwauling would continue apace through the next administration, which would restore funding in full plus a little extra bump for their trouble. If, like me, you want many of these activities curtailed, you just have to bite the bullet and accept that it's going to be an ugly process where every single person denied a previously received bit of American largesse informs you that you're literally killing children.

So, the solution, for me, is to say that the mistake is not in stopping now, but that we ever began the process of giving away so much American money that can never be redacted in the slightest and that is never enough to even begin to slake the demand.

I firmly believe that doing this in a slow, orderly fashion would just result in caterwauling about how we're killing the children in the future and that this caterwauling would continue apace through the next administration, which would restore funding in full plus a little extra bump for their trouble

I'm afraid this is called politics. Republicans were unashamed in their mobilisation of patriotism/the troops in the early 2000s, but that didn't mean that when Obama entered office he issued a stop-work order to the military. He simply just withdrew from Iraq. You might Trump is engaged in 'just politics' too, and this is sort of true, but he and his supporters have to own the negative consequences of their actions, and not blame the left for... complaining about Trump endangering valuable aid programmes when he does so.

  • -10

but that didn't mean that when Obama entered office he issued a stop-work order to the military. He simply just withdrew from Iraq.

Yes, but you may recall that it took another two Presidents for the US to actually works towards meaningfully disengaging from the Middle East afterwards--and even now, we can't afford to ignore the region. I think a lot of the people who voted for Obama actually expected him to go more whole-hog than he did.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats