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Notes -
One grant is a petty amount, but a memorable synecdoche.
Are 6000 grants a petty amount?
Is the total of Medicare fraud, home health fraud, home child care fraud, disability fraud a "petty amount"?
Nobody "serious" seems to give a shit about fraud when it happens on their team or by their favored constituencies, but I'm quite certain that all the other kinds of fraud are orders of magnitude more expensive than whatever Trump has done. His is concentrated and gaudy; the other kinds are diffuse. Cutting off a finger or two versus death by a thousand cuts.
But are all 6000 grants funding things as contemptible as Columbian trans operas?
Fraud is an obvious problem and isn't something most politicians would defend. It's categorically different than the type of corruption that Trump is showing.
I'm guessing around 5900 of them but who knows. other commenters have provided some further examples involving much higher dollar amounts.
AFAICT USAID had a small handful of truly defensible grants that rationalists like Scott and Kelsey really liked defending for a couple weeks, but then they got bored and moved on like the rest of us. or maybe they got drowned out in the volume of shitty grants like the culture war stuff or like caravaning migrants through the darien gap.
we disagree on this, I suspect. Perhaps also some passive/active distinction around "defend." Most politicians are happy to ignore it and bury any reports that demosntrate how much there is, but as I recall Tim Walz got pretty snippy about people trying to investigate it.
ah, there's always some reason. Can we just admit it's partisanship?
And I would guess those few examples like trans operas were an unrepresentative sample the Trump admin threw out to try to justify their action on an otherwise mostly uncontroversial program. I haven't seen other commenters present more than a few other anecdotal examples. I'm willing to change my mind on this though if someone has a more rigorous look.
No, my issue was specifically with corruption against Trump. This is getting into the issue where people redefine corruption as "anything the outgroup does that I don't like". Trump selling off pardons, Biden pardoning his son, and improper Medicaid disbursements are all bad, but only the first two are corruption.
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