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Plainly absurd, you only need to look at wtf was going on with USAID and the ficticious X millions for gay condom art to zanzibar to see your statement is absurd. In fact the money was flowing for Dems propaganda and elections.
No clue what this is in reference to.
Presumably a joke about USAID funding all sorts of nonsense and no one has really tracked through everything they did like navigating the Darien Gap, but the closest specific example is probably the Columbian trans opera.
Sure, that stuff looks like nonsense. Practically anything that goes to fund art or "culture" more broadly probably has a chance to end up funding some woke nonsense. That stuff is bad and it's good that Trump canned it.
In terms of comparison though, $47K is quite small.
It's one memorable and culture-warry grant out of 6,000.
That doesn't help the "USAID spending was corruption" case. It highlights how insubstantial the objections are and how feeble the attempts to draw an equivalence to Trump's corruption are. The argument is, essentially, that spending money on things conservatives don't like is fraudulent and that these petty amounts are equivalent to direct abuse of office for personal gain and billions in direct self-dealing.
(Underlying all of this was the incredible mendacity of DOGE and assorted fellow travelers in their claims of finding fraud/waste, such that any individual allegation can't be taken seriously without significant additional investigation)
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?
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