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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)
How many examples would you like?
$47k is as much income tax as has been withheld from me from 2018-2025. I don't think the fruit of my labor for eight years of my life is quite small, and I don't think nearly a decade of taxes extracted from me should be spent on this crap.
Eight years of my life for a trans opera in Colombia. Rooting it out isn't mendacity, it's what I voted for.
Similarly, annual estimates for Medicaid fraud are $50-100 billion per year, or the total lifetime taxes of roughly 100,000-200,000 Americans.
And yet Rick Scott is still a Republican in good standing...
Medicare fraud is different.
I'm not joking here - Republicans see Medicare as a program which helps good people, so a little bit of fraud is inevitable and acceptable. Whereas Medicaid is a program which helps the undeserving poor, so any fraud at all is grounds for throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This also explains why the government is so bad at anti-fraud efforts. The voters who are outraged by fraud believe (wrongly) and the politicians who pander to them pretend to believe that fraud is mostly a problem caused by politically unsympathetic groups of program beneficiaries claiming more than they are entitled to. People with experience of private sector anti-fraud work start with the assumption that most fraud involves organised, professional fraud operations such as the one Rick Scott ran.
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