[RD] Trump in Charge: The MAGA Presidency

USAID officially closes, attracting condemnation from Obama and Bush​

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has officially closed its doors after President Donald Trump gradually dismantled the agency over its allegedly wasteful spending.

More than 80% of all the agency's programmes were cancelled as of March, and on Tuesday the remainder were formally absorbed by the state department.

The shuttering of USAID - which administered aid for the US government, the world's largest such provider - has been newly criticised by former Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush.

These aid cuts could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to a warning published by researchers in the Lancet medical journal.
The authors of the Lancet report called the numbers "staggering", and projected that a third of those at risk of premature deaths were children.

A state department official said the study used "incorrect assumptions" and insisted that the US would continue to administer aid in a "more efficient" way, the AFP news agency reported.

Founded in 1961, USAID previously employed some 10,000 people, two-thirds of whom worked overseas, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The controversial cuts began early in Trump's second term, when billionaire and former presidential adviser Elon Musk was tasked with shrinking the federal workforce.

The move was widely condemned by humanitarian organisations around the world.

Among the programmes that were curbed were efforts to provide prosthetic limbs to soldiers injured in Ukraine, to clear landmines in various countries, and to contain the spread of Ebola in Africa.

On Wednesday morning, the agency's website continued to display a message saying that all USAID direct-hire personnel globally had been placed on administrative leave from 23 February.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously said that the remaining 1,000 programmes after the cuts would be administered under his department.

"This era of government-sanctioned inefficiency has officially come to an end," he added on Tuesday.

"Under the Trump Administration, we will finally have a foreign funding mission in America that prioritizes our national interests," he wrote in a post on Substack.

Trump has repeatedly said he wants overseas spending to be closely aligned with his "America First" approach.

Bush and Obama delivered their messages of condemnation in a video conference they hosted with U2 singer Bono for thousands of members the USAID community.

Bush, a fellow member of Trump's Republican Party, focused on the impact of cuts to an AIDS and HIV programme that was started by his administration and subsequently credited with saving 25 million lives.

"You've showed the great strength of America through your work - and that is your good heart,'' Bush told USAID workers in a recorded statement, according to US media. "Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you."

Meanwhile Obama, a member of the opposition Democratic Party, affirmed the work that USAID employees had already done.

"Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it's a tragedy. Because it's some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world," Obama was quoted as saying.

Long-time humanitarian advocate Bono spoke about the millions of people who he said could die because of the cuts.

"They called you crooks, when you were the best of us," he told attendees of the video conference.

USAID was seen as integral to the global aid system. After Trump's cuts were announced, other countries followed suit with their own reductions - including the UK, France and Germany.

Last month, the United Nations said it was dealing with "the deepest funding cuts ever to hit the international humanitarian sector".
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c307zq8ppj6o
 
Joij21 said:
It's not fascist the journalist was shot by mistake. It was a rubber bullet and not lethal too. Fascists only use lethal countermeasures, and there's no proof that this journalist was intentionally targeted. Likely mistaken identity or at the wrong place at the wrong time.
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More targeting the press:

The most recent example is the government’s attack on CNN for its reporting about an app called ICEBlock that alerts users to sightings of ICE agents nearby.

“Border czar” Tom Homan called on the Department of Justice to investigate CNN for its reporting, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said her agency is working with the DOJ on a potential prosecution of CNN for “encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities and operations.”

And officials haven’t stopped at just threatening investigations for reporting on ICE. In February, the Federal Communications Commission opened an investigation into a California radio station, KCBS, after it reported on ICE raids happening in San Jose.

In June, Sen. Marsha Blackburn introduced the “Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act,” a bill that would make it a crime to name a federal law enforcement officer, including ICE officers, in certain circumstances. Sen. Lindsey Graham joined as a co-sponsor of the bill after grandstanding on social media about the need for legislation to prohibit the disclosure of the identities of ICE agents and other federal law enforcement officers.

In May, ICE asked the San Francisco Standard to blur the faces of ICE agents whose pictures were taken in public during an operation at a courthouse. The Standard refused and then reported on the request under the headline, “The ICE agents disappearing your neighbors would like a little privacy, please.”

Last week, ICE agents in New York reportedly harassed journalists attempting to cover immigration court proceedings, including by photographing their press credentials.

Perhaps most disturbingly, ICE is currently attempting to deport Mario Guevara, a journalist known for documenting immigration raids, after he was arrested on unjustified charges while covering a “No Kings” protest in Georgia. Guevara now faces the prospect of being returned to El Salvador, a country he left after receiving death threats for his reporting.

He’s been granted bond, but the government alarmingly argued that his livestreaming of a protest justifies deporting him because he publicized law enforcement activities (which is what journalists are supposed to do).

In addition to using deportations to punish reporting, the administration is also targeting opinion writing. It’s currently attempting to deport Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk over an op-ed she co-wrote.
 
As Hakeem Jeffries continues filibustering on the floor of the House (for more than six hours now), scientists are warning that the US will lose a generation of talent because of Trump cuts.

Trump’s big, beautiful budget bill calls for a 56% cut to the current $9bn NSF budget, as well as a 73% reduction in staff and fellowships – with graduate students among the hardest hit. Yet the NSF student pipeline provides experts for the oil and gas, mining, chemical, big tech and other industries which support Trump, in addition to academic and government-funded agencies. The NSF, founded in 1950, has contributed to major breakthroughs in organ transplants, gene technology, AI, smartphones and the internet, extreme weather and other hazard warning systems, American sign language, cybersecurity and even the language app Duolingo.

Trump’s monstrous budget bill also cuts the USGS budget by 39% including entirely slashing the agency’s ecosystems mission area (EMA), which leads federal research on species & ecosystems and houses the climate adaptation science centres.
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danjuno said:
What exactly is the joke here? Both bills were passed.
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I don't know. I'm waiting for the punchline. All I remember was "build back better" was lampooned to hell and back by the MAGA cult.
 
also bonus for the bill, even if you don't care about poor people: it will absolutely balloon us debt to a ridiculous degree, probably to an actual breaking point. the us was already facing the prospects of the debt to double in like five years. and yeayea: no, debt doesn't matter; until it does. with the current setup, the us can't actually pay off the interest. the problem is that the people this bill serves to help aren't really much affected by an economic crash, infact it may help them consolidate power. furthermore, noone in the world wants the us to default, so they may just get a weird parachute. i am of the opinion that the issue of national debt is overstated, but you can also just crash your balance deliberately, which is done here. money is still money.

the thing is that in spite of the real cuts to social services, republicans refuse to balance tax cuts with the equivalent cuts in social spending (otherwise they'd lose too many voters). always has been the case.

danjuno said:
What exactly is the joke here? Both bills were passed.
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his only purpose in this thread is to waste time
 
The debt topic from the US is an interesting one. I gather that most of US debt is owned by China and they will happily keep buying it.
But besides devaluing the debt and closing the spigot, can they force the US to pay? I don't think so!
When I think about this I am recalled to this neat citation from Civ 6 "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.":D
 
They don't need to force them to pay. Congress has placed themselves in the farcical situation of legally needing to raise the debt cap every session, despite endlessly running up the national debt, and then international finance organisations take that into account when assigning credit scores (and then how much more or less of your GDP is consumed by interest repayments).
 
Ordnael said:
The debt topic from the US is an interesting one. I gather that most of US debt is owned by China and they will happily keep buying it.
But besides devaluing the debt and closing the spigot, can they force the US to pay? I don't think so!
When I think about this I am recalled to this neat citation from Civ 6 "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.":D
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Afaik the biggest chunk of externally owned US debt is held by Japan, it's just that all the focus is on China.
 
Ordnael said:
The debt topic from the US is an interesting one. I gather that most of US debt is owned by China and they will happily keep buying it.
But besides devaluing the debt and closing the spigot, can they force the US to pay? I don't think so!
When I think about this I am recalled to this neat citation from Civ 6 "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.":D
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- if you can't get someone to pay, people will no longer loan them money, and/or they're forced into actual bankruptcy. if the us refuse to pay, with no legal oversight (as there isn't a real supernational authority on the international stage, that's a literal default. which is bad, dude
- i read about this a few months ago, so i don't remember the details, but china owns so much us debt that they can just choose to crash the us economy. now it's a huge cost to themselves, absolutely massive, but they can do it. they opt not to because in spite of being competitors, the chinese are winning (and trump is helping them win), and the us market is still large and lucrative enough that the chinese prefer exporting.
- the debt is still the us' problem, because it's ballooning to the degree that interests are going to be more expensive than the still massive federal spending on social security soon. that it indeed affects other nations does not counteract this situation; infact, it notes that you should care. remember how the us *housing market* caused the worst global recession since the great depression? try and intuit from there what would happen if the us government actually defaulted on their debt.
 
Verbose said:
Afaik the biggest chunk of externally owned US debt is held by Japan, it's just that all the focus is on China.
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I found this and had to post it. UK, Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands being so high says so much about the world being owned by bankers. I am not such I can explain Ireland so easily, something to do with the lowest corporation tax in the EU strategy they are going with?

debt-holdings-ibtgraphics.jpg
 
It's pension/insurance/mutual funds plus banks and multinationals.

There are a lot of those funds registered here (for tax and regulation) so the US treasuries owned by them are noted as being Irish.

Their administration and management provide a lot of white collar jobs in Dublin. I considered going that way myself.
 
trump's allure to US Goverment stuff and whatnot is the way he could sell bankruptcy as a very good thing to people , and nobody today seems likely to be able to curtail his success if something big was to happen . Indeed there is eventually no free lunch and debt is eventually expected to be paid . Meaning the US is very serious about causing things that will let them NOT to pay back . Which eventually means war . Which is seen here as nothing will happen , the frontlines are on the other side of the world . This is a core belief of the New that despoils the world these days .
 
Moderator Action: Back to the topic please, which is not each other....
 
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