This week, a massive firefight broke out between Democrats and Team Trump over the White House takeover of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The USAID managed approximately $40 billion in fiscal year 2023; its original mandate, established under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, was to spread American influence across the globe through aid to various governmental and non-governmental organizations. Over time, however, USAID morphed into a piggy bank for a wide variety of international organizations with agendas ranging from green energy policy to the spread of left-wing gender and racial politics.
President Donald Trump tasked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with taking charge of the agency for purposes of assessing possible cuts. When Musk’s team, including a variety of talented young men, entered the offices, they were barred from access to material by the heads of USAID; Trump fired those officials. Within days, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was made acting director of USAID, with the authority to implement recommended changes from DOGE.
And all hell broke loose.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., accused Musk of leading “an unelected shadow government … conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government.” According to Schumer, cuts to AID would undermine “countering terrorist activity” as well as “humanitarian efforts” around the world. “If America retreats from the rest of the world,” Schumer said, “China will fill in the void.”
That may well have been true with decent leadership. But instead, Democrats decided that American interests had to take a backseat to blue interests. That’s why USAID embedded “LGBTQI+ Inclusive Development Policy” in its agenda for foreign countries — despite the obvious incompatibility with such radical ideology with America’s interests abroad. It’s why in 2013, for example, USAID announced that it would funnel $11 million to radical groups to support on gay and lesbian advocacy in Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala and other developing countries.
This is indicative of a broader Democratic approach to governance: When Democrats are in charge, they use the levers of government not only to enrich their political friends at home and abroad; they embed those streams of funding into the system for times when they aren’t in charge. Democrats have spent a century building permanent funding mechanisms of this sort: The hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year via the Department of Education, for example, are largely directed to blue-affiliated “educational” institutions and groups.
But what happens when the new head of the executive branch isn’t content to allow that blue funding pipeline to continue? What happens when he looks into the spending and finds that taxpayer dollars are being directed toward political ends antithetical to his own purposes?
That’s what Democrats are experiencing right now: the massive power base they built and maintained for their own ends is now being run by people they despise. And those people are gutting many of the systems they built.
That’s why panic is setting in: because while most executive action is by nature transient and reversible, unleashing a wrecking ball against the carefully wrought administrative state isn’t. Trump and Musk are doing something unprecedented on the right: They are keeping their promise to drain the swamp. They are moving fast, and they are breaking things. And the caterwauling from Democrats who supposedly care about America’s interests abroad is actually indicative of something far deeper: a grinding fear that their permanent, bureaucratic structures of power are under existential assault.
Ben Shapiro’s new collection, “Facts and Furious: The Facts About America and Why They Make Leftists Furious,” is available now. Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author. To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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That may well have been true with decent leadership. But instead, Democrats decided that American interests had to take a backseat to blue interests. That’s why USAID embedded “LGBTQI+ Inclusive Development Policy” in its agenda for foreign countries — despite the obvious incompatibility with such radical ideology with America’s interests abroad. It’s why in 2013, for example, USAID announced that it would funnel $11 million to radical groups to support on gay and lesbian advocacy in Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala and other developing countries.
This needs to be brought to it’s logical conclusion…. PRISON
“When Democrats are in charge, they use the levers of government not only to enrich their political friends at home and abroad;” (and to enrich themselves)
The lies, cons, deceptions, dishonesty, incompetence and corruption of this treasonous Democrat Party and their media/propaganda outlets know no bounds, truth and facts are irrelevant. This traitorous Democrat Party and its “useful idiot” supporters will do or say Anything to be able to dictate control over our country, then retain power over our citizens by any means available. No matter the costs to the people, the government, or the nation.
And those ‘non-governmental orgs, that TAKE THIS FUNDING FRom the govt, should get SUED INTO oblivion, for FALSE advertising (since the whole point in being nON GOvernmental, is to be NOT BEHOLDEN TO the govt!)
Democrat Chuck Schumber, ” FOOL ME ONCE, SCHAME ON YOU, FOOL ME TWICE, SHAME ON Me”
Author Inknown.
Orange Man Bad a**!
You can now see how this taxpayer funded blue state funding has surreptitiously enriched the democrat party with OUR MONEY, to the point they can buy enough Media organizations, crooked politicians, and Democrat party Crime families to fund mindless Pinocchio lying politicians like Biden/Harris into the highest offices in the USA, i.e. like Kamala’s wasted $2 billion spent on her hapless campaign. It is morally and legally a crime to use and divert Conservative taxpaying people’s money to fund the Liberal insanity we have had to endure any more than forcing Pro-Life Taxpayers to pay for death dealing abortions. Any thorough auditing or examination of USAID will expose enough Democrats to jail sentences and fines to depopulate half the party officials and apparatchik puppeteers who get and got rich for just the past 4 years. No wonder they are all in a panic to the point of demanding the streets be filled with their wacky woke warriors on another rampage of street violence of enough magnitude as to divert attention from who really is the American enemy of the State, and the REAL will and desires of THE PEOPLE. For years I have said “Just follow the money” and at last DOGE actually is !!!
AND this is why they are hell bent to STOP DOGE revealing all their dirty laundry…