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Maybe they didn’t save any money but they did manage to exfiltrate huge amounts of info on citizens and residents that had been provided under the understanding that it would be held in confidence and that was siloed to event cross-correlation and privacy violations.
So at least they accomplished that even if they failed to accomplish the cover story.
Ya have to wonder if there is a DOGE-Musk-Palantir connection.
Highly useful if you are building a Digital Control Grid.
Link to the GAO report that actually analyzes the spending: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108615
But closing USAID did result in lots of deaths around the world as life saving aid was just cutoff with no warning. Was done with no regard to consequences or Congressional approval.
So, the U.S. would've had to supply foreign aid for eternity, then? Instead of appreciating the vast sums given by the U.S. and her taxpayers, there's only vitriol for the stream of aid money having been cut off.
That's like helping a grandma to move her groceries, only to throw them on the ground, saying "I didn't sign up to be your carrier for eternity."
Like, understandably you could wish to stop helping her. But if you took her groceries to help, you also supposed to place them down gently.
There's the soft power argument that it was actually in US's self-interest to help. And for what it's worth, a lot of the vitriol is from taxpayers who supported that aid.
Weirdly, one of the arguments Musk advanced was that is was all a front for the CIA, which I'd guess is closer to hard power that he was dismantling.
Not something you'd expect to hear from a big military contractor.
It isn't just Musk, there are plenty of reputable journalists and scholars who argue the same point. Noam Chomsky for starters.
Cool. But sometimes it's ok to invest into some hard power.
America’s reputation in the world is not great, and deteriorating. Pulling back for these well-perceived/helpful initiatives while building up (and deploying) military force is not helping. It’s really not a well considered strategy, and the decision makers in Washington could really benefit from a more worldly perspective, imo.
What a sad response to the obvious immediate harm done by poorly thought out policy. I thought hackernews was better than this.
It’s really not. This place is full of people that never grew past the simplistic ideas of Ron Paul that they fell in love with twenty years ago.
Why am I in charge of speaking on behalf of HN? I could certainly be in the minority on this. Must you ensure that every space you enter hold to your exact opinions?
That's one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it, is that this relatively small amount of money the USA was spending on US AID did amazing things to stabilize the world, which also benefits Americans.
The steelman argument is that it was the sudden process that people object to. But the steelman against that is that slow processes are used adversarially to prevent action from being taken.
In the end, the only people who seem to get outcomes are the ones who rush things. Everyone talked about getting out of Afghanistan and only President Biden did it. The objections were predictably ones against haste. But we’d been in there for a decade past the time we wanted to get out.
In this event, considering that most of this aid has not been replaced since by other participants one can only conclude that it would have taken at least this long in a slow rollout. Even an emergency of unbelievable proportions did not incentivize other nations to act. It’s unlikely they would have acted when faced with what looks like yet another austerity project that is going to be inevitably rolled back.
In such a universe, if USAID was going, it was only going to go fast. If it wasn’t going to go fast, it was staying.
And it’s generally true that people subscribe to the famous Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Once we started providing AIDS treatment we were responsible, in their eyes, forever.
Given that, I think future charitable efforts should be evaluated in terms of such 50 year costs or so on. To save all the lives that US funding on PEPFAR saved we had to forgo an amount that would domestically have given us CA HSR. I think if you ask most Californians they’d rather have CA HSR than any charity program directed outside so in some respect we are just treating these people as our sin eaters.
It used to feel less bad when America caused an incident, because at least we helped people around the world in meaningful ways. Now there's really nothing. There's no underlying moral excuse to support the empire anymore.
If the US wants to be the most powerful country in the world, so that if benefits the most from a non-stop flux of wealth moving in from outside, that involves a cost, tiny as it might be.
The US decided that paying that cost of $0.10 in exchange for earning $10 was too much. So now it's saving those $0.10, and watching the $10 stop comming in.
This is an error all Empires commit a few years before falling from imperial status. As the British, themselves self-inflicted victims of the same mistake, say, penny wise, pound foolish.
I'm not rich, but I give a lot of money every year to charity, to try to help those who need help. The United States is the richest country in the world. It was also giving to charity to help those who badly needed help. It was a small amount compared to its budget, and we called it USAID. To protect the money from being scammed by those running the countries we were helping, the US itself administered those programs as much as possible. We know how much Trump donates to charity: bupkis (read about the Donald J. Trump Foundation) and I have a pretty good inkling that Musk donates even less.
Exactly. Since 2001, the amount of money we’ve spent on foreign aid is a DROP in the bucket between 0.7% and 1.4% of the federal budget; not much for us - but had an outsized impact on people in the greatest need.
It’s helped alleviate poverty, supported disaster relief, and even from a purely US centric motive helped to advanced our own interests by strengthening U.S. soft power abroad.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/06/what-the-...
You're spending your own money. I'm pretty sure that if there was one member of your family that didn't have money for food or medicine, you'd spend it there instead of donating it, wouldn't you?
If only the government thought like this, instead of blaming those family members of being "lazy welfare queens"...
A relevant segment on a 2h+ documentary: https://youtu.be/t1MqJPHxy6g?t=1936
Or before that: https://youtu.be/t1MqJPHxy6g?t=1702
If you've absorbed the American teaching that "if you just work hard you'll be successful", then you'd have to believe the opposite: "if you're not successful that means you're lazy".
People against usaid should ask basic questions:
would US (and therefore its individual taxpayers) be globally wealthy without the rest of the world?
does US benefit from disease and death in other countries?
This is a troll, right?
I do understand your point. But obviously us foreign aid doesn't (didn't) exist in a vacuum. The stuff you're talking about that would get these countries off the dole was in things like IMF contracts. And in trade deals. The state department actually had a plan. It gets me that somehow you don't know that, but feel entitled to complain about that plan.
Edit: wrong reply, sorry
It was never about saving money. It was about sabotaging programs they were ideologically opposed to, stealing data, and possibly messing with internal investigations into Musks "unsavory" business practices.
There already is a "DOGE", it's called the GAO.
And lastly, if anybody is actually concerned about government efficiency, they should be prepared to have it audit favored programs as well. Let's not forget that the Pentagon has never truly been audited.
One of countless cases of "trust me bro!": https://www.cnbc.com/2011/10/26/The-$40-Billion-Iraqi-Money-...
Although it seems to have been a flop in practice, I do appreciate the spirit of making good use of tax dollars. I only wish the program was more carefully guided, since the motive behind it did seem genuine.
That's why the GAO already exists, and what its job is! There's even an international association and conference of these bodies across countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_of_...
If GAO was half serious, it'd have set an expiry date on itself. We know exactly what happens with these things, they eventually just make problems to try to assert a reason for their own existence, and never materially move towards fixing them.
That's one of Congress' responsibilities: the GAO is in the legislative branch, it's Congress' job to exercise oversight. (And it's all US citizens' job to elect people who they trust to exercise that oversight. If the GAO isn't closed down when it should be, that's a failure of Congress, no more, no less, and nothing else. But they seem to be doing their job just fine, unless you have some indications otherwise?)
(I don't think the GAO could set an expiry date on itself even if they wanted to, they exist by power of Congress, so only Congress could put an expiry date on them.)
>they seem to be doing their job just fine
No one believes that. If it was true, DOGE would not have been necessary.
Now with DOGE's mission having been blocked for a good part, US is in an even worse situation. But can't blame an actual well calculated attempt.
>>they seem to be doing their job just fine
>No one believes that.
We're having an objective discussion here, please bring receipts, not beliefs.
> If GAO was half serious, it'd have set an expiry date on itself.
While I get where you are coming from, but the government isn't just a static thing that once you've done something it will stay like that. New procedures and jobs come and go all the time and will always need some form of optimisation.
It doesn't matter to keep something if you know for a fact it will go bad from the simple act of it staying around for too long, and/or having an incentive to keep itself relevant, by complicating/fueling the problem it was made to solve.
You probably want to have milk one year from now. That doesn't mean you keep a jug/carton of milk for a year. That way, you'd really only reduce the chance, taking space from something valid.
DOGE was putting the fox in charge of hen welfare. The “spirit” was just a bare minimum facade so they could redirect funds towards billionaires bank accounts.
> the motive behind it did seem genuine
put down the Kool-Aid my friend
I mean I surely disagree, but also I don’t think the motive really matters - the decisions made and actions taken very much speak for themselves.
Sure there were some people involved in DOGE that had good motives, but overall they assumed that history began yesterday and that they were the only people that had thought about reducing the size of government. This was a recipe for disaster.
What’s notable about this article is not its literal conclusion, which is obvious to any casual observer, it’s the publisher - I haven’t been following it lately, but for decades National Review was the preeminent Limbaugh-school right-wing magazine in America, so for its editors to be taking this position so clearly feels significant. These days the Trump Right has rags like The Epoch Times, so maybe they don’t need Buckley’s soapbox anymore?
National Review has been a critic of Trump since before he was elected for his first term in 2016.
It's weird that serial liars have such a rabid fanbase. Keep it up!
By GAO, lol. The only reason they'd do the reports is because DOGE isn't there to respond. Because it was in DOGE's design to not become just an instrument of furthering the problem it was designed to combat, unlike GAO!
The spirit of DOGE lives on though. The basics of just having to at least have a reason what an expense is for did wonders, and DOGE did save a ton, even if it'd benefited from more freedom. Another time.
Wasn't GAO the leading us org in that big simplification/trim of the Clinton admin? I know for budget hawks of my country (my uncles and whoever informed them for full transparency) it was the only good thing Clinton did and we should have done the same (the US budget was balanced for the first time since Reagan or something, without reducing social aid).
I think that's the best way to find out btw. Did the US budget increase in the last two years. If yes, Doge failed.
Your logic is flawed. If a fire department extinguishes ten fires fire after a fire bombing attack that burnt down half the town, they did not "fail". And further, talking down those that help where you did nothing of the sort yourself is contemptible.
About your example. That is Trumpian logic. Ask for the whole of Greenland and set the goalposts. Then let them "negotiate down" to just some bases. God knows the "trim" was still unbelievably bloated from a non-relative standpoint.
I think you have to be more explicit because I don't understand fully what you mean.
Which fire department? Are you talking about doge? In your allegory, it more like: a firebomb caused 20 fires, and after a few nights, the fire department all quit, called it a 'success', flooded an area untouched by fire, and now the area have 25 fires and a flood. Also they paid themselves a bonus because of a job well done.
Which trim? Are you talking about the US balanced budget? Why is that setting goalposts? I mean, I personally don't care about a balanced budget, but budget hawks do, and doing it without reducing social aid seems like a good goalpost to have, no? Should we move them? If so, where?
Nah, DOGE shut down plenty of fires, while being harassed by the arsonist's union. This was known from the start; if you try to attack something corrupt, especially when a lot of the corruption is "grey" of course you'll have tons and tons of people angry, because you're shutting down their grift. The kind of spending, especially just before Trump got to power I heard from NGO's, is so disgusting I rather forget what I saw.
If you don't understand my second point I can't help you.