Media Thinks Cutting USAID Will Cause Disasters And Death
The Biden administration had been slinging climate funds around in vast quantities with remarkably little accountability
The “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund” alone belched out around $27 billion, and one senior bureaucrat actually boasted in the final days of the Biden Administration about how the EPA was “tossing gold bars off the Titanic”.
Which ought to appal people convinced there’s a climate crisis and determined to do something about it, as well as those convinced there’s a fiscal crisis and even those thinking something is out of whack in the American Constitutional order.
Instead, in one of the weirdest acts of political self-immolation in a long and colourful history of same, progressives seem convinced that rallying Americans round a banner composed of red tape is the ticket back to intellectual and political credibility.
Do they really think the average American voter will be thrilled that:
“New documents reveal the extent of the Biden administration’s ‘eco grief’ workshops, in which U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees were encouraged to channel feelings of ecological anxiety into ‘lifesaving changes’ for the planet.
The documents, obtained through an open records request by the Functional Government Initiative, show that the grief workshops were more widespread than officials acknowledged, and agency officials considered it a ‘high priority.’”
Eco-grief? Good grief. And you’re militantly against cracking down on such nonsense?
One of the weirdest things about watching Donald Trump and Elon Musk try to make the American government more efficient, which is already a very weird sentence to find ourselves writing, is the way in which progressives in politics, the media and elsewhere have chosen the defence of expensively futile bureaucracy (even at the IRS) as the place to rally the populace.
For instance the New York Times melting down that “The Trump administration plans to all but eliminate the office that oversees America’s recovery from the largest disasters, raising questions about how the United States will rebuild from hurricanes, wildfires and other calamities made worse by climate change.”
And no, it’s not FEMA, NOAA, the EPA or the National Guard. The vital agency in question is the “Office of Community Planning and Development”, which Francis Scott Key unaccountably left out of the Star-Spangled Banner and Lincoln forgot to stress at Gettysburg but which surely is the very acme of American idealism, Yankee know-how and constitutional liberty, the one agency the US can’t live without.
Um right guys?
We could of course point out that if the result of all this bureaucracy is that government officials really believe hurricanes and wildfires are being made worse by “climate change” some serious downsizing is in order, since the data show no such trends.
But surely more pertinent is that the answer to how “the United States will rebuild” is that private enterprise will get it done, not Big Builder. At least the traditional answer.
Not to the Times, in this case in the person of Christopher Flavelle who “has covered U.S. disaster recovery programs for almost a decade” and cannot grasp that cutting this tentacle of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, another entity we doubt should exist, from 936 staff to 150 is unlikely to affect the wellbeing of anyone outside the Beltway.
Inside which, of course, it is located, in the “Robert C. Weaver Federal Building” in Washington, DC, where:
“The agency is headed by an Assistant Secretary, who oversees the following: Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Community Planning and Development/ Principal Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Community Planning and Development/ Deputy Assistant Secretary for Operations/ Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Development/ Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Needs/ Deputy Assistant Secretary for Grant Programs/ Director, Office of Field Management/ Director, Office of Policy Development and Coordination/ Director, Office of Technical Assistance and Management/ Director, Office of Rural Housing and Economic Development/ Director, Office of HIV/AIDS Housing/ Director, Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs/ Director, Office of Affordable Housing Programs/ Director, Office of Block Grant Assistance/ Director, Office of Environment and Energy”.
The very heart and soul of America or something. One is also inclined to wonder whether Flavelle really believes the American government’s contribution to rebuilding from natural disasters in the last decade is anything to write home about.
As even Wikipedia admits:
“For Fiscal Year 2015 the office’s appropriations Budget was $6.4 billion dollars, with nearly half of that intended to be used for the Community Development Block Grant, which has consistently been the focus of critics against wasteful spending.”
We also find it odd that people who think the presence in the White House of someone who actually won the Presidential election and now thinks he can run the Executive Branch is a massive threat to democracy, or that the judiciary frustrating the Chief Executive in every way constitutes government by the people, of the people and for the people.
But again we are at odds with among others the climate alarmists, who suddenly can’t get enough of lawsuits in place of elections.
Then there’s the EPA parking some $2 billion in grants with Power Forward Communities, a fledgling outfit with just $100 in revenue in its first three months of operations that just happens to be the brainchild of chronic Democratic campaigner and activist Stacey Abrams.
If you were, for instance, trying to convince the American people that Donald Trump is too close to certain entrepreneurs on the make, would you also try to defend this kind of thing?
An outfit called “The Liberal Patriot” recently posed “One Simple Question for Democrats”, namely “What would the working class say?” And it is worth pondering even if it’s not going to be the decisive consideration.
For instance Inside Climate News is in high dudgeon that:
“Last week EPA employees discovered their email signatures had been stripped of pronouns, part of the new effort to root out ‘gender ideology extremism’ from the agency.
ICN reporter Liza Gross spoke to demoralized staff and exposed the atmosphere of deep fear and mistrust at the agency entrusted with protecting the nation’s environment.
Inside the Department of Transportation, a similar story is unfolding. The new secretary handed down sweeping orders: purge the DOT of climate, gender, race, and justice initiatives.
‘It’s breathtakingly ignorant and dangerous,’ one former employee told ICN reporter Dennis Pillion, whose story illuminated the enormous risks of the new orders.”
Enormous risks. The Earth will explode and burn down because it’s no longer obligatory to say that men are known as “he”. Really?
Or is that some other planet, for instance Transsexual Transylvania where, also, it seems that those directly benefiting from government largesse are the most reliably dispassionate judges of its importance?
It’s also hard to believe that “U.S.A.I.D. Turmoil Threatens Key Aid Supplies to Gaza, Officials Say” is the key to Americans’ hearts. New York Times again. And yet again, with:
“This month, Opinion staff members interviewed representatives of the groups behind these programs and others that depend on the United States to support their work to promote health, fight human trafficking, address climate change, and provide so many other kinds of services to some of the most vulnerable people on earth.
They told us that by freezing and withholding funds and purging personnel, the Trump administration has unleashed chaos and uncertainty and caused harm around the world.”
They literally interviewed people getting the cash on whether it was important that they get the cash, who told them if they don’t get the cash “chaos” “uncertainty” and “harm” will engulf the world.
Well, at least it makes it look as if the world should have been a bit more appreciative of the United States instead of constantly slagging it as bullying, imperialist and vulgar. But also that the Times might, in the outmoded way journalists once had of being skeptical, have interviewed some people not actually receiving USAID money on just how vitally crucial the stuff was.
NBC did the same, with:
“Disease outbreaks and starvation deaths will increase as a result of USAID cuts, officials say/ The ‘ripple effects’ of President Donald Trump’s bid to shutter the agency are already being felt around the world, current and former USAID workers told NBC News.”
Totally unbiased take. So absolutely no need to interview anyone who might feel differently… and no attempt to. Instead we get features like (New York Times again):
“How Federal Employees Are Fighting Back Against Elon Musk/ Some civil servants are using whatever levers they have to resist the orders of the world’s richest man, both in public and behind closed doors.”
As if it were the flag-raising on Iwo Jima.
In this regard we also note the weird intervention on USAID by Canada’s cardinal at the Vatican, and not just because we’re trying to find a “Canadian angle” on any story. One Cardinal Michael Czerny, a Jesuit, said on behalf of the Vatican’s “Caritas Internationalis” charity that Trump dismantling USAID was “reckless” and “unhuman”.
Even if you’re going to render unto Caesar things that arguably are not his, would you choose this in particular? (Or the crackdown on illegal immigrants, which Czerny also managed to imply was unholy?)
The Church is apparently on the take here:
“One of USAID’s biggest non-governmental recipients of funding is Catholic Relief Services, the aid agency of the Catholic Church in the U.S., which has already sounded the alarm about the cuts.”
To put it mildly. In fact the Caritas Internationalis statement said:
“Stopping USAID will jeopardize essential services for hundreds of millions of people, undermine decades of progress in humanitarian and development assistance, destabilize regions that rely on this critical support, and condemn millions to dehumanizing poverty or even death”.
And journalistic outlets not otherwise conspicuous for their enthusiasm for Vatican doctrines rushed with independent-minded unison to declare that it was so. Millions will die. And if not, well, government good except if it’s Trump, private charity bad or something difficult to discern in traditional Catholic teaching.
Almost any argument will do. NBC hollered:
“What cutting USAID could cost the U.S. – and how China, Russia may benefit/ Concerns are growing in Washington that abruptly halting assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development ‘opens up a window for China and Russia,’ one analyst said.”
One entire analyst. Case closed then.
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