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He claimed that he would unearth billions of dollars of government fraud, only to lie about that too. Instead his team cut aid programs and have contributed to

He claimed that he would unearth billions of dollars of government fraud, only to lie about that too. Instead his team cut aid programs and have contributed to an estimated 700,000 deaths so far. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-human-cost-of-doges-war-on-usaid https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-...

cyberjerkXX 3mo ago
[flagged]
- ceejayoz 3mo ago
  > It's crazy to believe that stopping the funding of US backed NGOs directly kills people. Why? Have US-backed NGOs never saved a single life with their spending? You can argue it's not worth the spending, perhaps, but you really can't argue that it's not happening somewhere. > This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt. This is a tiny, tiny, nearly invisible fraction of that reason.
  - somenameforme 3mo ago
    Gotta hit on a few things there in no particular order: - USAID's final budget was $34 billion. That's already very real money, but it came from the discretionary budget - that giant bill of spending where the government decides what to spend money on: schools, roads, housing, and so on. The entire discretionary budget for 2025 was $1.9 trillion, so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending! - Nothing USAID was doing was irreplaceable. The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests. So saying they are saving a life when they are just another replaceable entity, even if a rather large one, is misleading. It's kind of like saying Google is why we have web browsers. - USAID and the CIA worked hand-in-hand. For instance one project was USAID/CIA starting a fake social media site [1] in Cuba specifically with the goal of trying to create an insurrection, which would undoubtedly be very bloody had they succeeded. So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well. - Many of their programs seemed geared towards the creation of dependencies rather than working to ensure the self sustainability of various places. I think this likely ties into the above issue. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you. Sociopathic intelligence agencies blending with philanthropy is a rather horrific combination. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZunZuneo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZunZuneo
    - ceejayoz 3mo ago
      > so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending! So, tiny; a fraction of what we spend on much less useful things like the Iran war or huge gifts to ICE. 30 years of that level of USAID funding would only get us to a single one of those trillions in debt. > The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests. Yeah, we don't really want China vacuuming up all of Africa. It was already looking like a growing problem before the USAID cuts (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11304 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11304). > So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well. I mean, your one example cited didn't work and resulted in zero deaths. If we get to count that sort of thing, we'd have to start accounting for the soft power benefits of USAID (and those the CIA gets from the trade), too. Goodwill, intel, not having a bunch of polio infections come into the country via air, etc. > Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you. How does "deplete their fishing grounds (and other resources) for hundreds of years" figure into the analogy?
      - somenameforme 3mo ago
        Yes the Iran war is also a waste of money. Money being wasted in one place is hardly an argument to do it in another place. And the whole point of discretionary spending is that it's money that could have been spent on society instead of e.g. setting up fake social media sites to try to cause chaos in another country. And because of regularly bloated spending I think we often lose track of what it really means. $34 billion is $100 from every man, woman, and child in the US. That's a lot of money, wasted every single year. And yeah after all is said and done Iran will cost hundreds more. Add Ukraine and we're up to the thousands. Add Iraq and we're getting into the tens of thousands soon enough. Imagine if all of this money was spent domestically. The reason China is succeeding in Africa largely gets back to my critiques of USAID. China's pharma companies are establishing production factories within Africa for the local production of trade-level quantities of pharmaceuticals meaning they'll be able to provide not only for their own needs, but have enough production to turn drugs into exports. In the future Africa could even viably start to become a destination for medical tourism. The US could have done this and much more with the vast sums of money we blew on USAID, but we didn't. We preferred exploitable dependency creation paired alongside some corporate welfare for US big pharma. It's yet another example of the focus on short-term benefits while ignoring long-term costs. It's not like African nations don't realize what we're doing, while we then go and try to lecture them about the Chinese debt trap. What a shock that they're not listening.
  - cyberjerkXX 3mo ago
    "No Snowflake in an Avalanche Ever Feels Responsible" You're right - we need to cut more. We'll save more lives if the US government stops the rate at which it is currently spending. The interest on our debt is currently larger that our military budget. The government can sell bonds to cover some of this debt but when it doesn't have money to cover mature bonds it needs to sell more bonds at a higher interest rates. It makes the deficit worse. The fed will respond with printing more money causing inflation. Inflation hurts the middle and lower classes the most. You either make massive cuts, or burden your productive wealth creating classes with taxes. We have a massive SPENDING problem.
    - ceejayoz 3mo ago
      > "No Snowflake in an Avalanche Ever Feels Responsible" You're trying to prevent the avalanche with a hair dryer that isn't even aimed at the snow. > We have a massive SPENDING problem. Guess what we'll have if we let China become the hegemon by removing all our international soft power initiatives?
- zzrrt 3mo ago
  > This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt. Trump's OBBBA will be another reason, expected to add several trillion in the next few years. So yeah, real cuts are probably needed, but the DOGE people aren't achieving that in net.
  - zzrrt 3mo ago
    To clarify, Elon himself opposed OBBBA because of the deficit. My point is that anyone cheering on DOGE for cuts but staying silent on the administration's generally bad record on spending, has an ideological bias that is not purely about fiscal responsibility.
- ink_13 3mo ago
  If US backed NGOs were distributing life saving medications (e.g. for HIV-AIDS via PEPFAR, to give only one example) and then that distribution was withdrawn, causing recipients to die because they could no longer access medication, what other conclusion should we draw?
- wredcoll 3mo ago
  Maybe we should have elected Hillary Clinton then? (This is a reference to Bill Clinton's extremely successful "Reinventing Government" initiative which actually balanced the federal budget until the next republican came along...)
danny_codes 3mo ago
I recall the Boyle video in this claimed the whole affair cost $100B or so and achieved nothing. So, typical Musk outcome.

cyberjerkXX 3mo ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz 3mo ago
> It's crazy to believe that stopping the funding of US backed NGOs directly kills people. Why? Have US-backed NGOs never saved a single life with their spending? You can argue it's not worth the spending, perhaps, but you really can't argue that it's not happening somewhere. > This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt. This is a tiny, tiny, nearly invisible fraction of that reason.
- somenameforme 3mo ago
  Gotta hit on a few things there in no particular order: - USAID's final budget was $34 billion. That's already very real money, but it came from the discretionary budget - that giant bill of spending where the government decides what to spend money on: schools, roads, housing, and so on. The entire discretionary budget for 2025 was $1.9 trillion, so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending! - Nothing USAID was doing was irreplaceable. The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests. So saying they are saving a life when they are just another replaceable entity, even if a rather large one, is misleading. It's kind of like saying Google is why we have web browsers. - USAID and the CIA worked hand-in-hand. For instance one project was USAID/CIA starting a fake social media site [1] in Cuba specifically with the goal of trying to create an insurrection, which would undoubtedly be very bloody had they succeeded. So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well. - Many of their programs seemed geared towards the creation of dependencies rather than working to ensure the self sustainability of various places. I think this likely ties into the above issue. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you. Sociopathic intelligence agencies blending with philanthropy is a rather horrific combination. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZunZuneo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZunZuneo
  - ceejayoz 3mo ago
    > so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending! So, tiny; a fraction of what we spend on much less useful things like the Iran war or huge gifts to ICE. 30 years of that level of USAID funding would only get us to a single one of those trillions in debt. > The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests. Yeah, we don't really want China vacuuming up all of Africa. It was already looking like a growing problem before the USAID cuts (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11304 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11304). > So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well. I mean, your one example cited didn't work and resulted in zero deaths. If we get to count that sort of thing, we'd have to start accounting for the soft power benefits of USAID (and those the CIA gets from the trade), too. Goodwill, intel, not having a bunch of polio infections come into the country via air, etc. > Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you. How does "deplete their fishing grounds (and other resources) for hundreds of years" figure into the analogy?
    - somenameforme 3mo ago
      Yes the Iran war is also a waste of money. Money being wasted in one place is hardly an argument to do it in another place. And the whole point of discretionary spending is that it's money that could have been spent on society instead of e.g. setting up fake social media sites to try to cause chaos in another country. And because of regularly bloated spending I think we often lose track of what it really means. $34 billion is $100 from every man, woman, and child in the US. That's a lot of money, wasted every single year. And yeah after all is said and done Iran will cost hundreds more. Add Ukraine and we're up to the thousands. Add Iraq and we're getting into the tens of thousands soon enough. Imagine if all of this money was spent domestically. The reason China is succeeding in Africa largely gets back to my critiques of USAID. China's pharma companies are establishing production factories within Africa for the local production of trade-level quantities of pharmaceuticals meaning they'll be able to provide not only for their own needs, but have enough production to turn drugs into exports. In the future Africa could even viably start to become a destination for medical tourism. The US could have done this and much more with the vast sums of money we blew on USAID, but we didn't. We preferred exploitable dependency creation paired alongside some corporate welfare for US big pharma. It's yet another example of the focus on short-term benefits while ignoring long-term costs. It's not like African nations don't realize what we're doing, while we then go and try to lecture them about the Chinese debt trap. What a shock that they're not listening.
- cyberjerkXX 3mo ago
  "No Snowflake in an Avalanche Ever Feels Responsible" You're right - we need to cut more. We'll save more lives if the US government stops the rate at which it is currently spending. The interest on our debt is currently larger that our military budget. The government can sell bonds to cover some of this debt but when it doesn't have money to cover mature bonds it needs to sell more bonds at a higher interest rates. It makes the deficit worse. The fed will respond with printing more money causing inflation. Inflation hurts the middle and lower classes the most. You either make massive cuts, or burden your productive wealth creating classes with taxes. We have a massive SPENDING problem.
  - ceejayoz 3mo ago
    > "No Snowflake in an Avalanche Ever Feels Responsible" You're trying to prevent the avalanche with a hair dryer that isn't even aimed at the snow. > We have a massive SPENDING problem. Guess what we'll have if we let China become the hegemon by removing all our international soft power initiatives?
zzrrt 3mo ago
> This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt. Trump's OBBBA will be another reason, expected to add several trillion in the next few years. So yeah, real cuts are probably needed, but the DOGE people aren't achieving that in net.
- zzrrt 3mo ago
  To clarify, Elon himself opposed OBBBA because of the deficit. My point is that anyone cheering on DOGE for cuts but staying silent on the administration's generally bad record on spending, has an ideological bias that is not purely about fiscal responsibility.
ink_13 3mo ago
If US backed NGOs were distributing life saving medications (e.g. for HIV-AIDS via PEPFAR, to give only one example) and then that distribution was withdrawn, causing recipients to die because they could no longer access medication, what other conclusion should we draw?
wredcoll 3mo ago
Maybe we should have elected Hillary Clinton then? (This is a reference to Bill Clinton's extremely successful "Reinventing Government" initiative which actually balanced the federal budget until the next republican came along...)

danny_codes 3mo ago

I recall the Boyle video in this claimed the whole affair cost $100B or so and achieved nothing. So, typical Musk outcome.