Michael Shellenberger on the Marxist funding pool:
President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are undermining democracy and national security by taking over the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), say Democrats and the media. "This is a five alarm fire," wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on X. "The people elected Donald Trump to be President - not Elon Musk. Having an unelected billionaire, with his own foreign debts and motives, raiding US classified information is a grave threat to national security." ABC News described USAID as in a state of "on-going turmoil" and in "chaos." A senior USAID executive told ABC, "The warp-speed of this mafia-like takeover has shaken USAID staff to the core."
But there was nothing illegal, unethical, or inappropriate about DOGE's takeover of USAID, and nobody has presented any evidence that it threatens national security. The American people elected Trump who appointed Musk to oversee DOGE, as Trump has a right to do. "With regards to the USAID stuff," said Musk last night on X, "I went over it with (the president) in detail and he agreed that we should shut it down." There is no evidence that Musk was illegally accessing classified information, as Ocasio-Cortez implied. Nor is there anything "mafia-like" about a new administration moving quickly to take control of the agencies it controls. Trump sought to merge USAID with the State Department in 2017.
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Samantha Power, former administrator of United States Agency for International Development (USAID), speaks during the Summit for Democracy on March 30, 2023 in Washington, DC. The theme for the final day of the summit encompassed "Advancing Technology for Democracy" and included speakers from the Department of Homeland Affairs and representatives from intelligence agencies (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
It may be that Congress will have to approve of any dissolution of USAID, since Congress created it. "Attempting to dissolve USAID without legislation would be unlawful and a serious breach of the Constitutional separation of powers," argued Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, on X. "USAID was initially established by [Executive Order] EO; but later written explicitly into law...in 1998, and only Congress can reverse that." Wrote Rep. Rosa Delauro, "Since 1998 Congress has recognized the independence of USAID & funded it in annual appropriations bills."
But all Trump has done is put his people in charge of USAID, paused its grants, and shut down the organization's communications. When asked about USAID yesterday, he said, "It's been run by a bunch of radical lunatics and we're getting them out... and then we'll make a decision." If the courts were to find that Trump dissolved USAID in violation of the law, the evidence suggests that he would obey the court ruling, as he did with every order he received between 2017 and 2021. And if USAID was funding worthwhile activities, they can be re-funded in the future.
What's more, researchers have caught USAID abusing its powers, including by funding everything from censorship to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which may have done research that resulted in the Covid pandemic. Between 2004 and 2022, USAID was the largest US government funder of EcoHealth Alliance, which sub-awarded grant funding to WIV. USAID gave EcoHealth Alliance $54 million during that period, which was more even than the $42 million the group received from the Pentagon.
Samantha Powers, the USAID Director under President Barack Obama, evaded questions about what USAID with the WIV, alleged Senator Rand Paul in 2023. "Some of the research proposals in 2018 were the Wuhan Institute of Virology asking for money to create a... SARS-like coronavirus with a furin cleavage site," said Paul. "That's exactly what COVID-19 turned out to be."
Paul accused Powers of withholding information. "We want to know if there were other research proposals you either granted or denied that were in the same vein as creating viruses that could have become COVID-19. We can't tell because you won't give us information... I now have 25 Senators that have sent you a letter, and you aren't responding... You are being dishonest."
Evidence of USAID withholding information from Congress is sufficient justification for Trump to remove the agency's leadership and pause funding. After all, USAID may be currently funding dangerous research and not informing Congress.
Shellenberger writes that USAID is the main engine of "Regime Change" abroad -- as well as Regime Change in America.
USAID has the distinction of being both a "deep state" agency, involved in covert actions aimed at destabilizing foreign governments, and one of the main US government agencies that comprise the foreign policy establishment, which many on both the Left and Right refer to as "The Blob," because it is comprised of amorphous shape-shifting and self-perpetuating imperialistic elite, like the famous gelatinous alien in the 1958 science fiction movie by the same name.
A few hours after USAID's website went dark, Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, wrote on X, "Most governments don't want USAID funds flowing into their countries because they understand where much of that money actually ends up. While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements. At best, maybe 10% of the money reaches real projects that help people in need (there are such cases), but the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda. Cutting this so-called aid isn't just beneficial for the United States; it's also a big win for the rest of the world."
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USAID is among other US government organizations that have promoted regime change abroad, including the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Even "To its proponents," notes the Washington Post, "USAID is an indispensable arm of U.S. foreign policy" that spends $40 billion per year to influence politics in 130 nations.
The money is ostensibly used for things like helping refugees but, as Jacobin and Chomsky noted, that money is always highly strategic and aimed at influencing politics. It's worth considering that many of the defenders of USAID operate as ostensibly normal charities. USAID is "a national security tool kit," said Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International.
As part of US government efforts to overthrow governments abroad, or simply influence what they do, USAID has in recent years been funding censorship advocacy worldwide through its "Countering Disinformation" program, which is part of its Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening (CEPPS). This work has included funding for so-called "fact-checking" organizations, including in Brazil, which governments use as a predicate for demanding censorship by social media companies.
The USAID program lays out its strategy, which is to fund ostensibly "civil society" organizations to pressure social media companies like Facebook and X to censor more, and to conduct "fact-checking." USAID also promoted pressuring advertisers to demand more censorship from social media companies, notes Foundation for Freedom Online founder Mike Benz.
The agency promoted "prebunking," like the kind used by Aspen Institute to program journalists and social media companies to censor the Hunter Biden laptop, as well as "strategic silence," which is similar to what Aspen promoted to journalists in the summer of 2020 before the New York Post published its first story about the laptop. USAID has funded the Aspen Institute in the past.
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Censorship advocate Nina Jankowicz, who was briefly the head of the Department of Homeland Security's "Disinformation Governance Board," posted a defense of USAID on the social media platform BlueSky yesterday. Shortly after, Benz noted that USAID is one of her funders.
Benz also pointed to USAID funding for a group called "Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project" (OCCRP), which investigated Rudy Giuliani, and whose work was cited in a letter written by a CIA agent, resulting in the impeachment of Donald Trump. In a documentary, OCCRP admitted that USAID must approve of its senior employees, which shows that OCCRP is not editorially independent of the US government. The US government was OCCRP's first and largest donor. And OCCRP's head says his organization's reporting resulted in regime change in five to six nations.
And, Benz noted, USAID funded the Atlantic Council, which was part of the Censorship Industrial Complex that demanded censorship of disfavored election and Covid information in 2020 and 2021.
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And, according to a new CNN story today, USAID officials appear to have attempted to "circumvent Trump's executive order to freeze foreign aid for 90 days." The Trump administration put "Around 60 senior USAID staff... on leave last week" and "Another senior official was put on leave for trying to reverse that move." Said Musk last night, "We don't have "an apple with a worm in it. We have a ball of worms... USAID is a ball of worms."
So why did Trump and Musk take such aggressive action against USAID? Part of the reason may be that it is a funder of the Censorship Industrial Complex, which targeted Trump and his supporters and which Musk exposed through the Twitter Files. Another part of the reason is that USAID is an instrument of US empire, and voters elected Trump to pursue "America First" over global commitments.
I excerpted a lot there, so let me propose that if you liked that, you should pay the $5/month or whatever it is for his substack. It's definitely worth it.
Speaking of Stanky Janky, this is the kind of censor and psychological operations officer against the populace of the United States that USAID was funding:
Adding fuel to the firestorm as the fact that ["Disinformation Governance Board"]'s director, Nina Jankowicz, had repeatedly cast doubt on The Post's reporting about former first son Hunter Bidens laptop.
Then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Majorkas quietly discontinued the board weeks after it was announced, leaving Jankowicz to find other employment as the head of a nonprofit that as of April 2024 was insisting that Russia had "interfered in our democracy" during the 2016 election.
Note that the Orwellian "Disinformation Governance Board" was funded and part of the DHS, but this is the kind of censor USAID and all the illegal censorship NGOs are funding -- anti-American, anti-democracy, catspaws of the transnational transgressive "elite."
But also note that since she was forced to step down as Biden's Top Censor, she is currently funded by USAID.
Those are the less egregious things USAID funded.
They also funded the creation of covid-19:
Even worse: USAID spends taxpayer money to fund NeverTrump operators and psyop influencers like Bill Kristol.
DataRepublican (small r)
@DataRepublican
Hello Mr. Kristol,
For you, the deep state is preferable because you are listed as the President of Defending Democracy (EIN 831567380) which is an indirect beneficiary of USAID through Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
You are exposed.
John Daniel Davidson
@johnddavidson
"Useful soft power"--like when we spent a decade teaching Afghan goatherds about gender identity and modern art? That kind of soft power?
U.S. foreign aid is a left-wing NGO scam and everyone knows it.
Zaid Jilani
@ZaidJilaniUSAID costs Americans next to nothing and is useful soft power against China and Russia. So of course Musk is calling it a "criminal organization." He tells us that "China rocks," though. Not sure which country he's working for.