Akash Bobba’s Hindu parents came to New Jersey from India after his father, Jay, secured an H-1B visa. Akash wrote artificial intelligence models for Meta when he was 19 years old and interned with Palantir at 20.
Luke Farritor was a senior at the University of Nebraska when he designed an AI program that made him the first in the world to decode scrolls from Roman Herculaneum, which had been burned and carbonized when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79.
Ethan Shaotran is of East Asian extraction and grew up in Silicon Valley, where he learned to code at 12 by hacking his school’s alarm system. He designed Energize AI, a scheduling assistant that has already saved millions of working hours, in his Harvard dorm room.
These three and their fellow engineers Edward Coristine, Gautier Cole Killian, and Gavin Kilger have been appointed by Elon Musk to the Department of Government Efficiency. Their task, President Donald Trump’s executive order says, is “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize government efficiency.” None of the Muskovites is older than 25 years of age. That happens to be the average age of the scientists at Los Alamos who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Harnessing young talent used to be a no-brainer, but the brain-dead Democrat gerontocracy is outraged. The tech-futurists of WIRED magazine ran a would-be exposé. All it exposed was techies doing what WIRED has always wanted them to do. “I treat bureaucracy like code,” Ethan Shaotran told the outlet. “Find the bugs. Rewrite the rules. Ship updates daily.”
The second Trump administration is determined to rewrite the rules. It is shipping updates so fast that the shocked op-eds are as stale as yesterday’s bread by the time they’re printed. The administration is moving at the speed of X. Finding the bugs exposes the operating code of the permanent bureaucracy. The inquiries began at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
USAID’s annual budget of $40 billion is about 0.6% of the $7 trillion federal budget, but the tech method is to start small and scale up fast. Ship the USAID updates, then move on to bigger departments, such as the Department of Health and Human Services (25.4% of the 2024 budget) and the Department of Defense (13.6%). By then, the efficiency inspectors will have proved that they can handle security clearances and sensitive information and that billions of taxpayer dollars are being burned for dubious and even dangerous reasons.
The “crap,” as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it, includes sending $2.5 million in electric vehicle subsidies to Vietnam, $2 million for sex-change surgery and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, $6 million in tourism subsidies in Egypt, $1.5 million to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbia, $70,000 for an Irish musical about DEI, $47,000 on a transgender opera in Colombia, and $32,000 to Peru for a transgender comic book. But it’s not a joke.
The Middle East Forum reported in 2024 that between 2016 and 2023, USAID sent $900,000 to the Bayader for Environment and Development Association, a Gazan charity closely linked to Hamas, via a network of U.S.-based NGOs. The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies reports that after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, USAID sent $114 million to Palestinian NGOs such as al Awda, a “health and community center” linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a proscribed terrorist group, and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, whose president praised the bestiality of Oct. 7 as “a glorious day for the Palestinian resistance and people.”
USAID exports policies in the guise of values. It was created in 1961 by an executive order from President John F. Kennedy to fight the cultural front of the Cold War: deniability by design. It has mutated into a boondoggling, backscratching influence operation exporting America’s cultural revolution. You and I call it waste, but USAID and its supervisors in the State Department think it money well spent. It creates client relationships with local elites, as empires have always done; for instance, $3.23 million to the BBC’s charity BBC Media Action. It uses nongovernmental organizations to train “future leaders” and astroturf deniable “color revolutions” in Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Israel.
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The spectacle of waste, corruption, and vanity provokes an understandable reflex. Trump calls for the closure of USAID, along with the Department of Education and NPR. This reaction assumes, like Adam Smith, that the market will fix it — or, like Thomas Paine, that once government gets out of the way, innate human goodness will flourish. Yet the crooked shall not be made straight unless we straighten out the crooks.
As Patrick Deneen says, the “normality” we wish to restore is a product of law and culture. “More Aristotle and Aquinas, less Paine,” advises the political science professor. This would save us all some pain, not least financially. We have found the bugs. Now we must rewrite the rules. Revenge is not enough. Enforce the law or change it. Reshape the bureaucracy to restore the ethic of service. Redefine the values and purpose of soft power. Make foreign aid great, if not again, then at least for tomorrow.