The good things USAID does can't and won't be replaced with private philanthropy. A major example is PEPFAR that keeps hundreds of thousands of people alive through HIV prevention and treatment. Private philanthropy could have stepped up and funded this in the early 2000s, but it did not.
USAID is minimal and provides soft power/influence for little overall cost.
Quick look at Jhpiego is the standard health and HIV prevention programs in various areas around the world.
The problem with cutting science research grants is that it then has the effect of reducing our capability and scope of research done. That then has the effect of reducing the overall advancement of the US in the long term, and thus the future economic benefits.
"I am an NIH-funded biomedical scientist with conservative leanings. I know at least a dozen scientists (a small closeted minority) who voted for Trump, largely because of frustrations with DEI and extreme wokeness that had permeated every aspect of University life. Each one of us deeply regrets their vote for Trump and are utterly ashamed of it.
We are absolutely horrified at how mindlessly destructive this admin has been to scientific institutions. They are single-handedly destroying the STEM dominance US established over decades.
Average Americans simply do not realize that we are now on the verge of a precipitous decline in STEM. We all admit that the warnings about Trump/MAGA were on target, and the thing we argue about now is whether the damage is even reversible. All the Lefty overreach was annoying as hell but the MAGA disdain for science is 100X worse."
If Congress approved each program, there might be more public trust in some of the agencies that waste money on zany left-wing programs. Of course, the bureaucratic craziness reflects the leaning of the executives who hired them and, until now, they have not received any scrutiny. The examples of wasted tax dollars are at least equal to Trump's foibles. A related but somewhat different point of view can be found here.
Congress is lazy and deals only with details that might get them publicity and reelection. They do not want direct association with the bureaucratic excesses.
The issue of course is that what is being defined as waste is just things that people of one political don't agree with, not necessarily actual wastage (as in inefficient use of funds).
You're correct that Congress should be far more explicit in their laws rather than offloading it to the bureaucracy. That takes a lot of effort and makes for really large bills, which IIRC the length of a bill is a serious issue for some.
The solution is to expand the House: the more elected representatives, the more manpower there is to both write these details into laws and to perform oversight.
I have to disagree with your narrow definition of waste. Waste includes spending federal money on anything does not stand a chance of furthering the interests of the USA. I defy anyone to justify the most egregious examples recently exposed.
Size does matter. Below is a link to the text of the ridiculously named "Inflation Reduction Act". I do not believe many people can read and understand it in three days. It contains many provisions that simply benefit small select groups and lobbyists. If there is anything useful in the law, it is obscured by the set-asides, carve-outs tax breaks and other provisions. The monstrosity should have been broken down into at least a dozen bills so that each one could pass or fail on its own merits.
I'm beginning to see some usefulness to your oft mentioned expanded house but still have reservations. I could go along with a constitutional amendment to expand the House to 3000 members, pay them each $50,000 a year with a $50,000 per office allowance for clerk(s) and office supplies. Remodel the House office buildings to accommodate cubicles and a few gender-specific restrooms. Additional provisions would include one 90-day session per year, a two-thirds majority to advance legislation and a clause to allow recall by the district that elected them.
Your disagreement is making my point: you and I may disagree on what constitutes furthering the interests of the USA. That doesn't make what you want or what I want waste.
You should list some examples of what you consider egregious.
Expanding the House should be done based on the number of constituents per representative, so that one rep can actually reasonably represent them. Something like 50k-100k per rep makes sense to me.
Pay will likely need to be a little higher, or else only the rich will be able to afford to be one. One thing to help with minimizing salary would be to have dormitories for reps rather than requiring them to find their own housing.
Rather than have X number of sessions, I'd prefer mandatory town halls in their districts - at least once per quarter.
And no, if anything remove the filibuster in the Senate and maintain majority rule in the House. Also remove the debt limit and have a law that continues the current budget levels unless a new budget it passed. That will remove the gamesmanship from the equation.
My suggestions are intended to reduce the potential for Congressional damage. I don't trust any legislation that does not have a very strong majority demand. Any more than one 90-day session is wasted. Short sessions could open up running for office to non-millionaires. Any number of town hall meetings is fine with me. I don't care how they run their campaign as long as they can be recalled.
I could go along with a simple majority in the senate if something more than a simple majority of 2450 house members is required to advance legislation. If House representation is based only on USA citizen population, I might concede that point.
There is too much motivation and opportunity for wrongdoing in the current system. Term limits would help greatly.
Continuing the current budget might be an improvement but it is meaningless since in the last 125 years, Federal spending has exceeded the budget 75% of the time.
There were a lot of wars during that last 125 years. The question should not be whether we spend more than budgeted but whether we can afford to pay for it. Due to tax cuts and a couple major financial crises we have run up our debt rather than eliminate it.
The budget is still useful for what we plan to spend: unplanned spending happens, that's life.
The various USAID cases filed by multiple NGOs — “Non-Government Organizations” — exposed the extent to which taxpayer money flows out of the Treasury to fund a vast network of progressive Neo-Marxist organizations with vaguely worded and often ridiculous mission statements. There is no question that some foreign aid programs are salutary and worth the investment made by US taxpayers for health and welfare purposes that ultimately redound to the benefit of the United States. But the public disclosure by DOGE showed thousands of USAID funded programs — a few of which were mentioned by President Trump during his address to Congress last week — only advanced progressive and Marxist political, economic, and cultural goals. Only USAID and State Department officials made the judgment calls on what to fund and what not to fund, revealing the extent to which billions of dollars in taxpayer money finances the an infrastructure of left wing organizations that keep progressive shock troops employed.
But USAID only involved foreign aid. More recently DOGE has dug into the level of spending going through NGOs from the “Green New Deal” — both domestically and abroad. In 2022, Biden named longtime Democrat party bigwig John Podesta to administer a fund to develop “clean energy” programs with money appropriated by the Democrat controlled Congress as part of the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Podesta eventually had control of more than $370 billion to distribute for that purpose. A story reported on by multiple media outlets involves a video of an Biden Administration EPA official, Brett Efron, recorded on video by Project Veritas describing how the Agency was frantically trying to spend $20 billion that had been parked in a Citibank account. Efron described the effort to find any project for the money as being tantamount to “being on the Titanic and throwing gold bars over the edge” and into the ocean. Efron expressly claimed the purpose was to get the money spent before the Trump Administration took over EPA.
EPA Administrator Zeldin gave a statement to the NY Post describing what his staff found when they took over as follows:
“The Biden EPA ‘gold bar’ scheme was designed to limit government oversight while doling out funds to far-left organizations pushing DEI and Environmental Justice…. Of the eight pass-through entities that received funding from the pot of $20 billion in tax dollars, various recipients have shown very little qualification to handle a single dollar, let alone several billions of dollars. I have zero tolerance for waste and abuse at the EPA.”
The entire episode involving $27 billion parked outside Treasury by an agency that does not normally administer grants, is explained in extensive detail by this article at RealClearInvestigations today by James Varney."
Yeah, there are all kinds of excuses. War is a good one, maybe one of the very few good ones, but we haven't been at war for 73 of the last 125 years. Political parties have been buying votes for at least that long.
The good things USAID does can't and won't be replaced with private philanthropy. A major example is PEPFAR that keeps hundreds of thousands of people alive through HIV prevention and treatment. Private philanthropy could have stepped up and funded this in the early 2000s, but it did not.
USAID is minimal and provides soft power/influence for little overall cost.
Quick look at Jhpiego is the standard health and HIV prevention programs in various areas around the world.
The problem with cutting science research grants is that it then has the effect of reducing our capability and scope of research done. That then has the effect of reducing the overall advancement of the US in the long term, and thus the future economic benefits.
Taken from elsewhere:
"I am an NIH-funded biomedical scientist with conservative leanings. I know at least a dozen scientists (a small closeted minority) who voted for Trump, largely because of frustrations with DEI and extreme wokeness that had permeated every aspect of University life. Each one of us deeply regrets their vote for Trump and are utterly ashamed of it.
We are absolutely horrified at how mindlessly destructive this admin has been to scientific institutions. They are single-handedly destroying the STEM dominance US established over decades.
Average Americans simply do not realize that we are now on the verge of a precipitous decline in STEM. We all admit that the warnings about Trump/MAGA were on target, and the thing we argue about now is whether the damage is even reversible. All the Lefty overreach was annoying as hell but the MAGA disdain for science is 100X worse."
If Congress approved each program, there might be more public trust in some of the agencies that waste money on zany left-wing programs. Of course, the bureaucratic craziness reflects the leaning of the executives who hired them and, until now, they have not received any scrutiny. The examples of wasted tax dollars are at least equal to Trump's foibles. A related but somewhat different point of view can be found here.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154858976
Congress is lazy and deals only with details that might get them publicity and reelection. They do not want direct association with the bureaucratic excesses.
The issue of course is that what is being defined as waste is just things that people of one political don't agree with, not necessarily actual wastage (as in inefficient use of funds).
You're correct that Congress should be far more explicit in their laws rather than offloading it to the bureaucracy. That takes a lot of effort and makes for really large bills, which IIRC the length of a bill is a serious issue for some.
The solution is to expand the House: the more elected representatives, the more manpower there is to both write these details into laws and to perform oversight.
I have to disagree with your narrow definition of waste. Waste includes spending federal money on anything does not stand a chance of furthering the interests of the USA. I defy anyone to justify the most egregious examples recently exposed.
Size does matter. Below is a link to the text of the ridiculously named "Inflation Reduction Act". I do not believe many people can read and understand it in three days. It contains many provisions that simply benefit small select groups and lobbyists. If there is anything useful in the law, it is obscured by the set-asides, carve-outs tax breaks and other provisions. The monstrosity should have been broken down into at least a dozen bills so that each one could pass or fail on its own merits.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5376/text
I'm beginning to see some usefulness to your oft mentioned expanded house but still have reservations. I could go along with a constitutional amendment to expand the House to 3000 members, pay them each $50,000 a year with a $50,000 per office allowance for clerk(s) and office supplies. Remodel the House office buildings to accommodate cubicles and a few gender-specific restrooms. Additional provisions would include one 90-day session per year, a two-thirds majority to advance legislation and a clause to allow recall by the district that elected them.
Your disagreement is making my point: you and I may disagree on what constitutes furthering the interests of the USA. That doesn't make what you want or what I want waste.
You should list some examples of what you consider egregious.
Expanding the House should be done based on the number of constituents per representative, so that one rep can actually reasonably represent them. Something like 50k-100k per rep makes sense to me.
Pay will likely need to be a little higher, or else only the rich will be able to afford to be one. One thing to help with minimizing salary would be to have dormitories for reps rather than requiring them to find their own housing.
Rather than have X number of sessions, I'd prefer mandatory town halls in their districts - at least once per quarter.
And no, if anything remove the filibuster in the Senate and maintain majority rule in the House. Also remove the debt limit and have a law that continues the current budget levels unless a new budget it passed. That will remove the gamesmanship from the equation.
My suggestions are intended to reduce the potential for Congressional damage. I don't trust any legislation that does not have a very strong majority demand. Any more than one 90-day session is wasted. Short sessions could open up running for office to non-millionaires. Any number of town hall meetings is fine with me. I don't care how they run their campaign as long as they can be recalled.
I could go along with a simple majority in the senate if something more than a simple majority of 2450 house members is required to advance legislation. If House representation is based only on USA citizen population, I might concede that point.
There is too much motivation and opportunity for wrongdoing in the current system. Term limits would help greatly.
Continuing the current budget might be an improvement but it is meaningless since in the last 125 years, Federal spending has exceeded the budget 75% of the time.
https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_usxbudget_history.htm
There were a lot of wars during that last 125 years. The question should not be whether we spend more than budgeted but whether we can afford to pay for it. Due to tax cuts and a couple major financial crises we have run up our debt rather than eliminate it.
The budget is still useful for what we plan to spend: unplanned spending happens, that's life.
I don't know if you could read or tried to read my link to Shipwrecked Crew but this is about as much as I felt it was honest to copy and paste.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154858976
"Starve the NGOs.
The various USAID cases filed by multiple NGOs — “Non-Government Organizations” — exposed the extent to which taxpayer money flows out of the Treasury to fund a vast network of progressive Neo-Marxist organizations with vaguely worded and often ridiculous mission statements. There is no question that some foreign aid programs are salutary and worth the investment made by US taxpayers for health and welfare purposes that ultimately redound to the benefit of the United States. But the public disclosure by DOGE showed thousands of USAID funded programs — a few of which were mentioned by President Trump during his address to Congress last week — only advanced progressive and Marxist political, economic, and cultural goals. Only USAID and State Department officials made the judgment calls on what to fund and what not to fund, revealing the extent to which billions of dollars in taxpayer money finances the an infrastructure of left wing organizations that keep progressive shock troops employed.
But USAID only involved foreign aid. More recently DOGE has dug into the level of spending going through NGOs from the “Green New Deal” — both domestically and abroad. In 2022, Biden named longtime Democrat party bigwig John Podesta to administer a fund to develop “clean energy” programs with money appropriated by the Democrat controlled Congress as part of the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Podesta eventually had control of more than $370 billion to distribute for that purpose. A story reported on by multiple media outlets involves a video of an Biden Administration EPA official, Brett Efron, recorded on video by Project Veritas describing how the Agency was frantically trying to spend $20 billion that had been parked in a Citibank account. Efron described the effort to find any project for the money as being tantamount to “being on the Titanic and throwing gold bars over the edge” and into the ocean. Efron expressly claimed the purpose was to get the money spent before the Trump Administration took over EPA.
EPA Administrator Zeldin gave a statement to the NY Post describing what his staff found when they took over as follows:
“The Biden EPA ‘gold bar’ scheme was designed to limit government oversight while doling out funds to far-left organizations pushing DEI and Environmental Justice…. Of the eight pass-through entities that received funding from the pot of $20 billion in tax dollars, various recipients have shown very little qualification to handle a single dollar, let alone several billions of dollars. I have zero tolerance for waste and abuse at the EPA.”
The entire episode involving $27 billion parked outside Treasury by an agency that does not normally administer grants, is explained in extensive detail by this article at RealClearInvestigations today by James Varney."
Yeah, there are all kinds of excuses. War is a good one, maybe one of the very few good ones, but we haven't been at war for 73 of the last 125 years. Political parties have been buying votes for at least that long.