One of the first major actions President Donald Trump’s team took as he began his second term was to freeze government spending on various domestic “assistance” programs as well as on foreign aid administered by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Late last Tuesday, hours before the domestic freeze was to go into effect, a federal judge put a hold on it, and the next day, the administration rescinded the freeze altogether. Similarly, the day before, the administration announced numerous waivers to the USAID freeze as groups within the executive branch battled over who was calling the shots.
Despite how quick the administration was in walking back the freeze on funding or making exceptions for foreign aid, the media still had a field day with all the chaos that erupted as a result. Reporters at establishment-friendly outlets across television and print went to great lengths to gather details about all the organizations providing goods and services to some of the most vulnerable people—at home and abroad—who were suddenly left wondering if their main source of funding had dried up.
Journalists raised the alarm about homeless veterans who would go without food, addicts who would go without professional support, students who relied on federal assistance to pay for college who would be forced to drop school, and the millions of people who depend on government programs for healthcare going without care—among many, many others.
The same goes for foreign USAID beneficiaries. The media ran alarming stories about the closures of soup kitchens feeding hungry people in war-torn Sudan, hospitals caring for destitute war refugees in Thailand, groups providing firewood to people enduring the harsh Ukrainian winter in a war zone, clinics preventing newborns from contracting HIV in Uganda, and more.
The media also seized on Elon Musk’s involvement in the USAID freeze to put their preferred spin on the situation—with one Politico writer characterizing the episode as “the world’s wealthiest person partially dismantling the world’s single-largest source of assistance to the world’s most vulnerable people.”
But beyond Musk and USAID, that sentiment is clearly how establishment figures in media and politics want us to think about the current administration’s effort to cut government: as a scheme to abandon the most vulnerable people in our country and around the world, to slash spending, and make room for tax cuts to the rich.
But that characterization starts to fall apart if we look beyond the subset of spending that the media is focused on, because USAID is funding far more than a couple of soup kitchens and hospitals. As Ron Paul explained in his column on Monday, “USAID is a key component of the US government’s ‘regime change’ operations worldwide.”
Much of the agency’s funding gets passed on to NGOs and media organizations in regions that are central to Washington’s foreign agenda. The same goes for dissident groups and “independent” media outlets in and around countries controlled by governments that Washington wants to overthrow.
As the New York Times revealed deep in their article about the USAID freeze, a substantial number of the groups and media organizations that make up the opposition coalition in Iran are struggling after being cut off from their primary source of funding—the US government. The same goes for Ukraine, where the freeze revealed that 90 percent of media organizations in the country rely on US government grants.
So, not only has USAID been used to fund groups working to unseat governments Washington wants toppled, but also to fund the outlets spreading the Washington party line around the world.
As Dr. Paul explained in his piece, the American media relies heavily on reporting from these local US-government-funded outlets when describing developments in countries like Ukraine. This means—thanks to USAID—the US government has created a propaganda loop that gives them a lot of control over how information from around the world is understood by the American people.
USAID is invaluable to the many government officials who are constantly pushing to expand US foreign interventions to further Washington’s imperial ambitions and to indulge the foreign governments and weapons companies that spend billions on lobbying. These wars then put many of the poorest people in the vulnerable positions that USAID then sweeps in to ostensibly address. The agency does a lot to keep the racket at the heart of American foreign policy going.
And the federal government’s rackets are not limited to foreign policy. Far from it. A tremendous amount of domestic spending goes towards programs we’re told are meant to make things like healthcare, education, banking, housing, food, and childcare more affordable and accessible. But across the board, despite these programs being in place for decades, the problems keep getting worse.
Prices for these incredibly important goods and services keep shooting up. And every year, the government pours more and more money into these programs which does nothing to slow or reverse the trend. What it does do, however, is transfer billions of our tax dollars into the pockets of government officials and politically-connected businesses and NGOs.
And again, the rise in the cost of living that these programs bring about forces more people into vulnerable positions where they rely on government benefits.
Then, whenever a group within the government threatens to cut the spending that fuels these rackets, these vulnerable people, who are themselves victims of the rackets, experience the quickest, most acute, and most visible pain. The political class can then hold the very real suffering of these folks up as the reason their racket needs to continue. They use our basic human aversion to seeing needy people suffer to keep the rigged system in place.
The needy are the economic human shields of the political establishment.
If an administration or political party is ever going to successfully address the spending and institutionalized corruption that is driving us off a cliff, they need to understand this dynamic. And then they need to turn around and make sure the American public understands it too.
And finally, those trying to cut government spending need to stop playing into the hands of their opponents in the political establishment. To use an analogy from Harry Browne, the government is breaking the legs of the most vulnerable people and then handing them a crutch. No successful effort to cut government spending can come from focusing on the crutch. It must center on and prioritize the many government policies that are worsening and even outright causing these problems in the first place.
