Development Assistance Cut Short by the World’s Richest Person

World’s richest person making life difficult by cutting development assistance and aid

Somewhere within all the issues Congress has to deal with, with this administration, there must be a day of reckoning coming. I can not imagine Republicans being too thrilled with the damage trump and his pissant are creating. In less than two years, there will be another Congressional election. Two years is not enough time for people to forget. Two years is way too long to wait and see how people react to the mess being created for them also.

Trump is not spreading the wealth amongst those with less than $500 million A couple of heils, jumping jacks on stage, and trump’s sidekick and himself will not be forgotten any time soon.

The United States is was the world’s largest provider of official development assistance, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Most of its support was channeled through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an independent government agency established by Congress in 1961.

USAID was the largest humanitarian and development arm of the US government, with a work force of approximately 10,000 people around the world and an annual budget of tens of billions of dollars. Gone to tax breaks now. Its main purpose was to provide development assistance and aid to countries in need.

The top three recipients of development assistance were Ukraine, Ethiopia and Jordan respectively. The scale of USAID’s funding for Ukraine was significant, with the war-torn European country receiving more than $16 billion in macroeconomic support (US government data). In 2023, 70 of the 77 countries the World Bank determined to be low- and lower-middle income countries received USAID assistance, the CRS report noted.

Doing Trump’s Dirty Work

– by Dan Rather

Steady

Dan Rather . . .

It was James Madison who in 1787 first introduced the idea of three branches of government in our new country’s Constitution: the executive, legislative, and judicial. But now, 238 years later, Musk has apparently decided all that is superfluous. All the American people really need is Donald Trump and the world’s richest man.

Case in point: Musk’s weekend antics. They started on Friday night at the Treasury Department, where he and his so-called DOGE kids, a small squadron of 20-something tech bros loyal to Musk, took control of the federal payment system, which includes personal information of the almost 2 million federal employees. The Treasury employees who tried to stop him were put on leave or quickly retired.

If that isn’t troubling enough, he also gained access to the federal “checkbook” that handles the $6 trillion of annual transactions. With this power, he says he has the legal authority to cancel payments for any government program he believes is acting illegally. No proof necessary.

He then moved on to USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID has an annual budget of $40 billion appropriated by Congress; that, by the way, is less than 1% of the annual U.S. budget. The agency employs 10,000 people around the world and is the largest provider of international food assistance. It also supports global health initiatives and humanitarian relief in 100 countries.

On Saturday, Musk and his band of mercenaries entered the USAID office demanding access to, well, everything. When the agency’s two top officials resisted, they were threatened with removal by U.S. marshals.

After gaining access to, well, everything, Musk dismantled the agency. The office was closed, the website taken down, the social media presence terminated. To finish off the complete eradication of an agency whose sole mission is to help the world’s most vulnerable populations, he denigrated it on X, accusing USAID of being “a criminal organization” and “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

Forgot something which may have been a cause . . . “The White House published a statement on Monday highlighting the “waste and abuse” it said existed at USAID, including $1.5 million to ‘advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities.'”