Month: February 2025

As soon as he took office President Trump shut down all foreign aid for 90 days. A week later, USAID, our primary aid agency, caught his eye. Allegedly, "several actions" within the agency "appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders," so Trump immediately ordered 56 people placed on leave.

What accounted for Trump's specific fury toward USAID? Most likely, he was influenced by Elon Musk, who has been raging against the agency on Twitter, calling it a "a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America"¹ and later declaring, "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die." Yesterday, Musk acolytes stormed into USAID headquarters demanding access to security systems and personnel files. They were turned back, but eventually got in after a couple of top security officials were put on leave.

Whew. But why is Musk so exercised about USAID? This is where things get murky, but it turns out Musk is a big fan of a guy named Mike Benz, a far-right provocateur, white supremacist, and all-around conspiracy crank who has recently reinvented himself as an anti-censorship activist. For unclear reasons, this has led him to become America's premier critic of USAID, which he views as a spider controlling the entire web of America's foreign policy, from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA. Benz posts endlessly about this and Musk is an avid follower.

This is how things go in the federal government these days. A crank decides to become obsessed with USAID; Elon Musk takes the bait; and Donald Trump then joins him in a mission of destruction. And all over nothing.

¹This is sort of ironic since the usual complaint about USAID is that it's just another CIA front group. Which it sometimes was during the Cold War.

Does Elon Musk even bother reading this shit before reposts it?

Crackpot Gen. Mike Flynn seems to have searched for all grants to any organization with Lutheran in its name and declared them all corrupt. What does he have against Lutherans?

Beats me. In any case, all of these are different groups. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, for example, is headquartered in Baltimore and provides resettlement help to people from places like Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Sudan, and so forth. Do we still take in refugees in the Donald Trump era? I don't know, but we used to.

The other Lutheran groups provide foster care, group homes, meals, and that sort of thing all over the country. You know, charity and humanitarian services.

So why does Elon say he's "rapidly" shutting down these "illegal payments"? There's nothing illegal about them and DOGE has no authority to stop them anyway. I assume he's just fluffing Flynn, but you never know. Does he really plan to just stop Treasury from writing checks to groups he disapproves of? That seems unlikely even for Elon, but who's to say?

I'm not especially worried about Trump steamrolling democracy, but if he does it will be down to one thing: The Republican Party rolling over and playing dead for anything Trump does.

Pardoning all the J6 insurrectionists? Meh. Shutting down the NIH? Yawn. Huge tariffs on two of our most steadfast allies and neighbors? Whaddayagonnado? Firing everyone associated with investigating or prosecuting J6ers or Trump himself? Well, he's the president. Halting funding for programs that you yourselves authorized a few months ago? Everyone does it. Elon Musk and his crew mysteriously taking over the Treasury's payment system? It's all fine. We trust Elon. Threatening Denmark over Greenland? Boys will be boys. Removing mpox from the CDC site because it's mostly a virus of gay men? Huh. Starting up a scam crypto empire right before the inauguration? Man's gotta eat. Opening the floodgates on two California dams in winter and sending billions of gallons of water south to soak into a dry lakebed and be wasted—all on a whim? I'll have to get back to you. Pardoning the founder of the most notorious online drug trafficking site on the planet? Uh huh. Nominating half a dozen singularly unqualified nominees to run critical government departments? The president should get the staff he wants. Ending Secret Service protection for a few people he personally dislikes? Whatevs. Gulf of America? Why not?

With a few exceptions I can count on one hand, no Republican has raised so much as a peep about any of this. Trump is the boss and that's that. It's a poltroonish performance of astonishing depth.

What's the end game here?

Trump doesn't want anything. He just want the tariffs. He's convinced they can raise vast sums of money that will let him enact tax cuts later this year, and he likes that. That's it. There's no theory of the case. There's no underlying rationale. There's no 4-D chess. He just wants the money, and he either doesn't know or doesn't care that he's raising it from Americans, not foreigners.

And why Canada, Mexico, and China? For the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: because that's where the money is. Those three countries account for nearly half of all US imports, so they're the ones that got held up.

There's no need to overthink this.

Donald Trump says he pulled out of the World Health Organization because it's unfair to the US. We pay dues of $500 million per year while China pays only $39 million. Bob Somerby wants a fact check.

Sure, why not. WHO works on a two-year budgeting cycle, so I've cut the numbers in half to get annual figures:

Hmmm. What's going on? Well, these are only the assessed contributions, which countries are required to pay. The US also makes voluntary contributions to programs it has a special interest in, like infectious diseases and polio eradication. When you add that in, we contribute a lot more:

Both of these figures are correct. You can use whichever one you want. But the US isn't required to pay $500 million per year. We do it freely.

POSTSCRIPT: Overall, the US pays about 14% of the WHO's budget. We account for a little more than 25% of the world's GDP.

In order to blow off our free trade pact with Canada and Mexico, Donald Trump has to find some kind of national security pretext. That's the loophole. This is why he's been so careful to stick to the script that it's all about fentanyl and illegal immigrants.

This is ridiculous, but it's especially super duper ridiculous in the case of Canada. The total amount of fentanyl seized along the northern border is about the size of a sack of flour, and the number of illegal border crossings is something like 7% of the US total. There's not even a hint of a legitimate national security issue here.

I know that courts are loath to insert themselves into national security disputes, but isn't there a limit? I think it was John Roberts who wrote that courts are required to take government justifications seriously, but they aren't required to pretend to be idiots. This seems like a case that could fit his dictum.

From a public health perspective, the benefit of vaping comes from cigarette smokers who use vaping as a way of quitting cigarettes. How many people does this include? It turns out that about 1.8% of adults are vapers who used to smoke.

So not a lot but not nothing. A new study tries to quantify this in terms of mortality. It's extraordinarily complicated since, to begin with, "smoking-attributable mortality" is no easy thing to measure. The authors end up using a definition that includes 21 separate underlying diseases. But that's not all:

While all 21 of these established causes are causally linked to smoking, many of these deaths would still occur even in the absence of smoking at the population–level. To refine our measure of the mortality burden of smoking, we weight each cause by the cause’s sex–specific SAF. Our measure of SAM is therefore the weighted sum of all 21 established causes of death, weighted by each cause’s SAF. SAM comprises half of all deaths in our sample, and roughly one third of these deaths (32%) are attributable to smoking.

Then of course there's a whole boatload of demographic controls:

We construct our mortality panel from 1979–2019 for each unique combination of sex, 5 or 3 race/ethnicity groupings, 5–year age bins, census region, and 2013 urban status. Our estimation sample consists of decedents between the ages of 30 and 79. Population counts for the same unique combinations come from the 1969–2020 and 1990–2020 single–year county–level population files from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (SEER).

There's much more, but let's cut straight to the meat. Here's what they found:

In 2011 the FDA lost its power to regulate e-cigarettes, and the authors contend that this ushered in a golden age of innovation that led to high take-up rates and therefore an immediate drop in mortality.

I can't make any sense of this. For starters, here is cigarette smoking in America:

It's been declining for decades, and if there's a change in 2011 you have to squint mighty hard to see it.

But that's hardly the main thing. Smoking largely kills you via chronic diseases that take decades to build up. There's simply no way that a small drop in smoking in 2011 could have anything more than a minuscule effect on mortality rates in 2013, as the chart shows, let alone the 10% mortality decline shown in the chart for 2016. That's crazy. It takes years for this stuff to show up.

For example: smoking peaked in the '50s and has been declining ever since. But it wasn't until 1991 that lung cancer deaths started to fall:

I'm frequently skeptical of studies showing how terrible FDA regulation is, so I try to be more careful than usual when I see a new one. But this study just makes no sense, and the authors don't even try to show any causality. I don't doubt that there was a lot of vaping innovation in the teens, but there's little evidence that this had a big impact on adult vaping or that it reduced death rates within a matter of months.

Bottom line: Perhaps the FDA is too hidebound. The evidence remains pretty thin, though.