Kevin Drum

In its initial incarnation USAID was a Cold War agency designed to help poor countries, but also to ensure that the United States was very visibly the one doing the helping. This focus produced both considerable efficiency and bipartisan support.

When the Cold War ended, USAID lost some of its support, especially among conservative Republicans. As a result, in addition to shrinking, it was forced to adopt "private sector reforms" that compelled it to do most of its contracting with big American NGOs, who then disbursed funds and generally ran the show. This may have been well meant, but it bloated costs because USAID paid its US contractors at US rates instead of paying local organizations at lower local rates. USAID also lost a lot of its insights into local conditions on the ground.

As you'd expect, this produced a carousel of reform proposals, as one decade's fashions ("private-public partnerships") ceded to another's. This is from 2021:

USAID spends so inefficiently because every year the agency needs to move more than $20 billion to projects worldwide. It has become dependent on funneling hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, of dollars to mammoth government contractors. In fiscal year 2017, for instance, 60 percent of agency funding went to just 25 organizations.

To right the ship, USAID needs a procurement renaissance. It must break its dependence on large and inefficient government contractors, increase its use of pay-for-results programs, and scale up initiatives that make it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises and organizations based in low- and middle-income countries to do business with the world’s largest development agency. Smaller organizations are far nimbler than juggernaut contractors. And local organizations have intimate familiarity with the issues that need solving and have a more direct stake in producing good outcomes.

None of this has really happened and USAID has remained dependent mostly on big US partners. That said, these criticisms, which come from both Republicans and Democrats, are relatively mild and technocratic. No one wanted to burn USAID to the ground. So what happened? The answer is largely DEI and climate change. Here is Project 2025:

The Administration has incorporated its radical climate policy into every USAID initiative. It has joined or funded international partnerships dedicated to advancing the aims of the Paris Climate Agreement and has supported the idea of giving trillions of dollars more in aid transfers for “climate reparations.”

....USAID installed advisers on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committees “in all its Bureaus, Offices, and [overseas] Missions”.... A Chief DEI Officer oversees this DEI infrastructure and sits in the Administrator’s office. DEI directives are now part of all agency policies....The upshot has been to racialize the agency and create a hostile work environment for anyone who disagrees with the Biden Administration’s identity politics.

But still, this suggests only going after USAID's DEI and climate change offices, not taking a blowtorch to the whole agency. So again, what happened?

The answer, when you finally reach the dark core, is a conspiracy theorist named Mike Benz, who suddenly decided in 2022 that USAID was a criminal organization:

According to Benz’s posts, USAID’s crimes are plenty, and they go straight to the top, accusations he lobs in rapid speeches filled with acronyms and hyperbole.

Benz paints a federal grant to a journalism outfit as proof USAID funded the 2019 impeachment of Trump.... Funding to a scientific research nonprofit is evidence that USAID played a role in starting the pandemic.... Benz also cites unspecified “source docs” as substantiation that USAID was censoring social media. From former President Barack Obama to the Bush family, “they’re all in on it,” he told a Newsmax host Tuesday.

But even this wouldn't have been enough except for one thing: Two weeks after Trump's inauguration Elon Musk, as he does, suddenly became obsessed with Benz and other USAID haters:

[Musk] described USAID, the foreign humanitarian assistance agency, as “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” “evil” and “a criminal organization.” “Time for it to die,” Musk posted.

....Most of Musk’s more than 160 posts about USAID have been responses to a handful of small but influential verified accounts, many of them using pseudonyms. The most popular...have been viewed hundreds of millions of times, amplified by Musk and his 216 million followers, according to X metrics. As the theories spread, they are repackaged, and in many cases added upon, to further the claims.

From there it went straight to President Trump and the rest is history. DEI wasn't enough. The entire agency had to be eliminated completely. All based on a bunch of dumb conspiracy theories amplified by the richest man in the world.

According to the Economist, here are the fates of Europe's main parties from about 2000 to the present:

Mainstream center-left and center-right parties have dropped a combined 20 points. Hard right parties have gone up about 20 points.

So far, hard right parties have mostly been kept out of power except in Hungary, Italy, and Poland (until 2023).

Are you interested in who supports whom after today's revenge fest in the Oval Office? Here's the scorecard:

That's 25-2 by my count, with Italy remaining neutral.

Donald Trump has been on a tear to eliminate DEI programs throughout the federal government. Now, in one sense, he clearly ran on this, so fair enough. What's more, if we're talking about killing Robin DiAngelo programs or similar beacons of enlightenment, well, even a lot of liberals will cheer you on.

But in MAGA world, this has metastasized into simply killing off all civil rights protections of all kinds.¹ Conservatives no longer want to admit even "yes, but" about racism. Instead, they want to flatly deny that women and minority groups suffer any possible discrimination at all. The result is the decimation of civil rights and EEO offices even though the relevant laws are still on the books:

It has long been on some conservatives’ wish list to kneecap the external civil rights work of the Labor Department’s contract compliance office, which for decades has audited the nation’s largest contractors — including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Deloitte — to ensure fair pay and hiring.

Plans obtained by The Post show the office will maintain 50 employees to enforce discrimination law for veterans and workers with disabilities, but it will no longer be staffed to audit companies for pay and hiring disparities for women and minority workers.

There you have it. Vets and disabilities? Sure. Women and Black people? Fuhgeddaboutit.

¹It's even worse than that, of course. For example, recently "The President's Own" Marine Corps band was scheduled to begin a series of concerts featuring high school musicians of color who competed for spots. But merely performing with young Black musicians was too much for Trump's anti-DEI sensibilities. The concerts have been canceled.

Trump attack dog Ed Martin, the US Attorney for Washington DC, has demoted seven prosecutors in the DC office:

The prosecutors are among a larger group targeted for “retribution” by President Donald Trump...because of their roles in Jan. 6 Capitol seditious conspiracy and riot cases and others, including ones involving Trump allies such as advisers Stephen K. Bannon and Peter Navarro, according to eight people close to the office, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The seven prosecutors were notified by email Friday morning of their immediate removal from high-ranking supervisory or senior roles.... They were reassigned to misdemeanors or early case assessment screening in D.C. Superior Court, the people said.

These people didn't even do anything to Trump. They just got assigned to January 6 cases and then did their jobs prosecuting them. But no matter. Maximal revenge anyway.

I want to reiterate something: Donald Trump has been plotting his revenge against Volodymyr Zelensky ever since 2019, when Trump was impeached for trying to extort dirt on Joe Biden from Zelensky.

Trump is not especially pro-Putin on Ukraine and never has been. But he hates Zelensky, and he's happy to let Putin carve up Ukraine as a simple act of vengeance.

Zelensky's fate was settled five years ago. He just didn't know it. Trump must be chortling today over his Oval Office shouting match, designed for maximum humiliation of a guy he's been conniving against for a long time.

For obvious reasons there hasn't been any catblogging lately, but today my sister comes to the rescue. One of her colleagues does regular kitten fostering, and she frequently brings her latest batch into work for everyone to ooh and ah over.

This is Billie Jean, one of a litter of three. Just look at those deep, soulful eyes.

Apparently the Oval Office meeting this morning to sign a US-Ukraine mineral agreement didn't go well:

President Trump and Vice President JD Vance loudly berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Friday in an explosive televised shouting match unlike any seen in the Oval Office between an American president and foreign leader in modern times.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance...sought to strong-arm him into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictate. With voices raised and tempers flaring, Mr. Trump threatened to abandon Ukraine altogether if Mr. Zelensky did not go along.

Talking over the Ukrainian leader, Mr. Vance...demanded that he thank Mr. Trump for his leadership... Minutes later, Mr. Trump seemed to call off the rest of the visit. “I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations,” he wrote on social media. “I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”

Trump just can't decide whether he likes Zelensky or not. One minute he's a dictator, the next minute he isn't. One minute he's offering a great deal that could be worth a trillion dollars, the next he's an ingrate who doesn't thank Trump enough.

Of course, this kind of shouting is also a possible sign of mental deterioration. It's a pretty common symptom of dementia and Alzheimer's.

POSTSCRIPT: There remains an open question of whether this was a genuine loss of temper or a carefully planned bit of humiliation. The presence of Vance suggests it was planned, since there was no special reason for him to be there.

I gotta say, if this was planned it demonstrates Trump's genuine sense of revenge against Zelensky, carried out coldly and when Zelensky least expected it. As a result, Trump is fully Putin's man now, simply because there are only two sides.

BEA releases everything all at once, so we have plenty more today than just an inflation print. Here's a couple of interesting ones.

First up is plain old Personal Consumption Expenditures. I'm showing this because it's unusual for PCE to go down substantially on a raw dollar basis even during recessions. But in January it was down nearly $80 billion from December:

That's not so great, but disposable income surged sharply:

Even on a conventional year-over-year basis income was up 1.8%. That isn't great news for inflation hawks, but it's good news for workers.

I think I still remember how to do this. Here is PCE inflation in January:

Not good. In more conventional year-over-year terms, headline PCE came in at 2.5%. Core PCE was 2.6%.