Obviously, DOGE Did Not Save Money

America’s reputation in the world is not great, and deteriorating. Pulling back for these well-perceived/helpful initiatives while building up (and deploying) military force is not helping. It’s really not a well considered strategy, and the decision makers in Washington could really benefit from a more worldly perspective, imo.

What a sad response to the obvious immediate harm done by poorly thought out policy. I thought hackernews was better than this.

There's the soft power argument that it was actually in US's self-interest to help. And for what it's worth, a lot of the vitriol is from taxpayers who supported that aid.

I'm not rich, but I give a lot of money every year to charity, to try to help those who need help. The United States is the richest country in the world. It was also giving to charity to help those who badly needed help. It was a small amount compared to its budget, and we called it USAID. To protect the money from being scammed by those running the countries we were helping, the US itself administered those programs as much as possible. We know how much Trump donates to charity: bupkis (read about the Donald J. Trump Foundation) and I have a pretty good inkling that Musk donates even less.

The steelman argument is that it was the sudden process that people object to. But the steelman against that is that slow processes are used adversarially to prevent action from being taken.

In the end, the only people who seem to get outcomes are the ones who rush things. Everyone talked about getting out of Afghanistan and only President Biden did it. The objections were predictably ones against haste. But we’d been in there for a decade past the time we wanted to get out.

In this event, considering that most of this aid has not been replaced since by other participants one can only conclude that it would have taken at least this long in a slow rollout. Even an emergency of unbelievable proportions did not incentivize other nations to act. It’s unlikely they would have acted when faced with what looks like yet another austerity project that is going to be inevitably rolled back.

In such a universe, if USAID was going, it was only going to go fast. If it wasn’t going to go fast, it was staying.

And it’s generally true that people subscribe to the famous Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Once we started providing AIDS treatment we were responsible, in their eyes, forever.

Given that, I think future charitable efforts should be evaluated in terms of such 50 year costs or so on. To save all the lives that US funding on PEPFAR saved we had to forgo an amount that would domestically have given us CA HSR. I think if you ask most Californians they’d rather have CA HSR than any charity program directed outside so in some respect we are just treating these people as our sin eaters.

This is a troll, right?