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Merged USAID: is it really a bunch of crazy leftists? / Trump Was Absolutely Right to Shut Down USAID

Ziggurat said:
There were no facts involved in your supposition of what motivates me.
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The facts lie in my descriptions of what Musk and his team are doing and the observations of the glaring inconsistencies in your position on those activities compared to other related issues.
 
Ziggurat said:
They have now. Where were they the last four years? Where were they the past too decades? And proposals for investigating how to cut basically amount to bureaucratic delays. We can't make any cuts until we've studied it deeply, then we can debate the study, and haggle about which cuts to make, and by the time we're done no real progress has been made. I've seen that game played before.
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I think this gets closer to the reasoning to why people are more accepting of this action on the conservative side. I am not a big fan of the abrupt nature, but I can't really debate that this isnt the normal trend of things. Not only that but also highlighting the cost of the investigation afterwards as a deterrent to further ones.
 
Ziggurat said:
And that cannot possibly be true of critics of USAID.

If it weren't for double standards, you would have no standards at all.
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I addressed this argument before you made it, but I’ll go ahead and address it again.

My concerns about the activities of Musk and DOGE coincide with the beginning of those activities.

USAID has existed for several decades in the same form it was when Trump and Musk decided it was a dangerous rogue agency that needed to be immediately dismantled. Zero people gave a ◊◊◊◊ about it.

The inciting incident for my concern was the thing I’m concerned about happening.

The inciting incident for the concern of Trump supporters was Trump and Musk manufacturing lies and conspiracies about a thing that had long been in existence.
 
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Ziggurat said:
That matches what I said. Everything else is innuendo.
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That's not what I infer from the quote. You said "They were investigating Ukraine" The quote says they were investigating "oversight of Starlink provided to Ukraine" That is Starlink, not Ukraine. Starling didn't decide on its own to go to Ukraine--it was provided by the owner, Elon Musk! Taken in conjunction with conflicting reports as to whether Russia had access to Starlink, it is pretty clear that the main player at issue here was not Ukraine, but Musk.
 
stanfr said:
That's not what I infer from the quote. You said "They were investigating Ukraine" The quote says they were investigating "oversight of Starlink provided to Ukraine" That is Starlink, not Ukraine.
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No it isn’t. Starlink terminals provided to Ukraine are in the physical possession of Ukraine. Want to know what the Starlink terminals provided to Ukraine are being used for? You need to ask Ukraine. Starlink here refers to the terminals, not the company, because the company wasn’t provided to Ukraine, the terminals were. And once those terminals were handed over to USAID, the company wasn’t in control of them. There would be no point in investigating the company to figure out what Ukraine did with them.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
Don't know. They're all too young to have a proper media footprint. Though I wouldn't be at all surprised if a couple of them were Ruzzian sleeper agents.
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And here I thought only the right did unhinged conspiracy theories.
 
The Guardian reported, "“[The US is handing] on a silver platter to China the perfect opportunity to expand its influence, at a time when China’s economy is not doing very well,” said Prof Huang Yanzhong, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations."

What if after a 90-day review, it is determined that a given program was a good thing and needs to be restarted? Then a great deal of money will be spent that would not have to have been spent. That is wasteful.
 
Ziggurat said:
And here I thought only the right did unhinged conspiracy theories.
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Is it known whether Musk's Muskrats have had any security vetting at all, and if so by whom? Are they US citizens?

So far as I know Musk got security clearance because Trump declared he had a security clearance magic wand and tapped Musk with it. Whether Trump did the same to Musk's techbros or Musk now has the magic power to vouch for them himself I wait to learn.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
The Guardian reported, "“[The US is handing] on a silver platter to China the perfect opportunity to expand its influence, at a time when China’s economy is not doing very well,” said Prof Huang Yanzhong, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations."
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Want to take bets on whether or not CFR is funded by USAID?
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Is it known whether Musk's Muskrats have had any security vetting at all, and if so by whom? Are they US citizens?

So far as I know Musk got security clearance because Trump declared he had a security clearance magic wand and tapped Musk with it. Whether Trump did the same to Musk's techbros or Musk now has the magic power to vouch for them himself I wait to learn.
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You do realize there’s a difference between not being vetted and being a sleeper agent, right? Do you think it likely that there’s a sleeper agent among them?
 
Safe-Keeper said:
You know, this is not really the right forum for strawmen and angry knee-jerk outbursts. We have Twitter for that.
Asking for better sources than (literally!) communist propaganda is just critical thinking. You'd get the same reaction here if you treated putin, Drumpf, or Musk as objective sources. It's not about automatically dismissing Cubans as a source, it's about striving for reliability and critical thinking.
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You obviously can't come up with one single argument for why my links are "(literally!) communist propaganda," even though the use of the word literally implies that it should be extremely easy for you to do so. Your knee-jerk reaction is no argument. Even when you are dealing with "putin, Drumpf, or Musk," the mere mentioning of their names is not enough to argue that what they say must be wrong. Who told you that that is how skepticism works? You actually have to deal with the arguments and alleged facts that they present.

It doesn't even seem to get through to you that, in addition to the Cuban sources ...
USAID (CubaSí.cu)
La Usaid en desgracia o la nueva narrativa de las viejas patrañas Granma.cu, Feb 3, 2025)
U.S. Agency finances campaign against Cuban doctors in Mexico (Granma.cu, Sep 22, 2022)
USAID and the deep pockets of the counterrevolution (Granma.cu, Nov 12, 2020)
USAID thieves in Latin America (Granma.cu, Feb 21, 2020)
The U.S. government allocates millions of dollars to obstruct Cuban medical cooperation (Granma.cu, Aug 29, 2019)
Another USAID covert plan exposed (Granma.cu, Dec 12, 2014)
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... I also presented you with these, all of which aren't Cuban and most of which aren't communist at all:
From Cuba to Brazil: How USAID became a political interference tool in various countries (The Times of India, Feb 4, 2025)
'Cuban Twitter' and Other Times USAID Pretended to Be an Intelligence Agency (Foreign Policy, April 3, 2014)
Secret Programs Hurt Foreign Aid Efforts (NYT, Dec 16, 2014)
Alan Gross (Wikipedia)
Raffi Berg: BBC Middle East editor exposed as CIA, Mossad collaborator (MROnline, Jan 28/MintPressNews Jan 3, 2025)
Rubio’s years of strong support for USAID stand in contrast to his sudden criticism of the aid agency (CNN, Feb 5, 2025)
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But feel free to feel in your heart of hearts that anything that criticizes your pipe dreams must be propaganda.
It's something you and Puppycow have in common with MAGA.
And I still haven't seen a single argument for why any of my sources are supposed to be communist propaganda - other than your knee-jerk outbursts that it must be the case.
It's bloody awful that this is what skepticism appears to have been reduced to.
 
TragicMonkey said:
This part is kind of funny, though: amongst USAID's purchases are...surplus crops from American farmers. They send the food as aid to other countries. But now, of course, they won't; the foreigners won't get the food, and those American farmers (repeat: American farmers) will not get the money. Instead, their surplus crops will...lower the value of all their other crops. I guess that's the price of "pwning the libs", red states.
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That is the genius of the man! That's how he'll lower the price of groceries as promised! It should have made chicken feed cheaper already, making the price of eggs drop any time soon ... Just wait for it ... Wait ... It's just about to drop ... any minute now ...
 
Ziggurat said:
You do realize there’s a difference between not being vetted and being a sleeper agent, right? Do you think it likely that there’s a sleeper agent among them?
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Yes, I do appreciate the difference. I don't think it's especially likely, but I do think competent enemies will have been very eager indeed to exploit any such lapse that presents itself. I'm sure you too appreciate why security vetting exists.

I'm sure you also recognise that "it wouldn't surprise me if one of them turns out to be a Russian sleeper" is not actually a conspiracy theory that one of them is a Russian agent. It's alarm at the possible consequences if indeed nobody has made what we might expect to be mandatory background checks to find out.
 
Ziggurat said:
You do realize there’s a difference between not being vetted and being a sleeper agent, right? Do you think it likely that there’s a sleeper agent among them?
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Great that you are admitting they are unvetted, not so great that you don’t seem to care.

I have no idea what the odds are that any of them are sleeper agents but they’re probably low.

Then again, there’s a whole range of issues between “sleeper agent” and “not a security threat” that would preclude someone from being granted access to sensitive government data. That’s why we have the vetting process and it’s weird that you refuse to acknowledge that.
 
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