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Comment by bearjaws | Hacker News Reader

If you are mad at your AWS bill, do you slide to your 10th line item? That is effectively what going after USAID is.

To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration.

She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50% of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her boss found her a job at another firm a week later thankfully. Then Friday she got called by the CEO to come back since it turns out they were not going to get cut. Obviously, she declined.

They are messing with real peoples lives and destroying businesses that help people.

Is the goal to save money? Balance the budget? If so, fixing tax loop holes and going after waste in the military will yield more than 10x what cutting USAID does.

FWIW I'm all for fixing government spending, but treating it like a CI/CD pipeline where you will just "rollback" is idiotic.

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Marco Rubio said that USAID wasn’t listening to orders. They were a rogue agency. From other things I’ve read it has been an issue for multiple administrations.

Watch here: https://x.com/defiantls/status/1888533363117449619?s=46

You need to understand when he says "irrespective of whether its in national interests" he means helping immigrants and asylum seekers, who are here legally even.

They listen to orders from many parts of the government, some of those are even conflicting orders. It's not like they are just doing whatever they want 90% of the time. Their money comes from who again?

For all the talk of legacy media, I assume anything posted on X is misinformation. And Rubio only cares about possibly being POTUS one day. Please post an article of any other administration that has ever complained about USAID being 'rogue'?

Orders can be given that are unconstitutional or unlawful. Congress appropriates and designates funds, it is illegal for the executive to impound funds Congress appropriate. Unfortunately the GOP is happy to hand over their power in Congress and walk right into a dictatorship.

Rubio was a vocal supporter of USAID until he had to bend the knee to Trump and by extension Elon.

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1298330380232200198

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1109221983907184641

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1179134071374598145

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1011667756209573888

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1331037375179452416

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1557806801491578886

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1222876152131457025

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1173664868408483840

https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1097238672909451269

Absolutely spineless. Thank you for showing this.

USAID funding is controlled by Congress. Trump cannot just order them to redirect funds on a whim.

Foreign policy is under the control of the executive branch. The President can order a pause on foreign aid to allow the new administration to review all foreign aid.

Once those orders were ignored, the administration had to take more drastic steps (as SOS Rubio pointed out).

No, the President cannot just unilaterally ignore Congressional spending requirements just because "the executive controls foreign policy". That's what got him impeached the first time.

They're also not "pausing" shit, they're cancelling contracts effective immediately & locking up the buildings. Elon tweeted a picture of the sign being removed from the front of the building. You're being dishonest about what is going on.

<< They are messing with real peoples lives and destroying businesses that help people.

I am not sure if NGOs are businesses. Aren't they typically some form of charity?

They're often registered non-profits, but not charities in the everyday sense of the word.

Correct they are a non-profit corporation. They recieve money from many sources, but they do employ people full time.

> non-profit immigration

Very vague. Wonder what they were really doing?

I worked for a USAID funded company once. On the surface they were doing satellite imagery analysis for agriculture. Want to know what they were really doing? Identifying prime agricultural land in Kenya to help the Kenyan government seize it from poor farmers.

This is an astonishing allegation. Can you substantiate any part of it?

And you went through the correct channels to notify USAID that their funds were being misused, providing sufficient evidence, right?

This was the intended use for those funds.

So USAID was aiding foreign states in strategically stealing land from its citizens? That was the goal of the program?

They didn't call it stealing, but yes. Google "Kenyan land seizure" for plenty of articles about it. The Kenyan government was particularly interested in Ogiek land, but it wasn't limited to them. It isn't much of a secret at this point. Kenya is by no means unique, USAID funds many such programs around the world. Or at least did.

This is an astonishing allegation. Can you substantiate any of it?

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