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Comment by neuronexmachina | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many deaths the USAID cuts will cause in the next decade. Congrats again to everyone who voted for this.

Lots of USAID-funded research in the US too - there are about a dozen labs researching food security that have been shut down at various US universities as part of the Feed the Future Initiative.

Here's one: https://ipmnewsroom.org/trump-administration-makes-cancellat...

> I wonder how many deaths the USAID cuts will cause in the next decade.

And how many it used to prevent for comparatively little cost:

https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/0-000-25-0...

I would expect that this exactly what the people who voted for the current government wanted. I would like to learn more what they were researching, though.

Or prevent. One of the many reasons people are happy about the ending of funding of USAID and NED is because these groups were major weapons of regime change and political agitation around the world. This foments instability and conflict in other nations. And in these conflicts the people most hurt are just the 'normal' people in a country who couldn't care less about the geopolitics, one way or the other.

Foreign aid with no strings attached or ulterior motives could be a good thing, but it mostly doesn't exist. That's tens of billions of dollars you could be spending on your own infrastructure, education, welfare, and so forth. The powers that be want something in return for that money, and that something isn't just a warm fuzzy feeling from doing right.

Russia will die anyway.

> That's tens of billions of dollars you could be spending on your own infrastructure, education, welfare, and so forth.

I don't see that money being reallocated domestically to infrastructure, education, or welfare. The opposite in fact.

Also, what you're arguing seems paradoxical? Either these programs are selfishly serving the interests of the US, and the US is benefiting, or they are of no benefit to the US and are useless.

This is all setting aside the manner in which these funding cessations happened, what the other "many reasons" were exactly, and why those reasons were important to the one person responsible for those cessations (to the extent we can even explain what actually happened). The question of how is probably as important as why.

You're missing the third option - these are harmful to the US. A lot of our propaganda, efforts to overthrow other countries, and other such efforts regularly backfire to a spectacular degree. For instance do you know the history of Iran? In the 50s it was a relatively moderate and secular democracy. But they got into a conflict with the West over demanding a greater degree of control over their own oil reserves (which we were exploiting at the time).

This motivated the propaganda to drive civil instability which was eventually exploited into a successful coup. [1] We then replaced their democracy with a pro-western puppet monarchy. This obviously was not especially well liked by the citizenry. And then in 1979 they had their own real coup, revolution, or whatever you want to call it against our puppet. [2] And this is when the hardline Islamist government took control who not only had a strong dislike of the West, but also this paranoia that we were always conspiring against them.

If we simply treated them as a sovereign nation instead of a plaything to be exploited, there's basically no chance Iran would be this Islamic extremist sect today. They may well even have ended up having positive relations with the US. And this isn't an exception, but a constantly recurring theme. Al Qaeda came about from our backing Islamic extremists in Afghanistan to try to get one off on the USSR.

And now after years we finally successfully overthrew Assad to replace a secular dictator with a worldwide wanted terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head, who we're now framing as a moderate extremist or whatever - even as he is genuinely actively carrying out acts far more egregious than even the most outrageous of our allegations against Assad. How do you think that relation's going to turn out over the next 20 years? It doesn't take a prophet to know the answer there.

It's all extremely myopic and destructive not only on a global level, but even a purely self interested one.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_revolution

That was the CIA not USAID.

So this would be like disbanding Ford because VW was cheating on their diesel emissions.

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Look, making the government more efficient is a good idea. That's not what's being done. The government is being shrunk so it's not capable of doing thinks like ensuring people like Musk/Bezos actually pay the appropriate tax rate. Or ensuring that factories don't enmass dump their toxic waste into drinking water.

The cover story is efficiency; the easy way to tell this is the GSA itself has proposed (prior to Trump) ways to save over 55 billion and DOGE isn't doing them.

Regime change operations regularly utilized USAID and NED (which, in turn, was often itself funded by USAID) to foster social instability, back opposition forces, and just generally cause chaos. For one particularly absurd instance in more contemporary times, here [1] is USAID trying to cause civil unrest in Cuba and instead ultimately just creating a honey pot for the Cuban government. Note that article is ~11 years old - it's not just a justification for contemporary actions.

[1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other... (archive: https://archive.is/IQl36)

Sadly, most of them don't care what happens to foreigners. Even more sadly, some of those same people are hoping for those deaths.

And pandemics.

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