The Trump 2.0 assault on the Deep State has become a rolling blitzkrieg. The second Trump administration is ploughing a big ol’ D9 through the Washington swamp, sending the alligators and snakes scurrying from the light and the demented hens of the mainstream media screeching and clucking.
They don’t come any deeper than the deceptively named USAID. You probably think – and the MSM certainly want you to think – that this is some kind of humanitarian aid organisation. Probably, you’re picturing US planes unloading pallet loads of food packages to grateful dusky hordes.
This is completely untrue. The name stands for US Agency for International Development, and it was established in the 1960s by the Kennedy administration, to co-ordinate a combination of US ‘soft power’ and dirty tricks agencies. Think of it as the American BRI.
Trump, via Secretary of State Marco Rubio and DOGE leader Elon Musk, is set on bringing it to heel.
A White House statement sent late Monday afternoon didn’t address the closure of USAID, but listed a number of projects that it accused of being wasteful.
“Under President Trump, the waste, fraud, and abuse ENDS NOW,” the statement says.
An email to USAID personnel on Monday morning said “Agency leadership” made the decision to close the headquarters. The message said that replies should be directed to an email address that appears to be associated with Gavin Kliger, whose LinkedIn profile identifies him as a special adviser to the director of the Office of Personnel Management and who works for DOGE.
The first step was an order to agency personnel to stay out of the office and work from home last Monday. The point of this was to give DOGE unfettered access to workstations and servers.
Rubio said earlier on Monday in San Salvador, El Salvador, that he was troubled by reports that USAID officials were “unwilling to cooperate with people who are asking simple questions about: What does this program do? Who gets the money? Who are our contractors? Who’s funded?”
Naturally, the Washington swamp is furious.
Two Democratic senators, Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, vowed to place holds on the Trump administration’s nominees to serve at the State Department unless USAID was back up and running.
Which makes you wonder what they’re trying to protect.
Stuff like this:
American taxpayer money has funded irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan mainly benefiting Taliban narco-jihadists, U.S. officials found.
What possible justification could they have for spending US taxpayers’ money on such a mad scheme?
Between 2005 and 2008, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) devoted at least $330 million in funding to failed [alternative development projects (ADP)] projects intended to deter farmers and traffickers from cultivating and trafficking opium.
How? By pumping hundreds of millions into building canals and irrigation systems. Which Afghan farmers promptly used to keep right on growing opium.
[John Sopko of…] the U.S. Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a watchdog agency, revealed in a report that U.S.-funded alternative development projects (ADP) are being used to support poppy cultivation in Afghanistan […]
Geospatial data derived from satellite imagery shows that, in some areas, the [USAID’s Kandahar Food Zone program] KFZ’s focus on irrigation facilitated an increase in the amount of land dedicated to agriculture under the improved canal systems, but also contributed to rising levels of opium poppy cultivation.
SIGAR also learned that some USAID projects based provided resources for farm equipment and fertilizer used to cultivate opium.
And why wouldn’t they? Growing opium accounts for nearly a third of Afghanistan’s GDP and employs over half a million people.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a long-time critic of America’s counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan, urged the Trump administration to target the poppy crop.
“If we wanted to eliminate the poppy production in Afghanistan, we could do it within a week,” he declared during Wednesday’s hearing.
In the past, the Republican lawmaker suggested aerial spraying to destroy the opium crops, a method that has been prohibited by the U.S. Congress since 2009 due to the environmental impact of herbicides.
Former President U.S. Barack Obama’s administration ended the U.S.-led eradication efforts in Afghanistan.
Now, maybe that one can be chalked up to cluelessness (although who couldn’t have foreseen what would happen), but other USAID funding absolutely cannot. For instance, channelling tens of millions to media and NGOs dedicated to leading impeachment efforts against Trump in his first term.
As well, far-left Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez received USAID funding early in her career. Thirty-eight million dollars of USAID money went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, ground zero for Covid. Forty-seven thousand for a ‘transgender opera’ in Colombia seems almost benign. And half a million went to ‘expand atheism’ in Nepal.
The swamp is indeed a morass of treacherous mires and tangled weeds.
