USAID Is History As Trump Targets Government Agencies

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Help me with USAID. Okay. You got Trump walking in saying, we're gonna close this place down. You got Congress saying you can't do that. He can do that. Okay. He can do that. The USAID, it was a congressional action that put them in place. That doesn't mean he can't dismantle them in all kinds of nuanced ways. What do you say? You say, Mary, Joe, Bob, we're gonna have to have you relocate to Alaska. We want you to be in Alaska because we think you can do better in Alaska. Oh, by the way, we're gonna shut the office down here and we're gonna move it down to Selma, Alabama. There's all kinds of things he can do. And he knows that. And for the senators to, you see, sometimes you have these senators that overspeak, they say he can't do that. It's impossible. And then they look like idiots because he's smart enough. He's been down this road already. He saw it with the first term. Everything he's doing, if you think about it, Farron, is a reaction to how he sat. He didn't know what he was doing first term. He didn't know the tricks first term. USAID, that's history. He's gonna suck it up into probably either, you could put it anywhere. You could say it's gonna be part of the defense budget. You could say it's part of the Secretary of State budget. You could put it anywhere and say, we're accomplishing the same thing. But to do that, he's got a problem because Congress did enact that particular office. Right?

Right. And so he cannot just say USAID doesn't exist. But he can say, well, nobody works there anymore. Or he can say, well, USAID is now a program of the US Department of Defense. And the counter argument that I've seen a lot of people try to make is okay, but USAID has congressionally approved funding for projects, and the president cannot take away the funding. The problem that those people don't realize is how long is the government funded for? The government's only funded for another month and a half.

Yes.

And Republicans right now are working on their budget bill. They can kill USAID. They can actually write the department out of existence in that bill and they likely will because he wants them to.

They can write it out. They can write 'em off in nuanced ways. That's what everybody's missing here.

There's a thousand ways, unfortunately.

It's all gonna be nuance.

Yeah. And you bring up a good point about moving it to the Defense Department because once you move it there and say, okay, we'll fund it with the Defense Department budget, well that becomes discretionary once the budget is approved. So if they say, okay, we're funding you, here's your 20 bucks. You still exist. We didn't violate the law by destroying the government agency. We're still giving you money, but it's not even enough for you to go and get lunch today. So they can do those things, unfortunately, because, we look at all this and we see, wow, we kind of screwed up as a country when we designed the government in ways. We gave so much power to this executive branch.

The executive branch has huge power. Every time I hear some senator get up and say, no, he can't do this, I cringe because all it does, it says he can't do what you're saying, but he can do what they're saying. And he will accomplish this.