USAID slashes 83% of the programs.

This makes more sense when you acknowledge that only 77% of their budget was devoted to foreign aid.

If my math is correct, this means that the USAID budget has gone from forty billion to around seven billion. That is just slightly less than the nine billion that their own broad spending budget was showing.

If I had to guess, I would say close to 100% of the "governance" spending got cut, and most of everything else outside of the actual aid got cut. Based on the math, at least some of the aid had to have been cut as well. Meaning that even within the portion that they were tasked to do, that there was some fraud or misuse of the funds happening there as well.

The program has been officially merged into the State Department. It was Marco Rubio who announced these cuts.

Now I was reading a tear-jerking article from someone who was just recently laid off from USAID. This person was devastated and suggested that the entire reasoning of USAID being dismantled was about deception. Obviously the deception was not on the part of the agency for being less than transparent about what they were doing with 40 billion dollars, but rather on the part of Trump, Musk, and DOGE for any exposure to said issues. The article doesn't explain the specifics of the deception, just suggests that it is there.

This person let us all know that they have worked with numerous countries and NGOs to assist in creating "an information system to improve aid transparency and efficiency when sudden news arrived". If that job sort of sounds made-up to you, well you are not alone. My bullshit detector is flashing red and buzzing uncontrollably. I mean, how often can we anticipate "sudden news" and to what degree can we be assured that the places we are building these "information systems" will be next in line for "sudden news"? This sounds like a literal open ended job that might never come to a conclusion based on the fact that there is always a new NGO that might need a new "information system" to make sure they are prepared to be more transparent when the next "sudden news" hits them. In fact, such a job and such a program is probably reliant on the creation of more NGOs for them to go work on. If you detect a circular manner in which this self funding occurs, well you are again... not alone.

Now it is possible that there was some good here being done? Maybe. But absent examples for when this information system came into play and how it helped this country or this NGO in these "sudden news" situations, it is hard to believe that such successes actually took place. It sounds like a fun job. Travel the world. Move from one place to the other setting up some form of an information system here and there and everywhere. But that all that was explained. It was not explained when or to what degree these systems have ever been used. The usual "success stories" appeared obviously lacking here.

At the end of the day, this is a minor success in the grand scheme of things. I am betting that this is one sticks because of all of the attention it garnered and because of how many Republicans came out against it. But there are so many other programs out there with probably just as much waste and fraud and we may never get to them over the next four years. Moreover, how long does it take for Congress to get back to business as usual where the horse trading is always about spending more and never about cutting anything.