Sam Lowry said:
BearlySpeaking said:
Sam Lowry said:
I've probably been talking about USAID longer than anyone else in this forum. I'd be delighted to see it go. But there's a right and a wrong way to do things. The ends don't justify the means. I'm surprised that this is such a difficult concept.
It's becoming clearer to me that Trump is engaged in a massive executive power grab. It's greater than anything else we've seen in our lifetimes. If a Democrat did the same, you'd be losing your **** and crying fascism all day long. At least I'm trying to give the president the benefit of the doubt as much as I can.
That's better than accusing judges of treason (a capital offense) just for doing their jobs. They haven't even got to the substance of the issues yet, and Trump already has you foaming at the mouth. How will you feel when Democrats exercise the vast powers that Trump is claiming?
You're being manipulated, friend.
There is no way I can see myself protesting Biden or Obama (or Bush or Clinton for that matter) acting on this magnitude of waste, if they were revealing the same type and amount of waste on this scale. I don't understand why you think we would be angry at any president of any party who brought the receipts that billions of dollars were going to terrorist-aligned organizations, foreign DEI boondoggles, immigrant assistance NGOs, sex positivity campaigns in Central Asia, postal workers with a $1.5 million salary to "watch mail circulation flows", etc., etc., and said they were going to cut it. I was on board with anyone doing this when the national debt hit around $12-13 trillion dollars.
I'm sitting here thinking and I can't imagine any world where I would be protesting a president doing this. Of the few things I supported Obama on, if he had done what has been done on the last 3 weeks and had another election coming up, I very likely would have voted for him if he followed through on this. Overhauling spending overseen by the executive branch is not "fascism" and it will never be "fascism." The power grab is a district judge in one of the states telling the President and his appointed agency heads that they not only cannot manage the agencies under their purview, they can't even look at/analyze the spending happening on their watch.
NO ONE IS SAYING THE AGENCIES SHOULDN'T BE AUDITED.
THAT INCLUDES THE JUDGES.
The concern is with the MANNER in which it is done.
I don't know what you would say if this were Biden, but I can tell you what 90% of the posters here would say. They would point out that DOGE is acting with little or no oversight from Congress. Its personnel aren't subject to the usual vetting processes. No one knows about safeguards against conflict of interest (and Musk's potential conflicts are many). No one even knows how these people are being paid.
That means there's an obvious danger that someone like Musk will act in his own interest and pursue his own enrichment while gutting programs that are useful and necessary to the public. Just like there's an obvious danger that corrupt bureaucrats who are being audited will kick and scream and do whatever it takes to hold onto their funding, whether justified or not.
Any reasonably objective person should be cognizant of both these hazards. If there's truly no way you can imagine Trump abusing his power, I guess that just shows how far gone the cult is.
Can you point out how he has abused his power up to this point? Can you point out what Musk has done that is corrupt or enriching himself? Where did the court address that? You really think an agency head has no right to look at the spreadsheets of his own agency? Really?
Congress abdicated its responsibility for tracking spending it has authorized. How are they going to do anything when they have made it clear they don't want the job? Have you thought about why this legislative institution that you have so much faith in has made it clear they don't want the responsibility?
I'm fully onboard with what the President is doing here. The idea is to use AI programs to track money flows and find out where it is actually going, to find unauthorized expenditures, so that we can finally pinpoint where the money is actually going and make much better informed decisions on what to cut. The whole point of this plan is to bypass the corrupt bureaucrats and get the actual routes and destinations of allocated funds before they can throw up the roadblocks like they always have in the past. It's a great idea, and if implemented well has an outside chance of actually starting to get our debt under control before we become another Argentina. Bringing the receipts of actual paths taken by funds to the public and Congress is the only way we have any chance to get Congress to act.
You have it completely backwards. Going to Congress with hat in hand asking for ambiguous "spending cuts" before we have the specifics laid out for everyone to see is not only going to fail miserably, but even if it did result in token "spending cuts," there is no guarantee it wouldn't be wasted on the same useless programs and cutting instead what actually needs to be funded by a government. The bureaucracy is already corrupt and some of its members have already stated they are going to oppose any administration cutting their money flow.
I'm always amazed fellow Americans like you aren't scared to death with where we are heading. Our only saving grace is that we are the richest nation in world history in absolute terms, but you should have started worrying about the debt trend around $15-20 trillion dollars ago. It can't continue going on forever.
Your idea that we can shut down the detailed analysis/tracking of expenditures the computer scientists under Musk has shown they can do and instead go beg Congress for a "spending cut" is precious. You are so far gone in your cultic worship of the bureaucracy and its enablers in Congress to think that this is an effective plan. Everything is going great with a $20 - 30 - 40 - 50 trillion national debt until one day it isn't.
When that day comes, you will finally see what it means to actually worry about a fascist/socialist/communist threat to our Republic.
