The opening month of the second Trump administration has been marked by incredible speed and progress, especially toward their goal of scaling back the bloat of the federal government. The pace has left an out-of-power Democratic Party reeling. Rather than propose their own spending cuts, most Democrats have decided to oppose reflexively everything President Donald Trump is doing.

They have directed their loudest opposition toward the administration’s merging of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a little-known Washington organization, with the Department of State.

On the list of pressing issues facing the country, most Americans would not identify the future of USAID, something many had likely never heard of, as top of mind. In fact, according to polling from the Associated Press, seven in 10 believe the government is spending too much on “assistance to other countries.”

Yet, to hear the Democrats’ bellyaching and complaining, you’d think the sky was falling.

Much of the fallout has focused on the more egregious examples of USAID waste. Items like $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities,” $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia, and $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, according to the White House.

The list goes on and can be as amusing as outrageous. For Americans sitting down to complete their taxes, the time of year when families tally their bills to the federal government, hearing these examples of misplaced spending is infuriating and makes the case for the new Department of Government Efficiency created by Trump and run by Elon Musk.

In other instances, the misplaced spending is more sinister. Specific USAID spending appears to support terrorism. According to the Washington Free Beacon, six days before Hamas executed the worst terror attack in Israel’s history on Oct. 7, 2023, USAID awarded $900,000 to a Gaza charity connected to the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. The Beacon also reported that USAID funded a Gazan “educational and community center” controlled by an association whose leader once said that Jerusalem needed to be cleansed “from the impurity of the Jews.”

The federal budget will not be balanced by streamlining USAID. Its 2023 spending ($38 billion) was less than 1% of the federal budget.

However, that doesn’t make it — or any other federal line item — immune from scrutiny or belt-tightening. If the federal government were a business, it would have shuttered its doors long ago. In 2010, the national debt was $13 trillion. Today, it’s $36 trillion. Try applying that math to your household budget over the last 15 years and see how it works out.

The current trajectory is unsustainable. Half of every dollar we borrow today goes to pay down the debt. Within five years, interest payments on the debt are projected to exceed our annual military budget. This bill isn’t going to come due in my lifetime. It will fall to my grandkids and their kids to dig out of a fiscal mess.

Where are the Democrats on this pressing issue? With their heads in the sand, pretending all is well and spewing venom at Musk for daring to shed long-overdue sunlight on the rot and corruption of the federal government. The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker recently observed, “Many strange battle lines the Democratic Party has chosen to defend these past few years: illegal migrants over citizens, teachers unions over parents and children, criminals over victims, men-turned-women over girls.”

Add the spending crisis to that growing list.

No doubt, USAID has done some good on the world stage since its creation in 1961. Folding its responsibilities underneath the broader umbrella of the State Department can allow that positive output to continue in time.

Even more glaring is the need to get tough on spending, a principle that used to be bipartisan. Remember Bill Clinton’s 1996 promise that the era of big government is over? Even Barack Obama launched a “Campaign to Cut Waste.”

Today’s Democratic Party is far from those days and even further from common sense. They believe that the status quo and spending money like a drunken sailor, as the late Sen. John McCain was fond of saying, is perfectly acceptable.

Every long journey starts with a first step, and streamlining USAID is a sensible place to begin.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Scott Brown is chair of the Competitiveness Coalition. He is a former senator and ambassador. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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