Myrtle Beach, SC
Both halves are partly right and the arithmetic settles which one matters more, so let me do the arithmetic.
Total US foreign assistance runs somewhere under seventy billion dollars a year. USAID’s share was around forty billion. Federal outlays are roughly six and three-quarter trillion.
So the entire foreign aid budget is about one percent of what the government spends. USAID alone was closer to half a percent.
Now set that against the target. The figure quoted at the rally last October was two trillion dollars. It was revised in January to a trillion as the realistic goal.
You cannot get to a trillion from an account worth forty billion. You cannot get to a tenth of a trillion. If every dollar of American foreign assistance had been eliminated on the first day and never restored, the government would have spent roughly ninety-nine percent of what it was going to spend anyway.
I work in marketing and I know the difference between a campaign that opens with its strongest product and one that opens with its easiest sale. This was the easiest sale.
That does not make the first half of the question wrong. A lot of that spending did have a weak domestic constituency, and the proof is that it was cut and the districts stayed quiet. Constituency is a real fact about money and it is worth naming.
But the second half is the one that describes the campaign, and it describes it with a number rather than a suspicion. Starting with the least-lobbied account is not merely a preference for easy targets. In this case it is a start that cannot reach the destination, because the destination is twenty-five times larger than the entire account.
So the honest sentence in April is: yes on the constituency finding, yes on the incentive critique, and the arithmetic makes the second one decisive. Everything that matters is still ahead, and none of it is quiet.
Novi, MI
A plant will scrap the unused side shed before it stops the main line, and that does not prove the shed was unproductive. It proves the shed had no union. That is the instinct and there is a large piece of this portfolio where it is simply wrong, so let me put it on the table.
Food for Peace. Title II of Public Law 480. The United States buys American agricultural commodities — wheat, sorghum, lentils, vegetable oil, roughly a billion and a half to two billion dollars’ worth a year — and ships them abroad as food aid. A statutory share of the tonnage must travel on American-flagged vessels under cargo preference law. The McGovern-Dole school feeding program works the same way on a smaller scale.
That is not a letterhead account. That is Kansas wheat, North Dakota commodities, Great Lakes and Gulf shipping, and American mariners, all of it with a district and a senator.
And the districts did not stay quiet. Farm-state Republicans — Kansas, North Dakota, others — pushed hard through the winter and spring not to eliminate the program but to move it to Agriculture, which is where the commodity purchasing constituency has always thought it belonged.
So the claim that this money had no domestic constituency fails on a substantial and identifiable piece of it, and the failure is not marginal — Food for Peace is one of the oldest and most politically durable programs in the entire portfolio precisely because it was designed in 1954 to serve two constituencies at once.
In process terms this is why you disaggregate before you conclude. The portfolio was treated as one part. It is not one part. It contains:
Commodity programs with a domestic supplier base, a shipping requirement, and farm-state defenders. Real constituency.
Health delivery programs — vaccination, treatment, disease surveillance — with countable output and an American pharmaceutical and NGO delivery chain. Moderate constituency, mostly institutional.
Governance, stabilisation and convening work with no unit of output anybody can name and no domestic supplier base worth the name. Genuinely thin constituency, and the honest target.
Cutting all three at once and then citing the silence as evidence about all three is a sampling error. The silence came from the third category. The first category was not silent — it was negotiating.
So my answer: the constituency finding holds for a portion and fails for a portion, the disaggregation was available and was not done, and the second half of the question is the better description of the campaign because the whole account is one percent of federal spending and the target was a thousand times larger.
Orange County, CA
Orange County can tell a constituency map from a courage story, and this one is mostly a map. What I want to do is price the campaign rather than the account, because the two are different questions and only one of them has been asked.
The account. Total foreign assistance is roughly one percent of federal outlays. USAID’s portion was around half a percent. The agency’s functions are being folded into the State Department as of July, per the notification sent to Congress at the end of March.
The target. Two trillion, stated in October. One trillion, revised in January.
The arithmetic. Complete elimination of all American foreign aid — every dollar, permanently — gets you to about four percent of a one-trillion-dollar goal.
I work in finance and I would not accept that as an opening position in any restructuring. Not because the account is sacred, but because a plan whose first six months address four percent of the target has not been sequenced. It has been started somewhere.
The obvious objection is that you start where you can move, and that is a real management principle. Early wins build credibility for later fights. I have run that argument myself in other contexts.
The test of whether it is a principle or an excuse is whether the schedule for the hard accounts exists.
It does not. There is no published sequence, no date on which Medicare administration gets the same treatment, no calendar at all. What exists is a completed action on the smallest available account and a claim about a target twenty-five times larger.
In portfolio terms, that is a manager who liquidated the least liquid holding first and told the client the position is being reduced.
So my finding is: the constituency observation is real and partly true — parts of that portfolio genuinely had no domestic defender, and the silence when they went is evidence about the political market rather than about the merits.
And the campaign finding is decisive. One percent, four percent of the target, no published sequence for the rest, and the accounts that remain are the ones with the constituencies.
The thing to demand in April is not the restoration of anything. It is a dated calendar for the large domestic accounts. That single document would settle whether this is a sequence or a stopping point, and it costs nothing to publish.
Bismarck, ND
Run it the other way, and this one is unusually clean.
A Democratic administration announces a trillion dollars in savings. Six months in, it has eliminated an agency accounting for roughly half a percent of federal spending, absorbed its functions into another department, and published no schedule for anything larger.
Would I call that a serious cost-control program? I would say they went where the resistance was lowest and called it a start, and I would ask to see the calendar.
Same answer here.
Now the part where I correct my own side. The claim that this money had no domestic constituency is not accurate across the portfolio.
Food for Peace buys American commodities from American farmers and ships a statutory share on American vessels. That is North Dakota. That is my state, and our delegation has spent the winter arguing to move the program to Agriculture rather than end it — not because they love foreign aid but because the program is a market for the crop.
So when this Forum says the districts stayed quiet, it should be clear about which districts. The health and governance programs had no domestic defender. The commodity programs did, and they used it, and they largely got what they wanted.
In compliance work we call that a coverage error in the sample. You cut three different things, one of them made noise, and the conclusion was drawn from the two that did not.
So: constituency finding true for part, false for part, and the campaign finding is the one that survives whole. One percent of outlays, no schedule for the rest, and every remaining account has a defender.
Publish the calendar. Refusing to publish it is the answer.
Clermont, FL
If the only people yelling are the contractors on the grant, it did not have guests. That was my line and I want to update it, because the yelling was more complicated than that and the structure has now changed.
At the end of March the administration notified Congress that USAID would be abolished as an independent agency and its remaining functions absorbed into the State Department, effective the first of July.
That is a reorganisation rather than a pure cut, and it matters for how this should be scored. Some of the work continues under a different letterhead. Some of it does not. Nobody has published which.
I consult with small businesses and this is the most common thing that happens when an owner closes a division. He announces the closure, the functions turn out to be load-bearing, and eighteen months later two-thirds of the work is being done again by other people under different job titles at a cost nobody tracks because there is no longer a division to attribute it to.
That is not a prediction about this case. It is the base rate, and the way to avoid it is a document listing which functions ended and which moved.
Nobody has produced one. That is the thing to ask for in April, and it costs an afternoon.
On the question itself: the constituency observation is real for a slice and wrong for another slice. The commodity programs have farmers behind them and those farmers were not quiet. The governance and convening work had nobody, and its silence when it went is genuine information about what the political market valued.
But the account is one percent of federal spending. Closing a gift shop is allowed. Announcing that you have begun a trillion-dollar reduction because you closed a gift shop is a different claim, and it is the one that needs the calendar.
Jacksonville, FL
Ports know a cargo that has a broker but no local consignee. That was my framing and it is right for part of this portfolio and wrong for a part I did not check, so let me correct it properly.
Where the framing holds. Governance programming, stabilisation work, convening, and technical assistance with no measurable output. Those had professional advocates and no district. When they stopped, the yelling came from implementers rather than from anybody’s voters. That is broker cargo and the observation is fair.
Where it fails. Food for Peace is not broker cargo. It is American grain, bought from American farmers, moved on American-flagged ships under a cargo preference statute that exists specifically to keep an American merchant marine in business. It has a consignee in every grain state and at every port that handles it. The program was designed in 1954 to serve a domestic agricultural interest and a foreign policy interest simultaneously, and that design is why it has survived seventy years of budget cutting.
So there is a genuine domestic constituency inside this portfolio and it behaved exactly as a constituency behaves — quietly, through its senators, negotiating placement rather than fighting elimination in public. That is what an effective constituency looks like from outside. It does not riot. It gets the program moved.
I missed that in February and I would rather say so than let it stand.
Now the manifest question, which is where the port framing earns its keep.
At the end of March the notification went to Congress: USAID abolished as an independent agency, functions absorbed into State by the first of July. That is a berth transfer, not a cancelled sailing, for some unknown fraction of the cargo.
What has not been published is the split. Which programs ended. Which moved. Which moved and were reduced. That document exists inside the building — it has to, because somebody is executing the transfer — and it has not been released.
Without it, nobody can score this. Supporters will count the full agency budget as a saving. Critics will count every terminated award as a loss. Both will be wrong by whatever the transferred amount turns out to be.
So the ask in April is one page: functions terminated, functions transferred, dollars attached to each.
And the campaign finding stands independent of all of it. This portfolio is about one percent of federal outlays. The stated target is twenty-five times the whole account. Starting here was not merely the least-lobbied door — it was a door that cannot lead to the stated destination, and the sequence for the doors that can has not been published.
Constituency finding: true for part, false for part, and I had it wrong on the part that has farmers behind it. Campaign finding: intact and the arithmetic makes it decisive.
Las Vegas, NV
If the floor does not notice the game is gone, it was a back-room game. That holds for a portion of this and I want to say what the sequence tells you, because sequence is the whole tell in operations.
Six months in, the completed action is on an account worth roughly one percent of federal spending. The target announced was a trillion dollars. That is four percent of the goal if you eliminate the entire account and never restore a dollar.
In my business, when a manager tells you he is cutting costs and the first completed action is the smallest line on the sheet, you do not conclude he is not serious. You ask for the schedule.
If the schedule exists and the big items are dated, he is sequencing and the small item was a warm-up. That is legitimate and it is how most turnarounds actually run.
If there is no schedule, the small item was the program.
There is no published schedule. That is the entire finding in April and it will remain the finding until somebody produces a calendar.
The other thing worth noting, and it goes to our own side’s accuracy. This Forum said the districts stayed quiet. Some did not. The commodity food aid programs buy American crops and ship on American vessels, and the farm-state members spent the winter working to move that program rather than lose it. That is a constituency operating exactly as constituencies do.
So the quiet was not uniform, and the part that was quiet was the part with no domestic supplier.
Cut the back-room games, fine. Post the date you touch the main pit. Nobody has posted it, and after six months the absence is the answer.
Knoxville, TN
The design question here is about sequencing, and sequencing has a testable property that nobody has applied.
A sequenced program has three things: a target, an ordered list of accounts, and dates. Any one of them alone is a claim. All three together are a plan.
Target: stated. A trillion dollars, revised down from two.
Ordered list: not published.
Dates: not published.
So what exists is a target and a completed first action on an account representing roughly one percent of federal outlays — about four percent of the target if it were eliminated entirely and permanently.
In public works we would call that a project with a budget and no schedule, and the standard treatment is to assume it will not be delivered until a schedule appears. That is not cynicism. It is what the absence of a schedule reliably indicates, in every discipline, every time.
The generous reading is that the sequence exists internally and has not been published because publishing it would mobilise the constituencies of the later accounts against them before you get there. That is a genuine tactical concern and I do not dismiss it.
The problem is that it is indistinguishable from having no sequence, and it will remain indistinguishable until either the calendar appears or the second account is touched.
So the test I would set, and it resolves this question empirically within a few months: which account is next, and when?
If the answer is another small foreign or cultural account, the second half of this question is the description of the whole enterprise.
If the answer is Medicare administration or federal IT procurement — the two places the money actually is, by this file’s own accounting in earlier weeks — then the first move was a sequence rather than a stopping point.
That question will answer itself by autumn without anybody having to argue about motives. I would rather wait for it than guess, and I would rather ask for the calendar now than complain about its absence in October.
