Way back in October of 2024, Elon Musk and his DOGE shock troopers, which included a man with the social media handle of Big Balls, claimed that they would cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. (That would be nearly a third of the entire budget.) It was a new era of austerity and employment cuts, such as eliminating 10,000 jobs at USAID.
Of the targeted agencies, USAID was easily the most criticized. With an annual budget of $40 billion it was doing insane things like spending millions a day to save lives across the globe. But the expenditures that Trump and his truly lovely press secretary Karoline Leavitt liked to bitch about were so insignificant they wouldn’t pay for the fins on a tomahawk missile. We are talking about $47k for a trans opera of some sort in Colombia or $70k for a production of a musical in Ireland that reportedly promoted DEI ideas.
The daily operating cost of USAID was around $109 million. So, the trans opera amounted to 0.043% of the daily operating cost of the entire agency. Some other neat facts about USAID: its budget was 0.3% of all federal spending, it ranked 19th in spending among federal agencies, and the share of USAID spending in FY 2024 was lower than in FY 1980, not ballooning like ole’ Musky would have us believe during his ketamine-fueled trips, I mean pressers, while standing next to Trump in the Oval Office.
One last fact worth sharing comes to us from the Center for Global Development. They’ve calculated that as a result of USAID being gutted by Musk’s minions, 500,000 to 700,000 additional deaths will occur worldwide…per year. They’ve ever so kindly reported that their initial estimate is quite conservative and that the number will almost certainly be higher.
USAID was the agency labeled as the enemy, the poster child for crazy, woke-riddled, DEI-pilled projects. But the main argument was that USAID is the best example of government spending gone wild! We were to believe that there was no justification for spending $109 million a day to save lives, prevent disease, to educate and uplift struggling populations across the globe.
They want you to believe that spending $890 million a day on the Iran War is a better use of our dollars because, hey, at least it’s not woke, am I right? And these dollars aren’t being spent on DEI, they’re spent on killing people. That makes it all better for Trump and his followers. When they tell you they are fiscally conservative, ask them how much of total federal spending did USAID amount to?
Ask them how much an F-15 costs? (Of which we’ve lost three so far in this war.) Answer: $90m a piece for a total of $300m lost.
Ask them how much a tomahawk missile costs? Answer: $2m a pop.
Ask them how much it cost to move war-making machines over to the Middle East and to keep them there? Answer: $630m for transportation. $13m a day to have two carriers there.
Ask them how much a one-way drone costs? $35k a pop. (Source for these costs.)
After all the hype, the little men and women working at DOGE to rid the country of wasteful government spending reported that they cut $160 billion in government spending, not $2 trillion like Musk promised. The only problem is, you have to trust DOGE to believe that $160 billion number because only 40% of that figure is broken down and detailed.
Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers have heard estimates from the Pentagon that the Iran War is really costing $2 billion a day. Today marks day 9 of the conflict, bringing the total cost so far to $18 billion if you believe what the Pentagon insiders are saying, or a mere 8.01 billion if you want to use CNN’s conservative number.
Put another way, the total cost of this war through day 9 is the equivalent of putting on 257,142 DEI plays in Ireland. Pick your poison, I guess, but for me it’s not even a choice. If one has to live with bloated government spending, I’ll choose, time after time, the kind that saves lives instead of blows them to pieces.
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