The Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action of any kind. The people do the same in overwhelming numbers every time it comes up for plebiscite.
I get that there is a class of people that benefited from affirmative action sinecures and are now worried that DEI rhetoric has made their cushy gigs untenable. As Steve Sailer pointed out, the old system had quietly selected for socially comfortable token ally behavior of the Obama first term kind.
But if my neighbor can have a cushy AA sinecure, why can't I have a cushy AA sinecure. And if I already have one, why can't it be even cushier! The demand for unearned privilege is basically infinite, and so DEI and its rhetoric is a natural goal of people wanting to grow the AA pie to include themselves by ratcheting up the rhetoric and trying to take it in new and novel ways. There is no natural endpoint to unearned privilege. No "boil the frog this much" coordination point that "the blob" can settle on. Because "the blob" is made up of individuals with their own incentives.
Its similar to how T has been a disaster for LGB, but its hard to keep out a new oppressed group when your claiming to be an oppressed group.
"The Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action of any kind."
I wish that were true but it's not. The logic of the Harvard admissions case could be applied to a lot of other areas but the Court refused to go there. And there are lots of older cases okaying affirmative action that would have to be explicitly overruled.
A Supreme Court that was sure of its own righteousness would do it. Such was the 1954 Court in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring segregation unconstitutional ("separate is inherently unequal"). But for all the rhetoric about them, this Court is not. Even the six "conservatives" are divided in many ways, perhaps the most important of which is "don't rock the boat/respect precedent" (John Roberts) v. "do what the constitution says and don't care about the precedents" (Clarence Thomas).
Yes and no. Alas, because the Justices have warped the language so much over so many years, there is no alternative but to use scare quotes in these discussions. But it depends what one means by "outlaw" and "affirmative action."
It's been nearly 50 years since Bakke in which SCOTUS explicitly prohibited racial quotas as unconstitutional. And then we still got 50 years of quotas. And it's been more than 20 years since Gratz, which prohibited crude point-scoring by race, but there's no doubt we got 20 years of crude point-scoring by race.
This whole line of cases including FAIR (that's how I like to abbreviate the case) can fairly be characterized as the most obviously, brazenly, and consistently dishonest of anything SCOTUS has done in the past century. If someone like Levin is looking for the real root of collapse in trustworthiness of institutions, this multi-generational legal travesty is a good place to look, because SCOTUS made it the law of the land to penalize integrity and reward perjury.
It was clear to all informed observers every time that SCOTUS would announce some prohibition and then not even create a "loophole" - which at least a lawyer could openly argue entitled their clients to an exception - but signal to institutions that they could go ahead and break the law so long as they -lied- about what they were doing in the Court's prescribed manner. The impact from the way this virus ripped through all intellectual and institutional life to create an entire ecosystem of error and empire of lies built upon yet more lies cannot be overstated.
Souter - who thought affirmative action was perfectly constitutional - was nevertheless of the New England WASP old school and scrupulous enough to be bothered by this state of affairs to make one of his only dissents in which there was a memorable - indeed now famous - excerpt. Here he is talking about a strategy to arrive at the same racial admission statistics by admitting the top graduates of high school classes, with the percent finessed so as to arrive at the intended quotas.
"While there is nothing unconstitutional about such a practice, it nonetheless suffers from a serious disadvantage. It is the disadvantage of deliberate obfuscation. The "percentage plans" are just as race conscious as the point scheme (and fairly so), but they get their racially diverse results without saying directly what they are doing or why they are doing it. In contrast, Michigan states its purpose directly and, if this were a doubtful case for me, I would be tempted to give Michigan an extra point of its own for its frankness. Equal protection cannot become an exercise in which the winners are the ones who hide the ball."
But that's what happened. For 50 years, SCOTUS said, "Racial preferences are not allowed under Equal Protection. But, if you go and hide the ball, we'll let you get away with it anyway." Of course even SCOTUS couldn't match the state of affairs in California, in which the state university system was ordered by public referendum to eliminate racial preference admissions, and the schools and courts there just ignored that law entirely without even extending the curtesy of lying about it.
In FAIR the majority opinion dug even further down the hole and meta-lied in denial that it was once again instructing institutions in how to lie to get away with it, at the very moment of issuing the instructions, and with the nerve to cite Cummings which had been a dead letter the whole time. (True to her style, Sotomayor was not shy about pointing this out in dissent, and the iterative editing process produced some pre-emptive swipes.) (Citations removed)
"At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But,
despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.” Cummings v. Missouri (1867). A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race."
In other words, "We will still let you get away with racial preferences if you lie and say you are not considering race qua race, and craft the essay prompt to ask how their race impacted their individual experiences which can be ties to their courage and determination and lead to their unique ability to contribute ... We recognize it might take you a few years of disruption to your racial quota goals to master the new ball-hiding game, and we sincerely apologize for that."
To the extent you have a point, they decidely do not “sincerely apologize for that.”
And I think you do have a point, though it is not as strong as you claim it to be, at least for private institutions. (For public ones, I agree with you that they should not be allowed to do any of it. Full stop.)
To do otherwise is to deny private institutions agency. And imo your presumed cure would be even worse than the disease. So having “fine lines”, which will occasionally be crossed is inevitable, but probably the least worst result.
And slapping down anyone, hard, who brazenly blows past the line should continue.
Just hopefully a lot more quickly than it’s been historically.
I'm unable to think of Roberts as a conservative except, I suppose, in the sense that the pope, whoever he is, and however much in sympathy with leftism at any given moment - is "conservative" because - well, because he's that old and venerable thing, the pope. I would not expect Roberts to represent a Protestant-American way of thinking; on "important" questions he is and must be a warrior for social justice, for the downtrodden. It's only the left that can't grasp that, I guess.
ETA: I'm not saying it's wrong that he should "be what he is". There is an admirable apolitical-ness to it. But of all the things that might puzzle the Founders about the country two plus centuries on, not least I think would be the degree to which Catholic-inflected elite law graduates, raised up in schools that offer the classical education that makes for a smart-sounding lawyer, possess a wing of government - and that wing in possession of *much* more than 1/3 of our decisionmaking.
Back when I was in law school, there was a saying that liberal judges make new liberal law and conservative judges then conserve it. Roberts, like say Warren Burger, seems to be one of those judges.
In 1968, Nixon ran on overturning many of the Warren Court's new rules. Burger was his appointment to replace Warren and, well, those overturnings pretty much didn't happen.
Some things are complicated. The two you describe here are not.
Roberts is center-right. And he leans Establishment/“don’t rock the boat”. The “exception that proves the rule” was his adamant position against Anthony Kennedy on gay marriage - which is indeed ironic because that decision, while in fact terrible constitutional law as Roberts noted, was in fact an excellent “‘Roberts-esque” centrist/Establishment public policy ruling which delivered more unity, not less.
Whatever the current pope might be on a few “purely” religious issues, he is a hard leftist on economic policy, and a “standard” leftist on oppressor-oppressed ideology.
He is likely not literally corrupt as so many of his predecessors of previous centuries were, but he is an absolute disgrace to his office and to Western civilization and civil society.
My 25+ years of experience teaching Black students (grad and undergrad) told me that way too many of them had for way too long been treated as if they were not only "backward children" but would remain "backward children" forever.
But all they really seemed to need in most cases was someone who believed that they were capable young adults who could learn and do a lot, with some pushing, some effort by both student and professor, and some willingness to believe in their own value.
I proudly watched rather a large number of "my" Black students grab hold of the opportunity presented to them and roar into a life full of good jobs and general potential. And they found they profoundly resented being treated as children, so many of them began to give back by helping other, younger Black students at all levels.
They didn't and don't really need Affirmative Action, they need to be treated as valuable, capable human beings.
To me it's less about wasted money--talk to as many lesbian menthol smokers as you want--than it is about the self-licking ice cream cone aspect of it all, where American taxpayer money gets used to advance narrow political or bureaucratic interests. What was USAID getting from Politico in return for that $8 million, exactly? It wasn't just access to the articles, I suspect. That kind of thing is more what bothers me than waste.
It was apparently spent on Politico Pro subscriptions, a very pricey service that has a Salesforce-style CRM purpose afaik of being a portal to data on orgs, individuals, for politicking.
"And when USAID pays $8 million for 437 Politico subscriptions—at over $10,000 per year per subscription."
Lots of other parts of the government pay CQ/RollCall millions per year and about the same amount per user per annual subscription for publicly available information. Plenty of very expensive subscriptions to WSJ / FT / Economist.
It's neither. That's just the thing about modern bureaucracy. CYA is the most important thing, and anyone who forgets that won't rise very far. And anyone sensitive and adept at it can never be made to do anything in which the finger of blame for clear fraud or stupidity can be so clearly pointed at any particular person even in circumstances of perfect information. At a deeper level, if you throttle down human judgment you will get more stupidity, and if you throttle it up you risk more fraud.
It will always be "Just doing what I was told", or "statute requires" or "this is standard procedure", or something. The devil will always get to hide in the details of arguable judgment calls. And then attempts to get rid of opportunities for judgment which could be abused will end up in "stupid", faceless, zero-tolerance bureaucratic decisions, which also can't be blamed on anybody in particular, because done intentionally to prevent abuse.
agreed on all that, which is the deep reason why if you want to have a small, effective government then you also must to be willing to give (and then defend!) wide-ranging discretionary powers to the civil servants
This cuts both ways. Previous administrations used their discretionary powers to install corrupt / ideological employees at USAID, for example. Now the current administration is using their discretionary powers to install new people to fight the metastasizing ideology/ corruption. Maybe we like the new direction more than the old, but the cycle will continue and we won’t always like the new directions. More power will not be a long- term solution so long as polarization remains extreme and public virtue remains low.
Sorry, but even if every remaining word in your comment was 100% spot on, the claim of “It’s neither” in the case of these subscriptions at these spend levels is just wrong.
It is indeed either evil or incompetence (or both).
I have never really understood Trump or Musk for that matter and didn’t think either would get as far as they have. Hell, I didn’t even think Trump stood a chance of winning the election. So I am in no position to second guess. Both appear to be in overdrive and the handful of things they do or say that I don’t understand, I would not want to overshadow the many positive accomplishments they have achieved so far.
I fear the real weak link are the Republicans in Congress. A bill to abolish USAID has been introduced but has not moved. Where is a bill to repeal the Impoundment Control Act and why hasn’t it been passed already? Why is there still a District Court for DC? Or New York? Why hasn’t the DC Court of Appeals been abolished? These are the most patently corrupt and vile institutions in all of the federal government, where any notion of justice is a lost cause and the chance of a fair trail impossible to conceive. The lowest of low hanging fruit is to abolish them yet nada from the congressional Republicans. Given Lionel Page’s important work on home field advantage in officiating, it would be nice to see some legislation relocating the US Supreme Court to the population center of the country, say somewhere in Wright County, Missouri. The justices are playing to appeal to the east coast establishment, a little relocation might connect them to the people again. Something also needs to be done to prevent members of the US Supreme Court from conspiring with military officials to launch a coup. I’d say the chances of Trump being replaced by a Supreme Court sanctioned military dictatorship sometime in the next 6 months is about 50-50.
We will likely have much better grounds for judging the new Administration when the first budget comes out. Good signs will be a healthy legislative agenda attached, rescissions, and massive personnel reductions across the board.
OMB Director Vought just passed the Senate so let’s hope he charges out of the gate as hard as Trump and Musk. Some initial changes he needs to make right up front are to reapportion grant funding to the 4th quarter, freeze all drafting services under section 7 of OMB Circular A-19, and impose transparency in the agency regulatory process by reporting all parties who review or comment on draft regulations prior to submission to OMB. A-19 provides “Drafting service. Agencies need not submit for clearance bills that they prepare as a drafting service for a congressional committee or a Member of Congress, provided that they state in their transmittal letters that the drafting service does not constitute a commitment with respect to the position of the Administration or the agency. Agencies shall advise OMB of these drafting service requests while the requests are being complied with, and supply a copy of the request, if in writing. A copy of each such draft bill and the accompanying letter should be furnished to OMB at the time of transmittal, together with an explanatory statement of what the bill would accomplish if that is not contained in the transmittal letter.” And then require all requests for drafting assistance to be routed through OMB and cleared by political appointees. Right now every leg affairs in every agency is busily scheming and conspiring with the opposition behind the backs of their political leadership to sabotage and thwart the administration’s agenda. They need to be stopped. During previous Democrat administrations, draft regulation packages were regularly given to the federal unions to review and rewrite. That all needs to end.
That said, I think much of the wind in Trump and Musk’s sails is popularly generated by the bottom-up citizen especially with the support of people like https://datarepublican.com/ We need more like her.
I've been following the SALT deduction as it's probably the most odious budget legislation there is. I assume that Trump trying to find some meritless compromise on this is a way to buy off red congressmen in blue states because of the narrow majority (also, he's a New Yorker).
If such a corrupt bargain is to be for the greater good, I suggest the following.
Have a "universal" SALT deduction unrelated to actual State and Local Taxes. Makes it $10,000 (flat property/sales) + 5% of income. I don't care if the states income tax is 0% of 13%, make the deduction 5%. No subsidizing blue state taxes.
Also, double the cap for married filing jointly. I think the cap should equal the standard deduction.
This gives those congressmen a win without subsidizing blue state spending nonsense.
I have some comments on this topic based on my experience working for the federal government, including a stint in the area of development aid, but first I want to comment on that someone from AK's ultra-leftwing synagogue who fled to Ireland of all places. At a recent Holocaust Memorial Day event in Dublin, the President of Ireland Michael Higgins used the event to lecture those present on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in the wake of the October 7th attacks. When some Jews in attendance turned their back on Higgins in silent protest, they were dragged out of the ceremony. I believe Israel has severed diplomatic relations with Ireland, among some other European countries, over these countries' position on this issue. More generally, it is my understanding that there is a long history of virulent Jew-hatred in Ireland (I don't use the term 'antisemitism'), which includes a pogrom. Moreover, as with many Western European countries, mass immigration into Ireland has resulted in a rising population of Muslim immigrants, a large fraction of which hate Jews (not to mention the abhorrent treatment of women). A Jew who moves to Ireland out of deranged fear of DJT has to be meshuga.
There are some Jewish people who hate present-day Israel, considering it a betrayal of what they consider Jewish values. For some it's just the present government (they hate Netanyahu) but for some it goes deeper. They may love what Higgins had to say.
This is an old trick, same applies to vote fraud, immigration fraud, Covid-relief / PPP fraud, etc. When you don't care about fraud (or for you it's a feature, not a bug) and so intentionally change standard procedure to stop asking for information that would provide evidence of fraud, you get lots more fraud without the evidence that would easily prove it. Using the consequential absence of proof as evidence for the absence of fraud is chutzpah on steroids.
Abstractly, most fraud involves a kind of security breach. A general best practice for any organization that actually cares about preventing security breaches is to incentivize experts to attempt such breaches, but then not do anything harmful, and just report how they did it.
Sometimes this involves posting "bug bounties", other times contracting with or employing "red teams" directly, and other times having red teams paid for by auditing / supervising / overseeing organizations make such attempts.
For example, GAO could have red teams try to get watch-listed identities or prohibited items past TSA security and onto a plane, then report the success rates for how often they were able to do so, for which items, using which techniques. This can sometimes get pretty ugly, but there's no better way.
If someone starts talking about the "absence of evidence of fraud" in a context in which such audits have been effectively prohibited, then the absence of red teams is evidence for fraud - the fraud of pretending that one isn't on the side of more fraud.
First - we agree. But I wanted to add that fraud does not necessarily involve a security breach and cybersecurity is a clean example, but is not the only way a fraud occurs. Outside cybersecurity, I disagree that the the best way to find fraud / or susceptibility to fraud is to basically attempt breaches of processes. For most mature organizations, the risks over say, cash disbursements, are fairly well-known and its really a matter of whether the processes are well-designed and well-executed on an ongoing basis - and they take for granted that you will have employees that have the ability to process transactions that could be fraudulent without oversight. In other words, for these types of fraud, access is not the only concern. I think the "attempt breeches" strategy is really only a beneficial in a cybersecurity context, where you don't necessarily know your own weaknesses until you look for them (because risks and threats are constantly evolving).
In more classic financial areas - besides the unauthorized access to systems angle - you certainly can have and do have fraud or theft that comes 'from the inside' - an employee or contractor. These types of fraud are best combated with proper controls and oversight over the related processes. Restricting system access to job duties only, segregating sensitive duties between 2 or more personnel, formal review of transactions/activity by individuals without direct system access, system controls (such as transaction limits), system enforced delegations of authority (person in Position A cannot independently process a transaction exceeding $XX), dual authorization of transactions, and so on. All of those controls instantly go out the window in a scenario where an outside actor gains unlimited access to your systems from the outside. But they are still very useful for 'in house' threats.
Let's say that I give you a company credit card so you can travel as a sales rep and a company policy manual on what are and are not acceptable uses of that card. You instead use the card to buy Christmas gifts for your family - that's fraud. You didn't steal the card or change your limit - you just used it while ignoring my instructions. You probably don't attempt it if you know I'm going to review your monthly card expenses for compliance and to enforce my policy (a 'detective' control). Furthermore, I can restrict the types of expenses the card can be used for with the credit card company (a 'preventative' control) and do further things like deny you the ability to take a cash advance on the card (another 'preventative' control).
If, in my example, I refuse to perform any oversight of your use of the company card or take any actions to restrict its use, then simply handing you the policy and the card should give me little assurance that you will only use it appropriately. It would be absurd to say "our company credit cards are free from fraud" without any controls to prevent or detect fraud. The fraud triangle is often cited - it occurs where there's 1) opportunity, 2) motivation, and 3) rationalization - I can do it, I have a reason to do it (i.e., personal financial difficulty), and I can tell myself that I deserve it (they don't pay me enough!).
So to bring this back to USAID - if there is no oversight or standard for how the money is actually used, then, yes, there is risk of fraud or collusion or simply waste. It would not be outlandish to discover that a government employee approved a grant to benefit a friend or family member (that otherwise should have been rejected, assuming there was much in the way of guiding principles or policy in doing so in the first place). But it's clear that that no one involved in USAID was all that interested or critical of how they actually spent the money. We agree that its absurd for the agency to say there's no fraud or waste when they never even considered that could happen or try to prevent or detect it - that they, as you put it, are "on the side of fraud" if they don't try to fight it (go ahead - no one's watching!).
Well yes and no. Partly they are few and far between because the system is set up to make fraud look like regular transactions. See Musk's recent recent Xeet about how the Treasury failed to note justifications for transfers, failed to verify social security numbers where appropriate and so on.
Musk is doing a good job of describing the waste and “irregularities” of some USG spending, as well as the role of NGOs acting as “cut outs” for highly questionable, or even illegal, activities. Approximately 75% of all federal spending is mandatory, and once interest on our rapidly growing debt and defense expenditures are added to the budget, there isn’t much left in the discretionary account to cut. DOGE, I believe, is laying the foundation and building the case for substantial budget cuts if we face another financial crisis, which I believe is likely.
The current "inside baseball" between the administration (containing its own rival long-run political strategies) and the various wings and important figures in the greater Republican party has never been as active or interesting in decades.
Sure, to a first approximation, the whole fiscal crisis is entitlement spending and nothing politically digestible can be done about that. That's not what DOGE budget focus is about.
What it is actually about is:
(1) Reconciliation - In order to get some priority things done, the administration needs to do them with the absolute minimum in congressional support, and it needs to come up with ways to generate significant savings over the current budget baseline in order to do that, again, without having to do to the trouble of having congress pass a budget with those savings in it. So, "Fraud, waste, abuse" and "Activities being conducted on the basis of executive accretion or arrogation and not strictly statutory mandate" and "voluntary resignations" and so forth.
(2) The USG budget and population is so big and the politically relevant favor-ecosystem so comparably small that it only takes diverting a fairly small percentage of it to pay favors to ones friends, fellow travelers, clients, etc. to keep the whole "political defense in depth" system afloat, even as what would look like rounding errors that are themselves needles buried in haystacks. That's no secret (perhaps an "open secret") but until now and perhaps going back a hundred years there has been both lack of will and capability for any GOP administration to try to the politically smart and sane thing and actually go after all of that. And suddenly, that has all changed. That's a big deal.
At a kids birthday party on Sunday in NOVA everyone was either fired, about to be fired, or knew co-workers and close friends that had been fired. Hiring freezes and project freezes the order of the day.
I have sympathy for them, in the same way I have sympathy for those who are the "collateral damage" in any war, and even for actual ordinary-soldier combatants who, may be fighting for a bad cause but usually in their own minds they are exemplifying noble martial virtues like courage and self-sacrifice in the name of their homes and peoples.
But they are still the enemy and there is no superior alternative to continue killing them - and regrettably and unavoidably, those around them - until they stop fighting.
I don't ask for any sympathy and I'll be ok, but personally I have taken a hit as a consequence of the recent reforms. I am not a combatant, but I definitely support the war and wish the combatants well and hope for their victory. I am kind of in the position of an ordinary Palestinian who supports Hamas' war against Israel and is upset to discover my restaurant has sunk into one of their tunnels.
I don't have much right to complain about friendly fire landing on my head when I look just like the enemy and I've chosen to position myself in one of the most target-rich environments available. War is more sledgehammer than scalpel, and it's not like I went to the trouble of painting lamb's blood on my cubicle frame to let the Angel of DOGE know to please pass over my particular desk. Though, if that works, someone please let me know.
My personal sympathies to you Handle! As someone not employed by the government but whose job is funded by the Medicare spending I despise, I know it could easily be me. My wife is sort of impacted too, as all building projects anywhere in the DC area have dried up and they aren't bringing her back full time.
The people at this kids party are not like yourself. I've watched them do evil and applaud evil and would be absolutely giddy if the exact same thing happened to their perceived enemies, and in fact were giddy just a few short years ago. The one whose wife just got fired from USAID I watched badmouth other families in their own driveways during Trick or Treating for having the wrong politics.
Before this got going we already made the final decision to escape DC. Just waiting for the right house to close on. If there is no longer anything holding you here, maybe it's time to try something new.
Bressler's point is specious. Even the Trump White House signed a $35k contract with Politico Pro the day before this silly controversy arose. They didn't do it to bribe Politico (nor did the many Republicans who subscribe), but because they find it useful to be well informed.
I noticed my husband calling one of his colleagues the other day, asking if they still subscribed to some news gathering service relating to their field. He’d dropped it, he said, because it “had gotten so expensive”.
Knowing him, the excessive amount in question would have been numbered in hundreds - certainly not thousands - like the $10,000 Politico subscription.
That’s a lot of daylight even if Politico is more in the actual reporting business.
My vague impression, admittedly from their free offerings, is that Politico is the Entertainment Tonight of politics. Which is fine but not perhaps something the governed have an interest in subsidizing.
A subscription to, say, the AP or Reuters would be more defensible.
So Politico Pro is a database of spending by various departments, etc.?
It is going to take some time for me to trust the opinion of a "the media girl" even if she's the best media girl in the world. But I am overall prepared to accept that the site is a useful clearinghouse. But it would be cool to learn more about Politico Pro's "policy" stances.
Because if it has played a role in policy since 2008 ...
That still sounds like a lot, multiply, for legislation tracking (?) that is not personalized to the client - but maybe it is personalized.
There's a lot of NGO hate on here, but the environmental group I am most familiar with, dispensed with the guy they had on retainer to track legislation. No objection to him or anything, but nobody could recall his ever having produced anything that the staff couldn't keep abreast of themselves. Their previous lady exec just liked to pay for stuff like that. (Do not underestimate the power of shopping to a woman, in any arena of life.) But government needn't be so lean, of course.
Burning it down and starting over is extremely risky and only warranted if iatrogenic rot and inefficiency are rampant. In many parts of the federal (and my state) government, we are at this stage. I recommend he goes as fast as possible while following the law.
My knowledge of USAID is limited to the technical assistance USAID provided to support the transition of former socialist economies to market economies in EE and the FSU in the 1990s. USAID funded the implementation of privatization programs based on auctions (both cash auctions for small-scale enterprises such as retail outlets and voucher auctions for larger state industrial enterprises) in these countries, and I would defend the use of federal funds for this purpose to this day, notwithstanding the controversies surrounding such programs. I had nothing to do with the more controversial and purely political USAID programs in the area of 'democracy promotion,' and there was no such thing as pushing LGBTQ+ on socially conservative societies back in those days as far as I know (pushing for women's equality was a thing, and although I don't support the use of aid for that purpose either, at least women generally represented approximately half the population of aid recipients, as opposed to the LGBTQ+ fringe). During that period, USAID still had some experienced old hands who knew all about the business of development assistance, including the good, the bad and the ugly, who in my opinion did some good work, and whom I greatly respected. There were certainly lots of wasteful programs (training programs are a tried and true way of wasting development funds, especially in countries that are hopeless basket cases), but I don't recall any programs as 'mindless' and counterproductive as the revelations coming out of DOGE suggest.
Hoffer said, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
In USG, every great cause quickly degenerates into a collections of human shields and cause-laundering (cf., "pink-washing", "green-washing") cover stories meant to conceal and provide plausible-deniability for the use of public funds to further partisan objectives and ulterior motives ranging from CIA operations, to first world corruption favor-paying, to political weaponization, to ideological evangelism.
If you give politicians these tools they will twist their use to their own political purposes to whatever extent they can get away with with. The temptation to do so is simply irresistible.
Much of the (uninformed) commentary on the DOGE cuts to USAID funding seems to equate USAID programs with 'soft power,' as if USAID programs are the one and only source of US soft power. That's absurd. MacDonald's alone is probably a far greater source of US soft power than all of USAID programs combined, and pushing DEI and LGBTQ+ on socially conservative societies undoubtedly undercuts US soft power in practice. Even the Russians loved MacDonald's.
I had peripheral involvement with a USAID training project that was partially funded through USAID, but it was managed by US Treasury personnel with matching funding provided by a Soros-funded entity. This was during the Clinton Administration, and the story (second-hand source) was that the relevant political appointee at Treasury (mentioned by AK in yesterday's post) viewed an unsolicited offer from Soros to jointly fund an aid project as one that could not be refused, because of Soros' donations to the Party. To be sure, the huge pot of money managed by USAID attracted unsolicited proposals from outside entities like bees to honey, but such proposals were routinely turned down during the relevant period. I get the sense from the revelations coming out of DOGE that the influence of outside, politically connected entities like Soros ballooned in the intervening years, and such influence had come to drive much of what USAID 'chose' to fund.
If anyone has a subscription to Politico Pro, it would be cool for the general public to get to see a few examples of its reporting across "22 Deep Policy Areas".
The thing about NYT which I assume lots of the same government staffers subscribe to - is that however deservedly loathed it is - Americans do know what's in it.
Maybe Bressler could elaborate on what sort of publication it is, since he's been invited to their Davos parties.
'Outlawing affirmative action of any kind, as Trump attempts to do, will discourage institutions from trying to level the playing field at all.'
I imagine that John McWhorter has good reason for believing that the playing field is not level or is he simply parroting an alleged 'fact' that looks less like a fact with every passing year? Or by 'level the playing field' is he talking about equality of outcome (i.e. keeping affirmative action forever, keeping disparate impact laws forever etc.?
I think McWhorter may have a sour view of the world, and while I certainly do myself, in an utterly different way - I think he is mistaken about how very much people want - to put it plainly - African-Americans to succeed. Decent people want that. *Americans* with wealth and power I would say, tend to want that. This is my impression from lifelong observation of the class that I am in the lower rung of. Basically, anyone who meets this desire halfway, is going to be invited to climb the ladder, to get all the education they want.
I realize that to some, this sounds paternalistic - and AA was supposed to take the personal out of the paternalistic. To regularize it. Maybe in this thinking, AA is more dignified. More something you can count on. Perhaps - but it seems that rather backfired along several dimensions.
That's fine having a sour view of the world but aren't academics and intellectuals supposed to engage with reality? As you say, for a long time now people have been praying that black people can raise themselves out of the family dysfunction, the low academic achievement and the grievance culture they are mired in but the social science data regarding IQ and personality traits appear to point against them ever achieving the dizzy heights of say, the US east Asians.
Either I've been bamboozled by a load of racist white supremacists posing as social scientists or John McWhorter is simply unwilling to countenance the idea that it is mother nature rather than Trump that is to blame for an unlevel playing field. Sure, if you squint and tilt your head in a certain way the data can be tortured into looking like we STILL haven't tried AA hard enough or long enough but I'm not really interested in the thoughts of dogmatists.
Well, (I think) he's a pretty standard ameliorist liberal. I don't know that it's fair to ask him to countenance something that would separate him from his political beliefs.
Which is why I more and more think, and maybe McW could get on board with it too - that the path forward, which it may be too late to take though it seems like we were once on it - is to quit talking about these things so damn much. Quit talking about racism. About IQ and about "outcomes" and about difference generally. Respect that difference exists, between groups, between individuals, and be polite about it and move on. Jettison the social scientists first and foremost.
McWhorter is center-left, what I’d call a “reasonable liberal”, but as with George Will he is virulently anti-Trump (as opposed to most GOPers, whom he merely opposes) if for no other reason than aesthetics.
I think in fact McWhorter does agree with most of what you wrote above.
To maintain a political belief in the face of evidence that your beliefs are based on false premises is ridiculous.
I don't think it's possible not to talk about these differences. I used to think it was impolite to bring attention to the fact that some ethnic groups underperform. I held to that until I realised that this left the field open to racial grievance mongers who would blame white people for all ills. Black people naturally subscribed to these beliefs, which were only confirmed by white liberals who agreed black people SHOULD be furious. I'm sure some black-on-white crime was justified by the belief that whites had it coming to them. That's the point at which politeness has to stop.
If you adhere to the blank slate then you are more or less bound to believe the solution to inequality lies in social programs like AA, which is why I think Nathan Cofnas is right to say that things will only change once elites - and thereafter the people who get their beliefs undigested from elites - discard the blank slate. At that point we can perhaps accept our differences and once the malicious anti-white slurs stop we can finally stop talking about race.
For the record, I don’t know that McWhorter would agree that “Mother Nature” has caused blacks to be less successful.
But he would surely put a big portion of the blame on black culture, and some portion of the blame on politicians and government programs that reinforce that culture.
I think I've only listened to him once and he seemed sensible enough though like Thomas Sowell, Wilfred Reilly and Coleman Hughes appeared to give genetic explanations of social disparities fairly short shrift.
Well, I give genetic explanations fairly short shrift myself.
Which is different from claiming they are zero percent responsible for differences.
While the culture part is clearly responsible for a high portion of the differences.
As can be evidenced, e.g. by differing groups of Asian-American immigrants with each other, where it’d be pretty hard to argue that the differences were for genetic reasons as opposed to varying cultural difference
Yes, I wasn't suggesting that genes account for 100% of differences. I don't think there is a person on the planet who argues this. A bang on the head with a hammer can reduce IQ and a hammer belong on the nurture rather than nature side.
Nor does anyone believe that all Asian Americans have an identical IQ. I have taught for 20 years in Japanese universities and I can assure you that the students are not all equally intelligent, despite all having 'Japanese genes' and growing up in Japan.
However, like height, intelligence is partly hereditary. Most studies point to somewhere around 80% by adulthood. We know this from identical twin studies and adoption studies.
'...the culture part is clearly responsible for a high portion of the differences.'
I'm not sure you can make that claim so cavalierly. You have to remember that different genes lead to different cultures i.e. high IQ people will tend to create different cultures to those of lower IQ people. It then becomes hard to tease apart cause and effect. For example, people from poor backgrounds often do worse academically than people in more wealthy areas. Some people then assume that that being poor negatively affects academic achievements. But what of it were the other way round? It could also be the case that people are poor BECAUSE they are low IQ. Therefore I think your certainty that culture is responsible for a high portion of the differences between black and white is misplaced.
Where does culture come from? Culture is downstream of genetics. There are huge genetic differences, IQ differences (80% heritable in adults), and culture differences between different Asian groups. Not to mention high selection for some.
One should treat differences between blacks and whites more like differences between different regions, or Catholics and Protestants. Race poisons everything.
Nobody cares whether Protestants or Catholics make more money, and if a region that mostly happens to be Catholic is poor no one cares about the type of Christianity, instead the debate is simply about economics and opportunities.
Jewish SES is extremely high, and there are no grand ideas to change that. Why can the gap between whites and blacks not be ignored like that between Jews and gentiles? The focus on weird racial lines ("white-Asian" vs "black-other-POCs") seems odd when there are so many kinds and sources of inequality.
“Politico Pro is to Politico what a Bloomberg Terminal is to Bloomberg news—a specialized product for sophisticated users. As such, it’s expensive. Individual subscriptions can run north of $10,000, and team subscriptions can run into the six figures. Politico can charge this much for the same reason Bloomberg can charge $25,000 for its famous Terminal—customers find it incredibly useful. And, by the way, single federal agencies have spent millions on those terminals, too.“
There are many more private than public subscriptions to Bloomberg Terminal, because it passes the market test of being judged to provide real economic value to its users in excess of the cost of the subscriptions. What percent of subscriptions to Politico Pro aren't paid for with taxes? If it's not zero, it rounds to zero.
In the semi-dysfunctional way in which things currently operate, an agency can't focus on its mission without advocating for legislation, often drafting it, often at the request of members of congress ("technical assistance"). Every major agency has an office of legislative affairs or liaison or equivalent, and plenty of other connective tissue with all the various grouping of congressional staff.
Amplifying other similar effects of other aspects of the contemporary administrative state, there is no such thing as independent branches and separation of powers with this much communication and interaction.
My main objection to this kind of politicking is that agencies are in a much more powerful position to set the facts and context for their ask, such that they will often have the upper hand against voters and interest groups.
On the other hand, if Congress wished it to be otherwise they could act.
An ultra-liberal Jew moving to the most anti-semitic country in Western Europe because of DOGE is the funniest thing I have heard in a while.
Arnold should be laughing at his friend’s choice—many Jews in Ireland are leaving.
I’d suggest Hungary is better, as Rod Dreher promotes, or London a bit. Or Israel, of course, tho the friend prolly hates Bibi.
Line of the week!
The Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action of any kind. The people do the same in overwhelming numbers every time it comes up for plebiscite.
I get that there is a class of people that benefited from affirmative action sinecures and are now worried that DEI rhetoric has made their cushy gigs untenable. As Steve Sailer pointed out, the old system had quietly selected for socially comfortable token ally behavior of the Obama first term kind.
But if my neighbor can have a cushy AA sinecure, why can't I have a cushy AA sinecure. And if I already have one, why can't it be even cushier! The demand for unearned privilege is basically infinite, and so DEI and its rhetoric is a natural goal of people wanting to grow the AA pie to include themselves by ratcheting up the rhetoric and trying to take it in new and novel ways. There is no natural endpoint to unearned privilege. No "boil the frog this much" coordination point that "the blob" can settle on. Because "the blob" is made up of individuals with their own incentives.
Its similar to how T has been a disaster for LGB, but its hard to keep out a new oppressed group when your claiming to be an oppressed group.
"The Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action of any kind."
I wish that were true but it's not. The logic of the Harvard admissions case could be applied to a lot of other areas but the Court refused to go there. And there are lots of older cases okaying affirmative action that would have to be explicitly overruled.
A Supreme Court that was sure of its own righteousness would do it. Such was the 1954 Court in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring segregation unconstitutional ("separate is inherently unequal"). But for all the rhetoric about them, this Court is not. Even the six "conservatives" are divided in many ways, perhaps the most important of which is "don't rock the boat/respect precedent" (John Roberts) v. "do what the constitution says and don't care about the precedents" (Clarence Thomas).
Yes and no. Alas, because the Justices have warped the language so much over so many years, there is no alternative but to use scare quotes in these discussions. But it depends what one means by "outlaw" and "affirmative action."
It's been nearly 50 years since Bakke in which SCOTUS explicitly prohibited racial quotas as unconstitutional. And then we still got 50 years of quotas. And it's been more than 20 years since Gratz, which prohibited crude point-scoring by race, but there's no doubt we got 20 years of crude point-scoring by race.
This whole line of cases including FAIR (that's how I like to abbreviate the case) can fairly be characterized as the most obviously, brazenly, and consistently dishonest of anything SCOTUS has done in the past century. If someone like Levin is looking for the real root of collapse in trustworthiness of institutions, this multi-generational legal travesty is a good place to look, because SCOTUS made it the law of the land to penalize integrity and reward perjury.
It was clear to all informed observers every time that SCOTUS would announce some prohibition and then not even create a "loophole" - which at least a lawyer could openly argue entitled their clients to an exception - but signal to institutions that they could go ahead and break the law so long as they -lied- about what they were doing in the Court's prescribed manner. The impact from the way this virus ripped through all intellectual and institutional life to create an entire ecosystem of error and empire of lies built upon yet more lies cannot be overstated.
Souter - who thought affirmative action was perfectly constitutional - was nevertheless of the New England WASP old school and scrupulous enough to be bothered by this state of affairs to make one of his only dissents in which there was a memorable - indeed now famous - excerpt. Here he is talking about a strategy to arrive at the same racial admission statistics by admitting the top graduates of high school classes, with the percent finessed so as to arrive at the intended quotas.
"While there is nothing unconstitutional about such a practice, it nonetheless suffers from a serious disadvantage. It is the disadvantage of deliberate obfuscation. The "percentage plans" are just as race conscious as the point scheme (and fairly so), but they get their racially diverse results without saying directly what they are doing or why they are doing it. In contrast, Michigan states its purpose directly and, if this were a doubtful case for me, I would be tempted to give Michigan an extra point of its own for its frankness. Equal protection cannot become an exercise in which the winners are the ones who hide the ball."
But that's what happened. For 50 years, SCOTUS said, "Racial preferences are not allowed under Equal Protection. But, if you go and hide the ball, we'll let you get away with it anyway." Of course even SCOTUS couldn't match the state of affairs in California, in which the state university system was ordered by public referendum to eliminate racial preference admissions, and the schools and courts there just ignored that law entirely without even extending the curtesy of lying about it.
In FAIR the majority opinion dug even further down the hole and meta-lied in denial that it was once again instructing institutions in how to lie to get away with it, at the very moment of issuing the instructions, and with the nerve to cite Cummings which had been a dead letter the whole time. (True to her style, Sotomayor was not shy about pointing this out in dissent, and the iterative editing process produced some pre-emptive swipes.) (Citations removed)
"At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But,
despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.” Cummings v. Missouri (1867). A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race."
In other words, "We will still let you get away with racial preferences if you lie and say you are not considering race qua race, and craft the essay prompt to ask how their race impacted their individual experiences which can be ties to their courage and determination and lead to their unique ability to contribute ... We recognize it might take you a few years of disruption to your racial quota goals to master the new ball-hiding game, and we sincerely apologize for that."
To the extent you have a point, they decidely do not “sincerely apologize for that.”
And I think you do have a point, though it is not as strong as you claim it to be, at least for private institutions. (For public ones, I agree with you that they should not be allowed to do any of it. Full stop.)
To do otherwise is to deny private institutions agency. And imo your presumed cure would be even worse than the disease. So having “fine lines”, which will occasionally be crossed is inevitable, but probably the least worst result.
And slapping down anyone, hard, who brazenly blows past the line should continue.
Just hopefully a lot more quickly than it’s been historically.
I'm unable to think of Roberts as a conservative except, I suppose, in the sense that the pope, whoever he is, and however much in sympathy with leftism at any given moment - is "conservative" because - well, because he's that old and venerable thing, the pope. I would not expect Roberts to represent a Protestant-American way of thinking; on "important" questions he is and must be a warrior for social justice, for the downtrodden. It's only the left that can't grasp that, I guess.
ETA: I'm not saying it's wrong that he should "be what he is". There is an admirable apolitical-ness to it. But of all the things that might puzzle the Founders about the country two plus centuries on, not least I think would be the degree to which Catholic-inflected elite law graduates, raised up in schools that offer the classical education that makes for a smart-sounding lawyer, possess a wing of government - and that wing in possession of *much* more than 1/3 of our decisionmaking.
Maybe it couldn't be any other way, I dunno.
Back when I was in law school, there was a saying that liberal judges make new liberal law and conservative judges then conserve it. Roberts, like say Warren Burger, seems to be one of those judges.
In 1968, Nixon ran on overturning many of the Warren Court's new rules. Burger was his appointment to replace Warren and, well, those overturnings pretty much didn't happen.
Some things are complicated. The two you describe here are not.
Roberts is center-right. And he leans Establishment/“don’t rock the boat”. The “exception that proves the rule” was his adamant position against Anthony Kennedy on gay marriage - which is indeed ironic because that decision, while in fact terrible constitutional law as Roberts noted, was in fact an excellent “‘Roberts-esque” centrist/Establishment public policy ruling which delivered more unity, not less.
Whatever the current pope might be on a few “purely” religious issues, he is a hard leftist on economic policy, and a “standard” leftist on oppressor-oppressed ideology.
He is likely not literally corrupt as so many of his predecessors of previous centuries were, but he is an absolute disgrace to his office and to Western civilization and civil society.
My 25+ years of experience teaching Black students (grad and undergrad) told me that way too many of them had for way too long been treated as if they were not only "backward children" but would remain "backward children" forever.
But all they really seemed to need in most cases was someone who believed that they were capable young adults who could learn and do a lot, with some pushing, some effort by both student and professor, and some willingness to believe in their own value.
I proudly watched rather a large number of "my" Black students grab hold of the opportunity presented to them and roar into a life full of good jobs and general potential. And they found they profoundly resented being treated as children, so many of them began to give back by helping other, younger Black students at all levels.
They didn't and don't really need Affirmative Action, they need to be treated as valuable, capable human beings.
To me it's less about wasted money--talk to as many lesbian menthol smokers as you want--than it is about the self-licking ice cream cone aspect of it all, where American taxpayer money gets used to advance narrow political or bureaucratic interests. What was USAID getting from Politico in return for that $8 million, exactly? It wasn't just access to the articles, I suspect. That kind of thing is more what bothers me than waste.
It was apparently spent on Politico Pro subscriptions, a very pricey service that has a Salesforce-style CRM purpose afaik of being a portal to data on orgs, individuals, for politicking.
"And when USAID pays $8 million for 437 Politico subscriptions—at over $10,000 per year per subscription."
Lots of other parts of the government pay CQ/RollCall millions per year and about the same amount per user per annual subscription for publicly available information. Plenty of very expensive subscriptions to WSJ / FT / Economist.
It is always fun to try to puzzle out whether a contract is outright fraud or if the govies involved are just stupid
It's neither. That's just the thing about modern bureaucracy. CYA is the most important thing, and anyone who forgets that won't rise very far. And anyone sensitive and adept at it can never be made to do anything in which the finger of blame for clear fraud or stupidity can be so clearly pointed at any particular person even in circumstances of perfect information. At a deeper level, if you throttle down human judgment you will get more stupidity, and if you throttle it up you risk more fraud.
It will always be "Just doing what I was told", or "statute requires" or "this is standard procedure", or something. The devil will always get to hide in the details of arguable judgment calls. And then attempts to get rid of opportunities for judgment which could be abused will end up in "stupid", faceless, zero-tolerance bureaucratic decisions, which also can't be blamed on anybody in particular, because done intentionally to prevent abuse.
agreed on all that, which is the deep reason why if you want to have a small, effective government then you also must to be willing to give (and then defend!) wide-ranging discretionary powers to the civil servants
This cuts both ways. Previous administrations used their discretionary powers to install corrupt / ideological employees at USAID, for example. Now the current administration is using their discretionary powers to install new people to fight the metastasizing ideology/ corruption. Maybe we like the new direction more than the old, but the cycle will continue and we won’t always like the new directions. More power will not be a long- term solution so long as polarization remains extreme and public virtue remains low.
Sorry, but even if every remaining word in your comment was 100% spot on, the claim of “It’s neither” in the case of these subscriptions at these spend levels is just wrong.
It is indeed either evil or incompetence (or both).
I have never really understood Trump or Musk for that matter and didn’t think either would get as far as they have. Hell, I didn’t even think Trump stood a chance of winning the election. So I am in no position to second guess. Both appear to be in overdrive and the handful of things they do or say that I don’t understand, I would not want to overshadow the many positive accomplishments they have achieved so far.
I fear the real weak link are the Republicans in Congress. A bill to abolish USAID has been introduced but has not moved. Where is a bill to repeal the Impoundment Control Act and why hasn’t it been passed already? Why is there still a District Court for DC? Or New York? Why hasn’t the DC Court of Appeals been abolished? These are the most patently corrupt and vile institutions in all of the federal government, where any notion of justice is a lost cause and the chance of a fair trail impossible to conceive. The lowest of low hanging fruit is to abolish them yet nada from the congressional Republicans. Given Lionel Page’s important work on home field advantage in officiating, it would be nice to see some legislation relocating the US Supreme Court to the population center of the country, say somewhere in Wright County, Missouri. The justices are playing to appeal to the east coast establishment, a little relocation might connect them to the people again. Something also needs to be done to prevent members of the US Supreme Court from conspiring with military officials to launch a coup. I’d say the chances of Trump being replaced by a Supreme Court sanctioned military dictatorship sometime in the next 6 months is about 50-50.
We will likely have much better grounds for judging the new Administration when the first budget comes out. Good signs will be a healthy legislative agenda attached, rescissions, and massive personnel reductions across the board.
OMB Director Vought just passed the Senate so let’s hope he charges out of the gate as hard as Trump and Musk. Some initial changes he needs to make right up front are to reapportion grant funding to the 4th quarter, freeze all drafting services under section 7 of OMB Circular A-19, and impose transparency in the agency regulatory process by reporting all parties who review or comment on draft regulations prior to submission to OMB. A-19 provides “Drafting service. Agencies need not submit for clearance bills that they prepare as a drafting service for a congressional committee or a Member of Congress, provided that they state in their transmittal letters that the drafting service does not constitute a commitment with respect to the position of the Administration or the agency. Agencies shall advise OMB of these drafting service requests while the requests are being complied with, and supply a copy of the request, if in writing. A copy of each such draft bill and the accompanying letter should be furnished to OMB at the time of transmittal, together with an explanatory statement of what the bill would accomplish if that is not contained in the transmittal letter.” And then require all requests for drafting assistance to be routed through OMB and cleared by political appointees. Right now every leg affairs in every agency is busily scheming and conspiring with the opposition behind the backs of their political leadership to sabotage and thwart the administration’s agenda. They need to be stopped. During previous Democrat administrations, draft regulation packages were regularly given to the federal unions to review and rewrite. That all needs to end.
That said, I think much of the wind in Trump and Musk’s sails is popularly generated by the bottom-up citizen especially with the support of people like https://datarepublican.com/ We need more like her.
I've been following the SALT deduction as it's probably the most odious budget legislation there is. I assume that Trump trying to find some meritless compromise on this is a way to buy off red congressmen in blue states because of the narrow majority (also, he's a New Yorker).
If such a corrupt bargain is to be for the greater good, I suggest the following.
Have a "universal" SALT deduction unrelated to actual State and Local Taxes. Makes it $10,000 (flat property/sales) + 5% of income. I don't care if the states income tax is 0% of 13%, make the deduction 5%. No subsidizing blue state taxes.
Also, double the cap for married filing jointly. I think the cap should equal the standard deduction.
This gives those congressmen a win without subsidizing blue state spending nonsense.
I have some comments on this topic based on my experience working for the federal government, including a stint in the area of development aid, but first I want to comment on that someone from AK's ultra-leftwing synagogue who fled to Ireland of all places. At a recent Holocaust Memorial Day event in Dublin, the President of Ireland Michael Higgins used the event to lecture those present on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in the wake of the October 7th attacks. When some Jews in attendance turned their back on Higgins in silent protest, they were dragged out of the ceremony. I believe Israel has severed diplomatic relations with Ireland, among some other European countries, over these countries' position on this issue. More generally, it is my understanding that there is a long history of virulent Jew-hatred in Ireland (I don't use the term 'antisemitism'), which includes a pogrom. Moreover, as with many Western European countries, mass immigration into Ireland has resulted in a rising population of Muslim immigrants, a large fraction of which hate Jews (not to mention the abhorrent treatment of women). A Jew who moves to Ireland out of deranged fear of DJT has to be meshuga.
There are some Jewish people who hate present-day Israel, considering it a betrayal of what they consider Jewish values. For some it's just the present government (they hate Netanyahu) but for some it goes deeper. They may love what Higgins had to say.
Examples of fraud are few and far between? Really?
This is an old trick, same applies to vote fraud, immigration fraud, Covid-relief / PPP fraud, etc. When you don't care about fraud (or for you it's a feature, not a bug) and so intentionally change standard procedure to stop asking for information that would provide evidence of fraud, you get lots more fraud without the evidence that would easily prove it. Using the consequential absence of proof as evidence for the absence of fraud is chutzpah on steroids.
"We did not find this thing we stopped looking for (or trying to prevent at all) - so, nothing to see here."
Abstractly, most fraud involves a kind of security breach. A general best practice for any organization that actually cares about preventing security breaches is to incentivize experts to attempt such breaches, but then not do anything harmful, and just report how they did it.
Sometimes this involves posting "bug bounties", other times contracting with or employing "red teams" directly, and other times having red teams paid for by auditing / supervising / overseeing organizations make such attempts.
For example, GAO could have red teams try to get watch-listed identities or prohibited items past TSA security and onto a plane, then report the success rates for how often they were able to do so, for which items, using which techniques. This can sometimes get pretty ugly, but there's no better way.
If someone starts talking about the "absence of evidence of fraud" in a context in which such audits have been effectively prohibited, then the absence of red teams is evidence for fraud - the fraud of pretending that one isn't on the side of more fraud.
First - we agree. But I wanted to add that fraud does not necessarily involve a security breach and cybersecurity is a clean example, but is not the only way a fraud occurs. Outside cybersecurity, I disagree that the the best way to find fraud / or susceptibility to fraud is to basically attempt breaches of processes. For most mature organizations, the risks over say, cash disbursements, are fairly well-known and its really a matter of whether the processes are well-designed and well-executed on an ongoing basis - and they take for granted that you will have employees that have the ability to process transactions that could be fraudulent without oversight. In other words, for these types of fraud, access is not the only concern. I think the "attempt breeches" strategy is really only a beneficial in a cybersecurity context, where you don't necessarily know your own weaknesses until you look for them (because risks and threats are constantly evolving).
In more classic financial areas - besides the unauthorized access to systems angle - you certainly can have and do have fraud or theft that comes 'from the inside' - an employee or contractor. These types of fraud are best combated with proper controls and oversight over the related processes. Restricting system access to job duties only, segregating sensitive duties between 2 or more personnel, formal review of transactions/activity by individuals without direct system access, system controls (such as transaction limits), system enforced delegations of authority (person in Position A cannot independently process a transaction exceeding $XX), dual authorization of transactions, and so on. All of those controls instantly go out the window in a scenario where an outside actor gains unlimited access to your systems from the outside. But they are still very useful for 'in house' threats.
Let's say that I give you a company credit card so you can travel as a sales rep and a company policy manual on what are and are not acceptable uses of that card. You instead use the card to buy Christmas gifts for your family - that's fraud. You didn't steal the card or change your limit - you just used it while ignoring my instructions. You probably don't attempt it if you know I'm going to review your monthly card expenses for compliance and to enforce my policy (a 'detective' control). Furthermore, I can restrict the types of expenses the card can be used for with the credit card company (a 'preventative' control) and do further things like deny you the ability to take a cash advance on the card (another 'preventative' control).
If, in my example, I refuse to perform any oversight of your use of the company card or take any actions to restrict its use, then simply handing you the policy and the card should give me little assurance that you will only use it appropriately. It would be absurd to say "our company credit cards are free from fraud" without any controls to prevent or detect fraud. The fraud triangle is often cited - it occurs where there's 1) opportunity, 2) motivation, and 3) rationalization - I can do it, I have a reason to do it (i.e., personal financial difficulty), and I can tell myself that I deserve it (they don't pay me enough!).
So to bring this back to USAID - if there is no oversight or standard for how the money is actually used, then, yes, there is risk of fraud or collusion or simply waste. It would not be outlandish to discover that a government employee approved a grant to benefit a friend or family member (that otherwise should have been rejected, assuming there was much in the way of guiding principles or policy in doing so in the first place). But it's clear that that no one involved in USAID was all that interested or critical of how they actually spent the money. We agree that its absurd for the agency to say there's no fraud or waste when they never even considered that could happen or try to prevent or detect it - that they, as you put it, are "on the side of fraud" if they don't try to fight it (go ahead - no one's watching!).
Well yes and no. Partly they are few and far between because the system is set up to make fraud look like regular transactions. See Musk's recent recent Xeet about how the Treasury failed to note justifications for transfers, failed to verify social security numbers where appropriate and so on.
As I substacked recently, the mafia have missed a trick if they don't have NGOs to help them launder money - https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/money-laundering-the-ngo-way?r=7yrqz
Actually, I’ve always subscribed to the notion of government being highly efficient under Mob rule.
The only thing it is highly efficient at doing is predating on those not in the mob.
Someone needs a sense of humor.
Musk is doing a good job of describing the waste and “irregularities” of some USG spending, as well as the role of NGOs acting as “cut outs” for highly questionable, or even illegal, activities. Approximately 75% of all federal spending is mandatory, and once interest on our rapidly growing debt and defense expenditures are added to the budget, there isn’t much left in the discretionary account to cut. DOGE, I believe, is laying the foundation and building the case for substantial budget cuts if we face another financial crisis, which I believe is likely.
The current "inside baseball" between the administration (containing its own rival long-run political strategies) and the various wings and important figures in the greater Republican party has never been as active or interesting in decades.
Sure, to a first approximation, the whole fiscal crisis is entitlement spending and nothing politically digestible can be done about that. That's not what DOGE budget focus is about.
What it is actually about is:
(1) Reconciliation - In order to get some priority things done, the administration needs to do them with the absolute minimum in congressional support, and it needs to come up with ways to generate significant savings over the current budget baseline in order to do that, again, without having to do to the trouble of having congress pass a budget with those savings in it. So, "Fraud, waste, abuse" and "Activities being conducted on the basis of executive accretion or arrogation and not strictly statutory mandate" and "voluntary resignations" and so forth.
(2) The USG budget and population is so big and the politically relevant favor-ecosystem so comparably small that it only takes diverting a fairly small percentage of it to pay favors to ones friends, fellow travelers, clients, etc. to keep the whole "political defense in depth" system afloat, even as what would look like rounding errors that are themselves needles buried in haystacks. That's no secret (perhaps an "open secret") but until now and perhaps going back a hundred years there has been both lack of will and capability for any GOP administration to try to the politically smart and sane thing and actually go after all of that. And suddenly, that has all changed. That's a big deal.
At a kids birthday party on Sunday in NOVA everyone was either fired, about to be fired, or knew co-workers and close friends that had been fired. Hiring freezes and project freezes the order of the day.
Didn't have much sympathy for them though.
I have sympathy for them, in the same way I have sympathy for those who are the "collateral damage" in any war, and even for actual ordinary-soldier combatants who, may be fighting for a bad cause but usually in their own minds they are exemplifying noble martial virtues like courage and self-sacrifice in the name of their homes and peoples.
But they are still the enemy and there is no superior alternative to continue killing them - and regrettably and unavoidably, those around them - until they stop fighting.
I don't ask for any sympathy and I'll be ok, but personally I have taken a hit as a consequence of the recent reforms. I am not a combatant, but I definitely support the war and wish the combatants well and hope for their victory. I am kind of in the position of an ordinary Palestinian who supports Hamas' war against Israel and is upset to discover my restaurant has sunk into one of their tunnels.
I don't have much right to complain about friendly fire landing on my head when I look just like the enemy and I've chosen to position myself in one of the most target-rich environments available. War is more sledgehammer than scalpel, and it's not like I went to the trouble of painting lamb's blood on my cubicle frame to let the Angel of DOGE know to please pass over my particular desk. Though, if that works, someone please let me know.
My personal sympathies to you Handle! As someone not employed by the government but whose job is funded by the Medicare spending I despise, I know it could easily be me. My wife is sort of impacted too, as all building projects anywhere in the DC area have dried up and they aren't bringing her back full time.
The people at this kids party are not like yourself. I've watched them do evil and applaud evil and would be absolutely giddy if the exact same thing happened to their perceived enemies, and in fact were giddy just a few short years ago. The one whose wife just got fired from USAID I watched badmouth other families in their own driveways during Trick or Treating for having the wrong politics.
Before this got going we already made the final decision to escape DC. Just waiting for the right house to close on. If there is no longer anything holding you here, maybe it's time to try something new.
Bressler's point is specious. Even the Trump White House signed a $35k contract with Politico Pro the day before this silly controversy arose. They didn't do it to bribe Politico (nor did the many Republicans who subscribe), but because they find it useful to be well informed.
I noticed my husband calling one of his colleagues the other day, asking if they still subscribed to some news gathering service relating to their field. He’d dropped it, he said, because it “had gotten so expensive”.
Knowing him, the excessive amount in question would have been numbered in hundreds - certainly not thousands - like the $10,000 Politico subscription.
That’s a lot of daylight even if Politico is more in the actual reporting business.
My vague impression, admittedly from their free offerings, is that Politico is the Entertainment Tonight of politics. Which is fine but not perhaps something the governed have an interest in subsidizing.
A subscription to, say, the AP or Reuters would be more defensible.
If you want to know more about Politico Pro, read this former Republican staffer's thoughts. https://x.com/CorieWhalen/status/1887313584578773281
So Politico Pro is a database of spending by various departments, etc.?
It is going to take some time for me to trust the opinion of a "the media girl" even if she's the best media girl in the world. But I am overall prepared to accept that the site is a useful clearinghouse. But it would be cool to learn more about Politico Pro's "policy" stances.
Because if it has played a role in policy since 2008 ...
Politico Pro is completely different
That still sounds like a lot, multiply, for legislation tracking (?) that is not personalized to the client - but maybe it is personalized.
There's a lot of NGO hate on here, but the environmental group I am most familiar with, dispensed with the guy they had on retainer to track legislation. No objection to him or anything, but nobody could recall his ever having produced anything that the staff couldn't keep abreast of themselves. Their previous lady exec just liked to pay for stuff like that. (Do not underestimate the power of shopping to a woman, in any arena of life.) But government needn't be so lean, of course.
Burning it down and starting over is extremely risky and only warranted if iatrogenic rot and inefficiency are rampant. In many parts of the federal (and my state) government, we are at this stage. I recommend he goes as fast as possible while following the law.
Well stated.
My knowledge of USAID is limited to the technical assistance USAID provided to support the transition of former socialist economies to market economies in EE and the FSU in the 1990s. USAID funded the implementation of privatization programs based on auctions (both cash auctions for small-scale enterprises such as retail outlets and voucher auctions for larger state industrial enterprises) in these countries, and I would defend the use of federal funds for this purpose to this day, notwithstanding the controversies surrounding such programs. I had nothing to do with the more controversial and purely political USAID programs in the area of 'democracy promotion,' and there was no such thing as pushing LGBTQ+ on socially conservative societies back in those days as far as I know (pushing for women's equality was a thing, and although I don't support the use of aid for that purpose either, at least women generally represented approximately half the population of aid recipients, as opposed to the LGBTQ+ fringe). During that period, USAID still had some experienced old hands who knew all about the business of development assistance, including the good, the bad and the ugly, who in my opinion did some good work, and whom I greatly respected. There were certainly lots of wasteful programs (training programs are a tried and true way of wasting development funds, especially in countries that are hopeless basket cases), but I don't recall any programs as 'mindless' and counterproductive as the revelations coming out of DOGE suggest.
Hoffer said, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
In USG, every great cause quickly degenerates into a collections of human shields and cause-laundering (cf., "pink-washing", "green-washing") cover stories meant to conceal and provide plausible-deniability for the use of public funds to further partisan objectives and ulterior motives ranging from CIA operations, to first world corruption favor-paying, to political weaponization, to ideological evangelism.
If you give politicians these tools they will twist their use to their own political purposes to whatever extent they can get away with with. The temptation to do so is simply irresistible.
Much of the (uninformed) commentary on the DOGE cuts to USAID funding seems to equate USAID programs with 'soft power,' as if USAID programs are the one and only source of US soft power. That's absurd. MacDonald's alone is probably a far greater source of US soft power than all of USAID programs combined, and pushing DEI and LGBTQ+ on socially conservative societies undoubtedly undercuts US soft power in practice. Even the Russians loved MacDonald's.
I had peripheral involvement with a USAID training project that was partially funded through USAID, but it was managed by US Treasury personnel with matching funding provided by a Soros-funded entity. This was during the Clinton Administration, and the story (second-hand source) was that the relevant political appointee at Treasury (mentioned by AK in yesterday's post) viewed an unsolicited offer from Soros to jointly fund an aid project as one that could not be refused, because of Soros' donations to the Party. To be sure, the huge pot of money managed by USAID attracted unsolicited proposals from outside entities like bees to honey, but such proposals were routinely turned down during the relevant period. I get the sense from the revelations coming out of DOGE that the influence of outside, politically connected entities like Soros ballooned in the intervening years, and such influence had come to drive much of what USAID 'chose' to fund.
If anyone has a subscription to Politico Pro, it would be cool for the general public to get to see a few examples of its reporting across "22 Deep Policy Areas".
The thing about NYT which I assume lots of the same government staffers subscribe to - is that however deservedly loathed it is - Americans do know what's in it.
Maybe Bressler could elaborate on what sort of publication it is, since he's been invited to their Davos parties.
'Outlawing affirmative action of any kind, as Trump attempts to do, will discourage institutions from trying to level the playing field at all.'
I imagine that John McWhorter has good reason for believing that the playing field is not level or is he simply parroting an alleged 'fact' that looks less like a fact with every passing year? Or by 'level the playing field' is he talking about equality of outcome (i.e. keeping affirmative action forever, keeping disparate impact laws forever etc.?
I think McWhorter may have a sour view of the world, and while I certainly do myself, in an utterly different way - I think he is mistaken about how very much people want - to put it plainly - African-Americans to succeed. Decent people want that. *Americans* with wealth and power I would say, tend to want that. This is my impression from lifelong observation of the class that I am in the lower rung of. Basically, anyone who meets this desire halfway, is going to be invited to climb the ladder, to get all the education they want.
I realize that to some, this sounds paternalistic - and AA was supposed to take the personal out of the paternalistic. To regularize it. Maybe in this thinking, AA is more dignified. More something you can count on. Perhaps - but it seems that rather backfired along several dimensions.
That's fine having a sour view of the world but aren't academics and intellectuals supposed to engage with reality? As you say, for a long time now people have been praying that black people can raise themselves out of the family dysfunction, the low academic achievement and the grievance culture they are mired in but the social science data regarding IQ and personality traits appear to point against them ever achieving the dizzy heights of say, the US east Asians.
Either I've been bamboozled by a load of racist white supremacists posing as social scientists or John McWhorter is simply unwilling to countenance the idea that it is mother nature rather than Trump that is to blame for an unlevel playing field. Sure, if you squint and tilt your head in a certain way the data can be tortured into looking like we STILL haven't tried AA hard enough or long enough but I'm not really interested in the thoughts of dogmatists.
Well, (I think) he's a pretty standard ameliorist liberal. I don't know that it's fair to ask him to countenance something that would separate him from his political beliefs.
Which is why I more and more think, and maybe McW could get on board with it too - that the path forward, which it may be too late to take though it seems like we were once on it - is to quit talking about these things so damn much. Quit talking about racism. About IQ and about "outcomes" and about difference generally. Respect that difference exists, between groups, between individuals, and be polite about it and move on. Jettison the social scientists first and foremost.
McWhorter is center-left, what I’d call a “reasonable liberal”, but as with George Will he is virulently anti-Trump (as opposed to most GOPers, whom he merely opposes) if for no other reason than aesthetics.
I think in fact McWhorter does agree with most of what you wrote above.
Ah, I see. I misconstrued his comment about AA. I assumed he was carping rather than supporting. Thanks for pointing that out.
To maintain a political belief in the face of evidence that your beliefs are based on false premises is ridiculous.
I don't think it's possible not to talk about these differences. I used to think it was impolite to bring attention to the fact that some ethnic groups underperform. I held to that until I realised that this left the field open to racial grievance mongers who would blame white people for all ills. Black people naturally subscribed to these beliefs, which were only confirmed by white liberals who agreed black people SHOULD be furious. I'm sure some black-on-white crime was justified by the belief that whites had it coming to them. That's the point at which politeness has to stop.
If you adhere to the blank slate then you are more or less bound to believe the solution to inequality lies in social programs like AA, which is why I think Nathan Cofnas is right to say that things will only change once elites - and thereafter the people who get their beliefs undigested from elites - discard the blank slate. At that point we can perhaps accept our differences and once the malicious anti-white slurs stop we can finally stop talking about race.
For the record, I don’t know that McWhorter would agree that “Mother Nature” has caused blacks to be less successful.
But he would surely put a big portion of the blame on black culture, and some portion of the blame on politicians and government programs that reinforce that culture.
I’ve heard and read plenty of McWhorter. He is a Trump hater, but he has been against most AA, and throughly against DEI, for many years now.
He surely does NOT blame Trump for anything on this one issue.
I think I've only listened to him once and he seemed sensible enough though like Thomas Sowell, Wilfred Reilly and Coleman Hughes appeared to give genetic explanations of social disparities fairly short shrift.
Well, I give genetic explanations fairly short shrift myself.
Which is different from claiming they are zero percent responsible for differences.
While the culture part is clearly responsible for a high portion of the differences.
As can be evidenced, e.g. by differing groups of Asian-American immigrants with each other, where it’d be pretty hard to argue that the differences were for genetic reasons as opposed to varying cultural difference
Yes, I wasn't suggesting that genes account for 100% of differences. I don't think there is a person on the planet who argues this. A bang on the head with a hammer can reduce IQ and a hammer belong on the nurture rather than nature side.
Nor does anyone believe that all Asian Americans have an identical IQ. I have taught for 20 years in Japanese universities and I can assure you that the students are not all equally intelligent, despite all having 'Japanese genes' and growing up in Japan.
However, like height, intelligence is partly hereditary. Most studies point to somewhere around 80% by adulthood. We know this from identical twin studies and adoption studies.
'...the culture part is clearly responsible for a high portion of the differences.'
I'm not sure you can make that claim so cavalierly. You have to remember that different genes lead to different cultures i.e. high IQ people will tend to create different cultures to those of lower IQ people. It then becomes hard to tease apart cause and effect. For example, people from poor backgrounds often do worse academically than people in more wealthy areas. Some people then assume that that being poor negatively affects academic achievements. But what of it were the other way round? It could also be the case that people are poor BECAUSE they are low IQ. Therefore I think your certainty that culture is responsible for a high portion of the differences between black and white is misplaced.
Where does culture come from? Culture is downstream of genetics. There are huge genetic differences, IQ differences (80% heritable in adults), and culture differences between different Asian groups. Not to mention high selection for some.
One should treat differences between blacks and whites more like differences between different regions, or Catholics and Protestants. Race poisons everything.
Nope, I don't get it. What would this different treatment look like?
Nobody cares whether Protestants or Catholics make more money, and if a region that mostly happens to be Catholic is poor no one cares about the type of Christianity, instead the debate is simply about economics and opportunities.
Jewish SES is extremely high, and there are no grand ideas to change that. Why can the gap between whites and blacks not be ignored like that between Jews and gentiles? The focus on weird racial lines ("white-Asian" vs "black-other-POCs") seems odd when there are so many kinds and sources of inequality.
"Nobody cares whether Protestants or Catholics make more money"
You've never lived in Ireland.
“Politico Pro is to Politico what a Bloomberg Terminal is to Bloomberg news—a specialized product for sophisticated users. As such, it’s expensive. Individual subscriptions can run north of $10,000, and team subscriptions can run into the six figures. Politico can charge this much for the same reason Bloomberg can charge $25,000 for its famous Terminal—customers find it incredibly useful. And, by the way, single federal agencies have spent millions on those terminals, too.“
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-internet-mob-comes-for-politico?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
There are many more private than public subscriptions to Bloomberg Terminal, because it passes the market test of being judged to provide real economic value to its users in excess of the cost of the subscriptions. What percent of subscriptions to Politico Pro aren't paid for with taxes? If it's not zero, it rounds to zero.
I realise this is naive but maybe agencies should focus on execution of the mission and not lobbying
In the semi-dysfunctional way in which things currently operate, an agency can't focus on its mission without advocating for legislation, often drafting it, often at the request of members of congress ("technical assistance"). Every major agency has an office of legislative affairs or liaison or equivalent, and plenty of other connective tissue with all the various grouping of congressional staff.
Amplifying other similar effects of other aspects of the contemporary administrative state, there is no such thing as independent branches and separation of powers with this much communication and interaction.
My main objection to this kind of politicking is that agencies are in a much more powerful position to set the facts and context for their ask, such that they will often have the upper hand against voters and interest groups.
On the other hand, if Congress wished it to be otherwise they could act.