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Yesterday, we explored the deeply offensive musings of The Vile and Useless Mr. Brooks and his silly comparisons of Elon Musk to the greatest mass murderers in history.
Today, we apply the Brooks model in more detail. The estimable but apparently innumerate David Brooks opined that DOGE's proposed cuts to USAID will cause 300,000 deaths. He relied on a totally brilliant and obviously totally accurate model from an academic who projected those deaths from cuts in USAID funding. This caused Mr. Brooks to compare Musk to Pol Pot (8 million deaths), Mao (30-50 million), and Stalin (9 million), even though Musk’s paltry alleged death toll is barely 2% of the average of those three mass murderers (it seemed a stretch to put him in the same category).
More interesting is the wider application of the Brooks model to funds denied to higher and life-saving purposes. If we were to take a very small sample of the bizarre funding targets of USAID—ignoring the complex web of subcontracting/consulting that keeps much, if not most, of USAID funds inside the Beltway—and consider what those funds were not used for, how is that functionally different from funds (theoretically) cut?
Our sample:
| $8,300,000 | Equity and inclusion education |
| $9,000,000 | Funds directed to/stolen by Islamist terror groups |
| $59,900,000 | Promoting resilient livelihoods & positive youth experience in Gaza |
| $43,300,000 | Building an inclusive workforce in Egypt with an emphasis on fighting climate change |
| $120,500,000 | Sample total |
Congress and the public generally assume that USAID is fighting poverty, disease, and otherwise serving basic needs. Perhaps they remain unaware of the more typical direction of such funds. (Do we really have US-funded teams on the ground in Gaza working on a more upbeat youth experience?)
What if that $120 million were directed at more basic needs? The Brooks model relies heavily on projected AIDS deaths, so let's look at that item first among things not purchased. Even assuming there is no bulk, generic pricing, we could have purchased over 30,000 months’ supplies of AIDS meds (in reality, at bulk generic rates, probably more than 10 million).
| 30,125 | Month supply, top of top-of-the-line AIDS meds, full retail cost |
| 150,625,000 | Pounds of rice, African prices |
| 10,041,667 | Healthy meals for a family of four |
If not spent on those AIDS meds, we could have provided 150 million pounds of rice or 10 million top-of-the-line meals (not your 80-cents-a-day advertised Third World rate but Western diet quality).
How many lives will not be saved because these funds were diverted to grifters and ideologues? Using the Brooks model, which presumes no alternative sources and total dependency, USAID grift has likely claimed at least a million victims when projected forward for several years. Maybe if we were to apply the infamous Neil Ferguson Covid model methodology, we could bump that up to 5 or 10 million.
These silly USAID expenditures in the table above were only a fraction of the waste, fraud, and absurdities uncovered by DOGE. Where is the outrage from Mr. Brooks et al. about this abuse? Is it not just a crime but a sacrilege when something so precious and central to liberals as government spending has been perverted and misused?
Leaving aside the obvious Trump Derangement Syndrome aspect of Brooks’ rant, there is also the possibility of the Alger Hiss Paradigm in play. The self-identified elite of the 1950s was less concerned about Hiss’s guilt or innocence than about the offense of grubby plebes and bumpkins like Whitaker Chambers and Nixon presuming to pass judgment on one of their betters. Apparently for Brooks, the corruption of USAID is the correct kind of corruption, a subsidy for members of the educated and connected classes who thrive in NGO/nonprofit/academic spheres. The only real crime was exposing it all and subjecting the enlightened to the judgment of the MAGA hordes. There may have been some trivial mismanagement, but not enough to permit the rubes to interfere, right?
Hiss was guilty and Brooks is a hack. Up the grubby hordes and down with the posh!
Discussion (19)
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I’d be willing to drop the waste denomination and go straight for fraud and when not-fraud, straight-on abuse.
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Do these grants to NGOs fall under any oversight whatsoever? I've looked for evidence of such, and haven't found any yet.
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The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act requires that grants be disclosed to be publicly available. It does not require detailed reporting of to whom the grantee gives the money to or otherwise how it is spent. Performance and other reporting requirements are presumably supposed to be incorporated into the terms of each grant. The agency could choose to monitor closely with specific requirements or just let the grantee do whatever.
In contrast, government contractors can be subject to hideously detailed reporting and accounting requirements.
So if an agency with broad appropriations leeway just wants to give money away and not look at results it can do so. The only disincentive is that giving it to other people means less money for the agency to spend directly. Buy some political allies, do some favors and take care of potential future employers...
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Money laundering, straight up.
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No. You are referring to the theft stage.
The laundering stage is when grantees hire/consult/subcontract/subgrant each other so that the money never leaves the DC metro area even though on the books it looks like a comprehensive program was created and delivered to enlighten third-worlders about the effects of climate change on disabled transgendered persons of color.
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