Podcasts about foreign aid

Last week's fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk was deeply disturbing, and as Andrew establishes at the start, “murder is murder” and those responsible must be held to account. So Mary and Andrew begin with where the investigation stands and how the FBI has handled the case, as well as the lawsuit filed against FBI Director Kash Patel over alleged politically motivated firings at the Bureau. Then, co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, Ryan Goodman stops in to share his research around the end of “the presumption of regularity” in the Trump era, amid growing frustration from many lower courts. And lastly, Andrew and Mary dig into the latest twists and turns in the President's attempt to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook.A note to listeners: After today's recording, Tyler Robinson was charged with felony aggravated murder, among other charges.Further reading:  Here is Ryan Goodman's research in Just Security: The “Presumption of Regularity” in Trump Administration LitigationAnd a reminder: There are still tickets available for MSNBC Live – our second live community event featuring more than a dozen MSNBC hosts. The day-long event will be held on October 11th at Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan. To buy tickets visit msnbc.com/live25.Want to listen to this show without ads? Sign up for MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Guests: Max Primorac & Christopher D. Heckel Host Scot Bertram talks with Max Primorac, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation's Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, about the history of U.S. foreign aid and how the Trump administration is charting a different path. And Christopher D. Heckel, associate professor of biology at Hillsdale College, gives a […]

Guests: Max Primorac & Christopher D. Heckel Host Scot Bertram talks with Max Primorac, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, about the history of U.S. foreign aid and how the Trump administration is charting a different path. And Christopher D. Heckel, associate professor of biology at Hillsdale College, gives a primer on invasive plant species across the United States.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"Either leave Africa alone or come with a sustainable business model in mind."Maya Horgan Famodu is the founder and CEO of Ingressive Capital, a venture capital fund focused on Africa. She raised over $10 million dollars for her first fund in 2020 and has since gone on to raise over $50 million for Fund 2. Maya wrote an article earlier this year called "The Hidden Benefits of Trump's Aid Policy for Africa" for the website TechCabal. Claude talks to her about how foreign aid encourages corruption, dependence, weak governance. And they discuss a different paradigm for Africa, one where investment fuels innovation, employment, self-reliance and some of the most successful start-ups the world will ever see.Plus: Why start-up founders would never join Boko Haram.

In Belf's News Gallery Greg Belfrage goes over the trending headlines of the day including Trump, Foreign Aid, Visa Crackdown, attack on Hamas, Israel, Job Growth Stalling, Education, and more...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

President Donald Trump said he will announce the launch of America Prays while speaking at the Museum of the Bible in Washington on Monday. “We are one nation, under God, and we always will,” the president said.The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to permit it to withhold billions of dollars in foreign aid previously authorized by Congress. The Department of Justice asked the justices to pause a ruling by U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, who ordered the federal government to spend about $4 billion in previously appropriated funds.Terrorists opened fire at a bus stop in Jerusalem on Monday, killing six people and wounding another 12, according to Israeli officials. Police said an Israeli soldier and civilians who were at the scene shot and killed the two attackers, while they later arrested a third person in connection with the shooting. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the scene about two hours after the attack. Netanyahu praised the soldier and civilians who fired on the gunmen.

After a Labor Day weekend that saw a judge halt the Trump administration's attempt to deport dozens of Guatemalan children already loaded onto airplanes, Andrew and Mary had planned to start their conversation there. But just this morning, Judge Charles Breyer ruled the administration cannot deploy U.S. military to carry out law enforcement operations, as this violates the Posse Comitatus Act. Andrew and Mary provide historical context for the act and walk us through the rationale of this latest ruling. Then, they take a beat on moves to oust two more Trump appointed U.S. Attorneys in California and Nevada who have yet to be congressionally approved. And last up, they review several big cases on tariffs, Lisa Cook, and cuts to foreign aid.Further reading:  Here is Judge Thomas T. Cullen's opinion dismissing Trump's lawsuit against Maryland federal judges.And here is Judge Charles Breyer's ruling on the Posse Comitatus Act: Opinion granting injunctive reliefAnd a reminder: tickets are on sale now for MSNBC Live – our second live community event featuring more than a dozen MSNBC hosts. The day-long event will be held on October 11th at Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan. To buy tickets visit msnbc.com/live25.Want to listen to this show without ads? Sign up for MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.

In this episode of 'Just Ask the Press', host Brian Karem, along with national security expert Mark Zaid and political correspondent John T. Bennett, delve into the recent developments surrounding Donald Trump's health, the implications of the ouster of CDC Director Susan Monterrez, and the ongoing legal battles regarding Trump's tariffs. The conversation highlights the importance of transparency in presidential health, the dynamics of Congress in response to the administration's actions, and the theatrical nature of Trump's cabinet meetings. The episode concludes with a discussion on the potential consequences of the administration's decisions on foreign aid and the legal ramifications of recent court rulings.Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JATQPodcastFollow us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/jatqpodcast.bsky.socialIntragram: https://www.instagram.com/jatqpodcastYoutube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCET7k2_Y9P9Fz0MZRARGqVwThis Show is Available Ad-Free And Early For Patreon supporters here:https://www.patreon.com/justaskthequestionpodcastPurchase Brian's book "Free The Press"  

The Third World suffers from a lack of economic development due to its lack of rights of private property, its government-imposed production controls, and its acceptance of government foreign aid that squeezes out private investment. Th e result is too little productive savings, investment, entrepreneurship, and market opportunity. – Murray N. Rothbard, Making Economic Sense, […]

The dismantling of USAID is contributing to a 17% drop in international foreign aid this year. That’s put some of the world’s worst conflicts in competition with each other for attention and resources. On today’s episode of the Big Take, Crisis Group CEO Comfort Ero joins host David Gura to discuss what this drop-off in funding has meant on the ground in the places that need it most — and why it’s so hard to sell developed countries on increasing their foreign aid budgets right now. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

/// Keith Knight - Don't Tread on Anyone ///Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://libertarianinstitute.org/books/domestic-imperialism-nine-reasons-i-left-progressivism/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Voluntaryist Handbook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://libertarianinstitute.org/books/voluntaryist-handbook/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support the show, PayPal: KeithKnight130@gmail.com or Venmo: @Keith-Knight-34 Odysee: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://odysee.com/@KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone:b⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/keithknight13/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Rumble: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://rumble.com/user/VoluntaryistKeith⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BitChute: KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bitchute.com/channel/keithknightdonttreadonanyone/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tiktok.com/@keithknightdtoa⁠

The Court of Appeal in London ruled that asylum seekers can remain in a hotel in Essex Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In our news wrap Friday, President Trump is trying to block nearly $5 billion in foreign aid funding already approved by Congress, an emergency hearing on Trump's firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook concluded with no immediate ruling, GOP Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst reportedly won't seek reelection and Trump revoked the Secret Service detail for former Vice President Harris. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Today marks 20 years since Hurricane Katrina and there are fears lessons from the disaster are being forgotten. We'll tell you who Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to name as the acting director of the CDC. Those challenging the Trump administration's foreign aid cuts may have mixed feelings after a recent court decision. A Thai court has removed the country's Prime Minister. Plus, we'll tell you what gas prices are doing ahead of Labour Day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

DEK: Plus: U.S. inflation persisted above the Fed's target in July. President Trump revokes Kamala Harris's Secret Service protection. Alex Ossola hosts.Sign up for WSJ's free What's News newsletter.An artificial-intelligence tool assisted in the making of this episode by creating summaries that were based on Wall Street Journal reporting and reviewed and adapted by an editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina devastating Louisiana, Mississippi and other parts of the Gulf Coast, tributes to those lost, pride in the rebuilding and recovery, and thoughts of preparing for future storms; President Donald Trump says he will cut $4.9 billion for foreign aid through a 'pocket rescission', which will not give Congress a chance to vote on it. Some Members of Congress, Democrats & Republicans, say that is illegal and unconstitutional; Transportation Department cuts nearly $700 million in contracts for 12 wind energy farms, calling the projects wasteful'; new tariffs on once-exempt small value packages have taken effect We will talk with New York Times business reporter Peter Eavis about what this means for you the next time you order something shipped from outside the U.S. (25); United Nations Security Council holds a meeting on Russia's continued deadly bombardment of Ukrainian cities, including the capital Kyiv; former Rep. Randy 'Duke' Cunningham (R-CA) has died. He was a war hero who went to prison after pleading guilty to taking bribes from defense contractors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Top headlines for Friday, August 29, 2025In this episode, we delve into the heart-wrenching tragedy that struck a Minnesota Catholic private school, where a shooting has left two children dead and many more injured. We also explore the latest legal battles as the Trump administration appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court over billions in foreign aid payments. Lastly, we address the controversial findings on mental health risks faced by women who undergo abortions, compared to those who carry pregnancies to term. 00:11 Minneapolis Catholic school shooter identified, changed name01:08 Ohio school defends guidance counselor seen in undercover video02:10 Supreme Court urged to weigh Trump's halting of foreign aid03:01 Court sides with hospital staffer fired over sex-change surgeries03:55 DNC committee member claims DEI 'foundation' of Christian church04:46 Mom speaks out after daughter's encounter in school locker room05:36 Abortion tied to increased mental health hospitalization: studySubscribe to this PodcastApple PodcastsSpotifyGoogle PodcastsOvercastFollow Us on Social Media@ChristianPost on TwitterChristian Post on Facebook@ChristianPostIntl on InstagramSubscribe on YouTubeGet the Edifi AppDownload for iPhoneDownload for AndroidSubscribe to Our NewsletterSubscribe to the Freedom Post, delivered every Monday and ThursdayClick here to get the top headlines delivered to your inbox every morning!Links to the NewsMinneapolis Catholic school shooter identified, changed name | U.S.Ohio school defends guidance counselor seen in undercover video | EducationSupreme Court urged to weigh Trump's halting of foreign aid | PoliticsCourt sides with hospital staffer fired over sex-change surgeries | U.S.DNC committee member claims DEI 'foundation' of Christian church | PoliticsMom speaks out after daughter's encounter in school locker room | EducationAbortion tied to increased mental health hospitalization: study | World

AP correspondent Haya Panjwani reports on foreign aid funding being revoked by the president.

This Day in Maine for Friday, August 29th, 2025.

In our news wrap Friday, President Trump is trying to block nearly $5 billion in foreign aid funding already approved by Congress, an emergency hearing on Trump's firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook concluded with no immediate ruling, GOP Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst reportedly won't seek reelection and Trump revoked the Secret Service detail for former Vice President Harris. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

This Day in Legal History: Constitutional Convention–Article IIIOn August 27, 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia turned their attention to the judiciary. Debates centered on what would become Article III, particularly the scope of judicial power. The Convention approved language stating that federal judicial power would extend to “all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution,” a formulation that blended common law tradition with equitable relief. This phrase would become foundational, granting federal courts broad jurisdiction over constitutional questions. Also debated was the method by which judges could be removed from office. A motion was introduced proposing that judges could be removed by the Executive if both Houses of Congress requested it. This raised immediate concerns about judicial independence. Critics argued that giving such removal power to the Executive would dangerously entangle the judiciary with the political branches. The proposal ultimately failed, with only the Connecticut delegation supporting it. The delegates chose instead to preserve the more rigorous process of impeachment as the mechanism for judicial removal. This decision reinforced the principle of judicial independence, anchoring it in the separation of powers. These discussions on August 27 set enduring boundaries around federal judicial authority and helped define the judiciary as a coequal branch of government.Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook has retained high-profile Washington attorney Abbe Lowell to challenge President Donald Trump's attempt to remove her from the central bank. Trump cited alleged mortgage fraud as grounds for her dismissal, claiming she misrepresented two homes as primary residences in 2021. Cook, appointed in 2022 by President Joe Biden, has denied any wrongdoing and faces no charges. Lowell, who recently launched a law firm to defend public officials targeted by Trump, announced plans to sue, arguing Trump lacks the legal authority to remove a sitting Fed governor. He characterized the removal attempt as politically motivated and baseless. Lowell's current and former clients include Hunter Biden, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and several other prominent figures, both Democratic and Republican. His firm also represents ex-government lawyers who claim they were unlawfully dismissed by the Justice Department. Cook is the first Black woman to serve on the Fed's board and her removal would mark an unprecedented breach of the central bank's political independence.Fed's Lisa Cook turns to top Washington lawyer Lowell in Trump fight | ReutersThe Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a federal injunction that is currently requiring it to continue foreign aid payments, despite an executive order halting such funding. In an emergency filing, the Department of Justice argued that the injunction, originally issued by U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, interferes with the executive branch's authority over foreign policy and budgetary decisions. Trump issued the 90-day pause on foreign aid on January 20, his second inauguration day, and later took steps to dismantle USAID, including sidelining staff and considering its absorption into the State Department.Two nonprofits — the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Journalism Development Network — challenged the funding freeze, claiming it was illegal. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the injunction should be lifted, the full court declined to stay the order, and Judge Ali rejected another request to do so earlier this week. The administration warned that unless the Supreme Court intervenes, it will have to spend roughly $12 billion before September 30, when the funds expire, thereby undermining its policy goals.Previously, the Supreme Court narrowly declined to pause Ali's order requiring the release of $2 billion in aid. The D.C. Circuit panel later found that only the Government Accountability Office, not private organizations, had standing to challenge the funding freeze.Trump administration asks US Supreme Court to halt foreign aid payments | ReutersAnthropic has reached a class-wide settlement with authors who sued the AI company for training its models on over 7 million pirated books downloaded from “shadow libraries” like LibGen. The lawsuit, filed in 2024, accused Anthropic of copyright infringement and gained momentum after U.S. District Judge William Alsup granted class-action status in July 2025—a ruling that Anthropic said put the company under “inordinate pressure” to settle. The potential damages, estimated at up to $900 billion if the infringement was found willful, created what the company described as an existential threat.In court, Anthropic admitted the magnitude of the case made it financially unsustainable to proceed to trial, even if the legal merits were disputed. Alsup repeatedly denied the company's motions to delay or avoid trial, criticizing Anthropic for not disclosing what works it used. While he ruled that training AI on copyrighted works could qualify as fair use, the piracy claims were left for a jury to decide. Anthropic appealed the class certification and sought emergency relief, but ultimately chose to settle.Critics say the settlement underscores how current copyright law's statutory damages—up to $150,000 per willful infringement—can distort outcomes and discourage innovation. The deal is expected to be finalized by September 3. Meanwhile, Anthropic still faces other copyright lawsuits involving song lyrics and Reddit content. Legal experts suggest the company's move was partly motivated by uncertainty over how courts interpret “willful” infringement, especially with a related Supreme Court case on the horizon.Anthropic Settles Major AI Copyright Suit Brought by Authors (3)Content warning: This segment contains references to suicide, self-harm, and the death of a minor. Discretion is advised.The parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in California state court, alleging that ChatGPT played a direct role in their son's suicide. They claim that over several months, the AI chatbot engaged in extended conversations with Adam, during which it validated his suicidal thoughts, provided instructions on lethal self-harm methods, and even helped draft a suicide note. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of prioritizing profit over user safety, especially with the release of GPT-4o in 2024, which introduced features like memory, emotional mimicry, and persistent interaction that allegedly increased risks to vulnerable users.The Raines argue that OpenAI knew these features could endanger users without strong safeguards, yet proceeded with the product rollout to boost its valuation. They seek monetary damages and a court order mandating stronger user protections, including age verification, blocking of self-harm queries, and psychological risk warnings.OpenAI expressed condolences and noted that safety mechanisms such as directing users to crisis resources are built into ChatGPT, though they acknowledged these measures can falter during prolonged conversations. The company said it is working to improve safeguards, including developing parental controls and exploring in-chat access to licensed professionals.OpenAI, Altman sued over ChatGPT's role in California teen's suicide | ReutersOpenAI Hit With Suit From Family of Teen Who Died by Suicide This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Thursday, August 14th, 2025Today, it appears that Russia is responsible for the hack of the federal court system; the US deficit has increased to $291B despite Trump's tariff promises; immigration agents on Monday detained a disabled 15-year-old student at gunpoint outside a Los Angeles high school; the bench trial in the case brought by Gavin Newsom alleging the Trump administration has violated the Posse Comitatus Act has ended and Judge Breyer should issue a ruling soon; the president says he will ask Congress for a long term extension of the federal occupation of the District of Columbia; Gavin Newsom will give a press conference today at 1130 AM Pacific Time regarding redistricting; the Congressional Budget Office is out with a score on the Billionaire Bailout Bill and it's just as we suspected; Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyer called my reporting a rumor on twitter, and i have a response; and Allison and Dana read your Good News.Thank You, Daily LookFor 50% off your first order, head to DailyLook.com and use code DAILYBEANS.  Thank You, Fast Growing TreesGet 15% off your first purchase. FastGrowingTrees.com/dailybeans. Community Support Sign-up - UTLAStoriesLive updates: Trump says he will request a 'long-term extension' of D.C. police takeover | NBC NewsTrump's tax law will mostly benefit the rich, while leaving poorer Americans with less, CBO says | NBC NewsUS deficit grows to $291 billion in July despite tariff revenue surge | ReutersAgents detain student at gunpoint near school; safe zones to be expanded around LAUSD campuses | Los Angeles TimesCommunity Support Sign-up - UTLATrump Administration Can Withhold Billions in Foreign Aid, Appeals Court Rules | The New York TimesGood Trouble Today's good trouble comes from Isaiah Martin, candidate for congress in Texas' 18th district. “Texas Republicans have now set up a TIP LINE to rat out the Texas Democrats. So PLEASE, for the sake of the public, DO NOT FLOOD THIS NUMBER with tips on Bigfoot sightings, UFO sightings, or asking why Trump is on "the list" 1-866-786-5972Texas House speaker creates 'tip line' to narc on missing Democrats - Raw StoryFrom The Good NewsIn this episode of Glad You Asked, Deputy Secretary Dr. Paul R. Lawrence is joined by DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar to discuss career... - VA FacebookWeatherly Heights Baptist ChurchReminder - you can see the pod pics if you become a Patron. The good news pics are at the bottom of the show notes of each Patreon episode! That's just one of the perks of subscribing! patreon.com/muellershewrote Our Donation LinksNational Security Counselors - DonateMSW Media, Blue Wave California Victory Fund | ActBlueWhistleblowerAid.org/beans Federal workers - feel free to email AG at fedoath@pm.me and let me know what you're going to do, or just vent. I'm always here to listen. Find Upcoming Actions 50501 Movement, No Kings.org, Indivisible.orgDr. Allison Gill - Substack, BlueSky , TikTok, IG, TwitterDana Goldberg - BlueSky, Twitter, IG, facebook, danagoldberg.comCheck out more from MSW Media - Shows - MSW Media, Cleanup On Aisle 45 pod, The Breakdown | SubstackShare your Good News or Good TroubleMSW Good News and Good TroubleHave some good news; a confession; or a correction to share?Good News & Confessions - The Daily Beanshttps://www.dailybeanspod.com/confessional/ Listener Survey:http://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=BffJOlI7qQcF&ver=shortFollow the Podcast on Apple:The Daily Beans on Apple PodcastsWant to support the show and get it ad-free and early?The Daily Beans | SupercastThe Daily Beans & Mueller, She Wrote | PatreonThe Daily Beans | Apple Podcasts

Today's host was Michael Wear, Founder, President and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life.  Thanks for listening to The Morning Five! Please subscribe to and rate The Morning Five on your favorite podcast platform. Learn more about the work of the Center for Christianity and Public Life at www.ccpubliclife.org. Scripture: Matthew 8 Top Headlines: 1) Trump, Putin Set to Meet 2) Trump WH Withholding of Foreign Aid Money Proceeds Following Court Decision 3) Americans Sour on Drinking Today's host was Michael Wear, Founder, President, and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life.  Join the conversation and follow us at: Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@michaelwear⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, @ccpubliclife Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@MichaelRWear⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, @ccpubliclife and check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@tsfnetwork⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Music by: King Sis #politics #faith #prayer #alcohol #trends #UnitedStates #culture #Russia #Ukraine #Trump #Putin #Europe #foreignaid #courts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

HOUR 1 of the Chris Hand Show 08-14-2025| aired on Thursday on SuperTalk 99.7 WTNSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

AP correspondent Ed Donahue reports on a favorable ruling for the Trump administration on foreign aid.

Billions in U.S. foreign aid for HIV, AIDS, and other global health programs remain frozen after a divided federal appeals court backed the Trump administration's hold. The decision sidestepped a larger constitutional question, while a dissent warned the ruling undermines Congress' spending power. Vulnerable communities abroad now face uncertainty. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed with the latest news from a leading Black-owned & controlled media company: https://aurn.com/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Does America have a moral obligation to the world? The former Department of Government Efficiency staffer Jeremy Lewin, now deputy administrator for the United States Agency for International Development, explains how he is implementing President Trump's foreign aid philosophy and what it means for humanitarian assistance going forward.01:59 - From the private sector to interviewing with Elon Musk09:18 - The rapid restructuring of U.S.A.I.D.19:44 - Lewin's critiques of U.S.A.I.D.'s focus25:15 - The most controversial cuts: humanitarian aid 29:50 - America's interests first, values-based interests second40:14 - What is the future vision for foreign aid?(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)Thoughts? Email us at interestingtimes@nytimes.com. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We've covered the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, pretty consistently on Statecraft, since our first interview on PEPFAR, the flagship anti-AIDS program, in 2023. When DOGE came to USAID, I was extremely critical of the cuts to lifesaving aid, and the abrupt, pointlessly harmful ways in which they were enacted. In March, I wrote, “The DOGE team has axed the most effective and efficient programs at USAID, and forced out the chief economist, who was brought in to oversee a more aggressive push toward efficiency.”Today, we're talking to that forced-out chief economist, Dean Karlan. Dean spent two and a half years at the helm of the first-ever Office of the Chief Economist at USAID. In that role, he tried to help USAID get better value from its foreign aid spending. His office shifted $1.7 billion of spending towards programs with stronger evidence of effectiveness. He explains how he achieved this, building a start-up within a massive bureaucracy. I should note that Dean is one of the titans of development economics, leading some of the most important initiatives in the field (I won't list them, but see here for details), and I think there's a plausible case he deserves a Nobel.Throughout this conversation, Dean makes a point much better than I could: the status quo at USAID needed a lot of improvement. The same political mechanisms that get foreign aid funded by Congress also created major vulnerabilities for foreign aid, vulnerabilities that DOGE seized on. Dean believes foreign aid is hugely valuable, a good thing for us to spend our time, money, and resources on. But there's a lot USAID could do differently to make its marginal dollar spent more efficient.DOGE could have made USAID much more accountable and efficient by listening to people like Dean, and reformers of foreign aid should think carefully about Dean's criticisms of USAID, and his points for how to make foreign aid not just resilient but politically popular in the long term.We discuss* What does the Chief Economist do?* Why does 170% percent of USAID funds come already earmarked by Congress?* Why is evaluating program effectiveness institutionally difficult?* Why don't we just do cash transfers for everything?* Why institutions like USAID have trouble prioritizing* Should USAID get rid of gender/environment/fairness in procurement rules?* Did it rely too much on a small group of contractors?* What's changed in development economics over the last 20 years?* Should USAID spend more on governance and less on other forms of aid? * How DOGE killed USAID — and how to bring it back better* Is depoliticizing foreign aid even possible?* Did USAID build “soft power” for the United States?This is a long conversation: you can jump to a specific section with the index above. If you just want to hear about Dean's experience with DOGE, you can click here or go to the 45-minute mark in the audio. And if you want my abbreviated summary of the conversation, see these two Twitter threads. But I think the full conversation is enlightening, especially if you want to understand the American foreign aid system. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious edits.Our past coverage of USAIDDean, I'm curious about the limits of your authority. What can the Chief Economist of USAID do? What can they make people do?There had never been an Office of the Chief Economist before. In a sense, I was running a startup, within a 13,000-employee agency that had fairly baked-in, decentralized processes for doing things.Congress would say, "This is how much to spend on this sector and these countries." What you actually fund was decided by missions in the individual countries. It was exciting to have that purview across the world and across many areas, not just economic development, but also education, social protection, agriculture. But the reality is, we were running a consulting unit within USAID, trying to advise others on how to use evidence more effectively in order to maximize impact for every dollar spent.We were able to make some institutional changes, focused on basically a two-pronged strategy. One, what are the institutional enablers — the rules and the processes for how things get done — that are changeable? And two, let's get our hands dirty working with the budget holders who say, "I would love to use the evidence that's out there, please help guide us to be more effective with what we're doing."There were a lot of willing and eager people within USAID. We did not lack support to make that happen. We never would've achieved anything, had there not been an eager workforce who heard our mission and knocked on our door to say, "Please come help us do that."What do you mean when you say USAID has decentralized processes for doing things?Earmarks and directives come down from Congress. [Some are] about sector: $1 billion dollars to spend on primary school education to improve children's learning outcomes, for instance. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) [See our interview with former PEPFAR lead Mark Dybul] is one of the biggest earmarks to spend money specifically on specific diseases. Then there's directives that come down about how to allocate across countries.Those are two conversations I have very little engagement on, because some of that comes from Congress. It's a very complicated, intertwined set of constraints that are then adhered to and allocated to the different countries. Then what ends up happening is — this is the decentralized part — you might be a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) working in a country, your focus is education, and you're given a budget for that year from the earmark for education and told, "Go spend $80 million on a new award in education." You're working to figure out, “How should we spend that?” There might be some technical support from headquarters, but ultimately, you're responsible for making those decisions. Part of our role was to help guide those FSOs towards programs that had more evidence of effectiveness.Could you talk more about these earmarks? There's a popular perception that USAID decides what it wants to fund. But these big categories of humanitarian aid, or health, or governance, are all decided in Congress. Often it's specific congressmen or congresswomen who really want particular pet projects to be funded.That's right. And the number that I heard is that something in the ballpark of 150-170% of USAID funds were earmarked. That might sound horrible, but it's not.How is that possible?Congress double-dips, in a sense: we have two different demands. You must spend money on these two things. If the same dollar can satisfy both, that was completely legitimate. There was no hiding of that fact. It's all public record, and it all comes from congressional acts that create these earmarks. There's nothing hidden underneath the hood.Will you give me examples of double earmarking in practice? What kinds of goals could you satisfy with the same dollar?There's an earmark for Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) to do research, and an earmark for education. If DIV is going to fund an evaluation of something in the education space, there's a possibility that that can satisfy a dual earmark requirement. That's the kind of thing that would happen. One is an earmark for a process: “Do really careful, rigorous evaluations of interventions, so that we learn more about what works and what doesn't." And another is, "Here's money that has to be spent on education." That would be an example of a double dip on an earmark.And within those categories, the job of Chief Economist was to help USAID optimize the funding? If you're spending $2 billion on education, “Let's be as effective with that money as possible.”That's exactly right. We had two teams, Evidence Use and Evidence Generation. It was exactly what it sounds like. If there was an earmark for $1 billion dollars on education, the Evidence Use team worked to do systematic analysis: “What is the best evidence out there for what works for education for primary school learning outcomes?” Then, “How can we map that evidence to the kinds of things that USAID funds? What are the kinds of questions that need to be figured out?”It's not a cookie-cutter answer. A systematic review doesn't say, "Here's the intervention. Now just roll it out everywhere." We had to work with the missions — with people who know the local area — to understand, “What is the local context? How do you appropriately adapt this program in a procurement and contextualize it to that country, so that you can hire people to use that evidence?”Our Evidence Generation team was trying to identify knowledge gaps where the agency could lead in producing more knowledge about what works and what doesn't. If there was something innovative that USAID was funding, we were huge advocates of, "Great, let's contribute to the global public good of knowledge, so that we can learn more in the future about what to do, and so others can learn from us. So let's do good, careful evaluations."Being able to demonstrate what good came of an intervention also serves the purpose of accountability. But I've never been a fan of doing really rigorous evaluations just for the sake of accountability. It could discourage innovation and risk-taking, because if you fail, you'd be seen as a failure, rather than as a win for learning that an idea people thought was reasonable didn't turn out to work. It also probably leads to overspending on research, rather than doing programs. If you're doing something just for accountability purposes, you're better off with audits. "Did you actually deliver the program that you said you would deliver, or not?"Awards over $100 million dollars did go through the front office of USAID for approval. We added a process — it was actually a revamped old process — where they stopped off in my office. We were able to provide guidance on the cost-effectiveness of proposals that would then be factored into the decision on whether to proceed. When I was first trying to understand Project 2025, because we saw that as a blueprint for what changes to expect, one of the changes they proposed was actually that process. I remember thinking to myself, "We just did that. Hopefully this change that they had in mind when they wrote that was what we actually put in place." But I thought of it as a healthy process that had an impact, not just on that one award, but also in helping set an example for smaller awards of, “This is how to be more evidence-based in what you're doing.”[Further reading: Here's a position paper Karlan's office at USAID put out in 2024 on how USAID should evaluate cost-effectiveness.]You've also argued that USAID should take into account more research that has already been done on global development and humanitarian aid. Your ideal wouldn't be for USAID to do really rigorous research on every single thing it does. You can get a lot better just by incorporating things that other people have learned.That's absolutely right. I can say this as a researcher: to no one's surprise, it's more bureaucratic to work with the government as a research funder than it is to work with foundations and nimble NGOs. If I want to evaluate a particular program, and you give me a choice of who the funder should be, the only reason I would choose government is if it had a faster on-ramp to policy by being inside.The people who are setting policy should not be putting more weight on evidence that they paid for. In fact, one of the slogans that I often used at USAID is, "Evidence doesn't care who pays for it." We shouldn't be, as an agency, putting more weight on the things that we evaluated vs. things that others evaluated without us, and that we can learn from, mimic, replicate, and scale.We — and the we here is everyone, researchers and policymakers — put too much weight on individual studies, in a horrible way. The first to publish on something gets more accolades than the second, third and fourth. That's not healthy when it comes to policy. If we put too much weight on our own evidence, we end up putting too much weight on individual studies we happen to do. That's not healthy either.That was one of the big pieces of culture change that we tried to push internally at USAID. We had this one slide that we used repeatedly that showed the plethora of evidence out there in the world compared to 20 years ago. A lot more studies are now usable. You can aggregate that evidence and form much better policies.You had political support to innovate that not everybody going into government has. On the other hand, USAID is a big, bureaucratic entity. There are all kinds of cross-pressures against being super-effective per dollar spent. In doing culture change, what kinds of roadblocks did you run into internally?We had a lot of support and political cover, in the sense that the political appointees — I was not a political appointee — were huge fans. But political appointees under Republicans have also been huge fans of what we were doing. Disagreements are more about what to do and what causes to choose. But the basic idea of being effective with your dollars to push your policy agenda is something that cuts across both sides.In the days leading up to the inauguration, we were expecting to continue the work we were doing. Being more cost-effective was something some of the people who were coming in were huge advocates for. They did make progress under Trump I in pushing USAID in that direction. We saw ourselves as able to help further that goal. Obviously, that's not the way it played out, but there isn't really anything political about being more cost-effective.We'll come back to that, but I do want to talk about the 2.5 years you spent in the Biden administration. USAID is full of people with all kinds of incentives, including some folks who were fully on board and supportive. What kinds of challenges did you have in trying to change the culture to be more focused on evidence and effectiveness?There was a fairly large contingent of people who welcomed us, were eager, understood the space that we were coming from and the things that we wanted, and greeted us with open arms. There's no way we would've accomplished what we accomplished without that. We had a bean counter within the Office of the Chief Economist of moving about $1.7 billion towards programs that were more effective or had strong evaluations. That would've been $0 had there not been some individuals who were already eager and just didn't have the path for doing it.People can see economists as people who are going to come in negative and a bit dismal — the dismal science, so to speak. I got into economics for a positive reason. We tried as often as possible to show that with an economic lens, we can help people achieve their goals better, period. We would say repeatedly to people, "We're not here to actually make the difficult choices: to say whether health, education, or food security is the better use of money. We're here to accept your goal and help you achieve more of it for your dollar spent.” We always send a very disarming message: we're there simply to help people achieve their goals and to illuminate the trade-offs that naturally exist.Within USAID, you have a consensus-type organization. When you have 10 people sitting around a room trying to decide how to spend money towards a common goal, if you don't crystallize the trade-offs between the various ideas being put forward, you end up seeing a consensus built: that everybody gets a piece of the pie. Our way of trying to shift the culture is to take those moments and say, "Wait a second. All 10 might be good ideas relative to doing nothing, but they can't all be good relative to each other. We all share a common goal, so let's be clear about the trade-offs between these different programs. Let's identify the ones that are actually getting you the most bang for your buck."Can you give me an example of what those trade-offs might be in a given sector?Sure. Let's take social protection, what we would call the Humanitarian Nexus development space. It might be working in a refugee area — not dealing with the immediate crisis, but one, two, five, or ten years later — trying to help bring the refugees into a more stable environment and into economic activities. Sometimes, you would see some cash or food provided to households. The programs would all have the common goal of helping to build a sustainable livelihood for households, so that they can be more integrated into the local economy. There might be programs providing water, financial instruments like savings vehicles, and supporting vocational education. It'd be a myriad of things, all on this focused goal of income-generating activity for the households to make them more stable in the long run.Often, those kinds of programs doing 10 different things did not actually lead to an observable impact over five years. But a more focused approach has gone through evaluations: cash transfers. That's a good example where “reducing” doesn't always mean reduce your programs just to one thing, but there is this default option of starting with a base case: “What does a cash transfer generate?"And to clarify for people who don't follow development economics, the cash transfer is just, “What if we gave people money?”Sometimes it is just that. Sometimes it's thinking strategically, “Maybe we should do it as a lump sum so that it goes into investments. Maybe we should do it with a planning exercise to make those investments.” Let's just call it “cash-plus,” or “cash-with-a-little-plus,” then variations of that nature. There's a different model, maybe call it, “cash-plus-plus,” called the graduation model. That has gone through about 30 randomized trials, showing pretty striking impacts on long-run income-generating activity for households. At its core is a cash transfer, usually along with some training about income-generating activity — ideally one that is producing and exporting in some way, even a local export to the capital — and access to some form of savings. In some cases, that's an informal savings group, with a community that comes and saves together. In some cases, it's mobile money that's the core. It's a much simpler program, and it's easier to do it at scale. It has generated considerable, measured, repeatedly positive impacts, but not always. There's a lot more that needs to be learned about how to do it more effectively.[Further reading: Here's another position paper from Karlan's team at USAID on benchmarking against cash transfers.]One of your recurring refrains is, “If we're not sure that these other ideas have an impact, let's benchmark: would a cash-transfer model likely give us more bang for our buck than this panoply of other programs that we're trying to run?”The idea of having a benchmark is a great approach in general. You should always be able to beat X. X might be different in different contexts. In a lot of cases, cash is the right benchmark.Go back to education. What's your benchmark for improving learning outcomes for a primary school? Cash transfer is not the right benchmark. The evidence that cash transfers will single-handedly move the needle on learning outcomes is not that strong. On the other hand, a couple of different programs — one called Teaching at the Right Level, another called structured pedagogy — have proven repeatedly to generate very strong impacts at a fairly modest cost. In education, those should be the benchmark. If you want to innovate, great, innovate. But your goal is to beat those. If you can beat them consistently, you become the benchmark. That's a great process for the long run. It's very much part of our thinking about what the future of foreign aid should look like: to be structured around that benchmark.Let's go back to those roundtables you described, where you're trying to figure out what the intervention should be for a group of refugees in a foreign country. What were the responses when you'd say, “Look, if we're all pulling in the same direction, we have to toss out the three worst ideas”?One of the challenges is the psychology of ethics. There's probably a word for this, but one of the objections we would often get was about the scale of a program for an individual. Someone would argue, "But this won't work unless you do this one extra thing." That extra thing might be providing water to the household, along with a cash transfer for income-generating activity, financial support, and bank accounts. Another objection would be that, "You also have to provide consumption and food up to a certain level."These are things that individually might be good, relative to nothing, or maybe even relative to other water approaches or cash transfers. But if you're focused on whether to satisfy the household's food needs, or provide half of what's needed — if all you're thinking about is the trade-off between full and half — you immediately jump to this idea that, "No, we have to go full. That's what's needed to help this household." But if you go to half, you can help more people. There's an actual trade-off: 10,000 people will receive nothing because you're giving more to the people in your program.The same is true for nutritional supplements. Should you provide 2,000 calories a day, or 1,000 calories a day to more people? It's a very difficult conversation on the psychology of ethics. There's this idea that people in a program are sacrosanct, and you must do everything you can for them. But that ignores all the people who are not being reached at all.I would find myself in conversations where that's exactly the way I would try to put it. I would say, "Okay, wait, we have the 2,000,000 people that are eligible for this program in this context. Our program is only going to reach 250,000. That's the reality. Now, let's talk about how many people we're willing to leave untouched and unhelped whatsoever." That was, at least to me, the right way to frame this question. Do you go very intense for fewer people or broader support for more people?Did that help these roundtables reach consensus, or at least have a better sense of what things are trading off against each other?I definitely saw movement for some. I wouldn't say it was uniform, and these are difficult conversations. But there was a lot of appetite for this recognition that, as big as USAID was, it was still small, relative to the problems being approached. There were a lot of people in any given crisis who were being left unhelped. The minute you're able to help people focus more on those big numbers, as daunting as they are, I would see more openness to looking at the evidence to figure out how to do the most good with the resources we have?” We must recognize these inherent trade-offs, whether we like it or not.Back in 2023, you talked to Dylan Matthews at Vox — it's a great interview — about how it's hard to push people to measure cost-effectiveness, when it means adding another step to a big, complicated bureaucratic process of getting aid out the door. You said,"There are also bandwidth issues. There's a lot of competing demands. Some of these demands relate to important issues on gender environment, fairness in the procurement process. These add steps to the process that need to be adhered to. What you end up with is a lot of overworked people. And then you're saying, ‘Here's one more thing to do.'”Looking back, what do you think of those demands on, say, fairness in the procurement process?Given that we're going to be facing a new environment, there probably are some steps in the process that — hopefully, when things are put back in place in some form — someone can be thinking more carefully about. It's easier to put in a cleaner process that avoids some of these hiccups when you start with a blank slate.Having said that, it's also going to be fewer people to dole out less money. There's definitely a challenge that we're going to be facing as a country, to push out money in an effective way with many fewer people for oversight. I don't think it would be accurate to say we achieved this goal yet, but my goal was to make it so that adding cost-effectiveness was actually a negative-cost addition to the process. [We wanted] to do it in a way that successfully recognized that it wasn't a cookie-cutter solution from up top for every country. But [our goal was that] the work to contextualize in a country actually simplified the process for whoever's putting together the procurement docs and deciding what to put in them. I stand by that belief that if it's done well, we can make this a negative-cost process change.I just want to push a little bit. Would you be supportive of a USAID procurement and contracting process that stripped out a bunch of these requirements about gender, environment, or fairness in contracting? Would that make USAID a more effective institution?Some of those types of things did serve an important purpose for some areas and not others. The tricky thing is, how do you set up a process to decide when to do it, when not? There's definitely cases where you would see an environmental review of something that really had absolutely nothing to do with the environment. It was just a cog in the process, but you have to have a process for deciding the process. I don't know enough about the legislation that was put in place on each of these to say, “Was there a better way of deciding when to do them, when not to do them?” That is not something that I was involved in in a direct way. "Let's think about redoing how we introduce gender in our procurement process" was never put on the table.On gender, there's a fair amount of evidence in different contexts that says the way of dealing with a gender inequity is not to just take the same old program and say, "We're now going to do this for women." You need to understand something more about the local context. If all you do is take programs and say, "Add a gender component," you end up with a lot of false attribution, and you don't end up being effective at the very thing that the person [leading the program] cares to do.In that Vox interview, your host says, "USAID relies heavily on a small number of well-connected contractors to deliver most aid, while other groups are often deterred from even applying by the process's complexity." He goes on to say that the use of rigorous evaluation methods like randomized controlled trials is the exception, not the norm.On Statecraft, we talked to Kyle Newkirk, who ran USAID procurement in Afghanistan in the late 2000s, about the small set of well-connected contractors that took most of the contracts in Afghanistan. Often, there was very little oversight from USAID, either because it was hard to get out to those locations in a war-torn environment, or because the system of accountability wasn't built there. Did you talk to people about lessons learned from USAID operating in Afghanistan?No. I mean, only to the following extent: The lesson learned there, as I understand it, wasn't so much about the choice on what intervention to fund, it was procurement: the local politics and engagement with the governments or lack thereof. And dealing with the challenge of doing work in a context like that, where there's more risk of fraud and issues of that nature.Our emphasis was about the design of programs to say, “What are you actually going to try to fund?” Dealing with whether there's fraud in the execution would fall more under the Inspector General and other units. That's not an area that we engaged in when we would do evaluation.This actually gets to a key difference between impact evaluations and accountability. It's one of the areas where we see a lot of loosey-goosey language in the media reporting and Twitter. My office focused on impact evaluation. What changed in the world because of this intervention, that wouldn't otherwise have changed? By “change in the world,” we are making a causal statement. That's setting up things like randomized controlled trials to find out, “What was the impact of this program?” It does provide some accountability, but it really should be done to look forward, in order to know, “Does this help achieve the goals we have in mind?” If so, let's learn that, and replicate it, scale it, do it again.If you're going to deliver books to schools, medicine to health clinics, or cash to people, and you're concerned about fraud, then you need to audit that process and see, “Did the books get to the schools, the medicine to the people, the cash to the people?” You don't need to ask, "Did the medicine solve the disease?" There's been studies already. There's a reason that medicine was being prescribed. Once it's proven to be an effective drug, you don't run randomized trials for decades to learn what you already know. If it's the prescribed drug, you just prescribe the drug, and do accountability exercises to make sure that the drugs are getting into the right hands and there isn't theft or corruption along the way.I think it's a very intuitive thing. There's a confusion that often takes place in social science, in economic or education interventions. They somehow forget that once we know that a certain program generates a certain positive impact, we no longer need to track continuously to find out what happens. Instead, we just need to do accountability to make sure that the program is being delivered as it was designed, tested, and shown to work.There are all these criticisms — from the waste, fraud, and corruption perspective — of USAID working with a couple of big contractors. USAID works largely through these big development organizations like Chemonics. Would USAID dollars be more effective if it worked through a larger base of contractors?I don't think we know. There's probably a few different operating models that can deliver the same basic intervention. We need to focus on, ”What actually are we doing on the ground? What is it that we want the recipients of the program to receive, hear, or do?” and then think backwards from there: "Who's the right implementer for this?" If there's an implementer who is much more expensive for delivering the same product, let's find someone who's more cost-effective.It's helpful to break cost-effective programming into two things: the intervention itself and what benefits it accrues, and the cost for delivering that. Sometimes the improvement is not about the intervention, it's about the delivery model. Maybe that's what you're saying: “These players were too few, too large, and they had a grab on the market, so that they were able to charge too much money to deliver something that others were equally able to do at lower cost." If that's the case, that says, "We should reform our procurement process,” because the reason you would see that happen is they were really good at complying with requirements that came at USAID from Congress. You had an overworked workforce [within USAID] that had to comply with all these requirements. If you had a bid between two groups, one of which repeatedly delivered on the paperwork to get a good performance evaluation, and a new group that doesn't have that track record, who are you going to choose? That's how we ended up where we are.My understanding of the history is that it comes from a push from Republicans in the ‘80s, from [Senator] Jesse Helms, to outsource USAID efforts to contractors. So this is not a left-leaning thing. I wouldn't say it is right-leaning either. It was just a decision made decades ago. You combine that with the bureaucratic requirements of working with USAID, and you end up with a few firms and nonprofits skilled at dealing with it.It's definitely my impression that at various points in American history, different partisans are calling for insourcing or for outsourcing. But definitely, I think you're right that the NGO cluster around USAID does spring up out of a Republican push in the eighties.We talked to John Kamensky recently, who was on Al Gore's predecessor to DOGE in the ‘90s.I listened to this, yeah.I'm glad to hear it! I'm thinking of it because they also pushed to cut the workforce in the mid-90s and outsource federal functions.Earlier, you mentioned a slide that showed what we've learned in the field of development economics over the past 20 years. Will you narrate that slide for me?Let me do two slides for you. The slide that I was picturing was a count of randomized controlled trials in development that shows a fairly exponential growth. The movement started in the mid-to-late 1990s, but really took off in the 2000s. Even just in the past 10 years, it's seen a considerable increase. There's about 4-5,000 randomized controlled trials evaluating various programs of the kind USAID funds.That doesn't tell you the substance of what was learned. Here's an example of substance, which is cash transfers: probably the most studied intervention out there. We have a meta-analysis that counted 115 studies. That's where you start having a preponderance of evidence to be able to say something concrete. There's some variation: you get different results in different places; targeting and ways of doing it vary. A good systematic analysis can help tease out what we can say, not just about the effect of cash, but also how to do it and what to expect, depending on how it's done. Fifteen years ago, when we saw the first few come out, you just had, "Oh, that's interesting. But it's a couple of studies, how do you form policy around that?” With 115, we can say so much more.What else have we learned about development that USAID operators in the year 2000 would not have been able to act upon?Think about the development process in two steps. One is choosing good interventions; the other is implementing them well. The study of implementation is historically underdone. The challenge that we face — this is an area I was hoping USAID could make inroads on — was, studying a new intervention might be of high reward from an academic perspective. But it's a lot less interesting to an academic to do much more granular work to say, "That was an interesting program that created these groups [of aid recipients]; now let's do some further knock-on research to find out whether those groups should be made of four, six, or ten people.” It's going to have a lower reward for the researcher, but it's incredibly important.It's equivalent to the color of the envelope in direct marketing. You might run tests — if this were old-style direct marketing — as to whether the envelope should be blue or red. You might find that blue works better. Great, but that's not interesting to an academic. But if you run 50 of these, on a myriad of topics about how to implement better, you end up with a collection of knowledge that is moving the needle on how to achieve more impact per dollar.That collection is not just important for policy: it also helps us learn more about the development process and the bottlenecks for implementing good programs. As we're seeing more digital platforms and data being used, [refining implementation] is more possible compared to 20 years ago, where most of the research was at the intervention level: does this intervention work? That's an exciting transition. It's also a path to seeing how foreign aid can help in individual contexts, [as we] work with local governments to integrate evidence into their operations and be more efficient with their own resources.There's an argument I've seen a lot recently: we under-invest in governance relative to other foreign aid goals. If we care about economic growth and humanitarian outcomes, we should spend a lot more on supporting local governance. What do you make of that claim?I agree with it actually, but there's a big difference between recognizing the problem and seeing what the tool is to address it. It's one thing to say, “Politics matters, institutions matter.” There's lots of evidence to support that, including the recent Nobel Prize. It's another beast to say, “This particular intervention will improve institutions and governance.”The challenge is, “What do we do about this? What is working to improve this? What is resilient to the political process?” The minute you get into those kinds of questions, it's the other end of the spectrum from a cash transfer. A cash transfer has a kind of universality: Not to say you're going to get the same impact everywhere, but it's a bit easier to think about the design of a program. You have fewer parameters to decide. When you think about efforts to improve governance, you need bespoke thinking in every single place.As you point out, it's something of a meme to say “institutions matter” and to leave it at that, but the devil is in all of those details.In my younger years — I feel old saying that — I used to do a lot of work on financial inclusion, and financial literacy was always my go-to example. On a household level, it's really easy to show a correlation: people who are more financially literate make better financial decisions and have more wealth, etc. It's much harder to say, “How do you move the needle on financial literacy in a way that actually helps people make better decisions, absorb shocks better, build investment better, save better?” It's easy to show that the correlation is there. It's much harder to say this program, here, will actually move the needle. That same exact problem is much more complicated when thinking about governance and institutions.Let's talk about USAID as it stands today. You left USAID when it became clear to you that a lot of the work you were doing was not of interest to the people now running it. How did the agency end up so disconnected from a political base of support? There's still plenty of people who support USAID and would like it to be reinstated, but it was at least vulnerable enough to be tipped over by DOGE in a matter of weeks. How did that happen?I don't know that I would agree with the premise. I'm not sure that public support of foreign aid actually changed, I'd be curious to see that. I think aid has always been misunderstood. There are public opinion polls that show people thought 25% of the US budget was spent on foreign aid. One said, "What, do you think it should be?" People said 10%. The right answer is about 0.6%. You could say fine, people are bad at statistics, but those numbers are pretty dauntingly off. I don't know that that's changed. I heard numbers like that years ago.I think there was a vulnerability to an effort that doesn't create a visible impact to people's lives in America, the way that Social Security, Medicare, and roads do. Foreign aid just doesn't have that luxury. I think it's always been vulnerable. It has always had some bipartisan support, because of the understanding of the bigger picture and the soft power that's gained from it. And the recognition that we are a nation built on the idea of generosity and being good to others. That was always there, but it required Congress to step in and say, "Let's go spend this money on foreign aid." I don't think that changed. What changed was that you ended up with an administration that just did not share those values.There's this issue in foreign aid: Congress picks its priorities, but those priorities are not a ranked list of what Congress cares about. It's the combination of different interests and pressures in Congress that generates the list of things USAID is going to fund.You could say doing it that way is necessary to build buy-in from a bunch of different political interests for the work of foreign aid. On the other hand, maybe the emergent list from that process is not the things that are most important to fund. And clearly, that congressional buy-in wasn't enough to protect USAID from DOGE or from other political pressures.How should people who care about foreign aid reason about building a version of USAID that's more effective and less vulnerable at the same time?Fair question. Look, I have thoughts, but by no means do I think of myself as the most knowledgeable person to say, here's the answer in the way forward. One reality is, even if Congress did object, they didn't have a mechanism in place to actually object. They can control the power of the purse the next round, but we're probably going to be facing a constitutional crisis over the Impoundment Act, to see if the executive branch can impound money that Congress spent. We'll see how this plays out. Aside from taking that to court, all Congress could do was complain.I would like what comes back to have two things done that will help, but they don't make foreign aid immune. One is to be more evidence-based, because then attacks on being ineffective are less strong. But the reality is, some of the attacks on its “effectiveness,” and the examples used, had nothing to do with poorly-chosen interventions. There was a slipperiness of language, calling something that they don't like “fraud” and “waste” because they didn't like its purpose. That is very different than saying, “We actually agreed on the purpose of something, but then you implemented it in such a bad way that there was fraud and waste.” There were really no examples given of that second part. So I don't know that being more evidence-based will actually protect it, given that that wasn't the way it was really genuinely taken down.The second is some boundaries. There is a core set of activities that have bipartisan support. How do we structure a foreign aid that is just focused on that? We need to find a way to put the things that are more controversial — whether it's the left or right that wants it — in a separate bucket. Let the team that wins the election turn that off and on as they wish, without adulterating the core part that has bipartisan support. That's the key question: can we set up a process that partitions those, so that they don't have that vulnerability? [I wrote about this problem earlier this year.]My counter-example is PEPFAR, which had a broad base of bipartisan support. PEPFAR consistently got long-term reauthorizations from Congress, I think precisely because of the dynamic you're talking about: It was a focused, specific intervention that folks all over the political spectrum could get behind and save lives. But in government programs, if something has a big base of support, you have an incentive to stuff your pet partisan issues in there, for the same reason that “must-pass” bills get stuffed with everybody's little thing. [In 2024, before DOGE, PEPFAR's original Republican co-sponsor came out against a long-term reauthorization, on the grounds that the Biden administration was using the program to promote abortion. Congress reauthorized PEPFAR for only one year, and that reauthorization lapsed in 2025.]You want to carve out the things that are truly bipartisan. But does that idea have a timer attached? What if, on a long enough timeline, everything becomes politicized?There are economic theorems about the nature of a repeated game. You can get many different equilibria in the long run. I'd like to think there's a world in which that is the answer. But we have seen an erosion of other things, like the filibuster regarding judges. Each team makes a little move in some direction, and then you change the equilibrium. We always have that risk. The goal is, how can you establish something where that doesn't happen?It might be that what's happened is helpful, in an unintended way, to build equilibrium in the future that keeps things focused on the bipartisan aspect. Whether it's the left or the right that wants to do something that they know the other side will object to, they hold back and say, "Maybe we shouldn't do that. Because when we do, the whole thing gets blown up."Let's imagine you're back at USAID a couple of years from now, with a broader latitude to organize our foreign aid apparatus around impact and effectiveness. What other things might we want to do — beyond measuring programs and keeping trade-offs in mind — if we really wanted to focus on effectiveness? Would we do fewer interventions and do them at larger scale?I think we would do fewer things simpler and bigger, but I also think we need to recognize that even at our biggest, we were tiny compared to the budget of the local government. If we can do more to use our money to help them be more effective with their money, that's the biggest win to go for. That starts looking a lot like things Mark Green was putting in place [as administrator of USAID] under Trump I, under the Journey to Self-Reliance [a reorganization of USAID to help countries address development challenges themselves].Sometimes that's done in the context of, "Let's do that for five or ten years, and then we can stop giving aid to that country." That was the way the Millennium Challenge Corporation talked about their country selection initially. Eventually, they stopped doing that, because they realized that that was never happening. I think that's okay. As much as we might help make some changes, even if we succeed in helping the poorest country in the world use their resources better, they're still going to be poor. We're still going to be rich. There's still maybe going to be the poorest, because if we do that in the 10 poorest countries and they all move up, maybe the 11th becomes the poorest, and then we can work there. I don't think getting off of aid is necessarily the objective.But if that was clearly the right answer, that's a huge win if we've done that by helping to prove the institutions and governance of that country so that it is rolling out better policies, helping its people better, and collecting their own tax revenue. If we can have an eye on that, then that's a huge win for foreign aid in general.How are we supposed to be measuring the impact of soft power? I think that's a term that's not now much in vogue in DC.There's no one answer to how to measure soft power. It's described as the influence that we gain in the world in terms of geopolitics, everything from treaties and the United Nations to access to markets; trade policy, labor policy. The basic idea of soft power manifests itself in all those different ways.It's a more extreme version of the challenge of measuring the impact of cash transfers. You want to measure the impact of a pill that is intended to deal with disease: you measure the disease, and you have a direct measure. You want to measure the impact of cash: you have to measure a lot of different things, because you don't know how people are going to use the cash. Soft power is even further down the spectrum: you don't know exactly how aid is helping build our partnership with a country's people and leaders. How is that going to manifest itself in the future? That becomes that much harder to do.Having said that, there's academic studies that document everything from attitudes about America to votes at the United Nations that follow aid, and things of that nature. But it's not like there's one core set: that's part of what makes it a challenge.I will put my cards on the table here: I have been skeptical of the idea that USAID is a really valuable tool for American soft power, for maintaining American hegemony, etc. It seems much easier to defend USAID by simply saying that it does excellent humanitarian work, and that's valuable. The national security argument for USAID seems harder to substantiate.I think we agree on this. You have such a wide set of things to look at, it's not hard to imagine a bias from a researcher might lead to selection of outcomes, and of the context. It's not a well-defined enough concept to be able to say, "It worked 20% of the time, and it did not in these, and the net average…" Average over what? Even though there's good case studies that show various paths where it has mattered, there's case studies that show it doesn't.I also get nervous about an entire system that's built around [attempts to measure soft power]. It turns foreign aid into too much of a transactional process, instead of a relationship that is built on the Golden Rule, “There's people in this country that we can actually help.” Sure, there's this hope that it'll help further our national interests. But if they're suffering from drought and famine, and we can provide support and save some lives, or we can do longer term developments and save tomorrow's lives, we ought to do that. That is a good thing for our country to do.Yet the conversation does often come back to this question of soft power. The problem with transactional is you get exactly what you contract on: nothing more, nothing less. There's too many unknowns here, when we're dealing with country-level interactions, and engagements between countries. It needs to be about relationships, and that means supporting even if there isn't a contract that itemizes the exact quid pro quo we are getting for something.I want to talk about what you observed in the administration change and the DOGE-ing of USAID. I think plenty of observers looked at this in the beginning and thought, “It's high time that a lot of these institutions were cleaned up and that someone took a hard look at how we spend money there.”There was not really any looking at any of the impact of anything. That was never in the cards. There was a 90-day review that was supposed to be done, but there were no questions asked, there was no data being collected. There was nothing whatsoever being looked at that had anything to do with, “Was this award actually accomplishing what it set out to accomplish?” There was no process in which they made those kinds of evaluations on what's actually working.You can see this very clearly when you think about what their bean counter was at DOGE: the spending that they cut. It's like me saying, "I'm going to do something beneficial for my household by stopping all expenditures on food." But we were getting something for that. Maybe we could have bought more cheaply, switched grocery stores, made a change there that got us the same food for less money. That would be a positive change. But you can't cut all your food expenditures, call that a saving, and then not have anything to eat. That's just bad math, bad economics.But that's exactly what they were doing. Throughout the entire government, that bean counter never once said, “benefits foregone.” It was always just “lowered spending.” Some of that probably did actually have a net loss, maybe it was $100 million spent on something that only created $10 million of benefits to Americans. That's a $90 million gain. But it was recorded as $100 million. And the point is, they never once looked at what benefits were being generated from the spending. What was being asked, within USAID, had nothing to do with what was actually being accomplished by any of the money that was being spent. It was never even asked.How do you think about risky bets in a place like USAID? It would be nice for USAID to take lots of high-risk, high-reward bets, and to be willing to spend money that will be “wasted” in the pursuit of high-impact interventions. But that approach is hard for government programs, politically, because the misses are much more salient than the successes.This is a very real issue. I saw this the very first time I did any sort of briefing with Congress when I was Chief Economist. The question came at me, "Why doesn't USAID show us more failures?" I remember thinking to myself, "Are you willing to promise that when they show the failure, you won't punish them for the failure — that you'll reward them for documenting and learning from the failure and not doing it again?" That's a very difficult nut to crack.There's an important distinction to make. You can have a portfolio of evidence generation, some things work and some don't, that can collectively contribute towards knowledge and scaling of effective programs. USAID actually had something like this called Development Innovation Ventures (DIV), and was in an earmark from Congress. It was so good that they raised money from the effective altruist community to further augment their pot of money. This was strong because a lot of it was not evaluating USAID interventions. It was just funding a portfolio of evidence generation about what works, implemented by other parties. The failures aren't as devastating, because you're showing a failure of some other party: it wasn't USAID money paying for an intervention. That was a strong model for how USAID can take on some risks and do some evidence generation that is immune to the issue you just described.If you're going to do evaluations of USAID money, the issue is very real. My overly simplistic view is that a lot of what USAID does should not be getting a highly rigorous impact evaluation. USAID should be rolling out, simple and at scale, things that have already been shown elsewhere. Let the innovation take place pre-USAID, funded elsewhere, maybe by DIV. Let smaller and more nimble nonprofits be the innovators and the documenters of what works. Then, USAID can adopt the things that are more effective and be more immune to this issue.So yeah, there is a world that is not first-best where USAID does the things that have strong evidence already. When it comes to actual innovation, where we do need to take risks that things won't work, let that be done in a way that may be supported by USAID, but partitioned away.I'm looking at a chart of USAID program funding in Fiscal Year 2022: the three big buckets are humanitarian, health, and governance, all on the order of $10–12 billion. Way down at the bottom, there's $500 million for “economic growth.” What's in that bucket that USAID funds, and should that piece of the pie chart be larger?I do think that should be larger, but it depends on how you define it. I don't say that just because I'm an economist. It goes back to the comment earlier about things that we can do to help improve local governance, and how they're using their resources. The kinds of things that might be funded would be efforts to work with local government to improve their ability to collect taxes. Or to set up efficient regulations for the banking industry, so it can grow and provide access to credit and savings. These are things that can help move the needle on macroeconomic outcomes. With that, you have more resources. That helps health and education, you have these downstream impacts. As you pointed out, the earmark on that was tiny. It did not have quite the same heartstring tug. But the logical link is huge and strong: if you strengthen the local government's financial stability, the benefits very much accrue to the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Social Protection, etc.Fighting your way out of poverty through growth is unambiguously good. You can look at many countries around the world that have grown economically, and through that, reduced poverty. But it's one thing to say that growth will alleviate poverty. It's another to say, "Here's aid money that will trigger growth." If we knew how to do that, we would've done it long ago, in a snap.Last question. Let's say it's a clean slate at USAID in a couple years, and you have wide latitude to do things your way. I want the Dean Karlan vision for the future of USAID.It needs to have, at the high level, a recognition that the Golden Rule is an important principle that guides our thinking on foreign aid and that we want to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Being generous as a people is something that we pride ourselves in, our nation represents us as people, so we shouldn't be in any way shy to use foreign aid to further that aspiration of being a generous nation.The actual way of delivering aid, I would say, three things. Simpler. Let's focus on the evidence of what works, but recognize the boundaries of that evidence and how to contextualize it. There is a strong need to understand what it means to be simpler, and how to identify what that means in specific countries and contexts.The second is about leveraging local government, and working more to recognize that, as big as we may be, we're still going to be tiny relative to local government. If we can do more to improve how local government is using its resources, we've won.The third is about finding common ground. There's a lot. That's one of the reasons why I've started working on a consortium with Republicans and Democrats. The things I care about are generally non-partisan. The goal is to take the aspirations that foreign aid has — about improving health, education, economic outcomes, food security, agricultural productivity, jobs, trade, whatever the case is — and how do we use the evidence that's out there to move the needle as much as we can towards those goals? A lot of topics have common ground. How do we set up a foreign aid system that stays true to the common ground? I'd like to think it's not that hard. That's what I think would be great to see happen. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

A new investigation reveals how the abrupt U.S. foreign aid cuts have left critical water and sanitation projects unfinished in over a dozen countries, placing millions at immediate risk from flooding, disease, food insecurity, and other miseries. Was it worth it? Colin Thomas-Jensen, Director of Communications of Advocacy and Impact at the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, joins Ian Hoch to talk about it.

This hour, Ian Hoch has a conversation with the WWL listeners about the role of religion when it comes to humanitarian aid for foreign countries and how much of the government's ability to provide aid should factor into the moral obligation to do so.

I caught up with Comfort Ero at the Aspen Security Forum last week. She is the President of the International Crisis Group, and in that role, she brings a truly global perspective on the drivers of conflict worldwide. Earlier in the forum, she participated in a panel on international aid—timely, given the massive scaling back of foreign assistance by the Trump administration and other traditional donors in Europe. So, for most of this conversation, we explore the implications of this sudden retraction of foreign aid on regional and global security—that is, how might these aid cuts impact conflict dynamics around the world? Get a 40% discount off Global Dispatches and support the show! https://www.globaldispatches.org/40PercentOff   

AP's Lisa Dwyer reports that a bill to cut billions from federal funding has been signed into law.

A.M. Edition for July 18. The House follows the Senate in overcoming Republican opposition to pass measures rescinding public media and foreign aid funding, marking the first time a White House has accomplished clawbacks in more than a quarter-century. Plus, reporter Jenny Strasburg details how De Beers aims to revive its brand as it competes with lab-grown diamonds and a world skeptical that purity is worth the price. And reporter Austin Ramzy unpacks what the U.S. is doing to respond to China's moves to flex its military muscle far beyond its usual patch in the Pacific. Azhar Sukri hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A bill with cuts to public broadcasting and foreign aid will next land on President Donald Trump's desk for his signature.Trump denies a report he wrote Jeffrey Epstein a lewd 50th birthday letter. Plus, polling shows voters aren't happy with how Trump's team is dealing with the controversial Jeffrey Epstein case.USA TODAY Senior National Political Correspondent Sarah D. Wire discusses this week's anti-Trump protests.Private equity is coming to your 401(k).USA TODAY Congress Reporter Savannah Kuchar breaks down landmark bills dealing with cryptocurrency.CBS cancels "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert."Please let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com.Episode Transcript available hereSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the 5 AM hour, Larry O’Connor and Patrice Onwuka discussed: Congress Sends Bill Clawing Back $9B in Foreign Aid, Public Media Funds to Trump’s Desk PBS, NPR Face ‘Tremendous Changes’ and Will Be ‘Forced to Make Hard Decisions’ as Funding Cut Looms CBS Ending Colbert’s ‘The Late Show:’ ‘This Is Purely a Financial Decision’ Patrice Testifying on Capitol Hill Yesterday Where to find more about WMAL's morning show: Follow Podcasts on Apple, Audible and Spotify Follow WMAL's "O'Connor and Company" on X: @WMALDC, @LarryOConnor, @JGunlock, @PatricePinkfile, and @HeatherHunterDC Facebook: WMALDC and Larry O'Connor Instagram: WMALDC Website: WMAL.com/OConnor-Company Episode: Friday, July 18, 2025 / 5 AM HourSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode we go into strictly politics. We got the 3 LA County Sheriff's Department deputies killed in an explosion, we also go into Trump Chronic Venous Insufficiency diagnosis and Trump rolling back $9B in public media funding and foreign aid. Hosted by your Pastor Michael Smith and co-hosted by your Brotha Lamick IsraelIf you would like tune in and join Brotha Lamick Young Disciples Discord the link is https://discord.gg/SVQygUP2 If you would like to sign up for the Monthly newsletter/ have a special request/report you would like done email Brotha Lamick Israel at Lamick19@outlook.com

The Senate approved the Trump administration's rescission package today, which proposes taking back $9 billion in federal funding already allocated for programs such as public media and foreign aid. We'll get into the implications for the bipartisan nature of the budgeting process. Plus, we explain the latest development of a lawsuit against Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company leaders, which stems back to the 2018 privacy scandal involving Cambridge Analytica. Then, we'll smile at a piece of new technology that claims to shoot mosquitoes using lasers. And, do you believe in supernatural forces?Here's everything we talked about today:“Russ Vought: Appropriations process ‘has to be less bipartisan'” from POLITICO“The Appropriations Process Was Already Broken. The Rescission Bill May Have Just Shattered It.” from NOTUS“Meta investors, Zuckerberg reach settlement to end $8 billion trial over Facebook privacy litigation” from Reuters“This ‘Iron Dome' for mosquitoes shoots down bugs with lasers” from Fast Company“Angels, witches, crystals and black cats: How supernatural beliefs vary across different groups in the US” from The ConversationWe love hearing from you. Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email makemesmart@marketplace.org.

The Senate approved the Trump administration's rescission package today, which proposes taking back $9 billion in federal funding already allocated for programs such as public media and foreign aid. We'll get into the implications for the bipartisan nature of the budgeting process. Plus, we explain the latest development of a lawsuit against Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company leaders, which stems back to the 2018 privacy scandal involving Cambridge Analytica. Then, we'll smile at a piece of new technology that claims to shoot mosquitoes using lasers. And, do you believe in supernatural forces?Here's everything we talked about today:“Russ Vought: Appropriations process ‘has to be less bipartisan'” from POLITICO“The Appropriations Process Was Already Broken. The Rescission Bill May Have Just Shattered It.” from NOTUS“Meta investors, Zuckerberg reach settlement to end $8 billion trial over Facebook privacy litigation” from Reuters“This ‘Iron Dome' for mosquitoes shoots down bugs with lasers” from Fast Company“Angels, witches, crystals and black cats: How supernatural beliefs vary across different groups in the US” from The ConversationWe love hearing from you. Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email makemesmart@marketplace.org.

In a historic move, Congress approved a $9.4 billion rollback of previously allocated funds—the first major rescission package since 1999. Spearheaded by Senate Republicans and influenced by Donald Trump, the cuts target foreign aid, NPR, climate initiatives, and unused pandemic relief. While critics argue the impact is largely symbolic, supporters see it as a critical first step in dismantling bloated government spending and reasserting America First priorities. With Speaker Mike Johnson signaling more cuts ahead, this vote could mark the beginning of a broader fiscal shift in Washington.

In a landmark vote, Congress passed a $9.4 billion rescission package—the first of its kind in 25 years—eliminating funds for NPR, foreign aid, and left-leaning initiatives. Championed by Senate Republicans and encouraged by former President Trump, the measure reclaims unused pandemic and climate funds while signaling a new era of fiscal discipline. Conservatives call it a win for taxpayers and America First values, while critics warn of political retribution and symbolic cuts. As Speaker Mike Johnson prepares for more rollbacks, the fight over the federal budget is just beginning.

In a groundbreaking legislative move, Congress has passed a $9.4 billion rescission package—the first since 1999—cutting funds to NPR, foreign aid programs, and climate initiatives. Championed by Senate Republicans and backed by Donald Trump, the bill reclaims unspent COVID and infrastructure funds while sending a strong message about spending restraint and America First values. While critics call the cuts symbolic, conservative lawmakers view this as the start of a broader rollback of what they consider wasteful government spending.

For the first time in a quarter-century, Congress passed a sweeping $9.4 billion rescission package, marking a pivotal shift toward fiscal conservatism. With support from Senate Republicans and former President Trump, the bill eliminates funding for NPR, foreign aid, and climate programs, reclaiming unused pandemic and infrastructure funds. Touted by conservatives as a blow to bloated bureaucracy and left-wing agendas, the measure is seen as the first step in dismantling the administrative state. Critics argue the cuts are largely symbolic—but House Speaker Mike Johnson promises this is just the beginning.

In a dramatic legislative shift, Congress has passed a $9.4 billion rescission package—the first of its kind since 1999—eliminating unspent funds from the Biden administration's climate, COVID, and infrastructure programs. Key targets include NPR, foreign aid, and left-leaning NGOs. Backed by Senate Republicans and championed by former President Trump, the cuts are seen as a symbolic but strategic strike against bloated government and progressive institutions. As Speaker Mike Johnson signals more cuts ahead, this vote marks the opening salvo in a broader battle over the federal budget and America's political direction.

Epstein: A local lens Utah County sharing information with I.C.E Mayor Mendenhall on public safety More safety changes coming to the airport. Speaker Mike Schultz on SLC's public safety plan, Why China shouldn't be buying Utah land

Breaking overnight... the Senate passed a rescission bill that would cancel about $9 billion previously allocated towards foreign aid and public broadcast spending. This is a move to reallocate and adjust federal spending across the board. Senator John Curtis calls in to discuss the decision. He weighs in on how the lack of transparency from the Trump Administration has created more issues around The Epstein Files.

In this broadcast, Tara breaks down a historic $9 billion Senate-approved funding cut targeting controversial programs like USAID, NPR, and PBS—calling it a first step toward deeper cuts that could reach hundreds of billions. She argues that USAID has long functioned as a “power center” for the CIA, funneling taxpayer money to enemies like the Taliban and Hamas. The segment details how USAID allegedly propped up terror groups and opium production, contributing to American casualties abroad. Tara then shifts to a New York Times op-ed urging readers to stop ostracizing conservative relatives over COVID and Trump, reflecting on her own painful experiences of political shunning. She questions whether apologies will ever come and whether the country can heal its divisions. Listener texts pour in, sharing stories of fractured families and unexpected reconciliations.

In these segments, Tara examines the unprecedented $9 billion spending cuts passed by the Senate, with more rescission bills poised to slash hundreds of billions in federal funding. She argues that agencies like USAID have secretly advanced left-wing agendas and bankrolled America's enemies, including the Taliban and Hamas. Tara details how billions in taxpayer money flowed into terror networks while U.S. troops paid the price. Shifting gears, she spotlights the cultural fallout from COVID and Trump-era politics—highlighting a New York Times essay admitting that shunning conservative family members may have backfired. Listeners flood the text lines with raw stories about divided families, lost trust, and the struggle to forgive.

William Henagan, a research fellow at the Council, sits down with James M. Lindsay to discuss the current state of U.S. foreign aid programs after President Donald Trump's reforms.   Mentioned on the Episode:   William Henagan, “Reauthorizing DFC: A Primer for Policymakers,” CFR.org   William Henagan, “Sovereign Funds and American Investment Strategy: How to Responsibly Create a U.S. Strategic Investment Fund,” CFR.org   For an episode transcript and show notes, visit The President's Inbox at: https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/tpi/future-us-foreign-aid-william-henagan

The White House effort to cut back $9.4 billion of already allocated government spending faces a critical vote in the Senate this week. Some Republicans have concerns about the cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting as the clock ticks to Friday’s deadline to approve or modify the Trump administration plan. Congressional correspondent Lisa Desjardins reports. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Send us a textBuckle up, warfighters—this one's gonna rattle some cages. In this fire-breathing episode, Jared and Aaron torch the lazy talking points and break down why foreign aid isn't just “giving away your tax dollars.” From crushing fentanyl pipelines before they cross U.S. borders to outmaneuvering China's Belt and Road sleight of hand, this is your crash course in how global influence actually works. They pull no punches while explaining how smart international assistance builds partner capacity, prevents U.S. boots on the ground, and gives America leverage without dropping a single JDAM. Plus: why U2 should be banned from Bluetooth speakers and what happens when your soft power goes soft.Forget TikTok takes—this is real strategy from dudes who lived it.