After a month vacationing in the Marxist utopia of France, my wife and I are now back on American soil. To say I have mixed feelings about this homecoming would be an understatement. On one hand, it’s not a great feeling returning to the collapse of the American experiment. On the other hand, I’m excited to purchase those plentiful, inexpensive eggs I was promised. Plus, I can’t wait to talk to all my friends and neighbors about some exciting timeshare opportunities in Gaza!
As we waited to retrieve our luggage from the airport baggage carousel, a young man approached us. He recognized me from TV and wanted a selfie. We got to chatting. He was on his way back from India. How was it, I asked, assuming he’d been as a tourist. Not so much. He works for an NGO. Or should that be past tense?
“Shut down?” I asked.
“We’ll see,” he responded.
The organization—which I am choosing not to name because I see no reason for it to receive any potential glare thanks to the commentary of some snot-nosed comedian on some snot-nosed website—builds schools and shelters for the poor. Naturally, I asked if it received money from USAID. It does, he said; about a third of its budget, which is now very much in doubt.
But while the financial hit they’re likely to take will be devastating, he continued, that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part is that they’re likely to lose all of their “in-kind” support. I didn’t know what that meant, so he explained: A lot of what makes their work possible is donations of surplus supplies from the US government.
He used Department of Defense desks as an example. The Department of Defense apparently has to replenish office desks every few years. They just do, OK? And the old desks have to go somewhere. One good place is NGOs, which can repurpose them for, say, schools and shelters in India.
Individually, the desks aren’t worth much; collectively, they represent both a massive investment and a massive saving for these organizations. Now, though, those in-kind donations are likely to disappear and America’s landfills are about to get a whole bunch of office furniture.
To what end?
What is the actual purpose of denying help to people? I’m sure you’ve all seen the statistics about pre-Trump foreign aid constituting about 1% of the federal budget. I’m not unsympathetic to the argument that Americans ought to spend money on Americans first. But I’m more inclined to believe that at least one penny out of every federal dollar could be used to help those in need around the world. At least while we’re still minting pennies.
And while my bleeding liberal heart wants to help people, my cold American calculus tells me that helping others also helps us. It’s practical. It’s tangible. A better-educated population suffers fewer diseases, experiences lower unwanted pregnancies and expands a nation’s GDP—which, in turn, creates new markets for American goods and services. Crucially, our aid also forges positive relationships with partner nations.
We can look at the same sorts of investments at home: NIH funding, CDC funding, PBS and NPR funding, NOAA funding. The acronyms are stale but the missions are vibrant. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on the chopping block right now as Elon Musk’s DOGE minions run amok under the guise of “government efficiency,” despite the fact that their lean annual budget has returned tens of billions of dollars to defrauded American consumers. What’s a more efficient return on investment than that?
I’m not enough of a Pollyanna to assert that all these agencies and department are run flawlessly, but I learned today that federal employees don’t even get free coffee at work, relying on some do-goodnik colleague to run their office “Coffee Club.” Personally, I’m more than happy to have some of my tax money go towards caffeinating the staffer inspecting nuclear power facilities or running point in an air traffic control tower.
But DOGE isn’t about fraud and abuse any more than Trump is about monogamy. They’re about robbing a billion Peters to pay one Elon. Is that what we want?
It might be hard to remember at times, but we’ve seen the land of the free and the home of the brave meet these sorts of moments time and time again. Usually the threat has been external, but now that it’s internal, it’s even more important that we show compassion towards each other, even towards with whom we disagree.
That doesn’t mean we don’t fight them. Of course we do. But we fight with the conviction of the enduring power of kindness. The same way water will always, over time, wear away stone, we can wear away their resolve in just the way they believe they can wear away our own. Speaking personally, I know they won’t. I’m home. And I’m not going anywhere.
But if you’re interested, let’s talk some more about those beautiful timeshares.
