CNN’s Kaitlan Collins warns that the US is “dangerously close to a constitutional crisis.” Meaningless, empty words that sound very scary. The legacy media is ramping up the fearmongering over Elon Musk and Donald Trump. They’re just fixing the economy.
“Constitutional Crisis”
Here it is again (from Kaitlan Collins). You’re going to see this phrase used relentlessly in the media because the Democrats have settled on this theme. They are all being instructed to use this phrase.
Democrats were the party of "reinventing government." Then, they decided to weaponize it. The reason Democrats today defend waste, fraud, and abuse, even at the expense of the separation of powers, is because their wealth and their ability to rule depend on it.
Shellenberger's bottom line:
The public desperately wants reform, and 60% of the public has long supported cutting foreign aid, which has long been popular with the public. Why can’t Democrats and the media just embrace Trump’s government efficiency effort? Why are they engaging in such seemingly self-destructive behavior?
https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1889064587733147677
President Donald Trump is causing a constitutional crisis by eliminating the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and giving Elon Musk access to confidential Treasury records, say the media and Democrats. The American people didn’t elect Musk, said Democrats in a rally on Friday, where some House members were disallowed from entering the Department of Education.
A judge on Friday restricted Musk’s team’s access to Treasury records. Trump yesterday, in an interview with Bret Baier of Fox, said that Musk would soon begin seeking efficiencies in the Departments of Defense and Education. As such, what’s happening is a “constitutional crisis,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin on Meet the Press, where he threatened a class action lawsuit on behalf of the American people.
But there is no constitutional crisis. The American people elected Trump as president, and he, not Congress, exercises authority over all executive branch agencies, including USAID, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, and the Treasury Department. Trump has clear Constitutional authority to audit the finances overseen by the Treasury and every other agency, and that includes assigning that audit to whoever he chooses. The Constitution grants Congress oversight duties but those powers do not include members being allowed to enter any executive branch building whenever they please.
None of that means that the administration should ignore Congress, court orders, or the potential public health problems that could be created by the closure of USAID and freezing of its funds.
Said the surgeon, New Yorker author, and former USAID official, Atul Gawande, on X, “20M people with HIV, including 500,000 children, have been cut off from access to medicines keeping them alive. Global HIV transmission, resistance, and deaths will now increase, endangering all.” Gawande added that, as a result of the loss of USAID, the US has lost critical bird flu surveillance, sacrificed humanitarian aid in Gaza, and halted the resettlement of former Islamic State combatants. USAID may have been doing and funding projects that were worthwhile.
And it may be that Congress will need to pass legislation to continue those projects through the State Department.
But it’s emotional blackmail to suggest the USAID closure and freeze on aid will kill African children. The Trump administration already created a waiver for HIV treatment and resumed aid for tuberculosis, malaria, and newborn health. And USAID’s health programs should be subject to scrutiny, given the agency’s history of using such programs as cover for other activities, including regime change and biodefense research.
For example, under President Barack Obama’s administration, USAID was caught using an HIV program to foment rebellion in Cuba. USAID used EcoHealth Alliance as a passthrough organization to funnel $1.1 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting risky gain-of-function experiments that may have caused the Covid pandemic.
As such, anyone who truly believes in public health for poor people in poor nations must agree that USAID needs to be reined in and cleaned up. That starts first with precisely the kind of audit the Democrats are trying to stop. After that, USAID — and other government agencies eventually — must justify what they are spending money on. The public’s interest is ensuring that every dollar of taxpayer money is accounted for and justified.
A major reason that the American people elected Trump was precisely because they believed he would reform the government, and that meant rooting out abuse, fraud, and waste. There is a large body of evidence of all three in USAID, the DOD, and the Department of Education. And, as for complying with the law on the closure of USAID, support for just such a law is growing in Congress.
The media and others in Washington, D.C., have known for decades that USAID was a hub of fraud and abuse. The Washington Post cited two individuals with the Center for Global Development, a center-left think tank funded by Bill Gates that has been defending USAID, who told the Washington Post that a claim by Musk that just 10% of USAID money reached people on the ground was “wildly incorrect and misleading.”
But their clarification — that just “10 percent of USAID payments are made directly to organizations in the developing world” and the “remaining 90 percent” is delivered by organizations in the US and developed world — underscored that USAID fundamentally isn’t working.
Think about it. If USAID were so effective in achieving its ostensible goal of “development,” why are the countries it works in still so poor and underdeveloped?
In truth, Democrats and Republicans alike have recognized for decades that USAID needed reform. In 2015, even the Center for Global Development urged a “top-to-bottom review of USAID’s sector- and country-based activities based upon program effectiveness, allocation of USAID resources, alignment with partner priorities, and national security implications” followed by “comprehensive reform.”
As recently as 2021, the media acknowledged the obvious. That year, the New York Times published an article headlined, “U.S. Aid to Central America Hasn’t Slowed Migration. Can Kamala Harris?” In it the Times acknowledged that “experts say the reasons that years of aid have not curbed migration” is in part because “much of the money is handed over to American companies, which swallow a lot of it for salaries, expenses and profits, often before any services are delivered” — precisely the reason President Trump shut down USAID.
Wrote the Times, “From 2016 to 2020, 80 percent of the American-financed development projects in Central America were entrusted to American contractors, according to data provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development.”
It’s the same story for education. Just 10 days ago, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) released the latest test scores showing yet another decline in reading and continued flat-lining in math for eighth graders. The media described the test results as a “new low” and “even worse” than in the past and “disheartening.”
Democrats and the media thus know perfectly well that the Department of Education’s work is either insufficient to counteract the decline or is actively contributing to it, and thus reform of the Department of Education is highly reasonable. And yet Democrats demanded they be allowed to enter the Department of Education headquarters in Washington as though to defend it. From what? Improvement?
The position of the Democrats is even more ridiculous when one considers the example of the Defense Department. Will Democrats now, after decades of attacking military spending as wasteful, defend it? If they do, they will alienate their own partisans. But if they don’t, then they will find it difficult to answer the question of why reform is necessary in the military but not in the Department of Education or USAID?
Making the situation even more surreal is that it was Democrats, not Republicans, who made the biggest push for government efficiency and reform in the last thirty years. In 1993, shortly after taking office, President Bill Clinton empowered Vice President Al Gore to oversee a “Reinventing Government” initiative. The aim was to streamline bureaucracy, cut costs, and improve government efficiency. It emphasized customer service, performance-based management, and innovation — all things that Musk is famous for implementing at his companies.
It’s not obvious why Democrats are opposing Trump’s actions. Doing so reinforces that they are the party of waste, fraud, and abuse. Polling shows that public support for Trump is at an all-time high of 53%, according to a new CBS poll. By contrast, 57% of registered voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party, the worst numbers in 17 years.
Nor is it obvious why the media has maintained its anti-Trump bias. The Washington Post’s daily traffic declined by nearly 90% from 23 million daily active users in January 2021 to 2.5 to 3 million in the middle of last year. In the week ending November 24, CNN and MSNBC lost 47% and 53% of their primetime viewership. Last month, CNN announced it was laying off 200 employees while MSNBC saw its president step down. Politico’s cofounder said last week that “The left right now, liberal media, has probably never been weaker in my lifetime than right now.”
The public desperately wants reform, and 60% of the public has long supported cutting foreign aid, which has long been popular with the public. Why can’t Democrats and the media just embrace Trump’s government efficiency effort? Why are they engaging in such seemingly self-destructive behavior?
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x.com/shellenberger/
The democrats are more mad about USAID than anything I e seen. I’ll bet a massive portion of their campaign funds are laundered back to their campaigns through USAID. Check ActBlue donations. Check members whose net worth inexplicably became massive.
What is zero-based budgeting (ZBB)?
Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) is a budgeting technique in which all expenses must be justified for a new period or year starting from zero, versus starting with the previous budget and adjusting it as needed.
ZBB is a highly effective business-planning tool to help a company identify and eliminate unnecessary costs, keep control of your spending, and focus on high-profit initiatives.
Budgeting, including ZBB, is the tactical implementation of a company’s strategic plan. To deliver the financial and operational goals in the strategic plan, an organization needs to translate its long-range plan into a detailed set of expected revenues and expenses that can be measured to track performance. These can be refined and adjusted along the way to keep the company on track with its goals to achieve the desired business outcomes.
Above all, budgets enforce ownership and accountability so that financial decisions are made sensibly. They help companies project profits, spot potential problems, and identify new opportunities so that finance leaders can make the necessary adjustments.
The typical budgeting process is translating a long-range strategy into annual operating plans that are pushed down to finance, lines of business, and operations. This communicates the financial targets across the organization in every line of business. The targets can be financial and operationally aligned. Some examples of this are revenue and expense budgets, R&D costs, marketing expenses, project costs and revenues, and capital expenditures.
The budgeting process requires analyzing and comparing actual versus expected financial performance to determine how to allocate expenditures for the organization to achieve the budget targets set.
With traditional budgeting, the process of projecting your business’ revenue and expenses for the upcoming year is typically based on your previous budget which is used to help predict, analyze, and track revenues, expenses, profits, and cash flows. Traditional budgeting calls for incremental increases over previous budgets, such as a 2% increase in spending, as opposed to a justification of both old and new expenses, as called for with zero-based budgeting. Traditional budgeting only analyzes new expenditures, while ZBB starts from zero and calls for a justification of old, recurring expenses in addition to new expenditures.
Zero-based budgeting was developed in the 1970s by Pete Pyhrr, a former accounting manager with Texas Instruments. The original goal of ZBB was to help organizations reduce costs and promote fiscal responsibility.
With zero-based budgeting, the budget is started from scratch or a “zero base” each year. Using this approach, every line of business within an organization is analyzed for its needs and costs while ignoring historic spending. The key difference is justification: Zero-based budgets need to review every expenditure at the beginning of the budget cycle, and lines of business have to justify the need and impact of each line item before funding can be approved.
Each budget line item is reviewed without the influence of the last period’s actuals as a baseline. Each item is carefully evaluated to determine if any programs, services, or activities will be increased, maintained, reduced, or removed. Managers need to account for all elements of the budget and identify cost-effective, relevant, and cost-saving areas...
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