America's Talking - Lawmakers Debate DOGE Cuts to Foreign Aid, Shuttering of USAID

Episode Date: March 1, 2025

(The Center Square) – While expert witnesses gave divided views on the shuttering of the U.S Agency for International Development (USAID), lawmakers sparred Wednesday during a  House Oversight subcommittee hearing over the alleged corruption within the independent agency. Democrats on the Subcommittee on Delivery on Government Efficiency argued that the closing of USAID’s operations by the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has politicized and jeopardized vital humanitarian work globally. Republicans, on the other hand, insisted that politicization is already endemic within USAID and necessitates either drastic reforms or abolishing the agency entirely and placing foreign aid under the purview of the State department.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxFull story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_7b0e95e2-f481-11ef-8f4f-cb0e8b093366.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, chief content officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency continue to make headlines with mass layoffs in the federal bureaucracy and Democrats' warning of the potential fallout, but many Americans support the expense cut efforts. Joining me to discuss this today is Casey Harper, Washington GHC Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, what's the latest on Doge? Oh, Doge is rip roaring and ripping through, you know, federal spending on a daily basis.

And it's hitting some legal roadblocks along the way. So what we've seen from Doge, which is actually, I started to say it's led by Elon Musk, the billionaire, but there's even questions about who exactly is leading it because the White House has really sort of dodged the question. But of course, Musk is the face of Doge. He's got the year of the president and is almost daily. announcing new decisions, new cuts, new wasteful spending that he's identified. He helped lead the charge to gut almost, you know, this looks, the AP reported, you know, 90% cuts to USAID, the, our, you know,

foreign aid agency. And so, you know, he's, he's up to that. We saw, he sent out that very controversial note to federal employees requiring them to say five things they did last week, which caused, you know, mass chaos in the government. One, I think, fear. People just had fear about it. And then two, there were some agency heads who told their employees to disregard the message. And now we have judges who are starting to kind of slow down these things to challenge the rulings or to stop the firing. So, you know, it raises a question, what's happening here? I think there's a few things. One, there's a real question about who has the authority to do what in the federal government and what is the limit of Elon Musk's authority. And so I think the

administration has kind of fumbled a little bit in just thinking they could cut through the line, kind of go around the normal lines of authority and just send out emails and memos from the Office of Management Budget or from OPM or from Elon and get things done. But the federal government is very regimented. It's very, you could say it's organized. In some sense, it's very disorganized, but it has clear lines of command and communication. And the White House, I think, tried to not use those or just in such a hurry they didn't use them. And so it's created some legal problems for them. including a judge this week who halted some of the mass firing at some of the agencies. So that's one thing is who has the authority to do what.

I think the White House is going to have to kind of reissue or refire some people using the right person to fire them basically the agency head or whoever it is. And then another thing that's going on here is there are these union contracts that the Biden, you know, some of them preexisted, but the Biden administration negotiated these contracts. with government unions. Some of them are pretty cushy. I mean, about like coming into work or not firing people, it's infamously difficult to fire federal employees, right? And we're seeing some of that now. But, you know, there's a question of all how much is the,

are the hands of the Trump administration tied by these union contracts that the Biden administration negotiated? And so these union, these union, the federal union is pretty strong. It's got almost a million members. And it's suing over all these things. And so there's all these flurry of lawsuits from the government union that are slowing everything down, challenging it. You know, I've read through some of the documents. And it looks like there's some, the judges are at least open to these challenges.

So, you know, it's more complicated than just saying the president can fire everyone. They're trying to move quickly. So they've run into some hiccups. Ultimately, I think they'll succeed in, you know, being able to fire some people and make some big cuts. But it's a lot more complicated than maybe the, they expected. And Congress's involvement is is is is noteworthy as well, Casey. While much, much of the focus on in the news on Doge has been these expense cuts, those is also charged with cutting government regulations on businesses and and and other things. You wrote this week, though,

that, you know, the president has the authority to, to only do so much, so many things. Congress would need to get involved to make some of these cuts, both in expenses and in government regulations, more permanent. Tell us about that. That's right. You know, the experts I'm talking to who support Trump's reforms are saying this is great, but this is temporary, and this is not really getting down to the root of the issue. So they see it as a good start. But, you know, for instance, you know, you can cut funding to the Department of Education, but the Department of Education has thousands of regulations that are still legally binding on the books. So until you, you know, either one by one or you could, you could pass a law to, you know, really undo a lot of that or supersede it.

But it would take Congress to really quickly say, you know, these thousand regulations are no longer in effect somehow. Just defunding the agency doesn't do that. They're still binding law. And also these agencies, an agency is not just, you know, one government office building with, you know, Department of Education on the door. I mean, there's, in some of the bigger agencies, there's many, many sub-departments with their own office buildings. And so, you know, the agencies have sort of metastasized and spread their roots out and they're everywhere. And so to really track down where the money is going, who's hired where is a big job. And I think it's going to be very hard for Trump to do this without Congress.

And then, of course, Dan, as soon as a new president comes in, if it's a Democrat or a Republican, who's just more moderate, they can undo many of Trump's actions with the stroke of a pen. And of course, Republicans do have majorities in both the House and the Senate, but they're the slimmest of majority. So, you know, any Republican defections can essentially put roadblocks on the long-term efforts to cut government spending and cut government over regulation to the Republicans in both the House and the Senate, are they united enough to get stuff like this done? I think right now they're not focused on this issue. They're pretty distracted. They are trying to figure out how to keep the government from shutting down in a couple of weeks since right now they're

not agreeing at all. I think that Trump still has the political will and the power to get something done to rally the Republicans. I think there would be some political appetite for some kind of big, bad government spending, you know, government waste cutting bill where they really trim so these agencies down. Now, if they're smart, they'll try to get that stuff into this new funding bill to help offset these tax cuts they want to pass, but I don't know if they're going to have time to do that. And also really, if they're going to make really substantial cuts, they're going to have to cut into some big entitlement programs or defense spending, which is going to be really unpopular among some Republicans who are just not going to be willing to do it. So I think that,

you know, the smaller agency trimming down, probably easy cutting the actual entitlements that need to be addressed and reforming them to deal with the big deficit problem. You know, I'll believe it when I see it. Thank you for joining us today, Casey. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecenter square.com.