Bulwark Takes - Trump and Musk Are Strangling the Government

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Sam Stein goes over some of the effects of the funding freeze implemented by Elon Musk and DOGE. Pain is felt throughout USAID, PEPFAR and from Virginia to South Africa. Tipline: thebulwark.com/tips

Hey guys, it's me, Sam Stein, back with you here for another video. This one, I'm going to talk about a story that we just posted, ran by me. So a week ago, I think, more or less, we did a video like this that looked at how federal workers were being impacted by the Trump-Elon Musk administration. And we talked a little bit about the sense of concern and paranoia and fear, the confusion, and we relayed a lot of the insights that they provided to us. And again, I encourage everyone to send us some insights if they have it. We have a tip line. I'll get into that a little later. Today, we did a story about not just the people, but the programs. There is a lot of confusion out there about what actually is happening to our

government. The government funds a lot of different things that we have in our lives on a daily basis, many of which we just don't recognize or realize, but many of which play critical roles. It's not just our lives. It's obviously across the globe. We have a massive foreign policy apparatus. And that's really been at the center of a lot of the attention over the past couple of days, what's happening with specifically USAID, our primary international relief agency. So long story short, Musk has basically targeted USAID. He's called it corrupt. He's tried to destroy it. He said it's a criminal enterprise. They've moved many of the people on

USAID on to leave or going to move them on to leave technically. They're shuttering a lot of the outposts and they're taking USAID and putting it under the State Department. It's questionable whether they can legally do that. And that's a topic for another day. But what's worthwhile is asking, well, what does that actually mean? And if you're a critic of USAID, you're grateful that this is happening because you think it funds a lot of useless, unnecessary things. You think it's a tool of lefty politics and American imperialism, or maybe not even American imperialism, just neoliberalism. I don't know. But if you're in the international aid and medical community, this is a horrifying, horrifying development. And one of the things that's been confusing is Rubio,

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said, well, we are going to give exemptions for those functions that are of critical nature, things that are involved in treating starvation and massive medical ailments and problems that happen across the globe. One of the specific issues that he said would get a waiver is this program, PEPFAR. For those who don't know, PEPFAR was a combating HIV and AIDS in Africa initiative started by George W. Bush. It has been a wild success story. The numbers tell the story. Since its inception, it has saved an estimated 26 million lives. So over the weekend, people were freaking out because they thought PEPFAR was going to be shuttered, not because of what's happened to USA, but because Donald Trump has already also put in a foreign aid freeze. Rubio came out and said, no, no, no, no, no.

PEPFAR has a waiver. It can continue operating. So we started looking into whether that actually was true. And I got in touch with a couple of people who are involved in PEPFAR operations. And they said it's not actually true. Yes, technically there is a waiver. No one's disputing that. But simply issuing a waiver doesn't really matter all that much because PEPFAR is a fund. And the people who administer the PEPFAR program are USAID and other entities like the State Department, Department of Defense, the CDC, but really a lot of it's USAID. So I talked on Wednesday, that's yesterday, to a doctor who works at a clinic. He does pediatric work at a clinic in an East African nation.

This doctor asked me not to reveal the nation or his name because they're worried that if you speak out, you're going to be targeted. This hospital treats about 1,400 kids a year administering AIDS treatment. This doctor said that because USAID has been effectively shuttered, the clinic that he works at has had to reduce its size. They had nine people working for them, then it was reduced to five. And then they started having to do things differently programmatically. So they were making plans to stop treating patients, infants really, unless they were over one year old. So that's not great because at a time when you want to nip the issue in the bud, if you don't treat them right away, you can miss some cases,

people will die. Separately, I talked to other administration officials who were involved, and they said this is actually a big issue across the board. One person said specifically this was a major issue in South Africa because in addition to USAID being shuttered, Trump has gone out of his way to say he was going to cut off aid specifically to South Africa. PEPFAR's operations in South Africa are bigger than any other country in the continent. So this person told me, quote, this attack on USAID made it nearly impossible to implement at least half of the PEPFAR programming that is now covered under the already limited waiver in the country. So again, this is a critical international program that's being hampered. Now, the good news, I suppose, is that on Thursday, that pediatrician in the East African country did say, sent me an email, said, look, actually some money did go through. We are not going to have to send home those five employees.

But there's a catch. He said the approval was for a one month budget that they got. And they have instructions to submit monthly budgets for the next three months. So they're going on a month to month basis for the time being, which, as you can imagine, is not really a great way to sustain operations or morale. So that's PEPFAR, obviously critically important. But what about other government operations? So we talked to people in all swaths of government operations in advocacy communities. And the gist we get is that even though the administration says things are moving back online after an initial freeze and as people and agencies are trying to implement President Trump's executive order, which barred federal funding, federal foreign aid funding, as well as funding for anything that's to do with DEI and trans rights. They said, even though everything's supposed to be back online, it's not. It's just not online. And anyone who's telling you it is, is lying. So a couple of data points to this end. Politico reported that the administration is still freezing

many climate and infrastructure grants, despite a federal court order that they had to stop freezing those grants. In Virginia, it was reported that some community health centers that depend on federal grants were closing because they couldn't get access to those grants. I talked to the deputy director of the National Head Start Association, that's pre-K essentially for poor families, who says that as of Wednesday evening, his group, quote, was aware of about 63 grant recipients in 25 states, plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, who are having issues accessing grant funding. I spoke with a woman, Dr. Jose Todd Hesham, who volunteers at a group called the Afghan Medical Professionals

Association of America. It's a small nonprofit, general justice. They work with refugees currently in America from Afghanistan and some from elsewhere, but mainly from Afghanistan to make sure that they are getting the medical attention and the mental health services that they need. Obviously, many of these people are living in war-torn countries and they're in a foreign place. They're here legally. And the question is, can we integrate them successfully or at least help them? And this group depends on funding that originates at the State Department, but goes to the U.S. Committee of Refugees and Immigrants, and they're not getting it. She said within a month that the AMPAA, that's again the Afghan Medical Professional Association of America, will be unable to issue paychecks. And the refugees who are dependent on their services won't get it. Also keep in mind, they pay, some of their employees are refugees themselves. So yeah, it's a bleak situation for them. It goes on. In the biomedical research community, a lot of people who are dependent on NIH grants have said that they are having

difficulty figuring out if their grant application is even being processed. One chief counsel, the National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council, was supposed to meet today, which it was going to consider grant applications. They postponed that meeting. It looks like possibly the next meeting will be in May because they meet quarterly. And the administration, I talked to the White House about this. They say this is not a fair portrayal of the situation. They say, you know, with respect to the community health centers, for instance, they say that there's nothing stopping the funding going out. They say the issue here is that these groups are having

difficulty filing their paperwork properly, or they're maliciously trying to stir up bad press. And to be fair, some things are in fact coming back online slowly, right? So, you know, we talked about the doctor in East Africa who finally can access funds. On top of that, some other NIH study sections are beginning to review grant applications, I was told. And you're seeing more communications from groups like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention after they had a communications freeze. So that's movement in the right direction. But ultimately, we're clearly at a place where a large swath of the government is not operating as it has been or should be, or certainly not operating efficiently. And that brings us back to the personnel, which was our first story, but also is a component of

this story, which is a lot of people in government who work on these issues are beginning to feel like this is self-sabotage. And they think that Musk and Trump are pretending to say, well, we're just doing this to make sure everything's kosher. But really, they just want these programs to fail. They want the agencies to shutter. They want to reduce the size of the government. But more than that, they want to sabotage government employees and put them in a state of paranoia. I talked to a number of these people. They were pretty downtrodden, to be honest. Many of them think that their personnel files have been accessed against their will. They believe they're being monitored by their bosses. A lot of them have switched from talking on Slack channels or whatever, Teams channels, and now they just communicate via Signal with their colleagues.

There's a particular anger over the return to work demands that the administration is implementing, not because they don't want to work from the office. They're fine mostly to work from the office, but they think they're being set up to fail. It's noted that a lot of the federal government during COVID and as telecommunity became more popular sold office space. And so if now you demand all the workers come back, there's literally not enough physical space for them to work in. So what are you going to do?

Are they going to sit in the hallway? How are they going to park all their cars if there's not enough parking spots? I mean, these are little things, but to the federal worker, it seems like they're being set up to be fired. and then I'll let you go. But obviously, the administration is trying to get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. They're also going after those people who are hired under those programs. Over the past week, at some point, a group called the American Accountability Foundation, it's an outside group unrelated to the government, but it's clearly a Trump-supportive organization. They put up a website called DEI Watchlist. I'm not going to share it on this video. I didn't share it in the piece because on the website, they put names of government employees who they claim are DEI hires.

They put their photos. They put their photos, they put their titles, they put their agencies. As you can imagine, this has spooked people tremendously. They are freaking out. People contacted me knowing colleagues on that list, deeply worried for their safety. One person said that their colleague who's on the list has contacted the police out of fear for their safety. It's a bad situation. And I tried contacting the American Accountability Foundation to get a comment about why they're doing this, who's directing it, what the purpose of it is. They did not respond to me. But yeah, that's the kind of situation that is paralyzing our government, both what's happening at the behest of Elon Musk in the programmatic level and what's happening at the personnel level where employees are facing historically bad morale. One person said it's non-existent. So the government is to a degree falling apart, frankly. And maybe that is by design, probably. But the real world impact is going to be felt from East Africa, the pediatric clinics there trying to administer

AIDS medications to back at home where government employees are fearing for their safety. As I mentioned, go to our tip line. We're going to have the URL right down there. medications to back at home where government employees are fearing for their safety. As I mentioned, go to our tip line. We're going to have the URL right down there. It's kind of a mouthful for me, but it's very secure. You can submit a message to us, let us know what's going on. But more importantly, what we really want are internal documents, papers, memos, things you're seeing or hearing to help us tell these stories. Thank you for tuning in. Appreciate your support. Talk to you soon.