President Donald Trump may have thought that defunding the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would only hurt foreigners -- but it turns out he could actually be mistaken.The Washington Post reports that shuttering the agency entirely "threatens billions of dollars the agency spends o...

Summary

Trump’s move to defund USAID is causing unintended consequences for American farmers and businesses.

The Washington Post reports that USAID purchases billions in U.S. agricultural products, with American farms supplying 41% of its food aid.

The funding freeze has already halted $340 million in food shipments, leaving tons of wheat stranded in Houston.

Experts warn this decision directly harms American jobs and businesses, as much of USAID’s aid is administered through U.S.-based organizations employing American workers.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
    86·
    16 hours ago

    They write these stories like this isn’t the result he is looking for. The point is to crash, not rebuild;

    I’m noticing a slightly different pattern with these actions. I don’t think trump and his cronies were actually seeking to hurt farmers, but something else.

    1. hurt everyone temporary to see who screams.
    2. Those that scream that are opponents, continue to deny them the government benefit
    3. Those that are allies, extract concessions and/or pledges of fealty before returning the same benefit they had before.
    4. For those that don’t scream, or don’t scream loud enough, simply pocket the benefit for himself and his own goals.

    nothing the Trump administration is doing is geared to help, rebuild, or make America great.

    Agreed.

    • Evotech@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 hours ago

      Basically pull all the cables and see what breaks that you care about.

      Then just fix that.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
        4·
        3 hours ago

        Basically pull all the cables and see what breaks that you care about.

        Then just fix that.

        Yes. In IT we call this the “scream test”. This feels like that with added corruption.

        • frezik@midwest.social
          2·
          1 hour ago

          Incidentally, Musk did exactly that at Twitter. He blamed the developers for his own recklessness (“I was told we had redundancy across our data centers. What I wasn’t told was that we had 70,000 hard-coded references to Sacramento. And there’s still shit that’s broken because of it”) when the infrastructure team strongly warned him ahead of time that this needed to be done carefully to avoid issues.

          Which indicates that he learned nothing. Now he’s doing the same to the federal government.

    • Nougat@fedia.io
      24·
      16 hours ago

      Demarcating between enemies and allies (coerced or otherwise) is most definitely a primary goal.

    • LedgeDrop@lemm.ee
      2·
      13 hours ago

      Thank you for sharing your perspective.

      I thought as the OP did (Trumps goal was to overwhelm and destabilize the U.S.)… your response gave me pause.

      I guess we’ll find out who was right in 4 years…