@Phil @realcaseyrollins it precisely codifies an agency it calls AID — Agency for International Development — and creates a period of time during which a potential reorganization might be pursued. that period very long ago expired, with AID still extant.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins are you suggesting calling it "United States Agency for International Development" means it wasn't the codified agency? man, what a bureaucrat you'd be.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins *under this division* sheesh. a reorganization exercise that expired in 1998.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins It enshrines an agency. Yes, under the state dept, Secretary of State:
"Unless abolished pursuant to the reorganization
plan submitted under section 601, and except as provided in section
412, there is within the executive branch of Government the United
States Agency for International Development as an entity described in
section 104 of title 5, United States Code."
Pretty plain language! 1/
@Phil @realcaseyrollins 602 explicitly forsees the reorganization of AID, but sets a deadline of October 1, 1998. 2/
@Phil @realcaseyrollins that "under this division" in 611 is referring back to 601. it's not perpetual authorization for SoS to reorganize the State department. that's the very function of this bill! it was permission that expired in 1998. /fin
@Phil @realcaseyrollins PEPFAR, established by GWB, administered by USAID, has saved conservatively 18M lives. maybe you contest the stats. but boy you are awfully glib about this stuff. sex clinics!
i think Trump people have said they mean to continue PEPFAR. there have been interruptions of medication however which risks emergence of resistant strains of HIV, endangering us all.
@realcaseyrollins USAID was, as @Phil says, initially established by executive order under JFK to pursue objectives set out in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.
but it was formally codified into a Congressionally mandated agency in the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1997 https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-bill/1757/text
what Congress mandates only Congress can undo.
this was less than 10 minutes of Googling. willful ignorance.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins willfully blind. even the aid they mean to send they've broken the competence to do so. they are the epitome of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "careless people". https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/usaid-trump-elon-musk-cuts
the part of the Federal government that is most dysfunctional and in need of radical change is Congress. it has been optimized for job security and internal stability at the expense of effective governance.
but the only take on electoral reform from this administration is Trump should have a 3rd term.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins There is everything illegal about it, food aid is rotting, people who would have been going hungry, and you are willfully blind. Might USAID have been reformed? Sure. That's what Congress is for, and you wind things down to minimize harms, if you decide you are going to wind things down.
@realcaseyrollins @Phil yes, we do have US citizens in the West Bank, we did in Gaza hopefully by now they've been evacuated but i don't know. we've had several US citizens killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank https://www.npr.org/2024/10/10/nx-s1-5106059/west-bank-gaza-israel-justice-department
@Mojeek so i'd like to transition my mobile (iphone) search to your app, but the problem i have is that when i find something, i often want to copy the URL to share, or save an image i've found to Photos, and i haven't figured out how reliably to do those things. i feel like i must be dumb, but i've had a hard time with these things and end up twitching back to Gulf of America.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins i'm all for defending US citizens abroad. i'm also for defending the separation of powers!
@Phil @realcaseyrollins I mean, domestically Musk is "projecting power", illegally and doing great harm. Much of that will be reversed, but much that is broken will take a long time to fix. And none of what he's attacking is at the heart of any of our problems. (Of course the heart of all our problems is brain death: the Constitution makes Congress the brains of our system, and Congress no longer functions due to rigging the electoral system for job security.)
@Phil @realcaseyrollins of course i hope i'll have to concede this one to you. god help us we don't need a war now.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins his oath, by the way, is to protect and defend the Constitution. but i sure hope he does protect and defend American citizens. i'll be impressed if he doesn't take the Biden Administration approach of ignoring deaths of American citizens in Israel/Palestine if they are ethnic Palestinians. 1/
@Phil @realcaseyrollins so far i've seen the opposite of any kind of successful or meaningful projection of power, other than in Israel, where Netanyahu wanted to give his ally a win in exchange for greater help and license going forward. which he has gotten, in Trump's plain endorsement of population transfer / "ethnic cleansing" from Gaza. (which, to be clear, at least has the virtue of a certain honesty that the prior administration lacked on Gaza). /fin
people don't like their franchise transgressed, i guess. it's fun when accusations of "judicial coup" issue from the people pursuing the more old fashioned kind.
@realcaseyrollins @Phil i guess i'll respect it when i see it. so far, the folks i know who went for Trump on a supposed ant-imperialist / anti-war line have not been willing to acknowledge any important transgressions. "russiagate" outweighs all of it, they say. it's just his bluster.
@realcaseyrollins i can respect that.
but then i’d expect some expressions of disappointment for a “no new wars” candidate who has now hinted at openly imperialistic military actions that were so far off the table you’d have needed a warp drive to find them a few months ago.
@gl33p i guess i’m talking about a community maybe exemplified by Glenn Greenwald, but of whom i know others. does anti-US-imperialism necessarily lead to apology for other imperialisms? not necessarily, but the Tulsi Gabbard arc is pretty common.
there are lots of elements of US foreign policy principled people can and should oppose! of course!
but a large swathe of these people became essentially a part of the MAGA coalition. they exist, and that’s the group I’m addressing.
@realcaseyrollins i’ll believe that when i see more of them disavowing their support for Trump as somehow the lesser evil.
@realcaseyrollins if you tell me you believed this was Trump’s line when you supported him during the campaign, okay. If you tell me you still believe it now, well, i’ll tell you one is born every day.