TYLER O’NEIL: Trump Deals a Huge Blow to the Left’s Funding Empire.
By pausing foreign funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, President Donald Trump has dealt a major blow to the ecosystem of nonprofits that promote woke ideology against America’s interests.
It is no accident that USAID’s funding has dovetailed with the grantmaking of leftist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations—and the foreign funding pause will undermine his efforts.
Trump placed a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance on his first day in office. This weekend, agents of the Department of Government Efficiency entered the USAID facility and the USAID website shut down. On Sunday, Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio acting head of the agency.
Full details at the link. It isn’t just USAID, either, that’s going to feel the sting. I missed this WSJ piece on Sunday but the headline tells a brutal truth: Democratic States Are Wards of Washington.
Democratic states and their economies depend much more on Washington largesse than Republican states do. This year, New York received roughly $4,900 per capita from the feds and California $4,300—two to three times as much as Florida ($1,700) and Texas ($1,500). That’s because Democratic states provide more generous social welfare, which is increasingly funded by Washington thanks to regulatory changes by the Biden administration.
Democratic states also received a disproportionate share of the more than $1 trillion that Congress sent to state and local governments in 2020 and 2021 as pandemic relief. Between 2018 and 2022, federal dollars flowing to state and local governments increased by about $515 billion, more than the rise in Social Security and Medicare combined.
Most Covid funds are running out, though the Biden Federal Emergency Management Agency planned to hand out disaster-relief funds to states and cities for pandemic “emergency” spending through August 2026. This year’s Los Angeles city budget includes $208.2 million in FEMA Covid funds, including for housing vagrants in hotels. New York state’s budget this year includes nearly $3.5 billion in FEMA dollars for Covid “emergency protective measures” such as home test kits.
DOGE is derailing the gravy train at USAID and State but taxpayer subsidies to tax & spend blue states ought to be next.