Game Over: And Then There Were … 294

Can Donald Trump and Marco Rubio close USAID and merge it into the State Department without Congress’ approval? Probably not.

But they can make it a lot smaller, and subject what’s left to microscopic scrutiny. 

Late yesterday, the new Secretary of State informed 14,000 USAID employees that he’d need a few less of them to spread around a whole lot less money. A few being, er, roughly … 13,700 fewer:

President Donald Trump’s administration plans to keep fewer than 300 staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development out of the agency’s worldwide total of more than 10,000, four sources told Reuters on Thursday. …

The four sources familiar with the plan said only 294 staff at the agency would be allowed to keep their jobs, including only 12 in the Africa bureau and eight in the Asia bureau.

“That’s outrageous,” said J. Brian Atwood, who served as head of USAID for more than six years, adding the mass termination of personnel would effectively kill an agency that has helped keep tens of millions of people around the world from dying.

Gee — that sounds like an argument for Congress. The State Department and White House cannot unilaterally close USAID or may not even be able to fold its functions completely into State, because USAID exists under an enabling statute. (It does not matter that it began under an EO; the statute has the force of law.) That statute, called the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, also dictates some of the functions at USAID. Those functions must continue — or at least exist — unless and until Congress either amends or repeals 22 USC 6501, which is the engrossment of that act in US federal code. 

Those grants and subsidies that truly go to life-saving activities not covered by statute could be brought to Congress. Elected representatives and senators could then look at those activities and fund them through either a budget resolution or a separate statute. In fact, that’s how a democracy-based constitutional republic is supposed to work. Self-governance means decisions that send $50 billion annually should be made by people with direct accountability to voters, not by unelected and sinecured bureaucrats issued blank checks who believe that the officers elected by the people have no control over those decisions — in either the legislative or executive branches.

So Atwood and Democrats in the House and Senate are free to introduce bills in both chambers to specifically authorize grants to specific organizations. That would require them to defend such spending, as well as the recipients of those grants. It would also allow all of us to know where our money goes and the purposes for which it will be used. We won’t need a platoon of twenty-something data-scientist geniuses to brute-force a deliberately opaque system to get the kind of transparency that self-governing republics require. 

Wanna bet that Democrats wouldn’t dare to float a majority of these grants and recipients publicly?

Congress will get involved in this anyway, because Trump and Rubio will force them to do so. They will use the same model at the Department of Education too — forcing a fight over retaining a rump organization that Republicans will vote to close entirely. If Trump had merely gone to Congress with a request to shut down USAID or the Dept of Ed, Democrats would have simply filibustered it and scoffed at the impertinence. Trump, however, plans to use the overwhelming executive authority that Democrats routinely created in enabling statutes to simply shut down as much of these functions until Democrats cry uncle!  Or perhaps Trump will just keep them shut down for four years, and dare Demoacrst to run on restoring opacity over what clearly are politicized agencies and departments that exist for purposes that are far from their ostensible missions. 

That is called draining the swamp. But more importantly, it’s a demonstration of why executive power should be always carefully delineated, and why giving legislative authority to unelected bureaucrats under the executive aegis is a very bad idea for everyone. Time for Congress to become Congress again, and to put an end to agency law and the bureaucratic state.