What? USAID Was Investigating Musk's Starlink? You Don't Say!
What an incredible coincidence!
On Wednesday, Politico published an article featuring takes from David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and James Carville, all about how we should just shut up about USAID because “people” don’t like foreign aid. Who cares if what Trump and Musk are doing is clearly unconstitutional? Just let them have this one and wait for more “serious” things to care about that people actually won’t like.
Nevermind the fact that “just let them have this one” is pretty much never a strategy that leads to more restraint in the future. Or that the “the things I don’t personally care about are just a distraction so they can get away with doing things I would be mad about” school of thought tends to cause unnecessary infighting at a time when that is especially unhelpful.
The attack on USAID is important for a number of reasons (again, it’s unconstitutional as hell), and one of those reasons is that it’s becoming very clear that it’s been motivated by Elon Musk’s personal animus towards the organization — perhaps even more than we originally thought.
Many people have speculated that it’s likely that he’s not too fond of USAID, due to their history of helping to dismantle apartheid in his home country of South Africa. While we can’t know what’s in his head, it seems fairly likely.
However, it turns out that he may have an even more personal grudge against the agency he ridiculously refers to as a “criminal organization.” Why? Because USAID was investigating Starlink’s activities in Ukraine.
Via The Lever:
Musk is targeting the agency that’s inspecting his company’s equipment. Elon Musk’s crusade to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development comes months after the agency announced a probe of his company’s Starlink terminals, according to pages that still remain on the agency’s website. An archived 2022 USAID press release — now inaccessible on the agency’s website — said the agency had delivered 5,000 of the terminals to the Ukrainian government “through a public-private partnership with the American aerospace manufacturer, SpaceX.”
In a deeply ironic turn of events, it seems that this was first announced by USAID Inspector General Paul K. Martin in testimony to Congress about his work in “identifying, preventing, and investigating fraud, waste, and abuse in U.S.-funded foreign assistance programming.”
He said:
“In addition to another ongoing audit on direct budget support, we are examining USAID’s Energy Security Project, USAID’s oversight of Starlink Satellite Terminals provided to the Ukrainian government, and USAID’s efforts to protect against sexual exploitation and abuse in Ukraine. When completed, we look forward to sharing the findings of these reports with the subcommittee.”
Interesting!
Musk’s hysteria over USAID, and the lengths that he has gone to in order to paint an agency that provides funds to organizations dedicated to feeding people, providing medical care, clearing land mines, and doing other good things around the world as an evil “criminal organization” rife with nonspecific fraud and waste.
So far, everything Musk and his supporters have claimed about USAID has been either proven untrue or not proven at all. While their claim that it’s full of leftists makes some amount of logical sense (conservatives don’t care about poverty and lack of access to medical care here, why would they care about it elsewhere?), there’s no actual proof of that, and it wouldn’t be a crime if it were. Stephen Miller’s claim that 98 percent of staffers donated to Harris was similarly pulled out of his ass, although it’s also still legal to vote for whomever you like. Oh, and we know for a fact that the “$50 million worth of condoms” being sent to Gaza thing was blatantly false. Why, we wrote about it just this morning!
USAID does not take up a lot of our money. It’s less than one percent of our entire budget and, if divided evenly among the United States population, cost each of us $131 a year. That is a whole lot less than, as Sally Struthers might have put it, a cup of coffee a day. Even if a lot of people who don’t really pay attention to things or have no awareness of the benefits of “soft power” that comes with doing good things around the world don’t like the idea of foreign aid, it’s a weird choice for a major target. If you didn’t know the many, many good things USAID does, Doktor Zoom explicated that for you today as well.
Unless, you know, that target happened to mention, during testimony about fraud and waste by someone who is actually qualified to identify fraud and waste, that they are investigating one of your companies.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Survival kit contents check. In them you’ll find:
– One forty-five caliber automatic
– Two boxes of ammunition
– Four days’ concentrated emergency rations
– One drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills
– One miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible
– One hundred dollars in rubles
– One hundred dollars in gold
– Nine packs of chewing gum
– One issue of prophylactics
– Three lipsticks
– Three pair of nylon stockings.
- $50 million in condoms.
"Just let them have this one and wait for more “serious” things to care about that people actually won’t like"
Have they really not seen the classic poem? Well, here you go, jagoffs:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
/FFS
https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin-niemoller/