Donald Trump and Elon Musk have not been the first people high up in the federal government — elected or appointed — to say they want to do something significant about reducing government spending.
Everyone with a smidgen of sense knows the federal government spends too much, and it’s why the nation is more than $36 trillion in debt.
Some of that debt is the result of fraud, some of it waste, and some of it just good intentions that the country doesn’t have the revenue to afford without borrowing.
But, doing away with any of this spending is much easier said than done, as the president is already finding out. That’s because every dollar that Congress appropriates is a dollar that has a constituency, and frequently a powerful one.
Early on in Trump’s second go in the White House, the Republican and the ad hoc agency of which he put Musk in charge, the Department of Government Efficiency, targeted the U.S. Agency for International Development not only for spending cuts but for total elimination.
Politically, USAID seemed to be an easy target for the pair. Most Americans grossly overestimate how much the federal government spends on foreign aid. (It’s just over 1% of the federal budget.) They also have a hard time accepting the argument that not only is foreign aid the moral thing for a rich nation like ours to do, but also it’s in our own interests. Helping people avoid starvation wins America friends and reduces the chances that we might have to send arms or troops one day to curb unrest in places where American interests are put at risk.
What Trump and Musk, though, did not fully calculate is what an attack on USAID might mean for America’s agriculture industry, since a major part of the foreign aid supplied by the U.S. comes in the form of American-grown grain.
Farmers and farm-state members of Congress from both parties have been big supporters of the “food for peace” initiative that dates back to the post-World War II administration of Dwight Eisenhower. The idea was that this program would not only be good for foreign relations but also monetarily helpful to farmers, reducing excess grain supplies and creating new markets for what they grow.
With USAID crippled after 10,000 employees were put on leave, though, that grain isn’t moving. The agency’s inspector general warned earlier this month that almost $500 million of food assistance already purchased by the federal government was at risk of spoiling because it’s stuck in ports or in transit. The Trump administration was exacerbating waste by supposedly trying to reduce it, and the inspector general got fired by Trump for pointing this out.
Not only does this upheaval at USAID come at a terrible time for farmers, who are pinched by low commodity prices and high input costs. It also comes at an inopportune place for the Trump administration.
The Republican can credit his strong showing in rural America for his return to the White House. It is going to be a shock to these farming communities — and potentially erode support for Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress — if Trump eliminates this major source of income for them.
This is just one example of the unintended consequences and political hazards of spending cuts. Every similar effort is going to hurt some sector or some aspect of the U.S. economy. That’s why it’s so hard to cut spending for a program once it’s established.
