I have no problem with Donald Trump’s effort via DOGE, The Department of Government Efficiency, to eliminate government waste and reduce his country’s massive deficit. But surely the sometimes dire repercussions of such an agenda ought to impact the manner in which it is pursued. Of course Trump, convinced of the legitimacy of his goals, is not given to such “subtle” distinctions. While this renders him fully worthy of some of the criticisms levelled at him by the Left, it too has pursued ideologically based policies [i.e., open borders] with seemingly little concern for their negative impact on the American population.
The United States Agency for International Development [the USAID] has for years been the primary source of financial aid in various foreign lands ravaged by war, government inefficiency, etc.. On May 25, The Toronto Star published a massive article outlining the potential impact of Trump’s 90% reduction of the USAID’s budget, focusing specifically on Nigeria, a country ravaged since 2009 by the terrorist activities of Boko Haram, a fanatical Islamist sect. A woman from the town of Dikwa in northeastern Nigeria who had lost one of her daughters to starvation, suggested that 400,000 people in her country depended on foreign humanitarian aid simply to survive. Shawn Baker of Helen Keller Intl., a group devoted to the nutritional needs of impoverished masses around the world, says Trump’s USAID cuts could result in 163,500 additional deaths per year. While that number seems suspiciously precise and may in fact be a gross exaggeration, if it is only half true it would seem to indict Trump as a monster more concerned with dollars and cents than human life and suffering.
Is the U.S. in any way responsible for Boko Haram’s devastation of Nigeria? Of course not. Is it in any way responsible for the failure of that country’s government to provide for the welfare of its citizens? Of course not. But does this justify Donald Trump’s seeming indifference to the suffering and deaths of tens of thousands of people? Of course not. Ought not a rational approach to his fiscal agenda have entailed giving the various nations affected a year or so to adjust to his cuts? Was not simply cancelling hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid little more than an act of mass murder? I remain a “conservative” for whom Common Sense supersedes mindless Compassion. But is it not simple Common Sense that Trump ought not to have put his fiscal concerns before the lives of thousands of utterly innocent people?