Does anyone other than President Trump like the idea of a U. S. occupation of Gaza? Initially, I attributed the comment to a bad habit the president has: floating trial balloons. Now he appears to be doubling down on it.

Was anyone surprised by Jordan and Egypt refusing to accept the Gazans? Arab states won’t accept them for multiple reasons the most important being a) it would signal surrendering the territory to Israel; and b) the Palestinians are troublemakers.

“Everybody loves it”? Give me a break.

There’s a considerable amount of kerfuffle over the treatment of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). William Galston provides a pretty good primer in his column at the Wall Street Journal:

President John F. Kennedy established USAID via an executive order, relying on authority granted to him by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. Had USAID remained in this status, Mr. Trump would be within his rights to eliminate it by reversing Kennedy’s order. But in 1998 Congress enacted a law establishing USAID as a distinct entity within the executive branch and distinguishing between its functions and those of the State Department. The law granted President Bill Clinton a few months to modify the plan, after which his authority to do so would lapse. His report to Congress stated that USAID would “continue as an independent establishment in the Executive Branch.”

Congress legislated on this subject again last year. According to Brookings scholar George Ingram, the 2024 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act explicitly prohibited a reorganization, redesign or elimination of USAID without congressional participation.

but

Enter newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who told reporters accompanying him to Latin America that USAID is “a completely unresponsive agency.” Citing his experience in Congress, he stated that “it’s supposed to respond to policy directives with the State Department, and it refuses to do so.”

If this alleged unresponsiveness continues, Mr. Rubio would have the authority to fire noncompliant officials and seek to replace them with people who would respect his statutory authority. But he has no legal right to abolish USAID any more than the president does.

In other words USAID can legally be completely dismantled but not abolished. It would take an act of Congress to abolish it. That wouldn’t be unique or even unusual. The federal government has hundreds of “zombie programs”, programs that remain on the books, some funded and some not, but don’t actually do anything.

There are several ways of looking at the kerfuffle. The first is that USAID is a tiny portion of federal spending. Not a significant cut. That ignores serious problems with the agency.

My view is that USAID operated for more than 30 years solely on the basis of an executive order and without significant empowering legislation. That’s a problem on its face. In my opinion there should not be such a thing as an “independent agency within the Executive Branch”. Every agency should be subject to the will and policies set up for it by the Congress in its empowering legislation, subject to the will and policies set up for it by the president, or both. Not independent.

Marco Rubio has the right of it.

Furthermore, the executive order President Trump issued on USAID lists some of the agency’s dubious programs. My question is how do these programs support “international development”. The description “slush fund” has been used to describe USAID. To what degree is that right or wrong?

My second observation is how is it in the U. S. interest to intercede in the political or social arrangements of other countries and how is that development?

My third observation is a question. Should the federal government be funding foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? I think not at least not without considerable oversight and I believe the majority of Americans agree with me. Let’s not conflate “foreign aid” with “providing support for foreign NGOs”.

As President Trump’s more controversial cabinet appointments make it through the Senate’s confirmation process, I thought I might offer my opinion. It’s brief. With the exception of Marco Rubio, by whom I’ve been pleasantly surprised, I have found the appointments quite unimpressive.

Should they be confirmed? It’s a mixed bag. Of the most controversial (Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard, Patel), I doubt that under a normal administration any would ever have been nominated. In general, a newly-elected president deserves to be served by a cabinet of his choosing. But Donald Trump is anything but a “normal” president.

Let’s consider this passage from Article II, Section 2 of the U. S. Constitution:

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.

For my taste we are seeing somewhat too much acquiescent consent and precious little advice. When did the Senate stop offering advice on “officers of the United States”? I think the Senate is supposed to be more than a rubberstamp.

All of that said I noticed something interesting about President Trump’s cabinet appointments:

I’ve included the role, appointment, age of each cabinet member for both the Biden and Trump administrations for easy comparison. There are two things that struck me about Trump’s appointments. The first is that on average Trump’s appointments are younger than Biden’s were. Even when you subtract four years from each of Biden’s cabinet members’ ages, on average Trump’s cabinet is still younger. It’s something of a “changing of the guard”. Many are Gen X. The only Trump appointment over 70 is RFK, Jr. and he’s by far the most controversial.

The other thing is that it appears to me that President Trump is both sending a message with his appointments and appointing cabinet officers who are less prepared to run the large bureaucracies they are being tasked with but much better prepared to communicate his policies to those bureaucracies, to the Congress, and to the media. Add JD Vance to that list and it’s even more notable.

So, what policies will they convey? Fasten your seatbelts, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

You must surely know by now that President Trump has imposed tariffs on goods imported from Canada, Mexico, and China by executive order. Rather than cite external sources, I’ll just provide my reactions.

As a general principle I’m opposed to tariffs. Tariffs tend to reduce the economic growth and welfare of countries that impose them. If you don’t believe me, look it up.

I think that imposing tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada is a mistake. I presume that President Trump is doing so as a bargaining chip on issues unrelated to trade. The more quickly those issues can be resolved amicably, the less harm they will do. I suspect that more leverage could be exerted on Mexico by imposing a tax on remittances.

China is a completely different case. Dislike tariffs as I might, I’m afraid we really have little choice. China is too big and too mercantilist. My only complaint about the tariffs imposed on Chinese goods is that they’re too low.

One of the things that struck me in reading Allysia Finley’s column at the Wall Street Journal was how, er, selective it was. Here’s a snippet:

The uproar last week over the Trump administration’s short-lived pause on federal grants exposed how dependent Democratic states and cities have become on Washington handouts. Call it a welfare trap.

“Fifteen percent of our workforce are funded by those dollars,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy groused. A lawsuit brought by all 22 states with Democratic attorneys general plus the District of Columbia detailed a litany of programs funded by Uncle Sam. Washington state said it received $121 million last year for allergy and infectious-disease research. Illinois claimed federal Medicaid funds made up 60% of its 2023 spending on “critical health services.”

“Washington, do you realize the consequences of what you’ve done here? And do you really want us to not fund law enforcement?” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared. “Do you really want us to not fund roads and bridges?” What are New York state taxes for?

The title of the column is “Democratic States Are Wards of Washington”. I agree with her that some Democratic states are unduly dependent on federal spending. Some aren’t. Some Republican states are unduly dependent on federal spending. Here’s a handy map of per capita federal spending in each state:

The states with the highest per capita spending are Alaska, Rhode Island, and New Mexico. However, Wyoming, Montana, Louisiana, and Kentucky are also highly dependent on federal spending. Which states are the most dependent?

As you can see nearly a third of Montana's, Louisiana's, and Kentucky's state budgets come from the federal government. A quarter of Rhode Island's, Massachusetts's, and Maryland's budgets come from the federal government.

I don't think that Ms. Finley is telling the whole story. I can see several stories in those maps. One of them is that too many states depend too heavily on the federal government. I don't think you can tell a partisan story from them.

Here’s another fantasy. At CIMSEC Benjamin Van Horrick wants to bolster our ability to oppose China in the Western Pacific and South China Sea by increasing the number of speakers of Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Tagalog:

A dire shortage of Asian operation linguists in the First Island Chain hinders the United States’ capability to deter Chinese aggression. The joint force’s campaigns depend on strengthening regional partners and fighting as coalitions. Operational linguists act as interpreters and translators, forge trust, assist with planning, and enable the execution of coalition operations. Since language is culture, linguists also inform and educate the commands about the host nation’s cultural and social nuances, such as those that can affect operational integration. However, the present number of operational linguists in the Pacific is already insufficient for regular peacetime campaigning, let alone for crisis or war. The new administration can fix the problem and add more operational linguists in the Pacific before the operational need becomes a damaging shortfall.

To accomplish that they will need to draft Korean-Americans, Japanese-Americans, etc. into the military. Training serving personnel adequately in languages rated as difficult (which describes most of the languages he wants us to expand on) takes years.

Americans aren’t linguists. There are multiple reasons for that. The most obvious is that there are many places in the U. S. where you can travel for hundreds if not thousands of miles in any direction without hearing a language other than English spoken. Other than Spanish nowadays of course. Furthermore, the only reasons for Americans to study languages other than English or Spanish is nostalgia or personal enrichment. It opens no career possibilities. American companies hire native speakers of other languages not people who’ve learned other languages in school.

A rather remarkable number of the posts I’ve seen today have looked to me like free flights of fancy. This post by Eyck Freymann and Hugo Bromley at Foreign Affairs is one of them. It opens:

As tensions rise in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, U.S. efforts to deter Chinese aggression suffer from a fundamental credibility problem. The United States has conventional and strategic tools to deter Beijing, including the threat of punishing economic sanctions. But China is much too big and integrated into the global trading system to expel it from the world economy overnight. A sudden economic break between Beijing and Washington would be devastating for the United States and catastrophic for the rest of the world. Financial panic and supply chain disruptions would fracture the international economic order and undermine U.S. leadership. China might calculate that the United States would be unwilling to take such risks—or that even if it tried, the rest of the world would resist U.S. pressure to choose between the two powers.

Punishing Beijing for unprovoked aggression would be essential to maintaining U.S. credibility and leverage, but it would have to be balanced with U.S. interests. These include preserving macroeconomic and financial stability, dollar hegemony, and a functional and rules-based international trading system, as well as breaking U.S. and allied dependence on the Chinese market. Even in an extreme crisis scenario—for example, if Beijing attacked U.S. bases in East Asia during an invasion of Taiwan—attempting a total and immediate economic decoupling from China would be a costly and dangerous gamble. It would subordinate all other U.S. interests to a punishment strategy that might not even work.

The only real prospect for “decoupling” from China was abandoned more than 20 years ago when China was granted Most Favored Nation trading status and membership in the World Trade Organization. Since then the United States’s imports from China have grown enormously:

Find more statistics at Statista
and deindustrialized considerably. To decouple from China we would need billions if not trillions in additional capital investment in reindustrializing and at least a decade to do it in. The actions we have taken most recently, e.g. blocking Nippon Steel from acquiring U. S. Steel have not been targeted at reshoring our industrial capacity but at further deindustrializing.

They go on to advocate something they call “avalanche decoupling”:

If Beijing crossed one of Washington’s redlines, the United States could work with its allies to manage the resulting global financial crisis, reshore critical supply chains away from China as fast as possible, and trigger a ratcheting trade policy to unlink noncritical supply chains over the longer term. The plan would also initiate the creation of an Economic Security Cooperation Board, a new institution with membership open to all countries except rogue states such as Iran, North Korea, Russia, and of course China. The ESCB would ensure that the decoupling process was rules-based, driven by market forces rather than command and control, and protective of its members’ national and economic security interests, while acknowledging that most countries would continue to trade with both the United States and China. A credible U.S. commitment to this kind of economic leadership during a crisis would not only help stabilize the international economic system but also potentially transform it in a way that benefited most of the world at China’s expense.

With what? At this point we can’t even build our own military systems without components from China. How will we “reshore supply chains away from China”?

At Axios Erin Doherty reports:

The Democratic Party is the most unpopular it’s been in polling that dates back to 2008, according to a new survey from Quinnipiac University.

Why it matters: Democrats are struggling to repair their image with voters after a bruising 2024 election that put President Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of both houses of Congress.

• Democratic lawmakers are grappling — and in some cases, experimenting — with how best to respond to Trump’s rapid, sweeping changes in the early days of his administration.

By the numbers: 57% of registered voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party, the highest percentage since Quinnipiac started asking the question in 2008.

45% of voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party.
43% of voters have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, the highest since 2008.

• By contrast, 31% of registered voters have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party.
• That’s the largest favorability advantage the GOP has had over the Democratic Party since 2008, according to Quinnipiac.

In short those are the worst favorable/unfavorable ratings for the Democratic Party not simply for as long as Quinnipiac has been asking the question but for the last thirty years or more, as long as the question has been asked.

The kneejerk reaction of apologists to that has emphasized messaging. The Democratic Party’s problem is not merely a messaging problem. As Ruy Teixeira has been saying for some time the party is adopting positions on a variety of issues that are wildly unpopular among historic constituencies. That’s not just a messaging problem. The party needs to change what it’s doing or risk becoming a fringe party.

My advice: execute. Crime should be lower, education results better, and economic performance better with less political corruption where the party is the strongest like Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City than in places where the party is the weakest. The Democrats need for people to be flocking to these places rather than leaving them in droves.

The trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, the longest-serving speaker in U. S. history, on charges of corruption and racketeering has gone to the jury. Michelle Gallardo reports at ABC 7 Chicago:

CHICAGO (WLS) — 14-and-a-half weeks after the jury was first seated in former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s federal bribery and racketeering trial, his fate, and that of his co-defendant Mike McClain is now in their hands.

While the case is now in the hands of the jury, any actual deliberations are unlikely to take place before Thursday. The delay is due to the countless recordings and documents that must be set up in the jury room for them and a foreman must be selected.

Including the more than 100 pages of instructions they have to go through.

The jury is made up by eight women and four men, including a nurse, a woman who works at a Goodwill donation center and a manager for Aramark food company.
Former Federal Prosecutor Chris Hotaling said they may start by taking an initial poll.

Today is the first full day of deliberations and I honestly have no idea of how long they will deliberate or what their verdict will be. Considering that Speaker Madigan made the unusual move of testifying on his own behalf, the verdict may depend primarily on whether the jury believes him or not.