Human Events Daily host Jack Posobiec brought Mike Benz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, onto Tuesday's episode to discuss a major shake-up within the US government. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is being merged into the State Department, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio set to serve as its acting administrator.
Posobiec and Benz discussed the broader implications of this restructuring, with Benz cautioning that such a change is far more complex than simply eliminating a department.
“When it comes to USAID, and this head of the snake that has been lopped off. I mean, you pointed to it, President Trump and Elon Musk and their team swung the sword, but that said, the nature of government is different than that. You can’t just take out one thing, and the programs all go away. It’s a little more complicated, isn't it?" Posobiec asked.
“It’s a lot more complicated, that’s right,” Benz replied. “My concern is that… make no mistake, what’s happening right now is historic. It’s really the first time that the foreign policy establishment has had to respond in a serious way to the concerns of the American people that fund it. This has never been done before. There were attempts in the 1990s to do this, there were attempts with the intelligence communities in the 1970s, but this looks to be the most serious one in American history.”
“At the same time, we should be rejoicing and cheering it on but can’t make the mistake that the Brexit movement did in June 2016 when everyone popped the champagne at the moment of the referendum, but Brexit, in fact, was thwarted, in terms of Brexit in practice, by all the layers of subsequent pushback and resistance that effectively 180’d the whole reason for Brexiting in the first place, and today the UK is run by the UK Labour Party, which is the most tyrannical government perhaps in the entire world right now. It’s arresting people for clinking the retweet button.
“The same thing could very well happen with the current reform of USAID if stewardship of it is not aggressive to the hilt, to the very, very end of this."
“It’s worth noting that while there is a so-called funding pause on USAID, USAID is fully funded through [Quarter] One, which means that the overwhelming lion's share of USAID activities will continue to be financed until the end of March. In that time, much can happen… I’ll keep repeating it, killing USAID does not end USAID. It’s moving over to State, and State is going to be inheriting a USAID herpes infection. It is very easy to take those same grants and same operations and move it to USAID’s democracy rights governance division, to states’ democracy rights and labor division,” Benz warned. “There are parallel offices for State and USAID in almost all respects,” he said, comparing it to the CIA in this way. “You heard Marco Rubio acknowledge this himself… Every step of the way, you’re going to have a solid block of congressional Democrats, plus a critical component of defecting Republicans who are going to want to keep that rift going,” said Benz.
