By now, you’ve heard the litany. Still, it bears repeating.

We spent $3.3 million to promote LGBTQ lifestyle in the Caribbean; millions for sex-change operations and LGBTQ activism in Guatemala; $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia; $32,000 for an LGBTQ comic book in Peru; $20,600 for a drag show in Ecuador; $70,880 for a DEI musical in Ireland; $1.5 million to promote job opportunities for LGBTQ folks in Serbia; $80,000 toward an LGBTQ community center in Slovakia; $1 million for French-speaking LGBTQ+ groups in West and Central Africa; $1.5 million to help women to adapt to climate change in northern Kenya; $425,600 for Indonesian coffee companies to promote climate consciousness and gender friendliness; $1 million for disabled climate activists in Tajikistan; $2.5 million for EV charging stations in communist Vietnam.

We even spent $446,700 to promote atheism — atheism! — in Nepal.

I could go on. Of course, this says nothing about the millions that went into the coffers of left-leaning news organizations like The New York Times, the BBC, Politico, and Christianity Today — in the latter’s case, right before the election.

These are your tax dollars at work, and the particular awfulness of what and how and why we’re spending this money has been a source of, shall we say, great interest to Elon Musk and the youthful sleuths in his Department of Government Efficiency.

Musk is clearly over the target, and he’s taking a lot of fire for it. “Elon Musk needs to keep his grubby hands — his greedy grubby hands — off of our government,” said Massachusetts Democrat Ayanna Pressley.

Whose government, Ayanna?

Or take Missouri’s Emanuel Cleaver, who at 80 years young is part of the Democrats’ youth movement. “Elon,” he said, “you get your musty hands off of our money!”

Whose money, Emanuel?

The common complaint from Democrats is that no one elected Elon Musk. So? Except for two guys, Donald Trump and JD Vance, the executive branch is made up entirely of unelected folks. As Fox News funnyman Jimmy Failla put it: “I know some liberal lawmakers go, ‘Oh, well we didn’t vote for Elon Musk.’ Yo, none of us voted to let USAID waste our taxpayer dollars by exporting dopey woke initiatives around the globe.”

Indeed, why on earth is the United States Agency for International Development funding far-left causes and social contagions in third-world countries that have much more important things to worry about? If we had to guess, we’d say the good folks of Guatemala care a lot more about clean water and plumbing than sex-change operations. We tend to laugh it off when Iran calls us “The Great Satan,” but in this case, we seem to be living right down to it.

Perhaps the most fascinating part in all this, though, is the Democrats’ willingness to fight for it — their willingness to keep USAID’s appalling largess on the front burner instead of taking the “L” and slinking away. After all, if there are three things today’s American taxpayer has been conditioned to hate, they’re wokeness, bureaucracies, and foreign aid. USAID embodies all three. It’s one gigantic and heretofore secretive leftist slush fund, and defending it is a surefire political loser.

Democrat strategist Ruy Teixeira gets it, and he’s trying to sound the alarm. “Trump occupies the high ground in this fight,” he writes at The Free Press, “which is probably why he and Musk picked it. … USAID is a 10,000-employee bureaucracy — housed in a palatial building on prime downtown real estate — that spends $40 billion a year on other countries.”

As Teixeira adds, “Democrats are unconditionally defending an obscure government institution at a time when even well-known and previously trusted institutions are regarded with intense suspicion.”

Republican Senator John Kennedy was rather less charitable. He pondered, “How did these people find their way out of the birth canal?”

It’s been said that you shouldn’t interfere with your political opponent when he’s bent on committing suicide, but perhaps we could just hand them the rope. Instead of allowing the Democrats to attack Musk, we should demand that they defend spending American taxpayer dollars on transgender operas in Colombia.

The bottom line is that the more time the Democrats spend on defending the indefensible, the less time they’ll have to promote their own priorities and mount a defense against the Trump juggernaut.

So, yes, by all means, let’s keep talking about USAID.