This week, a massive firefight broke out between Democrats and Team Trump over the White House takeover of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The USAID managed approximately $40 billion in fiscal year 2023; its original mandate, established under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, was to spread American influence across the globe through aid to various governmental and non-governmental organizations. Over time, however, USAID morphed into a piggy bank for a wide variety of international organizations with agendas ranging from green energy policy to the spread of left-wing gender and racial politics.

President Donald Trump tasked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with taking charge of the agency for purposes of assessing possible cuts. When Musk’s team, including a variety of talented young men, entered the offices, they were barred from access to material by the heads of USAID; Trump fired those officials. Within days, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was made acting director of USAID, with the authority to implement recommended changes from DOGE.

And all hell broke loose.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., accused Musk of leading “an unelected shadow government … conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government.” According to Schumer, cuts to AID would undermine “countering terrorist activity” as well as “humanitarian efforts” around the world. “If America retreats from the rest of the world,” Schumer said, “China will fill in the void.”

That may well have been true with decent leadership. But instead, Democrats decided that American interests had to take a backseat to blue interests. That’s why USAID embedded “LGBTQI+ Inclusive Development Policy” in its agenda for foreign countries — despite the obvious incompatibility with such radical ideology with America’s interests abroad. It’s why in 2013, for example, USAID announced that it would funnel $11 million to radical groups to support on gay and lesbian advocacy in Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala and other developing countries.

This is indicative of a broader Democratic approach to governance: When Democrats are in charge, they use the levers of government not only to enrich their political friends at home and abroad; they embed those streams of funding into the system for times when they aren’t in charge. Democrats have spent a century building permanent funding mechanisms of this sort: The hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year via the Department of Education, for example, are largely directed to blue-affiliated “educational” institutions and groups.

But what happens when the new head of the executive branch isn’t content to allow that blue funding pipeline to continue? What happens when he looks into the spending and finds that taxpayer dollars are being directed toward political ends antithetical to his own purposes?

That’s what Democrats are experiencing right now: the massive power base they built and maintained for their own ends is now being run by people they despise. And those people are gutting many of the systems they built.

That’s why panic is setting in: because while most executive action is by nature transient and reversible, unleashing a wrecking ball against the carefully wrought administrative state isn’t. Trump and Musk are doing something unprecedented on the right: They are keeping their promise to drain the swamp. They are moving fast, and they are breaking things. And the caterwauling from Democrats who supposedly care about America’s interests abroad is actually indicative of something far deeper: a grinding fear that their permanent, bureaucratic structures of power are under existential assault.

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