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Notes -
Pretty sure he is referencing this article. The Angle:
The last point is highlighted throughout.
There might be something to this. Channeling Scott from his "Dark Money in Almonds" piece, it's kind of remarkable how small amounts of money in politics make a big difference. Kamala's campaign was uniquely wasteful, but she still only spent a couple billion.
So I think there might be something to the USAID cuts being able to kneecap advocacy.
Let's say that $50-100 billion annually leaked from the federal government into partisan NGOs. That money might be earmarked for nonpartisan things, but it freed up other money for the NGO to pay protestors, buy ads on social media, etc... Even $1 or $2 billion spent on those activities might move the needle a lot.
Now, those same NGOs need every dollar they have to avoid laying off staff. The money for paid agitation is just gone, kaput.
I would just make a point that even modest cuts can paralyze many sorts of organizations.
A 10% cut in resources isn't just 'you can do 10% less.' While the deadwood theory of waste is that if you cut off the waste (and some small part of the good) the rest of the body can grow / work better, in a lot of contexts a 10% reduction in the ability of healthy parts of a system to operate creates complications for other, also, healthy parts. Due to how responsibility loads tend to flow (you hyper-specialize roles to certain people), this can create administrative/logistical chokepoints with non-linear effects.
To give a vague example, going from, say, 2 officials to 1 on Job X does not mean the 1 takes twice as long to do the same amount of work- it can mean 2.5x as long, since the burden-sharing between two allowed better efficiencies / redundancy / surge capacity / so on unavailable to the 1. Particularly when 'flat' requirements that apply to a administrative unit (at least 1 person from each directorate is represented at a meeting' are constant, which in turn takes up a larger % of the single person's man-hours.
Eventually the system may rebalance and be better, but depending on the compliance requirements for the remainder, you can sometimes cripple organizations by making them just barely able to sustain themselves, with little ability for organized efforts. Like a skeleton without muscle that was lost in the name of cutting fat, it can exist, but not necessarily move.
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I read you article
I partly understand the concern. Legislation may be much different from how it is described. Nevertheless "tax breaks for terrorists" is bad optics. Does any-one know the story behind this? The article discusses various groups
but doesn't join the dots on how accusations of "supporting terrorist organizations" could be weaponized against the groups mentioned. Perhaps there are other groups, not mentioned, that are more at risk?
Based on the groups involved and the act, my guess is that people in those organizations had some dealings with Palestinian charities. Being charitable, my guess would be that they did less than enough investigation into them, and are realizing that they might be in big trouble.
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