Senior USAID security officials put on leave after refusing Musk’s DOGE access to agency systems
- Thread starter pjhawk
- Start date
Looks like uber and lyft has some driving candidates headed their way.
“If Harris wins, I’m going to prison” -Elon Musk
This dude needs kicked the **** out of our country
This dude needs kicked the **** out of our country
Gold
You gonna fly up to the space station and rescue the crew?
Politico’s Payroll Mishap Shines Light On USAID Ties
Employees at Politico were caught by surprise when their paychecks failed to arrive for the latest pay period. According to internal emails shared by staff, company leadership pointed to a “technic…
thedeepdive.ca
Karoline Leavitt at her presser just said the 8 million USAID funding of Politico has been cancelled immediately.Politico’s Payroll Mishap Shines Light On USAID Ties
Employees at Politico were caught by surprise when their paychecks failed to arrive for the latest pay period. According to internal emails shared by staff, company leadership pointed to a “technic…
The US has no business at all funding private news outlets. I cant believe this was happening at all.
To be clear, $44k in USAID funding to Politico. The biggest shares of the $8m came from HHS and DoI. The overwhelming majority of the awarded funds are essentially electronic subscriptions (eg, "Politico Pro"), over a period of several years. https://www.usaspending.gov/search/?hash=ce007c986b96d38c983ae10dc0614b6a
Translation: this is a ginormous nothing-burger. Other than the fact that government employees will just have to sit at their desks and read the free content like the rest of us schlubs.
Edit: funnily enough, the Executive Office of the President also has a number of subscription contract awards, in amounts substantially more than the USAID subscription..
Last edited:
and others, though in fairness these are likely national licenses of nearly unlimited users. But yeah, i view politico as basically just sort of light entertainment fare that I'd never pay extra for.
It's certainly not as important as having a subscription to, say, Lexis or Westlaw.
I will acknowledge - it does raise an interesting question in my mind that had not really occurred to me before. just how important a customer is "the government" when it comes to news and trade publications, which are so ubiquitous that they most of their content can be accessed without charge by the general public?
(Edit: I gotta say, this sort of evokes a great old Xfiles episode in which Mulder makes a reference to the "Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex")
Last edited:
I dont think the government should be subscribing, with taxpayer dollars, to any political publications. Especially one with such obvious titles such as this one. I also dont think government employees should accept them gratis either.
Pay for it or read the free version if you wish.
Lexis, Westlaw etc are non political. Not the same as you know.
How would Dems feel about the DoD paying for a Daily Wire subscription for all soldiers with taxpayer dollars?
Not simply a waste but diversion of taxpayer dollars to political entities without countervailing alternate conservative media.
What if we just didn’t give tax payer dollars to any sort of media?
While I'd probably quibble with the characterization as a political publication (actually a fair bit of good old fashioned reporting rather than just opinion pieces), I'm on the fence here. There may be very good reasons for govt officials and employees to access trade press like this.
But I have to say, i'm just a little dubious of the value proposition of the stuff behind the paywalls. It'd be fascinating to get a feel for what percentage of their non-government user-clickers are also behind-the-paywall subscribers.
My point is simply that these are (qualitatively) pretty ordinary expenses, and probably unlikely to be such as to support an inference of an unholy relationship for, say, placing stories here or in foreign editions.
Last edited:
Yep. It’s funny this is happening just as many traditional online sources are trying like hell to move MORE of their stuff behind paywalls.
Last edited:
Reporting on this says that each Politico Pro subscription cost American taxpayers 10,000 each.
NO WAY their reporting behind the paywall is worth that kind of money. At all. Sounds like a way to divert government dollars to support, via 'subscriptions', a private company that, at best, leans left.
You mean 'dumb', as in I should have known that this level of graft was occurring and not be surprised by it?
I think a better word would be 'naivete'. Guilty.
How many users per? Remember the agency has like 10000 employees worldwide. I don’t the subscription allows one person to access the content. (For comparison, I am one of a dozen licensed users on a niche subscription product at work that is very good, for which we pay about 2000).
I agree that there are very few info products worth the subscription, and none worth 10k
They have individual Pro plans and group Pro plans.
US Government Dropped Millions On D.C.’s Favorite Media Outlet — Here’s What They Spent It On
U.S. government agencies have dropped a staggering $34 million in contracts with Virginia-based news outlet Politico, mostly on subscriptions.
dailycaller.com
Honestly, setting aside the value prop, I’m still kinda underwhelmed at the idea that this is somehow sinister. (Which was the original implication). Wasteful maybe, but not sinister. And even then, usaid seems positively miserly relative to other usg entities.They have individual Pro plans and group Pro plans.
US Government Dropped Millions On D.C.’s Favorite Media Outlet — Here’s What They Spent It On
U.S. government agencies have dropped a staggering $34 million in contracts with Virginia-based news outlet Politico, mostly on subscriptions.
Oh I dont think it is sinister. I just think it is a massively irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars that most would not be supportive of if they knew.
What if we just stopped giving aid of any kind for awhile?,.. USAID?,.. Just close the doors.
Aid can be used to the USAs advantage so I am fine with Aid to our allies or to push whatever our foreign policy agenda is within the frames of the constitution. I do believe that we do need to go through a lot of the inefficiencies of the government as a whole but the way Trump is doing it is completely the wrong way.
Absolutely. it's soft power (let's be real about the 'humanitarian' nonsense), and always has been, and now's probably the last time to pull the plug given China's belt and road.
No,.. We need to just shut it all off for a couple years, get our finances back in order, then we can revisit this international aid idea with a new and improved understanding of what's really important.
Absolutely, these are things that could have been accomplished by Congress. Part of our checks and balances would still be intact. The optics of Elon and his little group of hackers vacuuming up our data, and doing whatever else to sensitive computer systems is terrifying. Then they follow it up with Tweets with little to no data making claims of weird spending. It's also not great optics that USAID was investigating Elon.
A couple of years?!
I'm actually sorta-kinda ok with the idea that we're going through a zero-balance budget exercise where everything has to be justified, but as painful as those exercises can be, they're generally done on the fly and at the very least, you don't shut your business down for a couple of years.
They weren’t. The USAID IG was inspecting how USAID tracked the utilization of Starlink systems they bought and deployed in Ukraine.
You know, to make sure they weren’t just passing into the black market.
The ‘business’ of borrowing money on the U.S. taxpayer’s back to ship overseas needs to be shut down.
It’d be one thing to debate the value of this stuff if we could afford it, but we can’t, so we borrow, creating perpetual debt and essentially making the true cost of these initiatives infinite.
It’s stupid.
International aid should not be our primary "business",.. That's what I was suggesting be shut down for two years.
Nah, I don’t agree at all with this. There are way to go about things but usually starting with the most extreme way of going about it is not the best strategy imo. We will just have to agree to disagree on how to go about but we agree with the premise of the inefficiency and reigning in the spending.
