Get DC out of Cold War rut cut government but dont destroy it

With President Trump ordering the charge, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have smashed into the federal bureaucracy and are proceeding to dismantle it piece by piece.An early target was the Agency for International Development, better known as USAID.One day it was there, immutable and eternal like every government organization — the next day, it was gone and employees were locked out of the building.The legality of this demolition is an open question, and there’s probably a handful of functions USAID carried out that need to be continued, but let’s not quibble.

Nothing remotely like this had been witnessed in this staid company town during the lifetimes of those concerned.Opponents of the move — mostly bureaucrats and Democrats — organized a protest in front of the USAID building on D Street, where Democratic lawmakers made speeches claiming the agency worked to prevent terrorism and feed children all over the globe.They also vented their outrage with Musk, who seems to have replaced Trump himself at the top of the Democratic hierarchy of devils.Musk stood accused of breaking the law by ignoring Congress in his mass slaughter of the bureaucrats.

In an uncanny moment of historical inversion, the protesters began to chant, “Lock him up!”The case of USAID presents us with a good opportunity to pose the question: Can an assault on a legally constituted government agency become a matter of ending graft and inefficiency and saving taxpayers’ money, as Musk and DOGE maintain, or is it demonstrably an act of nihilistic vengeance that will cripple important services, as the Democrats insist?USAID is a Cold War organization.It bribed or otherwise seduced corrupt foreign governments into supporting our side in the twilight struggle against world communism.

That’s a perfectly honorable mission in my book.But the Soviet Union went belly up in 1991.

Like a surprising number of federal institutions, USAID has had trouble dealing w...