"... in saying that the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department did not need to immediately pay for more than $1.5 billion in already completed aid work. A federal judge had set a midnight deadline for the agencies to release funds for the foreign aid work.... The Trump administration [made] an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court just hours before the deadline.... Chief Justice Roberts issued an 'administrative stay,' an interim measure meant to preserve the status quo while the justices consider the matter in a more deliberate fashion.... However tentative, the stay was nonetheless the first victory for the administration in a deluge of cases that the justices could hear over President Trump’s blitz of executive actions...."
The NYT reports.
For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: Do you think this is a mixed metaphor: "a deluge of cases about a blitz of executive actions"? And: Would George Orwell have a problem with this dead metaphor?
Anyway, Trump's victory in the Supreme Court isn't much... just preserving the status quo (as Trump disrupts the status quo), but it may feel awfully auspicious.
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Assuming the NYT is accurate and the so- called aid work was really completed, I’m confident that SCOTUS will eventually allow the President to impound funds and otherwise cut wasteful spending. US taxpayers have no business paying for sex changes in Central America.
“Trump disrupts the status quote”
At long last! Hallelujah!
For now…however tentative… Eff you with the editorials NYT…
What would be the argument for not paying for already completed work? Seems like a dangerous, reputation-ruining act that would complicate future programs.
The fact NYT saw fit to editorialize makes it sound like season 2 episode 3 of Trump Hate is gonna eventually lose this one to make the leftie lawfare record O for Evah…
Foreign aid for gender corruption: carving front holes, castrating healthy organs, attaching inorganic mounds, injecting psychoactive toxins, and grooming services. The German socialists were progressive ahead of their liberal times.
Preserving the disrupted status quo was the absolute best result in this instance. All of the restraining orders and injunctions wins by Dems will get a lot of press but the stays and dismissals will be ignored by the mainstream media. Is anyone else looks forward to a deluge of “egg prices are back to normal” stories when it happens? Yeah, me neither.
"Blitz" may be intended to remind us of "blitzkrieg" so that our minds wander down that path.
How could anyone have expected less. Im surprised it took thos long. I foresee more of these.
@tim maguire, my gut tells me that Roberts is not so pro-Trump that he would have issued this stay if this truly represented payments for goods and services rendered which makes me think that the characterization of the payments as compensation for 'already completed aid work' is not completely accurate. I'm wondering if these are more gold bars tossed over the side (i.e. money obligated to an intermediary for dispersion to grantees named later) or if there are questions of fraud or failure to complete in at least some cases.
"Assuming the NYT is accurate and the so- called aid work was really completed,"
You mean the street mobs did their jobs destabilizing democratically elected governments, like the one in Kiev in 2014?
Big fan of what Elon is doing, but I hope along with the freeze there will be careful review of organizations and contracts.
Water for South Sudan good, $2 billion of gold bars thrown overboard bad.
He also needs some comms specialists to get out the data he's seeing in an easily comprehensible and verifiable way, to shut down the idiots in the propaganda media.
Presumably the payments are being withheld so that the incoming administration can determine whether they are fraudulent. The statement that the money is for "completed aid work" repeats the canard that USAID is solely a humanitarian aid organization. "AID" stands for "Agency for International Development." It is already documented that much of the money is for propaganda, whether legit or not.
$1.5 Billion is a small fraction of USAID's budget.
The idea that a judge can order the Executive to pay ALL withheld funds is absurd. (Perhaps a specific organization can show "irreparable harm," but my understanding is that the claimants in this case are States. If the payments are legit, and late, then they can get interest as a remedy.)
As far as that "...already completed aid work." is a totally bogus claim by the NYT to paint Trump in a bad light. It should be obvious that nobody is going to be doing "aid work" (if you can call it that from what we've seen of where the money was going) without having the money first. What Trump/D.O.G.E. is doing is cutting off any future funding so these dubious activities don't continue.
Grok say that the approximate number of nationwide restraining orders or injunctions placed on President Donald Trump’s executive orders during his first administration was about 63.
The number for Biden's term was about 3.
Not that Howard,
The concept of water for South Sudan is fine and noble; whather an organization named "Water for South Sudan" is, also, might be a different question.
As someone who was part of a project -- entirely carried out with private funds -- to bring well water to one South Sudanese community, I'm not at all sure that US taxpayer dollars should be involved.
Ann, could you explain or point me towards a good resource to understand the jurisdiction that various federal judges have to constrain the executive branch from conveying orders to various executive branches?
I do not understand the checks and balances here at all, and all current reporting is framed around Trump rather than actual structural governance. In my daily reading though, it seems like there is a huge number of federal judges who can, at any time, order the executive to stop executing - or to stop the executive from changing the path of current execution.
This seems deeply problematic to me. It's one thing if the executive puts an order in place that is subsequently sued and found to be unconstitutional/unlawful (i.e. what happened with Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness EOs). It's another thing daily and essential EOs directing agencies are simply paused by broad judicial exercise.
For now, Roberts stops one district court from controlling Federal spending. We know all D's will support the leftwing district judge. Whether 2 R's will join them is always the question.
If we had a real Government true to the constitution and our history, district courts wouldn't be able to issue nationwide injuctions and stays, they'd have to hear the case and issue a ruling. And the ruling would have to be go up to the appeals court and SCOTUS before it took effect.
“Water for South Sudan good, $2 billion of gold bars thrown overboard bad.”
Those two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and the poor little south Sudanese children dying of thirst make wonderful “hostage puppies“ for the manipulation of American public opinion🐶
What seems to be happening goes something like this: Congress makes a grant to USAID. Some GS 12 in the agency gives $1 billion to his former boss, who runs an NGO called “Cool Water Fountains for African Babies”. They go to South Sudan and drill half a dozen wells using local labor, for a total expenditure of $150,000. A film crew gets touching footage of half naked little black children playing in a shower of clean water. The former boss takes a salary of 1 million bucks. The film crew get a half million bucks. Half a million goes for leather chairs, a quarter million for a chef and masseuse to cater to the whims of the NGO staff, three or 4 million for salaries for flunkies whose only job is throwing out money to other NGO‘s. 990 million gets given away to similar organizations, with similar fat salaries for their officials, and so on through four or five layers of cut outs and money laundries. Eventually, 50 million or so ends up in the personal NGO of the wife of the chairman of the congressional committee that approved the disbursement. she draws a multi million dollar salary and donates the rest to a “worthy“ charity that does urban get out the vote efforts in the heavily democrat districts, or engages in “grassroots“ agitation for gun control, social media censorship, or other ways that Democrats steal our freedom.
Anyone questioning this cascade of money to beltway cronies gets portrayed by the media (who also dipped their beak quite heavily in the river of money) as wishing to fill in the wells that supply little black children with water in the desert in Africa, because racism. The video clips of half naked Black toddlers frolicking in the water get played on repeat by every media outlet.
Who is the racist though? The people who try to derail this gravy train, or the people who use money earmarked for drought-stricken villages in Africa to enrich themselves and meddle in domestic American politics?
Orwell is probably less worried about "dead metaphors" and more concerned about being ... dead ...
“Water for South Sudan good, $2 billion of gold bars thrown overboard bad.” True enough, water for South Sudan is good, but what exactly is our obligation to provide it? And since our government is currently over $30 trillion in debt, we don't actually have any money to throw at the problem. If we had a $30 trillion surplus, sure go ahead and help the South Sudanese out but it is near criminal to borrow money to do it. Add in that Hasayamper describes the scam of NGOs perfectly it becomes truly criminal.
The effort to paralyze the Trump administration with lawfare is well-funded and has been organized for a long time. This particular district court ruling and subsequent enforcement order was riddled with partisan hack flaws. I support the impeachment effort. This was not “good behavior”.
In its filing, the gub’ment made clear that completed work would be paid if the claims were legitimate. And nonetheless, there is an entire Article I court to deal with disputes over that sort of thing. The Administrative Procedures Act is not the vehicle for that claim. Plus the preliminary injunction obligates the payment of massive sums to non-parties regardless of validity.
This is partisan judiciary hack horseshit and the Supremes need to put a stop to it pronto and in a hurry.
- Krumhorn
If you look at the link for Water for South Sudan, the CEO makes around $100k, most others around $40k. I'm just holding that up as an example where they're not ripping the Treasury off. I'd like to see the billion dollar NGOs completely defunded, but don't really have a problem with some of these small ones that can make an outsized difference. I think that was the original intent of foreign aid. It's just that corrupt politicians saw a great opportunity for graft, and were able to hide it among the trees for a long time, so to speak. Elon has a chance to bring true transparency to what we are getting for our tax dollars.
The only (minor) edit I would make to Hassaymper's analysis is that the wells are generally to alleviate waterborne diseases that people get from taking their drinking water directly from rivers and streams, not so much drought.
Your presentation sounds a lot like the theme of The Road to Hell, which I highly recommend but only if you are into disturbing books.
“If you look at the link for Water for South Sudan, the CEO makes around $100k, most others around $40k.”
Now do the rest of the $2 billion. Or is the entire $2 billion going for water in the Sudan?
"Blitz" means (originally) lightning. "Deluge" means flood.
Your presentation sounds a lot like the theme of The Road to Hell, which I highly recommend but only if you are into disturbing books.
Indeed, and that reminds me that I forgot to include an important line item for bribes to government officials and local Big Men.
Foreign aid, everywhere and always, consists mostly of taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries.
Actually, the Trump Admin win here is huge.
The original TRO was meaningless, because it said the Trump Admin could still cancel contracts based on the terms of the contract, and every single one of the gov't contracts involved essentially gives the Admin that power.
So the order "you will pay, now" was new. It's been stopped.
Which means we're back to the Trump Admin can keep on doing whatever they want while the judge and plaintiffs sit on the sidelines and whine
It disgusts me that the US is going into these countries and giving them food and water making it counter productive for these people to grow their own food and construct their own infrastructure.
Will a farmer grow rice when there are 10,000 tons of it in a warehouse next door? Will a man dig a well when there is a new $1.5mm rotary drill driving around the countryside?
The instinct of the US is to treat everyone as children and lead them into dependence and slavery. F*** these unsaid bastards. They think Africans will love them when we make them sit on their tails and beg.
And we borrow money to feed them! How long are you going to feed your kids if you don’t work and buy pizzas and McDonald’s on your credit card.
tim maguire said...
What would be the argument for not paying for already completed work?
The Trump Admin has already said it will pay for legitimate work that was completed before the EO went out saying to stop.
However:
1: There are claims courts for suing for non-payment for work done. Suck lawsuits are NOT allowed in normal Federal courts. So this judge has no legitimate power over such issues
2: The Trump Admin stated that the previous Admin had NO tools in place to make sure that the work was actually done before paying for it, and the Trump Admin is changing that.
So, those with legitimate invoices will get paid. but not because of anything done by this District Court judge
Yes this is a big win. The administration can review the contract terms and deny payment or open investigations for fraud. They have some time now. I can see no way a court can demand payment on a contract that violated terms, and every contract written can be contested in some way. And due to sovereign immunity I suspect that there are contractural procedures for how to deal with non payment that were not followed by getting a tro.
This seems to be a very weird way to bypass normal business law by the plaintiffs.
And if you sue the government for non payment you better be sure that you are completely innocent of all fraud or non performance, and have perfect documentation. Are all the congressmen’s wives who run these things that well versed in law? (Oh no, how prejudiced I am.)
However tentative, the stay was nonetheless the first victory for the administration in a deluge of cases that the justices could hear over President Trump’s blitz of executive actions...."
How many temporary restraining orders against Trump's EO's have been rescinded? I can think of at least 3.
The MSM is so addicted to the drug of choice - gaslighting - that they can't function without using it in almost everything now.
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