"The Grift Machine Has To Stop"

This is a quote from an interview with Elon Musk, where he referred specifically to the Ukraine war. But it occurs to me that this has been a key strategy for Trump since he returned to office.

For instance, the removal of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants knocks away a key cause of the problems in places like Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA:

The Trump administration on Thursday canceled an extension of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, the latest move by the president targeting the form of immigration relief for people coming from countries facing political upheaval and natural disasters.

In June, amid the island's violent domestic turmoil, the Biden administration announced the temporary immigration protection was extended for Haitians until February 2026.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday that it was vacating the extension and the protections would end on Aug. 3.

As I've discussed, for instance, here, the Haitians have been key to an elaborate NGO-driven economy. The Biden immigration policy brought in hundreds of thousands of Haitians, who needed jobs, housing, food, health care, cars, education, and so on. Other arms of the government then gave grants to NGOs, which in turn worked with sweatshop employers, their job recruiters, slumlords, community organizers, and so forth to supplement the migrants' low-pay jobs and overcrowded rentals, which drove down salaries and drove up rents.

The Haitians then strained local schools and health care resources. The NGOs apparently bought them cars, but they didn't get driver training or insurance, and the local insurance rates soared. But for the NGOs, some of which were associated with Catholic Charities, there was a guaranteed skim: part of the grants was always a generous percentage for the NGOs' administrative overhead. DOGE has been restricting these charges to 15%, when they previously had been as high as 70% -- but if the Haitians must go back to Haiti, there will be far less need for such grants going forward in any case.

The complaints from the US Catholic Bishops about cuts to their programs would have more credibility if we knew how much their programs charge for administrative overhead, as well as the precise activities they sponsor in places like Springfield. I have a suspicion that some of these programs have been hijacked by secular employees with a political agenda in conflict with Church teachings, or tacitly tolerated by local bishops with a similar agenda. At minimum, the precise budgets and line item programs need to be made transparent -- the bishops should be eager for these issues to be resolved.

The administrative overhead skim is completely legal. But I've always thought there's also an illegal skim, part of which takes the form of kickbacks to politicians, organizers, and other influential parties. The most prominent in the past week has been the $2 billion awarded to a climate group with ties to former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, described by Wikipedia as "an American politician, lawyer, voting rights activist, author, and perennial candidate", who has not held public office since leaving the Georgia House of Representatives in 2017.

The money was earmarked for Power Forward Communities — a nonprofit partnered with multiple left-wing groups founded by Abrams and which the Georgia Democrat has stated she was “thrilled” to be part of, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Wednesday.

The funds were set aside at an outside financial institution — Citibank — before Biden left office and part of a larger, $20 billion pot of money the former president’s EPA received through the Inflation Reduction Act to dole out to climate groups.

“It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the outlet, referring to Power Forward Communities’ latest tax filings. “That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

It's hard to avoid thinking that much of such money simply finds its way into the pockets of favored figures. Cuts in at at least some foreign and domestic NGO progams have been immediater, resulting in layoffs and project terminations. In the USAID,

In the first day President Trump took office in the White House, he paused almost all of the operations of the world’s single biggest aid donor – US Agency for International Development (USAID) – for 90 days.

Prior to Trump’s pause on aid, more than 10,000 people worked for the organisation, with around two-thirds working overseas. Because of the freeze, many have been put on leave and thousands of contractors have lost their jobs. Projects across the world have also been forced to alter or cease operations entirely.

In Ukraine alone,

Shelters used by evacuees are also facing uncertain futures. One location used in Ukraine for evacuees is a concert hall in the eastern part of the country. Prior to the freeze, 60 per cent of the costs to run the shelter (around $7,000 USD) was being paid by the US.

News outlets have also been hit, such as Ukraïner – known for its war reports in many languages – which has announced it is scaling back its operations since the USAID cut. Dozens of its projects rely on financial support from the organisation.

‘We will no longer be able to make the series of war reports…because they are very expensive to produce,’ said Ukraïner’s founder Bohdan Logvynenko in a Facebook post. ‘To make them cheaper and stop traveling to the front line, we may have to significantly sacrifice quality.’

The situation in Ukraine seems to be changing by the hour. As of yesterday, there were sketchy reports that at least some US weapon shipments had been paused:

Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko, who works as the secretary of the Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, told reporters on Thursday that the US weapon sales and deliveries have been halted.

Kostenko made the announcement during a press roundtable on Thursday that was later posted on YouTube.

According to Kostenko, “Deliveries of the weapons that were going to be sold have stopped. Those companies that were supposed to transfer these weapons here are now waiting, because there is no decision.”

But every indication is that Trump's people are working across the board to stop the grift machine by simply turning off the money spigot. This in turn is causing loud complaints, which is useful in itself -- as various administration figures have pointed out, the people complaining the loudest, certainly including those in Congress, are the ones losing the most. That's where we need to look.