Dylan Scott
speaker
698 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 16 Sep
Dylan Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I think we're starting to see that as a pattern that they're going to try to play out. And we don't really know how far it's going to go yet, but
Already, I've heard reports about Doge being in the building at the Social Security Administration, at the Treasury famously mucking with payments, at the General Services Administration, which controls like the physical buildings that a lot of the government is housed in.
They've started working at the Department of Health and Human Services on Medicare and Medicaid, which is a huge, huge chunk of federal government payments. So I think it's fair to say that this is something they want to do across the entire federal government.
And in fact, when they were criticized because foreign aid is such a trivial share of the overall federal budget, the defense was, yeah, it's small, but wait till you see where we get going. So it's definitely not just about USAID. This is a broader plan they have.
So I think the first step, and this is the thing that started on January 20th, as soon as Trump was inaugurated, is pulling funding. So the first thing they did was announce that they wanted a 90-day freeze on all grants, contracts, anything related to foreign aid.
I just really want to underline that they can't do this. This is money that was appropriated by Congress. Legally, the president does not have the power to stop funding that was authorized and mandated by Congress. But they did it.
And even though there have been court rulings against them doing this in general, there haven't been specific USAID rulings, but there have been rulings about this general power, they do not appear to have stopped. Step two is pulling staffing.
And so if you were trying to implement, say, like a delivery of food to Sudan in the middle of their civil war and possible famine, it's possible the person doing that is an actual federal employee. It's just as possible that that person was an institutional support contractor and they largely got furloughed by their organizations and were out of the building.
Then they started in on people who were actually in the civil and foreign service, who directly worked for the government and were important in running USAID. The Monday after the inauguration, so a week after inauguration, Trump or Trump's representatives within the aid infrastructure put about 60 people at the very top level of the civil and foreign service on administrative leave.
It's like trying to run a middle school if you've put the principal and all the vice principals on leave. And so you're in a situation of like pretty serious disarray to start with. And then the people who would have like walked you through that situation are gone. And that's, I think, when people realize this isn't just sort of a temporary funding freeze.
This is like a serious effort to dismantle this agency.
So I think a very important part of this has just been instilling a culture of fear. One question I've had throughout this is, like, why aren't the contractors suing? And I think part of why that hasn't happened is that people are terrified that if you make yourself a problem in this moment—
not only are you going to lose these contracts, you're never going to be a government contractor ever again. And not just at USAID, but across the government. And similarly, I think there was a very serious attempt to instill fear within the building. The stated purpose for putting the senior staff on administrative leave was that they were supposedly sabotaging the president's executive order.
And That was sort of a like putting ahead on a spike moment of if you try to sort of go against these executive orders because you think they're illegal or that they're going to get people killed, we're still willing to throw them on administrative leave and throw the agency into chaos. So what makes you think we won't do that to you too?
We've never seen something quite like this. I think it's a synthesis of a lot of ideas that you separately heard about on the campaign trail and that people who are now prominent in the Trump administration have been speaking about for a very long time. So one is impoundment.
This is the idea that when the Congress says, we want you to spend $45 billion on foreign aid, the president can choose to spend less of that if he wants.
This is more or less a crank theory that the Supreme Court unanimously ruled was not a thing and not constitutionally permissible in the 1970s when Richard Nixon tried to do it. Um, USAID was a test case for can we impound things and get away with it?
And I think there was a sense of a lot of people in the Trump administration that in the first term, they were frustrated again and again by what they call the deep state, which is just federal civil servants who are apolitical and, um, are responsible for saying when something is illegal or goes against existing regulation and were often a thorn in Trump's side.
And so I think they spent the four years out of power thinking a lot about how to dismantle that element of the civil service once they got back. And USAID, I think, is one interesting illustration of how that works.
In part because I think foreign aid is an incredibly important government function. I think it's important to spend every dollar as effectively as you can. And this has been a shared goal of USAID administrators during the Obama years. Trump's first USAID administrator, a guy named Mark Green, who was a former congressman from Wisconsin, said,
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