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
Under Samantha Power, who was Biden's, there's been just broad bipartisan agreement that not enough programs are grounded in high quality evidence like randomized control trials, that there's too much overhead with private contractors, that more programs should be run locally by specific countries rather than by Western contractors coming in. I think they made a lot of progress on that.
It's not perfect, but they launched sections like Development Innovation Ventures, which is a small unit within USAID that functions kind of like a venture capital fund and moves really fast and scales up sort of pilot programs.
They've done a lot to make it easier to apply for support in languages other than English or if you don't have government connections and don't know the magic words to say in your grant application.
What I think is particularly dangerous about this moment is that Trump has taken USAID, which used to be this like very bipartisan thing where there was like a broad bipartisan consensus that it's good. It needs to be reformed. We should do the following things to reform it. It'll take a while, but it's an important process.
He's taking it from something that everyone from like Lindsey Graham to every Democrat in Congress could agree on and made it a hyper-partisan political issue. That's really, really bad. When things have bipartisan consensus, they tend to get funded no matter what. When they are hyperpartisan, it fluctuates a lot.
And whether a kid in Kenya can get anti-HIV drugs depends on an election half a world away. It's a really grim situation to be in. However, the agency ends up at the end of this battle. Elon Musk said something about how it was finding the toughest guy in the prison yard and beating him up on your first day. The Musk idea really got under my skin because it's...
It's evocative because it's so much the opposite of what happened. This is like going up to the guy in a wheelchair in the prison yard and pushing him out of his wheelchair. And for no good reason. This does not meaningfully change our deficit situation. Any of the grants that they thought were dumb, sure, cancel those grants.
But they left people who were on HIV drug trials completely abandoned, cut off from drugs. There's no reason for that. It's just cruel.
I admire their loyalty to their boss, but I think Biden is... a pretty mid-tier, mediocre president. I don't think he's awful. I don't think he's a horrible threat to freedom the way that you might hear on Truth Social. The main way I would describe Joe Biden is that he was an unusually weak president.
And he was, in many important moments, loath to decide when we really needed a president to decide. And I think that ultimately made him less effective than he could have been in the moment.
So I think there's sort of the causes of the weakness and there's the symptoms of the weakness. And I think the causes of the weakness, there's a bunch. Joe Biden is really old. Like, it's a hard thing to get around.
And I think being the president is a very hard and demanding job. And the amount of energy and focus you're able to bring to it really affects how impactful you can be. Bill Clinton was famous for staying up till 2, 3 in the morning, like, poring over policy documents with aides, trying to sort things out. But Biden seems like he was perhaps the opposite extreme.
There's been some reporting from the Wall Street Journal that a lot of decisions got devolved down to his national security advisor or his economic counsel that ordinarily would be decisions for the president, that he had sort of good days and bad days, days when he could hear stuff and days when he couldn't.
That's going to make you sort of weaker and less effective. But I think a lot of it also has to do with his position within the party. If you go back to the 2020 primary, it was not as though Joe Biden won a sweeping mandate that showed he was much more popular than everyone else running against him.
I think that left him sort of owing a lot of people a lot of favors and who had to manage a lot of different factions. And I think that that put him in less of a good position to make difficult decisions and expect people to follow him.
So let's, in our heads, go back to January 2021. Vaccine distribution.
Things are maybe starting to open up, but they kind of shouldn't. People are largely locked down, offices are not reopened. The American Rescue Plan was Biden's sort of stimulus package for that moment. And it was a mix of a lot of different things.
But there was a lot of other parts, too. They gave a lot of money to states to spend as they saw fit. There was a lot of funding for programs like food stamps, Medicaid. There was also an expansion of the child tax credit, which did a lot to cut poverty that year.
It was a very, very big package. It was about $1.9 trillion.
So Biden's line was, this is what we need to emerge from this catastrophe. It was very much like, we're in an emergency. Yes, this is a massive bill, but we need a massive bill to get out of this. I want to be clear that I was saying that in the moment. A lot of people were saying that in the moment. But there were people at the time who were saying, maybe this is too big.
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