Why is Trump getting rid of NED and USAID

Trump has a simplistic view of geopolitics, and generally considers soft power to be a waste of resources that could otherwise be redirected toward more hard power.
- I kinda believe this one. Occam's razor and all. Doesn't mean he's going to pull out army bases from those countries that we were previously providing aid for.
  I also don't think he realizes these countries need USD to absorb America's surplus. Well he does to some extent, but doesn't realize it's because we give them loans and "aid" in USD that allows them to do this.
  
  Why do those countries need USD to absorb America's surplus what does that even mean?

This has been their plan since PNAC (Project for a New American Century) to secure America's place in a multi polar war as the preeminent bully. They are rolling back the projects of American "soft power" to focus on the military. They knew the days of the unipolar world was limited in the early 2000s so they drafted an entire plan for refocusing the US global hegemony to operate in different conditions. Part of it has always been a controlled contraction of non military spending.
- PNAC was about trying to lay a foundation that would maintain the US's unipolar global hegemony for the whole of the 21st century. I see this as a departure from that and the acknowledgement that a new strategy of empire is needed.
  
  Yes and no, they had contingency. It's primary focus was getting into the middle east as fast as possible to try and secure the unipolar world but even in 2003 they knew that China was going to be a threat to imperial interests and they would have to contend for the power. If you read through the white papers this really isn't a departure though, they wanted to get rid on all non military spending and use the military to run the empire instead of the business empire of the past. Considering they want to wrap up Ukraine as fast as possible and close the Russian front so they can focus on Taiwan and China is a last gasp of the PNAC plan to prevent true multipolarism from starting. Listen to their language about BRICs to get a hint of their plans, they want to nip it in the blood. It is just that they're too late.

the theory that i have heard is that this is a result of a long intelligence community debate. there has been a marked shift away from field work and other direct interventions. instead they have promoted desk work and funding friendly foreign NGOs (i.e. "soft power"). this is them saying that those more recently emphasized efforts have been not performing as well and shifting back toward a more direct involvement in a smaller number if areas. this is a consolidation of the collapsing us empire by prioritizing areas with more direct involvement where they think they can beat back BRICS and other foreign power blocks by letting go of areas that they think they won't be able to compete in.

The liberal explanation is that Trump is a big dumb dumb and doesn't understand the role of those orgs in US hegemony.
The fact that relatively few institutional voices from the US state apparatus are stepping out to denounce this move, collectively running out waving their arms for the bull to stop running around the china shop, if it was really done out of sheer ignorance, shows that there is likely more of an internal power struggle at play rather than some "comrade Trump" working against US empire.
There's still no real indication whether Trump will actually follow through on any of this. Regardless, however, one thing that should be noted is the reality is that those orgs are essentially the sinecure of the US institutional elite, where their spawnlings that are too incompetent even for some Wall Street board seat or STEM lord Silicon Valley company management are fobbed off to. Those like Anderson Cooper and the like. If you get a liberal arts major in the wasteland of the American job market nowadays, you're likely in for a struggle as a normal individual. If you get a liberal arts major as a failson/faildaughter of some US institutional elite, you get a job at USAID/NED and the Radio Free Whatevers. These "non-partisan" NGO careerist positions were their golden parachute and they had all largely swung in the Democratic camp over the years as they had alienated Republicans with objectives like rainbow imperialism.
There was this big news story a while back about the "Chaguan" column for the Economist (a cushy one-man job journalist position in Beijing that also funded travelling around China writing anti-China propaganda hitpieces by doing cherry-picked interviews) being shut down. Amidst all the Economist's whining about the "hostile journalism environment," it inadvertantly revealed that this "journalist" was the son of a MI6 director, John Rennie.. These are the kind of places that the failsons of Western institutional elite drift into and Trump's actions against them is essentially a form of blackmail to cow them and attempt to make them fall in line. The important thing to note is that new institutions more closely aligned with the MAGA Republican flavor of US imperialism will inevitably be created, whether wholesale or more closely under the government's leash within the State Department, and the intent of these purges is enforce a reset so that anyone who wants to regain their old spots would need to pay fealty to the new order of the day.
- those orgs are essentially the sinecure of the US institutional elite, where their spawnlings that are too incompetent even for some Wall Street board seat or STEM lord Silicon Valley company management are fobbed off to.
  These “non-partisan” NGO careerist positions were their golden parachute
  This is like saying U.S. domestic media jobs are just golden parachute make-work for elite failsons. Some jobs in that industry fit the bill, but the industry serves a real purpose outside of that and a ton of its workers don't fit into the "elite failson golden parachute" box.
  What's happening is (1) true believers in "cut everything but the military" are in power, (2) they're trying more blanket cuts than we've seen before because they're seeing what they can get away with and they don't know enough to do it more selectively, and (3) they don't care if it causes problems because it won't cause any meaningful problems for them.
  
  I don't see the difference and splitting the hair seems irrelevant. The US military isn't just an imperialist fascist force, it's also a jobs program for millions of Americans. It's dialectical to acknowledge all relevant facets and the existence of those orgs as a institutional golden parachute is one of them. I don't care if someone weighs it as "just that" or "primary" or "secondary" or "whatever" it's simply a crucial element that should be highlighted.
  Yes, the Reddit Democrat "analysis" or the Hasanabi interpretation of this as just "evil dumb racists" doing "evil dumb racist" things isn't necessarily wrong. There's no value in framing this under that sole paradigm, however.

My theory is that the oligarchs have recognized that traditional media platforms and thinktanks, which have been the main recipients of NED/USAID, are starting to become obsolete and also have lost credibility from the public. There is also the rise of cryptocurrencies as a way to obscure transactions and anonymously transfer funds.
I think moving forward they're going to shift their strategy to funding influencers in social media platforms through means like cryptocurrency, this also makes it easier to increase funding just look at all the cryptocurrency scams, dumbasses throw their money at these scams consistently.
- I do wonder what the economics of these crypto scams are like. Like it's not poor working class people getting scammed, but wealthier middle classes (landlords?) who then, to compensate for losing money, increase their rents/squeeze the working class for more value.
  
  In the imperial core i think it covers all backgrounds, especially middle class guys with white collar jobs, in the global south is mostly petit bourgeois and bourgeois the ones that get scammed by these since you need to be very americanized to know about that sphere.

Another theory I've heard is that this is a strategic shift away from global hegemony, which is no longer sustainable, to hemispheric hegemony. Rather than spreading soft power all around the world, the empire is going to consolidate its hard power in the Americas through more direct control and maybe even annexation.
- I doubt this because there have been no statements (either publicly or from some think tank) to support it. Big strategic aims like this (e.g., containment during the Cold War) usually have some vocal support even if we're nominally being cagey about it, or even denying it.
  It's bad to underestimate an opponent, but it's also bad to conclude that even their mistakes must be part of some plan. It's entirely believable to me that a group as dumb as Trump, Musk, and some crypto kids is capable of making huge mistakes.
  
  It's entirely possible they're just stupid - certainly annexing Canada and Greenland and Panama and shit is dumb af
  But if there's a logic to this, I think it's hemispheric.

I still can’t tell if the Trump admin have any positive policy positions (that is actually wanting something) as opposed to their negative policy position of undoing ‘liberal policy’ without any consideration of the consequences because lib policy is inherently harmful and any apparent benefit is actually just harm the Trump folks don’t know how to describe yet.
Bush’s war on terror was the attempt to convert Cold War soft power intro a traditional hard power empire and it was a complete catastrophe. That’s why all the former Bush guys, Bolton and his allies., were so intent on preventing Trump from doing this. Obama and co made it their mission to intensify soft power because that’s the best way to meet americas goals. I’m not convinced this isn’t just reactionaries undoing everything the non-white president did. There certainly isn’t a thoughtful reason to be doing this. Moving towards hard power is simply an objectively wrong move and this is doubly true from the perspective of an American populace that has no interest in joining the military let alone fighting and dying.
So it’s an ideological consideration certainly, combined with Elon having some issues with both agencies negatively impacting his businesses—for example, payments received by Elon’s starlink company were being investigated by USAID.
- Moving towards hard power is simply an objectively wrong move and this is doubly true from the perspective of an American populace that has no interest in joining the military let alone fighting and dying.
  A good point and especially within what I hear is a recruiting crisis with no end in sight for the US military.

Because his racist hillbilly supporters have been led to believe 10 to 15% of the country's budget is spend on poor not-white-enough freeloaders in other countries. It's a populist move.
- I don’t think that is a sufficient reason for it, but a fringe benefit of it and cover story for it.
- Dullard, you're doing a great job, demonstrating the need to consider foreign policy and political economy as the main factor, beyond mere culture wars and all that.
  
  I'm well aware of the controversial nature of USAID, and I don't deny that it is possibly desirable to wind it down for moral reasons - although not like that, obviously.
  But I guarantee you Trump isn't intelligent enough to consider that. He's just wrecking it as visibly as possible to please his NASCAR-loving fan base.
  Musk on the other hand probably has other motives.