While most of the country spent Monday trying to make sense of the Congressional Budget Office report that ruthlessly drags Paul Ryan's delusional, facially absurd healthcare bill, the Trump administration, perhaps reluctant to be outdone in the coveted "displaying wanton cruelty to vulnerable people" department, dropped a few more hints about its forthcoming budget proposal. We already knew that the White House would seek to slash State Department funding when it releases its budget on Thursday, but even so, the details about anticipated cuts to foreign aid are gut-wrenching. From Foreign Policy:

State Department staffers have been instructed to seek cuts in excess of 50 percent in U.S. funding for U.N. programs, signaling an unprecedented retreat by President Donald Trump’s administration from international operations that keep the peace, provide vaccines for children, monitor rogue nuclear weapons programs, and promote peace talks from Syria to Yemen, according to three sources.

The report continues:

Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said cuts of this magnitude would create “chaos.”

The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) received $1.5 billion of its $4 billion budget from the United States last year, he said. Cutting the U.S. contribution would “leave a gaping hole that other big donors would struggle to fill.”

“Multiply that across other humanitarian agencies, like the World Food Programme, and you are basically talking about the breakdown of the international humanitarian system as we know it,” he added.

Defunding initiatives that fight famine, provide aid to refugees, and protect children from disease is morally bankrupt, of course, but it's also monumentally stupid. The $10 billion that the United States provides to the UN each year is about one-quarter of one percent of the $3.8 trillion federal budget, and that impossibly thin sliver of spending is not just charity. It helps promote U.S. foreign policy objectives, discourages nuclear proliferation, and helps prevent the growth and development of terrorist organizations abroad. It also stabilizes fragile economies, which creates valuable new potential trade partners. Particularly within the context of federal spending, foreign aid is money very well spent.

If the Trump administration and its run-government-like-a-business ethos were motivated by a sincere desire to eliminate waste or reduce the deficit, there are many smart ways it could go about doing so. (The proposed $54 billion increase in military spending and/or that stupid taxpayer-funded border wall both might be good places to start!) But the White House's myopic obsession with slashing foreign aid—a drop in the proverbial bucket that is the federal budget—demonstrates that it either doesn't know how to make government more efficient, or isn't actually interested in doing so. Instead, President Trump is just acting out his most absurd isolationist, America-first fantasies by cutting things that don't sound like they comport with that worldview, real-life consequences be damned. Even though his analysis is dead wrong, and even his decisions would make the world less stable and less safe, this President simply doesn't want to hear about it.

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