“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” reads the very first sentence of Article II of the Constitution. “A” is singular. There is a President of the United States. He has the executive power. The federal bureaucracy operates under the President. Congress has, in some cases, established executive departments that the President cannot get rid of due to their statutory origin. Congress has granted some executive powers that the President cannot get rid of due to their statutory origins. But everyone in the executive branch serves at the pleasure of the President and, with few limits, he gets to direct the executive branch. //

rump is, they claim, engaged in a coup against the American administrative state.

One can hardly launch a coup against oneself. The executive power is vested in a single President, not an administrative state. Mr. Trump is retrieving powers long ago distributed to unelected bureaucrats who have used that power to advance progressive goals even when progressives do not hold power. //

Contrary to some Trump supporters’ claims, USAID did not spend $50 million on condoms for Gaza. It was $45 million and included “sexual and other reproductive health care” for Gaza, not just condoms. There was, separately, $10 million for condoms in the Gaza Province of Mozambique, in Africa. USAID also spent $2 million on healthcare for transgender youth in Guatemala; $45 million for DEI scholarships in Burma; $520 million for leftwing ESG investments in Africa; and $45 million to promote social justice and democracy based on the theories of an Italian Marxist professor. The money flows through and subsidizes various leftwing NGOs. Virtually one hundred percent of USAID’s top outside contractors, recipients of billions of dollars, donate to the Democratic Party. Tim Meisburger, a former USAID employee, discovered that “Of the top 17 grantees and partners of USAID’s Office of Democracy, Human Rights and Governance, 14 saw 100 percent of their political donations during the 2019–2020 election cycle directed to Democratic Party causes with only one (the International Republican Institute) under 90 percent.”

Therein lies the reason Republicans now wish to wind down USAID and Democrats wish to preserve it. The organization is not just a clearing house for aid from the United States to the developing world but both a boundary-breaking vanguard of progressive funding abroad and a pass-through source of Democratic Party donations domestically.

The State Department can run PEPFAR and other programs. USAID is not a necessary entity.