Helping the Third World

 6/5/25 Federalist:

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent a rescission package to Congress on Tuesday, requesting $9.4 billion in funding cuts for various programs. This is the first package of proposed DOGE cuts since Trump was elected on the promise to eradicate waste, fraud, abuse, and excessive government spending. According to the OMB, here’s some of the waste they found.

OMB reported that the rescission bill would cut “$67,000 for testing insect powder nutrition on children in Madagascar.” Details listed for a USAID grant first awarded in 2023 dedicated funds to testing a porridge made from “dried cricket powder.”

The bill would nix $33,000 in funding for the United Nations program “Being LGBTQI+ in the Caribbean,” as well as $643,000 for a similar program in the Western Balkans and $567,000 for one in Uganda. It also proposes a $5 million cut in funding for the Minority Serving Institute, which awards National Nuclear Security Administration grants to “Minority-Serving Institutions,” and would nix $595,400 for “training women in gender equity.”

The bill would also prevent $500,000 from going to an electric bus program in Rwanda. USAID approved a grant to “scal[e] up clean, green, public transportation in Rwanda” in 2023. The package would cut $6 million in funding for “net zero cities” in Mexico, $2.1 million for “climate resilience in Southeast Asia, Latin America, & East Africa,” and $5 million for “green transportation and logistics” in Eurasia.

The package would remove $4 million in funding for “legume systems research” — which was apparently not intended for increased agricultural productivity in the U.S., but for improving bean production in Guatemala and Honduras. The bill also includes a $3 million cut to funding for a Sesame Street program for children in the Middle East. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, once quipped, “USAID asked, ‘Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?’ and ended up in Iraq.”...

The OMB’s suggested cuts would save taxpayers $833,000 in funding that would have gone to “transgender people, sex workers and their clients, and sexual networks” in Nepal, while slashing $5.1 million allocated for “resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, intersex, and queer global movements.”  

If DOGE were impoverishing the Third World, I might have some sympathy for concerns about this.   Some of this is really just subsidies to make LGBTWTF groups in America happy.