The extent of the budget cuts – and their locations – reflect the origins of Donald Trump in the business world, exclusively in the business world – and with no apparent capacity for thinking non-private sector parts of the world should operate in any other manner than how the private sector operates. Jack Goldsmith does Lawfare‘s preliminary analysis of the State Department’s apparent gutting:
The State Department runs U.S. diplomacy and oversees the operation of U.S. international agreements. The Trump administration is trying to gut State Department capacity across the board. This is evident in its proposal to cut sharply the State Department and USAID budgets, in its failure to nominate (much less get confirmed) anyone yet for senior Department posts other than Secretary of State Tillerson, in the general slowdown of State Department operations, in Tillerson’s very low-key tenure thus far, and in its proposal to kill a number of State Department initiatives and funds, including the Global Climate Change, the Green and Strategic Climate Funds, the Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund, and the East-West Center. It is unclear at this point precisely how a reduction of State Department capacity will impact U.S. international law commitments and U.S. participation and influence in international institutions. But Tillerson wrote to State Department employees yesterday, the budget cuts are “an unmistakable restatement of the needs the country faces and the priorities we must establish.”
One result will be a lessening of oversight of corporations across the globe – no doubt viewed by folks who think the private sector is the be-all, end-all, and that the libertarian dream that free enterprise is entirely self-correcting, but for those not sharing in the dream – and who’ve had to clean up after the private sector’s excesses – a nightmare.
Fortunately, when the these folks leave office, what I might call “true conservatives” will have a template on how to return to shepherding the private sector along. True conservatives are folks that liberals can get along with – not the current radical right circus show.
But for the moment, Trump will see the restraints of government to be unnecessary – because his God is money, now isn’t it?
