Donald Trump hasn’t even been in office for a month, and already, his administration is dismantling key agencies of the federal government, including USAID. Much of this work is being done by shadow president Elon Musk, whose so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been wreaking havoc on key systems at the Treasury, the Department of Education, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
If DOGE really plans on cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget, there’s one place progressives say he can start: the Pentagon’s whopping $850 billion budget.
“If you’re going to say that you’re going to deal with government waste and you’re not going to be dealing with the Pentagon, you’re just one big hypocrite,” Ben Cohen, progressive activist and co-founder of the ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s, tells Mehdi.
“If the Pentagon were a publicly held company, the executives would be in jail today,” Cohen says.
For Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist who served in Trump’s first-term State Department, DOGE’s efforts to destroy USAID are a big concern.
“I’m all for reforms, but you would be naive not to recognize the miracle work they do each and every day around the world,” Bartlett says.
Cohen points out that defunding USAID not only takes food out of the mouths of people who are starving; it results in “essentially killing newborn babies by getting rid of HIV/AIDS treatment for their moms.”
In recent days, Trump has touted his plan to “take over” Gaza and said in a Fox interview that Palestinians won’t have the right to return to the territory. It’s a move Bartlett says “is more than problematic.”
“For a lasting peace to ever be a notion in this world, the Palestinians need to have sovereignty,” Bartlett tells Mehdi. “They need to have their homeland returned to them.”
If you are a paid subscriber, you can watch the full panel discussion with Ben Cohen and Matthew Bartlett above to hear Mehdi question the latter about why and how he served in Trump’s first administration, and to hear Cohen’s response to whether Trump’s plan for Gaza amounts to ethnic cleansing and why parent company Unilever is trying to suppress Ben & Jerry’s stance on Palestine.
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