Comment by lesuorac
8 days ago
Ignoring the fact you left off the rest of the description (as pointed out by another commenter) which also means that like $2 could go towards that purpose and $1,999,998 to something else (also $2M hasn't been spent; just $350,000 per your own link ...).
The quote you have starts of with "Activity to strengthen" which is uh incredibly vague. Like if you provide say _leadership training_ that sounds like an activity that could strengthen an organization as well as create individuals that could organize to promote Democratic values in their home country and promote good will towards the US for helping them out (unlike say what goes on in Iran). So there's so far no evidence it's surgery or pills.
Even if it is strictly gender-affirming care that does not mean it's surgery and pills. Gender affirming care is more vague than that [1].
And then finally, even if somehow none of the funds are for "ADVOCATE FOR IMPROVED QUALITY AND ACCESS TO SERVICES, AND PROVIDE ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OPPORTUNITIES." (the part you left off) and the funds for "ACTIVITY TO STRENGTHEN TRANS-LED ORGANIZATIONS TO DELIVER GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE" are strictly for surgeries; there appears to be ~0.95% of the US identifying as transgender so spending 0.0000002% of the federal budget seems uh fair (or really 0.00000006% of the federal budget because it's over 3 years while the budget is annual).
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Ol' Musk isn't working at Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, or any of his other companies right now. He has the time to ask people and figure out if it's actually sex-changes or something else (it's always something else btw).
[1]: https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-02/gender-affir...
“Advocate for improved quality and access to services”
The “services” here is gender affirming care. What does it mean to “advocate”? Why are my tax dollars being used for this?
Yes it is vague, the vagueness just helps to strengthen the argument that this is probably a waste of taxpayer dollars.
> just $350,000
“ONLY 350k”
Dude 350k is a lot of money, and yeah, by canceling the contract we actually saved the American tax payers the remainder of the money. This is great news and we can use that money towards paying down the national debt or returning it to the hardworking American people.
I want none of my tax dollars to go towards any part of the description.
Your argument seems to be “it’s not very much money”. And you’re not understanding that we the American people do not want any of our tax money being wasted on this. This is why you lost the election, and in the long term you will continue to lose future elections if you don’t change the attitude towards this stuff.
Answer the question honestly, if a politician campaigned on promising to send taxpayer money for gender affirming care in foreign countries, do you think that they would get more or less votes on net because of it?
> so spending 0.0000002% of the federal budget
The only acceptable % of my tax dollars that should go to a foreign nation for trans care is 0%.
I pay a lot of taxes, and the signaling from the left is always that I need to “pay my fair share” and that taxes are so good because they are used to pay for roads and bridges and schools etc.
But when we actually start examining where the dollars are going we get into weird arguments about soft power and gender affirming care in foreign nations. And your arguments for paying our fair share don’t hold up at all anymore because these dollars are not even going to help Americans, this is basically charity for foreign countries. It’s easy to be charitable when you’re spending other people’s money. I bet you are not donating your own personal money to “advocate” for gender affirming care in Guatemala.
> The “services” here is gender affirming care. What does it mean to “advocate”? Why are my tax dollars being used for this?
You should ask Elon Musk since he brought up the program and has the ability to actually ask people on it what it's about.
It should really be telling that the heads of say USAID have been replaced with politically sympathetic individuals and yet they can't surface any memos or etc that are red flags and instead have to rely on portions of headlines?
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> Dude 350k is a lot of money,
If somebody has a severed artery and also a paper cut you need to ignore the paper cut to repair the artery.
There is a significant amount of time being wasted on saving 0.000000004% of the federal budget. There are straight up 4 solutions to balancing the budget and none of this nickel and dimeing will get close (especially after the next round of Trump tax cuts).
1 - Cut Military
2 - Cut Medicaid / Medicare
3 - Cut Social Security
4 - Raise taxes to pre-Reagan levels
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> It’s easy to be charitable when you’re spending other people’s money.
1) Elon doesn't pay anything in taxes [1] so he really should't have a say in how they're spent.
2) Compromise / Pork Barrel [2] is largely how congress works; you get votes on things you want in exchange for things other people want. Reneging on things congress as a group agreed to later on is bad faith.
3) There hasn't been any evidence provided that the program wasn't authorized by congress or isn't achieving any policy goals.
[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel