Ranger from the North

Ed Morrissey:

Those grants and subsidies that truly go to life-saving activities not covered by statute could be brought to Congress. Elected representatives and senators could then look at those activities and fund them through either a budget resolution or a separate statute. In fact, that's how a democracy-based constitutional republic is supposed to work. Self-governance means decisions that send $50 billion annually should be made by people with direct accountability to voters, not by unelected and sinecured bureaucrats issued [sic] blank checks who believe that the officers elected by the people have no control over those decisions -- in either the legislative or executive branches.

So Atwood and Democrats in the House and Senate are free to introduce bills in both chambers to specifically authorize grants to specific organizations. That would require them to defend such spending, as well as the recipients of those grants. It would also allow all of us to know where our money goes and the purposes for which it will be used. We won't need a platoon of twenty-something data-scientist geniuses to brute-force a deliberately opaque system to get the kind of transparency that self-governing republics require.

Wanna bet that Democrats wouldn't dare to float a majority of these grants and recipients publicly?

More here:

All of this ignores an obvious point: Congress could restore funding for any worthy efforts at USAID that the administration has terminated. They could earmark those funds in the State Department budget (now that Congress has re-enabled that process) or fund it with direct legislation. There are no legitimate reasons that the funds for worthy projects should have to come out of a slush fund that defeats accountability, both fiscal and political. That is precisely how spending is supposed to function in our constitutional system of self-governance, in fact.

# posted by Ranger @ 8:12 PM