By David Hoffman
Arlington, VA (The Hollywood Times) 2/22/25 – What follows — alas — is the merest fraction of the deepening tragedy within and beyond the Trump administration actions of the Musk-Rubio Regime with their sudden and savage freeze on US foreign aid — as provided worldwide through USAID, the State Department partner Agency for International Development signed into law originally by President John F. Kennedy.
And with the freeze, swiftly following inexorably in its brutal wake: mass furloughs and then shocking firings of thousands of federal workers and contractors. This toll is so grim that it brings to mind the dark vision of the English poet John Donne — “ask not for whom the (funeral) bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
Just as also in the eponymous Ernest Hemingway novel about the human sacrifices during the Spanish civil war, the toll is now everywhere everyone everything every day. And it tolls for all of us.
It even reminds some of us of one of the old jokes about the Republicans (in my hopeful retelling) who formed a firing squad, but did so in a circle, and then shouted aloud in unison, Ready! Fire! Aim! (From their mouths inshallah to the gods’ ears.)
Just the Facts indeed! Just as perhaps also, much earlier, in fact, in the time of the 1854 novel by Charles Dickens. “Hard Times” was his brilliantly coruscating takedown of Victorian Era Big Business versus undervalued workers and their nascent struggling unions. “Nothing but the (hard) Facts!” the Dickens’ villainous school superintendent Gradgrind declared about what students ought rightly to learn in schools. (Dickens himself emphatically disagreed.)
Just so, the FA&NS subcommittee must perforce honestly report just how BAD things are in our own overseas and national security frame of reference, including on the State Department and USAID home front among one-time federal employees and contractors.
Just the facts — that’s what TVs Joe Friday famously asked in Dragnet.
Here are the lamentable facts. They’re horrendous, awful and horrible, in the revengeful retributive raid by President Trump and his iniquitous co -conspirators Musk, Vance and Rubio, launched by this troublesome trio of bad guys earlier in the new Trump 2.0 Era against USAID and its very raison d’etre: its top officials, workers, contractors and aid recipients worldwide.
These hard-edged facts are stunning in their wicked intent. To shock us silly. To “awe” us into weak-willed submission. But of course, it is well assured already to generate exactly the very opposite effect. To stir us instead to a concerted rising BLUE tide of effective action. Just like here, in our upcoming actions with the Women’s National Democratic Club — and the return of Winning Wednesday events helmed by our Get Out the Vote partners led so ably by Melissa and Michelle, of course working closely with Kathy Hochman our PPC chair.
Finally, let’s turn away from the truly Hard Times big picture of the “just the facts” of what’s happening everywhere now in the merciless carving up of USAID and the attempt to throttle its idealistic mission of our government since JFK. There’s also the human toll which is immediate and immense. It’s saturated in the softer side of sadness perhaps best captured in a granular way in a recent Washington Post headline: “Fear, pain, hunger for millions, as aid dries up.”
Of course, in Trump Redux Land that same headline is cheered as great gleeful good news. Their 2025 plan for retribution is on target — like malicious clockwork. Bullseye.
Specifically, the Post reporters depict the drastic deleterious details of the severed services when the Trumpian axe fell without notice on victims near and far, in the immediate wake inaugurated in calculated cold blood during the fearsome First Hundred Days of the current disruptive unpleasantness. Wielding the awful Oval Office power-without-principle of the immediate Republican grip upon federal government authority — based upon their occupation of the trifecta of government — they band together to revoke all the progress from FDR through the Great Society to Obama and Biden. They use a massive meataxe of destruction aimed directly at the heart of basic government institutions heartlessly swung by the likes of DOGE-crazed semi-fascist Elon Musk, he who cackles aloud and gives neo-Nazi salutes now virtually as co-President of the United States of America.
The Washington Post dispatch is filed from Nairobi Kenya. It reveals in human details the “immediate fallout in the most desperate places”:
“Soup kitchens can no longer feed the hungry. First responders are unable to reach the dead and wounded. Mothers and fathers search in vain for the medicines” urgently needed to keep their children alive. Stark reports from the front lines of Hell.
“Across Africa, in bombed-out Sudanese cities, Kenyan clinics and Mauritanian refugee camps, the policies of the Trump administration are already having profound consequences for some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”
Just one snapshot. One day in the life of a catastrophe.
“The president’s decision to cancel or suspend billions of dollars’ worth of foreign aid, followed by ill-defined exceptions” deepen the humanitarian crisis and “put an untold number of lives at risk, according to frontline aid workers and civilians who rely on American- funded programs.”
A further Washington Post front line report only a few days later chronicled the devastation in this headline: “Trump team unmoved as federal workers, aid workers, and recipients stagger.”
In the body of the Post article: “Federal and nonprofit employees across Washington are reeling, some prepared to be jobless as President Trump takes an axe to their agencies…. The Trump administration’s response has roughly amounted to SO WHAT?”
(The foreign affairs and national security subcommittee chair is personally acquainted with a specific severe immediate example, one headquartered in Northampton Massachusetts, of the drastic human toll of the cutoff of USAID contractors. Simply of course one of hundreds of other examples of the foreign aid funding freeze.)
In conclusion there’s this, also reported in the Washington Post and detailing the upending of the lives of those workers and contractors whose lives have been so cruelly turned upside down by the facts of these hard times.
“The Trump administration has dismantled (USAID) teams, fired or placed top officials on leave and threatened layoffs” with merely a temporary pause to the fall of the blade of the executioner’s sharpened axe currently staying that axe due to a temporary restraining order issued by a federal court judge.
A former long time USAID contractor: “I thought I would stay … for a long time. Overnight, my field has been decimated.”
Her spouse’s salary won’t cover their mortgage, childcare, and food.
But also, she grieves for the people she was serving around the globe. “Babies are going to die,” she declares.
Another federal contractor, in an entry-level position, was first furloughed then fired the next day: “I don’t know where to turn.”
Another contractor with over a decade on the job says simply that she’s in “survival mode.” She worries frantically that she won’t be able to access continued medical attention she needs as a cancer survivor. And she calls out the mendacious Trump administration for what she sees as its spreading rank falsehoods about US foreign aid. “We work with the most vulnerable people in the world — women, youth, people in disaster-stricken communities, those with disabilities …. Getting rid of our work diminishes the American brand of generosity. That has dire consequences.”
These are feelings yes. They are also facts. Facts writ both large and small. Not in 1854, in Charles Dickens day. But the human wreckage left behind by the Trumpian wrecking ball swinging wildly in all directions, aiming at everything and everyone in our own Hard Times in 2025. Facts that can’t be denied. Only opposed.
The Foreign Affairs and National Security subcommittee urges a militant resolve to stand tall for what President Kennedy in 1961 warned us would become a “long twilight struggle” and the English poet Matthew Arnold once said would be waged on “a darkling plain.” All too true. But stay tuned. And also, stand up. And get ready. The action agenda here at the WNDC is just beginning.
Working together, we can each help to lead the way to higher ground. Spring is just around the corner now. Yes, look around. The times they indeed are a ‘changing. And yes, in the moving prophecy of the old tried and true Civil Rights anthem, we shall overcome.