Rationalizing sending money to Africa while people in North Carolina are hurting

 David Strom:

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Having worked in government and around politicians, I can assure you that from the perspective of the bureaucratically minded, the dissociation between spending in one area and that of another is indeed totally disconnected. People in government think in terms of bureaucratic fiefdoms, and the budget of one fiefdom is in a different universe than that of any other. 

Right-leaning accounts and some Republican members of Congress expressed outrage that Biden was giving money to Africans while many in the southeastern U.S. are still struggling to recover from Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

"What about the Americans affected by recent Hurricanes?" conservative commentator Benny Johnson asked on Instagram. "North Carolina would like a word," U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., wrote on X.

Former U.N. Ambassador and Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley wrote on X: "This is infuriating. After pardoning his son and fleeing to Africa, Biden gives a BILLION of our tax dollars to rebuild homes in Africa when we still have people homeless from the hurricane! Completely tone deaf and insulting.

But the claims ignore how domestic disaster relief and foreign aid are funded. Congress separately determines funding for each through appropriations or supplemental bills. The claims also ignore the $3.1 billion the Federal Emergency Management Agency has spent so far responding to Hurricane Helene, which left a trail of destruction across six states in late September, and Hurricane Milton, which struck Florida in October. 

"Comparisons between foreign aid and domestic disaster funding often reflect a misunderstanding that aid to other countries reduces resources available for domestic disaster survivors," said Francis Torres, associate director of housing at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "In reality, these funds come from different accounts, with Congressional authorizations for foreign assistance being separate from appropriations for disaster relief and recovery programs."

 Stupid people like you and I think that our taxes go to Washington, and policymakers spend it in ways that, at least theoretically, are supposed to best benefit the American people. There are priorities that get evaluated, and the limited resources available are distributed based on sound (or not-so-sound) judgments of how best to meet those priorities. 

How naive! What really happens is that the pie gets divided up into various pots of money determined by political considerations, and each pot of money is treated as independent of all the others. And, as a practical matter, the bureaucrats in charge of any one pot are determined to get as much of the available cash (plus whatever they can from deficit spending) away from the other pots of money. 

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I am reminded of a training session in the Marine Corps where we were engaged in a nighttime compass movement.  A team was maneuvering in the darkness when a couple of Marines got bogged down in a mud pit.  While they obviously needed help getting out and started yelling for help the guy "leading" them responded, "I can't or I will lose my azimuth."  Getting hyperfocused on helping people in Africa while your own people are suffering is an example of not responding to an important problem.  Dementia Joe needs to get out of Africa and get his butt in North Carolina.