(DCNF)—Panelists on “Morning Joe” expressed concerns Monday morning that Democrats in Congress have failed to mount a “cohesive response” to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and State Department audit of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) foreign funds, which have previously funneled millions of taxpayer funds into promoting far-left social causes abroad.
Representatives from DOGE and the State Department gained access to the USAID headquarters Friday night to review the agency’s spending in order to align it with U.S. foreign policy after a brief standoff with employees of the agency, ABC News reported. MSNBC host Ali Vitali and panelist Jonathan Lemire both questioned if “the other branch of government” would counter Elon Musk’s effort to shut down the $40 billion government agency.
“So, Ali, the question is, is the other branch of government going to do anything?” Lemire asked. “Elon Musk said over the weekend, well — I’m paraphrasing here — but more or less said, it’s easy to get work done when your opponents take the weekend off. And we have seen, first of all, a lack of cohesive response of Democrats, who seem a little slow here on most issues, but also Republicans who do have majorities, who do have the ability to say, look, actually, these programs have been in place for decades,” Lemire continued. “They’ve had bipartisan support. There are even national security reasons to keep them going. But yet so far, they seem completely muted and afraid to stand up to [President Donald] Trump and Musk. Is there any way that changes?”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the decision to shutter the agency, claiming that his concerns about its oversight began when he was in Congress and noting that the agency is “completely unresponsive” and “not functioning” as intended.
“The attitude that USAID has adopted over the years is ‘no, we are independent of the national interests, we fund programs irrespective of whether it is aligned or not aligned with the foreign policy,” Rubio told reporters while in El Salvador on Monday, adding that the agency had been “completely uncooperative” with efforts to oversee spending.
“We’re spending taxpayer money here, these are not donor dollars, these are taxpayer dollars,” Rubio added.
Responding to Lemire, Vitali said, “Yeah. I mean, we started the program talking about how when power is given, people don’t just willfully give it back. And yet we’re watching in Congress the very central power of the purse that Congress has had forever. They’re now seemingly OK, especially the majority party, with giving it over to the White House and the Trump Administration on this.”
“Look no further than the fact that Elon Musk went on X overnight, did a Spaces held court online. And with him was Senator Joni Ernst, who was effectively backing him up when he said that he wanted to get rid of USAID. She made the point that she said we want to help starving children effectively in other countries, but that they’re afraid the money is not going where it’s supposed to be going,” Vitali added.
“The way that USAID does its work is it funds non-governmental organizations that then funnel the money where it needs to go into any of the number of these countries that USAID helps,” Vitali continued. “What Joe is talking about here is the hearts and minds approach to national security. And so, yes, Democrats have been flat footed in some cases or aggressive in others in pushing back against this administration. But when you’re in the minority, it’s hard to affect change, especially if no one in the majority party is willing to cross party lines and stand with you.”
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa said during a Sunday night discussion with Musk on X that USAID officials threatened her after she sought information on humanitarian aid to Ukraine as part of Congressional oversight. Ernst’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation about the threats.
Elon Musk on threats made by USAID to U.S. Senator Joni Ernst: “It’s outrageous that a taxpayer-funded organization would threaten a U.S. Senator who is simply trying to figure out if American taxpayer money is being spent correctly and not fraudulently”
— America (@america) February 3, 2025
“This began years ago, when we were trying to figure out what they were doing with our American taxpayer dollars that were going to support humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. So, I wanted to know exactly how those dollars were being spent. But we got all kinds of threats from USAID because I was trying to exercise my oversight capacity in Congress,” Ernst told Musk. In a 2023 post on X, Ernst said USAID handed billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine to the United Nations.
One of the projects frozen by Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order mandating a review of foreign aid was a $50 million grant to Gaza for condoms, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a Jan. 29 briefing.
USAID also provided funding for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an outlet whose reporting on former Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City was cited by then-Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman in the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona wrote USAID and three other agencies in December 2023, seeking information on funding sent to EcoHealth Alliance, which reportedly was involved in financing gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. USAID provided at least $14 million to EcoHealth Alliance, according to Gosar.
USAID additionally spent $45 million on grants to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) scholarships in Burma and $21 million for renewable electricity in Lebanon, the Washington Times reported.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
