Reforming the National Security State
26th February 2025
To prevent national security failures and mitigate them when they occur, the U.S. has built a national security state unlike anything humanity has ever seen. The U.S. government has a network of security intelligence and operations agencies that spans the world, working through a web of domestic and foreign governmental, nonprofit, and corporate institutions.
We outsiders think this network runs through the CIA. Yet as we are learning, thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), that is only partly true. In 2023, while the Intelligence Community, including the CIA, was appropriated $71.7 billion dollars, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an “independent” but supposedly State Department-guided agency, received about $40 billion. While USAID has the word “International” in its name, it has spent a lot of money not only spreading atheism in Nepal but also on woke dogma and censorship at home.
As true Communist believers can now barely be found outside of U.S. educational institutions, USAID and their web of partners have moved on to new missions. The most important of these is “countering threats to democracy,” especially “countering domestic extremism.” To those ends, every U.S. agency has been weaponized, and law has served as a shield for official excess as much as it has been used as a weapon against genuine bad actors outside of government.