View From The Porch

Once upon a time Nigeria was the center of internet scams, as any fan of the old 419eater site will remember. These days it's centered in Southeast Asia. Most of those bogus followers sliding into your DMs are essentially slave labor.

Over the past five years, dozens of “scam compounds” have been constructed in Southeast Asia, particularly within Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. Run by organized crime groups, which often have links to Chinese nationals, more than 200,000 people from 100-plus countries have been trafficked into the compounds—often under the pretense of getting a legitimate job. These people are often held captive, beaten and tortured, and forced to work long shifts running online scams targeting people around the world, including in the United States. While the compounds engage in a range of fraudulent activity, so-called pig butchering scams have been the predominant focus, with global losses estimated at $75 billion or more.

The State Department has been spending quite a bit of money fighting that, including supporting numerous NGOs that are helping trafficking victims get to freedom and escape the gangs that imprisoned them. A lot of this money was funneled through... you guessed it ...USAID.

Another victim of this "haircut with a chainsaw" budget trimming? U.S. farmers, who sold tons of food to agencies that distributed it via USAID.

Now U.S. businesses that sold goods and services to USAID are in limbo. That includes American farms, which supply about 41 percent of the food aid that the agency, working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sends around the world each year, according to a 2021 report by the Congressional Research Service. In 2020, the U.S. government bought $2.1 billion in food aid from American farmers.

Purchases and shipments of U.S. food aid worth over $340 million — including rice, wheat and soybeans — have been paused during Trump’s foreign-aid freeze, according to officials and an email obtained by The Post. That has left hundreds of tons of American-grown wheat stranded in Houston alone, Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, said Tuesday.

Also whacked? Clinical trials of a vaccine for HIV that could potentially save millions of lives.