White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller: “If you refuse to come back to the office, you’re going to be laid off. Why would federal taxpayers be subsidizing Netflix watching at home?”

On 2/8/2025, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) appeared on CNN and was asked about the Trump Administration’s efforts to close down USAID. During their discussion, host Michael Smerconish asked the Delaware senator if he could justify spending $20 million of taxpayer money on Sesame Street in Iraq. “Is funding Sesame Street (in Iraq) a judicious use of soft power?” Smerconish asked. Instead avoiding the question as one would expect from a Democrat, Coons went ALL IN on defending the indefensible with this insane response. “This isn’t just funding a kids show for children, millions of children in countries like Iraq,” Coons claimed. “It’s a show that helps teach values, helps teach public health …” Spending money on publicly funded television in America is bad enough, but trying to justify its use in a country that has been all-but taken over Iran is another level of bad.

Coons then dismissed the inexcusable outlay as just a drop in the bucket. “It’s pennies on the dollar,” he continued. “The Department of Defense has an annual budget of $850 billion. USAID was spending about $30 billion.” Coons then invoked Joe Biden’s name to continue to defend this ridiculous waste of money and called it “smart power.” “It’s a small proportion of our overall federal spending. And as Joe and I would often say, it’s not just soft power, it’s smart power.”

Flashback: Why should the American taxpayer pay more in “indirect costs” for research grants than private companies, nonprofits, and universities?
I’ve asked this question for years in hearings on Capitol Hill.
Good work by DOGE

https://www.facebook.com/HygoNewsUSA/videos/1320659902407756
Miller: Why taxpayers subsidizing Netflix watching? Dem: USAID only $30B pennies on the dollar