Kenya picked up the check. I read the deal Kenya’s president signed on December 4, 2025, and it puts $850 million of Kenya’s own money into Kenya’s own health care, which the left calls cruelty. I call it the first time in sixty years somebody asked the patient to chip in for the doctor.
When Trump froze foreign aid in early 2025, the left came unglued. Children would starve, democracy would collapse, and the planet would wobble off its axis and drift somewhere past Neptune. Worst of all, a taxpayer-funded comic book about an LGBTQ superhero in Lima might never get its sequel.
That comic book was real, by the way. I will come back to it.
By July 1, 2025, USAID had stopped implementing foreign aid. The GAO published the autopsy on September 30 of this year: roughly 6,780 of 7,510 awards terminated, and a workforce that shrank from about 13,600 people in January 2025 to 241 by April 2026. You do not “trim” an agency down to 241 people. You turn off the lights and hand the keys to the State Department.
Then something happened that nobody at MSNBC had on their bingo card. One Latin American country after another went to the polls, and the left kept losing.
I teach physics. When two things happen at the same time, my whole job is figuring out whether one caused the other or whether they are just two strangers standing at the same bus stop. So I did what I make my students do. I pulled the data, read the transcript of Secretary Rubio’s four hours in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on June 3, 2026, sat through a late-night comedy panel making the same argument with a lot more cat jokes, and graded every race one at a time.
— WHAT WE WERE ACTUALLY BUYING
The branding on USAID was genius, I will give them that. The word “aid” is right there in the name. Say “USAID” and most Americans picture a sack of rice with a little flag stitched on it. Ask a question about the spending and you have just declared war on hungry children, so please sit down and stop asking.
In February 2025, the White House put a few line items on the board:
o $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces
o $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia
o $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru
o $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland
I promised my students I would never fudge a lab, so here is the correction before somebody with a leak in the think tank tries to make it for me. Fact-checkers were right that three of those four came out of State Department public-diplomacy money, not USAID. The Colombian opera was $25,000 in federal money plus about $22,000 in matching funds. The Serbia grant was USAID.
Fine. Take the point. Same taxpayer, same habit: Washington paying for one side of a cultural argument inside somebody else’s country, where nobody ever voted for it.
On that late-night panel, one comedian swore the Colombian opera cost $2 million. It cost $47,000. When the other side spends $47,000 of your money on a transgender opera in Bogotá, you do not need to puff up the number. The real one is already embarrassing enough.
The cultural grants were the sideshow, though. A coalition of democracy-promotion groups that openly hates the shutdown published the main event themselves last November: 97% of USAID’s democracy and governance awards were terminated. Across USAID and State, more than 1,600 grants and more than $14 billion in more than 120 countries. Election programs. Media programs. “Civil society” programs. And my personal favorite, programs for “political competition.”
American taxpayers were funding political competition in other people’s countries. I had to put my coffee down when I read that.
Picture a foreign government wiring money to NGOs in Stark County so they can shape who wins your school board race. You would call it election interference, and you would be right. When Biden’s Autopen did the same thing overseas, they called it “soft power,” and the folks who ran it got invited to Davos.
Quinn’s Law #7 says it is different when you are a Democrat, and that the things conservatives get condemned for become résumé enhancements for liberals. I have rarely seen a law confirmed this cleanly outside of a physics lab.
Chairman Mast summed it up at the hearing. While Rubio was rebuilding relationships in Panama, Venezuela, and Cuba, the last administration was busy “funding drag shows in Ecuador and transgender operas in Colombia.” The room laughed. The taxpayers who footed the bill should be doing something a lot louder than laughing.
— WHAT REPLACED IT (SPOILER: NOT NOTHING)
This is where the other side keeps tripping over its own shoelaces. They say Trump “ended foreign aid.” He ended the middleman.
Rubio told the committee that 32 countries had signed health compacts by June, and he explained the difference in plain English. Aid is no longer a pile of dollars handed to an NGO that flies in and imposes its own programs. It goes government to government, and it builds the country’s own health system. His line, which is now written on my whiteboard: these countries “do not want to be perpetual aid recipients.”
By September 11, 2026, the count was 35 countries and roughly $24.2 billion over the compact window. Now the part I want every Democrat on that committee to write on the back of their hand: the partner countries are covering about 39 to 40% of it themselves.
o Kenya: up to $1.6 billion from us, plus $850 million more of Kenya’s own money
o Uganda: up to $1.7 billion from us, plus more than $500 million of Uganda’s own
o Nigeria: covering about 59% of its own package
o Botswana: covering about 78% of its own
HIV, TB, malaria, polio, and maternal health are still funded. What changed is the co-pay, and the health workers move onto the country’s own payroll over time.
Every parent in America already knows this move. You cover the teenager’s first car insurance payment. Then you hand him the bill. The only person in the house who calls that cruelty is the teenager. And, apparently, the entire Democratic side of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Rubio said the old system graded aid by how much money went out the door, and he wants it graded on results. Quinn’s Law #9 says liberals care more about intentions than outcomes. USAID was founded in 1961. Rubio’s own accounting puts its lifetime spending, adjusted for inflation, above $700 billion. Sixty-four years later, plenty of the same countries were still on the list.
If one of my students showed that little progress in sixty-four years, I would not ask the school board for a bigger budget. I would ask what we were teaching.
A science teacher who hides his error bars is just a salesman in a lab coat, so here are the critics’ numbers too. A Lancet modeling paper projected more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030 from the cuts. A Democrat at the hearing claimed more than 500,000 children died last year. Rubio called that figure false.
Both of those are models and extrapolations, and neither one is a body count. In my classroom, a model with no work shown earns partial credit and a note in red ink that says SHOW YOUR WORK. A fair critic should also notice that the compacts put HIV, TB, malaria, and polio money right back on the rails, with the receiving government carrying part of the load.
Some of these compacts have real problems, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Kenya’s deal got dragged into court over health-data sharing, and that fight is still open. A few of the poorest countries signed co-pays their budgets may not be able to cover. Still, “this deal needs work” and “Trump is killing children” are two very different sentences, and only one of them survives a fact-check.
At the same hearing, one congresswoman spent part of her five minutes asking the Secretary of State who won the 2020 election and whether the shoes the President bought him were too big. Rep. Burchett asked out loud whether this was the Foreign Affairs Committee or a circus. Rubio looked down at his own feet like a man checking whether he had wandered into the wrong building. For the record, he said the shoes fit fine. You can lead a person to Congress, but you can’t make them think.
The same Democrats demanded receipts, line by line, on the Venezuelan oil account, which KPMG audits on every single disbursement. Good. I like receipts. Now ask where those receipts were for 7,510 USAID awards. Matthew 23:24: “You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!”
— THE BALLOT BOX SCORECARD
A row of flags is not a lab report, and “right-wing” is not one flavor. So here is every race, graded on its own.
o ECUADOR, April 2025: Daniel Noboa beat the correísta candidate 55.6% to 44.4%. He was already president, so this one is a hold, not a flip. And the ugly part: Ecuador’s homicide rate hit a record 50.9 per 100,000 in 2025, up 31%. If somebody tells you “everything is better now,” they skipped this page.
o BOLIVIA, October 2025: Rodrigo Paz won 54.5% to 45.5% and ended about twenty years of the socialist MAS party. Paz is a centrist. He beat the right-wing candidate in the runoff, and the earthquake was who got knocked out. Bolivia then spent weeks behind union road blockades over austerity, so nobody is throwing a parade yet.
o ARGENTINA, October 2025: Milei was already president. His party took about 41% in the midterms against the Peronists’ 24.5%, enough to protect his veto, and the peso jumped more than 10% the next morning. When he took office in December 2023, monthly inflation was 25.5%. By July 2026 it was 2.1%. Plenty of Argentines are still poor and still protesting, and they handed him the veto pen anyway.
o HONDURAS, November 2025: Trump-backed Nasry Asfura beat Salvador Nasralla by less than a point, 40.27% to 39.53%, while the leftist LIBRE party finished a distant third. The losers cried fraud. The result held.
o CHILE, December 2025: José Antonio Kast won 58.6% to 41.4%, the cleanest right-wing win on my list and the hardest-right president Chile has elected in decades. His approval dropped 14 points this spring during a fuel-price fight. Big win, rough first semester.
o COSTA RICA, February 2026: Laura Fernández, hand-picked successor to the outgoing right-populist president, won outright with about 48.5%. Nobody had skipped a runoff there since 2010. Continuation, not a flip.
o PERU, June 2026: Keiko Fujimori won by 49,641 votes out of more than 18 million, on her fourth try. That margin is thinner than a substitute teacher’s patience at 2:45 on a Friday. She ran on order, in a country where extortion is up about fivefold in five years.
o COLOMBIA, June 2026: Abelardo de la Espriella beat the left’s candidate, Iván Cepeda, 49.66% to 48.70%, with Trump’s endorsement. The outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, is a former M-19 guerrilla.
What’s next? Colombia swapping out a former guerrilla for a law-and-order lawyer who wants closer ties with Washington… oh, wait. I’m being told they already did that.
o BRAZIL, October 4, 2026: First round only, so I am not calling it. The polls going in had Lula slightly ahead. The count put Flávio Bolsonaro up about two points, 47.03% to 45.16%, or 56,104,503 votes to 53,879,538. Down the ballot, the right cleaned house. Michelle Bolsonaro was the most-voted senator in the Federal District, and Carlos Bolsonaro won a Senate seat in Santa Catarina. Jair Renan Bolsonaro and Jair’s brother Renato won seats in the lower house. Bolsonaro’s party now holds 28 of the 81 Senate seats. The runoff is October 25, and that one is the final exam.
Some context, because the press has spent four years telling you which of these two men is the threat to democracy. Lula was convicted in 2017 on corruption and money-laundering charges from the Car Wash cases and sentenced to nine years and six months. He sat in prison for 580 days, from April 2018 to November 2019. In March 2021, a Supreme Court justice annulled those convictions because the Curitiba court lacked jurisdiction. That is a ruling about which courthouse heard the case. It is not a finding that he was innocent. Jair Bolsonaro, meanwhile, is barred from office until 2030 and is serving a 27-year, 3-month sentence in the coup-plot case, under house arrest. One man’s convictions were wiped on a technicality. The other’s family just swept the ballot. Brazilian voters can read a scoreboard.
Final tally. In eight decided races, the left’s candidate lost all eight. Four were genuine flips away from a sitting left government: Bolivia, Honduras, Chile, and Colombia. Peru flipped by a hair. Ecuador, Argentina, and Costa Rica confirmed a turn that was already underway. Brazil is still pending.
— NOW FOR THE SCIENCE TEACHER PART
If a student handed me a paper claiming “USAID closed, therefore Chile elected Kast,” I would hand it back bleeding red ink. That is post hoc ergo propter hoc, which is Latin for “after this, therefore because of this.” The rooster crows before sunrise. He did not make the sun come up, no matter how proud he looks about it.
Voters told pollsters why they flipped: crime, extortion, corruption, and economies that went nowhere. The Wall Street Journal’s read on Brazil lists the same ingredients: anger over violent street crime, the growing political weight of evangelical Christians, and business and middle-class frustration over taxes and spending. Trump’s endorsements helped in Honduras and Colombia, and those were endorsements made out loud, on camera, not a secret grant pipeline. One researcher put it plainly. Latin American voters punish whoever holds office when crime rises and the economy stalls. I agree with him. I can also still do arithmetic.
So here is the claim I will actually defend.
For decades, American taxpayers paid for one side of the civic argument inside these countries. Media programs, NGOs, “political competition,” election observers. Grants the people living there never voted for. Biden’s Autopen budget asked for $444 million for Colombia alone in fiscal 2024. Even Ben Shapiro, who is not exactly shy about this subject, said there is some evidence the money mattered in close elections but not total evidence. That is the honest place to stand. Chris Rufo made the point on that late-night panel: the money built a ground game with more staff and more cash than the other side could match, and when a government stopped cooperating, the money shifted to NGOs that could brand the opposition as human-rights abusers.
That tap is closed. The candidates who won did not need those grants. Nobody has measured whether the closed tap changed a single vote, but the closed tap itself is measured, down to the last of 7,510 awards. And the replacement aid now carries a message that sounds a lot like what the winners campaigned on: stand up, carry some of your own weight, and quit waiting on Washington.
Correlation is not causation. Still, when voters in eight countries keep picking the candidate who talks like a bill collector over the one who talks like a grant writer, that is a pretty loud hint about what they wanted all along. It was not a federally funded opera.
Rufo also said something that should make every taxpayer sit up straight. He said we have a domestic USAID too, the same kind of NGOs, universities, and activist groups running the same software here at home. If you are confused after listening to the people who defend that machine, that is by design; they are muddying the water to make it look deep. I already wrote about what happens when you try to audit them. They sue you. (
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2080723162678067423
) And the word of the day, boys and girls, is still FRAUD. (
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2079987255137939636
)
— THE PLOT TWIST: SOCIALISM IS MOVING NORTH
Right as Latin America checks itself out of socialism rehab, New York City checked in.
Latin Americans have lived the shortages, the price controls, and the inflation. Argentines remember 211% annual inflation. Venezuelans remember everything. Meanwhile, a city full of people who have never stood in a bread line elected a socialist mayor because the brochure had nice fonts. Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side.
It is like watching one cousin finally get a restraining order against a guy, and the very next week your other cousin starts dating him because he “has really interesting ideas about rent.”
I already wrote the lab report on how this experiment ends in New York, because it has been run a hundred times and never once came out differently. (
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2076692440593879352
) Quinn’s Law #1 says liberalism always produces the exact opposite of its stated intent. Socialism needs a marketing department. Capitalism needs a cash register.
A modest proposal, since the left loves its “common sense” ideas: every American gets one free DEI musical every Monday, and the theaters just eat the cost. Kenya pays for Kenya, and Broadway pays for Bogotá. This is not a radical thing. Nobody tell Mamdani, or it will be on a ballot by spring.
And before anybody gets smug about New York, I already showed that by plenty of honest measures we became a socialist country years ago, and nobody voted for that either. (
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2082810783096877403
)
— MEANWHILE, BACK HOME, A SOLDIER IS STILL WAITING
This is the part that is personal for me, so the jokes stop here.
USAID was moving something on the order of $40 billion a year. Over ten years, that is about $400 billion. Hold that number in one hand.
In the other hand, hold the Major Richard Star Act, H.R. 2102. It would stop the federal government from clawing back the retirement pay of combat-wounded, medically retired veterans, men and women whose careers ended because they got blown up for this country. Advocates have priced the narrow fix at about $10 billion over ten years. CBO scored the current bill text closer to $78 billion because it read the eligibility much wider. That gap is a drafting fight, and we should have it out in the open.
Pick either number. Either one fits inside a single year of what USAID used to move.
At that same Rubio hearing, Rep. Sheri Biggs of South Carolina said the USAID savings had already sparked proposals to steer money toward repairing long-term veterans homes. Good. Now finish the sentence. We found $70,000 for a musical in Ireland and $1.5 million for workplace diversity in Serbia, and we are STILL arguing about wounded soldiers.
The discharge petition is H.Res. 1247. If your representative co-sponsored H.R. 2102, call the House switchboard at (202) 225-3121 and ask, politely, why their name is not on the petition yet. Co-sponsoring the bill and then refusing to sign the petition that brings it to the floor is the legislative version of RSVPing to the wedding and skipping the ceremony.
I wrote about why this is personal for me and my daughter (
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2098966443521876075
) and why 218 signatures are only the start (
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2100410972166897910
). If you want the full plan to pay for it, the blueprint is here. (
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2105702363734405427
)
Anybody who wants to defend the old foreign-aid model is welcome to do it in the comments. Start by explaining to me, a medically retired combat medic, why a Serbian HR department ranked ahead of a wounded soldier on the old priority list. I’d grade the answer, but I don’t have a letter below F.
— THE GRADE
Eighteen months after the spigot shut off, the grade is mixed and the pattern is not.
The civil-society grant machine is off. The health aid that is left comes with a bill the partner country has to sign. Ecuador is bleeding, Kast is wobbling, Bolivia is blockaded, and Milei still has protesters at the door, so anyone telling you “everything got better” needs to sit back down and finish the reading. From the Andes to the isthmus, though, voters keep firing the incumbent left and hiring the candidate who talks about order, work, and paying your own bills. They said crime and corruption drove them. Nobody, anywhere, said they voted that way because they missed the opera.
A science teacher does not get to upgrade a hint into a proof. He does get to grade the hint. This one gets a B-plus, and the A is sitting in Brazil waiting on October 25.
But what do I know, I am only a science teacher who read the GAO report, the hearing transcript, and nine sets of election returns before I hit post.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
—
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