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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Interview with Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski on Russia-Ukraine War; The Fragility of America's Justice System. Interview With Law Professor And Author Rachel Barkow; Interview With Author Marc Dunkelman. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired February 23, 2025 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:30]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you live from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Today on the program, a world shaking reversal in U.S. foreign policy as Europe and Ukraine seem to have become America's new adversaries at the same time as Moscow comes in from the cold.

I'll talk to Poland's foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, an ardent supporter of Ukraine and an equally ardent critic of Vladimir Putin.

Also, Trump's moves at the Department of Justice have exposed a weakness in the U.S. constitutional system. The president controls the prosecutors. So what's the fix? We'll take lessons from other countries that do it other ways.

And well put a GPS fact-check on Elon Musk's claims about all the so- called fraud he says he's found at USAID.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

At the conclusion of talks with the Russian delegation in Saudi Arabia, Mike Waltz, the U.S. National Security adviser, noted that --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE WALTZ, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Only President Trump can do that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Only president Trump could have shifted the global conversation on how to end the Ukraine war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, determined not to be outdone, quickly noted that the first important point he wanted to make was that the only leader in the world who could make this happen is President Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARCO RUBIO, SECRETARY OF STATE: He's the only one in the world that can do that right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Welcome to America's new North Korea-style diplomacy, where our diplomats are more worried about their boss than the adversary.

It's true that Donald Trump has found a lightning fast way to end the war in Ukraine. Surrender. At least when France fell in 1940, it did so in the wake of a German blitzkrieg that swept through the country. Ukraine has actually held back Russian forces for three years now, and despite fighting a much more powerful adversary, even taken some Russian land, and yet, the Trump administration has preemptively conceded most key Russian demands before the formal negotiations have even begun.

No return of all the Ukrainian territory acquired by force. No NATO membership for Ukraine. No American troops on Ukrainian soil. And Trump trashed Zelenskyy, calling him a dictator and saying he better move fast or he is not going to have a country left. It is no wonder that senior Russian officials like former president Dmitry Medvedev seem almost giddy with joy.

What explains Trump's desire to sell out Ukraine and cozy up to Putin? There have been so many theories about Trump and Russia, but I think the real story here is about Trump and Zelenskyy. Donald Trump views almost everything from a personal lens and his own relationship with Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been fraught for many years.

In 2016, Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort was exposed to have been on the payroll of Ukraine's former president Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian politician who fled to safety in Russia in 2014 after national protests against him. Then came the allegations that Russia had interfered in the 2016 elections on Trump's behalf. As a defense to those charges some in Trump's orbit convinced him of a strange conspiracy theory that it was actually Ukrainians pretending to be Russians who were to blame.

Trump seemed convinced by this explanation. In fact, so much so that in his infamous telephone call with President Zelenskyy in July 2019, he asked Zelenskyy for two favors. First, he wanted the server that would show these Ukrainian efforts to interfere in the U.S. elections and frame it on the Russians. And second, he wanted Zelenskyy to launch an investigation into Joe Biden and his son.

The key point here is that Zelenskyy did not give in to Trump's pressure, even though Trump was holding up military aid to Ukraine seemingly as leverage. Essentially, Zelenskyy called Trump's bluff. This must have left Trump outraged. A personal affront to a man with a healthy ego. Trump recently made another ask of Zelenskyy, a truly bizarre one even by Trump's standards.

[10:05:04]

He demanded a 50 percent share of Ukraine's natural resources like oil, gas and minerals in return for American military aid. Zelenskyy rejected this neocolonial demand, but said that some arrangement could be part of a discussion included security guarantees for Ukraine. Still, it was a rejection of a Trump demand.

Lev Parnas, the Ukrainian American who worked with Rudolph Giuliani to pursue Trump's agenda in Ukraine, said to Politico, Trump hates Zelenskyy with passion and Zelenskyy knows it.

I would guess that for Trump, Ukraine is a set of bad memories and Zelenskyy is a foreign leader who has not gotten with the program -- constant flattery and submission to Trump's demands. The result, alas, goes well beyond the personal. It will result in a truly historic surrender of Western interests and values built over decades.

The United States has long been at the forefront of efforts to make it illegitimate to acquire territory by force. After World War II, Washington urged that this idea be at the center of the United Nations charter. At the Nuremberg trials, it required that military aggression be deemed a crime, and it actively supported this principle, sending troops to fight North Korean aggression in 1950 and Iraqi aggression in 1991.

The results are noted in "The Internationalists" by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro. Between 1816 and 1945, there were more than 150 territorial conquests. Since 1945, with the international system of rules and norms the U.S. helped create, territorial conquests have almost completely disappeared, quote-unquote. But thanks to Donald Trump's personal peak, this enduring American achievement is about to be lost.

Go to CNN.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.

Tomorrow marks three years since Russia invaded Ukraine and began Europe's deadliest war since World War II. Peace might be in the offing, at least according to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. But at what cost to Ukraine and Europe?

I want to bring in Poland's foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, whose country is Ukraine's neighbor and one of its strongest allies. He joins me from Washington, D.C., where he met with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday.

Radek Sikorski, welcome to the show. You said after your meeting with Secretary of State Rubio that it was your impression that the United States wanted a lasting peace in Ukraine. Do you mean by that you got assurances that there would be some security guarantees for Ukraine, because, after all, that is what has been the problem, the lasting peace part of it? Russia has invaded in 2014, invaded in 2022 and potentially could invade again.

RADOSLAW SIKORSKI, POLISH FOREIGN MINISTER: Ukraine, remember, already has security guarantees under the Budapest memorandum given back in 1994 I think in return for what was then the world's third largest nuclear stockpile, which the Ukrainians handed over to Russia. Ukraine also has a border treaty with Russia that guaranteed the border between two countries, and three years after the war, after the beginning of the invasion, Ukraine has defended the great bulk of its territory.

The best guarantee for Ukraine is the almost million-man army, which is manning the foxholes and heroically resisting Russian aggression. But yes, if we are to have a durable peace, it has to be one that both sides can live with, above all the victim of aggression.

ZAKARIA: What -- do you understand the United States' strategy right now? President Trump is frankly trashing Zelenskyy, calling him a dictator, saying he was being a very weak negotiator. Doesn't he really need to be at the negotiation table? Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has essentially conceded several of the Russia's demands, saying it's unrealistic to expect that Ukraine will get back all its territory, ruled out NATO membership, ruled out U.S. troops in Ukraine.

And now the United States is thwarting a U.N. resolution, which says that Russian aggression is to blame for this conflict.

[10:10:03]

What do you think is the strategy here?

SIKORSKI: I think every new administration always takes a bit of time to find its feet and to assess the full information from intelligence agencies and so on, and is talking to allies. I was very glad to be able to speak to, first, General Kellogg, then Marco Rubio, also to the National Security adviser, Waltz, and consultations with allies are good things.

But remember, it's Ukraine that decides whether she wants to fight or not. This is -- I was in Munich and you know what happened in Munich in '38? Czechoslovakia was dictated to, but that was because Czechoslovakia wasn't ready to fight alone and didn't have allies. Ukraine is fighting and rather successfully defeated the Russians at sea, for example, and has allies. We in Europe have said that we will continue to support Ukraine come what may.

ZAKARIA: Will Poland back the American alternative to the Ukrainian resolution in the General Assembly? The Ukrainian one squarely says Russian aggression caused this conflict. The United States has resolution essentially deletes that sentence and makes no reference to Russian aggression.

SIKORSKI: We need to call a spade a spade. Three years ago, there was an overwhelming vote in the U.N. General Assembly condemning the Russian aggression, and this continues to be the case.

ZAKARIA: When you think about the end of this war, in your view, is it possible that Ukraine can survive and be strong with no guarantees in security terms from either NATO or the European Union? And can the European Union give such guarantees? It's not really a security organization.

SIKORSKI: Well, Ukraine, remember, has 110 brigades in the field. They've destroyed most of Russia's tanks. They produced 1.5 million drones last year. They are going to produce 4.5 million drones this year. If you'd asked me three years ago where Ukraine and Russia would be in this war in three years' time, I don't think either of us would have guessed that Russia would only capture 20 percent of Ukraine's territory, and Putin, did you notice yesterday, interesting piece of news, has secretly sold 100 tons of Russia's gold?

The Russian economy is getting into trouble. He has thrown everything he has in the last few months with these pyrrhic victories, sacrificing thousands of soldiers to gain a village or two precisely for this moment to put himself in a position where he appears to be stronger than he is. Ukraine can fight on its own without European support for the rest of this year. And I think that Putin has to take this into account.

ZAKARIA: Stay with us. When we come back, I'm going to ask Radek Sikorski what does Europe do in a new world where the United States's support cannot be taken for granted. When we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:17:58]

ZAKARIA: And we're back to talk about Russia's war on Ukraine and Europe's response with Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski. He joins me from Washington, D.C.

Radek, the "Financial Times" has said that the United States has made a historic move for the first time in eight decades, effectively turning its back on its allies. Turned, actually turned on its allies, treating them as adversaries. Friedrich Merz, the man likely to become chancellor of Germany, says Germany can no longer be sure that America will protect it.

Do you worry about the same thing? Can Poland be sure that in the event of a Russian attack on Poland, the United States will come to its defense today?

SIKORSKI: Well, that's the essence of NATO. And we were there for the United States in Iraq, above all in Afghanistan. We sent a brigade when the United States was attacked. An alliance is a relationship. And yesterday, Poland's president spoke to President Trump. I spoke to the National Security adviser, and nothing has changed in that. We are good allies, and I hope we continue to be.

But what -- where we agree with the Trump administration is that some European allies have lagged behind in their readiness. Poland has been spending 2 percent of GDP on defense for 20 years. We're now at almost five, and we'll continue to do so. The majority of allies have now come up to scratch. We need to do a better job of it, and there is determination to do what is up to us.

ZAKARIA: Merz even talked about the possibility of Germany having to rely on French and British nuclear protection because he worried that the United States would not actually come through. Do you worry about that? Would you worry about a Germany that decided it needed to take its security into its own hands given that Poland has been a victim of German aggression over the centuries?

[10:20:09]

SIKORSKI: We are good allies with Germany. Germany is our biggest trading partner. And -- but remember, Germany is banned from having nuclear weapons by its unification treaty and also has a ceiling of I think 300,000 troops. But we need a partnership in Europe to deter Putin, to do our bit, and this is happening.

ZAKARIA: You know, one theory about what Donald Trump is doing is that he's trying to wean the Russians off the Chinese, off their tight alliance with China. Do you think -- you've traveled extensively to both places. You've been foreign minister for two -- this is your second time around. Do you think it would work?

SIKORSKI: Well, trying to do a Kissinger in reverse is, of course, a tempting intellectual construct. I think with the current solidarity of dictators between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping is unlikely to succeed. Let us do what can be achieved, which is to support Ukraine, to bring Russia to her senses, withdraw from Ukraine, and then we'll have a more peaceful world with a more reasonable Russia and a more reasonable China.

ZAKARIA: What do you make of the deal that the United States is trying to make with Ukraine to get, what, I think President Zelenskyy just said at a news conference, $2 back from Ukraine for every dollar of military aid it has given? Does that strike you? I mean, European Union has actually, in total, given more aid to Ukraine. Does it strike you as a reasonable ask for the United States to make of Ukraine?

SIKORSKI: Poland holds the presidency of the E.U., and I'll be speaking on behalf of the E.U. at the Security Council in New York tomorrow. And yes, you're right, by our figures, the United States has contributed just over half, $100 billion to Ukraine, mostly militarily, militarily more than Europe. But overall, we think we are at about $145. But maybe that means that the U.S. wants to give Ukraine much more support, which then the U.S. believes should be refunded. Maybe this is good news.

ZAKARIA: Radek Sikorski, you're looking for good news in everything. So let me ask you, if in fact, this is a new world, as so many people are predicting, where the United States is withdrawing and countries are going to fend for themselves, will Europe, you think, make greater overtures to China? Is it possible that Europe, you know, diverges from the U.S. policy on China and finds a way to have a working relationship that's much more constructive?

SIKORSKI: I helped to formulate Europe's policy towards China in my previous role as a member of the European parliament, and it's in a slogan collaborate with possible on global issues, compete when needed, plenty of that, and confront when necessary. And I think this is sensible.

The Trans-Atlantic bargain is that the U.S. helps us to deter Putin. In return, we buy American and we express our solidarity with the U.S. on many international issues, including its competition with China. And the deal obviously works both ways.

ZAKARIA: Radek Sikorski, always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you, sir.

SIKORSKI: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, Trump's recent moves at the Justice Department have raised the question, should the president have control over federal prosecutors? What do other countries do? I'll ask an expert after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:28:42]

ZAKARIA: Donald Trump took office vowing to end what he called the weaponization of the Department of Justice, which investigated and tried to prosecute him. But critics say it is now the Trump administration that is weaponizing the DOJ, purging prosecutors who worked on the Trump cases and moving to dismiss a case against New York Mayor Eric Adams so that the mayor can help with the administration's immigration crackdown.

Does this show a defect in the U.S. constitutional system since federal prosecutors are under the president's authority?

To help us understand this, I want to bring in Rachel Barkow. She is a professor at NYU Law School, and she has a terrific book out next month on a somewhat different but important topic, "Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration."

Pleasure to have you on, Rachel.

RACHEL BARKOW, LAW PROFESSOR, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY: Thanks for having me.

ZAKARIA: So to me, it's always somebody who tries to look at the world in comparative perspective. I'm always struck by how other liberal democracies in the Western world, particularly, have moved over the last few decades, particularly after World War II, to create a kind of independent justice system. You know, that is not -- that is separate from and not under the direct control of the prime minister or the president, say in Britain, for example, or Canada.

We, you know, the United States has the oldest constitutional system in the world in a sense. And one of the features is that it is still this kind of Tudor political system, where the prosecutorial branch is under the president's authority. So, is that a fundamental problem?

RACHEL BARKOW, LAW PROFESSOR, NYU: It doesn't help, but I don't think that's the fundamental problem because we -- you know, we had a good run in United States history where even with that model, everybody understood that the attorney general needs to be separate from the White House. You know, the White House should not interfere in individual cases. There was an understanding that for the rule of law you need to have prosecutors who are independent from politics and the executive branch.

And I think what we're seeing now is a breakdown in that norm. And it might be easier to effectuate because we have an attorney general that's under the president in our executive branch structure. But at the end of the day, it's really the breakdown in a norm where everybody previously understood, yes, of course, this needs to be independent. And I fear what we're seeing now is a dismantling of that.

ZAKARIA: So -- and after Watergate, it seems like, you know, there was clearly kind of massive abuse of presidential power in Watergate. And Nixon tried to use the Department of Justice, the CIA, the FBI. There were built a whole bunch of additional constraints, right, put in place, and norms. Is that what the Trump administration is kind of trying to either ignore or erode?

BARKOW: Yes. You know, I think we're seeing the cycle of history here because I think what happened with President Nixon and him trying to fire the people investigating him and -- was there was a reaction after that that said, well, we have a constitutional flaw here. And Congress responded by passing a statute that created what's known as an independent counsel.

And the problem with that structure, or at least as the public perceived it, was that also looked political, that also looked like independent counsels were behaving in ways that went too far, and they didn't seem accountable. And so, I think we see a kind of an ebb and flow where you want independence, but you also want to make sure that you have some accountability with prosecutors.

And I think post-Watergate, everyone was very sensitive to independence. There was this sense that, you know, we really needed to shield the White House from the attorney general. That's actually what started getting kind of written into the protocols between the White House and the attorney general and the Department of Justice were post Nixon. But I think we're seeing an erosion of that because I think a lot of people forget how bad it could be if you have a president interfering with the Department of Justice.

ZAKARIA: You know, independent judiciary is so much a core part of liberal democracy. But, you know, what all of this highlights, is even that at the end of the day depends on norms. Because if a court rules, for example, free -- unfreeze the USAID spending because Congress appropriated that money, the president does not have the authority to simply stop spending it. If the president doesn't obey the order, the court doesn't have an army.

BARKOW: Yes. No, it's -- it's true. And I think what it -- you know, you mentioned that we have lots of different models of prosecution around the world, and we have some where they're set up to be, you know, completely independent. Some are in the judicial branch. And at the end of the day, when people have researched what works, you know, the things that really hold in check independence are things like a free press so that the public can be made aware when there's corruption or there's attempts to influence things on a political basis.

An independent judiciary is really important, but at the end of the day, you need the public to understand why they're important. And you need there to be an outcry if you had an elected official who wants to flout that.

And, you know, I think we might be stress-tested in the United States soon. Where, I think, President Trump is going to see how far he can go on that authoritarian path. And there'll be a question to how the public responds to that. You know, will there be an outcry?

And I think we'll see what the reaction is -- not just the public. I should say the markets because there's also an economic component to all of this, which is countries that don't have good independent judiciary and independent prosecutors. You know, when you don't have those rule of law norms, it destabilizes everything in your country, including the economy. And so, there might be some economic pressure as well to try to keep him in check.

Congress really isn't much of a check when it's dominated by the same party as the president in power, at least when it's Republicans, because they seem unconcerned by what they're seeing. They're really not speaking out. And so, I think it will come down to, if we get to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says certain things are off limits, then what happens?

ZAKARIA: Rachel, pleasure to have you on.

BARKOW: Thanks so much.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, Democrats are struggling to oppose Trump's agenda. But when they've been in power, they have also struggled to actually implement their own agenda. We'll discuss why in a fascinating new book when we come back.

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[10:39:39]

ZAKARIA: One can agree or disagree with the Trump administration's rapid disruption of the American government. But one thing this pace of change has done is highlight something about the opposition. The Democratic Party prides itself in bringing change through good governance. But even after passing sweeping legislation, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, it has struggled to actually achieve large scale changes on the ground.

[10:40:05]

Why is that? The author, Marc Dunkelman, explores this very idea about the progressive movement in America in his new book, "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back." Marc is a fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

Marc, pleasure to have you on. So, let's start with a fascinating example in the book. Mike Bloomberg has this idea, as mayor of New York, that he will make a bid for the Olympics. And the reason he wanted to do this was it was a forcing mechanism to get all kinds of modernization of New York infrastructure that people have been waiting for decades to do. That this would be the way that you'd get it all done.

He lines up everything to be able to do it. One state legislature votes against a key provision of it, and the whole thing crumbles. Explain how that can be. Why do you have a system where there are so many vetoes?

MARC DUNKELMAN, AUTHOR, "WHY NOTHING WORKS": Well, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Rockefeller administration had overspent and spent. The New York state was over its skis so that it was spending more money than it had and it all came crashing down in the 1970s.

And at that point, it seemed as though the thing that we needed to do was create new checks on New York state government in all facets. So, one of the things that was created almost without anyone thinking about it was something called the Public Authorities Control Board. Nobody knew what it was at the time. No one gave much thought to it.

But what it was was that any major capital expenditure needed to have the approval of the governor of the state assembly, speaker, and of the Senate president, all three. And if any one said no, the investment was off.

So, in this case, it's -- that was in the 1970s. This is the mid-2000. It has been 30 years. No one really even remembers the Public Authorities Control Board, except for the speaker of the state assembly, a man who would eventually perish in jail for corruption. Shelly (ph) Silver is told by one of his benefactors that they don't want this project to move forward, and he uses his veto and upends the entire thing. And the Olympics go to London.

ZAKARIA: It's an example of a larger trend that you described in the book, which is of a liberalism that was able to do astonishing things. I mean, you described the Tennessee Valley Authority. You know, tell -- remind people what it was and, you know, this is what the Roosevelt administration did.

DUNKELMAN: Yes, it's sort of remembered almost as a one off of the new deal. But it was this remarkable bureaucracy created right at the beginning of the Roosevelt administration that takes an area of the country, the upper south, that's basically the size of England, and gives power to essentially one figure named David Lilienthal, who is then empowered to dam the rivers and reforest the mountainsides, to do massive changes in this region. Basically, to hook up poor farms to electricity so that they can modernize their lives.

And there's a notion at the time, a very patriarchal notion, that they're going to civilize this sort of neanderthals who live in the center of the country. And the project, which seems -- can seem almost sort of politically gross to us today, was enormously successful in actually spreading wealth to this huge swath of the land.

ZAKARIA: Well, it brought electricity to this entire, you know, rural poor population.

DUNKELMAN: Exactly right. And so, it was incredibly successful and really did create an economic transformation.

ZAKARIA: And when you look at this, do you sense that there is a kind of turning of the tide? I mean, it feels inbuilt into the system. You know, the environmental reviews, all that kind of thing. It's difficult to see how it changes.

DUNKELMAN: Well, it changed once. Progressivism was born at the beginning of the 20th century to move the courts out of the way, to allow bureaucracies to do big things like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Then we go through a change in the 60s and 70s where people realize, yikes, these powerful bureaucracies are abusive, coercive, almost settler colonial in some sense to use some of the modern parlance. And we begin to create new checks.

We can go back to full circle progressivism. We can know that our own tradition originally wanted to create bureaucracies that could make decisions expeditiously. And so, the challenge now is to find some balance between the old system, which moved too fast and did things that were too disruptive, and the new system that can't move at all and can't solve our big problems like climate change, economic mobility, high speed rail. None of these things can get done unless we change the systems underneath them.

I think that progressives, rather than saying, we need to defend all of these institutions, we should be the ones saying these institutions aren't working for people, and we're going to reform them in ways that will begin delivering for people.

[10:45:12]

We are, as Democrats, the party of government. People think of us as the party of government, and we have to acknowledge that government isn't working. And it's not something that you can just change your rhetoric and convince them that actually government does work. It's -- it's plain to everyone.

ZAKARIA: They can see.

DUNKELMAN: They can see. We need to be aware of it. We need to be talking about it. We need to be acknowledging it. And we need to be offering plans to fix it.

ZAKARIA: Marc Dunkelman, pleasure to have you on.

DUNKELMAN: Thanks for having me.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, Elon Musk calls USAID a viper's nest of radical left Marxists who hate America. I'll tell you why he's wrong when we come back.

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[10:50:32]

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. When Elon Musk's DOGE began its quest to shrink the federal government, it did not start with Social Security and its $1.5 trillion budget, 21 percent of the entire government's outlays, or the Pentagon, which will spend $850 billion this year. No, it pounced on a somewhat obscure agency that most Americans probably didn't know existed, USAID, with a budget of about 40 billion, less than 1 percent of federal spending.

Trump called the 63-year-old organization a fraud and a big scam. Musk tweeted that USAID is a criminal organization and it was time for it to die. Trump, Musk and other officials have listed a series of programs that they say proves that the agency is wasteful and corrupt. Obviously, they have cherry picked ones that they think are especially outrageous. Except that on closer examination, one finds that these expenditures are neither fraudulent nor even that indefensible.

I'll start with one of the most infamous. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the Trump administration has halted a program that would have spent $50 million to send condoms to Gaza. This turned out to be patently false, which Musk later admitted. In the previous three years, USAID spent no money on sending condoms anywhere in the Middle East.

One reporter asked Musk if the administration might have been looking at a contraceptive program in Gaza, Mozambique. That's a province in the east African country with no connection whatsoever to the Gaza Strip.

Now, Mozambique has the fifth highest HIV prevalence in the world, and condoms are actually the cheapest way to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. A whole lot cheaper and easier than the antiretroviral medication needed after someone is infected with HIV.

Or let's look at another program that the Trump administration singled out. Earlier this month, Musk tweeted that his Department of Government Efficiency canceled a $17 million project to provide tax policy advice to Liberia. Why would anyone think that this is a good use of your tax money, he wrote.

Again, it's not entirely clear which program Musk is referring to. So much for accuracy and transparency. But USAID has in the past run programs that support the reform of Liberia's tax laws, enabling the government to increase revenues and improve governance.

Now, over the decades, a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy has been to encourage other countries to become more capitalist, more market friendly and economically open. Liberia is a longtime ally. Why is this a bad use of a few million dollars?

Press Secretary Leavitt derided a USAID program that sent $1.5 million to, as she said, quote, "advance DEI in Serbia's workplaces." Now, this is true. This grant was to a local organization to promote diversity in general and reduce workplace discrimination against Serbia's LGBTQ community. Recall that the Balkans is a region scarred by sectarianism and violence. Fostering a less tribal, more open and inclusive society could help prevent conflict.

Of course, you might disagree that these are wise expenditures of taxpayer money. The Trump administration obviously does. So, it should shut them down. But nothing we have learned about them suggests fraud or corruption, something Trump and his aides keep suggesting.

Programs you don't agree with are not evidence of malfeasance. But of course, the Trump administration's focus on a handful of small grants is meant to paint the work of the agency as crazy and radical, shoveling money to foreigners. It's an easy way to curry favor with the MAGA base.

In fact, USAID is a serious organization that has worked on eradicating polio, on easing famine in the most desperate places in the world, on cleaning up Agent Orange poison that the U.S. inflicted on Vietnam. Most of its money is spent providing medicines, health care and food.

[10:55:01]

As the agency's head under George W. Bush, Andrew Natsios, a self- described conservative Republican, told "60 Minutes," 40 percent of the staff are accountants and lawyers actively watching out for graft. He called it the most accountable aid agency in the world.

It's always been a source of pride to me that as the richest country on the planet, the United States was also the most generous. Every box of medicines, every bag of grain sent to help the sick and hungry had stamped on it, from the American people. But now, because politicians in Washington decided to score some cheap political points, those bags are empty and the poorest people in the world will be the ones to pay the price.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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