I spent my working life in three different fields—four years each in special education and basketball coaching, then some 35 years in the communications field split between journalism and PR/advertising. My special ed knowledge is no doubt dated since I haven’t really kept up with the field, my basketball knowledge is a bit dated but still highly functional, and my communications work quite current since I remain a close follower of matters related to the absorption and conveyance of words and ideas.
One thing I’ve noticed repeatedly over that now long span is that whenever someone with no direct experience in those fields begins speaking with an air of authority and strong opinions on them (“The media ALWAYS…”….”Why doesn’t the coach…?”), my internal response, which I do not share with them unless we’re extremely good buddies, tends toward: “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”
How could they?
If you’re not in one of those fields, I would submit you’re as ignorant as I am about them, and you had better speak gingerly, with appropriate humility, from whatever type of barstool you occupy to expound on them.
Human beings by and large specialize—it has always been the chief means of putting food on the table. We all started out as hunter-gatherers and child-bearers/tenders. Eventually, with increasing intelligence and know-how, we began to branch out into different activities that fit with our natural-born endowments of intelligence, aptitude, and interest.
Slow-forward 300,000 or so years and here we are, with a dizzying, uncountable array of career fields that take us deep inside all that human beings have managed to learn and refine in a now massive, inter-related and increasingly complex world.
So: we have physicists who specialize in all things related to “the scientific study of how matter and energy interact, including things like motion, forces, heat, light, and sound.” (It’s notable, I think, that I had to look up that definition just to be sure I wouldn’t botch even the most elementary definition of the field. So no, you will not be hearing from me on the corner barstool expounding on, “What physicists really need to do is…”)
We have epidemiologists who have immersed deeply into how diseases spread, how they can be prevented, what exhaustive clinical trials and experience have told them about the efficacy of vaccines and the best way to employ them.
And we have international development professionals skilled in the workings of culture, the knots and tangles of conveying assistance to those in need, the best ways to work with the bureaucracies and political systems they must navigate to accomplish the goal of relieving human suffering.
And I am here to tell you that I barely know a damn thing about physics or epidemiology or international development, nor a thousand other fields that have become refined over the eons by virtue of accomplished professionals who have painstakingly, with exhaustive effort and dedication, become experts in their fields.
Maybe you’re in one of those fields, in which case I salute you and offer you, too, a richly deserved, “Thank you for your service.”
But if you’re not, I would submit you’re as ignorant as I am about them, and you had better speak gingerly, with appropriate humility, from whatever type of barstool you occupy to expound on them.
And far more importantly with respect to the affairs of our world on this day, I would submit this: Neither Elon Musk—a physicist by training—nor Donald Trump (a reality TV star and businessman) know a damn thing about international development, nor many of the other fields they are currently taking axes, sledgehammers and flamethrowers to with all the arrogance and ignorance of a nasty mob boss, bent on destruction alone.
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This post was partly inspired by Trump/Musk’s ongoing, attempted dismantling of multiple agencies and the intended layoffs of multi-thousands of professionals across those fields. One of those is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), but the same applies to all the destruction rippling through law enforcement, environmental, cultural and other agencies subject to the snap judgments of our willfully ignorant president and his unelected billionaire henchman to whom he has off-loaded the base work of destroying all institutions and individuals who may stand in the way of their power.
The other inspiration is a friend’s recent Facebook post discussing these matters, which played host to sometimes heated appraisals of the purported fraud/waste/incompetence/irrelevance and worse of the USAID, a longtime pillar of our country’s support for the larger disadvantaged world.
Reading that commentary and many others, I have been struck by how much some of the commenters seem to think they know about the workings, history, works and problems of this agency.
How do they know what they think they know about it?
Do they really think international aid workers fanning out to far corners of the globe are in it for the money, or because it’s easy for them to defraud the program to accumulate it? Or that they look the other way when fraud happens?
If so, what is the evidence to back up that claim?
I’ve known a few international aid workers in my life. Sure, they’ve griped and seen some of the dollars get siphoned or wasted, as funds and goods always do in in the heave-ho of every human enterprise with good intentions in this world. The emphasis there, it seems to me, is in “human” enterprise, every one of which is imperfect and laced with the compromises and contradictions and shortcomings that bedevil every individual human being, and therefore, by extension, have to make up part of their institutions as well.
How could they not?
Have many USAID dollars on line items gone to waste or landed in the hands of wrong parties due to fraud or violence in the receiving country? Yes—fact-checking the matter reveals many such examples of good intentions gone awry.
But probably nowhere does the maxim “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” apply better than it does to international development work in our country’s noble, and dare I say, “Christian” quest to relieve the suffering of others, wherever we find it. (And, in turn, to make the world more safe and secure for our own interests.)
But that maxim applies just as well to the FBI, CIA, EPA, FDA, NIH, PBS, FCC, SSA, CMS and scores of other three-letter organizations that work mostly out of sight and without our knowledge (because we all have other matters requiring our attention!), to support our daily lives.
What do we truly know about any of them?
How much time and attention can we afford to devote to them if we do want to learn anything about what they do and how they do it?
I’m going to make another assumption now, maybe not applicable to every reader but I’m betting to most, that the honest answers to those questions are: “Not much” and “Hardly any.”
And yet, most of us, including me more than I’d like, feel free to spout off regularly on these and a near-infinite number of other matters when, in truth, the well-worn phrase works very well here: We don’t know squat.
That includes Elon Musk and his few (if any!) days of prep in beginning to dismantle longstanding agencies totally out of his area of expertise, about which he does not even pretend to want to learn. The same applies to his putative boss.
Both of them suffer from ignorance about the daily workings of these agencies and zero desire to do anything about it. They are on a mission with destruction at its core, no more questions need be explored.
Here’s Musk this past week:
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.
Could gone to some great parties.
Did that instead. https://t.co/0V35nacICW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2025
Charming, isn’t he? More than 10,000 employees whose service reaches millions of people in some 130 hard-bitten countries of the world—into the wood chipper.
In the end, if anyone has evidence showing widespread fraud, waste and incompetence of government agencies and the people, the living, breathing human beings who staff them, I’d like to see them bring it forward. Not via tweets, but in a comprehensive, objective, meticulously sourced, transparent report that can be reviewed and discussed en toto by everyone with an interest, but most carefully by other professionals with intimate knowledge and expertise in the field.
Not by opportunistic politicians cherry-picking problematic line items, but by a comprehensive cost-benefits review.
Short of that, scores of the institutions that undergird and help sustain our lives and the country’s long tradition as a beacon of freedom and generosity will remain under siege and in mortal danger by the veritable drunks on barstools currently wielding axes to vanquish all who would stand between them and their next drink.
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“How long, how long?” the singer asks—forty-three years ago…
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