For CBS, Sunday marked a day for the ages. Along with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan having engaged in a new act of political masochism and shamelessly peddled a pants-on-fire lie that free speech caused the Holocaust, 60 Minutes not only embraced Germany’s criminalizing of dissent as a model, but tried to convince the populous to commiserate with government workers in light of massive government layoffs.
Host Scott Pelley shoveled apocalyptic, tone-deaf argle bargle about President Trump and Elon Musk being authoritarians and the supposed world disorder by shrinking government using the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and lied to viewers by spotlighting two laid-off workers who were actually bleeding-blue partisans.
Pelley came out with his proverbial hair on fire: “It’s too soon to tell how serious President Trump is in defiance of the Constitution. In his first 28 days, he signed an order to nullify birthright citizenship for some — a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. And he has closed agencies and frozen spending that Congress mandated by law.”
He naturally used the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as an example of what Trump has “eviscerated” and turned to what seemingly were to poor souls who lost their jobs there, Kristina Drye and Adam Dubard (click “expand”):
KRISTINA DRYE: People are really scared. I think that, you know, 12 days ago, people knew where their next paycheck was coming from. They knew how they were going to pay for their kids’ daycare, their medical bills. And then, all gone overnight.
PELLEY: “All gone, overnight,” for Kristina Drye and Adam Dubard — fired this month in the chaotic shutdown of foreign aid distributed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. More than 8,000 USAID employees were sent home by the administration.
ADAM DUBARD: They’re not looking for competency. They’re not looking for — if you’re good at your job. They’re looking for pure loyalty tests and if you don’t give it, you will be punished.
DRYE: And they had to leave the building and these are folks who had decades and decades of public service serving USAID across administrations from, you know, George Bush, to Obama, to the first Trump administration and they were never able to walk back in the building again.
PELLEY: There was no process? No one explained to them why they were being relieved?
DRYE: To my knowledge, they received an email. And then, if they didn’t leave the building, they were escorted out of the building.
The problem? Neither were actually the kind of nonpartisan workers the liberal media would like you to believe.
In Drye’s case, she wasn’t a career employee. Rather, she was a contractor working as a speechwriter for the Biden regime’s USAID head Samantha Power, a longtime globalist liberal, so it’s utter rubbish for Drye to portray herself as someone with job stability.
The great Jerry Dunleavy pointed this out as well as the fact that she had, among other unhinged takes, “made a ‘BlackLivesMatter Reading List for Allies’” with “authors includ[ing] Malcolm X, Howard Zinn, & Ta-Nehisi Coates.”
Our own Jorge Bonilla flagged her back on February 3 as having spoken to ABC’s World News Tonight as some innocent “contractor” and admitted “we took down our pride flags, we took down — I took out any books I felt would be incriminating” when DOGE arrived.
As for Dubard, he had also been a communications contractor and openly published partisan op-eds such as one for The Hill in June 2023 with this headline: “Biden has maintained Trump’s failed sanctions policies.”
Time after time, the liberal media hide these facts from their viewers, giving Americans further reason not to trust a single thing they say if they can’t be straight with the public.
Pelley stacked the deck with a former USAID head, former Republican National Committeeman, and diehard Liz Cheney donor, Andrew Natsios, to argue Trump has no authority to change it and it’s an incredibly transparent organization (and thus not wasteful) (click “expand”):
PELLEY: USAID was dismantled on Trump’s order, even though it was mandated by Congress and its funding was required by law. [TO NATSIOS] The President says he has the authority to shut down an independent agency like USAID.
NATSIOS: He most definitely does not.
PELLEY: Andrew Natsios is a former member of the Republican National Committee. He’s a professor of government at Texas A&M University and, in the Bush White House, he was administrator of USAID.
NATSIOS: He cannot rescind federal law by executive order. And AID is a statutory agency. The Foreign Assistance Act, I believe, is 300 or 400 pages long. You can’t rescind that without an act of the Congress and the Congress has not acted.
PELLEY: Acting on his own, the President started by destroying USAID’s image. In online posts, the administration smeared USAID as, quote, “a criminal organization” and called employees “worms.”
DONALD TRUMP: USAID, it’s a disaster — what — the people, radical left lunatics.
PELLEY: About USAID, President Trump has said, quote, “Billions of dollars have been stolen.” “The whole thing is a fraud.”
NATSIOS: It’s utter nonsense. The most accountable aid agency in the world is USAID. I’ve written actually widely on this subject. Forty percent of the staff are accountants and lawyers and people trying to make sure no money is stolen. We’ve created systems to monitor that. What they did was, they went back 20 years to try to find things. If you have to go back 20 years to find abuse, that means there isn’t that much abuse.
PELLEY: USAID’s spending in 2023 was $38 billion, that’s less than 1 percent of the federal budget. Natsios told us there is waste and occasional fraud, like any big agency, think of the Pentagon. But the money he says is watched by officials including those in the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget.
NATSIOS: The question is, why did the Congress approve all these contracts, and grants and programs all these years? Why did OMB approve them? Why did the State Department F Office? The F Office controls all foreign aid spending. Every line item in the USAID budget is approved by three different bodies: the F Office, OMB and the congressional oversight committees, of which there are four. Four. No one caught all these horrible abuses? I — that’s just not believable.
Notice in there Pelley defended USAID by citing its size as “less than one percent of the federal budget” at $38 billion.
Imagine thinking billions in spending was nothing in the eyes of working-class Americans.
As one witty X user sarcastically posted, what they’re arguing is “[o]nly a small amount of your bank account is being stolen or misused.”
Pelley’s next move to stack the deck was to let Delaware Democrat Senator Chris Coons spelling doom about the future of other departments and agencies with DOGE consisting of “an unelected, unofficial, small group of young tech bros who are charging into different federal agencies...doing things with them that at least I don’t know the full details of.”
Wait, wasn’t that similar to what the last few years looked like under his close friend, Joe Biden?
But wait, there was more! Pelley went rhetorically crying to the head of the union for USAID workers, Randy Chester, and then far-left law professor, Steve Vladeck to assert, in a whole lot of empty words, that the Founders would be horrified (click “expand”):
CHESTER: What are they going to do with the information? Are they, you know, we don’t know who these people are. We don’t know what controls have been placed on the information.
PELLEY: Randy Chester has worked for USAID 21 years under four presidents — two Democrats, two Republicans. He represents the agency workforce for the American Foreign Service Association. DOGE arrived at USAID January 27th. And that same day, USAID’s top 58 managers were given 45 minutes to get out. [TO CHESTER] The 58 senior managers, how would you describe them?
CHESTER: They’re the best professionals I’ve had the privilege to work with or work under. Their integrity is without question. I think to a person, they believe in the mission of USAID, and they believe in the ideals of public service.
(....)
VLADECK: We’ve seen flashpoints in these fights before. We’ve never seen this fight unfold across such a broad front, and at such a basic level, where a president is claiming so much of Congress’ constitutional powers.
PELLEY: Stephen Vladeck is a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center.
VLADECK: Fraud doesn’t negate statutes that Congress has enacted. Fraud just provides an excuse for revisiting them and so, the problem is, is that you see these claims of fraud by President Trump, by Elon Musk, that really feel like they’re fig leaves.
PELLEY: If it’s a fig leaf, what are they covering up?
VLADECK: I think what we’re really seeing is a consolidation of power. And so, fraud provides a plausible sounding reason for running over what had been historical constraints, whether they were statutes or norms, limiting the president’s ability to centralize power. The end game here seems to be controlling every single apparatus of the federal government directly out of the White House. And that’s just never been how we’ve understood executive power.
PELLEY: In your view, what would the founders think of where we are today?
VLADECK: I mean, the founders were a “they,” not an “it.” Even James Madison changed his mind about 17 times between when he wrote the Constitution and when he was president. So, I think it’s hard to generalize. I do think the founders would be very worried about just how much the tension that I think they thought they were creating among the branches has broken down. I mean, the idea is that we want a zealous executive. We want a zealous Congress. We want a zealous courts because if they push at each other, that’s how we’ll find the limits. That’s how we’ll ensure that there’s healthy checks and balances, but I think we can no longer dispute that Congress, which is supposed to be providing rigorous oversight of the executive branch, which is supposed to be reining in abuses by the executive branch, by the courts, too, has largely stopped doing any of that.
Kvetching that Musk “had cut off assistance to the world’s poorest families” by going after USAID (and yet saying nothing about the number of insane programs the White House highlighted), Pelley and Natsios left behind the notion of George and Alex Soros or Reid Hoffman, or Laurene Powell Jobs tipping elections:
PELLEY: Musk spent nearly $250 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected. He collects billions in taxpayer dollars for his SpaceX rockets.
NATSIOS: I think we’re creating a system that violates the separation of powers and the checks and balances that are intended in the Constitution.
Unsurprisingly, Natsios asserted he’s “a conservative Republican,” but concerned about shrinking government and — wait for it — a coming “constitutional crisis” in which “no one knows” what would happen next.
Somewhere, an aggrieved white liberal in Washington D.C. ditched their expensive beverage to hide under their bedsheets.
To see the relevant CBS transcript from February 16, click here.
