The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was a taxpayer-funded agency that provided money for a number of non-governmental (NGO) agencies. Over the years it evolved into something you could reasonably call a money laundering scheme. When a country needed something from America, rather than give the money directly to the need, the money went through an NGO and then to where it was needed. Obviously, the NGO got their cut. What the NGO used their cut for was not necessarily reported. I don’t know if President Trump fully understood what would happen when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) caused the end of USAID, but the consequences are politically significant.

On February 12th, Hot Air posted this headline:

Look at What Happens When the NGO>Democrat Pipeline Shrinks

The article reports:

Presidential years tend to be high-turnout elections, and off-years not so much. And since elections are won by margins, every bit of voter motivation matters. Getting a larger share of your voters to the polls can make all the difference, even in situations where the majority of people disagree with you. You need the majority of people who VOTE to win, not the majority of people who have an opinion.

With all that said, the Democrats face one very big problem: after Harris’s disastrous 2024 performance, which burned through so much cash to no effect, donors are not excited to give Democrats money. And, more importantly, DOGE and the fraud investigations have put a huge dent in the supply of reliable Democratic cash: government spending that goes into a black hole and then comes back to fill the party’s and its candidates’ coffers.

…Democratic voters may be foaming at the mouth, but it turns out that the mouth foamers have never been the big source of cash that the Democrats always claimed. ActBlue has been a money laundering machine, and USAID and other government programs have been handing over billions of dollars to NGOs that do the Democrats’ dirty work, and that firehose of cash has been cut to a trickle.

The article concludes:

Now that the money spigots are being turned off one by one, starting with USAID but going far beyond that, the Democrats can’t seem to tap into that sweet flow of cash anymore.

And no, the cash disparity can’t be attributed to Republicans being in power again—the Democrats had a huge cash advantage in Trump’s first term. Trump and the Republicans may be doing well in raising money, but the Democrats’ money supply really has crashed.

I can’t predict what the cash advantage will mean come November. The evidence seems to be that spending makes a marginal difference, but far less than you would expect given how often you see ads on TV. Probably the best money spent is on “Get Out the Vote” (GOTV) efforts, which Democrats are quite good at.

Or at least they were, using all those phony NGOs. We’ll see this year.

I am not crazy enough to try to predict the results of the midterms. There are too many factors–the economy, the propaganda, voter integrity, etc. But this is definitely turning out to be an interesting year.