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Feb. 14, 2025 Editor, The News-Gazette: After reading Matt Paxton’s “Ink Spots” column Feb. 12, I say: Wake up! Attempting to find some “ we can still all b e friends” middle ground on the Trump-Musk administration’s destruction of the independent agency, USAID and the massive cutting of National Institutes of Health research grants, Paxton overlooked the real news in American politics, the collapse of our constitutional order. To this, his column is blind.
The most important question before the United States today is not whether closing USAID is ethically, or better yet, strategically defensible. The most important question is not whether we’ll be better served putting more of our basic medical research in the hands of privatesector actors. These are terrible policy choices, but if the United States Congress voted them into law, they would, at least, be constitutional choices.
The real crisis lies not in policy but in the fact that Trump and Musk have no legal authority to close USAID, an independent agency authorized by Congress. They have no legal authority to impound funds for NIH grants already authorized by Congress.
If Congress passes legislation gutting research grants and deserting developing nations in crises from hunger to Ebola, that would be constitutional, if bad, policymaking. Then, Paxton could reasonably do his “a little of this, a little of that” thinking.
But in failing to point out that Trump-Musk do not seem to believe in “a government of laws, not men,” Paxton ignores the most important news in American history. Policy mistakes are hardly new, but for the first time our post-Civil War history, the very existence of the representative democracy promised by our constitution is threatened.
But at times I have wondered if the News-Gazette knows: The Union won the Civil War.
ROBIN M. LeBLANC Lexington
