“(I) can’t believe it, but almost two weeks after we [Our Hope South Africa] get a vague USAID termination letter, today we’re told that we’ve received a waiver and without anything in writing are supposed to jump back to work again like nothing happened. Who runs a business or much less a country like this? It feels like a game of cat and mouse.”

This is a text message I recently received from my daughter Betsy. She had been cut off from USAID funding to aid HIV patients and orphans among the Zulus of Kwa Zulu Natal in South Africa. Now her care organization was given a waiver!

I can draw several insights from this flipflopping:

Our president is predictably unpredictable. He bases his decisions on who talks to him last, or whether he will obey a temporary court order or whether DOGE has broken federal law passed by Congress. A pattern has emerged which can clearly be seen with the firing/hirings of thousands of federal workers, on-again, off-again, on-again tariffs, bullying Canada, Greenland, and Panama, his stated desire to close the Department of Education, and end the IRS….

There is a pattern and a contradiction to cutting government spending. The problem is that while the Administration wants to reduce expenditures, there is an opposite desire to cut taxes for the super wealthy. These tax reductions will have the result of increasing the national debt by at least $4.6 trillion over ten years.

The president won the 2024 election because he promised to end inflation. The problem is that inflation is rising due to economic uncertainty and threatened tariffs. If people and businesses don’t know what will happen in the future, they cut back or delay spending and investment. Stocks drop in value. There is talk now of a recession (or worse) in the near future. The advice from the administration is that the pain will be brief. It’s possible that Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare may be cut, especially hitting people in red states that voted Republican in the last election. This is not what his supporters expected when they voted for him. It does show that that many of his supporters who want smaller government and balanced budgets are going to be the ones who will see their income and healthcare cut.

I applaud the attempt to cut federal spending. Paying off our national debt is now the biggest income drain along with defense, Medicare and Medicaid. Something must be done. Such long-term deficit spending is dangerous for any country’s future economic health.

When I ran for a second term for the city council twelve years ago, I lost to a businessman who won because he said he would run the government like a business. Business and government have differing priorities: For most businesses profit comes before service. Government priorities place service as the sole goal. As my daughter noted above, no business acts like the current administration. Firing thousands of workers with no notice, and then having to rehire them due to court orders is not good business. Neither is angering and betraying one’s allies and using bullying tactics to force our customers and suppliers to act as we wish. This is not a way to build trust among nations and individuals. If tariffs are used to force our will upon other nations, other nations will reciprocate. Boycotts of U.S. products, especially Tesla, has cost Elon Musk billions of dollars of losses to his company. Once trust is destroyed it takes decades to repair the damage. Once jobs are lost, many of the best people with their institutional knowledge disappear. Our government will become more wasteful and costly. Mistakes will be made because of the lack of experience with maintaining national security as happened with the Signal texting of the bombing of the Houthis in Yemen.

Voters elected our president because, while they might not like him, they wanted unpredictability and change; “You’ve got to break a few eggs to get an omelet” mentality. What voters didn’t seem to understand is that their lives would be deeply affected.

Government is bad until it isn’t, or so it seems. We have three years and ten months to live with unpredictability and uncertainty. Hold onto your hats!

Are you feeling like the cat or the mouse?