Writer: Karoli Ssemogerere. PHOTO/FILE
Many things are happening in the new Donald Trump administration. His cabinet nominees have been confirmed. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State; Pete Hesgeth, Secretary of Defence; Scott Bassnet, Treasury Secretary, and others.
Some doubt lingers over Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination as Health and Human Services Secretary but it's mostly theoretical. Mr Kennedy has a complex global net of different interests from vaccine and environmental litigation to support for key figures in Uganda’s evangelical movement like Prophet Mbonye, according to a recent New York Times article.
Mr Trump has ordered a review of discretionary expenditure. He has proposed the creation of an external revenue service to collect international tariffs. The United States is running a big but narrowing deficit, spending $7.1 trillion in fiscal year 2024/2025 against just $5.1 trillion in revenues collected by the Internal Revenue Service, of which $300b goes out in tax refunds. Discretionary expenditure amounts to $1 trillion.
Mr Trump’s expenditure freeze has affected foreign aid programmes, domestic programmes everywhere up to the minutiae of allowing government department to send out an email.
Many employers had no choice but to send workers home this week unable to meet the payroll after the aid cuts.
Mr Trump has also withdrawn security detail for former officials perceived to have been disloyal to him during his time in exile. He withdrew any job offers to their staff or anyone with a record of working for them. At the Justice department, prosecutors who had worked against him have been hit with a sack.
Mr Trump gave notice to the World Health Organisation that the US was leaving the WHO. The WHO, which runs global public health programmes, including disease prevention, is a relatively small UN agency. However, the WHO has found itself on the defensive from the US which claims it over contributes to the WHO.
Second, the Trump administration is still reeling from disagreements on how to manage the Covid-19 pandemic dating from the first time Trump was in office.
In the details of the post-pandemic work environment, workers who have insisted on remaining at home have been offered eight months' pay and told to resign their jobs, ending remote working completely.
Remote working had turned many government buildings, which are normally at the centre of urban life, into virtual ghost towns. A famous meme online had a caption to the effect that zoom workers were now back at their desks.
The deportation machine is also in high gear even though the 200 or so deportations of criminal felons daily are mostly for deterrent purposes than America’s real immigration problem of more than 15 million persons in 2025 up from 11 million persons in 2022. Deportation is popular mostly for effect even though most countries in the West realise they need more, not less immigration. The budget freeze affects everything from school lunches, community policing, international HIV/Aids management efforts, literacy programmes, etc. I exchanged greetings with a Chief of Party friend in Liberia he told me they were home awaiting further directives.
As we pored through a high-pressure mediation session with a client, an email came through informing the people in the room that the office had been closed. Another friend in the international renewable energy business was in Bunyoro waiting for rains to plant more coffee, due to the same reasons.
Maybe, this is the disruption that Elon Musk wanted. He now has an office in the West Wing and does coffee runs at 6.30am. Mr Musk infamously was forced to buy Twitter for $45b. He renamed Twitter, “X” and fired all executives, and undressed the headquarters building of all its signage.
New investments in Artificial Intelligence led by Stargate’s $500 billion in AI infrastructure amounting to billions of dollars have been announced. China’s announcement of Deepseek, an AI application that makes existing leaders like chatgpt, look like child play has turned the IT world upside down, crashing stocks like Nvidia on fears that China has brought a game-changer to the table.
Two Americas are likely to emerge.
The former is the face of a fading, but important industrial powerhouse consumed by information, glitz, and triumph, then the more muscular United States which sometimes looks like its office space for a strongman, out to get things done. As for now, the doomsday scenario of a third-world coup has not materialised, stocks are up, and America, Trump in front is chugging forward.
The writer, Karoli Ssemogerere is an Attorney-At-Law and an Advocate. [email protected]
