Chesterton’s Fence

G. K.  Chesterton (1874-1936), British author, philosopher and Christian apologetic, is best known for his short stories featuring priest-turned-detective Father Brown.

One of my news articles or opinion pieces this morning mentioned Chesterton’s parable of the fence, and related it to current US political events (and typically I can’t find it now to provide the source – I just want you to know the original idea wasn’t mine). Anyway, the parable goes like this:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

The parable is often shortened to just “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”

Last week, starting Wednesday February 27, the State Department in Washington cut funding to 5,800 projects around the world that had been funded by USAID (United States Agency for International Development). These projects included refugee camps, polio vaccination programs, TB clinics, malaria prevention, clean water projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo, HIV care and treatment for 10,000 children and 10,000 pregnant women in three African countries, shelters for women who were victims of rape and domestic abuse, feeding millions of malnourished children in Yemen and Nigeria, the only health clinic in a region of Sudan, providing medical care, food and water to refugees of the war in Ethiopia, and thousands and thousands more programs like these. We won’t even know how many people die as a result of these cuts because programs tracking such statistics have also been canceled.

There does not appear to be any attempt to examine these programs to find out what they are doing or why USAID is funding them. They were just “fences” in the road of the Trump regime’s drive to cut government “waste, fraud and corruption”.

Most of the staff of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are young software engineers. There are no forensic accountants to carefully examine each program to see where they could be made to run more efficiently. I don’t know if there are any staff with even basic accounting training.

The Trump regime is destroying that which it does not understand.

Sources:

https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/health/usaid-contract-terminations.html