There is no trigger being pulled, metaphorically or not. USAID isn't a force of nature that would have continued to flow, as though water going downhill, if only it weren't for those sadistic meddlers at DOGE!
It's humanitarian aid funded by the American taxpayer and brought to life by every dedicated worker involved. To choose to stop being a part of this chain of actions is to go from acting on something good to becoming neutral, not becoming evil. What's next, calling someone ethically culpable for quitting their USAID job?
In the BBB, they deferred tax hikes on poor people to after the midterms (we all know why, but that's an aside), meaning they didn't feel they needed the budget balanced immediately.
Yet with USAID they cut it the next month, meaning people have died, without any warning.
If they had done this by saying "We will cut off this funding starting 2027, other countries, foundations, organizations, etc would have time to plan/divert/ramp up to fill the gaps.
Your argument fails, not on principle, but on details.
Evil is stopping all aid immediately without a tapering period. Evil is letting life-saving medicine and food rot in warehouses because somebody was horny about taking a chainsaw to the federal government, saving nothing and wasting billions in the process. Evil is making a cruel decision to let people die solely for the sake of political theater.
You can talk about this in the abstract all you want, but at the end of the day, someone chose to let people suffer and die when a far more humane approach with the same financial outcome could have been taken. For flash. For pizzaz. For revenge, perhaps.
It's humanitarian aid funded by the American taxpayer and brought to life by every dedicated worker involved. To choose to stop being a part of this chain of actions is to go from acting on something good to becoming neutral, not becoming evil. What's next, calling someone ethically culpable for quitting their USAID job?