Delaware Sen. Chris Coons agreed with CNN host Michael Smerconish that funding a “Sesame Street” show in Iraq could be a good use of taxpayer funding to teach “values” to Iraqi children.
Smerconish commented on his title show Saturday about reports that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) gave $20 million to a nonprofit called Sesame Workshop to produce a show called “Ahlan Simsim Iraq” in an effort to “promote inclusion, mutual respect, and understanding across ethnic, religious, and sectarian groups.” The show began in 2021 and will run until 2027.
He asked Coons and his viewers whether they believe this could be an effective use of “soft power” despite facing backlash from conservative lawmakers.
“This isn‘t just funding a kids’ show for children, millions of children in countries like Iraq,” Coons said. “It’s a show that helps teach values, helps teach public health, helps prevent kids from dying from dysentery and disease and helps push values like collaboration, peacefulness, cooperation in a society where the alternative is ISIS, extremism and terrorism.”
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He continued, “And to your point, it‘s pennies on the dollar. The U.S. Department of Defense has an annual budget of about $850 billion. USAID was spending about $30 billion. It is a small proportion of our total federal spending. And as [political scientist Joseph Nye] would often say, it‘s not just soft power, it‘s smart power.”
Smerconish also appeared to defend funding for the show as he polled viewers for their opinion.
“Nye himself said, in the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power, but the long run effects might be the opposite. Or, as a caller to my Sirius XM radio program said yesterday, who would you rather teach Iraqi kids? Big Bird or al-Qaeda? Disease prevention helps us all, education that fights extremism,” Smerconish said.
Near the end of his show, Smerconish revealed 72% of his viewers supported taxpayers funding the international series. He argued the political controversy surrounding it likely came from “soundbite” politics rather than the program itself.
“Now does that make it a better political issue than I said at the outset of the program? No, because I took five minutes to explain exactly what is that program in Iraq for ‘Sesame Street,’ teaching kids to wash their hands and not hate America,” Smerconish said. “And as I said to Chris Coons, you know, it‘s a soundbite world in which we‘re living, far easier to be dismissive and say, can you imagine they‘re spending all this money on fill in the blank, EV cars in Vietnam?”
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The Iraqi children’s show was one of several examples Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has used to accuse the agency of wasteful spending and abuse.
Although DOGE and the Trump administration have been aiming to shut down the agency as a result, a federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s efforts to put thousands of USAID workers on leave Friday.
Fox News’ Emma Colton contributed to this report.
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