To hear critics describe it, President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development is a disaster. But take it from someone who worked at USAID for three years: Its fate was already sealed.
USAID, the U.S. government’s vehicle to disburse tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded foreign aid, is a troubling tale of a government agency going off the rails ideologically and losing both bipartisan political support in Congress and the trust of the American people.
On his first day back in office, Trump issued an executive order halting most foreign aid actions asserting that ‘the United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.’ Two weeks later, he blasted the agency for being ‘run by radical lunatics.’
Trump appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to merge its functions into the State Department. Rubio quickly accused USAID of ‘rank insubordination.’ So how did the agency become such a pariah?
USAID was formed in 1961 to counter Soviet efforts to spread communism in the developing world, transition former communist countries into U.S. allies, and respond to global disasters such as earthquakes, epidemics, famine and war refugees. It did so well. But sometime during the Clinton administration, USAID began to promote radical social agendas, such as population control.
Under President Barack Obama, LGBT and climate ideologies were added. President Joe Biden topped it off with transgenderism, requiring that every foreign aid program promote this divisive radical stew, even when it came to food aid to starving refugees.
Institutionally, its political culture would eventually skew far left, purged of conservatives and independents. USAID no longer represented America nor its values, becoming a taxpayer-funded haven for radicals controlled by an industry of global elites composed of former aid officers and officials from past Democratic Party administrations.
In 2020, days after the George Floyd riots, 1,000 USAID staff demanded the agency ‘affirm Black Lives Matter,’ and accused their own agency of ‘systematic racism.’ More recently, another 1,000 USAID officials issued an open letter defying Biden’s Israel policy by demanding ‘an immediate ceasefire between the State of Israel and Hamas,’ which would give the terrorists an opportunity to regroup and kill more Israelis.
Last year, as America began breaking the shackles of DEI orthodoxy, the aid industry doubled down instead. The head of the Society of International Development, an association of aid experts, recommitted to ‘focusing on DEIA issues.’ InterAction, a foreign aid lobby, still pushed its DEI Compact blaming ‘white supremacy’ for racism in international development. Congress rebuked it by blocking it from receiving U.S. government funds.
Meanwhile, USAID burned its bridges to Congress that pays its budget. Agency officials refused scrutiny over its practices. In 2023, Sen. Jodi Ernst, R-Iowa, now Chair of the DOGE Caucus, demanded to know the overhead charges of organizations and companies to see if they were over-charging taxpayers to carry out USAID’s programs.
She was repeatedly stonewalled, and her staff threatened. Eventually she found that half of aid funds was spent on overhead. A government audit the following year found that USAID could not account for overhead charges of over $142.5 billion in awards. Foreign aid became a massive financial boon for progressives as ordinary Americans struggled to pay their bills.
Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Jim Risch, R-Idaho, promised to ‘work closely’ with Secretary Rubio on merging USAID into the State Department after Risch, a long-time supporter of PEPFAR, the global HIV/AIDS program, was burned by an aid lobby that had falsely assured him that the multibillion-dollar annual program was not illegally funding abortion. It had.
House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Brian Mast blasted USAID for funding condoms to the Taliban, atheism in Nepal and conducting a culture war on African Christians. The list of stupidities had grown long.
Lesson learned? No. On the day USAID’s headquarters were shut down, its supporters gathered in protest. Featured speakers were Reps. Ilhan Omar, the pro-Hamas progressive from Minnesota, and Jamie Raskin, who managed the House of Representative’s phony impeachment of President Trump in 2021. The degree of political tone deafness in the aid community is stunning.
With conservatives now controlling the White House, U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives, it’s clear the aid establishment made a bad ideological bet. Now USAID is being eliminated. Its supporters’ cries about USAID being an ‘important national security tool’ has fallen on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, USAID burned its bridges to Congress that pays its budget. Agency officials refused scrutiny over its practices.
Rubio now must separate the wheat from the chaff, preserving those foreign aid programs that reflect American values and align with U.S. interests, especially in the era of countering Communist China.
He must replace corrupt United Nations agencies, partisan NGOs and for-profit companies with a new cast of aid implementers that cost less, deliver better results, such as local faith-based groups and businesses, and refrain from ideological excess. He must transition our foreign aid approach away from endless spending to promoting trade and investment, the proven hallmarks of alleviating poverty and ending the need for aid.
It’s a daunting task, but long overdue.