John Jefferson
For years, many career officials in foreign affairs, including this author, observed firsthand as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) fought bureaucratic battles within the government to protect its turf, budgets, and pet projects—often with little or no interest in advancing U.S. objectives in target countries. By shuttering USAID, President Donald Trump is not only saving taxpayers billions of dollars but also disbanding a uniquely self-interested bureaucracy with an ideological agenda. The USAID motto “from the American people” stopped ringing true many decades ago.
President John F. Kennedy first established the foreign assistance agency in 1961 to help fight the Cold War. But over decades, too many USAID careerist officials and contractors jettisoned the idea that their mission was to serve the president. Most exasperating of all was USAID’s vague, moralistic attitude that its priority was “making the world better,” a view typically aligned with the far-left globalist agenda. Nothing typified the mindset better than USAID efforts to remove the American flag from certain assistance packages distributed in regions where Uncle Sam was considered an enemy.
Trump’s decision to eliminate USAID will also limit the use of foreign aid as a backdoor way to keep the United States intentionally mired in never-ending foreign debacles that serve no national purpose. Going forward, the president has tasked the State Department with re-evaluating and managing those few occasions when there might be a need for targeted U.S. international financial assistance. The president’s instructions are based on legal authority over USAID that the secretary of state already holds, but which past leaders in Foggy Bottom have tended not to exercise.
USAID defenders immediately trot out the agency’s work in dealing with genuine humanitarian assistance matters such as disaster relief, emergency food distribution, and vaccinations. In fact, USAID’s record is far-left and globalist, regularly advocating for values such as open borders, transgenderism, and extreme climate change policies. The agency’s funding to support “independent media” and other “civil society” groups was inevitably funneled to NGOs dedicated to progressive activism within target countries. Under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights, USAID favors groups like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, whose idea of “development” is to radicalize traditional societies. Many Americans are rightly appalled by USAID’s bizarre grants for projects such as transgender operas in Colombia and LGBT activism in Guatemala. This kind of USAID funding is definitely not “from the American people” and has nothing to do with delivering food and emergency supplies to countries in crisis. President Trump is absolutely right to say it all must be stopped.
In addition, much of USAID’s “normal” spending is similarly directed to economic and democracy-promotion activities unconnected to any legitimate U.S. geopolitical goals in target countries. As a State Department officer in the field, I encountered many USAID officials who deliberately kept the rest of the embassy in the dark about their assistance budget and the activities of their NGO contractors. They wanted to avoid State Department “meddling.”
It was a similar story back in Washington, where USAID and State Department planners regularly engaged in bureaucratic budget jousts to determine who would set spending priorities. The USAID bureaucracy usually prevailed on where the money was directed, demonstrating that Washington’s broken “interagency process” was not about implementing the president’s priorities, but protecting the ability of federal agencies to tain and control their resources.
When challenged, USAID officials regularly refused to end wasteful or nonsensical programs. One of their inventive but bogus arguments was to assert that the agency was “locked” into seven-year spending commitments with their NGO grantees. It fell on deaf USAID ears when we protested that Congress did not appropriate any “seven-year money” to government agencies. Since federal government decision-making is so stove-piped, resolving such matters is practically impossible. Or at least that was the case before Sheriff Donald Trump rode back into town.
Another problem is that USAID projects are often implemented in remote areas in countries with little public scrutiny, and none of those involved in these programs has any incentive for them to end. To eliminate a program is to break someone’s rice bowl. Human nature being what it is, the priority of grant-receiving NGOs is to keep the USAID grants coming, never declaring victory or cutting losses and getting out. Everyone in the process always wants bigger budgets, all charged to the long-suffering American taxpayer.
Those foreign policy conservatives who claim we need to save and reform USAID to counter China should reexamine the historical record. America long ago finished JFK’s Cold War, and President Trump can find much better platforms for this mission than relying on the self-interested and highly radicalized USAID bureaucracy.
The agency is unreformable. First, the entire USAID foreign assistance industry has gulped down the globalist Kool-Aid and is all about dealing with climate change and promoting radical left-wing social values; it is incapable of engaging in hard-nosed geopolitics with Chinese competitors. Second, as Elon Musk is documenting publicly – and many of us in government witnessed firsthand – USAID is stuck in questionable contracting practices and an outdated engagement strategy built on doling out federal grants to Washington-connected NGOs.
Surely, it is time to abandon the worn-out USAID model and use other foreign-policy tools to pursue realistic, national-interest goals. Where necessary, for example, we can engage new and inventive private-sector actors using market and tax incentives, rather than relying on sprawling and self-interested bureaucracies.
In shuttering USAID, President Trump is doing more than simply ending the agency’s flawed contracting model and disbanding its bureaucracy. Trump is also repudiating Washington’s internationalist nation-building establishment, all closely interwoven with the foreign assistance industry that USAID sits atop, and which has ended so badly in recent years for the United States.
Take, for example, Washington’s pie-in-the-sky nation-building adventures in Afghanistan and Mexico, where USAID poured in billions in an effort to address a long list of societal issues such as endemic corruption, poor educational infrastructure, and the role of women in society. In their own ways, both Afghanistan and Mexico are awash with all sorts of societal pathologies, but fixing these deeply rooted historical dysfunctionalities is neither in the core U.S. national interest nor – most importantly – even attainable. Hubristic USAID programmatic efforts, not surprisingly, failed gigantically as the Washington foreign policy apparatus ran smack into the stone wall of altering the traditional societies in these two countries.
Consider U.S. foreign assistance in other countries like Bosnia-Herzegovina and Colombia. Since the implosion of Yugoslavia more than thirty years ago, USAID funding continues to flow yearly not only into Bosnia-Herzegovina but across the Western Balkans with, until Trump, no end in sight. Many heartland Americans would find it remarkable that any USAID money is still given out in Europe. USAID’s commitment to the conflict-torn Balkans is classic “forever foreign assistance.” Bosnia-Herzegovina is the permanent failed state, and the centuries-long hostility between Serbia and Kosovo is the classic Balkan feud that has no end. Washington’s foreign assistance industry would never voluntarily leave these man-made disasters.
USAID defenders point to Colombia as their modern success story, where the agency’s programs have been flowing for decades. Claims of success are, not surprisingly, overblown; the story of the Andean country’s desperate struggles against narco-terrorists and communist guerrilla insurgents has much more to do with its own national leadership than any miracles of U.S. development assistance. Nothing makes the point more dramatically than Colombia’s being transformed in recent years from an ally to a hostile adversary through the election of its neo-Marxist president, Gustavo Petro.
USAID defenders retort that the Colombia example stands for the proposition that no matter who runs a country’s government, U.S. foreign assistance is about helping people. That assertion points back, again, to the danger in keeping a permanent, self-absorbed foreign assistance bureaucracy: USAID acts as if it were a giant international NGO, fully detached from advancing the U.S. national interest.
Why has this gone on for so long? First of all, the foreign assistance lobby is enormously powerful, made up of well-connected NGO contractors, bureaucrats, and foreign governments, who all get a cut of USAID’s $40-$50 billion annual budget.
Second, keeping USAID alive lets many Americans, who largely do not understand the self-interested nature of the bureaucracy, feel good about themselves. Liberal guilt runs deep across the developed world as, for example, with the British, who still send foreign assistance to India, a country with a larger economy than the U.K. In Brussels, you can hardly talk to a European leftist who has not memorized the percentage of GDP his country devotes to foreign aid. For them, just the spending level itself is the measure of success.
That is why President Trump’s bold initiative is so significant. Through its actions, USAID has made clear it is not reformable. By closing down the agency, the president is not only terminating its broken assistance-delivery model, he is finally ending the misguided and failed era of nation-building as part of U.S. foreign policy.
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