What’s up with USAID?
I remember first hearing about USAID – the United States Agency for International Development – back in the 1960s. But I have no recollection of the context or the specific topic. Now that the Trump administration has focused on the agency and its excesses, I wondered what I’d written about it here over the years.
The answer is: very little. Now, of course, it’s very much in the news. Here’s some of the general history, from Wiki. It was established during the Kennedy administration:
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the United States government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With a budget of over $50 billion, USAID is one of the largest official aid agencies in the world and accounts for more than half of all U.S. foreign assistance – the highest in the world in absolute dollar terms. USAID has missions in over 100 countries, primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
Big. But nevertheless, only a small percentage of the US budget. This AP article – which, surprisingly, doesn’t seem especially biased to me – explains some of the background to the current fight, and indicates what I recall, which is that the amount and nature of the US’s foreign aid has long been criticized:
In the decades since [the USAID’s founding in 1961], Republicans and Democrats have fought over the agency and its funding. …
Today, supporters of USAID argue that U.S. assistance in countries counters Russian and Chinese influence. …
Critics say the programs are wasteful and promote a liberal agenda.
On his first day in office Jan. 20, Trump implemented a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Four days later, Peter Marocco — a returning political appointee from Trump’s first term — drafted a tougher than expected interpretation of that order, a move that shut down thousands of programs around the world and forced furloughs and layoffs.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has since moved to keep more kinds of strictly life-saving emergency programs going during the freeze. …
It’s part of a Trump administration crackdown that’s hitting across the federal government and its programs. But USAID and foreign aid are among those hit the hardest.
Rubio said the administration’s aim was a program-by-program review of which projects make “America safer, stronger or more prosperous.”
The decision to shut down U.S.-funded programs during the 90-day review meant the U.S. was “getting a lot more cooperation” from recipients of humanitarian, development and security assistance, Rubio said. …
Republicans typically push to give the State Department — which provides overall foreign policy guidance to USAID — more control of its policy and funds. Democrats typically promote USAID autonomy and authority. …
Musk alleges USAID funding been used to launch deadly programs and called it a “criminal organization.” …
Foreign assistance overall amounts to less than 1% of the U.S. budget.
“Less than 1% of the US budget” is still a ton of money. And the issue is not just saving money, but whether the money is being used for good or for ill. Some of the revelations don’t involve all that much money compared to the entire US budget, but are nevertheless shocking. Condoms for the Taliban? Transgender operas in Colombia? See this for some of the causes USAID has funded.
Here’s some of what Rubio has said:
RUBIO: … [M]y frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress. It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives of the State Department, and it refuses to do so.
The functions of USAID, there are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue that are going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy. I said very clearly during my confirmation hearing that every dollar we spend and every program we fund that will be aligned with the national interest of the United States. And USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that and deciding that there’s somehow a global charity separate from the national interest. These are taxpayer dollars. …
… And we owe the American people the assurances that every dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interest.
And so far, a lot of the people that work at USAID have just simply refused to cooperate.
Ace has written two lengthy and hard-hitting posts on the subject of USAID and what’s going on at this point: see this as well as this. It’s obviously a huge topic, and I assume I’ll revisit it as time goes on. But it’s become more and more obvious that the agency functions as an employer for an enormous number of leftists in leftist causes.
And here’s an interesting article I discovered in my researching the topic. It’s about aid through USAID to Haiti which, according to the author (who wrote a book on the subject last year), has “circumvented the democratic process, ended sovereignty, undermined local businesses and government, and served more as a benefit to US special interest groups than to the local population.” I’m going to assume that’s often the case all around the world.
Those “special interest groups” are now extremely upset. I assume we’ll be learning more as time goes on.
Typo: “Ace has written two lengthy and hard-hitting posts on the subject of USAID and what’s going on at this point: see this as well as this.” Your first “this” has no link.
I looked at Wikipedia quite recently and it claimed that USAID was created by statute. Here Andrea Widburg links to the Federal Register for JFK’s executive order. It is indeed a part of the State Department, not legally independent.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/02/even_a_short_list_of_how_usaid_spent_our_money_is_outrageous.html
Widburg has a long list of outrageous spending.
I think there are two, major issues that transparency can fix:
1. Whether they are leftists, or not, a slush fund like this makes it way too easy to fund things U.S. tax payers would not wish to have funded. Or, even when purely altruistic, would prefer to be done through private, charitable dollars than public funds.
2. All these layers of bureaucracy make it easy for NGOs to overpay their staff and hire more staff than is necessary. Very often nefarious people create these NGOs with the sole intention of enlarging their personal wealth through public dollars, rather than a belief in the NGOs stated mission.
“Less than 1% of the budget”
There’s a lot of disaster-affected people all across this country that would love a piece of 1% of the budget.
The agency in question was renamed in 1961. It was founded (IIRC) in 1947 as the “Economic Co-operation Agency’ and was during the Eisenhower Administration called the ‘Mutual Security Agency’.
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That it’s a slush fund used to finance NGOs who are clients of Democratic politicians is dismaying but not a great surprise. Partisan Democrats are of the view that public agencies are their property. Their disposition in this regard used to be less pronounced.
Ric Grenell adds:
“…Devil in the Details With USAID“—
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/ric-grenell-usaid-investigations/2025/02/03/id/1197681/
Grenell adds the CIA dimension to the mix, that is the association—apparently well known—that the CIA had with USAID.
Knowing how Obama and Brennan weaponized the agency, it would be perfectly understandable how it may have occurred to them to likewise weaponize USAID…and all those other agencies and departments as well (I mean, why not? AKA the more weaponized agencies, the merrier…and the stronger, more impregnable, more invincible we’ll be!!!…in our lust for total power and the Transformation(TM) of America.)
At the very least I am enjoying all the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments by all the sanctimounious grifters who have demostrated their utter disdain for the American taxpayers who have been unwittinlgy filling their troughs for decades now. And all while often working against USA interests. Sure, in the big picture it’s not a lot of money, but why are we giving even one penny to people and groups who in many cases hate us and our way of life? There’s nothing wrong with at least asking the question: What are we getting out of this?
Tracing how USAID funding ends up in the hands of Bill Kristol is like following the money trail from the CCP to Joe Biden. Fortunately it looks like Elon Musk’s team of data nerds is up to the task. I think we are about to find out that spending a few grand on a transgender opera in Colombia is among the least concerning use of taxpayer’s money.
Please recall The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, published in 1954. There have been people making the case contra overseas development programs for some time. See Charles Murray’s In Pursuit: of Happiness and Good Government, which drew for one fragment of its argument on his experience as an overseas development apparatchik.
Uh oh.
Trouble on the horizon.
Musk appears to have left AOC unimpressed.
“AOC mocked after calling Elon Musk ‘one of the most unintelligent billionaires I have ever met’”—
https://nypost.com/2025/02/04/us-news/aoc-calls-musk-one-of-the-most-unintelligent-billionaires-i-have-ever-met/
Can’t imagine how he’ll ever be able to recover from a setback of this magnitude…
Kate:
Thanks. I fixed the link.
I knew someone who worked for USAID a long time ago. And one thing that appalled me was the number of meetings they had in Paris, London, Rome… that could’ve just been down the hall at the office since most everyone attending them were employed by USAID in DC. I know that isn’t scads of money in the grand scheme of waste, but pennies here and pennies there, can make a difference.
Plus, I am sure that is SOP for a LOT of DC swamp agencies.
Well, AOC is certainly an expert on not being intelligent.
AOC’s political career is also a product of USAID.
This information has been publicly accessible for a very long time, available online since 2010. Interesting that we only start digging into it just now, but the pre-Trump GOP seems to have had little interest in bringing any of this to light, neither did such conservative media as National Review.
Let me expand that a little. Writing a negative story about this or that wasteful government program is definitely the kind of thing an outfit like National Review has always done.
But paying some data analysts to actually dig through a publicly available database to connect the dots about who is getting money from whom is not something any of them did, and they easily could have. A data analyst isn’t much more expensive than a full-time columnist.
AOC’s political career is also a product of USAID.
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The guy on talk radio this morning was up in arms because funds were going from AID to the infamous Wohan virology lab for gain of function research! This was in addition to the money sent by Fauci by way of EccoHeath Alliance. I wonder if there are other foreign biolabs which were also getting money for illegal work.
There were also clips of Democrats who were extremely upset at so many programs being shut down. I’m guessing that they have been getting bucks indirectly and they are suddenly going to lose their graft.
Congress passed laws in 1998 and 2024 regarding the status of USAID. The following WSJ article explains the details, which are a bit complicated: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-usaid-and-the-rule-of-law-us-agency-for-international-development-3177a22c?st=EWoQaH&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
The agency seems to have spent billions of dollars in recent years on establishing independent supply chains in lower-income countries for medical supplies, apparently without much success.
https://www.devex.com/news/too-big-to-fail-how-usaid-s-9-5b-supply-chain-vision-unraveled-105141
The WSJ article is kind of hilarious–says Trump can’t legally abolish USAID, but concedes he can legally fire everybody who doesn’t obey him and he can tell USAID to do no work. And of course they raise the spectre of Trump doing away with “the rule of law”. Because of course what is meant by “the rule of law” is that once Congress creates an entity it can and should do whatever it think best and never be held accountable by anyone elected.
Just a reminder:
‘Zelensky Says Ukraine Received $76 Billion Out of $177 Billion From U.S.
“I don’t know where those funds went.”’—
https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/02/zelensky-says-ukraine-received-76-billion-out-of-177-billion-from-u-s/
And then there’s this golden oldie—one of my faves…wherein Mad Max gets down and really spills the beans…
“Maxine Waters on Obama’s Spying Tool”—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9lQjfFLLQs
This made me laugh:
The decision to shut down U.S.-funded programs during the 90-day review meant the U.S. was “getting a lot more cooperation” from recipients of humanitarian, development and security assistance, Rubio said.
That will do the trick alright.
Shut it down. Level every building it occupied and then salt the earth. USAID delenda est…
Tony Randall’s famous line in the 1970s “Odd Couple” TV show was “to assume makes an ass out of you and me”.
So never assume!
A Historical Side Note:
William Lederer, Naval Captain.
later as special assistant to Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, Admiral Felix Stump at Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii.
My Dad was Admiral Stump’s Radio Operator while stationed at Barber’s Point, Hawaii. He knew Lederer.
Also, Stump and Lederer were Old China Hands.
Nonapod,
“Sure, in the big picture it’s not a lot of money…”
Pardon my crudity, but if it’s a big enough punch bowl the turd in it is not a main ingredient of the punch, but I’m still not drinking a ladleful.
Any rot or inefficiency in an organization is sub-optimal. Why wouldn’t one eliminate waste or corruption when uncovered?
Mike Pliass,
That is another part of the brilliance of this approach. Agencies genuinely doing good work at reasonable rates have nothing to hide, and will quickly make their case in 90 days in an attempt to avoid the chopping block. The staff will do a lot of the work for you. And there will be massive finger* pointing, especially amongst the cockroaches.
*Tarsal claws?
This attack on USAID is brilliant. It will not only save a lot of money, but it will accomplish a partial de-funding of leftist NGOs both foreign and domestic.