USAID’s demise is nothing to mourn

The very future of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) is now in doubt.

At the request of US president Donald Trump, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been through USAID’s books. There they claim to have found an organisation funding myriad dubious campaigns and groups around the world. Among many other activities, it’s been backing drag shows in Ecuador and transgender operas in Colombia. It’s held to have dished out $84million to Chelsea Clinton through the Clinton Foundation. It also gave $54million to the controversial NGO, the EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with the notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology in ‘gain of function’ experiments that are alleged to have made Covid-19 more transmissible.

The Trump administration has now moved to dismantle USAID. According to reports, it wants to reduce its 10,000-strong global workforce to just over 600 ‘essential workers’. Although a US judge has submitted a ‘very limited’ temporary order blocking the moves, things do not look good for USAID.

Predictably, liberal elites in the US and beyond have responded to Trump’s plans with unbridled outrage. They claim cuts to USAID will cause a ‘global humanitarian crisis’ and that ‘people will face terror and starve, many will die’. They relentlessly paint USAID as an altruistic force for good, a triumph of American soft power.

Those angrily lamenting the dismantling of USAID are clearly suffering from amnesia. Established by President Kennedy in 1961, USAID was a Cold War-era agency tasked with ruthlessly promoting American interests abroad. As such, it was heavily involved in CIA subversion and counterinsurgency in Latin America and elsewhere. Its Office of Public Safety (1962-74) is recorded by the CIA itself as being charged, by a Democratic Party senator, with using its International Police Academy to train cops in foreign dictatorships that ‘employed torture’. As John Hopkins history professor Stuart Schrader noted in his 2019 book, Badges Without Borders, USAID’s police-assistance programmes were viewed as a ‘cheap, flexible, small-footprint instrument of US geopolitical power and suasion’. A former top administrator at USAID now apologises for some of its practices. He notes that ‘the most successful USAID programmes were those in places where vital US interests were at stake, including Greece, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and South Korea’.

There is every indication that USAID has continued with its tradition of skulduggery, especially in Latin America. In Venezuela, it has long been trying to undermine the socialist government. In Brazil, it has supported the Amazon-based Roraima Indigenous Council, particularly when it opposed the right-wing former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro.

Moreover, in more recent years, USAID has also been a staunch supporter of the State Department’s woke imperialism. Under President Obama, it focussed its efforts on climate alarmism and gay-rights advocacy, before President Biden added transgender activism to the mix. Indeed, in recent years it has become a haven for ‘progressive’ ideologues. In 2020, amid the sometimes violent protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd, over a thousand USAID staff accused the agency of ‘systemic racism’ and called on it to ‘affirm Black Lives Matter’.

Of course, USAID has offered genuine assistance to foreign peoples in need, but above all it has ruthlessly pursued American political interests. Yet those now livid with Trump’s moves to shut USAID down choose to focus only on the small number of good things it has done, while ignoring its extensive rap sheet.

The liberal New York Times is especially apoplectic. It complains that several USAID officials living abroad are agonising ‘over what to do about [their] pets’ if they have to return to the US. The New York Times also claims that, from the Seychelles to Mozambique, coral reefs, elephants, tigers and hyenas are now all ‘on the chopping block’. Reading such coverage, one could be forgiven for thinking that the very survival of life on Earth has always rested on USAID.

Predictably, ‘progressives’ are now blaming Russian president Vladimir Putin for USAID’s travails. They claim he has spread ‘disinformation’ about the agency, fuelling Trump’s attacks on it.

Yet, ironically, USAID itself funds propaganda. It has gifted funds to sympathetic media outlets, such as Politico, and to charities like BBC Media Action – to which it contributed £1.9million in 2022-23 alone. BBC Media Action is dedicated to promoting ‘a safer, more habitable planet, and inclusive societies’ around the world. Such is the White BBC Exec’s Burden.

Donald Trump’s fledgling second presidency marks a significant change in the political mood. USAID has meddled in other countries’ politics for far too long. More recently, it has become little more than another intensely partisan organisation, promoting reactionary woke ideas around the world. Its demise is nothing to mourn.

James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. He tweets at @jameswoudhuysen