On smashing and slashing USAID

Frans Hogenberg, Beeldenstorm (“Iconoclasm”, 1566)

Since Trump first froze all spending by USAID and then proceeded to unleash Musk and his hounds onto agency staff, put everyone on paid leave, issued a stop order on all spending, merged it with the State Department and summoned all 10,000 overseas staff home, a cacophony of criticism of the agency and foreign aid in general has been swelling. Some of it is the crusty old classic drawing on base stinginess and envy, some of it cites all the most polemic cases of foreign aid waste, fraud and absurdity. This has been familiar since the Cold War.

There is a newer iteration, too, which in our social media era has wandered from the alienated fringe into the raucous mainstream: USAID meddles with foreign elections, does coups, color revolutions, Maidans, it’s a CIA-cut-out, one big psy-op, run by Deep State globalists. And that is ALL USAID does.

I see your criticism and I raise you mine: development aid is one big fraud. The world’s poorest countries receive less in foreign aid than they pay wealthy countries in interest payments on loans. Now add to that decades of unfair terms of trade, the brutally extractive industries we unleashed onto them, the proxy wars in which we have bled them white, the climate catastrophe wrought by our consumption that is drowning and parching them. Don’t forget that of those foreign aid budgets, much (up to 80% in the case of USAID) goes to our corporations and aid contractors. None of this is particularly subversive. These are established facts.

Therefore, Musk’s and Trump’s gleeful, shockingly lawless snuffing out of USAID isn’t a misguided overshooting of reform. It is a deliberate escalation of the cruelty and exploitation we have been inflicting on the world. I also don’t, for a minute, buy their and their supporters’ faux indignation at how USAID funded captive media, interfered in political processes, spawned astroturfed NGOs and altogether failed to respect other countries’ sovereignty and self-determination. As I am writing this, Trump has announced on live TV that the US will not only promote the ethnic cleansing of Gazans, but claim Gaza for itself. To own and build stuff there. These people have no concern for other nations’ sovereignty and self-determination.

For foreign aid to no longer be a fraud, we need debt forgiveness and a prohibition on high-interest loans, fair terms of trade, regulation of extractive transnational industries, equitable climate finance for low-income countries and an end to armed conflict. That’s a tall order. I’d like to think I will live to see it, but I have my doubts. A credible foreign aid policy would acknowledge these faraway objectives, but also start implementing the many incremental best practices that aid agencies like USAID have been outlining in hundreds (thousands?) of earnest, data-heavy, experience-based reports.

Because even if we set aside that foreign aid is a fraud, it’s also often implemented poorly: too much bureaucracy and monitoring, or too little accountability and safeguarding; dismissive of locals’ agency and insights, or too fast and loose with technical prescriptions (see how this works? damned if you do, damned if you don’t); wasteful, corrupt, distorting local markets, riddled with moral hazards for impoverished, desperate target populations. Entire libraries’ worth have been written about this, but for a brief, brisk introduction, you can start with this account of foreign aid realities in Haiti. This, too, of course, is no reason to smash foreign aid institutions and slash foreign aid spending. Quite the contrary.

My focus is the “USAID is a CIA cut-out” hype, though. It is lurid and titillating, perfect for social media outrage of the already alienated, but it is a caricature and a distraction. Reality is both far more complicated and far simpler.

In 2024, USAID disbursed $32.48 billion. Of that, $5.4 went to Ukraine, mostly to prop up the normal functioning of government. At https://foreignassistance.gov/, the resulting picture of global spending minus Ukraine is quite clear: of $27 billion disbursed,

• $8.37b went to Emergency Response (humanitarian aid)

• $4.709b to HIV/AIDS prevention/treatment

• $3.564b to Operating Expenses

• $2.081b to Basic Health

• $1.368b to Maternal and Child Health, Family Planning

• $1.13b to Agriculture

• and the remainder to Energy, Education, Environmental Protection and others…

….while 2.28b, out of $27b, went to “Government and Civil Society”. That’s the programmatic area that captures all the potentially iffy, regime-changey stuff. But it also contains perfectly kosher budget support to governments and other governance- and civil society-related programming that does not infringe on these countries’ sovereignty and is often welcomed by their governments.

So quite a bit less than 10% of USAID’s spending is on iffy stuff: election monitoring by groups that are suspiciously pro-opposition; teaching civil disobedience to students at hipster co-working spaces; slush funds for protest swag; social media campaigns and preachy news websites; tedious, endless memes and videos debunking this or that disinformation; the wholesale capture of entire civil society sectors and their transformation into an elitist professional-managerial class with pro-Western tastes and loyalties. A lot of it is hit and miss. It does not necessarily produce the preferred results.

These numbers make clear that USAID isn’t a purpose-built, cynical cover for sneaky, regime-changey stuff. That would be the most disproportionately expensive, conspicuous cover in the history of covers. USAID is the real thing: a foreign aid agency, primarily and earnestly concerned with things like malnutrition, economic growth, girls’ education and soil erosion. Making lots of mistakes and often neglecting its own guidance, but definitely a genuine foreign aid agency.

The sneaky, regime-changey stuff exists within it, though, and it is absolutely problematic, even if it encompasses far less than 10% of USAID’s spending. It crosses a line. I’m on the record about that. I became an activist in part because I was so uncomfortable with how civil society support was soaked through with geopolitics. Despite my (very modest) best efforts and to my increasing dismay, it got worse instead of better, especially in the last decade. Including during Trump’s first term. I realized this conflation of zero-sum geopolitics with supporting civil society would end up being ruinous, first and foremost for civil society in poor, fragile places with little resilience. That has proven true several times already and now it has come true again, with far more disastrous consequences than ever.

I imagine some people at USAID were not happy with the iffy stuff, which was getting too close for comfort into target countries’ sovereign politics. They might have felt queasy about it. In fact, years ago, some USAID staff and embassy diplomats told me as much. I expect most of them, working on technical things like water and sanitation, mobile banking or early childhood education, found it easy not to think too much about what that other office was doing, the one on the fifth floor (I’m making this one up).

This focus on the iffy stuff - the astroturfed NGOs, the wholly dependent “independent” media, the social media campaigns and worse - functions as a distraction, though. It captures anger and disgust with US excesses and corrals them towards pointless Schadenfreude, when instead we should channel our energy towards true solidarity with people around the world. If Trump and Musk were genuinely concerned about the activities under the “Government and Civil Society” header, if they were motivated by respect for other nations’ sovereignty, they could have just frozen that budget line and sealed the doors on the fifth floor only. Instead, they choose to stop all funding and all work (with a few, unclear exceptions). For good, if they get their way. Make no mistake, people will die because of this. Some probably already have died, in places and circumstances where death is always close. People will suffer hunger, sickness, pain and trauma, their lives will be blighted and knocked onto a harder trajectory.

We’re no closer to building a better way of being in the world, and that, I expect, is the point.