Created by executive order at the height of the Cold War, the United States Agency for International Development was originally intended to fight the spread of communism by helping countries develop liberal market democracies. While the agency could be a key asset in countering the influence of the Chinese Communist Party throughout the developing world, it has instead been subsumed by an aid industrial complex consisting of international nongovernmental organizations, self-dealing politicians, and for-profit contractors.
President Donald Trump was right to bring the agency under democratic control, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the man needed to realign its actions with the national interest of the U.S.
“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,” Rubio said on Monday in El Salvador. “I said very clearly during my confirmation hearing that every dollar we spend and every program we fund will be aligned with the national interest of the United States,” Rubio continued. “USAID has a history of ignoring that and deciding that they are somehow a global charity separate from the national interest.”
“USAID is not an independent nongovernmental entity,” Rubio concluded. “It is an entity that spends taxpayer dollars, and it needs to spend it, as the statute says, in alignment with the policy directives that they get from the secretary of state, the National Security Council, and the president.”
USAID’s $40 billion budget would make it an average Fortune 500 company, but as far as government agencies go, it is actually quite small. In 2023 alone, the federal government spent almost $900 billion on Medicaid and another $1 trillion on Medicare. The federal deficit is not going to be eliminated by cutting USAID spending.
But unlike a Fortune 500 company, USAID is funded by taxpayers, and Trump has a responsibility —indeed, it is his first responsibility as commander in chief — to ensure that taxpayer dollars are being used in the interest of national security, not the political whims of the nebulous and unaccountable international elite, which is what much of USAID’s money is now spent on.
From $2 million spent on “trans-led organizations in Guatemala” to “women’s empowerment” mobile video games in Kenya to $45 million for diversity, equity, and inclusion scholarships in Burma, USAID was far more intent on promoting far-left social causes than securing America’s interests.
Nowhere was this more evident than in USAID’s efforts to promote abortion across its spending programs, most damagingly through the President’s Emergency Plans for AIDS Relief program and its infatuation with climate change, which blocked investment of much-needed fossil fuel projects across the developed world — projects that China was more than happy to finance.
Considering that more than 97% of all political donations from USAID employees went to the Democratic Party, it is not surprising that USAID even funded efforts to silence conservative media through grants to the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, an NGO devoted to fighting so-called “misinformation.”
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This was a government agency in desperate need of thorough housecleaning.
While USAID was first created by executive order, Congress passed a law establishing it as an independent agency in 1998, so Trump cannot eliminate the agency entirely through executive action. He would need an act of Congress to do that. But Trump does have the power to appoint Rubio as acting administrator of the agency, and Rubio seems to be giving USAID’s portfolio of spending programs the exhaustive review they desperately need.