On the first day of his second term, President Trump issued an executive order suspending all foreign aid expenditures, except for those providing emergency and military assistance. On March 10, the administration cancelled 83 percent of the programs run by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
USAID, Trump declared, had been “run by a bunch of radical lunatics.” Elon Musk opined that the agency was “a criminal organization.” Social media outlets spread false allegations that USAID had spent $60 million on condoms for South Africa. On May 21, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “No one has died because of USAID.” Lawmakers presented him with credible evidence that he was wrong.
By the middle of the year, 94 percent of USAID’s 4,500 employees, many of them living overseas, had been laid off. As of July 1, Rubio announced, “USAID will officially cease to implement foreign assistance.” The State Department would only implement existing and new foreign aid programs if they advanced the administration’s “America First” agenda by privileging “trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, investment over assistance.”
The dismantling of USAID has already had a negative impact on the lives of tens of millions of poor and vulnerable people in some 130 countries. And the evisceration of USAID is undermining our national interest.
Established in 1961, USAID became the world’s leading donor of humanitarian, economic development and democracy-promoting programs. The organization has had considerable success in alleviating poverty and malnutrition, decreasing the spread of infectious diseases and increasing access to safer drinking water and sanitation. Its programs helped mitigate the effect of natural disasters and achieve substantial reductions in mortality rates across all ages and causes, death rates from HIV/AIDS, malaria and tropical diseases. Working with non-government organizations, USAID provided educational opportunities for women in Afghanistan and supported independent media committed to correcting disinformation campaigns by state-controlled outlets in Eastern Europe.
Although MAGA Republicans have denounced USAID as “woke,” the agency’s largest implementing partner in 2024 was Catholic Charities. In the last four years, Samantha’s Purse, founded by Franklin Graham, the son of evangelical minister Billy Graham, received $90 million in USAID funds.
A study recently published in The Lancet, the respected scientific and medical journal, estimates that the implications of dismantling USAID could “reverberate for decades,” with an impact “similar in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict.” By 2030, an additional 14 million people, 4 million of them children under five years old, could die. 630,000 of those deaths would be associated with dramatic reductions in staff, medications and treatment through PEPFAR, President George W. Bush’s signature foreign aid initiative.
USAID is a paradigmatic example of the exercise of “soft power,” a difficult to quantify strategy of exerting national influence through trade, economic assistance, educational exchanges, public-private partnerships and relationships with business and political leaders.
China had already strengthened its global ties by investing $679 billion — more than nine times the foreign aid expenditures of the U.S. — between 2013 and 2021 to construct or repair roads, railways, airports and energy and digital infrastructure. It began filling the soft power void created by the dismantling of USAID almost immediately in Nepal and Colombia.
U.S. foreign aid, moreover, is relatively inexpensive. In 2023, total expenditures for non-military foreign aid were $71.9 billion, 1.2 percent of the $6.1 trillion federal budget. USAID was responsible for $43.5 billion of the $71.9 billion. The U.S., it’s worth noting, gives a relatively low percentage of its GDP in aid compared to most other wealthy nations.
As Trump and Rubio surely know, a substantial majority of Americans do not understand the aims and achievements of foreign aid or know how much the U.S. spends on it. On average, Americans believe that foreign aid constitutes 31 percent of the federal budget. About 70 percent of Americans (and 9 out of 10 Republicans) think Washington spends too much money assisting other countries. Trump and Rubio are not attempting to enlighten them.
The dismantling of USAID provides a teachable moment. Referring to PEPFAR, former President Bush recently asked and answered a rhetorical question: “Is it in our national interest that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is.”
Providing humanitarian assistance is the right thing for the wealthiest country in the world to do, whether or not there’s an immediate payoff. But it is also one of many ways, in our increasingly interconnected and interdependent planet, in which a robust USAID served — and might again serve — America’s national interest.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
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