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On paper, USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) is an aid agency — one of the largest in the world, which delivers some US$50 billion annually through missions located in over 100 developing nations.

In practice, USAID funds censorship initiatives, foreign coups, radical left-wing causes and preposterously wasteful ventures the world over.

It is on this pretext, at least, that USAID is in the process of being shuttered by the Trump administration. As reported by the Associated Press:

USAID staffers said more than 600 additional employees had reported being locked out of the agency’s computer systems overnight. Those still in the system received emails saying that “at the direction of Agency leadership” the headquarters building “will be closed to Agency personnel on Monday, Feb. 3.” The agency’s website vanished Saturday without explanation.

In the days since, Trump and his team have appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio as Acting Director of USAID, placed virtually all personnel globally on administrative leave, and ordered all USAID missions overseas to shut down by last Friday.

In justifying the agency’s mothballing, Rubio told reporters last Tuesday that his frustrations with USAID go back to his time in Congress. “It’s a completely unresponsive agency,” he explained. “It’s supposed to respond to policy directives of the state department and it refuses to do so.” Rubio continued:

Every dollar we spend will be aligned with the national interest of the United States. USAID has a history of ignoring that and deciding that they’re a global charity. These are not donor dollars, these are taxpayer dollars. We owe the American people assurances that every dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interest.

The shutdown of USAID has been met with fierce resistance from staff and Democratic lawmakers alike. Another AP report revealed that two top security chiefs at the agency refused to cooperate with DOGE inspection teams sent in at President Trump’s behest. Dozens of employees staged a protest on Monday and have since been joined by members of Congress. Democrats and the media (though I repeat myself) have variously described last week’s events as a “hostile takeover”, an “illegal power grab”, and a “constitutional crisis”.

It is, of course, none of the above.

USAID was created by John F. Kennedy in 1961, largely via executive order. As the duly elected head of the executive branch — and with a popular-vote mandate to boot — Trump and his appointees have jurisdiction over the agency and have acted lawfully, even if they have upset the apple cart. More importantly, perhaps, by winding back USAID, Trump is delivering on his pre-election promise to rein in wasteful spending — and to use Elon Musk to do it.

So, what of the claims of wokeness, waste and wrongdoing?

Wokery and Waste

USAID’s rabid support of abortion, DEI and LGBT politics is already well documented. By the by, this might help explain why 97 percent of all political contributions from USAID employees went to Democrat candidates. But it’s the scale of spending on wokery that is truly eye-watering.

In addition to spending $520 million on ESG consultants and $375 million in DEI grants, USAID has given $15 million for condoms to the Taliban, $3.3 million towards “being LGBTQ in the Caribbean”, $1.5 million to promote job opportunities for LGBTQ individuals in Serbia, $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, and $425,622 to help Indonesian coffee companies become more climate and gender-friendly.

🧵From funneling tax dollars to risky research in Wuhan to sending Ukrainians to Paris Fashion Week, USAID is one of the worst offenders of waste in Washington… all around the world. 🌎

This is why @POTUS, @DOGE, and @elonmusk are ending the nonsense. 👇

— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) February 3, 2025

USAID’s apolitical wastefulness is just as bad. According to one internet sleuth who troweled through a lengthy ProPublica report:

USAID spent $335 million on a diesel fueled power plant that just sat there because Afghans can’t afford to import diesel. $300-500 million on a dam that was deemed too unsafe to use. $250 million on a partial road that deteriorated. Millions on healthcare facilities that don’t exist. $70 million on contractor fees for projects that were canceled before being started, but they got to keep the money anyway.

“Zero consequences for not delivering,” he summarised. “Given more money every year. And this is just Afghanistan to 2015.”

In one of the most egregious examples, as reported by Breitbart, US officials discovered that USAID had spent at least $330 million on “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan mainly benefiting Taliban narco-jihadists”.

Notoriously, USAID funnelled almost $1 million to coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which the CIA has since conceded was the likely source of COVID-19.

And, as recently highlighted by Unherd, USAID has been a major supporter of internet censorship — under the guise of combatting “misinformation” and “disinformation”, of course.

Then there are the foreign coups that have been aided and abetted with the help of USAID funding — including secretly creating a “Cuban Twitter” to foment unrest and trigger a Cuban spring, bankrolling opposition groups in Venezuela seeking to overthrow Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, funding separatist movements in Bolivia aimed at unseating President Evo Morales, and much, much more. In sum, these efforts have put USAID on the back foot against allegations it is a CIA front — an assessment I’ll happily let others make.

At best, USAID has devolved over the years from foreign aid into a foreign slush fund for wokery and censorship. At worst, it is a money laundering scheme used to enrich activists and enact globally what Congress has forbidden on US soil.

Either way, after years of attempted reforms, the Trump outfit is smart to turn off the funding tap before — not after — investigating all the apparent fraud and pork barrelling.

When all is said and done, perhaps Trump’s legacy won’t just be making America great again, but making foreign aid great again too.

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Republished with thanks to Mercator. Image courtesy of Adobe.