Gutting the USAID-Industrial Complex

“The strategy is to delay, postpone, obfuscate, derail.”

That was the U.S. Agency for International Development’s approach to protect its autonomy from the president. It had nothing to do with resisting Donald Trump and DOGE—this line was written three decades ago to resist reforms by Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton’s mild-mannered secretary of state.

The career bureaucrats and their aid-industrial complex won out. That marked the last shovelful of dirt on the grave of attempts to rein in USAID.

Until Trump and his DOGE team.

Recent revelations go beyond the imaginations of what many knew but could seldom prove. USAID has become an out-of-control agency spending billions a year in bloated crony contracts, rotten from top to bottom with systemic fraud, corruption, and politicization. USAID has a budget roughly triple the official budget of the CIA, and has become an unaccountable slush fund for a left-wing political machine. For decades, that slush fund paid the salaries and projects of activist consultants, policymakers, lawyers, journalists, entertainers, organizers, think tanks, universities, and NGOs.

The real scandal—like the wails of protest against exposing USAID fraud and abuse—isn’t about profiteering and kickbacks. The real scandal, as my colleague Kyle Shideler has observed, is that USAID has become a cash cow with near-infinite udders to recruit, train, fund, and credential the next generation of woke social warrior cadres whose goal is not only to transform other countries—but to transform our own.

An Instrument of Serious Statecraft

Over its 64-year history, USAID has provided humanitarian and development aid to improve the lives of millions, arguably billions, of less fortunate people worldwide. Many Americans support that mission. Others oppose it as a giveaway.

All Americans paid to build USAID into a noble institution. Despite problems over the years and relentless social media criticism in 2024, it stood almost untouchable until this month. That’s when DOGE gained access to agency computer systems. That access revealed USAID to be as wasteful and crooked as the countries it was entrusted to help.

Foreign aid is useful only when it secures or advances American vital interests abroad. Employed wisely, it can be an essential instrument of soft power.

But foreign aid is not charity. Americans are the world’s most charitable people. Charity is the voluntary work of private citizens funded with private contributions. Charity is not government institutions funded through compulsory taxation. Confusion about charity, combined with the smug superiority of administrative state bureaucrats and social justice warriors, defeats the purpose of foreign aid.

Properly exercised, foreign aid is a controlled instrument of United States national security strategy. It serves under the president through the diplomatic machinery that executes his policies. It can have an America First purpose without military adventurism.

That’s how it was intended from the start. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower presided over post-World War II reconstruction aid and early Cold War containment of Communism aid to rebuild Europe and Asia. They integrated humanitarian and redevelopment aid, plus multilateral banking and financing, into a network of security alliances that served their purpose.

That explicit purpose was to protect the U.S. and its interests as Communism spread and, after the Korean War, to ensure a world of American supremacy without military intervention.

Read more HERE.