Cross-posted from https://ilcarizona.substack.com/
Duane Stilwell provides a primer on the legacy, function and future of USAID, in light of it’s dismantling by the new administration.
The Rapid Dismantling of USAID: A Mixed Bag
The dismantling of USAID by Elon Musk has been in the headlines lately. Many decry the disastrous effect such a rapid suspension of humanitarian aid will have on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people worldwide.
Musk is quoted as saying that the agency is “a radical-left political psy op” and a “crazy waste of money” and claimed that “USAID has been paying media organizations to publish their propaganda.”
And he is right about the last part: the U.S. does put out quite a bit of propaganda to defend USAID, but the CIA is most definitely NOT a “radical-left” organization, and USAID has served as a front for destabilization operations by the CIA in countries that can scarcely protect themselves from the CIA or from US blackmail.
What are the facts?
Here is a sample of what legacy news outlets in the U.S. have said recently about USAID:
From NBC:
“Established by then-President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as an independent agency, the goal of USAID was two-pronged: to counter Soviet influence during the Cold War and to run various foreign assistance programs, based on the idea that American security was tied to stability and economic advancements in other nations.
“The agency addresses a wide range of needs, from women’s health to clean water. Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official during the Obama and Biden administrations, described the agency’s work as urgent and said gutting it would disrupt vital public health initiatives at U.S.-funded clinics in other countries.
“‘To be very explicit about what is being turned off, the sort of things that are being stopped, are programs that support 20 million people on lifesaving HIV treatment right now,’ said Konyndyk, who is president of Refugees International, a rights advocacy organization. ‘That’s a huge risk to those individuals, but it’s also a risk to the health of the world more broadly.’
USAID provided assistance to about 130 countries in fiscal year 2023. The CRS says the top 10 recipients were:
- Ukraine
- Ethiopia
- Jordan
- Congo
- Somalia
- Yemen
- Afghanistan
- Nigeria
- South Sudan
- Syria
From MSNBC:
“Across the globe, aid agencies have been forced to lay off staff, turn away the needy and even shut down operations.
“Then, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — sent workers in their late teens and early 20s, with no federal government experience, to demand access to personnel records and classified material. Security officials who tried to stop them were placed on administrative leave. Now Washington is abuzz with speculation that Trump will try to shut down USAID or fold it into the State Department (two actions that he is forbidden by law from taking).
“The impact around the world has been immediate and catastrophic.
“No country on earth is more affected by malaria then Uganda. Every single day, the mosquito-borne disease kills 14 children under the age of 5. Because of Trump and Musk’s actions, Uganda’s Malaria Council has suspended insecticide spraying and shipments of bed nets, one of the most effective tools in limiting the spread of the disease, have ended.
“Medical supplies to help pregnant women and save babies from dying of diarrhea are no longer reaching villagers in Zambia.
“Efforts to eradicate polio and stop an outbreak of the Marburg virus, which is similar to Ebola and has a death rate of up to 90%, have stopped.
“One of the most popular and effective U.S. government health programs, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved tens of millions of lives from the scourge of AIDS, is also halted. This includes the delivery of daily medications that are keeping alive 20 million people in 50 countries who are HIV-positive.
“In Sudan, staffers at a U.S.-supported aid agency faced an impossible choice — ‘defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.’ ”
What about that propaganda?
If you go and look for basic info online on USAID you will find stuff like this:
What USAID helps countries with:
- Poverty: USAID helps countries recover from disaster, escape poverty, and engage in democratic reforms.
- Nutrition: USAID helps countries improve nutrition.
- Trade and investment: USAID helps countries increase exports to the United States and other countries.
The purpose of USAID:
USAID’s decentralized network of resident field missions is drawn on to manage U.S. government programs in low-income countries for various purposes:
- Disaster relief
- Poverty relief
- Technical cooperation on global issues, including the environmen
- U.S. bilateral interests
- Socioeconomic development
However…
It is important to note that USAID functions under constraints that favor U.S. interests:
“U.S. commercial interests are served by U.S. law’s requirement that most goods and services financed by USAID must be sourced from U.S. vendors.”
This means that a large portion of the money spent by USAID benefits companies in the U.S., and in the case of food assistance, it is money paid to U.S. farmers or Agricultural conglomerates like Cargill.
This recently was published in The NY Post:
“Purchases and shipments of U.S. food aid worth over $340 million — including rice, wheat and soybeans — have been paused during Trump’s foreign-aid freeze, according to officials and an email obtained by The Post. That has left hundreds of tons of American-grown wheat stranded in Houston alone, Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, said Tuesday.
“Besides farmers, researchers whose work is funded by USAID have been furloughed. Smaller companies in sectors such as global health care could go out of business, upending the jobs of office staff and security guards. Experts and representatives from the industries affected said the disruption will worsen if the pause in spending persists and USAID continues to lose staff that once administered these programs.
“’You’re talking about a direct impact on American products and American jobs,’ said George Ingram, a senior fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution.”
What the press don’t say:
In the 1960s and early 1970s, USAID has maintained “a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under USAID cover.”
The 1960s-era Office of Public Safety, a now-disbanded division of USAID, has been mentioned as an example of this, having served as a front for training foreign police in counterinsurgency methods (including torture techniques).
Folha de S. Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, accused USAID years ago of trying to influence political reform in Brazil in a way that would have benefited right-wing parties. USAID spent $95,000 in 2005 on a seminar in the Brazilian Congress pushing for legislation that would punish party infidelity. According to USAID papers acquired by Folha under the Freedom of Information Act, the seminar was planned to coincide with the eve of talks in that country’s Congress on a broad political reform. The papers read that although the “pattern of weak party discipline is found across the political spectrum, it is somewhat less true of parties on the liberal left, such as the [ruling] Worker’s Party.” The papers also expressed a concern about the “‘indigenization’ of the conference so that it is not viewed as providing a U.S. perspective.” The event’s main sponsor was the International Republican Institute.
In 2008, Benjamin Dangl wrote in The Progressive that the Bush administration was using USAID to fund efforts in Bolivia to “undermine the Morales government and coopt the country’s dynamic social movements – just as it has tried to do… throughout Latin America”.
From 2010 to 2012, the agency operated ZunZuneo, a social media site similar to Twitter in an attempt to instigate uprisings against the Cuban government. Its involvement was concealed in order to ensure mission success. The plan was to draw in users with non-controversial content until a critical mass is reached, after which more political messaging would be introduced. At its peak, more than 40,000 unsuspecting Cubans interacted on the platform.
In the summer of 2012, ALBA countries (Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda) called on its members to expel USAID from their countries.
Influence on the United Nations
Several studies suggest that foreign aid is used as a political weapon for the U.S. to elicit desired actions from other nations. A state’s membership of the U.N. Security Council can result in a considerable raise of U.S. assistance.
When the Yemeni Ambassador to the United Nations in 1990, Abdullah Saleh al-Ashtal, voted against a resolution for a U.S.-led coalition to use force against Iraq, U.S. ambassador to the UN Thomas Pickering walked to the seat of the Yemeni Ambassador and retorted: “That was the most expensive No vote you ever cast”. Immediately, USAID ceased operations and funding in Yemen.
The skinny:
So yes, USAID has functioned to further the long-term, strategic interests of the U.S. ruling class families (the Koch family, the DuPonts, the Mellons, and the new billionaires like Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk.) And when they need to, they have no qualms about functioning like gangsters.
The truth is that agencies like USAID, while ostensibly doing “humanitarian” work, project what is called “soft power,” providing desperately needed aid but then using that aid as leverage to influence the governments of countries where they operate.
The aid, in fact, comes with dangerous strings attached!
So on one hand we should shed no tears for the weakening or even the demise of agencies like USAID, the FBI, or the CIA, which are all an integral part of the political police of the United States.
On the other, the sudden halt in desperately needed aid in poor countries facing hunger, disease, war, and displacement will wreak havoc and probably result in many deaths. It didn’t have to be like this. The aid doled out by USAID represents about 0.7% of the U.S. government’s budget, a very cheap way to exert control in over 100 countries.
Furthermore, the way this is being done is completely unconstitutional and undemocratic, and more importantly, it undermines the equilibrium and independence of the three branches of government.
We are currently witnessing a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in most countries of the world, and from poor countries to rich countries through debt and coercion. Here in the U.S. the main goal of Musk and his acolytes is to make sure the massive tax breaks for the Super Wealthy remain in place when, by law, their expiration comes about later this year.
So the dismantling of USAID is a mixed bag.
There is no question that we should be opposed to the way USAID is used against the interests of working people around the world. However, this should not blind us to the fact that the way this is being done is needlessly harmful and cruel to the millions of people receiving the aid and ALSO undermines democratic values and constitutional principles here at home. It is just one more example of how the constitutional protections we enjoy as citizens are being threatened wholesale by this administration.
In addition, the U.S. will now have one less way to deploy “soft power,” so it will have to rely more on brute-force military coercion, bearing its true intentions for all to see. That is not a bad thing.