The Trump administration’s decision to decimate USAID, the foreign assistance agency, has sparked a fierce debate in Washington. While Republicans on the hill and in the media have largely directed their ire against the left-wing ideological character of USAID programs, most of their Democratic counterparts have defended the agency on humanitarian grounds.
The White House, however, has offered the correct, most urgent view: USAID largely fails to advance American national interests, and Washington can no longer afford to spend taxpayer dollars on programs that don’t benefit Americans.
Reasonable people may disagree about the merits of particular USAID programs, but it’s clear that a large portion of funding goes to meddling in the internal affairs of other countries—presented as benign “governance” projects. In fiscal year 2023, $16.8 billion of the total $43.4 billion of USAID obligations were in this category, which has included such projects as bankrolling “independent media” in Ukraine and pouring tens of millions into elections in Georgia. Perhaps these efforts did some good, but the catastrophe that American meddling has helped produce in Ukraine, and the victory of a pro-Russian party in Georgia’s recent parliamentary elections, suggest that USAID can no longer reliably advance U.S. interests in Moscow’s sphere of influence.
Of course, USAID has also funded genuine humanitarian projects that have saved lives, such as the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). But even commendable humanitarian projects may not be worth the burden they place on the American taxpayer, meaning partisan debate about them is legitimate and indeed necessary. So long as people in North Carolina and Los Angeles are suffering from recent environmental tragedies, sending their hard-earned money to foreign lands does not sit right with many Americans.
Lost in the domestic hysteria of the moment is a more frank consideration of the sustainability of U.S. primacy in a changing global landscape. Washington doesn’t use USAID just to save lives, but also to expand and sustain American power globally. But if the “unipolar moment” is over and the world is now bipolar or multipolar, American cultural influence—sometimes called “soft power”—deserves reconsideration no less than the hard stuff.
Hellbound and Down 