Mixed Thoughts on USAID

Live-saving aid is good, socio-political engineering is bad.

Elon Musk, acting with a mandate from President Donald Trump, has targeted the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The attack on USAID is part of the chaotic and destructive effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”). USAID activities have mostly been suspended and its budget and programing are being scrutinized, a spectacle that Republicans in Congress have eagerly embraced.

The targeting of USAID has been polarizing. On the one hand, Republicans as well as some left-wing critics of the Democratic Party have depicted USAID as either wasteful, insidious, or both. You can see the following thread from Republican Senator Joni Ernst to get a flavor of the Republican line of attack. Whereas many Republicans have just treated USAID as silly, one Republican Congressman, Scott Perry explosively alleged that USAID funded Boko Haram and other terrorist groups. His statements, although not backed by any convincing evidence, have had a huge reverberation in Nigeria, with many commentators treating the allegations as established fact. Meanwhile, some left critics have analyzed USAID as a wing of empire, a force that reshapes other countries’ politics and societies in line with U.S. interests; see Mark Ames’ Radio War Nerd for an example of this kind of discussion.

There is also, especially from anthropologists, a long-standing critique of USAID and indeed of “development” as a whole - see James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine for perhaps the most famous example. Here is one passage:

Turning to the defenders of USAID, many of them have, to my mind, made a muddled case that has inadvertently reinforced some of the criticisms. Is USAID about helping people in need? Or is USAID about projecting American power abroad? The defenders mostly want to say it’s about both, and that these goals are intertwined. For example, Ben Rhodes, who was a speechwriter and key foreign policy advisor for former President Barack Obama and who remains a respected voice among progressives (i.e., not very far left but not centrist either), published an op-ed in the New York Times attacking Trump over the dismantling of USAID. Rhodes approvingly quoted President John F. Kennedy, whose administration created USAID. Kennedy told the first USAID staff, “The people who are opposed to aid should realize that this is a very powerful source of strength for us. As we do not want to send American troops to a great many areas where freedom may be under attack, we send you.” For Rhodes and many others, this dual purpose of helping people while projecting power is noble and important - but I think the argument will land poorly for anyone who is skeptical of the United States’ self-appointed leadership role in the world, which is a great many people in the U.S. and abroad. Depicting USAID staff as surrogate soldiers plays into the idea - and to some extent the reality - that the agency is more interested in manipulating other societies than it is in meeting their basic needs. I am not sure how much ordinary Americans care about whether people in Madagascar or Indonesia are impressed with U.S. soft power, and I am not sure how many people in Madagascar or Indonesia want to be on the receiving end of aid that is bound up with propaganda.

There are also questions to be asked about where USAID’s money goes - not in a nefarious sense of “funding terror,” but in terms of how much of USAID’s budget is fed back into Americans’ pockets through payments to contractors and through subsidies to American farms and other businesses.

For my part, I reject the idea that USAID, or the American government in general, should be intervening deeply in “governance” and “civil society” and “countering violent extremism” and even “peacebuilding” in foreign countries. To me, there are twin risks in such lines of effort. One risk is simply wasting a lot of money by funding feckless organizations and media outlets with little grassroots appeal. The other risk is doing active harm by propping up some actors at the expense of others, or alienating political parties or governments from the constituencies they are supposed to represent, or giving artificial life to ideas and movements whose eventual collapse destabilizes their societies…etc. In this vein, Almut Rochowanski writes persuasively about foreign-backed NGOs in Georgia and then draws some strong conclusions:

Without foreign grant funding, the majority of NGOs in the Global South would not exist at all. Some groups and movements might have taken radically different forms had such funding not been available. They would have had to rely far more on support from their own population and on the latter’s volunteering and donations, and therefore would have had to listen far more to their fellow citizens and center their concerns in their missions. Or to win the public over to their causes, they would have had to explain their ideas and their work far better. Probably both. Without foreign financing, the NGO sector would have never generated a high-earning, aloof upper class, similar to that of investment bankers and management consultants in the West.

Rochowanski poses a counterfactual that cannot be settled definitively - what would the NGO landscape look like without American and European funding - but at a minimum I can say that many West African NGOs I am familiar with seem to speak in the preferred vocabularies and categories of Western donors.

My own limited experiences with USAID left me with a mixed impression of their work; the one project I did for them was an attempt to answer the question (my phrasing) “can you produce messaging that convinces people not to migrate?” - and my answer was, effectively, no. And I don’t think that it is or should be the role of the U.S. government to undertake messaging projects like that - to try to convince ordinary people overseas to think and act in certain ways. Every government tries to influence other governments, obviously, but there is something intrusive about trying to systematically influence other countries’ citizens.

And yet the U.S. should have some kind of institution that helps people overseas, and indeed the strangling of USAID has caused direct and serious harm. Although elite American newspapers and other Western journalistic observers are hardly disinterested observers here, the New York Times has compellingly detailed how the shutdown of USAID is really hurting people in Africa - thousands of health care workers are losing their jobs, camps hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees are seeing devastating budget cuts, schools face closures, etc. In another, equally upsetting report, the Times talks about the many “people around the world [left] with experimental drugs and medical products in their bodies, cut off from the researchers who were monitoring them.” One cannot understate the cruelty that Trump and Musk have shown here, both to USAID’s beneficiaries and to USAID’s own staff. Supposed waivers for life-saving aid, meanwhile, have not been carefully implemented, leaving the World Food Program and others to sort through the wreckage. Trump, Musk, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are flailing, which compounds the cruelty. And Peter Marocco, a Trump official playing a central role in the anti-USAID effort, seems not be anti-interventionist so much as preferring a different kind of interventionism, one more geared towards supporting hardline Christians at home and abroad. The Trump team are, it should be emphasized, not “isolationists” but rather a different sort of imperialists.

What I would eventually like to see is - to be idealistic about it, because someone has to - a reformed USAID that does not have political manipulation and social engineering as part of its core mission. According to data from Pew and others, much of USAID’s budget goes to health, disaster relief, and humanitarian aid. It’s hard to disentangle where “governance” interventions end and more straightforward humanitarian work begins; even “countering violent extremism” practitioners have complained that virtually everything was rebranded as “CVE” at one point or another. But I do think some disentangling could be done, that the overtly political goals of “development” could be pruned away, that the various middlemen and contractors could be mostly sidelined, etc. The United States is a wealthy nation that should feed the hungry and house the homeless and heal the sick, at home and abroad; it’s about that simple.