USAID Needs a Controlled Burn, Not a Wildfire

Celebrating the end of liberal pet projects is valuable, but it’s not a foreign policy.

By Anthony J. Constantini, political and foreign policy analyst

Much of the New Right has been in celebration mode since the Trump administration began its shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While the future of the agency, tasked with actualizing U.S. foreign aid is currently uncertain—a judge has temporarily blocked some firings, and it’s unclear if President Donald Trump can unilaterally eliminate the agency—it’s effectively neutered for the duration of the administration.

Conservatives are correct to cheer. USAID, and America’s foreign aid as a whole, originally intended as a dual-use humanitarian and Cold War-winning effort, has been used in recent years to spread progressivism around the globe and uphold an increasingly defunct liberal international order. But amidst the agency’s demolishment, the administration should be careful to engage in only a controlled burn and, when the fire is extinguished, should make sure to build something better in its place.

Shouting “be careful!” is, of course, never popular when people are having a great time celebrating, and those who say it are often, in official parlance, referred to as ‘party poopers.’ And again, there’s great benefit to turning off America’s unrestricted spigot of foreign aid, but we must be careful.

However, the past few years have seen America send foreign aid to a bevy of progressive trifles around the world: $32,000 for a pro-LGBT Peruvian comic book (with a coming-out storyline specifically asked for by America’s embassy in Lima), over $70,000 to an Irish company to produce a musical celebrating equity, and over $20,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia have all been highlighted by the Trump administration as some of the worst excesses undertaken by the Biden administration. 

Some less “woke” initiatives still seem baffling when examined closely, like USAID’s funding of Moldova’s electoral commission or its spending $20 million on a project to, among other things, “[unite] Moldovans around a shared European identity.” On issues like these, there’s a question as to how much America’s national interest is aided. Moldova is a small country bordered by Russian-controlled Transnistria and NATO-member Romania. There’s not much of a domino effect that could occur if Moldovans were to vote for an EU-skeptical candidate, as they nearly did last year (before the USAID-funded electoral commission rendered a narrow win for the pro-EU candidate). Likewise, making Moldovans feel more European would seem to be something that is in the interest of the European Union, not America.

While not all of the above were through USAID—some aid comes via the State Department, which USAID is not part of—USAID has become the symbol for conservatives.

Lots of recent defenses of USAID, mostly from Democrats, have defended all of these cases. Americans are already skeptical of foreign aid, and polls show large majorities prefer a focus on domestic spending. Taxpayers paying “$32,000 for a transgender Latin American comic book” would likely not poll well. Instead, the primary argument has revolved around the idea that USAID was instrumental to upholding America’s soft power. Samantha Power, USAID Director under President Joe Biden (and UN Ambassador under former President Barack Obama), said that the attack on USAID was “one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in U.S. history”—an eyebrow-raising declaration, given that she was a member of the Obama administration during the disastrous Libya incursion and the Iraq War.

Nevertheless, on the surface, the argument sounds reasonable. Soft power is the ability of a state to influence other countries with humanitarian or other types of aid in order to get them to change their internal or external policies. This contrasts with hard power, where countries use military force or the threat of military force to elicit those changes. And the United States does need soft power. Hard power physically held off the Soviet Union from advancing in the Cold War, but it was soft power, through policies like the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, which helped to win the hearts and minds of the countries in Europe and elsewhere, preventing communist world domination.

But soft power also helps in smaller ways. For example, as the United States Institute for Peace noted, African minerals are, and will continue to be, critical for our nation: products widely used by Americans, such as cell phones, depend on them. Aiding African countries by providing HIV drugs in programs like PEPFAR, which has saved approximately 25 million lives since it was first instituted by President George W. Bush, increases American influence in places like Rwanda, in turn helping secure American access to those minerals. 

Conservatives should support a foreign policy aimed at upholding the national interest when it comes to by holding back Chinese influence or ensuring access to key minerals, particularly at a modest cost. But if USAID’s goal during the Cold War was to keep communism at bay, in the post-Cold War-era it seems to have become a machine used for spreading progressivism and liberal democracy. That approach should be obliterated. 

While some might say $32,000 is pennies in comparison to the rest of the budget, it’s a mystery as to how America’s national interest is served by our embassy specifically requesting a gay comic book and then offering $32,000 for its storyline. The same for the $1.5 million that USAID gave to a pro-LGBT Serbian group; at the time, USAID’s director in the country said that “inclusive development is important for driving economic growth, and also for creating a healthier democracy.” But she was begging the question here, as there’s no real reason to expect making Serbia more gay-friendly will strengthen their democracy. It would strengthen progressivism, and it would aid international liberalism, but there’s no indication that it would help democracy—or advance America’s national interests.

And, as liberal internationalists have been warning for the past week, USAID’s collapse will decimate independent media in places like Russia. But America’s interest is not inherently served by promoting independent media in Russia or making Moldovans feel more European. If the US wants to overthrow Vladimir Putin or change the political calculus in Russia—and it’s not at all clear that his overview would actually benefit the United States—it will not do so by funding ‘independent media,’ as the last 20 years have proven. If anything, such activity will only poke the bear, not kill it. If Democrats want to make the case that annoying our adversaries, without actually causing problems for them, is in America’s national interest, then so be it. But then they should make the case.

So yes, the transformation of USAID and America’s foreign aid network into a dual progressivism and liberal democracy factory is something which should be strongly opposed by the Trump administration. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated, the post-Cold War liberal international order is “not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us.”

However, this is where I must be the unfortunate party pooper, for two reasons. Firstly, the burning of USAID is being portrayed by conservatives as a way to save money: “Why are we spending money on progressive comic books when our roads have potholes?” is a genuine question.

But the New Right’s answer to that question must be to ensure that the millions spent abroad on frivolous causes doesn’t just disappear back into government coffers; it should be returned as something beneficial for Americans. Attacking waste, only to reroute the funding to the Pentagon so they can buy more $1,280 coffee mugs or another $90,000 bag of insulator joints, undermines an opportunity to rebuild trust with Americans. Or the money could be returned to taxpayers. Either way, conservatives should be clear on what they’ll be doing with it.

Secondly, we should be sure to rebuild our foreign aid policy, not simply burn it down, as there’s a genuine national interest in America undertaking some sort of foreign aid. The aforementioned example of soft power—ensuring access to key minerals—is one. Some conservatives may squint at that example, arguing we could use hard power to ensure fair deals. But we can’t do that everywhere around the world; not only is it effectively impossible, even for America, but it would absolutely devastate our ability to prepare for the coming struggle against China if we returned to a wanton neoconservative imperialism.

This underscores the necessity of soft power. China is already beating us in the “hearts and minds” battle in key, mineral-rich areas. China has invested massively into mining projects throughout Africa (as well as in other areas), and its economic Belt-and-Road initiative has found members around the globe. Some hard power, in the pursuit of securing our position against China, is good and useful, such as the Trump administration’s threat to retake the Panama Canal if China gains too much influence over such a key waterway. But to prevent a new Chinese global order, we need to offer carrots as well as threaten with sticks.

Doing so doesn’t mean blasting everyone with aid like the U.S. has done previously. Allies like El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele have critiqued USAID in the past, writing that, “most governments don’t want USAID funds flowing into their countries because they understand where much of that money actually ends up,” financing “opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.” Indeed, governments like Serbia’s—a crucial player between Russia, China, and the United States—would probably appreciate it if we did not try to socially engineer their populations.

And part of the problem lies is whose hands control the spigot of government money. When we rebuild America’s system of aid, it should be under the control of the State Department (instead of USAID being an “independent agency” in the worst, least-accountable sense, as it is now). And it should be strictly built around humanitarian aid. While President Trump could feasibly do this by executive fiat, Congress could ensure this becomes permanent by slipping a spending restriction into the upcoming reconciliation bill banning aid from going to frivolities unrelated to alleviating human suffering. Aid should be viewed through the lens of America’s interests, not squishy humanitarianism.

So, yes, the New Right should enjoy the bonfire. Just make it a controlled burn, not a wildfire.