I am utterly opposed to DOGE hacking government institutions, and shutting down US agencies created by Congress. Not only is this Unconstitutional, it doesn't deal with the lives of the current employees and other people affected for no good reason.
USAID was created by an act of Congress in 1961, and that act specifically says there should be an agency to perform this work (not a few handpicked friends of the Secretary of State).
If President Trump is allowed to get away with this, where it will all end? We know one thing for sure, from the moment he does get away with it, we no longer have a Republic, we have a naked Dictatorship.
If one wants to change the direction of the US government, and I concede I do, one must change the mission first, in Congress, then everything else follows. If we don't change the mission, the work will go on somewhere else and with even less transparency. It should well be noted that the kinds of work USAID (and it's sister public NGO, the NED) does was previously done by CIA on the black budget, and it could resume being done by CIA on the black budget.
So if the goal is to make the US stop trying to control the world, which mine is, that has to be taken head on, and not skirted around the edges by even "abolishing" individual agencies like USAID. Such actions are reckless, unfair, and ultimately pointless.
Even if your goal were just saving money, this would not be the way to do it.
And, it's laughable that Elon Musk and his friend Mike Benz have described USAID as a "Marxist" operation. If only it were, I'd be deeply supportive of it. Such incredible spin and dishonesty mainly reveals these people cannot be trusted at all. They're kooks as well as crooks, just like their boss President Trump. Boy do we have a wild ride ahead.
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But all the same it irks me when USAID is described as a Humanitarian Agency, as if the US had a charity because of its bleeding heart. Nearly the entire US media (including online) has gone to bat almost immediately to defend USAID in those sorts of terms, about how much "aid" it delivers (while not mentioning anything else). Once again this makes the "conspiracy theory" of CIA controlling US media look all too real.
Let's get something straight here.
USAID is US SOFT POWER.
Wikipedia says:
The goal of this agency was to counter Soviet Union influence during the Cold War and to advance US soft power through socioeconomic development.[13][14]
[14]
Matanock, Aila M. (July 25, 2017). Electing Peace: From Civil Conflict to Political Participation. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-10140-0. The mission of USAID had initially been to counter communism through development.
Soft power is generally a more cost effective means of opening up new regions to US financial exploitation (called Freedom and Democracy, of course) than hard power. If you want to win hearts and minds, nothing works as well as food and medical assistance.
Cuba does it probably far more relative to the size of its economy as the US (and generally where the US doesn't do it at all).
US SOFT POWER pales in comparison to US HARD POWER
US waves a lot more Hot Power in the world than soft power. Merely look at the military weapons sent to Ukraine since President Trump first authorized it. I'm seeing a number of $65 Billion but that does not sound complete to me (I think it's about double that).
And Israel, which had generally been the Camp David Accords authorized $3.5B per year, but more recently it's been $21 Billion.
And even that probably pales in comparison with what the US spends on military operations. The US has spent Trillions of Dollars on foreign military operations since 9/11/2001. And it's continuing.
IS USAID GOOD OR BAD ?
I think it's fine a good that the US government spends money providing food and medicine to people in other countries, regardless of the political motivations of the US in doing so. Whatever it spends in these ways pales in comparison to Hot Power, when it should probably be the other way around. So I look at is as a drop in the bucket given back to the world, at least the food and medicine part. I'm sure it primarily goes to people we want to curry favor with, for geopolitical power reasons, and others we less want to curry favor are damned, but at least we're doing something positive somewhere, and that's better than nothing.
(Um, but is is "medicine" or "research" the US is conduction. Research may be fine, certain kinds perhaps not, but let's not consider it aid at all.)
I don't feel so sanguine about the media and other influence USAID provides. It's clear that USAID has run many influence operations, funded media organizations around the world and especially in US conflict zones. But I have yet to see the total numbers, no searches I've done have located the total numbers, and most often just debunking Musk on particular points.
The individual numbers can be pretty impressive though. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, who would in no way enlarge the numbers (more likely find any way to minimize it--which is what they are doing here I believe, claiming these to be exceptional cases when in fact they are typical examples if not on the smaller side):
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other-times-usaid-pretended-to-be-an-intelligence-agency/
According to a US government website, USAID has given $3 Billion to Ukraine since 1992 to "support efforts to strengthen democracy and good governance, improve health care systems, and mitigate the effects of the conflict in the east.
When I read a line like "strengthen democracy and good government" I know what that means.
It's the same old Freedom and Democracy propaganda that enables US investors to buy up the world, which is called Neo-colonialism.
$3B to Ukraine of influence ops is still a drop in the bucket of USAID over that period. (Victoria Nuland is shown on a video from a conference from around 2014 saying the US had given more than $5 Billion to Ukraine.)
It turned out, that was only a tiny down payment.
But let us remember that USAID isn't the only US soft power organization. There is also NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, whose entire mission is the promotion of US style bankster imperialist "Freedom and Democracy."
Here's a relevant QUORA discussion on USAID and NED. The original post (from someone who does a lot of work for USAID) gives a link (broken) to the "Foreign Aid Explorer" which would tell us where the USAID money goes. Then. it has a link which supposedly tells us were NED funding goes, but it's just a FAQ for applying to NED which gives no such information. This discussion appears to be from five years to a few months ago, and I wonder if defenders of Freedom and Democracy are following the standard disinfo playbook of providing links (or references etc) which they don't expect anyone to check out, or have things just changed (and when and why?)
Poster Lance Chambers (an elder with PhD, MA, 6500 Quora followers) thinks like me when he writes:
I remember when I lived in Tanzania that a host of US NGO’s would set up charities and schools to educate the young children. One of the big things they did in the schools was to teach English - understandable as it would help them to read which is an important attribute but why English - it was because they also offered a host of books written in English.
The problem wasn’t that they were helping them read but that the books in English were all in English. No books in Swahili so they could write in their native language which would have been very useful but also that many of the books were about how wonderful the US was, how rich they were, how much they should be honoured and respected for all the largess they were offering, how America was so wonderful, so supportive, so kind, so generous - I’m sure you have an idea of what these bodies were doing?
To me they were humiliating the Tanzanians so as to convince them that America would be their saviours and to convince them that America could do no wrong and that the people and government of Tanzania should follow the US in all things.
I admit that this was close to 60 years ago but I still see the US acting in the same way far too often to make me feel comfortable of Americas suggestions of proffered largess when it all ends up being little that is of use if anything at all.
As if to respond to my questions, a video from Grayzone appeared about 8 hours after I first posted it.
