It appears that the Trump administration, in an effort spearheaded by Elon Musk’s “DOGE,” will permanently fold the US Agency for International Development (USAID) into its parent organization, the Department of State.
USAID was established by executive order of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. An act of Congress confirmed its existence as an independent agency within the Department of State in 1998.
USAID coordinated a vast array of different aid organizations working around the globe. Many of these were faith-based organizations, which, in the absence of USAID, will struggle to continue their work.
Foreign Aid and USAID
Explaining the importance of USAID to Americans has always been difficult. The American public is not necessarily hostile to foreign aid as a whole, but it habitually overestimates the amount of taxpayer money devoted to foreign assistance.
The mission of USAID is depressingly easy to demagogue against, as the costs (billions of dollars!) seem large and the benefits (people in Africa don’t die from AIDS) seem distant to the non-expert.
The motivating concept of USAID is that poverty and deprivation around the world are disruptive and consequently contrary to the interests of the United States, both in broad social and narrow national security terms.
Unaddressed poverty creates unrest that serves as fertile ground for violence, terrorism, and political ideologies that the United States has long found threatening and distasteful. Diseases allowed to run rampant in the developing world can find their way back to the United States.
In more narrow national security terms, the work of USAID was regarded as part of ideological competition against the Soviet Union, especially in underdeveloped parts of the world that lacked extensive commercial contacts with the United States.
Often, USAID workers were the only Americans present in remote parts of the developing world. This logic has transitioned to the era of competition with China, and some Democratic legislators have decried the shuttering of USAID as a gift to Chinese political and commercial efforts in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
What is Elon Musk Doing?
Musk seems particularly hostile to the flow of aid to Sub-saharan Africa, an attitude that may reflect his familial connections with the apartheid South African political elite. That President Trump has singled out South Africa for the termination of aid suggests a deep political grievance against the country within the administration, grievance that may have been abetted by Musk’s personal experience.
Musk also found himself at the center of a group of far-right conspiracy theorists who have made evidence-free assertions about USAID’s activities abroad, accusing the organization of censorship, warmongering, and even having a role in the creation of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Musk may also have had more personal motives. USAID was evidently investigating contracts between Musk’s Starlink and the Ukrainian government at the time of its dissolution.
The shuttering of USAID has been quite popular with foreign autocrats. In addition to its development and assistance work, USAID has devoted a small portion of its resources and activities to efforts that support the development of democratic norms and civil society. Authoritarians naturally regard these efforts as threatening, and as consequence USAID has come under criticism from despots such as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. Musk’s hard turn to the political right has won him friends and fans in this crowd.
Impact
The immediate fallout is unclear, although experts suggest that dislocation caused by the sudden cessation of operations could derail a number of health and infrastructure initiatives around the world. The USAID workforce, currently distributed across dozens of countries, has been taken aback by the suddenness of the shuttering.
The USAID website now redirects to a page instructing US government employees to arrange for return to the United States within thirty days, which effectively means uprooting and ending lives, careers, and projects abroad. As for those projects, the sudden termination of aid will certainly cause considerable hardship. In one case, the end of clinical trials will leave patients cut off in the middle of a medical treatment.
And yet all may not be lost. As with much of the activity of DOGE, the elimination of USAID stands on extremely shaky legal ground. However, as the survival of the agency would seem to depend on the willingness of a GOP Congress and a Republican-leaning judiciary to hold the Trump administration to account, not many have much optimism about USAID’s future.
Still, Democrats are taking the situation seriously and exerting what influence they have to reverse the decision.
About the Author: Dr. Robert Farley
Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.
