Back in 2017, I wrote this piece analyzing The Paris Agreement when President Trump, during his first term, signaled that the United States would be pulling out of that climate agreement. In doing so, I examined how much we had been committing to TPA against the amounts being committed by other countries, both as an overall number and as an amount per-person relative to the population. I had pulled up USAID statistics at the time for how much money we were spending on other countries, to the tune of $42.4B for FY2016. According to Axios, that number for FY2023 was $44B, marking a rise for sure, but still staying within the same 1% target of the entire budget, which was $4.15T in 2016, and $6.1T in 2023. A wider discussion can be had about how that budget has ballooned almost $2T over the span of 8 years, and by whom, but if there is one thing I hate is partisan football when neither team is interested in moving the ball. But because so many people have been convinced now that this paltry 1% of the budget not going to other countries and instead going back to us is somehow going to SAVE AMERICA, I feel like I need to sit down and take a better look at this.
What is USAID?
The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, was an independent agency of the United States government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. Created by President John F. Kennedy through Executive Order, and then formally codified by Congress as the Foreign Assistance Act on September 4, 1961. Under this consolidation, foreign aid programs would take on new goals, mainly to counter Soviet Union influence during the Cold War, and to advance US soft power through socioeconomic development. It is important to note that while the agency does report to the Secretary of State and the President, meaning its employees are subject to review by the Executive branch of government, its budget and spending is appropriated and authorized by Congress as part of the FA Act. A lot of people online try and focus on the first part as a means of insisting that the president is within his right to dismantle the agency, but that is simply not the case as he would require Congressional approval to even begin that process. This makes Elon Musk and DOGE’s improper dismantling of USAID unlawful pending either legislation, or judicial review.
The primary focus points of the organization are:
- Disaster relief
- Poverty relief
- Technical cooperation
- U.S. bilateral interests
- Socioeconomic development
One of the more interesting things about USAID that mimics Trump’s previous fight with The Paris Agreement is that USAID is also part of the United Nation’s “Agenda 21” project, which was a non-binding “action plan” on creating sustainable developments by 2000. At the time, the project called for “rich nations” to contribute 0.7% of GNP (gross national product), and since then, no country ever hit that target, with the US contributing 0.20% as of 2011, but continuing to be the highest-contributing nation for development and aid. The top four countries below the US are Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. One of Trump’s contention points with TPA in 2016 was that he felt the US paid too much into the program while other countries barely paid anything, or nothing at all. This was something I agreed with, as I felt that any significant climate initiative being undertaken by the global community should have some kind of enforcement mechanism for countries like China and Russia, who largely ignored it.
On its face, USAID seems to be a fairly important, fairly straightforward organization providing a myriad of aid, support, and services to less fortunate countries, and it can be seen in one of many ways. To many, it’s an important peacekeeping, humanitarian front. To others, it’s centralized, organized charity. For a few, it’s a clever CIA front utilizing that soft power I mentioned before. An oft repeated line about the demise of USAID this week is that in the absence of US aid, other countries will “step in”. We’ll touch on that later.
So what are some of the things USAID does? And even if it’s only 1% of the budget, are they worth paying for?
Who Benefits from USAID Funding?
Unfortunately, because of the Trump-DOGE blockade of the agency, much of their website which had a lot of good breakdowns of their spending by-country and its purpose are down. I tried to use Internet Wayback to fetch some archived copies, but it seems to rely on some kind of graphing subsystem I am guessing IA cannot cache. In searching for an exact, qualified breakdown of agency spending, I first found their profile on usaspending.gov, which provides a good overview of how much is being spent each fiscal year. However, because USAID is in fact split up into almost a hundred sub-agencies denoted by country or department, the site would not exactly breakdown where that spending goes. I continued searching, and found ForeignAssistance.gov, which looks to be a fairly complete list by not only USAID, but other leading organizations as well, and has been updated at least as of December 2024. There, the current FY2024-2025 obligations by country is Ethiopia, Indonesia, Congo, Sudan, and Yemen. The current disbursements by country are almost entirely Ukraine and Jordan, but a larger worldwide effort on combatting HIV/AIDS, which is why you saw that in the news the moment the agency was frozen. The top three categories of spending are Health, Humanitarian, and Economic Development. Halfway down the list though, you see Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance. This is kind of the soft power we touched on earlier when it comes to advancing democracy and western interests in many of these developing nations. The goal in doing so is not necessarily to keep them indebt to us, but to foster goodwill and relationships so they favor us over adversaries and regional powers. During The Cold War, we were especially concerned about communism spreading to other countries, particularly Africa, Asia, and The Middle East. We made it a point to come in and not only provide aid, but education and information as a means of trust. Opponents of this view it as a form of colonialism, and they’re not entirely wrong. It does feel like a soft occupation of sorts to have a constant presence in countries, feeding them like a mother and an infant. But typically we do try to move on to the stage where we teach them to walk and to foster their own independence. Perhaps that always does not work.
Earlier I mentioned that in the absence of the United States, other countries would fill the void. China, for example, spends at least $4.4B a year on foreign assistance programs worldwide, though they do not have exact data as we have for USAID. Because the Chinese communist government has a vested interest in spreading their ideology throughout at least Eurasia and elsewhere, they have an incentive to go in and backfill these places we’ve traditionally supported, and you can be sure that they will want to run their own “social development” programs geared towards their own interests. Unfortunately, conservative-isolationists don’t seem to interested in combatting this, which represents a departure from 1960s-1980s conservatives who were very against communism and supported USAID efforts to “promote democracy” worldwide.
So Then Why Do People Think These Programs Are “Waste” or “Fraud”?
Most people have no idea what USAID does.
To understand what USAID does, you have to understand how a probably-complex series of funding requests, proposals, requests-for-proposals, grants, and a bunch of other steps to be approved for funding from the federal government. Popular public conception is that anyone can get government money if they present a sad enough story, and I doubt that is ever the case. Rather, the reason people unilaterally see USAID as a wasteful or corrupt organization is that they approach it, and most government spending, from a place of implicit bias, and then cogitative dissonance.
The implicit bias is two things. One, people have a built-in distrust of government, government institutions, and the people who work in government. Two, partisan politics means that one side is always going to accuse the other of maleficence, regardless of if their party is in power or not. This means the majority of social media comments on USAID’s demise and takeover by DOGE have focused around “Well it’s a GOOD thing they’re being AUDITED!” Audited tends to imply that a team of specialized people, be they government, non-government, or civilian-government, with expertise in government systems and process, as well as experience in financials, how money is appropriated and spent, and everything in-between, are the ones performing a careful and detailed audit of USAID, while USAID is still conducting normal business. That was clearly not the case. Instead, you had Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, along with a cabal of 5-6 men aged 18-25, enter USAID, OPM, Treasury, and other organizations, and begin seizing all of their systems, forcing all government employees onto paid leave pending review (and termination), taking down their websites, and especially cutting all financial resources. Why? Musk made any number of claims on social media that USAID funded all sorts of people, places, and things that Americans would be angry about. Most of them have been debunked, but as the facts begin to get laid out in lieu of judicial reviews and injunctions, it seems pretty clear that USAID earned its fate when they tried to simply zero out their prior financial commitments per the spending freeze, despite it already authorized by Congress, and drew the ire of Trump’s loyalists and the President himself, who unhappy with that action, sent in DOGE as the attack squad to “shut it down” much in the way the EPA inspector in Ghostbusters demanded the containment grid be shut down. The results were predictable, both fictional, and non-fictional. We haven’t even approached how the President’s spending freeze order was already in violation of separation of powers, because again, even though he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio can tell USAID employees to go home or stop working, they cannot freeze their funding, or stop payments. That is why Musk immediately went after Treasury, to prevent anyone there from further authorizing payments, or any kind of government payments. That almost worked until he encountered much stiffer resistance than before, and a slew of independent reporting that exposed his slash-and-burn plans.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t really stopped anyone from still believing this audit is justified, and many just shifted from WASTE and FRAUD to TRUMP WON U LOST and similar rhetoric centered either around justifying the president’s actions as lawful (they weren’t) or justifying Musk and DOGE’s actions as lawful (they also weren’t). At this point, the courts are now involved, with various injunctions having been made by government employee unions concerned over DOGE’s access to the Treasury systems, to state attorney generals concerned over the entire improper orders to freeze spending, shutter agencies, and subvert computer systems. People who have already made up their mind about these events and still think this administration is justified are not going to be dissuaded by a mountain of facts, fake news, or social media assertions. They probably won’t even be swayed by a final court ruling that will no doubt go against the President and Musk. But as they say, the price of democracy is steep.
So if all of this foreign aid is the subject of such a huge clash between the American people, the President, Congress, and people like Elon Musk, there must be something in there, right? Well fortunately I don’t need to be an Keatmine-addicted, Adderall-riddled mess of a DOGE employee to analyze these claims by the White House. being made and arrive at my own conclusions.
Then Why Has USAID Been Spending X on Y?
The obvious focus of this new administration is everything racist woke, which means “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” According to some government employees, you should also add “Accessibility” to that as well. In ironic witch hunt action, the President’s new administration has spared no expense over the last two weeks trying to shut down every “DEIA” program in government, and firing any employee suspected of pushing a “woke leftist agenda”. New administrations usually go through a period of realignment, where the incoming administration will often remove agency heads and appoint new ones that align with their policy platform, and fire some employees who don’t want to be part of the next 4-8 years. But 80% of government is typically run by nonpartisan “career” employees who simply handle the work of the government. USAID is no different, and in many ways, the bulk of its employees aren’t even government-centric employees. Many are hired to go to the countries where help is needed, and others are part of faith ministries and other organizations that partner with USAID to provide local services. Because USAID employs so many people, you will find that there is a large amount of “administrative costs” line items. That represents their pay, housing, benefits, and other needs But most of the public ire has focused on various individual lines that, predictably, seemingly have to do with DEIA initiatives.
Not surprisingly, as I finally got a chance to sit down and try and go through the website to find more specific information on the many claimed disbursements above, the FA website became unusable and would load data, but not let me filter or parse it by name or activity. I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but I am sure enough people have pointed out the fact that FA exists and has existed for years, and that the President, Musk, DOGE, Congress, and literally anyone with an internet connection could have been looking to see what USAID was spending going back to 2001. It’s patently embarrassing how people seem to think that their government has been trying to somehow keep some big secret from them while also publishing transparent records data for many years.
With my original plan out the door, let’s run a thought exercise and say all the above claimed line items are true. What I was able to get off the website while it’s still semi-functional is their annual reports XLS, which offers a breakdown of all their obligations and disbursements sorted by year and “goal” from 2016-2023.
The goals are denoted on their website:
So I fixed the goals column to all of the actual goal names, and sorted by FY_Total for 2023
In doing so, we can see that poverty initiatives come out on top for FY2023, followed by sustainability, peace and justice, good health, and zero hunger. All of that totals roughly $18.6B (Amt_Exclusive, I think?) though the site cautions that the raw data is representative of how much each goal area has done across all agencies, including USAID. Remember, there are other external organizations that also provide funding from private donors and sources, which I believe is represented by the total amount However, I think this is enough information to at least make the assumption that at least half, if not more, of USAID funding, goes to the core areas we expect of foreign aid, of disaster and humanitarian relief, food aid, health care and medicine, disease control, housing, and basic infrastructure.
So does this mean we should be cutting the other half? Programs that support sex or gender, trans rights promotion, cultural aids, or “contraceptives and condoms”?
That’s not something I, or anyone, can answer objectively. If the goal of USAID is ultimately the promotion of American values to other countries, likely with the express purpose of promoting democracy, then it does make sense to me that we might spearhead and pay for programs that further that objective. Creating a regional Sesame Street in Iraq for example achieves two goals, one to develop children’s programming for local children, and two to replicate a time-honored cultural classic from America for a new audience. Could that be something paid for out of private funding rather than public taxpayer money? Sure. But who makes that decision? Me? You? Congress? I would argue that Congress would be the ones to go line-by-line and review every proposal for funding and say yea or nay, and ask questions of what they don’t particularly think should be funded. If Republican lawmakers over the last two decades of being in Afghanistan objected to contraceptives and condoms, very likely being done to prevent disease, pregnancy by rape, and other issues, why did they approve it in the annual appropriations bill?
Which brings me the most important consideration. Congress.
Why Isn’t Congress Doing It’s Job?
Ultimately, even if USAID’s directors, supervisors, and employees fall under some degree of control of the Secretary of State and Executive, neither of them have control over USAID’s budget or disbursements, and furthermore do not have the legal standing to suspend or freeze them. Only Congress has this power. But why is Congress not doing this, and why is Congress just passing spending bills without identifying items they feel should not be paid for?
That answer is probably much more than I can write out here, but I can summarize it as two things, one Congress has largely abdicated most of its power and willingness to challenge the unitary executive over the last forty years, going back to the Reagan administration, which first popularized the theory of executive order. Although the unitary executive is more of a debate among lawyers and legal circles, it’s not hard to see the growing, unchecked power of the Executive branch over the last seven presidents, though it expanded greatly beginning with Bush W. into Obama, Trump, and also Biden. Like most expansions of power, subsequent presidents rarely put the genie back in the bottle, and instead seek to expand their power. The fact Trump is able to execute so many Executive Orders, even knowing most would get struck down or tied up in the courts, is because some will endure, like throwing shit at a wall to see if it sticks.
The other issue with Congress is the lack of a line-item veto power, either within Congress, or with the President. Although it has not been favored by The Supreme Court in the past and failed to manifest in the many times it has been introduced by Congress, the lack of a mechanism for which Congress could submit a spending bill and the Executive, feeling empowered by the will of the American people, challenge a specific item and push back on it for review without compromising the entire bill. While I understand the risks in having this kind of power on the executive level, most of the fears expressed twenty years ago are now a moot point in today’s ecosystem where Congress refuses to actually look at the bills they consider and simply ram them through no matter what. “Obamacare” was famous for being thousands of pages that “nobody read”, yet it was expected to pass and be funded?
Yet for all that, Congress routinely drops the ball on even trying in the first place often to consider important legislation, and instead focus on frivolous bills aimed at targeting political platform issues or engaging in political attacks. Almost all of the GOP’s opening 20-30 bills this term have focused on abortion initiatives and anti-DEI task forces instead of doing anything to address spending. Yet they purport to care about the spending of USAID, of which they already appropriated and approved? The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is a pretty clear road map for them to take control of this entire situation, as the President should not have standing to impound or freeze any part of USAID’s budget, or any budget, but can have them rescind and rework it. Neither seem to want to do that, because you have an Executive who wants to appear tough and have power he does not have, and a Legislative that doesn’t want to tell him no, or step on his toes, Democrats withstanding.
So Why Do Republicans Ignore Everything and Still Insist on This Being a Good Thing?
I mean, look, this is the part where I am going to dip into some of my own implicit bias; The modern-day, alt-right brodude Republican is dumb as fuck. Behind them is the culture warrior Trump Won U Lost Are U Gunna Cry LIBERAL? Republicuck. Then you have the chill dude conservative, probably doesn’t like it, but won’t object to the world burning down around him as long as a Democrat is not in office. Finally, the old-school, Goldwater conservative who doesn’t like Elon, doesn’t like Trump, is upset the Jan 6 guys were pardoned because they killed good cops, millennials and zoomers are destroying this great country, but there is nothing they can do about it because they were left behind by Bush and McCain is long gone.
I don’t want you to think I am firmly in the camp of liberals or Democrats. I’m not. In fact I probably have archives on this blog back in the Obama years which were my further-right years. I am just amazed by how many conservatives I have engaged over the last week who are acting as if everything USAID does is unnecessary and “Oh well, good riddance” because they somehow think recovering that 1% of the budget will put money back in their wallets. It won’t. It will go to a corporate tax cut for the wealthy, or another defense spending black hole. Are we going to go through defense spending soon and will conservatives gleefully chomp at having much of that gutted by DOGE? Or will that be left alone because Musk receives something like $10B from it for SpaceX?
No, any semblance of me trying to have rational conversations with people about USAID’s budget and insist that “auditing” it should have been done carefully and methodically by functional adults with proper security clearances and government backgrounds has gone out the window because everyone is just hitting this from a maximum culture wars angle. It’s fraud, it’s waste, it’s DEMS HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE, it’s awful (and I mean pixelated horrors) memes. None of these people could care less, just like they didn’t know what USAID spent despite the data being online for years. You could have reviewed it back in 2016 like I did when the topic of climate change came up. You didn’t, but now you have because IT GOT THAT WOKE SHIT IN IT.
You can’t fix that kind of stupid, and I don’t suggest anyone does. But if you made it to the end of this and you’ve given any amount of thought to the entire process, then perhaps you may consider that in the end, the ones you should hold responsible are your elected lawmakers in Congress. They’re supposed to do this work, and if they aren’t, you need to replace them. The Executive enjoys too much power because we allow it. Stop. Return government to its three branches, and then maybe we can have productive conversations about issues and not the political mudslinging.
But also, fuck Elon Musk.
2/9/2025 @ 10:11PM Edit: If I haven’t made myself clear on two things, let me impound them:
- I am not a liberal, or a Democrat, and I hate having to repeat this each time someone comes at me thinking I am simply because I disagree with their false god.
- It is a clear logical fallacy to suggest that I hate America or am somehow in support of government corruption because I am questioning how this “audit” is being conducted. It was not that long ago when largely-conservatives were distrustful and against Musk, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and other social media giants because they were afraid of them stealing their data and selling it to the government. Remember the Leftist Tech Elite? Big Tech Liberals? Do you not find it a little bit weird that they would now suddenly switch sides and pledge fealty to the “New Republican Party” and cozy up to them for the day when they can, as they are now, unleash their real plans on the government? That’s what I have a problem with. You can cut whatever spending you like our of government. I might think that’s silly but fuck it, who cares, we’ll find out if that’s bad or not. I simply do not want THIS asshole doing it. We will regret it.