USAID cannot be fully gotten rid of or fully embraced as it is. Can it be reformed? That is a $40 billion question.
Picture a worried fellow sitting with an oncologist. The latter has just discovered an aggressive cancer in the lungs. The doctor matter-of-factly states, “We’ll just remove the lungs and that will be the end of the problem.” “But then I will not be able to breathe. I will die.” “The alternative is to leave some of the lung present but then the cancer will grow and spread, and then you will die.”
Like most people in the Internet era, my period of concentration has been reduced to around two minutes. I often hear my kids listening to messages or the audio of a video at 1.5X or 2X speed. I ask how they can listen to what sounds like a chipmunk on drugs; they counter that the speaker talks too slowly and they can get all of the information in the sped-up presentation. So with my short attention span, I was surprised when I sat from start to finish during an interview on X by Tucker Carlson of Mike Benz. It went 2 hours and 10 minutes and it was worth every second.
I had thought that Mike Benz would be riding around on a white horse, stating that he had been warning of all of the malignancy at USAID. I figured that he would be completely thrilled that the ugly truth was coming out about billions of dollars wasted on anti-American organizations and activities. I was wrong. While on the one hand he stated clearly that he is pleased that this process of exposure of USAID malfeasance is occurring, he repeatedly returned to a very painful truth: the United States needs something like USAID. So like the cancer patient above, getting rid of the organization or keeping it each presents a different kind of danger. Even if you do keep it out of necessity, it would appear all but impossible to prevent it from crossing a line and engaging in anti-American activity. Tucker Carlson seemed to feel that we could do without USAID, as the potential downsides outweighed the good. Mike Benz seemed more skeptical and felt that some form of a regulated USAID with oversight was a necessity for US prosperity and what he rightly calls the US empire.
Soft power has been used for ages by governments to get what they want without sending in the fleet or the Marines. Soft power via the press, political opposition parties, NGOs and other groups has been used in the past to secure US interests. Many markets have been opened for US businesses via the activities of governmental agencies to make sure that certain products are sold or to allow for competition in a local market. The CIA and USAID have done more than their fair share in destabilizing governments and changing leadership throughout the globe. Benz revealed that over a billion dollars was spent on the “Arab Spring” that led to government changes, not all of them necessarily favorable to US interests. A local “Twitter” alternative was set up in Cuba to set the groundwork for removal of the Castro government, until the whole project imploded.
The problem, as it is being shown daily in the press, is that there are no brakes for USAID activities. Once “populism” was defined as a threat to the US, activities leading to the second impeachment of Donald Trump or the prevention of reelection of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil could be funded. Not only were activities undertaken that would appear to have worked against the US, but activities within the US such as the $8 million a year to Politico for favorable journalism became common. Add to that graft, waste, fraud, and money laundering, and USAID was by all standards out of control. The problem may be that there is no way to make a perfect USAID, whether it is officially inside the State Department or it is a free-standing governmental body. And that is a very serious problem.
Let’s look at the two extremes. The first case is that there is no USAID or anything like it in the US government. On the one hand, you have taken care of the wasted billions or the monies directed against the American people. On the other hand, your influence in the world has dropped significantly. In the past, many markets and allies were brought on board by the open or covert actions of the US government. If China is pushing a country to join its economic sphere of influence, the US may be well-served by influencing the politics, news, and economics of that country for US benefit. Regime change or rent-a-riot may appear quite unseemly, but just as one who faints at the sight of blood should probably not be a butcher, so too a person who does not want to understand how modern politics work might look for a job outside of USAID or the CIA. I have a friend whose job in the 1970’s was to get Yemen into America’s sphere and away from the Soviets; he did so by offering development projects to the ruling Emir.
If USAID is exorcised and finally brought back on line, is there really any way to keep it in line? How long would it take before its missions would be directed back into the US? How long would it take before it decides that misinformation or disinformation is too dangerous to allow for continued freedom of speech? While one might hope to put guardrails, penalties and oversight on a restructured and redefined USAID, the question will always come up as to how reliable will this new body be in the future. Just as the heads of USAID in the 1960’s probably did not expect the organization to support anti-law Soros DA’s of the present, how likely will a new USAID turn on US citizens some time in the future?
So if there is no USAID or its soft power equivalent, US interests could suffer, whether they be markets, goods, political alliances or military partners. On the other hand, if USAID is kept online (and its $40 billion in grants are still functioning at this time, though its staff has been reduced from 14,000 to 300), at some future time, it may well work against some subset of American citizens. Can leaders make a version of the presently bloated and corrupt organization that will neither work within the US nor take actions that harm Americans at home, even if the action takes place overseas? I don’t know. One thing that Benz pointed out is that some of the activities that the US spent millions on overseas sound like woke expenses. He noted that in reality it could be that the money was spent on groups, including journalists, who could act to promote US interests, which might include regime change. It’s like being in a hall of mirrors and not knowing what you are seeing.
A reformed USAID would appear to be the best option for the country. Can Donald Trump and his team achieve the necessary balancing act?
The first job is to fully expose all of the waste at USAID. The next task for the Trump administration is to figure out if a better version can be created that truly serves US interests abroad and does not risk devolving into what it currently has become.