The USAID I Knew

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is a Cold War relic that has been allowed to metastasize into some sort of woke monster, racked with corruption as if squandering money grabbed a hold of the organization and shook it like the norovirus. USAID’s time has passed and it deserves the quick death Elon “feed it into the wood chipper” Musk seems to have in store for it. But is there a baby in the bathwater?

My own experience with USAID was in Iraq some 15 years ago when I led two Provincial Reconstruction Teams there for the State Department. My so-called team of heroes included a contractor representing the vast money pool that was USAID. Then, like now, the USAID money followed America’s foreign adventures; whereas once Iraq was the number one recipient of foreign aid money, today it is Ukraine that is the big winner. In 2023, USAID funding represented approximately 0.7 percent of the U.S. federal budget. In 2021, before the war in Ukraine, it accounted for only about half that.

The USAID rep in Iraq was a nice enough guy—he probably meant well—but it was only later I found out he was so quiet in meetings because he was ordered by USAID higher-ups not to tell anyone at State what he was working on for fear we’d meddle somehow. When a local Iraqi town council complained about a corrupt building contractor siphoning off funds designated for rebuilding homes, the USAID guy swore no knowledge of the project. I knew it was not a State or Army Civil Affairs piece of work, but a little embarrassed checking with the Iraqis (!) revealed it was indeed USAID.

My efforts to get their inspector general or even an intern to look into things was met with stonewalling until finally I was invited to a nice sit-down lunch at the sprawling USAID compound in Baghdad with a senior staffer and told to mind my own business, that no one would be looking into the project, things needed to move ahead, go find something else to do, there was plenty of war around for everyone. The Iraqis, too, learned a valuable lesson in American soft power: The Americans were willing to overlook outright fraud to get a nice photo-op and tick another to-do box. That kind of thing was often the case with USAID—things were designed to look good for the head office, not necessarily to benefit anyone on the ground.

I laughed out loud when I read recently how USAID funded LGBT plays and transgender comic books and the like, little woke projects packaged for Washington rather than Peru or Guatemala. USAID (and State) did the same in Iraq, only we had not discovered the fertile ground of the LGBT community then; our version of wokeness projects were aimed at women.

It was considered part of democracy-building that those women throw off their headscarves and rush out to open businesses and vote. So in parallel with USAID we magically tried to create entrepreneurs out of housewives, at least long enough for some photos, and, yes, staged a few plays about female empowerment. A special program was devised to tell Iraqi women to vote, and to vote their own opinions not those of their husbands. That might have at least been justifiable if it had worked. It didn’t; it was drawn up in a way to appeal to Washington, not the literal, real-life goat herders who populated our area.

My view of USAID in Iraq was not comprehensive, but confirming. I saw nothing that wasn’t a gross caricature of our foreign policy. The absurdities of 2015 and the goofy woke programs of 2025 are cousins.

So what happened to USAID?

The Cold War ended, is what. The organization was founded in 1961, near the height of the Cold War, as a way to fight back against the Russians in the developing world. The idea was to push American influence out past the battle lines of the military, past the diplomatic front lines, into the towns and villages of the people we were trying to affect. Similar efforts were being made by the Soviets. The idea was to make the most likely American the people would see not be a man wearing a green uniform or a cheap blue suit, but instead one providing food, medicine, and schooling for them.

But with the urgency of the Cold War behind it and the New World Order mission muddied, fringe political ideologies became the norm at USAID. The agency’s funding was corrupted, with grants going to support radicals. It became “a shadow government piggy bank for far-left causes.”

Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, knows. “While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements,” he wrote. In 2021, he said the Biden administration used the agency to prop up a communist protest movement in San Salvador to oppose his government. He released WhatsApp messages from administration officials as evidence of the meddling in his country’s democratic process.

Perhaps the best illustration of how USAID has misused its funding, the New York Post reports, is found in the Middle East:

In 2024, as the region reeled from the aftermath of the bestial atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel the previous year, the United States significantly boosted its financial support for projects in Gaza and the West Bank, spending more than $200 million of American taxpayers’ money in territories already rife with terrorist incitement and activity. The respected Israeli research organization NGO Monitor pointed out that as the U.S. government “dramatically increased funding” for these various projects, it “drastically decreased transparency.” These grants were made to what USAID called “miscellaneous foreign awardees.” You wouldn’t know from the opaque accounting process that beneficiaries included local partners who praised the October 7 onslaught.

Again, not comprehensive—it is just one more example—but confirming. There is nothing that isn’t a gross caricature of our foreign policy. The problems with USAID I saw in Iraq a decade and a half ago are the same problems it has today. This is not a hill for Democrats to die on. The agency was long overdue for a gutting, and Musk is the man to do it. Pointless “democracy initiatives” and woke comic books amounted to some $1.6 billion of USAID funding in 2023—granted, only a small portion of the agency’s $42 billion annual budget, but more than enough money to be worth reining in.

The agency in 2023 also provided more than $1.9 billion in food aid, delivered HIV treatment and maternal care, and combated malaria. America needs these kinds of soft power tools, for their own sake and to compete with growing efforts by China. These critical functions of USAID, Secretary of State Marco Rubio already indicated, will persist. Foreign aid broadly, he stressed, must be “in furtherance of and aligned with the national interest and foreign policy of the United States.” This is similar to what Warren Christopher believed, when he tried unsuccessfully to bring USAID into the State Department during the Clinton administration (so none of this is new, Democrats.) Hopefully those worthwhile programs can be continued under USAID’s new owners at State and the organization, under the control of Rubio, can get back to its real roots promoting American soft power.