Why USAID Has Been Gutted
Trump and DOGE unmasked “tremendous fraud” that is costing taxpayers tons of money.
Just a few days ago, the Trump administration, via DOGE, unmasked some serious waste at USAID. At the same time, many American taxpayers learned there was something called USAID.
President John F. Kennedy created the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1961, tasking it with overseeing humanitarian aid worldwide. Who doesn’t love humanitarian assistance?
Well, it turns out that when you allocate a huge pot of money to do-gooders, some of them become con artists, hucksters, and thieves who use that money as a slush fund for their pet causes.
As our Emmy Griffen detailed on Tuesday, USAID was rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. We’ve learned even more since then, including USAID money funding a slew of Leftmedia outlets. If you thought NPR and PBS were the only ones on the federal dole, you thought wrong. On Thursday, President Donald Trump ordered every one of those media contracts canceled.
He called USAID a “tremendous fraud.” In a statement, the White House said it had been “unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.” Those include things like $2.5 million for EVs in Vietnam and $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala.
Trump used Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to expose all this and turn off the spigot. Trump put Secretary of State Marco Rubio in charge of the agency with the objective of cleaning house.
Just as money can turn good people bad, exposing the rot can provoke some angry reactions. It’s like the demotivational poster about consulting: “If you’re not a part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”
See also: Democrats’ coordinated caterwauling about DOGE and its “unelected billionaire” leader.
On Thursday, the Trump administration brought a whole new meaning to cleaning house, saying it will cancel roughly 800 contracts and awards, as well as reduce the number of USAID workers from more than 10,000 to just 294. What’s left of the operation will be folded into the State Department.
Yeah, read that again.
When you cut government bloat like that, the people who benefit from the grift fight back. In a matter of hours, the American Federation of Government Employees — the nation’s largest public union — and the American Foreign Service Association filed suit in hopes of blocking Trump’s “unconstitutional and illegal actions,” which they absurdly claim “generated a global humanitarian crisis.”
Rubio argued that “we have rank insubordination” among USAID employees. They’ve been “completely uncooperative, so we had no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control.”
Those dramatic steps can cause upheaval for some who work hard and don’t deserve to be ousted. On a personal level, I have some compassion for folks who just show up to work every day and suddenly have to make arrangements to move from overseas to the States and figure out a new life. Among 10,000 people, there will be some — maybe quite a few — good ones who are collateral damage.
Yet when an agency and system are so thoroughly corrupted, it’s hard to imagine what more delicate approach would actually solve the problem — and it is a problem.
“Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government,” James Madison told the House of Representatives in 1794 during a debate over a humanitarian crisis involving Haitian refugees coming to New England. Should Congress allocate $15,000 to help them? Clearly not, argued the man who wrote the Constitution.
That was here in the U.S. Never mind doling out exponentially more money to other nations. Oh, but foreign aid makes up less than 1% of the federal budget, the Leftmedia reassures us. Well, as DOGE put it recently, “The last time a comprehensive review of the federal government was completed in 1984, the budget was $848 billion, national debt was $1.6 trillion & debt to GDP ratio was 38%. The budget is now $7 trillion, the national debt is $35.3 trillion & the debt to GDP ratio is 121.6%.”
Gotta start somewhere.
I’m not arguing that humanitarian needs aren’t real or don’t require money. Madison wasn’t arguing that either. At the same time, most Americans work darn hard for our paychecks, and before those checks even hit our bank accounts, the federal government has taken its cut. It’s well past time for some accountability on how every last cent is spent.
