Let me make one thing crystal clear. I have never received one dime from USAID...and that's a massive miscarriage of justice. How can they even consider shutting this bad boy down before I'm "taken care of".
BTW...Bill, once again is sour grapes...I guess he also got zilch. What a grouch!
The Left Didn’t Always Love USAID
Until recently, the agency received criticism not only from conservatives but from leftists and centrists.
By Tom Nicholson, WSJ
Feb. 6, 2025 4:46 pm ET
Employees and supporters gather to protest outside of the U.S. Agency for International Development headquarters in Washington, Feb. 3. Photo: Gent Shkullaku/Zuma Press
The U.S. Agency for International Development is making headlines, and there seems to be a standard partisan divide on the issue. But the history of political support for or opposition to the agency is complex.
USAID today may look like a cherished agency of political progressives, but it has long faced skepticism and outright opposition from leftists and some centrist liberals. Many of the vocal left-leaning groups that today behave as though USAID is a selfless and apolitical agency would have employed a more thoughtful, multifaceted assessment in decades past.
A primary complaint has been the failure of aid dollars to reach their stated beneficiaries. Critics note that a substantial portion of “foreign aid” never leaves the U.S., instead staying within USAID or circulating among well-heeled USAID subcontractors. Many of these subcontractors later work for USAID and sustain the revolving door of self-interest. Some dollars do reach intended recipients around the world, but plenty of the funding goes to local affiliates of those same USAID subcontractors. By most assessments, less than 10% of U.S. nonmilitary foreign aid ends up with locally based organizations.
Critics on the left made these charges for decades, insisting that USAID primarily served Washington’s interests and rarely delivered on its promises. By contrast, a more-targeted program—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a global health initiative created by President George W. Bush—is widely celebrated because it is mindfully administered by the executive branch rather than run entirely through USAID’s opaque and byzantine processes.
Many critics in the New Left movement of the 1960s and ’70s also criticized USAID for some of its more nefarious actions, deeming them politically subversive and manipulative. In 1965 the New York Times reported that the level of USAID funding to India was contingent on India’s importing certain products, such as fertilizer, from U.S. companies. This was an example of so-called tied aid. Later that decade, USAID gave a Laotian general funding to start a private airline, which was involved in regional opium and heroin trades that funded Laos’s war against its communist foes.
USAID’s support for dictators has also attracted opposition. The agency generously supported many authoritarian figures and regimes—including Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Congo), the Duvaliers in Haiti, the Somoza regime in Nicaragua and the military junta in Brazil that took power in 1964.
Some economists and aid practitioners argued that USAID’s economic assistance to these countries was often paternalistic at best and destructive at worst. They accused the agency of undercutting farmers by dumping free grain in local markets in Haiti, impoverishing rural communities that were critical constituencies resisting dictatorial rule. While USAID fed hungry people, critics argued, it also sometimes fatally compromised a society’s ability to produce its own food, weakening popular resistance to authoritarian rulers.
In 2006 the U.S. spent millions of dollars through USAID to boost the popularity of the Palestinian Authority before its election against Hamas in Gaza. This was likely counterproductive. The appearance of foreign money flowing toward the Palestinian Authority may have damaged its credibility, and Hamas won the election.
In post-Soviet states, organizers of “color revolutions,” or political uprisings, have openly received hundreds of millions from USAID. Closer to home, USAID developed a social-media app in 2010 designed to encourage young Cubans to revolt against the government.
As recently as 2009, there was still an interest in improving transparency. President Obama said “the American people’s money must be spent to advance their priorities, not to line the pockets of contractors or to maintain projects that don’t work.” Today, these kinds of critiques have all but disappeared in liberal circles as the political winds have shifted.
But it isn’t only liberals. Until recently, although conservatives often criticized USAID for its lack of effectiveness and accountability, they generally considered it an effective tool for growing American soft power. They supported its efforts to stabilize regions of interest, strengthen U.S. businesses’ entry into foreign markets, and maintain foreign market share through budgetary leverage. USAID’s close working relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies and U.S.-funded armed groups was also seen as necessary to achieve these goals.
Views of the agency have changed drastically in recent years. USAID lost face with conservatives after it was revealed that the agency’s Center on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance had turned some of its focus inward and was meddling in domestic politics. In 2021 this USAID bureau published a 100-page “disinformation primer” for USAID staff and partners on how private tech and media companies can better “manage” inconvenient political speech online. This censorship makes it more palatable for civil libertarians and conservatives to shrug at GOP proposals to defund the agency and its grantees completely.
The current conservative and the older liberal critiques of USAID are both valid. This moment presents a chance to change foreign aid radically. Aid should be maintained for assisting other countries when and where needed, for maximum benefit of recipients, with a plan to hand activities over to capable local partners. Subcontractors should be properly vetted and their windfall revenues from public coffers made public. Domestic political manipulation should be forbidden.
Congress should lead the way in improving the foreign aid model, lest the deeply flawed USAID simply be reinstalled when the White House changes hands. We don’t want to end up back where we started.
Mr. Nicholson is director of Advance Access and Delivery, a global health nonprofit.
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