In its initial incarnation USAID was a Cold War agency designed to help poor countries, but also to ensure that the United States was very visibly the one doing the helping. This focus produced both considerable efficiency and bipartisan support.
When the Cold War ended, USAID lost some of its support, especially among conservative Republicans. As a result, in addition to shrinking, it was forced to adopt "private sector reforms" that compelled it to do most of its contracting with big American NGOs, who then disbursed funds and generally ran the show. This may have been well meant, but it bloated costs because USAID paid its US contractors at US rates instead of paying local organizations at lower local rates. USAID also lost a lot of its insights into local conditions on the ground.
As you'd expect, this produced a carousel of reform proposals, as one decade's fashions ("private-public partnerships") ceded to another's. This is from 2021:
USAID spends so inefficiently because every year the agency needs to move more than $20 billion to projects worldwide. It has become dependent on funneling hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, of dollars to mammoth government contractors. In fiscal year 2017, for instance, 60 percent of agency funding went to just 25 organizations.
To right the ship, USAID needs a procurement renaissance. It must break its dependence on large and inefficient government contractors, increase its use of pay-for-results programs, and scale up initiatives that make it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises and organizations based in low- and middle-income countries to do business with the world’s largest development agency. Smaller organizations are far nimbler than juggernaut contractors. And local organizations have intimate familiarity with the issues that need solving and have a more direct stake in producing good outcomes.
None of this has really happened and USAID has remained dependent mostly on big US partners. That said, these criticisms, which come from both Republicans and Democrats, are relatively mild and technocratic. No one wanted to burn USAID to the ground. So what happened? The answer is largely DEI and climate change. Here is Project 2025:
The Administration has incorporated its radical climate policy into every USAID initiative. It has joined or funded international partnerships dedicated to advancing the aims of the Paris Climate Agreement and has supported the idea of giving trillions of dollars more in aid transfers for “climate reparations.”
....USAID installed advisers on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committees “in all its Bureaus, Offices, and [overseas] Missions”.... A Chief DEI Officer oversees this DEI infrastructure and sits in the Administrator’s office. DEI directives are now part of all agency policies....The upshot has been to racialize the agency and create a hostile work environment for anyone who disagrees with the Biden Administration’s identity politics.
But still, this suggests only going after USAID's DEI and climate change offices, not taking a blowtorch to the whole agency. So again, what happened?
The answer, when you finally reach the dark core, is a conspiracy theorist named Mike Benz, who suddenly decided in 2022 that USAID was a criminal organization:
According to Benz’s posts, USAID’s crimes are plenty, and they go straight to the top, accusations he lobs in rapid speeches filled with acronyms and hyperbole.
Benz paints a federal grant to a journalism outfit as proof USAID funded the 2019 impeachment of Trump.... Funding to a scientific research nonprofit is evidence that USAID played a role in starting the pandemic.... Benz also cites unspecified “source docs” as substantiation that USAID was censoring social media. From former President Barack Obama to the Bush family, “they’re all in on it,” he told a Newsmax host Tuesday.
But even this wouldn't have been enough except for one thing: Two weeks after Trump's inauguration Elon Musk, as he does, suddenly became obsessed with Benz and other USAID haters:
[Musk] described USAID, the foreign humanitarian assistance agency, as “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” “evil” and “a criminal organization.” “Time for it to die,” Musk posted.
....Most of Musk’s more than 160 posts about USAID have been responses to a handful of small but influential verified accounts, many of them using pseudonyms. The most popular...have been viewed hundreds of millions of times, amplified by Musk and his 216 million followers, according to X metrics. As the theories spread, they are repackaged, and in many cases added upon, to further the claims.
From there it went straight to President Trump and the rest is history. DEI wasn't enough. The entire agency had to be eliminated completely. All based on a bunch of dumb conspiracy theories amplified by the richest man in the world.
