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.
No one voted for Elon to be doing just about any of this, especially the way it's being done, except maybe him, Vought, Miller, Rufo and a cadre of other Project 2025 insiders.
We can't forget that Trump literally ran away from Project 2025 either, in his campaign, alternately denying knowing anything about it (like Peter), giving keynotes for the effort, and saying parts of it were unacceptable, so a large number of people likely didn't consciously vote for that.
The simplest Musk explanation is still a long held grudge over the role USAID played in helping dismantle apartheid S Africa.
A white South African born in 1971 would have watched USAID help dismantle white racial dominance throughout their teen years, including resources for anti-apartheid legal defense and supporting an independent Black press there.
That would have left an impression and grudge. Sure, call it anti DEI or whatever, but that other stuff is just noise.
“a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America"
Sounds very Putinesque to me. That's so over-the-top ridiculous you need to understand there's something else going on. What could that be? The fact that the unstated mission of USAID has been about more than humanitarian work. It's been an arm of US intelligence operations filled with CIA types who have been working till now in countries all around the world.
Try to think of a world leader -- an oligarch, say (one with a dacha on the Black Sea perhaps) -- who wanted USAID shut down. Mission accomplished.
I think this gets closer to the real reason why the agency was taken down with such extraordinary haste. Trump/Musk taking orders from the boss.
Occam's razor says bingo. Plus how important USAID soft power is in the underdeveloped world for keeping certain bad actors at bay, The link would be whoever's paying this Benz guy, feeding him disinfo, etc. Hmmm, I wonder....
I dunno, Trump's Razor* militates more in the direction that Kevin concluded: Elon Musk believed a stupid conspiracy theory, and nobody in Trumpworld either knows enough or cares enough to do otherwise.
__________
*namely, the stupidest explanation is probably correct.
That requires one to believe that Leon is much stupider than even I thought before, to believe some random obsessive on the Interwebs, who has no evidence whatever. Not that ‘really stupid Elon’ would violate a law of physics. And nothing prevents both theories being true (stupidity + Kremlin disinformation).
"That requires one to believe that Leon is much stupider than even I thought before"
Not necessarily--remember, Elongated Muskrat is a megabillionaire, which means that he doesn't have to personally care very much about a thing in order to make that thing happen/not happen. He doesn't _need_ to be careful or prudent: that's what the billions are for; and if he wasn't right all the time, how come he's so rich and how come everybody around him keeps telling him how smart and right he is?
We're like ants, trying to figure out why that lumbering giant kicked over one of our anthills, reasoning that surely he must have had some grand plan, because why would anyone go to all the trouble and expense of destroying an anthill that took so many of our resources to build?
That, and Elmo's bigger project was to hack the government by getting a handle on the payment authorization system; using that system to destroy some little agency he, the Great Elon Musk, has heard helped make covid and also is mean to poor little South Africa is not something he needed to think about very much, since it's just proof of concept.
And don't forget the likely internal feedback loop of nonsense, whereby some of his cadre, tasked with investigating USAID payments, came up with a bullshit list of incorrect numbers for incorrect things, incorrectly attributed, which then *justified* to others in the WH targeting USAID. I mean, ffs, even people on this thread seem to think (looking at you, middle) that USAID was spending money on trans operas, despite that being 100% false.
Companies managing under a billion dollars in contracts aren't considered large, and local companies wouldn't be able to procure aid are the same prices global ones - and they wouldn't be paying cheaper rates for doctors and nurses anyhow, so the whole argument is mostly facetious even before you get to the conspiracy stuff.
Most of the valuable USAID projects are quite small and local. Things like improving logistics in small parts of Africa to give farmers cheaper access to markets and ports. They can be done by local teams more cheaply and probably better. You just need Americans oversight to make sure the money isn't stolen.
Why are you intent upon finding a motivation beyond "gubmint bad" and right-wing rage at helping non-rich people? Even if you look at everything you dug up and posted, that's what's behind that, too. That's literally all there is to it.
It's no different from right-wing rage at having to pay taxes, or funding Medicaid, or funding SNAP or WIC or TANF or literally anything else that contributes to the common welfare.
“All based on a bunch of dumb conspiracy theories amplified by the richest man in the world” and all it took was an uncaring moron to be Prez. This country is so F’d…
Things like this are not conspiracy theories. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_72016922FA00001_7200
USAID should be focused on supporting America's foreign policy goals. In Serbia's case that means prising them away from Russia. Anyone who knows anything about Serbia (and I do - I did some business there back about 10 years ago) will tell you that this will do the exact opposite. Programs like this are not popular and Russian propaganda that the West will force acceptance of homosexually has been very effective in Serbia. The last thing USAID should be doing is giving proRussian groups in Serbia ammunition to support this argument.
The only reason for this kind of program is US woke ideology taking precedence over achieving actually important US objectives.
The last thing we should be doing is giving Serbia any money at all.
Yesterday at the White House as seen on Hazbin Hotel,
https://old.reddit.com/r/HazbinHotel/comments/1j0sqd0/yesterdays_events_in_the_white_house_colourized/
Congratulations America, you are now governed by what ever brainfarts two of the stupidest people on the planet have. We are so fucked.
Or is it just a story of republicans wanting to make government so small they can drown it in a bathtub? Why is it our role in the world to solve its problems?
Clearly not anymore.
It benefits the US to have whatever solution is reached to address “all the world’s problems” be one that we either chose or pushed everyone else to choose. (We often took solutions off the table that we disliked before presenting the remaining options to our “partners.”) A world in which other countries band together to choose solutions that work for them but suck for us in some way or another will be a shock for US companies and individuals used to having global solutions be catered to meet our needs and wants.
Also, fuck off Justin.
I’ve fucked off so many times I can’t feel it anymore! 😂
Thanks for your encouragement. So of course the humanitarian impulse leads to both practical and moral achievements, but they were always elitist / moralist ones. Those with more pedestrian world views were never interested. It turns out there are more of them than we anticipated.
https://youtu.be/_AMvzan3EKM?si=tAi1P2KIXTzok_wx
My cynicism has proven accurate. Join me! It’s liberating. It’s not helpful to have mercy for the enemy.
Why are we sending money to shithole countries that don't even have one Trump hotel? Maybe if they bought a few million in $Trump coins things would be different.
Mike Benz was on the Joe Rogan Experience earlier this month, so he can't be all bad. I mean, Joe though he was credible.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2272-mike-benz/id360084272?i=1000691523000
On serious note, this (from the NBC story Kevin linked to) pretty much says it all.
For Benz, funding to a scientific research nonprofit is evidence that USAID played a role in starting the pandemic. He draws that conclusion based on contributions of funding by USAID — along with the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Department and other government agencies — to the EcoHealth Alliance, in part to identify emerging infectious diseases. One organization EcoHealth worked with was the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, a potential origin point of the Covid pandemic, though scientists and authorities are divided over the lab-leak theory.
“So our U.S. tax dollars were used effectively to, in the end, kill Americans, which is insane,” Musk said of USAID in an X Space on Monday.
We’re talking here about people who are black holes of knowledge — sucking it in never to emerge again.
Mike Benz finds connections between CFR, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, deep state, the Blob, and then simply speculates. He calls the people working at those agencies hippies, which shows he's plugged into the zeitgeist.
I've never listened to Rogan before. He's an idiot. In the interview (link above) at the 36 minute mark, they discuss (and play) the clip of Biden saying Ukraine should dismiss a corrupt official or US withdraws aid. Rogan's response: "It's so crazy watching him bragging about that publicly."
Benz (53 min)
Just like the word USAID itself, that we talked about last time. It's your mind playing tricks on you, seeing "aid" but it's "agency for international development".
=-=-=-=-=
Wow! What a revelation. We've been fooled for decades by those deep state bastards.
>"Mike Benz finds connections between CFR, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, deep state, the Blob, and then simply speculates. "
You forgot Soros organizations!
I also watched Rogan the other week to specifically learnt more about Benz and was shocked how Rogan was amplifying things. Rogan went off on USAID funding Soros prosecutors in the US and he seems to have simply pulled this out of the air. Of course his fabrication then was cited around the wing-nut echosphere.
I suggest
1) Polling suggests, Americans are okay with cuts to our foreign aid.
2) Most Americans are not sophisticated: they don't get the long term benefits of foreign aid. Sometimes our politicians don't help. I believe it was then Presidential candidate John Kerry who said something like 'The US should be building new fire houses in Boston and not Iraq.'
3) There were items in the USAID budget that funded things, say transgender opera in a third world country, that are hard for most Americans to see the value back to the US.
Basically USAID is an easy target for the GOP
jfc, USAID did not fund a "transgender opera" (whatever the fuck that might be) in any country, third world or otherwise.
The state department did contribute some money ($25k) that ended up going to the US embassy in Colombia that did, through a local grant system, go towards helping the cost of producing an opera performance in Bogata that (quelle horreur!) included a trans character.
But that was the state department not the goddamn USAID so congrats, middle, you got rolled by the idiots/amateurs in the WH.
Let's be more accurate. To an opera in which the main character was trans. Effectively a trans opera.
In the same way that, say, The Barber of Seville is a "white opera."
But that's irrelevant in face of the fact that USAID had nothing to fucking do with it, and yet here you are, like an unrepentant ignoramous, citing it as an example for why illegally deleting an agency (and all the good work it does in terms of addressing starvation and disease) is Just Fine.
Your prejudices are showing.
This is dumb.
Slander is illegal, and libel is illegal.
Isn't it time that purposeful deception to corrupt the public interest became illegal?
But wait! There's more!
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/michael-benz-rising-voice-conservative-criticism-online-censorship-rcna119213
"But before his stints in government and as a pundit, Benz appears to have been a pseudonymous alt-right content creator who courted and interacted with white nationalists and posted videos espousing racist conspiracy theories, according to recordings, livestreams and blog posts reviewed by NBC News.
The pseudonym, Frame Game, posted videos and participated in podcasts and livestreams during the rise of the alt-right following Donald Trump’s election. Frame Game avoided showing his face in his videos or appearances, during which he pushed a variety of far-right narratives including the “Great Replacement Theory” that posits the white race is being eradicated in America for politics and profits. In others, Frame Game said he was a white identitarian, railed against the idea of diversity and made montages urging white viewers to unite under the banner of race.
In interviews with white nationalists, Frame Game blamed Jews for “controlling the media” and for the decline of the white race. “If you were to remove the Jewish influence on the West,” he said in one video, “white people would not face the threat of white genocide that they currently do.”
Epistemic closure. Republicans live on another planet, currently.
It's about dismantling American soft power so the Russians and the Chinese, the people for who Trump is really working, can take our place.
My wife found a report from from the Democrats on the House Committee on the Judiciary (ranking member Jamie Raskin):
FACT SHEET: TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, DOGE PUNISH AGENCIES INVESTIGATING ELON MUSK’S COMPANIES
Looks like most of the agencies that were early targets by had active investigations going on into Musk's secretive (and probably in some cases illegal) operation.
I bet a query to Rep. Raskin's office could get you a copy of the report. It's only 2 pages long...
https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2025.02.13_fact_sheet_re_musk_investigations.pdf