More on the Potential Death of USAID
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Some more thoughts on USAID…
The mission of USAID is depressingly easy to demagogue against, as the costs (billions of dollars!) seem large and the benefits (people in Africa don’t die from AIDS) seem distant to the non-expert.
The motivating concept of USAID is that poverty and deprivation around the world are disruptive and consequently contrary to the interests of the United States, both in broad social and narrow national security terms.
Unaddressed poverty creates unrest that serves as fertile ground for violence, terrorism, and political ideologies that the United States has long found threatening and distasteful. Diseases allowed to run rampant in the developing world can find their way back to the United States.
In more narrow national security terms, the work of USAID was regarded as part of ideological competition against the Soviet Union, especially in underdeveloped parts of the world that lacked extensive commercial contacts with the United States.
Often, USAID workers were the only Americans present in remote parts of the developing world. This logic has transitioned to the era of competition with China, and some Democratic legislators have decried the shuttering of USAID as a gift to Chinese political and commercial efforts in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
Chris Blattman has a good thread on where things stand with respect to litigation and resistance.
A famous truism of politics is that most voters agree, abstractly, that the government should spend less money, but almost every specific program turns out to be popular. The big exception to this is foreign aid, which voters don’t like. Questions of process, legality, and the constitutional order matter, but they don’t really matter as much to voters as more substantive issues. So if you want to get away with something that involves an extremely dodgy process, it’s smart to start with the most substantively unpopular program you can find. The humanitarian work of USAID seems largely irrelevant to this administration. George W. Bush, for all his flaws, had a genuine interest in global public health that was motivated by a sincere idealism, and that’s just not the case for Trump or anyone influential on his team. USAID is a soft target to beat up on while testing the theory that the president can ignore the law and unilaterally kill off duly authorized programs.
At the same time, Russian propaganda has become increasingly influential on the American right, and Elon Musk has a warm relationship with the Communist Party of China. There is clearly some level of specific animus against this agency operating at an elite level.
And the elite politics are arguably the bigger deal here.
If courts force Trump to follow the law (which they should and, I think, probably will), he’s still the president and has a lot of influence over what the laws will say in the future. USAID has traditionally existed not because the mass public loves it, but because of a bipartisan elite consensus that it’s good. That consensus has involved a mishmash of do-gooders and national security hawks, and while national security hawks still wield influence in the Republican Party, their star is greatly diminished. Secretary of State Marco Rubio used to be a big proponent of USAID, until he became one of its undertakers. I have to believe that on some level, Rubio thinks that in subsuming the agency into the State Department, he can protect some of its functions. But a Senate-confirmed senior member of the cabinet currently has less influence on American foreign policy than the main owner of what Rubio previously (and accurately) identified as a “stateless corporation” in hock to foreign autocracies.
Yglesias gets at a point that I think Van Jackson and Matt Duss try to wish away; advocacy for USAID in Washington has always and ever leaned on the national security justification in order to create the coalition of Democrats and Republicans necessary to maintain the survival of a program over time. Noting that justification up front isn’t WWIII-mongering; it’s speaking to the coalition that has enabled the survival of the organization and that is in all likelihood necessary to the rescue of whatever parts can be rescued.