Parsing the USAID Shutdown
Terry H. Schwadron
Feb. 8, 2025
As is well understood by now, the Trump administration is dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — pending a court hearing — dismissing thousands, canceling foreign aid programs for the world’s poorest, and likely inviting foes like China and Russia to step in to offer replacements.
We understand that the shutdown violates the laws by which Congress has set up and financed the semi-independent agency, that the effort has been led by Elon Musk, who’s on an unchecked tear to cut federal spending, that Donald Trump has given his approval and then left the effects to drift.
We even get that the employee unions have sued for a halt to the dismissals, and that any court hearing likely will be too late to affect whether starving people in Sudan will get emergency food supplies or whether unexploded land mines are removed in Cambodia. A federal judge issued a temporary stay in the dismissals until a hearing can be set.
What we still do not understand in any substantive way is what programs this administration finds so offensive as to justify Musk’s claim that the agency “must die” or Trump adding that the agency was riddled with “corruption” without spelling it out. Specific programs or reflections of “liberal” policy aside, we also don’t understand why the logic of paying $40 billion a year, less than 1 percent of budget, to keep communicable diseases like Ebola away from our shores and contact that helps collect intelligence for us reflect non-partisan goals that all political parties should find helpful.
In other words, this time we get the politics, while actual meat of the problem seems secondary. “President Trump is taking a sledgehammer to a bedrock of U.S. foreign policy, ripping up decades of “soft power” in favor of a highly personalized, transactional, coercive style of dealmaking, said Axios. “A ‘Special Government Employee’ wealthy beyond the dreams of Croesus, chose as his first target the poorest and most vulnerable people on Earth,” said The Bulwark.
What Did USAID Do Wrong?
From many accounts, it seems that Team Trump decided that few Americans would care about cutting foreign aid and might just cheer it as an expression of America First campaign promises. Foreign aid polls poorly, the Bulwalk noted, adding that polls show people believe we spend upwards of 25 percent of federal budgets on such payments rather than less than 1 percent.
But the money we spend largely goes to U.S. farmers, notes The Washington Post. The shutdown is spawning thousands of calls to Congress not because of illegality alone but because farms are losing their markets — a little over 40 percent of the USAID agency food budget, or about $2 billion worth.
The legal issue here revolves around the fact that the administration could have simply gone through Congress, but this was seen as a political play rather than a debate over substance. Indeed, when Secretary of State Mario Rubio was called on to defend it, his issue with USAID was about “insubordination” by agency officials who did not immediately snap to attention when asked to produce spending records. Unions representing workers have sued the administration, calling dismissals of 10,000 workers and contractors “unconstitutional and illegal” and demanding restoration of operations.
Musk’s capture of computer spending reports turned up money spent on premium subscriptions to the Politico.com website, and that has been enough to set off Fox News anchors and MAGA complaints. Trump described it not as subscriptions but wholesale support for a news agency whose articles he finds insufficiently flattering. “The money for Politico is a huge scandal.” Jesse Watters alleged on The Five.
Media Matters dissected the flap over Politico, which offers both a free website on inside the Beltway reporting and a paid Politico Pro service that includes legislative and regulatory tracking tools that insiders find helpful. “There’s a reasonable argument to be had about whether Politico’s products are worth this level of expenditure by the federal government. But there are apparently plenty of institutions and individuals outside of U.S. agencies willing to shell out for them — including Republican members of Congress.”
Is that it?
Here’s what the White House has offered as reason to shut the agency. For decades, USAID “has 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.” Fox reported that, according to a White House list, USAID allocated millions of dollars for programs the Trump administration considers controversial and that frequently involved diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives launched during the Biden administration.”
The White House quoted news reports — not audits or examined programs — to say there was a $1.5 million program to “advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities” and a $70,000 program for a “DEI musical” in Ireland. Initiatives that supported LGBTQ programs were also flagged, including $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia, $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru and $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala. The White House also said USAID funded coronavirus research, support for contraceptive initiatives, $20 million for a “new Sesame Street show in Iraq,” and $1.5 million and $5.5 million to promote LGBTQ+ advocacy in Jamaica and Uganda, two countries where members of the LGBTQ+ community have few legal rights.
The Washington Post fact-checker looked at the list and concluded that some were small, at least one, the opera, was a State Department program rather than an USAID project, Others, including the musical, the comic book, the Guatemalan health project, and tourism in Egypt were incorrectly described or assumed to be USAID programs.
Left unanswered is why the incoming administration couldn’t just audit the programs and weeded out what it felt was inappropriate. Instead, they chopped down a program that arguably should be seen as part of national security in its broadest sense, and they did so in a manner that was brusque, interruptive, and likely illegal.
What’s Being Lost?
The Bulwark’s take is that “ by abruptly pulling the plug, the world’s greatest humanitarian country has become one of its least, raising a huge middle finger to those facing hunger, disease, war, and oppression.”
Those who benefit from the assistance have been left in the lurch, including people on the verge of starvation in Yemen, AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa, people clearing landmines in Cambodia, medical workers treating people with malaria, cholera, and measles in Sudan. and those providing medicine, housing, food, and other assistance to Ukraine, among millions of others worldwide
The sorts of programs Republicans have identified are dwarfed by aid agencies like the World Food Program, UNICEF and nongovernmental agencies like Save the Children. The most expensive grants issued by USAID deal with issues like improving health care and economic development rather than advancing diversity programs, according to a review of contracts issued by the agency in 2024. Some may continue to operate under the State Department.
USAID handed out more than 6,000 contracts in FY2024. The largest was a $6 billion grant to development firm Chemonics International to work on combating HIV/AIDS under a program pushed by George W. Bush. It also received $2.5 billion related to malaria. Pfizer was also a top recipient, receiving $4 billion for international COVID-19 vaccine development. HIV patients in Haiti showed up to find local offices shut. Catholic Relief Services reports its works in 122 countries have been gutted.
Clearly, as Samantha Powers, former USAID administrator and UN ambassador argued in a New York Times op-ed, the bigger picture here is that by helping with aid, we forestall disease and limit desperate migrations to the United States, and invest in the kind of positive image this country has sought to reflect.
USAID “has generated vast stores of political capital in the more than 100 countries where it works, making it more likely that when the United States makes hard requests of their leaders — for example, to send peacekeepers to a war zone, to help a U.S. company enter a new market, or to extradite a criminal to the United States — that they say yes.”
Decisions about which programs are being cut are expected to be made by the end of March. The obvious question is why we couldn’t wait a month to look at the programs rather than the dollars and mentions of DEI alone.
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