When I was finishing my dissertation a decade ago, I found myself regularly explaining to friends and family what the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was, and why it was at the center of my research on US policy towards Venezuela. I had no idea that years later the little-known organization would become symbolic of the Trump-Musk alliance aimed at downsizing the federal government.
“Cold War foreign policy lay behind the initial instantiation of USAID.”
Enemies create strange bedfellows. While MAGA stalwarts have celebrated the cost savings achieved by shutting down USAID, some on the left have also celebrated its demise, arguing that it was merely a tool of US imperialism. There is something to this. Cold War foreign policy lay behind the initial instantiation of USAID. When he created the agency in 1961, President John F. Kennedy was attempting to show countries in what was then termed the Third World that a capitalist model of development would yield prosperity.
Some forget that the Soviet model of centralized state planning achieved impressive economic growth for decades, seeming to offer an example for other low-income countries looking to industrialize, electrify, and modernize. With USAID, the Kennedy administration sought to counter Soviet propaganda by showing that these goals could be achieved through a market economy, while also improving the image of the United States. In the agency’s early decades, USAID representatives sought to enhance farming, increase food production, and vaccinate populations for diseases such as smallpox and measles. These sorts of agricultural, medicinal, and humanitarian efforts comprised the bulk of USAID efforts until the 1990s.
After the Cold War, USAID came under fire, as it has recently, from members of Congress who argued it was merely doling out unearned handouts, administered by an inefficient blob back in Washington. As a result, USAID downsized, began contracting out much of its overseas efforts to private contractors and NGOs. but also developed more politically oriented and interventionist programs, to the ire of many longtime employees. One administrator who worked at USAID under the George W. Bush administration told me he had to constantly remind those working under him that the organization was not a charity, and they had to do more in the world besides “planting trees.”
In my own research and subsequent book, I examined USAID’s political programs in Venezuela during the rule of the late President Hugo Chávez, between 1999 and 2013. As became clear to me, where Washington was at odds with a government, USAID was enlisted to intervene in local politics. For instance, USAID designed sham community groups that appeared connected with the Chávez government, but which were actually designed to convince the government’s supporters to switch their loyalties to the opposition. One of the individuals who worked with these groups told me USAID designed all the materials for their gatherings and “took care of every word to give them, so it didn’t look like we were sympathizing with the opposition.” Former Ambassador William Brownfield, too, detailed these efforts in a diplomatic cable, reporting that USAID “directly reached approximately 238,000 adults … providing opportunities for opposition activists to interact with hard-core Chavistas, with the desired effect of pulling them slowly away from Chavismo.”
Later, after these efforts ultimately failed and Chávez was reelected again and again, USAID began working with a resurgent student movement, some of whose members, such as Juan Guaidó, would later spearhead the opposition. As one top USAID bureaucrat at the time told me, the “objective was that you had thousands of youth, high school, and college kids that were horrified of this Indian-looking guy in power. We wanted to help them to build a civic organization, so that they could mobilize and organize.” Over the last two decades, USAID has undertaken similar operations against left-wing governments in Cuba and Bolivia, where former president Evo Morales eventually kicked the group out of the country.
As all of this makes clear, those on the left who have pointed out the most egregious examples of USAID’s foreign intervention aren’t wrong to do so. However, this is far from the full story.
In many countries with which Washington has less hostile relations, USAID programs are far less interventionist and much more mundane in their aims. In Albania, for instance, USAID has worked with existing governments to develop and repair roads, enhance government efficiency (ironically), and help to reduce corruption as the country works towards EU membership. Elsewhere, the organization has combated HIV and other infectious diseases. To be sure, however, some of these programs have also been infiltrated by intelligence officers, such as in Pakistan, leading to some skepticism even when it comes to seemingly progressive aid programs.
But Trump supporters are fooling themselves if they believe eliminating USAID will save our country much money. On the contrary, cutting it makes a mere dent in the budget, while leaving some Americans worse off. Consider the many American farmers, engineers, and technicians who benefit from USAID contracts. There are other self-interested reasons to be wary of the agency’s disappearance. Research continually demonstrates that foreign aid enhances perceptions of America abroad. Many who are surely aware of the dismal record of US intervention abroad also appreciate these sorts of American goodwill gestures.
The United States remains the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. There is no scenario in which US foreign policy doesn’t continue to cast a large shadow. Rather than nihilistically celebrating the demise of the form of imperialism embodied by USAID, the left’s task should be to define a positive role for America in the world. Trump clearly isn’t offering a non-interventionist foreign policy—on the contrary, he is promising to revive the unabashed imperialist expansionism of the 19th century, with his sights set on Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Gaza. His opponents must recognize the errors of the past—including the interventionist uses of USAID—while considering how America can play a progressive role abroad, and how US actions might contribute to a world based on mutual respect.