The Trump administration’s takedown of federal spending has begun in earnest with the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an independent government agency that has been funding healthcare, pro-democracy and civil society programmes around the world since 1961.
‘We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,’ Elon Musk boasted on X, describing the agency as ‘a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.’ Over the past three weeks, USAID’s leadership and staff have been gutted by furloughs, firings and disciplinary leaves, the website taken offline and – most painfully to many – funding for thousands of NGOs around the world has been suspended, leaving media outlets, anti-corruption centres and democracy activist organisations high and dry. The move has drawn howls of protest from the NGO-funded journalists and civil society activists who say they will have to shut down their investigative and campaigning activities.
‘Almost none of the information you read about Georgia would be available without independent and critical media, delivered by me and others who report on the country,’ complains Katie Shoshiashvili, a senior corruption researcher at the Tbilisi branch of Transparency International. ‘This is exactly what the [governing] regime is trying to silence.’
Shutting down USAID is ‘exactly what autocrats all over the world want,’ says Michael McFaul, who was US Ambassador to Russia when Vladimir Putin expelled USAID in 2012. ‘Their work supported free markets, democracy, human rights – [all] causes that threatened Putin’s dictatorship.’
Certainly, many avowed enemies of America have welcomed the move. ‘USAID is the antechamber of globalist Lodge,’ gloated ultra-nationalist Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who denounced the agency as ‘the core of the deep state’ and ‘where the main monster of the Swamp dwells.’
The gutting of USAID’s $50 billion annual budget has also drawn whoops of delight from those in the US and beyond who argue that the agency has been systematically funding opposition activities and media outlets around the world that would not otherwise exist. USAID programmes have been instrumental, both supporters and critics say, in inciting protests and revolutions in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Romania. Furthermore, say critics, far from being truly independent, the groups funded by Washington are actually a fifth column for US influence.
‘USAID, which is a CIA front, put $5 billion to fund those riots in 2014 in Ukraine,’ Robert F. Kennedy Jr – whose uncle, President John F. Kennedy, founded the agency in 1961 – told Tucker Carlson this week. Balázs Orbán, a close political ally of the (unrelated) Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, complained that USAID has been a source of ‘illicit foreign funding funnelled into the opposition … Couldn’t be happier that @POTUS, @JDVance & @elonmusk are finally taking down this corrupt foreign interference machine.’
But if USAID has indeed been such an effective soft-power tool, enabling the US to act as puppet master in the politics of small countries around the world, why would the Trump administration voluntarily dismantle such a powerful instrument of influence? Team Trump’s own explanation is that US foreign policy should focus on promoting US interests rather than on making the world a better place.
‘US foreign policy has long focused on other regions while overlooking our own … That ends now,’ said Senator Marco Rubio. Essentially, the shutdown of USAID marks an acknowledgment by Washington that the post-Cold War unipolar world is over – and that America is disengaging from its 80-year-old role as world policeman and arsenal of democracy. ‘There are now multiple great powers in different parts of the world,’ said Rubio. ‘The postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us.’
But there is another, more earthy component to the MAGA movement’s longstanding hatred of USAID – retaliation for the Russiagate and Ukrainegate scandals. The second impeachment of Donald Trump in the closing days of his first presidency cited investigations by an anti-corruption group funded by USAID no fewer than four times. Focusing on Trump’s alleged demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky supply compromising information on his opponent Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s business activities in Kyiv in exchange for US aid, the impeachment charges used reports by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The OCCRP received $20 million of US funding for its activities in Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and the western Balkans.
‘Why did USAID pay $20 million to hit-piece journalists to dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and use that dirt as the basis to impeach the sitting US President in 2019?’ asks former State Department cyber expert turned online freedom campaigner Mike Benz. ‘The left-liberal-centre spectrum that drove Russiagate for four years has since forgotten about it, but for MAGA Russiagate is red hot live & a great mobiliser. Reap what you sow.’
Whether Trump’s true motivations are a deeply considered geopolitical reset or a petty act of personal revenge, the demise of USAID marks a major practical and philosophical shift in US policy. America’s longstanding role as a supporter of democratic movements around the world is officially at an end.
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