Trump and his DOGE goons have promised to chuck USAID into the woodchipper. Fueled by conspiracy theories, Musk has declared that the agency is “a ball of worms” and “pure evil.”
Meanwhile, the liberal media are rending their garments over the dismantling of the agency’s alleged good works. Are we to believe that these warmongering Democrats are suddenly reformed and disinterestedly wish to preserve their government’s “charitable” aid?
Schools, wells, and regime change
The US Agency for International Development was created by President Kennedy in 1961 to combat Soviet influence through the application of “soft power”—i.e., non-military force. In the imperialist equivalent of “we can do it the easy way or the hard way,” Kennedy announced, “As we do not want to send American troops to a great many areas where freedom may be under attack, we send you.”
Since then, USAID and other related institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy have sponsored schools, wells—and regime change.
John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, highlights how even the most benevolent American “aid” is really self-serving. For example, infrastructure projects after natural disasters later serve to benefit private US-owned industry.
Perkins interviewed former Peace Corps volunteers who were uneasy that their programs ultimately increased dependence on fertilizers, pesticides, and GMO crops. Despite the best intentions of the individual aid workers, they were clearly being used to prime the African market for US agribusiness giants like Monsanto.
Liberal mouthpieces are weeping about the end of American altruism. One New York Times reporter asked how all this aid benefits US interests:
If you’re looking for a justification for the investment of American taxpayer dollars, well, Zambia has a very busy mining sector. The US has a lot of mining interests there, including agreements for the electric vehicle supply chain. So I think it’s pretty clear that this [USAID-sponsored HIV treatment] was the right thing to do in human terms. It also had direct economic benefit to the United States.
The same outlet reported that families in Kenya were paid in corn for work on an irrigation project. Prohibited from purchasing local grain, American corn flooded the market, causing prices to plunge—a policy defended by congressmen whose states received hundreds of millions in agricultural subsidies.
Without a hint of self-awareness, they reported on a presidential visit to “a packing station in the [Guatemalan] village of Chirijuyú, where local farmers, with the help of an irrigation system built with assistance from USAID, now distribute produce to local businesses like McDonald’s and Walmart Central America.”
At the height of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, the US generously spent $33,304 on a grant—titled Land Redistribution Dos and Don’ts—to send an unnamed individual to “investigate” land expropriations carried out under Hugo Chavez. Another grant of nearly $50,000 was sent to an organization with the goal of building “a democratic leadership campaign.”
As NPR put it, USAID is “a $42 billion soft-power glove … to go along with the Pentagon’s nearly $900 billion hard-power fist.”
“An army of clean hands”
The imperialists’ favorite “soft” power tool is the media, which allows them to shape and reshape public opinion.
Americans have put up with years of scaremongering about foreign state-sponsored media, “Russian interference,” and the nefarious role of TikTok. When USAID’s tap was shut off, it was revealed that 90% of the Ukrainian media was state-sponsored—by the American state. Add to that the $2.3 million given to anti-government Cuban media last year, at least $10 million to right-wing media in Nicaragua over a decade, and $1.5 billion for the “Countering Russian Influence Fund.”
The list goes on. A memo obtained by Reporters Without Borders shows that USAID was stuffing the pockets of over 6,000 journalists, 707 non-state news outlets, and 279 media-related civil society organizations.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) is an international network of investigative journalists boasting “editors on all continents.” It is responsible for high-profile exposés like the Panama Papers or the Russian Laundromat. Independent reporters found that the US government provided most of OCCRP’s budget for the last decade. The bulk of that funding came from USAID, which reserved the right to veto top personnel and editorial staff.
They quote the head of OCCRP bragging about regime change and how investigative journalism gets the job done. Indeed, scandalous reports have been used to systematically trigger criminal proceedings.
One “top editor in Latin America” told the journalists: “It’s an army of ‘clean hands’ investigating outside the US … But it’s always other people’s corruption. If you’re getting paid by the US [government] to do anti-corruption work, you know that the money is going to get shut off if you bite the hand that feeds you.”
“Transition” initiatives
When soft power needs to get tough, the job falls to the ominously named “Office of Transition Initiatives” (OTI). Hidden within the bureaucratic maze of USAID, OTI’s mission statement reads like a non-profit start-up in the regime change sector—which is what it is:
To support US foreign policy objectives by helping local partners advance peace and democracy in priority countries in crisis. Seizing critical windows of opportunity, OTI works on the ground to provide fast, flexible, short-term assistance targeted at key political transition and stabilization needs.
Are Trump and Musk suddenly anti-imperialist crusaders? Certainly not. But Trump represents a wing of the ruling class that is interested in retrenching to America’s traditional sphere of influence. He also has an axe to grind. USAID is part of the “deep state” that sabotaged his plans during his first term.
The apparatus of US imperialism is a truly vile institution—but only independent working-class politics can dismantle it. Join The Communist to cut through the nauseating propaganda and anti-democratic actions of the bourgeois and their state.