Editorial: By Dismantling U.S.A.I.D., Trump Helps Our Adversaries

The president is tough on China—in name only.

Donald Trump jettisoned a core tenet of American influence abroad when he shut down the United States Agency for International Development in late January. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration would review all of the agency’s expenses to ensure that they are in line with America’s goals—nothing wrong with that. Instead, however, they unilaterally paused all on-the-ground agency work, tactlessly endangering the dependent millions around the globe. Samantha Power P’27, the director of USAID under Joe Biden, spoke here one year ago.

Trump’s agency deletion raises constitutional issues: only Congress has the ability to form or dissolve agencies. What Trump decides to do if the court rules his actions unconstitutional, however, is another story. (Andrew Jackson, for example, went ahead with the removal of the Cherokee Nation in Georgia despite the fact that the Supreme Court had ruled it unconstitutional; contemporary newspaper publisher Horace Greeley distilled Jackson’s views with the famous quote, “let him enforce it.” The illegal government removal of this sovereign nation resulted in the tragic Trail of Tears.)

Backlash against USAID accumulated over right-wing social media. Recently, for example, Russian propaganda accounts spread misinformation in a viral video on X, claiming that the US agency had paid actors millions of dollars to visit Ukraine to advocate for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Musk, who owns X, reposted the video; he and others have claimed, without evidence, that USAID is a hotbed of leftist radicalism. Musk happened to run the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that seeks to cut wasteful federal spending, and thus shutting down USAID became imperative to Trump’s wrecking-ball-esque return to the White House.

The general concept of DOGE, and Rubio’s insistence that federal work align with the administration’s values, should be well-intentioned. The federal government concluded 2024 with the third-largest deficit as a percentage of G.D.P. ever recorded, according to the Tax Foundation. Regarding wasteful federal spending, the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, recorded over $100 billion in improper medicare and medicaid programs in 2023. Another factor in support of reducing government inefficiency is that a plurality of American voters supposedly expect the Trump Administration to follow through on the campaign promise of “draining the swamp” (sic), however disruptive. 

But the metaphor of the Trump Administration as a wrecking ball seems particularly apt in their unprincipled shuttering of USAID, an agency that delivers life-saving medication and nutrition to the world’s poor, but also works as front-line suasion against the dangerous foreign meddling of China and Russia. USAID distributes, among other items and services, H.I.V. medication, nutrition and food packages, contraception, and treatments for diseases like malaria and ebola. 

USAID helps war-torn regions recover: when Ms. Power came to Middlesex last year, she spoke about advancing agriculture in Ukraine. Grain exports fuel the Ukrainian economy. The agency granted loans and distributed fertilizer and seeds to help farmers continue producing crops, feeding the valiantly embattled Ukrainian people.

Another advantage to saving lives abroad for the common good is that these suffering regions view the United States as an obvious ally. That’s why chairman of the senate intelligence committee Tom Cotton and secretary of state Marco Rubio, both Republicans, have stated that USAID is central to our national interest. 

USAID embodies America’s “soft power” and underpins America’s cultural standing abroad, especially in populations vulnerable to exploitation. The alternative to US foreign support is China’s burgeoning global influence buttressed by the Belt and Road Initiative, a usurious foreign investment program started in 2013 which acts as a loan shark to the Global South. 

Indeed, Pakistan had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, due to costs associated with the Chinese-based initiative. Ghana and Zambia both defaulted due to the debts wrought by Bridge and Road. To counter China’s ambitions abroad, USAID amassed a $60 billion investment portfolio which led America’s push to use goodwill to persuade nations—especially nations in need—to join the side of the free world.

Days after Trump laid off many USAID workers, he put Rubio in charge of the agency temporarily. While Rubio reinstated some critical health and humanitarian support, the damage had been done: the network of employees, packages, and aid recipients had been irrevocably disrupted. Rubio in early February appointed Pete Marocco, an established foreign-aid skeptic, to assume long-term control over the now-skeletal agency. 

At the time of writing, thousands of agency employees have been laid off, and both the people in need of humanitarian assistance and America’s soft power stand to suffer. As Ms. Power warned in her February 6th guest essay in the New York Times, American adversaries like China—the perpetrator of Belt and Road—and Russia—the propagator of anti-USAID misinformation on social media—“celebrate their luck” at this administration’s callous willingness to harm America’s national interest. 

George Thornton