United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is a government agency that helps in and advances the United States’s interests in foreign affairs. According to the Trump administration and the Department of Governmental Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, the agency has been overtaken by waste and abuse. The agency’s funding was frozen by the U.S. State Department on Jan. 25th.
The Trump administration believes that USAID has been used as a slush fund to promote left wing political programs in foreign countries. The Trump White House posted a fact sheet on Feb. 3 listing some examples of this abuse. The list includes items like “$2 million for sex changes and ‘LGBT activism’ in Guatemala” and “$32,000 for a ‘transgender comic book’ in Peru.”
One of the first claims to come out of the audit of USAID was an alleged shipment of $50 million of condoms to Gaza. This claim was found to be false, however, when it was revealed that the shipment was to Gaza in Mozambique, not the Gaza Strip in Palestine. When asked about this during a press conference, Musk responded, saying, “I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million of condoms anywhere. That’s really an enormously large amount of condoms.”
The response from opponents of Trump and Musk’s slashing of USAID spending and programs has been to ask why these expenditures are of concern, given how small of a portion of the budget they account for. The response has been that these funding cuts do still save a small (relative to the U.S. budget) amount of money. Some critics say that it is an ideological matter to remove left-wing expenditures from the federal government.
A more recent controversy of a different nature, surrounding USAID was the death of Pe Kha Lau, who died in a hospital in Thailand after her oxygen was cut off due to the funding freeze. Opinions on this were divided, with some feeling outrage that a woman died, while others questioned why the U.S. government had a role in supplying oxygen to hospitals in foreign countries.
This story leads to a different debate regarding foreign aid, which is what should be done in cases where the goal being achieved is uncontroversial on its own. The true debate regarding these scenarios is the role of the U.S. government to have a presence in other countries at all. Questions have been raised about creating dependency; the ethics of using tax money for things that, while good, do not directly benefit the taxpayer; and many more such quandaries.
The USAID controversy has brought issues of foreign policy as it relates to aid, rather than just war and diplomacy, to the forefront of American politics. It is important to know that foreign aid is much more complicated than the United States’s involvement in middle eastern wars and the like.
The USAID audit is still ongoing, and more information becomes available every day. Much of it is contradictory, which shows the complicated nature the federal government, and the difficulty of understanding or changing its inner workings.
