By abruptly shuttering the US Agency for International Development (USAID) only two weeks after returning to Washington, President Trump is signaling that he will bring accountability and efficiency to foreign aid.
In an ideal world, USAID strengthens US influence through soft power.
At just over $40 billion, USAID’s annual budget is a small fraction of the Department of Defense’s annual allocation of nearly $900 billion. This relatively small investment is intended to help save billions more in US hard power, yielding a high return on investment for taxpayers.
In principle, the agency’s efforts to advance democracy and prevent wars are laudable. Developing countries benefit from agricultural technologies, inoculation against disease, and educational development.
But, as is so often the case with social development projects, fringe political ideologies were imposed on USAID’s work by the government employees and consultants.
The agency’s funding was corrupted, with grants going to radical causes and organizations.
Perhaps the best illustration of how USAID has misused its funding is found in the Middle East.
In 2024, as the region reeled from the aftermath of the bestial atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel the previous year, the United States significantly boosted its financial support for projects in Gaza and the West Bank, spending more than $200 million of American taxpayers’ money in territories already rife with terrorist incitement and activity.
The respected Israeli research organization NGO Monitor pointed out that as the US government “dramatically increased funding” for these various projects, it “drastically decreased transparency.”
These grants were made to what USAID called “miscellaneous foreign awardees.” You wouldn’t know from the opaque accounting process that beneficiaries included local partners who praised the October 7 onslaught.
A “flash appeal” issued by the United Nations for assistance in Gaza attracted $114 million from Washington, feathering the nests of local non-governmental organizations like Al Awda, a “health and community center” with close ties to the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, designated as a terrorist organization, and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, whose president described the massacres in Israel as “a glorious day for the Palestinian resistance and people.”
Indeed, the rot had set in before 2023.
Among the 20 Palestinian NGOs that received USAID funding in 2022 was the Community Development and Continuing Education Institute, whose chairman crowed over the escape of “six of our prisoner heroes” from an Israeli jail in 2021, all of whom were later recaptured.
One of those six was Zakaria Zubeidi, a former leader of the notorious Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades who was responsible for several terrorist outrages in Israel, among them the 2002 bombing of a polling station in the Israeli town of Beit Shean in which six people were murdered.
Late last month, Zubeidi was included among the Palestinian terrorists released by Israel in exchange for Israeli hostages abducted to Gaza by Hamas on October 7.
None of this was remotely worrying for USAID’s governing bureaucracy.
Instead of heeding the August 2024 warning from its own Office of Inspector General that due diligence standards had fallen woefully short, the agency stoked false Palestinian claims that Israel was engineering a famine in Gaza, ignoring Israel’s efforts to ensure that hundreds of trucks carrying humanitarian aid crossed every day into the coastal enclave from its main Kerem Shalom crossing.
USAID has routinely parroted the talking points of terrorist organizations and bestowed America’s largesse on so-called “humanitarian” initiatives that did much the same.
It’s no wonder that the agency’s reputation became tarnished — and as far as Trump is concerned, beyond redemption.
The goal now must be to rebuild USAID so that the good work the agency has done in countries from Ukraine to the Democratic Republic of Congo can continue without the stain of associations with terror apologists and Islamist radicals in the Middle East.
Sen. Jim Risch (R-Ind.), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is right to support USAID’s incorporation into the State Department, which, he says, would “reform and restructure the agency in a way that better serves US national security interests.”
With Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the helm, the United States now has to ensure that funds continue to flow to projects and organizations engaged in humanitarian development without compromising our national interests, and without allowing hostile nations like Russia and China to exploit the temporary vacuum left by USAID’s dismantling.
Returning the agency to its primary mission will support this administration’s goal of ending wars and maintaining peace.
Mark Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ben Cohen is a senior analyst.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
