USAID: Beware of Yanks bearing gifts

What’s hard to keep in mind these days is that just because Donald Trump and Elon Musk are trying to destroy some entity doesn’t automatically make that entity beneficial to humanity. That’s independent of the Musk/Trump reasons, which are never to benefit anyone but a handful of multibillionaires and mainly themselves.

A case in point is the White House’s attack on the U.S. Agency for International Development or USAID. In the course of the first week of February, the administration announced it would shut down the department and placed nearly all of its 13,000 workers worldwide on leave. By Feb. 8, a judge had issued an order blocking the president’s executive order, which the Musk/Trump cabal is flouting.

While on paper the judge should have stopped the shutdown, the illegal and unconstitutional attack on USAID continues as of Feb. 10. It is part of the executive’s maneuvers to seize all elements of the state apparatus or dismantle government departments that partially aid the working class. 

The question remains, what is USAID and what does it do? A look at its history eliminates the illusion that it is some sort of humanitarian foundation.

Founded in 1961

USAID was founded under John F. Kennedy’s administration in 1961. Before that time, various departments of the U.S. government — the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon and others — each funded different aspects of U.S. foreign aid, much of which was military aid. Kennedy said his administration was creating USAID to get most of those aid programs under one organization and coordinate them.

There should be no confusion about the goal of U.S. foreign aid or of USAID. Whether it is efficient or effective or not, whether it’s medical aid or military aid, its goal is to further the interests of U.S. imperialism in the world. For the past few years, USAID has dispensed between $50 billion and $70 billion annually — less than 1% of the federal budget. About 10% of this is military aid. Other U.S. departments dispense a little more than half the total U.S. foreign aid. 

David Baldwin, a foreign policy expert, when he was a research fellow for the Brookings Institution wrote the book “Foreign Aid and American Foreign Policy: A Documentary Analysis.” (New York: Frederick A Praeger, 1966)

He wrote in it that, “ … foreign aid is first and foremost a technique of statecraft. It is, in other words, a means by which one nation tries to get other nations to act in desired ways.” 

Thus, when USAID funds a program of humanitarian aid, such as delivering medicine to control HIV to a country in Africa that otherwise couldn’t afford it, it does so with the goal of building business contacts in that country, making it dependent on keeping good relations with the U.S., enabling intervention in critical moments, etc.

In addition, the trade programs of USAID have turned into a major support for exported goods from the U.S. “In a recent year, for example, from 20% to 33% of foreign sales of locomotives, fertilizer and iron and steel were paid for with dollars made available by aid programs.” (From a review of Baldwin’s book in the Dartmouth Alumni magazine from 1967) 

While this book was written almost 60 years ago, the foreign aid program’s goals have changed little. Then foreign aid was a much larger part of the national budget than it is today, especially non-military foreign aid.

While USAID was created by Kennedy’s executive order in 1961, in 1998 Congress passed a law that made it a department independent of the State Department. In the following years, USAID provided an example of how U.S. imperialism combined hard power (a U.S.-NATO 78-day bombing war against what was left of Yugoslavia in 1999) with soft power to restore capitalism to the Balkans with a vengeance.

Intervention in Yugoslavia

USAID intervened in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia when, after the Slobodan Milosevic government of Yugoslavia was overthrown and Montenegro split from Serbia, it announced it would undertake “assistance programs to support economic reform and restructuring the economy … to advance Montenegro toward a free market economy.” (Gregory Elich, “The CIA’s Covert War,” Covert Action Quarterly, Apr.-Jun., 2001)

USAID ran and runs programs throughout the world. Some of them provided and provide important humanitarian aid. Their abrupt closing may cost millions of lives. But they were created to expand the control of U.S. imperialism, and they have been used in many more instances than discussed in this article to change regimes in a reactionary direction.