Elon Musk is right about USAID

I suspect few people outside the Washington nexus had ever heard of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, until recently.

Yet this independent agency manages a budget of nearly $50 billion, which is more than the CIA and State Department combined. Under Joe Biden, its head was Samantha Power, Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.

What do they spend the money on? It is supposed to help the United States project “soft power” by injecting US aid to needy entities around the world. But it is not really about aid. What in fact does, as the commentator Mike Benz noted, is to coordinate “clandestine operations through foreign left-wing NGOs. What it’s developing is all the activist organizations in foreign countries that the state department is building to gain influence.”

Did they fund Covid-19 research in Wuhan? Why, yes, to the tune of some $200 million, some of which went to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in China. It also has a domestic apparat. In 2019, the USAID paid $20 million to susceptible journalists to dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and, Benz writes, “use[d] that dirt as the basis to impeach” Donald Trump.

Elon Musk is on the case. “USAID is a criminal organization,” he wrote on X, involved in “rogue CIA work” and “internet censorship.” “Time for it to die,” he posted. When representatives of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DoGE) attempted to access a secure area of the USAID offices, they were turned away.

In response, Donald Trump put USAID’s head of security, John Voorhees, and his deputy on administrative leave. The DoGE representatives eventually accessed the files they had come to inspect.

For readers wishing to know more about the USAID and John Voorhees, allow me to recommend Mark Moyar’s book Masters Of Corruption: How The Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged The Trump Presidency, which I published last year at Encounter Books. Moyar, a celebrated historian of the Vietnam conflict now teaches at Hillsdale College. He was employed at the USAID during Trump’s first term. He witnessed the corruption and self-dealing first-hand and was penalized for calling it out.

You can see why foreign aid skeptics such as Rand Paul think USAID ought to be abolished. Over the last couple of days, its web site has gone dark and there are rumors that Donald Trump intends to fold its legitimate activities into the State Department. One news report noted that integration with the State Department, should Trump be successful in bringing it about, “would allow him to align foreign aid with his ‘America First’ vision.” Among other things, that would mean fewer funds to “cope with climate change and boost gender equality.” I believe that was intended as a criticism.

This is an excerpt from Roger Kimball’s column in the forthcoming March edition of The Spectator World. Subscribe here.