The Trump administration made moves this week to eradicate the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.
USAID is the agency that provides aid to fund education and fight starvation, disease and poverty overseas. The effort is being led by Elon Musk, who has been given the title “special government employee” through his work with the Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk has been tasked with cutting down on bureaucracy and unnecessary government spending. However, critics of shutting down USAID have decried the negative impact on those in need, and pointed out that the agency is allocated less than 1% of the federal budget.
Andrew Natsios, the director of the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at Texas A&M, is also a former administrator at USAID. He said U.S. federal aid projects date back to the Marshall Plan after World War II.
“George Marshall was secretary of state under Harry Truman,” Natsios said. “When he announced the Marshall Plan at the commencement at Harvard, Stalin was taking over much of Europe and we had to stop it by announcing the reconstruction of war-torn Europe.
“And the Marshall Plan was one of the greatest success stories in aid history, as a matter of fact. Then, in the ’60s and ’70s, we focused on agriculture in Asia because there was a risk of Communist takeover in many countries in Asia.”
Post Cold War, Natsios said, USAID has focused on food production in African countries, among other things.
“The Obama administration, with support from President Bush and myself, started a big agriculture program in Africa called Feed the Future,” he said. “And they’re trying to bring the Green Revolution to Africa, and they’re beginning to succeed at that. These things, by the way, take 20 or 30 years. They don’t take two years.
“We began immunization campaigns to reduce deaths among children in particular. We ran a campaign with the Center for Disease Control to eradicate smallpox, one of the most horrendous diseases in world history that killed 300 million people in the last hundred years. We are now trying to eliminate polio. AID is the strongest, the biggest, the most powerful humanitarian response agency in the entire world. We should be proud of it.”
However, many of those projects are currently shut down under orders from the Trump administration. Natsios said that a small amount of the agency’s work gets caught up in political ideology when the presidency changes hands, but that does not represent the majority of USAID’s projects.
“When the Democrats are in power, AID moves to the left. When the Republicans are in power, it moves to the right — if you have a skilled administrator,” he said. “I started a review of all projects in AID when I took over from the Clinton administration under President [George W.] Bush. We eliminated 60 or 70 programs. We saved $50 or $60 million, as a matter of fact.
“I did it very quietly. The career people helped me do it. Both parties use USAID to encourage the culture wars, which is not very helpful, to be very frank.”
» FROM NPR: Why is the Trump administration targeting USAID?
Natsios said the new administration could have taken a similar approach and canceled programs they didn’t want to continue, rather than taking issue with the whole agency.
“The stuff that they’re complaining about is stuff from the Biden political people, not career people,” he said. “They could have eliminated all these projects in about two weeks. I could have helped them do it, but instead they made this look like that’s what the entire agency is doing. That’s utter nonsense. It’s a quarter of 1%. And they’re using those examples to bludgeon USAID.”
Some people in the Trump administration have suggested moving USAID within the Department of State, but Natsios said he feels this change would hamper the agency unnecessarily.
“If you look at when President Bush was in office, at what the State Department was doing and what the Defense Department was doing, AID was much closer to George Bush’s vision,” he said. “Secondly, the State Department controls every single dollar we spend at AID. And it has since I left, which was January of 2006. …
“And I might add, there’s another problem. Congressional earmarks. When they tell us to spend $275 million for family planning, we have to spend … if you don’t do that, you get into a huge amount of legal trouble.”
Natsios said he feels USAID is worth its budget because the work the agency does protects American interests abroad and at home.
“AID installed, over the last 30 years, a data collection system for disease around the world, with all the ministries of health. They can collect data on the beginning of any disease outbreak in the 90 countries we’re in,” he said. “You think we can control disease outbreaks at the border of the United States? The only way to control them is at the source. If you want to protect the American people from another epidemic or pandemic, you do it through AID.”
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While some conservatives have touted this cut as a way of aligning with small government ideals, Natsios pushed back.
“I am a Republican, and I am a conservative – and I’m one of the leading authorities, I might add, in the Republican Party on what AID does, because I ran the agency. I was there for nine years. I know intimate details of what they do,” he said. “And I’ve been educating students for 18 years to go there, all of whom have been fired now.”
And with the conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Natsios said this is not the time to disrupt AID efforts abroad.
“We are going back to war now. What do you think is happening in Ukraine? Whose weapons are they using? They’re using our weapons,” he said. “President Trump just sent last week a huge shipment of new weapons systems, which I support, by the way, because I think Vladimir Putin is extremely dangerous.
“And the notion that we should just ignore what’s happening in Europe is nonsense. We shouldn’t be destroying our institutions, because we’re going to need them to get the work done.”
Natsios pointed out that efforts to reduce funding to USAID in the past have not been popular, even among Republican lawmakers.
“There was an effort long before Trump was around to cut the AID budget by 50%. Rand Paul proposed this. … He got 10 votes, and 40 Republican senators voted against this motion,” he said. “So the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the Congress, particularly in the Senate, have been supportive of it from the beginning.
“The only reason that [this effort is] surviving what is happening right now is the Republicans are saying nothing. And they’re all afraid. They’re afraid of the base. The base is going to go after them because the base does what Donald Trump wants them to do.”
