Volcanoes are erupting in The Philippines, but on-fire Australia received some welcome rain. The Iran war cries have been called off and The Donald’s military powers are about to be hamstrung by the Senate. Meanwhile, his impeachment trial is starting, and we’re all on Twitter for a front-row seat.
What Could Go Right? What USAID Does
One percent of the federal budget saves tens of thousands of lives yearly.
Emma Varvaloucas
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What USAID Does
President Donald Trump’s day-one executive order to halt all foreign aid funding has turned into a fight over the future of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), throwing programs such as those that provide HIV medication or famine assistance into disarray.
While Elon Musk has declared that the agency is a “criminal organization” that has reached its time to “die,” as he wrote on X, Trump seems likely to try to fold it into the State Department, mimicking what the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have done in their own governments. The US last tried to do the same in the 1990s, an attempt led by a Republican-held Senate and then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, under President Bill Clinton. Either option—closing or subsuming the agency—would require Congressional approval, although such legal requirements have not slowed down Trump on anything else yet. On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was appointed USAID’s acting administrator, another legally dubious move.
Meanwhile, disruption to the agency has been building throughout the week, culminating with an announcement on the USAID government website that as of tomorrow, all direct hire personnel “will be placed on administrative leave globally,” with certain exceptions for mission-critical functions and leadership. Sixty senior leaders, as well as hundreds of independent contractors, had already been placed on administrative leave earlier in the week.
The agency has been gutted down to its walls: the odd, disrespectful decision to remove plaques honoring murdered USAID workers has infuriated many (including one former USAID director, a Republican), and even decorative photos have been taken down.
The capricious and chaotic manner of the shutdown is both a serious legal issue and literally threatens lives abroad. Those in the international aid world are worried that programs that have already closed up shop due to the funding freeze will never open back up again, even if funding resumes, and representatives of aid programs currently exempted from the freeze under Secretary Rubio’s “life-saving humanitarian assistance” waiver say that the money isn’t actually flowing or that they can’t apply for the waiver in the first place, because no one at the agency is responding.
The theory that Trump is using USAID as a test case for how to dismantle other government agencies is also alarming. But there is a third matter at stake here, and that is the guiding argument behind bringing USAID under the purview of the State Department.
Trump’s Aid Realignment
The administration, as Ari Weitzman writes in the newsletter Tangle, is not wrong “to scrutinize whether USAID’s funding mechanisms are efficient or proper.” USAID’s budget—$43 billion in 2023—covers humanitarian assistance but also military aid, such as to Ukraine, Egypt, and Israel. Criticism from both the right and the left has pointed out that USAID dollars have also gone to interventionist activities in which the US meddles with foreign elections or tries to foment internal dissent in other countries. As taxpayers, we should know about where our dollars are going and why, and be able to have a say in those matters.
But the Trump administration believes that the US should not be doling out foreign aid at all unless it advances US interests. (Trump himself went further recently, suggesting a give-to-get policy for military aid to Ukraine.) Expounding on this perspective, Weitzman goes on to say in his article:
If the United States government is going to be in the philanthropy business, it should be directing its funds strategically. That isn’t to say that fighting AIDS in Africa isn’t important or moral or even flat-out beneficial to the entire globe—of course it is—but why is that the job of the US government? To be incredibly blunt, why should the US subsidize the health of countries that align with Russia? If we as citizens want to spend billions of dollars on philanthropy, we can do so on our own rather than outsourcing our charity to the government.
Perhaps that perspective is sensical, politically speaking. It is one that is not unpopular with Americans, who by and large seem sympathetic to the idea that, even though USAID’s spending represents less than one percent of the federal budget, we should focus on the issues facing us here at home and not the ones facing those in faraway countries. Nevertheless, I think we have a moral duty to oppose it, both on humanitarian grounds, and from an understanding that much of the progress we write about in this newsletter is directly tied to USAID activities.
Americans Directly Fund Progress
Consider just a short list of what USAID does and has accomplished. USAID:
- Works in concert with foreign governments to track and stop viral outbreaks worldwide, such as a current Ebola-like one in Bolivia that has not been contained amid the pullout of USAID officials
- Provides food assistance to 60 million people every year. Progress Network member Charles Kenny writes here that a USAID-funded system even predicts food shortages in advance, so assistance can flow before people begin to die.
- Saves over 50,000 lives from malaria every year, as calculated by Vox
- Has saved an estimated 26 million lives from HIV/AIDS through the PEPFAR program, which distributes antiretroviral drugs to more than 50 countries
- Sends medical treatment, including emergency obstetric services for women, as well as blankets, household goods, hygiene kits, and water treatment supplies to people displaced by war, such as in Yemen and Gaza
You could argue for continuing some of these programs from a strategic perspective easily. It’s of concern to US citizens to monitor viral outbreaks for obvious reasons, for instance. But I also think that we should make the argument, unabashedly, that the US government should be in the philanthropy business, whether it aligns with our interests or not.
To use Weitzman’s phrasing, we should subsidize the health of countries that align with Russia because condemning the citizens of a nation to malnutrition, disease, or early death because of the decisions of their government is morally repugnant. We should subsidize it because we are the world’s richest country, and because it has made a difference, and because many of the issues we are looking to solve at home are not ones that can be solved simply through reappropriating those funds. (Improving American healthcare, for example, is not a matter of cutting an enormous check, as much as we would like it to be.) There is also no guarantee, as the writer Scott Alexander points out, that funds transferred away from USAID will go to a domestic government program that is effective.
Take a look at USAID’s 2024 contribution to address food insecurity in Sudan, where we donated 81,000 metric tons of surplus food commodities from American farmers. Yes, it takes money to purchase, ship, and distribute that surplus. But would we really rather let it go to waste? The head of one aid group in Sudan told The Atlantic that with the current funding freeze, they can keep their efforts to treat severely starving children and babies going for a few more days. After that, many of them “will die in two to six hours.”
America is the giant whale of international aid, accounting for 42 percent of all global humanitarian aid contributions in 2024. Perhaps other countries should be stepping up to the plate. But most can’t, or don’t, and even under a best-case outcome for the agency, it’s likely that USAID’s activities will be significantly curtailed.
The White House has listed a few programs, some of them old, as examples of “waste and abuse.” They are neither, but if Americans disagree with their purpose, those programs could be easily trimmed, saving what amounts to less than a penny of the entire federal budget. Sure, save that penny. But putting the entirety of USAID on the chopping block has already created enormous damage and will only create more, even if a stripped-down version of it starts running again.
The American people should be “immensely proud,” Kenny said in his piece for the Center for Global Development, that we have helped turn the tide globally against famine and disease. To give our government the green light to turn our backs on this hard-won progress would be a moral disgrace.
Updates and Further Reading
- Ezra Klein of The New York Times argues that Trump is much less powerful than he wants you to believe.
- Last week’s edition highlighted the court cases currently filed against the Trump administration’s unprecedented maneuvers, including its freeze on federal funding. On Monday, two federal judges ordered that the funding be unfrozen while cases proceed. However, the administration has so far been unresponsive.
- Political scientist Francis Fukuyama elucidates why Trump’s “Schedule F” order, which reclassifies civil servants as at-will employees who can be fired without cause, is not the reform to bureaucratic bloat some think the government needs.
- Reporter Jessica Yellin has published another excellent interview with a law expert, this time about whether Elon Musk’s actions on behalf of the new government department DOGE are legal.
By the Numbers
6: The number of US states that have enacted a phone-free school policy. Nine states have launched pilot programs or have taken other action toward a statewide policy, and 23 others have one under consideration.
74: The percentage of Americans (82% of Democrats, 73% of Republicans, and 71% of Independents) who believe that Trump should always follow the Constitution, even if it limits what he can get done.
90: The share of the global population in range of a 4G network, up from 44% in 2015.
Quick Hits
In asteroid-related news, a building-sized one has a small chance of hitting Earth in 2032; luckily, the International Asteroid Warning Network—a real group affiliated with the United Nations—is tracking the space rock, and another group is at the ready to prepare a proposal, if necessary, for how to deflect it. And, some surprising specimens from the asteroid Bennu, collected as part of a NASA program that launched in 2016, have scientists scrambling to review their theories about how life first began on Earth.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved a new type of non-opioid painkiller, Journavx, that can be used post-surgery to cut down on pain. The drug is billed as nonaddictive, and lands somewhere between Tylenol and an opioid prescription as far as pain relief.
The Trump administration has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, but an alliance of governors from 24 states and territories will continue working with the international community on meeting climate targets.
New Jersey has passed legislation mandating the statewide tracking of rape kits, in order to reduce a backlog of untested evidence and to provide more transparency to victims. Only nine states do not have such a system already in place.
Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire are closing in on universal electricity access. About three-fifths of the $90 billion needed to bring electricity to the 600 million people in Africa who remain without it has been raised by global funders.
Research has proved for the first time that the autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis is triggered by a virus—a common type of herpes—potentially creating new pathways for its treatment.
Scientists have used artificial intelligence, along with a 3D printer, to create nanomaterials “as light as foam but as strong as steel.” They hope that the new material design could one day be used in airplanes, helicopters, and spacecraft.
What we’re watching: Syria’s new interim president expects that it will take three to four years to hold elections and rewrite the nation’s recently scrapped constitution. Meanwhile, archaeologists are hoping that the new regime will be open to cultural heritage reconstruction efforts. Many sites and objects had been damaged or stolen during the years of civil war.
Editor’s pick: Vaccines do not cause autism. But how do we know that? STAT News lays out the science for the skeptical and the curious.
TPN Member Originals
(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)
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