When it comes to helping people in need overseas, the US has centuries of experience. In 1794, just 11 years after America won a costly war for independence, the House of Representatives passed an act to assign $15,000 from the treasury to help refugees fleeing Haiti.
Since then, the US has frequently used its considerable resources to support projects aimed at stabilising countries suffering from war, poverty and natural disasters. Perhaps the best-known example of this, the European Recovery Programme of 1948 – better known as the Marshall Plan – helped lay the foundations for Western Europe to recover from the ravages of the Second World War.
The moral and strategic importance of foreign aid was recognised by John F Kennedy when, in 1961, the president signed an executive order bringing together different aid organisations to form the US Agency for International Development, or USAID. For more than six decades, USAID has been the main instrument through which American overseas assistance was directed. And its global footprint is massive; the US supplies 40 per cent of the world’s governmental humanitarian aid.
No longer. The agency’s funding was frozen by President Donald Trump on the first day of his second term in office. Some of its senior staff have been suspended, its website is offline and Elon Musk – a key ally of Mr Trump – has said it is time for this “criminal organisation” to die. The reaction among many humanitarians, diplomats and legislators has been one of shock, with some fearful that life-saving programmes in more than 100 countries are at risk of collapsing.
The freeze is meant to last 90 days, while US officials carefully audit the agency’s activities and expenditure. But the signals coming from Mr Musk on his social media platform X suggest a resuscitation may not be on the cards.
USAID is not without its problems, and the agency has long been the subject of scrutiny from American politicians – particularly from Mr Trump’s Republican Party – in the past. In March 2017, Mr Trump issued an executive order instructing federal agencies to improve their efficiency. According to a 2019 report from the independent Government Accountability Office, although USAID undertook a process of internal reform in light of this, it had not “identified outcome-oriented performance measures for all its projects” and had failed to complete “a strategic workforce plan to ensure that it can meet the agency’s future staff needs”.
Criticism has also come from other quarters. A 2022 report from the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a European think tank, accused USAID of being an organisation that is “overly reliant on a small cadre of largely US-based contractors” and whose reform efforts “have rarely been accompanied by legislative action”.
As of 2023, USAID had more than $50 billion in federal funding available to it, employed more than 10,000 people and operated missions in more than 80 countries. Given Mr Trump’s “America first” sensibilities, it is perhaps understandable that he has taken an aggressive approach to a large federal agency whose work is often far removed from the tough, day-to-day realities of many within his voter base.
But whatever concerns exist about its bureaucracy and efficiency, pulling the rug out from underneath USAID’s many life-saving aid programmes is not a methodical or considered way to modernise what is an important expression of US foreign policy and a valuable tool for promoting American interests – among them, a safer, more prosperous world – abroad. Those close to Mr Trump might do well to reflect on how the void left by USAID’s absence might be filled. If for no other reason than this, a more strategic approach is needed. For humanitarian concerns, a long-term solution is vital.
