February 3 2025 - 11:10am
Heavy howitzer fire continues in the American Blob, as the Trump administration’s DOGE team has set about regime-changing the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. Following a day-one executive order temporarily freezing all US international aid pending a review to ensure it was consistent with the President’s “America First” policy, CNN has reported that top security officials at the agency have been put on administrative leave after refusing to comply with DOGE requests for information. At the time of writing, USAID’s website remains down.
Elon Musk has been combative in his statements, posting on X yesterday that USAID is “a criminal organization”. Trump left slightly more room for maneuver, telling Fox News that USAID is “run by radical lunatics” and that “we’re getting them out, and then we’ll make a decision.”
It’s difficult to overstate how revolutionary this is. The United States provides some 40% of the world’s humanitarian assistance, and with an annual budget of over $50 billion USAID is one of the biggest development agencies in the world. Founded by John F. Kennedy in 1961, it was intended to follow in the footsteps of the Marshall Plan by using aid to advance US foreign policy interests. It employs around 15,000 people in Washington, DC, with thousands more overseas and a great many more indirectly via grant funding.
USAID has long been criticized by the international radical Left as “a tool of U.S. capitalist and imperialist interests”. These critics claim its purpose isn’t helping foreign states on their own terms, but instead creating opportunities for American businesses, as well as funding NGOs that foment political unrest abroad in line with US interests. Russia expelled USAID in 2012, blaming its “attempts to influence political processes through its grants”. And China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accuses US international development practice of “using aid as a bargaining chip” to compel political and economic changes overseas in America’s interest.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally, echoed this critique yesterday. He declared that most governments don’t want USAID money flowing into their country because while “marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights”, most of the money received is “funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements”.
Much Western reporting on the freeze focused on famine relief and other humanitarian projects. However, some reports tacitly acknowledged the aspect of USAID critiqued by Bukele and others. In Moldova, for example, ABC reported that “pro-democracy groups, independent media, civil society initiatives and local governments” are now “scrambling to make ends meet”. In other words: liberal political activists funded by American “development” money have been abruptly exposed.
It seems, then, that Trump is now doing within USAID what USAID-funded groups do abroad: using politically aligned funding and personnel changes to transform the body’s overall political orientation. But why would the “America First” President be at war with a body which critics accuse of always prioritizing the US?
Really, Trump is regime-changing USAID in response to profound intra-elite domestic disagreement over what it means to put America first. USAID has hitherto operated on a broadly shared consensus in this respect: open markets, business-friendly regulations, and democratic regimes. In other words: the America-led globalization that has formed the backdrop to all of international politics and economics since the end of the Cold War. Now, though, this program is being contested not just outside “the West” but within it. It’s not yet entirely clear what “America First” will mean in practice, but Trump has evidently concluded that unless he radically reforms America’s principal vehicle for overseas soft power, it won’t mean anything at all.
It’s a reasonable bet that, notwithstanding Musk’s declaration that it’s “time for it to die”, USAID — or at least something broadly resembling it — will survive the 90-day freeze and personnel shake-up. “The smiling face of imperialism” is surely too potent a tool to discard entirely. But if Trump’s internal color revolution succeeds, the values and people that order this institution will surely march to a different drum for much longer than the next four years.
There is a lesson here for the British Right. The recently-departed Tory regime whined endlessly about “the Blob”, without ever so much as lifting a finger to change any of its entrenched personnel, institutions, or regulatory structures. Any prospective Right-wing administration in Britain should be studying the Trumpian approach to regime change closely, and working on equivalent plans.
