USAID’s Disturbing Decades of Foreign Adventurism

What’s happening

The Trump administration is engaging in a comprehensive effort to eliminate the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). President Donald Trump attacked the organization as “run by a bunch of radical lunatics” and directed his Director of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, to put his microscope over the agency’s $40 billion operations.

The White House released a list of some of the agency’s most inane projects, like funding “$32,000 for a ‘transgender comic book’ in Peru” and “$2 million for sex changes and ‘LGBT activism’ in Guatemala.”

These just scratch the surface of what USAID has funded over the years. Since its inception, this agency has spent billions of American taxpayer dollars not just on humanitarian assistance, as advertised, but fomenting foreign insurrections and spreading American soft power to every corner of the globe.

A CIA front

In the early 1960s, Congress directed the president to establish an agency overseeing America’s foreign aid. President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order doing so, creating USAID. The law and executive order, written in the midst of the Cold War, were designed to help the United States oppose “communist domination” of the world.

Shortly after USAID’s creation, Kennedy added the USAID administrator to a special counter-insurgency group. From then on, USAID distributed food, medicines, and other life-saving equipment around the world.

However, the agency was also used as a CIA front.

In the early 1970s, USAID’s “Office of Public Safety” worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to train “foreign police/security personnel” in counter-intelligence and helped right-wing South American forces keep leftists from taking power — or even overthrow leftist regimes.

These are just the beginning of USAID’s decades of international adventurism. Now, Republicans in the White House and Congress are revealing the agency’s unsettling history and ending its years of rogue projects — including funding America’s enemies.

Funding Hamas

In October of last year, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) issued a letter to then-USAID Director Samantha Power where he warned of the “likely misuse of more than one billion dollars in US humanitarian aid sent to Gaza since October 2023.” 

Before and after October 7, USAID sent hundreds of millions of dollars to groups enabling Hamas to launch and sustain attacks on Israel. They misrepresented this aid in public records, failed to disclose the recipients, and sent tens of millions in American funds without proper oversight.

According to US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), USAID internally acknowledged that the aid would benefit Hamas, though denied it publicly, and exempted themselves from anti-terrorism laws.

USAID’s funding of Hamas, however, can be traced back nearly a decade.

In 2016, during the Obama administration, USAID sent $310 million to a Palestinian cement factory project under the guise of humanitarian aid. This project, run by the private company Sanad, established cement mills and factories that ultimately contributed to the creation of Hamas' hundreds of miles of terror tunnels in Gaza.

As the United States of America funds Israel to fight off its terrorist neighbors, it simultaneously bears responsibility for the arming of, and infrastructure used by the very same terror groups.

Foreign projects

Shortly after then-President-elect Trump announced the creation of DOGE, the department immediately began sending agents, backed by the president, to investigate the internal operations of various government agencies, including USAID.

When USAID officials attempted to stop DOGE from accessing its information on secure systems, the former were placed on administrative leave. Nearly all of USAID soon followed: President Trump slashed the agency from thousands of employees to under 300 — and directed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take over the organization.

Though Trump’s order is currently paused, pending a court case, the agency’s operations are effectively frozen; as Musk put it, “We…[fed] USAID into the wood chipper.” As of this writing, USAID’s website is just a blank page.

Trump’s and Musk’s attacks on USAID have not gone without pushback. Samantha Power, Biden’s USAID chief and former President Barack Obama’s UN Ambassador, chided the moves to shutter the agency, saying it made “authoritarians and extremists celebrate their luck” because “USAID has become America’s superpower” when it comes to winning hearts and minds.

But under Power’s own guidance, the organization strayed from those goals. Power, for example, took a trip through Central Europe — far from the under-developed nations USAID was supposed to focus on — where she met with opponents of governments the Biden administration did not approve, like Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary. In doing so, she showered them with millions of dollars to “strengthen democratic institutions” — a poorly disguised code word for regime change.

On one project, the Moldova Resilience Initiative, USAID spent $20 million to make Moldovans feel European; USAID also sponsored Moldova’s electoral commission, which recently helped deliver a narrow, come-from-behind win to the country’s pro-EU president. In total, USAID spent $25 million on “democracy, human rights, and governance” in the country.

This kind of regime change was not limited to Europe.

In Cuba, USAID built an alternative to Twitter, which could be used by those opposed to the Castro regime to organize meet-ups like in the Arab Spring. The Obama administration also had USAID carry out HIV prevention workshops, which were, in reality, attempts to foster revolution.

And in Bolivia, leftist President Evo Morales kicked USAID out of the country in 2013 over claims that they were trying to overthrow him.

But USAID, along with the State Department, was not just attempting to overthrow governments. They also worked to push progressive priorities like gay rights and transgenderism, awarding tens of thousands of dollars in grant money toward a transgender opera in Colombia and $1.5 million to a Serbian pro-gay group.

Why it matters

Defenders of USAID, like Power, often point out that it is a relatively small portion of America’s budget. And, though the budget is bloated, this is true.

But conservatives would not have targeted USAID with the same outrage if it was solely focused on giving food and medicines to starving children. The reason it has come under fire is that although the organization was ostensibly designed to provide food aid — and unofficially work against communism — its mission has completely spun out of control by funding everything from progressives’ woke cultural revolution to radical Islamic terror.

Now, the agency is effectively gone. And while many of its projects are being unearthed, the true depths of its corruption, however, are still yet to be fully explored.

We’ve made this deep dive free for all readers. We also left the comment section open for all readers, so make sure to tell us what you think.