What US aid will look like after USAID

This is the best I’ve seen justifying USAID on the basis of its benefits to the United States. Certainly its food and health programs were also important to the rest of the world. I think it hard to argue that we were doing too much. It is inexcusable that we are now headed towards doing too little.

Shifting priorities

But that is not all that is going to happen. Trump will want to maintain some of the food programs, which DOGE claims to have restored already. Those all too obviously benefit farm communities that vote Republican.

The Administration will also restore some of the health programs, like bird flu surveillance, that directly benefit the US. But Trump will shift the funding for these programs away from the universities and nongovernmental organizations that used to do most of the work. He’ll want the money to flow to profit-making companies willing to kick back campaign contributions.

At the same time, vaccine programs and programs that support foreign agricultural production will suffer. So too will programs that help foreign governments in the health and agricultural sectors. Not to mention cuts to programs for democracy, rule of law, gender equity, or other liberal ideals. Foreign aid tends to reflect domestic values. That was the main point of Project 2025’s chapter on USAID. It did not propose elimination, just ideological purification in the right-wing direction.

The reform AID isn’t going to get

I am not a diehard defender of AID as it existed before Trump shredded it. It was founded as an economic development agency. It had failed to adapt to a world in which bilateral aid has relatively little economic impact. Multilateral agencies like the World Bank have most of the money, especially when it comes to infrastructure. Not to mention the gigantic international flows of private financing, including remittances.

I thought AID needed thorough reform. I’d have liked to see it refocused on setting up the institutions required to manage a modern market economy. Instead it continued to support relatively small economic development projects that rarely had much impact beyond the immediate beneficiaries.

But Trump isn’t going to want American aid going to health and agriculture ministries, justice sectors, and anti-corruption institutions and campaigns. Never mind education ministries. These are precisely the institutions he is destroying at home. He won’t support them abroad.

What’s next?

What we are headed to is foreign assistance as a feeding trough for Trump’s friends, including right-wing nongovernmental (NGO) religious organizations. The staff required to maintain accountability is already gone. The Administration will aim to defund the UN and mainstream NGOs with experience in health, food, and emergency relief in favor of profit-making organizations. As promised in Project 2025, it will try to withdraw from conflict-affected countries with governments unfriendly to the US, regardless of the humanitarian situation. And it will hire new staff loyal to its right-wing social values.

In short, US aid will be a cash cow for Trump donors, a mainstay of autocratic regimes friendly to the US, and a major funder of rightwing ideology. That will be worse than the unreformed USAID Trump inherited. Everything he touches turns to dross.