President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s two-and-a-half week push to reorganize USAID came to a head Tuesday after Trump signed an order placing almost all USAID workers on administrative leave. The order excludes “designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs.”
USAID’s mission statement is to “promote and demonstrate democratic values abroad, and advance a free, peaceful, and prosperous world.” In 2023, USAID committed to $42 billion of foreign aid, with Ukraine being the largest receiver.
Voices on both the left and right are divided on their opinions of the move. Some called the mass administrative leave “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” but others labeled USAID as “corrupt” and “a viper’s nest.”
The Washington Examiner (Lean Right bias) published an article stating, “USAID spread wokery to all corners of the globe, persuading the rest of the world that America represents a corpus of ideas and values that are, if truth be told, repellent to the majority of Americans as much as they are alien to overseas peoples on whom the money is spent. To acknowledge that is not to suggest all USAID work is worthless. It is not. But much of it is. And it is right that Rubio should sift through payments, save only what is right, and zero out what is left. Aid must, as he said, ‘be aligned with American foreign policy.’”
A writer for the Wall Street Journal (Lean Right bias) wrote, “President Trump’s move to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose programs have helped people deal with humanitarian crises in more than 100 countries, is troubling—both because the agency does critically important work and because the president’s threat to shut it down exceeds his authority and usurps congressional powers.”
USA Today (Lean Left bias) published an article that argued, “Of course USAID gives humanitarian aid to all kinds of valid organizations. But a cursory search of USAID grants also shows an extraordinary amount of spending on things that wound up being a waste of money…Consider what we could have done with all that money here in the United States.”
A writer for the New York Daily News (Left bias) claimed, “The agency’s programs haven’t always been perfectly executed, but its efforts on alleviating poverty, disaster relief, disease prevention, climate mitigation and democracy promotion, among other things, have helped keep nations around the world more stable and provided runway for them to get on more solid footing, eventually needing less international assistance. The reverse of this isn’t the U.S. saving some money in a world that remains just as stable. The absence of these investments will drive global poverty, social fraying and political instability, which is a cocktail that never turns out well for anyone, including the global community of which, for all Donald Trump’s hand-wringing, we remain a part.”
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