The idea that foreign aid is both wasted on (nonwhite) foreigners and threatens (white) Americans’ prosperity and safety at home was self-reinforcing, and persists to this day. A whole chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was devoted to plans to restructure USAID; its author claims, drawing on both the Helmsian and Bircher traditions, that the Biden Administration has “deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.” (Suggestions for fixing this included dismantling USAID’s “DEI apparatus” and using USAID to promote Christian Nationalist initiatives under the guise of “International Religious Freedom.”) In the face of such emotional triggers, rational rejoinders — like the fact that foreign aid generally makes up just 1% of the federal budget, and carries clear benefits for American influence and “soft power” against geopolitical rivals, just as JFK intended — struggle to break through.
Yet while Helms’s faction failed to end foreign aid, they did manage to hamstring it, often with the help of liberals and Democrats. A series of laws have imposed protectionist restrictions on foreign aid for decades, from requirements that at least half of U.S. food aid be shipped on expensive U.S.-flagged carriers to ensuring through law and the congressional appropriations process that U.S.-based businesses and nongovernmental organizations have gotten priority in USAID projects and grants.
Priority was given to projects that helped U.S. corporations and red-state constituents, such as shipping rice from Arkansas and Louisiana (a de facto subsidy for U.S. rice growers) instead of buying locally in Africa or Latin America. Meanwhile a short list of U.S.-based NGOs, sometimes nicknamed “Beltway Bandits,” are constantly at the top of the annual USAID grantee lists including Chemonics International, FHI360, DAI Global, and Catholic Relief Services.2 As the Center for Global Development’s Justin Sandefur wrote in 2022: “Foreigners don’t receive much of America’s … annual foreign aid budget, at least not directly. Less than ten percent goes to local charities, companies, or governments in developing countries.”
Despite constant harping on the point by aid critics (including me!), and a widespread realization by officials including former USAID administrator Samantha Power that such change is needed, the big NGOs and their allies in Washington have repeatedly defeated efforts to reform the system — in part by making sure the public was not properly informed about what was actually going on.
I don’t want to overstate the case here: USAID has been an effective force in many cases, especially its support for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which until Trump’s funding freeze supported HIV treatment for 20 million people worldwide. Losing it on the eve of another possible global pandemic, cutting off embattled allies and aid recipients who have nowhere else to turn, will be a catastrophe.
But the America-centric way of doing business has also resulted in decades of ineffective, often wasteful projects that prioritize U.S. economic and political interests over helping people on the ground, often failing to do either.