Our foreign assistance wins us friends, establishes our leadership, and neutralizes distant threats.
Chris Coons, a Democrat, represents Delaware in the U.S. Senate.
Donald Trump ran for president on a promise that he would keep Americans safe. His effort to defund and destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development shows he has a misguided idea of how to do that.
USAID’s programs, like all our foreign assistance, play a central role in combating extremism, promoting stability and protecting our homeland. Trump plans to sign an executive order that would direct action he is already taking to drastically reduce USAID’s budget and fold it into the State Department. This is an unconstitutional overstepping of our nation’s separation of powers. But even if it is blocked, Trump has already started gutting the agency.
On his first day back in the White House, Trump issued an executive order freezing all foreign assistance for at least 90 days, prompting “stop-work” orders — affecting hundreds of projects around the world — that will weaken U.S. influence. This past weekend, much of USAID’s leadership was furloughed or laid off, some fired for protecting national security secrets from unelected bureaucrats from the Elon Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency.”
U.S. foreign assistance makes up 1 percent of our federal budget, and this money isn’t charity. It bolsters our security and advances our values. The reckless steps the Trump administration is taking as part of its isolationist “America First” agenda are, simply put, dangerous for Americans. Our foreign assistance and engagement wins us friends around the world, establishes our leadership and, more important, neutralizes distant threats to the United States well before they put our country at risk.
Right now, a new outbreak of Ebola in Uganda is beginning to claim lives. To the south, in Tanzania, there is an outbreak of the Marburg virus. Many Americans might remember 2014, when Ebola broke out in West Africa and made it to the United States. They are probably far less aware of the many other outbreaks that have been contained before they traveled here. Marburg might be even worse. Like Ebola, it is a hemorrhagic fever that shreds your blood vessels and leads to death by internal bleeding. Unlike Ebola, it has a mortality rate of up to 90 percent, and there is no approved vaccine.
The safety of Americans depends on containing these deadly viruses before carriers can travel to the United States. That depends on the success of USAID-funded projects such as disease monitoring, contact tracing and testing, administered by USAID staffers and contractors on the ground where the outbreaks occur. Without USAID funding, these programs will be kneecapped, and more of these diseases will spread unchecked throughout the world and come to our shores.
USAID’s work and our other foreign assistance programs go far beyond pandemic preparedness, however. We know that in countries such as Somalia, Yemen and Syria, terrorists exploit security vacuums to develop havens from which to attack the United States and our friends — as the Islamic State did in the 2010s and al-Qaeda did in the run-up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Our foreign assistance funds are used to train friendly militaries to raid terrorist training camps, to secure prisons where Islamic States members are held, and to provide the equipment needed to screen and keep bombs off planes. Similarly, we use our foreign assistance funds to train partners in our hemisphere to curb the flow of fentanyl and destroy the cartels that feed this deadly drug and others into the United States.
Foreign aid also promotes democracy. In May, Romania will rerun an election after its last one was annulled following heavy Russian interference. The Kremlin will put its thumb on the scale again, and if it succeeds, a lackey of Russian President Vladimir Putin will take charge of a key NATO ally. The State Department and USAID fund election-monitoring programs that will keep an eye out for interference and make it more likely that Romanians can go to the polls freely and fairly.
We have been winning this fight — but we are now abruptly leaving the playing field. Many countries will fall further into China’s orbit. We will face a more hostile world.
U.S. foreign and development assistance carried out by USAID might occur out of the public eye and far from our borders, but it addresses instability and keeps Americans safe. It keeps Americans living overseas safe. It keeps our service members stationed around the world safe. It keeps my constituents in Wilmington safe. As Gen. Jim Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, said, if we don’t fund foreign aid, “then I need to buy more bullets.”
USAID is not a perfect agency, and if the Trump administration wants to have a conversation about legal ways to reform it, I welcome that. What Trump is doing, however, is not a conversation. It is a destruction. Americans will pay the price.