--Why USAID Made American Foreign Policy Better
It would seem logical to expand, rather than terminate, many USAID programs.
Chas W. Freeman, Jr.Date: March 5, 2025We Americans will miss USAID. Amid a foreign policy apparatus too-often dominated by interventionism and militarism, it was the caring face and hands of America abroad. It saved millions of lives and alleviated suffering from natural and manmade disasters. It made foreign friends for the country and helped persuade them to follow Washington’s lead or give it the benefit of the doubt on matters of concern to the United States.
President John F. Kennedy founded USAID in 1961. It was inspired by Christian charity and the Marshall Plan that put Europe back on its feet after World War II. USAID and its development and humanitarian relief programs showed the world that Americans were concerned about the well-being of others, not just ourselves. Its programs exposed other societies to American best practices. This raised their standards of health and living while promoting liberal democratic, capitalist values. Their increased prosperity expanded overseas markets for US exports of goods and services and created new jobs at home to meet this increased demand.
Closer to home, modest USAID programs in Central America somewhat mitigated the political and economic conditions — including a long history of US military and covert intervention — that drive desperate people there to risk irregular immigration here. (It would seem logical to expand these programs rather than to eliminate them.)
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As part of its development activities, USAID enlisted other countries to combat pandemics, crop blight, the spread of disease, and threats to the American food supply. Known as PEPFAR, an HIV treatment program in Africa inaugurated by President George W. Bush has saved at least 26 million lives. Another part of the USAID budget has kept the Camp David accords in place and Egypt and Jordan at peace with Israel. USAID has also spearheaded efforts to promote cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians.
Kindliness may well be its own reward. But for six decades, USAID has been an essential strategic tool of American foreign policy, accounting for more than one-third of the Department of State budget.
Now USAID has been dismantled, leaving vacuums — that America’s adversaries are already moving to fill — and ill will for them to exploit. Elon Musk and the Trump White House have abruptly shut the agency down, fired nearly all its 10,000 employees, and canceled some 800 awards and contracts administered by it, including medical care for child victims of HIV, demining operations, and efforts to mitigate the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
It’s not clear why. Was Elon Musk paying USAID back for its role in dismantling apartheid and exclusively white rule in his native South Africa? (In denouncing the agency as “a criminal organization” staffed by “radical lunatics,” he sounded like he might be.) Has populist xenophobia suddenly replaced traditional American compassion and generosity for the suffering and downtrodden? Or, given how little Americans know about USAID, was it just a convenient opening target for the digital delinquents of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)?’
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Most Americans believe that our country spends a huge amount on foreign assistance. A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that, on average, Americans estimate that 26% of the federal budget is devoted to such aid. That would be about $2 trillion. But in 2024 (a year in which the United States transferred nearly $118 billion worth of weapons to foreign countries) the USAID budget was just $44 billion. This is considerably less than 1% of federal outlays.
The modest American investment in helping others through USAID not only bought the United States respect and good will —it strengthened global capacities to support economic growth, health, education, energy, food security, and governance. USAID was established to manage programs that would accomplish these objectives, creating a more prosperous, healthier, better educated, and better governed world. USAID’s programs were clearly in the American national interest, if only because they made us, too, more prosperous, healthier, and safer.
Now USAID has been dismantled, leaving vacuums.
With the end of the Cold War and arrival of the so-called “unipolar moment,” however, the USAID budget became a grab bag for the funding of ideological projects less clearly related to development and humanitarian relief than to other objectives, including regime change and special interest agendas. The newly elected Trump administration opposes some, if not all, of these agendas. It could selectively end them. But instead of doing so, it has thrown out not just the baby and the bathwater but the bathtub as well.
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The demolition of USAID is an act of self-vandalization that Americans will regret. It does not save billions of dollars. Rather, it is a form of unilateral diplomatic disarmament that makes us look chaotic, lawless, mean-spirited, selfish, and incompetent. It betrays the moral and spiritual values that made us for so many decades the preferred partner in promoting global peace, prosperity, and collaboration.
USAID is no more, and it cannot be put back together. The patriotic Americans who staffed it have suffered indignities that will make almost all of them reluctant to join whatever replaces it, as something must. USAID’s termination has also permanently dismissed decades of experience and expertise in the promotion of development in accordance with US interests. This is our country’s loss. It will not make America great again. It will make it irrelevant or despised.
The United States needs more than military power, sanctions, tariffs, and bluster to secure itself in a decaying world order. Americans will not just miss USAID — we will have to reinvent it.
Author bio
Chas W. Freeman, Jr.
Chas W. Freeman, Jr., is the former US assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs (1993–1994), US ambassador to Saudi Arabia (1989–1992), principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs (1986–1989), and chargé d'affaires at Bangkok (1984–1986) and Beijing (1981–1984).
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