Trump Freezes Foreign Aid Fraud
The Trump administration has suspended top officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The move, labeled a “Monday afternoon massacre,” was spurred by allegations that top AID officials were circumventing President Trump’s 90 day freeze on foreign aid disbursements. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) howled on Twitter that “Trump decimating USAID’s leadership without cause is all harm & no benefit for our national security.” But the sordid record of failed aid programs doesn’t support his caterwauling.
Foreign aid has long been the incarnation of American benevolence – at least according to the Washington elite. But presidents have sporadically conceded otherwise for more than 60 years. President John F. Kennedy promised “a dramatic turning point in the troubled history of foreign aid” in 1961. Didn’t happen. Twenty years later, President Ronald Reagan declared, “Unless a nation puts its own financial and economic house in order, no amount of aid will produce progress.” I bashed Reagan’s failed policies in a 1986 New York Times piece that labeled foreign aid “the opiate of the Third World.” In 1989, an AID report conceded that foreign aid had been a dismal failure and urged a “radical reshaping” of U.S. assistance. No such luck.
In a 2010 United Nations speech, President Obama promised to “change the way we do business” with foreign aid, pledging to judge aid programs and budgets “based not on dollars spent, but on outcomes achieved.” The Los Angeles Times noted that Obama’s “aides said the United States in the past has often seemed to just throw money at problems.” The following year, AID ballyhooed a new evaluation policy for a “transformation based on absolute demand for results.”
But any “absolute demand for results” was obliterated by Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to double foreign aid. As the Christian Science Monitor noted, AID “created an atmosphere of frantic urgency about the ‘burn rate’ – a measure of how quickly money is spent. Emphasis gets put on spending fast to make room for the next batch from Congress.” Martine van Bijlert of the nonprofit Afghanistan Analysts Network commented: “As long as you spend money and you can provide a paper trail, that’s a job well done. It’s a perverse system, and there seems to be no intention to change it.” Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Id.) was chagrined in 2011 when he visited Afghanistan and spoke to AID officials: “When we asked what were your results, the answer was the result was we spent X amount of money. That is all they knew, how much money had actually been spent.”
One American contractor received $35 million to promote the rule of law in Afghanistan in part by distributing kites and comic books to kids. The New York Times reported that the contractor “arranged an event to hand out kites and comic books to children. The kites were festooned with slogans about gender equality and rule of law that most of the attendees could not read. Police officers guarding the event stole many of the kites, beating some of the children, while fathers snatched kites from their girls to give to the boys.” A 2015 report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report found that the billion dollars the U.S. government spent on “rule of law” and justice reform programs in Afghanistan had been an utter failure. The “burn rate” fixation produced endless absurdities, including collapsing schools, impassable roads, failed electrification projects, and non-existent phantom health clinics aside from the revival of the Taliban.
“Fail-and-repeat” was also AID’s motto in Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, AID and the Pentagon paired up to spend $60 billion to rebuild Iraq. As long as projects looked vaguely impressive at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, AID declared victory. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) listed some of the agency’s farcical Iraq success claims at a 2011 hearing: “262,482 individuals reportedly benefited from medical supplies that were purchased to treat only 100 victims of a specific attack; 22 individuals attended a 5-day mental health course, yet 1.5 million were reported as beneficiaries… and 280,000 were reported as benefiting from $14,246 spent to rehabilitate a morgue.” Ali Ghalib Baban, Iraq’s minister of planning, denied in 2009 that U.S. aid for relief and reconstruction had benefited his country: “Maybe they spent it, but Iraq doesn’t feel it.” The Center for Public Integrity reported that, according to top Iraqi officials, the biggest impact of U.S. aid was “more corruption and widespread money-laundering.” Unfortunately, corruption has long plagued foreign aid around the globe.
Some foreign aid programs are designed almost solely for bragging rights. The U.S. launched the Food for Peace program during the Eisenhower administration largely to dispose of embarrassing crop surpluses spurred by lavish subsidies. In the 1950s and 1960s, massive U.S. wheat dumping in India disrupted India’s agricultural market and bankrupted thousands of Indian farmers. In 1984, George Dunlop, chief of staff of the Senate Agriculture Committee, told me that American food aid may have been responsible for the starvation of millions of Indians. The U.S. government was often angry at the Indian government because of its pro-Soviet leanings in the Cold War. In a secret White House tape in 1971, President Richard Nixon declared that “the Indians need – what they really need is a mass famine.”
After President Clinton sent U.S. troops to re-install Jean-Bertrand Aristide as Haiti’s ruler, Aristide agreed to end Haitian tariffs on rice imports. Heavily subsidized U.S. rice soon flooded the country and bankrupted legions of Haitian farmers. In 2010, Clinton publicly apologized for the devastating impact: “I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did.” After a 2010 earthquake, the U.S. and other nations deluged the island with free food, profoundly disrupting local farm markets. Two months after the earthquake, Haiti’s President Rene Preval pleaded to the U.S. government to “stop sending food aid, so that our economy can recover and create jobs.” (The U.S. refused to stop.)
In 2016, the U.S. dumped more than a million pounds of surplus peanuts on the island, threatening the livelihoods of a 150,000 Haitian peanut farmers. Sixty humanitarian and activist organizations warned that of “a series of devastating consequences,” an Haiti’s largest rural organization denounced the peanut donation as “a plan of death” for the country’s farmers. Raymond Offenheiser, the president of Oxfam America, complained, “USDA has not done any market analysis in Haiti to ensure that this project does not interfere with local markets.” Protests did not deter USDA’s peanut deluge.
Foreign aid bureaucrats apparently vow to never learn from mistakes. SIGAR “found a USAID lessons-learned report from the 1980s on Afghan reconstruction but nobody at AID had read it” after the 2001 U.S. invasion. In 1982, AID’s incorrigibility spurred a sardonic GAO report title: “Experience – A Potential Tool for Improving U.S. Assistance Abroad.” A 2009 AID report found that evaluation of US foreign aid programs “rarely assesses impact, lacks sufficient rigor, and does not produce the necessary analysis to inform strategic decision making.” A 2013 Congressional Research Service report lamented that many AID staffers “are reportedly defensive about evaluation, concerned that evaluations identifying poor program results may have personal career implications, such as loss of control over a project, damage to professional reputation, budget cuts, or other potential career repercussions.” One AID bureaucrat bluntly admitted: “If you don’t ask [about results], you don’t fail, and your budget isn’t cut.”
Foreign aid has been incorrigible since long before most of the readers of this article were born. Happily, the Trump administration is not repeating the “free market pipe dreams” used to justify foreign aid handouts in prior Republican administrations. Both the Reagan and the George W. Bush administration pretended that they could bribe foreign governments to reduce their idiotic economic policies. Foreign aid is failing in our times for the same reasons that I laid out almost 40 years ago in the New York Times
“Every time a third world politician says something nice about free enterprise, it seems to cost American taxpayers another $10 million in foreign aid. We are squandering billions annually, and often do more harm than good to the world’s poorest. Some countries simply refuse to tell us how our foreign aid donations are used – yet keep getting more money or free food year after year. A country virtually has to declare war on America to be declared ineligible for more aid.
“The vast majority of foreign aid goes to foreign governments. Yet, strong, arbitrary and interventionist governments are the third world’s largest curse. Third world governments could not have become so strong without foreign aid – and could not maintain their stranglehold over the economy without constant injections of further aid.
“If governments were following sound economic policies, they could readily attract foreign investment and loans. If they are busy scuttling their own economies, no amount of handouts will save the day.”
Will Trump extend the 90 day freeze on foreign aid disbursements until the end of his presidency? American taxpayers should no longer be vexed to pay for boondoggles anywhere on earth. Ending foreign aid will also be a huge step to curbing American meddling around the globe.
** An earlier version of this piece was posted by the Libertarian Institute.
ProPublica
January 31, 2025
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump walks under a U.S. flag as he holds a campaign rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, U.S., September 21, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
On Friday morning, the staffers at a half dozen U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan who care for severely malnourished children had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.
They chose the children.
In spite of the order, they will keep their facilities open for as long as they can, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation. The people requested anonymity for fear that the administration might target their group for reprisals. Trump’s order also meant they would stop receiving new, previously approved funds to cover salaries, IV bags and other supplies. They said it’s a matter of days, not weeks, before they run out.
American-funded aid organizations around the globe, charged with providing lifesaving care for the most desperate and vulnerable populations imaginable, have for days been forced to completely halt their operations, turn away patients and lay off staff following a series of sudden stop-work demands from the Trump administration. Despite an announcement earlier this week ostensibly allowing lifesaving operations to continue, those earlier orders have not been rescinded.
Many groups doing such lifesaving work either don’t know the right way to request an exemption to the order, known as a waiver, or have no sense of where their request stands. They’ve received little information from the U.S. government, where, in recent days, humanitarian officials have been summarily ousted or prohibited from communicating with the aid organizations.
Trump’s rapid assault on the international aid system is quickly becoming the most consequential and far-reaching shift in U.S. humanitarian policy since the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, aid groups and government officials warned.
Among the programs that remain grounded as of Friday: emergency medical care for displaced Palestinians and Yemenis fleeing war, heat and electricity for Ukrainian refugees and HIV treatment and mpox surveillance in Africa.
Experts in and out of government have anxiously watched the fluid situation develop. “I’ve been an infectious disease doctor for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything that scares me as much as this,” said Dr. Jennifer Furin, a Harvard Medical School physician who received a stop-work order for a program designing treatment plans for people with the most drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis. Infectious diseases do not know borders, she pointed out. “It’s terrifying.”
Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio first issued the freeze on aid operations last Friday, which included limited exemptions. “The pause on all foreign assistance means a complete halt,” a top adviser wrote in an internal memo to staff. (The order was separate from Trump’s now-seemingly rescinded moratorium on domestic U.S. grants.) Aid groups across the globe began receiving emails that instructed them to immediately stop working while the government conducted a 90-day review of their programs to make sure they aligned with the administration’s agenda.
Trump campaigned on an “America First” platform after unsuccessfully trying to slash the foreign assistance budget during his first term in office. The U.S. provides about $60 billion in nonmilitary humanitarian and development aid annually — less than 1% of the federal budget, but far more than any other country. The complex network of organizations who carry out the work is managed by the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development.
Over the weekend, that system came to a standstill. There was widespread chaos and confusion as contractors scrambled to understand seemingly arbitrary orders from Washington and figure out how to get a waiver to continue working. By Tuesday evening, Trump and Rubio appeared to heed the international pressure and scale back the order by announcing that any “lifesaving” humanitarian efforts would be allowed to continue.
Aid groups that specialize in saving lives were relieved and thought their stop-work orders would be reversed just as swiftly as they had arrived.
But that hasn’t happened. Instead, more stop-work orders have been issued. As of Thursday, contractors worldwide were still grounded under the original orders and unable to secure waivers. Top Trump appointees arrested further funding and banned new projects for at least three months.
“We need to correct the impression that the waiver was self-executing by virtue of the announcement,” said Marcia Wong, the former deputy assistant administrator of USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau.
Aid groups that had already received U.S. money were told they could not spend it or do any previously approved work. The contractors quoted in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared the administration might prolong their suspension or cancel their contracts completely.
As crucial days and hours pass, aid groups say Trump’s order has already caused irreparable harm. Often without cash reserves or endowments, many organizations depend on U.S. funding entirely and have been forced to lay off staff and cancel contracts with vendors. One CEO said he expects up to 3,000 aid workers to lose their jobs in Washington alone, according to the trade publication Devex. Some groups may have to shutter altogether because they can’t afford to float their overhead costs without knowing if or when they’d get reimbursed.
Critics say the past week has also undermined Trump’s own stated goals of American prosperity and security by opening a vacuum for international adversaries to fill, while putting millions at immediate and long-term risk.
“A chaotic, unexplained and abrupt pause with no guidance has left all our partners around the world high and dry and America looking like a severely unreliable actor to do business with,” a USAID official told ProPublica, adding that other countries will now have good reason to look to China or Russia for the help they’re no longer getting from the U.S. “There’s nothing that was left untouched.”
In response to a detailed list of questions for this article, the White House referred ProPublica to the State Department. The State Department said to direct all questions about USAID to the agency itself. USAID did not reply to our emails. Much of its communications staff was let go in the last week.
In a public statement Wednesday, the State Department defended the foreign aid freezes and said the government has issued dozens of exemption waivers in recent days.
“The previously announced 90-day pause and review of U.S. foreign aid is already paying dividends to our country and our people,” the statement said. “We are rooting out waste. We are blocking woke programs. And we are exposing activities that run contrary to our national interests. None of this would be possible if these programs remained on autopilot.”
The dire international situation has been exacerbated by upheaval in Washington. This week, the Trump administration furloughed 500 support staff contractors from USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau, about 40% of the unit, and fired 400 more from the global health bureau. Those workers were told to stop working and “please head home.”
The remaining officials in Washington are now attempting to navigate a confounding waiver process and get lifesaving programs back online. Officials and diplomats told ProPublica that Trump’s new political appointees have not consulted USAID’s longtime humanitarian experts when crafting the new policies. As a result, career civil servants said they are struggling to understand the policy or how to carry it out.
During an internal meeting early in the week, one of USAID’s top Middle East officials told mission directors that the bar for aid groups to qualify for an exemption to Trump’s freeze was high, according to meeting notes. It took until Thursday for the directors to receive instructions for how to fill out a spreadsheet with the programs they think should qualify for a waiver and why, a government employee told ProPublica. “The waiver for humanitarian assistance has been a farce,” another USAID official said.
“Like a Russian nesting doll of fuck-ups,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who ran some of USAID’s largest programs under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “It’s just astonishing.”
Fear of retaliation is permeating the government’s foreign aid agencies, which have become some of Trump’s first targets in his campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Earlier this week, the administration pulled down photographs of children and families from the agency’s hallways.
Many are afraid of being punished or fired for doing their jobs. Officials in USAID’s humanitarian affairs bureau say they have been prohibited from even accepting calendar invites from aid organizations or setting up out-of-office email replies.
On Monday, USAID placed about 60 senior civil servants on administrative leave, citing unspecified attempts to “circumvent” the president’s agenda. The group received an email informing them of the decision without an explanation before they were locked out of the agency’s systems and banned from the building.
“We’re civil servants,” one of the officials said. “I should have been given notice, due process. Instead there was an agencywide notice accusing people of subverting the president’s executive orders.”
Then, on Thursday, the agency’s labor relations director told the group that he was withdrawing the agency’s decision because he found no evidence of misconduct, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.
Hours later, the director was put on administrative leave himself. “The agency’s front office and DOGE instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices,” he wrote to colleagues, referring to Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment.)
Later that night, the original 60 officials were placed back on leave again.
Diplomats have long lauded American humanitarian efforts overseas because they help build crucial alliances around the world with relatively little cost.
When he created USAID in 1961, President John F. Kennedy called it a historic opportunity to improve the developing world so that countries don’t fall into economic collapse. That, he told Congress, “would be disastrous to our national security, harmful to our comparative prosperity and offensive to our conscience.”
USAID is responsible for the most successful international health program of the 21st century. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, created in 2003 by President George W. Bush to combat HIV globally, has saved an estimated 26 million lives over the past 22 years. It currently helps supply HIV medicines to 20 million people, and it funds HIV testing and jobs for thousands of health care workers, mainly in Africa.
That all ground to a halt this week. Since receiving the U.S. government’s stop-work orders, contractors who manage the program say they have so far received little communication about what work they will be allowed to continue, or when. They are not allowed to hand out medicines already bought and sitting on shelves.
If the exemption waivers don’t come through, policy analysts and HIV advocates say the full 90-day suspension of those programs would have disastrous consequences. More than 222,000 people pick up HIV treatment every day through the program, according to an analysis by amFAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. As of Friday morning, those orders had not been lifted, according to three people with direct knowledge.
Up through last week, PEPFAR was providing HIV treatment to an estimated 680,000 pregnant women, the majority of whom are in Africa. A 90-day stoppage could lead to an estimated 136,000 babies acquiring HIV, according to the amfAR analysis. Since HIV testing services are also suspended, many of those could go undiagnosed.
The disarray has also reached warzones and foreign governments, risking disease outbreaks and straining international relationships forged over decades.
Government officials worried about contract personnel who were suddenly stranded in remote locations. In Syria, camp managers were told to abandon their site at al-Hawl refugee camp, which is also a prison for ISIS sympathizers. That left the refugees inside with nowhere to turn for basic supplies like food and gas.
In Mogadishu, Somalia, the State Department instructed security guards who were protecting an arms depot from insurgents to simply walk off the site, according to a company official. When the guards asked what would happen to the armory, their government contacts told them they didn’t have any answers. (Concerns about the armory were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.)
The contractors in Syria and Somalia have since been allowed to return to their sites.
An executive at a health care nonprofit told ProPublica he has not been so lucky. His group is still under the stop-work order and can’t fund medical operations in Gaza, where there is a fragile ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel that depends in part on the free flow of humanitarian aid.
“People will die,” the executive said. “For organizations that rely solely or largely on U.S. government funding, this hurts. That may be part of the message. But there would be less drastic ways to send it.”
In response to criticism, the Trump administration has offered misinformation. During a press conference, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, touted the initiative’s success so far and said the government “found that there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Trump later went further, saying Hamas fighters were using the condoms to make explosives.
They didn’t name the contractor, but the State Department later cited $100 million in canceled aid packages slated for the International Medical Corps.
IMC said in a response that no U.S. government funding was used for condoms or any other family-planning services. The organization has treated more than 33,000 Palestinians a month, according to the statement. It also operates one of the only centers in Gaza for severely malnourished children.
“If the stop-work order remains in place,” IMC said, “we will be unable to sustain these activities beyond the next week or so.”
There are also new outbreaks of Ebola in Uganda’s capital and of the disease’s cousin, the Marburg virus, in Tanzania. The U.S. has long been a key funder of biosecurity measures internationally, including at high-security labs. That funding is now on hold.
In Ukraine, groups that provide vital humanitarian aid for civilians and soldiers fighting Russia have been told to stand down without any meaningful updates in days, according to three officials familiar with the situation. The halted services include first responders, fuel for hospitals and evacuation routes for refugees fleeing the front lines.
“These are people who have been living in a war zone for three years this month,” the head of one of the organizations said, adding that they may have to lay off 20% of its staff. “And we are taking away these very basic services that they need to survive.”
A support staffer working on contract for the U.S. mission in Yemen said her entire team had been told to stop their work last weekend, which ProPublica corroborated with contemporaneous emails. “One of my tasks was summarizing how many people had been directly saved by our health programs every week,” she said. “It was usually 80 to 100.”
Their stop-work order has not been lifted. It will be a week on Sunday.
Erik De La Garza
January 31, 2025
Calling the moment “an emergency” and making clear that he views Donald Trump as unfit to return to the presidency, prominent conservative and staunch Trump critic Charlie Sykes said he will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris – and encouraged other conservatives to follow suit. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill and political observers expressed outrage amid speculation swirling around Washington that President Donald Trump will dissolve the U.S. Agency for International Development – a move some are saying could come as soon as Friday night.
While an official decision has yet to be announced, Trump’s failure to name an administrator for USAID coupled with his freezing of billions in foreign aid funding has added “turmoil” to the agency, and suggests that a major change is on the way, Politico reported. That includes the possibility that USAID could be wrapped into the State Department, the publication added.
But just the mere speculation that Trump would dissolve USAID, which is responsible for administering international development and humanitarian assistance around the globe including disaster and poverty relief, left social media fuming.
“Trump's been purging and intimidating USAID employees. Now there’s a rumor he'll dissolve USAID as an independent agency,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote Friday on X. “It was created by JFK and established in law to further our national security and spread hope. This'd be illegal and against our national interests.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told his X followers: “Watch USAID tonight.”
“Hearing that Trump is about to double down on the constitutional crisis,” he wrote. “A President cannot eliminate an appropriated federal agency by executive order. That’s what a despot - who wants to steal the taxpayers money to enrich his billionaire cabal - does.”
Liberal influencer Harry Sisson repeated Murphy’s warning in his own X post and added: “This is dictator stuff here folks.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), posting from the official account of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, posed a question to her followers.
“To those considering consolidating or eliminating a premiere U.S. national security agency @USAID, ask yourselves: — Does this make America safe? — Does this make America stronger? — Does this make America more prosperous? The answer is NO.”
“Trump plans to shut down USAID tonight, which feeds 60 million hungry people in 60 countries,” Karen Piper, a University of Missouri-Columbia professor and author wrote on her X account. “Babies and the elderly will start dying first while others will leave home in search of food. Expect global instability.”
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