Why USAID is so important
A quick survey of political discourse reveals a general lack of understanding of USAID. The agency saves lives, prevents conflict, and builds the clout and security of the country that funds it.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is one of the most important institutions on the planet. It is one of the largest single donors of foreign aid, supporting life-saving initiatives that provide food, healthcare, economic development support, and other vital services. Since its creation, USAID has been a leading force in shaping a professional practice of servant leadership by doing good for those in need, at home and abroad.
That high standard for transformational acts of public service brings vaccines to remote areas that have no medical facilities, brings 21st century education to places that have never had an opportunity to access higher education, and delivers medical assistance and food to the most vulnerable people, including children born to families displaced by violence and instability.
USAID is some of America’s best advertising, letting people in desperate conditions know that a self-governing free people across the ocean is driven by decency and humanity.
Each delivery of aid bears the unmistakable stamp, with the well-known words “From the American people”.
Transformational programs provide long-term support, to help people escape the threat of prolonged crisis, then establish the foundations for long-term self-reliance and sustained private-sector investment.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in food and medical aid are now stuck in ports, as the unlawful stop work order plays out. In Kansas, and elsewhere, American farmers now face the possibility of a major loss of income and opportunity, because the food aid that might be defunded comes from American farms.
Ebola hemorrhagic fever, one of the world’s most lethal diseases, killing between 25% and 90% of those infected, is spreading in Uganda. USAID offices that would help to contain the outbreak have been ordered closed and abandoned.
USAID has contributed to the successful containment of past Ebola outbreaks, and is seen as a vital piece of the overall epidemic prevention response. Failure to contain Ebola and stop the outbreak could lead to mass death and potential destabilization, and the out-of-control spread of one of the most lethal viruses in existence.
USAID helped eradicate smallpox, has been a leading force in containing and reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS, and has brought early warning, disease prevention, and diagnostics to dozens of high-risk countries. An archived USAID page from the first Trump administration reports:
In 2018, USAID with its partners…
• Detected 4,600,000 cases of tuberculosis and started 98,435 patients on critical treatment for drug-resistant tuberculosis.
• Leveraged $3.2 billion in drug donations for more than 268 million treatments to control and eliminate neglected tropical diseases like lymphatic filariasis and blinding trachoma.
• From 2014 to 2018, supported the discovery of over 900 new viruses in more than 30 countries to help prevent outbreaks before they start.
Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) describes USAID as:
an essential national security agency that saves lives, advances U.S. interests, and promotes peace.
Dr Joia Mukherjee, a leading infectious diseases specialist who advised on the creation of PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), said the shutdown of American aid is:
… taking 20 years of goodwill and turning it into an instrument of terror, when people feel like if they touch the drugs, if they see a patient, they might get fired.
Christopher Barrett, Professor of Applied Economics and Policy at Cornell University, warns: “Closure of USAID – even sustained, significant reductions of its operations – will be a major global calamity,” because:
USAID is the main repository of technical expertise on food security, health, humanitarian logistics and a range of other issues in most of the world’s countries...
The organization Doctors without Borders warns:
the sudden pause in humanitarian and health assistance… will cause an unmitigated humanitarian disaster affecting millions of the world’s most vulnerable people.
The Guardian reports:
[USAID] now administers about 60% of US foreign assistance and disbursed $43.79bn in the 2023 fiscal year. According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report this month, its workforce of 10,000, about two-thirds of whom serve overseas, assisted about 130 countries. USAid is funded by Congress, based on administration requests.
The idea that the agency is wasteful is not consistent with the data. The leadng country in the world for foreign aid by proportion is Norway, which gives more than 1% of gross national income. By this standard, the US ranks near the bottom of the list of wealthy countries, at 0.24%.
The New York Times is reporting that dictators around the world are cheering Trump’s effort to dismantle USAID. Authoritarian leaders have long seen USAID as a threat, because it demonstrates the benefits of open democracy, saves lives they have abandoned, and assists people in discovering, reporting, and countering corruption and rights violations.
For China and Russia, the disappearance of USAID would be a gift. Both countries seek to establish coercive influence over much of the world, not just for their own interests, but to weaken the United States and other democracies and control access to open trade and reliable alliances. China is already working to outflank the US in development assistance, reducing its strategic influence.
This week, the deleted USAID website has returned with a single white page, with the message below. The message outlines a plan to dismiss a large number of staff, including the recall of staff doing the vital, life-saving work in the field. It appears there is no legal authority for this action, as USAID was created by an act of Congress and cannot be undone without a superseding act of Congress.
This same single page and message of defunding is what comes up behind several links that previously reported USAID activities relating to the containment of Ebola in East Africa. The links shown in the image below all go to this one landing page.
USAID is not an instrument of ideology; it is an instrument of humanity, of rescue for the most vulnerable, peacebuilding in at-risk regions, and human development for the benefit of both beneficiary communities and the American people who provide the funding. The Executive branch has no legal authority to dismantle it, and doing so appears, by all evidence, to be an act of surrender to totalitarian adversaries.
On hunger prevention:
Leaders call for food security moonshot
153 winners of Nobel Prizes and the World Food Prize have signed an open letter calling for early action to prevent a global hunger catastrophe. The letter opens with these words: