PATRICK LAWRENCE: Musk & the Myth of USAID

Among the agency’s missions, the one to promote democracy has made it a very sad story.

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

What hath the MAGA movement wrought? I doubt the archest of Donald Trump’s arch-enemies ever imagined that in his second term he would take things this far in the direction of dangerous or dumb or both. 

To be clear straightaway, Trump’s full-frontal attack on the Deep State and the liberal authoritarians who collaborated to subvert his first four years in the White House is wholly warranted.

In particular, purging the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation while exerting some measure of civilian control over the intelligence apparatus are not only well-grounded undertakings: They are necessary if the foundations of the decadent republic are to be restored after the wanton misuse of these institutions during the Biden years.

But let us be clear in all directions: A lot of what Trump is getting up to this time merits principled objection in the name of reason, decency, democracy, and a genuine global order — but not, I add immediately, in defense of liberal ideology and (its close cousin) an imperium that conducts its business in a more cosmetically acceptable fashion.  

Ownership of the Gaza Strip? Wresting control of the Panama Canal from the sovereign Republic of Panama? I read last Friday Trump has issued yet another executive order, this one to halt aid to South Africa and offer the country’s notoriously racist Afrikaner farmers refugee status as victims of a “massive human rights VIOLATION,” as he put it in a social media post — adding that he considers them “racially disfavored landowners.” 

Just when you think you’ve heard everything, Donald Trump says something else. As in every day at this point in the proceedings. 

On Monday Trump said in an interview with Fox News that the Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip will not be permitted any right to return home after he turns it into some kind of glitzy West Asian version of Palm Beach. “I’m talking about building a permanent place for them,” he told Fox’s Bret Baier. 

“A permanent place”: Trump just confirmed he is on for the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza he previously proposed in all but name. The force required to get this done, and the direct role he plans to play in executing the project, will make the president of the United States guilty, by all internationally accepted definitions, of crimes against humanity and very possibly war crimes. 

As Joe Lauria, Consortium News’ editor-in-chief, astutely pointed out in a conversation the other day, during Trump’s first term the more thoughtful of our independent media were so taken up with defending him against the anti-democratic fabrications of the Russiagate hoax that there was neither the time nor the column inches to attend to all that was objectionable or condemnable about the Trump of 2017 to 2021.

Writing Off the Wall 

Now, as Trump and his people pounce with ferocity on the liberal authoritarians and their various totems, icons, and virtue-signaling programs, there is some sorting out to do. Nothing makes the plainer than the running battle in Washington over the life or death of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The USAID case is worth some consideration. In it we find … the bluntness of Trump and Musk, the blindness of liberals. 

USAID’s fate has been a cause célèbre since Elon Musk, who runs Trump’s government efficiency program, said publicly earlier this month that he had the president’s agreement that “we should shut it down.” It has been tears and the gnashing of teeth ever since.

Musk, who I count the most dangerously anti-democratic figure in the cabal of the mostly mal-intended Trump has gathered around him, sent a team of underlings from his Department of Government Efficiency into USAID’s building, a few blocks from the White House, shortly after he declared the president’s assent to begin closing the agency.  

Employees were locked out of their offices and email accounts and told to stay home; USAID websites were blocked or taken down. All full-time USAID people were placed on leave and orders went out to recall the thousands of people USAID has in the field around the world. The New York Times reported last Thursday that the White House’s intent is to cut USAID’s staff from more than 10,000 to fewer than 300. 

The USAID case now seems headed for court. A federal judge, Carl Nichols of the District Court in Washington, issued a restraining order at the end of last week temporarily blocking parts of the Trump–Musk plan. This was in response to a lawsuit filed by two unions — one representing federal employees and the other Foreign Service officers. 

But there is a telling detail here that is not to be missed: Last weekend a variety of mainstream media — NBC News, The New York Times, and others — published a photograph of a federal government maintenance worker high on a ladder as he chiseled off USAID’s name above the entrance to its building at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The writing, let’s say, is off the wall. I do not see America’s premier dispenser of foreign aid and humanitarian assistance surviving Elon Musk’s Storm Trooper-esque sweep — not as the agency has long been known. 

And how has USAID been known? This is our question. It is what makes this case worthy of some scrutiny. 

Kennedy’s Idea

It was John F. Kennedy who established the Agency for International Development in 1961, his first year in the White House. He gave the State Department authority over it, gave USAID a generous budget, and sent it forth in the world to address the countless problems of others we can file under the heading “Underdevelopment.”

Kennedy was no stranger to self-interest, but this project, like the Peace Corps, was in some good measure an expression of the altruism we find threaded through many of his speeches and policies. 

(Can self-interest and altruism co-exist in the same mind, the same heart, the same institution? It seems a contradiction in terms, given altruism is defined as selfless concern for others, but I give Kennedy some rope on this question:

The evolution of his vision and understanding in the course of his thousand days was decisively in the direction of an America that could finally reject its idea of itself as an empire. He paid for this evolution with his life, let us remind ourselves.) 

Social and economic development programs, health and nutrition programs, irrigation and drainage projects, disease eradication, environmental remedies: Kennedy wanted USAID to make life for others better in all these ways and many more. But note: Among its missions was one to promote democracy.

It is this last assignment that has made USAID a very sad story. By the time the agency sponsored the founding of the

National Endowment for Democracy, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, “altruism” was a Boy Scout’s term for a lot of the business USAID got up to.

The aid and humanitarian programs remain, and millions of disadvantaged people in more than 100 countries depend on them. But USAID is all about American self-interest now — acting as an instrument of the imperium’s foreign policies with no exceptions that come readily to mind.

Along with the National Endowment for Democracy, it has taken over the coup function from the C.I.A. when this is possible — infamously in NED’s case.

Promoting democratic governance, fighting corruption, helping newspapers and broadcasters do good, professional work, funding all manner of “civil society” groups: What’s not to like is the question you are supposed to ask. Whad’y’a mean, not altruistic?

You have some infamous cases. The “color revolutions” in the former Soviet republics, Venezuela, Ukraine for many years prior to (and since, indeed) the coup the U.S. cultivated in 2014: USAID was the man for all seasons, if I can put it this way. 

Russia is a notable case. Reflecting Washington’s regret that Vladimir Putin did not turn out to be another pliant tool when he assumed power from the inebriated Boris Yeltsin in 2000, USAID’s subterfuge got so out of hand in the ensuing years that Putin expelled all of its operatives in 2012. 

Georgia is another just now. USAID shrieked and shouted foul last August, when the Parliament in Tbilisi passed a law requiring NGOs receiving a fifth or more of their funding from abroad to register as foreign agents. Some $95 million in U.S. funding, a good bit of it going to “civil society operations” via USAID, has since been on hold.

What? We’re here to manipulate your political process to tilt Georgia Westward, and you, the elected government in Tbilisi, object? How undemocratic of you. How authoritarian. How… how “pro–Russian.” Netted out, this is USAID’s position on the question. 

Preserving the Imagery

There are other dimensions to USAID’s doings worth a mention. Its budget so far in this century has averaged something more than $20 billion. The Washington Post reported last week that in 2020 (the latest figures available, presumably) $2.1 billion of that went to corporate farming operations.

USAID ships food aid to poor nations. USAID subsidizes what we call Big Ag. Both of these statements are true. This is altruism with American characteristics, let’s say. 

It is instructive to hear the protests of those now standing in defense of USAID. They run consistently to the good the agency does via its overseas operations, and this reality must be honored. There is no question but that countless people in Africa, Asia and Latin America will suffer if Trump and Musk shutter this institution.

There is another photograph that tells an interesting story. It appears atop a Times piece headlined, “Falsehoods Fuel the Right–Wing Crusade Against U.S.A.I.D.” It shows a group of people protesting the Trump plan on Capitol Hill last week. 

The protesters carry aloft a wall of placards. One carried by a young boy reads, “Both my parents lost their jobs thanks to President Musk.” O.K. Self-interest is alive and well and living in Washington. Another, held above it, says, “USAID: national security investment.” Some honesty here, but it has been a long day’s journey for American altruism. 

I look at the people in the photo — the dress, the demeanor. They seem to me a latter-day gathering of counterculture folk, intent on doing good and keeping their hands clean. It is good to know such people are still among us.

But they are either lost or they are liars. Assuming the former, their references are to an aid agency that long ago succumbed to ideology and corruption. Their USAID is a mythological object at this point, a museum piece. 

They are not, in a phrase, facing up to what USAID has become since, as I think of its decline, the Reagan years and the birthing of the straight-out malevolent NED, a C.I.A. op in very thin disguise. This is to say they do not seem to face up to what has become of America since the altruistic Kennedy days.

And facing it, facing it all, is high among the responsibilities of my generation and all those that follow it. 

Mainstream media and all manner of political and public figures have rushed to the side of those Capitol Hill protesters this past week. It makes for an amusing spectacle, this effort to preserve the old imagery of USAID and pretend, as the Times does in the piece linked above, that all the talk of USAID’s not-very-democratic promotions abroad are conspiracy theories and — what would we do without this? — Russian disinformation. 

Pitiful. The simple fact is that all the commotion Trump and Musk have prompted has caught USAID with its pants down.

There is no saying the outcome of Trump and Musk’s evangelical crusade against USAID. There is no telling even what their motives are, what they are after. There is something more than efficiency at work in what seems to resemble a vendetta in its severity, it seems to me.  

Will Trump and Musk choose to forego all the foreign subterfuge with which they can project American power via the agency’s plethora of pernicious programs? I doubt this, without much grounding for my doubt. 

Is the intent somehow to attack Samantha Power, USAID’s done-for director and a Deep State operative if ever there was one? I doubt this, too, allowing for a slim possibility. 

I doubt altogether that Trump and Musk have mounted their campaign against USAID for the right reasons, whatever they may be. 

The rump contingent of USAID staff that will remain after the purge, I read, will be those dedicated to humanitarian assistance. This is curious, certainly. 

But it is always this way with Trump. We are left to wonder what he is trying to do and why he is trying to do it.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. 

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