The U.S. Agency for International Development’s efforts to remake the world in the image of a woke America are coming to a screeching halt. Elections have consequences, and the 2024 cycle may have been one of the most consequential in our history.
This is why Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that he is the acting administrator of the sludge fund for global progressive causes known as USAID and informed Congress that he delegated that administrative capacity to Pete Marocco. The aim is to review all USAID programs and completely remake U.S. foreign assistance efforts, prying them from a hyper-progressive staff.
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Marocco, who served at the agency during Trump’s first term, knows where the bodies are buried. He “knows how the system works and is dismantling it at every turn,” a disgruntled USAID official told CNN. USAID staffers were locked out of the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., where yellow police tape saying “do not cross” blocked off the lobby. Hundreds of these staffers also lost access to the agency’s computer system, including email. The agency’s website says nearly all of its employees are on administrative leave.
There have even been physical exchanges. Two USAID security officials attempted to physically block staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, set up by Elon Musk at President Donald Trump’s behest to make the bureaucracy more efficient, from having access to USAID headquarters over the weekend. The USAID officials have been fired.
“It is the apocalypse at USAID,” a forlorn USAID official wailed to CNN.
The Trump administration also ordered a freeze on nearly all foreign assistance pending a review of the programs, exempting things such as emergency food programs. The United States, a country with more than $36 trillion in debt and a government budget deficit of almost $2 trillion last year, spends about $60 billion in foreign aid per year.
USAID, like NPR, PBS, racial preferences, Roe v. Wade, critical race theory, and the Department of Education, is one of those institutions and practices that started in the 1960s and had its hangover in the 1970s. All these entities were either started by the Big Left or taken over by the Big Left during its March Through the Institutions.
All of them, and many others, are now not under the scalpel but in the trajectory of a gigantic wrecking ball swinging at the speed of one of Musk’s rockets. Big Left is apoplectic, of course, and the press is pliantly amplifying the shrieks. Democrats held a mass rally Monday at the agency.
However, history is clear. Former President John F. Kennedy created the agency in November 1961 through Executive Order 10973 after Congress passed Public Law 87-195, the Act for International Development, two months earlier. The act specifically said the reason for giving foreign aid was that the “survival of free institutions in the United States can best be assured in a worldwide atmosphere of freedom.” The words “free” or “freedom” appear 28 times in the act.
The act also mentions multiple times that aid assistance is to be undertaken when “the president determines it to be important to the national interest,” to quote directly from one of its lines. Instead, USAID devolved into an agency that spent money on programs that hindered the pursuit of freedom overseas and directly contravened our national interest.
“During the Obama years the U.S. Agency for International Development was used to promote abroad policies that remain controversial within American society itself and that serve no clear national security interests,” I wrote in a 2017 Heritage Foundation study.
These agendas, I wrote, included programs that promoted — sometimes as a condition of the aid — lifestyle choices that Americans debated for decades or are still being debated, such as transgender rights and same-sex marriage or trained foreign citizens in street “activism,” “civic engagement,” and “mobilization.”
Rubio agreed, saying during a tour of Latin America, “Every dollar we spend and every program we fund” must “be aligned with the national interests of the United States. And USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that.”
The goal of what Trump is doing, said Rubio, is “to go in and align our foreign aid to the national interest. But if you go to mission after mission and embassy after embassy around the world, you will often find that, in many cases, USAID is involved in programs that run counter to what we’re trying to do in our national strategy with that country or with that region. That cannot continue.”
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I added in my paper that in the promotion of radical agendas in several countries, USAID has found an ideal partner in George Soros, a billionaire supporter of far-left causes worldwide. Indeed, evidence began to emerge that, under former President Barack Obama, USAID made Soros’s foundations the main implementer of its aid.
This is all the more reason for the Trump administration to conclude its investigation of USAID programs and find out what has transpired there.