I have dealt with USAID for nearly four decades now, and my overall impression has been akin to Longfellow’s description of the little girl with a curl:

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

My first contact with the organization was as a military observer with the U.N. Truce Supervisory Organization (UNTSO) in the Middle East. Stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, USAID partnered with U.N. alphabet organizations (UNRA, WHO, UNICEF, etc.) to provide aid relief to refugees who were primarily Palestinians.
I quickly learned that USAID considered itself a contracting and grant-giving organization independent of the rest of the U.S. government. They primarily worked through contracted NGOs which they term “implementers.” The USAID folks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem didn’t physically do anything. They primarily gave contracts and grants to the implementers. I believed that some of them were corrupt. The Israelis thought that most were terrorist front groups and I learned to stay away from them in the field in Lebanon and Gaza for fear of being caught up in an Israeli strike.

My experience in the 1991 Operation Sea Angel in Bangladesh softened my view of the organization considerably. The horrific cyclone in the Bay of Bengal in 1991 caused a tidal surge 20 feet high that killed thousands and displaced millions. The Bangladeshi Navy was literally displaced to the downtown area of the Port City of Chittagong. As the director of operations (J-3) of the newly designated Joint Task Force, I accompanied my commander and a small assessment team to the nation to determine what needed to be done.
We were met at the embassy by the ambassador and the country director of the USAID mission, one of the largest in the world at the time. After the usual whining from the USAID head that her entire budget wouldn’t buy a single Patriot missile, she introd...