Former Presidents George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s farewell messages to staffers of the U.S. Agency for International Development this week reinforce the perception that critics have called the “uniparty” culture in Washington.
On Monday, the staff of USAID received video messages from the two former presidents, along with one from Bono, the ultraliberal Irish frontman of the rock band U2. Monday was the last day for foreign assistance programming by USAID, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced would be moved under the purview of the State Department. The former presidents and Bono spoke with thousands in the USAID community in a videoconference.
The messages were a remarkable display of bipartisan support for an agency plagued by mission creep that has been almost entirely left-wing. “You had a one-sided uniparty apparatus here [in the State Department and USAID] funding only one side of the political equation,” Max Primorac, who previously served as USAID’s chief operating officer, explained in an interview with “The Signal Sitdown” podcast in February.
“You’ve shown the great strength of America through your work, and that is our good heart,” Bush said in his video message to the staff. The Republican ex-president then went on to praise the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which he launched in 2003.
“Is it in our interest that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is,” Bush concluded in an apparent dig at Rubio’s emphasis on putting American interests first in the country’s foreign aid allocation at the direction of President Donald Trump, a fellow Republican.
Bush’s critique of his GOP successor’s efforts at realigning PEPFAR with its stated mission is surprising, given that under Democrat President Joe Biden, the program also began to promote abortion. PEPFAR funding had even been used to perform 21 abortions in Mozambique, despite being against U.S. law, Reuters reported in January.
“Ending your presence and your programs out in the world hurts the most vulnerable, and it hurts the United States,” Obama, a Democrat, said in his statement to the staff.
“If this isn’t murder, I don’t know what is,” Bono concurred. The Irish singer then subjected the gathered staff to what appeared to be an attempt at making a song about their plight.
“They called you crooks—when you were the best of us, there for the rest of us. And don’t think any less of us, when politics makes a mess of us,” he rhymed.
Bono was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Biden in January. At the ceremony, he was cited as having “brought together politicians from opposing parties to create the United States PEPFAR AIDS program.”
A senior State Department official told The Daily Signal in February that Rubio had identified and cut almost 5,800 awards worth about $54 billion from USAID that he said didn’t fit with the core mission of protecting American interests. The State Department has already said a reformed version of PEPFAR will continue to be supported by the federal government.