Roiling controversy has surrounded President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping changes at the US Agency for International Development, or USAID. The agency does supply humanitarian aid, yet it seems a portion of its budget goes to dubious propaganda campaigns worldwide. Little attention has been paid to the agency’s involvement with the CIA, particularly in creating the infamous 1974 Kissinger Report, which advocated for population control to further US “national security interests” in developing countries.
Numerous Democratic lawmakers have denounced efforts to reform USAID as illegal, unconstitutional, or even – according to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) – tyrannical. Upon further inquiry, it appears the seemingly innocuous agency has been using a facade of philanthropic activities to conceal its more profound mission, which, ironically, many would call illegal, unconstitutional, and tyrannical.
Revelations that the agency, along with the Treasury, funded foreign social justice ventures – including a transgender comic book in Peru, a transgender opera in Colombia, a DEI musical in Ireland, drag queen shows in Nepal, and sex-change surgeries in Guatemala – do not appear to concern the agency’s outspoken supporters. But are these policies – such as $2.5 million for EVs in Vietnam and $1.5 million for DEI in Serbia – supported by a large majority of taxpayers?
Investing half a billion dollars to “expand atheism” in Nepal smacks of interfering with a foreign nation’s religion and possibly runs afoul of the US Constitution’s Establishment Clause: Some US courts and states have recognized atheism as a religion. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) claimed USAID supports “freedom fighters” around the world, conjuring memories of Iran-Contra, the unseating of Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh, and other illicit activities hidden from taxpayers.
Recent reports allege the organization has funded propaganda and disinformation abroad, including targeting US journalists as agents of foreign governments. Did the agency fund a campaign by v-Fluence on behalf of the pesticide industry to discredit US food writers Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan? Suppose USAID funded slurs that Tucker Carlson is a Russian operative or against prominent politicians such as Vivek Ramaswamy. Will Chris Murphy and others change their tune? Journalist Michael Shellenberger claims the USAID was used to direct a deep state intelligence operation orchestrated to impeach Donald Trump. If true, the agency’s activities make Watergate look like child’s play.
It seems USAID has served as a rogue CIA tool for many decades, its activities sealed from public awareness by top-secret classifications. The 1974 Kissinger Report was not released publicly until 1989. It appears the memorandum that authorized its creation – and revealed the connection between USAID, the CIA, and numerous government agencies, including the USDA (for food control) – was not disclosed publicly until 2007.
The Kissinger Report was shocking in its industrial colonizing justifications to depopulate the world using nefarious methods to advance US “national security interests.” The April 24, 1974, National Security Council Memorandum, unsealed in 2007, was directed to the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Deputy Secretary of State, and the Administrator of the Agency for International Development.
The subsequent Kissinger Report, often cited for the maxim “Control the food, control the people,” contemplated withholding US aid to developing nations unless they implemented “fertility reduction” policies, including birth control and sterilization. The report justified its calls to create a global organization of nation-states and NGOs to protect US interests in retaining industrial access to foreign-owned natural resources. The World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank now further Kissinger’s USAID-assisted dystopian vision to integrate agricultural production globally.
In an odd rant titled “Trump’s Power Grab,” Journalist Seymour Hersh jumped aboard the partisan bandwagon to declare any impingements on USAID as anti-humanitarian hatred typical of all Republicans:
“I’m someone who has spent more than enough time in difficult places around the world — places where there was nothing more welcoming than the sight of a USAID truck speeding to some crisis, or perhaps just with food to give away. I never saw the United States’ aid program as an enemy, but the agency has now been shut down and its employees put out of work, as of this week, by presidential fiat.
“Republican Presidents for more than five decades have come to office vowing to slash the bureaucracy, eliminating needed services for the citizenry, and finding ways to make piles of money for their financial backers.”
If Hersh never saw USAID as a potential enemy, perhaps he never read the Kissinger Report or investigated the various propaganda activities allegedly funded by what Elon Musk and others have labeled a criminal enterprise. Americans can expect that Musk hasn’t made such bold claims without proof, which will likely be forthcoming.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made clear that the goal of reforming USAID is to rein in its surreptitious activities and align it with US national interests. Presumably, this would lead to a continuation of legitimate humanitarian efforts, not the conquest of developing nations to plunder their natural resources or to slander American journalists. Americans deserve to know what USAID has been up to since Kissinger’s days: truths that would have almost certainly remained hidden under a continued Democratic tenure.
Hersh closed his USAID anti-GOP screed with a particularly ironic pat on his own back:
“[A] special Senate Intelligence Committee led by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho … investigated CIA covert activities in the mid-1970s. (The committee was set up in response to a series of articles I wrote in December 1974 in the New York Times about secret illegal CIA spying on American citizens who opposed the Vietnam War.)”
Hersh’s attention was not on the Kissinger Report back in 1974 because it was “top secret.” His rabid defense of USAID is the opposite of his erstwhile journalistic mission to rout CIA abuses. His closing line is unwittingly prescient: “It seems evident that Trump’s power grab – it is not his alone – is just the beginning.”
Hersh will likely be proven correct in this prophecy as Americans see more of what Rubio, Musk, and Trump eventually unveil. The “power grab” appears to have been by the CIA and the shadowy unelected powers that Hersh once opposed but now defends and is certainly not “Trump’s alone.” On the contrary, Americans see that “Trump alone” has been willing to challenge these unaccountable, anti-American forces.