The New York Times has, for months, been forecasting death and doom around the world related to the demise of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Closing USAID would “cause enormous human suffering,” NYT writer Apoorva Mandavilli predicted in March, estimating “up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths,” without USAID money. And how could earthquake response in Myanmar or aid supplies in Gaza happen without USAID?
But hidden, 22 paragraphs deep in its latest USAID postmortem piece Sunday, NYT writers briefly admit the agency was wasteful.
“Even the agency’s supporters acknowledged it could use reform,” the piece reads. “Much of the more than $35 billion it managed last year went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to communities in need overseas. The success of its programs, especially those focused on economic and political development, was often hard to measure.”
The three writers who wrote this piece, Christopher Flavelle, Nicholas Nehamas, and Julie Tate, should have pursued that part of the story. Who are the contractors connected to? What oversight did USAID staff engage in once the money was sent to contractors?
The writers said USAID, “sometimes clashed” with the goals of the State Department.
And it should be said that around 1,000 USAID programs are still alive and now managed through the State Department. The U.S. is still doing a lot of good meeting basic needs, for example, sending hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food to Ethiopia.
The NYT piece focuses on the internal reaction at USAID during the weeks when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, combed through its spending. DOGE was looking for waste that “could be easily mocked,” according to that reliable old NYT source, “one person familiar with the strategy.”
USAID was blowing money on all kinds of things that taxpayers would have bristled at, had they been asked in advance, like “$70,000 for a ‘DEI musical’ in Ireland, $47,000 for a ‘transgender opera’ in Colombia, $32,000 for a ‘transgender comic book’ in Peru, and $1.5 million for an LGBT jobs program in Serbia,” as Tristan Justice reported for The Federalist in February.
USAID funded electric vehicles for Vietnam and sent $10 million worth of meals for Syrian refugees, but the food ended up in the hands of terrorists instead, Justice reported. When Congress had questions, USAID refused to provide answers, The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported in February. She also reported about the Ukrainian pickle maker and other foreign businesses being subsidized by USAID.
But NYT readers are told not to worry about wasted taxpayer dollars because other agencies waste money too, according to the former USAID employee in charge of detecting waste.
USAID’s fired Inspector General Paul Martin told the NYT that the agency, “had its share of fraud, waste and abuse,” it was his job to investigate it, but “he had found no evidence that [USAID] was subject to more fraud, waste or abuse than other agencies.”
That is not at all comforting.
As a successful businessman, Trump manages the U.S. like a business. Sometimes hard choices must be made to get things thriving again. Program changes, staff cuts, and priority shifts can be messy, and that is why so many politicians are unwilling to walk through them.
But if the NYT truly cares about the people USAID was supposed to be helping, it would support an end to funneling money to garbage programs, that have strayed far from USAID’s original mission.