Guatemalan transgender organizations scooped $2 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development, and oxymoronic diversity, equity, and inclusion “scholarships” in Burma took another $45 million. Advancing DEI in Serbian workplaces was financed with $1.5 million, and $47,000 was found for a transgender opera in Colombia.
These and many other left-wing grifts are being brought to light by early Trump administration moves to get bloated federal spending under control. It is incontestable that such egregiously unnecessary programs richly deserve the chop. But there is a yawning abyss between the thousands, millions, and even billions of dollars wasted on them and the $2 trillion that Elon Musk wants to cut with the sharp edge of the Department of Government Efficiency.
If the axman severed every USAID program and nothing else, it would save only $40 billion a year. Although taxpayers would applaud, the improvement to public finances would be almost undetectably small. America would keep hurtling toward insolvency. Doing easy things, taking a win, and walking away leaving really difficult stuff untouched will be tempting, but it is a temptation that must be resisted.
Absurd programs draw disproportionate attention and invite justified outrage precisely because of their triviality. Where they are not pernicious, they are obviously frivolous. A well-governed nation, especially one living beyond its means as America is, would drop them without hesitation or a backward glance. But they are not the substantive danger to the nation’s finances. That comes, rather, from massive entitlements such as Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and food stamps. Means-tested social welfare spending reached $1.6 trillion in 2023 and needs cutting immediately. Social Security and Medicare are dire problems that must be dealt with immediately afterward.
Such programs have accumulated like financial snowfalls to form a glacier that is grinding down and gouging out the valley of public policy from a mountaintop of good intentions to a torpid ocean of fiscal ruin. To continue the metaphor, USAID programs being targeted for elimination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and lamented by vested interests are little ice pebbles on top of that glacier and contribute almost nothing to its weight and destructive power.
Cutting entitlement programs is enormously difficult politically but is legally straightforward. The Supreme Court has ruled, for example, that Social Security payments are taxes, not insurance premiums conferring guaranteed benefits. So Congress and the executive are free in principle to cut payouts and raise the retirement age, as in prudence they should. But no president since George W. Bush has even suggested, let alone tried, touching this third rail of politics, with its potential to deliver a fatal electoral shock, and President Donald Trump has explicitly ruled it out.
Having duly noted that Trump and DOGE need to go where the big money is, let us return to USAID boondoggles. Although they are minuscule in monetary value compared to America’s overall fiscal dismay and incontinence, they should not be lightly passed over. They are symptomatic of a moral rot that must be cured as the first order of business in returning the nation to good governance fit for future generations.
The premise of those who argue that a few million dollars here and there make no difference, even when they add up to $40 billion, are like those who argued for decades that America was so big and powerful that it could withstand every protest, slight, retreat, and humiliation. The truth, however, is that the drip, drip, drip of wasted dollars is similarly destructive to the drip, drip, drip of denigration. The former erodes the probity of those who have a duty of care in spending taxpayer money, just as the latter wears down our strength, patriotism, self-confidence, and international authority. America is big and rich, but not so big and rich that it can withstand either profligate spending or moral corrosion indefinitely.
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All but 3% of political donations from USAID employees went to the Democratic Party, and the agency has, for decades, been plundered to finance every conceivable work of left-wing propaganda. The agency became a sort of propaganda bank, from which career bureaucrats drew funds for work that was unnecessary at best and often destructive, sometimes deliberately so. USAID spread wokery to all corners of the globe, persuading the rest of the world that America represents a corpus of ideas and values that are, if truth be told, repellent to the majority of Americans as much as they are alien to overseas peoples on whom the money is spent.
To acknowledge that is not to suggest all USAID work is worthless. It is not. But much of it is. And it is right that Rubio should sift through payments, save only what is right, and zero out what is left. Aid must, as he said, “be aligned with American foreign policy.”