President Trump has turned his attention to the “radical lunatics” at the U.S. Agency for International Development in his pursuit of wasteful federal spending.
The frustration with USAID has simmered for decades among conservatives and taxpayer advocates who insist the agency has wandered away from its core mission and squandered money on programs threatening the nation’s interests.
Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the USAID is “the epitome of the deep state.”
“The metric its staff uses is money spent, and they never question the wisdom of those expenditures,” Mr. Rubin said. “USAID is also a miserable bureaucracy, so people who are nothing in Washington can go overseas on the government’s dime and feel like kings, with everyone at their beck and call to get a piece of the pie.”
Washington’s focus on USAID intensified in the wee hours of Monday after billionaire Elon Musk said Mr. Trump had agreed to shutter the $40 billion agency. USAID was established to promote economic growth in developing countries and provide humanitarian and disaster assistance.
The humanitarian aid community is notoriously left-leaning, and USAID is the pinnacle of that culture.
SEE ALSO: Democrats dismiss Musk-led push to shut down USAID as ‘plainly illegal’
“The result is a bureaucracy that is representative of the Ivy League set rather than America,” Mr. Rubin said. “Many USAID employees can then channel taxpayer funds to advance their own personal agendas, be it support for Palestinian extremists, Somalia’s kleptocracy or LGBT politics in Africa.”
The Trump administration’s moves against USAID, including orders for the staff to stay out of the agency’s Washington headquarters on Monday, prompted outrage and hand-wringing.
Fuming Democrats said Mr. Musk’s plans require an act of Congress, threaten lives around the world and play into the nation’s global adversaries, including Russia, China and Iran.
“It is a matter for Congress to deal with, not an unelected, billionaire oligarch named Elon Musk,” Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia said at a press conference outside USAID headquarters.
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump telegraphed his administration’s USAID rethink.
He signed the “Reevaluating and Realigning the United States Foreign Aid” executive order that called for a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. He said the nation’s “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”
SEE ALSO: How USAID grew from war relief to a global humanitarian mission
“They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” it said.
In the eyes of conservatives, the evaluation is long overdue.
Sam Westrop of the Middle East Forum, a conservative think tank, wrote last month that “violent extremists have prospered under the federal government’s aid programs” and “USAID has knowingly funded terrorists and their proxies, making America weaker and less safe.”
A Middle East Forum analysis found that USAID has handed millions of federal dollars to organizations directly in the Gaza Strip, which Hamas controls.
“USAID beneficiaries have called for their lands to be ‘cleansed’ from the ‘impurity of the Jews,’ among dozens of other chilling examples,” the group’s report said. “USAID staff attend the offices of charities which seemingly operate on behalf of senior Hamas leaders, while staff of multiple multi-million dollar USAID beneficiary charities openly praise and encourage violence against Jews.”
The Washington Times reported late last year that federal prosecutors revealed in an indictment that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer-funded meals that were supposed to go to Syrian refugees instead went to the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front in Syria. The man who ran the organization’s Syrian division skimmed as much as $10 million of meals.
On Monday, Mr. Trump reiterated his claim that DOGE had stopped $50 million from being spent on condoms in Gaza, a claim that news media fact-checkers dispute. The president also downplayed the idea that Congress must get involved to overhaul USAID.
“Not when it comes to fraud,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “These people are lunatics. … I love the concept [of USAID], but they turned out to be radical left lunatics.”
USAID also appears to be crosswise with Mr. Trump’s other priorities.
In a recent analysis, the Congressional Research Service said diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives were a top priority for USAID under Administrator Samantha Power. Mr. Trump has ordered an end to such programs in the federal government.
According to the CRS report, Congress has set aside more than $46 billion in emergency funds since 2022 “for accounts solely or partially managed by USAID to address the war in Ukraine.”
Mr. Trump has been skeptical of the money Congress has sent to help Ukraine beat back the Russian invasion.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters during a stop in Central America on Monday that he is now the acting director of USAID and that it has become clear that the agency was “involved in programs that run counter to what we are trying to do in our national strategy with that country or that region.”
“That cannot continue,” he said.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.