DOGE Cuts to USAID Needed Since Foreign Aid Often Hurts More Than It Helps

The new Trump administration is taking a cautious approach to foreign aid, seeking to ensure wise stewardship of every U.S. taxpayer dollar. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday on X that following a six-week review process, the federal government is cancelling 83% of U.S. Agency for International Development programs.

“The 5,200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio wrote, noting that he intends for the remaining 18% of programs, approximately 1,000, to be more efficiently managed by the State Department.  

This process, led by the Department of Government Efficiency (which Rubio thanked in his X post), caused the Left to attack the Trump team as heartless, even while reams of evidence show that foreign aid quite often hurts more than it helps.

For example, economics professors Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett wrote a famous book called “When Helping Hurts” explaining that foreign aid, like the U.S. welfare system, quite often backfires on the people that it’s intended to help. 

It distorts economic markets and creates unhealthy relationships of dependency and latent resentment. It keeps people–and just as importantly, their government leaders–from becoming agents of their own uplift, leaving them entangled in a complex web of dysfunction and learned helplessness.  

Except for in the most urgent crisis circumstances (like natural disasters, plagues, etc.), a better long-term use of foreign aid money should be private, foreign direct investment, which more permanently lifts people out of poverty by fostering the development of healthier, rule-based, less corrupt political and economic systems. 

Former USAID employees laid off under Trump would do better to help the world by moving into private sector jobs–including in developing areas they are passionate about–to create cycles of generational transformation and sustainable wealth creation.

For example, Patrick Lowndes of Pragma Advisors and Andrew Winker of ibex are two experts in this field who I met last year when they visited D.C. to speak to an audience of people interested in solving global poverty. Lowndes and Winker focus on the areas of North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. They provided a constellation of ways that Americans (and other investors) can invest in job creation in developing countries. 

Sadly, foreign aid sometimes falls into the hands of despots who then pocket the money or other resources and use it to further suppress their own people.  

Unfortunately, other USAID programs disguised as “aid” under Democrat-led administrations were mere fig leaves for pushing woke, partisan, DEI agendas rather than bipartisan, universally accepted humanitarian missions of rescue and goodwill.

Rubio noted how USAID programs sometimes promote toxic values, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. As Heritage scholars Max Primorac and James M. Roberts note, the Biden administration weaponized foreign aid programs to fund gender and identity ideology, and climate alarmism. And the Biden foreign aid regime often caused local communities to recoil at U.S. wokeness.

“Biden’s foreign aid agenda clashes with the developing world’s conservative values, which are incompatible with the idea that gender can be untethered from biological sex and which reject the atheism that undergirds progressive ideology,” write Roberts and Primorac. Primorac is a former USAID Deputy Administrator over the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance and former Senior Advisor at the Middle East Bureau, so he’s seen the bureaucratic rot firsthand. 

Roberts and Primorac also report how a USAID program under Biden promoted training under the work of Donatella della Porta, an Italian professor who embraces Marxism.

“This is the first time the U.S. government explicitly endorsed Marxism as the guiding principle for foreign assistance,” write Roberts and Primorac.

Beyond the negative direct impact of foreign aid is the problem that government aid and jobs are essentially spending “fake” or “Monopoly game money” from value that was not created by the government. Foreign direct aid destroys value created by the productive, private sector. And it saddles U.S. taxpayers with debt in the process.

We saw this domestically, where the Biden administration’s job statistics were inflated by a potemkin village of disproportionate government job creation, rather than private sector jobs. 

Foreign aid is too often ineffective at breaking the cycles of global poverty, and it’s often a bad use of taxpayer money. Congratulations to Trump and Rubio for their courageous actions to reverse course.

Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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