Rubio: USAID Closed After Decades Of Funding Posh Lifestyles Of ‘Countless’ NGO Execs

The Trump administration has officially shuttered the United States Agency for International Development after rolling its operations into the State Department.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the end of the independent agency on Tuesday. Rubio said USAID funds would be better managed and more effective under State Department oversight than they have been in decades.

“USAID had decades and a near-infinite taxpayer budget to advance American influence, promote economic development worldwide, and allow billions to stand on their own two feet,” Rubio wrote in a statement. “Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War.”

For months, the Trump administration has audited USAID, shrinking its operations and moving it underneath Rubio’s effective control. The Department of Government Efficiency has led the probe into USAID funding, cutting thousands of spending programs worth tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.

What spending is left will be reallocated and closely watched for measurable returns toward the United States’ national interest, according to Rubio. Of the regions and communities that have received funding from USAID in recent decades, American objectives have “rarely been met.” At the same time, “instability has often worsened, and anti-American sentiment has only grown,” Rubio said.

“[I]n 2023, sub-Saharan African nations voted with the United States only 29 percent of the time on essential resolutions at the UN despite receiving $165 billion in outlays since 1991. That’s the lowest rate in the world,” Rubio wrote. “Over the same period, more than $89 billion invested in the Middle East and North Africa left the U.S. with lower favorability ratings than China in every nation but Morocco.”

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“[USAID’s] expenditure of $9.3 billion in Gaza and the West Bank since 1991, whose beneficiaries included allies of Hamas, has produced grievances rather than gratitude towards the United States,” he continued. “The only ones living well were the executives of the countless NGOs, who often enjoyed five-star lifestyles funded by American taxpayers, while those they purported to help fell further behind.”

USAID funding has elicited complaints from some allies to the United States. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in February that non-governmental organizations in his country that have been partly funded by USAID have pushed leftist priorities and sought to “topple” his government.

“Now is the moment when these international networks have to be taken down, they have to be swept away,” Orban said. “It is necessary to make their existence legally impossible.”

Under the State Department, international aid will be directed toward “prioritizing trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, and investment over assistance,” said Rubio.

“USAID viewed its constituency as the United Nations, multinational NGOs, and the broader global community — not the U.S. taxpayers who funded its budget or the President they elected to represent their interests on the world stage,” he wrote.

“That ends today, and where there was once a rainbow of unidentifiable logos on life-saving aid, there will now be one recognizable symbol: the American flag. Recipients deserve to know the assistance provided to them is not a handout from an unknown NGO, but an investment from the American people,” he added.