Defunding USAID Is About Shutting Down Left-Wing Propaganda

The most common argument you’ll hear from those defending the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is that the grant dollars in question are just a fraction of the federal budget — less than one percent! Even if the Trump administration eliminated USAID altogether it wouldn’t put much of a dent in the deficit or help control the national debt, is the argument. Everyone from the talking heads at CNN and MSNBC to Jim Geraghty at National Review are repeating this line.

But trimming the federal budget and reducing the deficit aren’t really the point of this exercise. The point is to expose USAID for the left-wing propaganda and regime change operation that it has become, and to shut it down. In the six decades since it was established, USAID has gone from fighting poverty, spreading American ideals, and undercutting Soviet propaganda, to becoming a woke propaganda operation of its own that actively undermines the pillars of western civilization. It’s gone from exporting democracy to exporting deviancy, and it’s time to shut it down.

President Trump this week tasked Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio with a review of the agency’s grants and expenditures, which has already shone a much-needed light on where tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are going. My colleague Tristan Justice detailed a handful of some of the most insane projects USAID funds, including “$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.” Other projects were to fund electric vehicles in Vietnam, infrastructure in Egypt, meals for Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria, and internet censorship in the United Kingdom.

One anonymous X user, @DataRepublican, created a searchable database of federal government grants that’s helped uncover even more outrageous projects funded by USAID. Some of these are genuinely funny and easy to ridicule. For example, a $30 million grant for an organization that funds women making ponchos in the Guatemalan highlands and bankrolls “community organizing” in Burkina Faso. Or a $20 million grant for a Sesame Street-style show in Iraq, a $2 million grant to promote pottery in Morocco, and $15 million for condoms and contraceptives in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

The common theme in many of these grants is that they push LGBTQ, green, and woke ideologies under the pretext of fighting poverty and promoting democracy abroad. What began in 1961 as a way to promote stability and lure countries out of the Soviet orbit during the Cold War has over the past six decades transformed into an instrument of propaganda aimed at the foundations of western civilization. Everywhere you look in the USAID database, you see projects promoting LGBTQ ideology, mass immigration, multiculturalism, DEI, climate change-ism, and the like. You see programs that undermine the traditional family, that enable anti-free speech censorship, that strive to make the rest of the world just like urban liberal enclaves in the U.S.

Even more alarming, a significant portion of USAID funds appear to be nothing more than sinecures for connected establishment politicians in the U.S. The person who built the database, @DataRepublican, revealed that huge amounts of taxpayer dollars, through both the State Department and USAID (the former operating as a passthrough to the latter), go to NGOs stacked with establishment politicians from both parties — basically, the Washington uniparty.

As I write this, crowds of pro-USAID protesters, egged on by Democrat politicians, are gathering in Washington, D.C., to demand the arrest of Elon Musk and the shutdown of the Senate. Thousands of organizations in and around our nation’s capital are wholly or almost wholly funded through USAID grants in what amounts to a massive ongoing grift. For them, losing those funds means their NGOs will simply fold.

And fold they should. What began as a State Department agency to promote freedom and stability abroad during the Cold War has devolved, as perhaps it was inevitably going to, into a scam that steals from American taxpayers and uses their money to promote the dissolution of the American nation and the destruction of its founding ideals.

So it doesn’t matter how much or how little we might save by shutting down USAID — although every penny saved is worth it — what really matters is twofold: that we starve left-wing NGOs of the funds they use to promote toxic anti-American ideologies all over the world, and that the Trump administration demonstrates that it can indeed shut down executive branch programs and agencies that don’t align with White House priorities.

The fact that Democrats are howling about this is an admission, on their part, that they don’t think a Republican administration should be allowed to control the administrative bureaucracy. They think that belongs to them and their pet NGOs and activists, who have been using it to wage psychological warfare on the entire world for decades. That ends now, and if it means the women making ponchos in the Guatemalan highlands will have to find another source of funding, or the transgender comic books don’t ever get made, then so be it.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.