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Hey, its a veritable bargain for Donald Trump! How could the businessman president (six of whose firms once went bankrupt) not be thrilled? For a mere $167,000, his administration will be able to destroy $9.7 million worth of U.S.-purchased contraceptives, now stored in a warehouse in Belgium, that otherwise would have been wasted on poor women in distant lands. After all, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which once distributed such products in poor countries, was essentially wiped off the face of the earth by the Trump administration. That act was hailed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who denounced USAID as a charity-based model that fueled addiction among the leaders of developing nations. The process of doing it in was described ebulliently by Elon Musk, when he was still involved in the Trump presidency, as putting the agency through the wood chipper. Admittedly, a study in the British medical journal The Lancet suggests that its closing could result in 14 million (no, that is not a misprint!) additional deaths by 2030 (and more than 4.5 million of them are likely to be children younger than five).
Still, what could fit our moment better? Donald Trump, as the bankruptcy president, prefers to rule by bullying and spite, not aid of any sort, globally or domestically. And it tells you all you need to know about our present all-American world, that his crew has indeed essentially wiped out the one government agency dedicated to truly helping other people on this planet, while investing staggeringly more money in yes, the U.S. military budget. Thats all the aid you could want on this planet, right?
And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular William deBuys consider what the destruction of USAID is likely to mean not just for global health but for an America Last planet. Tom
America First Is America Alone
The Destruction of Global Health, Trump-Style
The totalitarian playbook that Donald Trump seems to follow lacks a chapter. Power-crazed the president may be, but he fails to grasp soft power. Wise military and diplomatic minds understand it well. George C. Marshall, the nations top general through World War II and later secretary of state and secretary of defense, lent his name and his energies to the greatest exercise of soft power in American history, the Marshall Plan. Such was his stature that, with help from President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, he persuaded an isolationist post-World War II Congress to approve the costly program and so secured western Europe from Soviet political control, while defining the preeminent battle line of the Cold War.
More than six decades later, Jim Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps general who served as secretary of defense in the first Trump administration (when experience and professionalism were sometimes entertained in the Oval Office), championed soft power as Marshall had done. In testimony to Congress in 2013, he said, If you dont fund the State Department fully, then I have to buy more ammunition. He was endorsing the soft power of diplomacy to which he might have added the soft power of non-military assistance and moral and cultural influence. Soft power is the ability to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion and payment through means, that is, other than bullets, bullying, and bribery.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was a lineal descendant of the Marshall Plan and an embodiment of soft power. Its abandonment and ultimate destruction by the second Trump administration marks a watershed moment in the projection of American influence globally. Next to its headstone in the graveyard of institutions, one might also place a marker for the era that publisher Henry Luce once labelled the American Century. Like a married couple, the agency and its century deserve to be buried together, their lives having been intertwined and their dates nearly the same.
The Murder Was Not Premeditated
A possibly ketamine-pumped Elon Musk, brandishing a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, proved an apt image for the Trumpist demolition of government institutions this year. The hideously misnamed Department of Government Efficiency, then led by Musk, performed no meaningful analysis of which government functions were essential to preserve, let alone which civil servants had the expertise and experience to make such functions viable. Employees were simply fired en masse in the bureaucratic equivalent of a meat-cleaver amputation (no scalpels involved).
Initially, there was no plan to demolish USAID, just shrink it. However, what began as layoffs and the appointment of unqualified individuals to positions of authority led to resistance from employees loyal to their agency and their mission. That, in turn, prompted further cycles of layoffs and demolition. When the red mist of fighting finally lifted, there wasnt much left of the agency. Its remains were swept into the State Department, accompanied by solemn assurances that vital humanitarian programs had not been and would not be compromised, assurances no more real than an invitation to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
Yes, USAID had problems. What $30-billion-a-year organization doesnt? Some of its long-term advocates decried its faults as loudly as any MAGA cheerleader. In the words of one veteran partner of the agency, The bureaucracy was legion, hugely frustrating. In order to donate/spend a dollar you had to spend three, just to make sure the treasury wasnt getting ripped off.
Its vital to understand that the agencys sclerotic procedures and glacially slow decision-making resulted not from the rampant waste, fraud, and abuse alleged by Trumpists but in order to avoid those evils. As a top executive of one of USAIDs largest contractors told me, Outside auditors were never not in our offices. Every expenditure was examined, checked against the highly detailed contract and program of work, and verified.
In cases where speed was necessary or where arrangements in some back-of-beyond province were too fragile, USAID bypassed its labyrinthine contracting process and made direct grants to non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, that were locally based and staffed whenever possible. Admittedly, in those cases financial controls were looser, usually because scant infrastructure and operational uncertainties made bean-counting impossible. Sometimes, to build capacity or save lives, a relief organization simply has to wing it. Its tough to have it both ways.
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