Baumgartner: Overhaul Foreign Aid to Serve American Interests

When President John F. Kennedy created the United States Agency for International Development in 1961, he did so with a spirit of optimism about America’s ability to help the needy but also with the pragmatic realization that winning a Cold War that was being fought across the globe meant fighting communist ideology with foreign development aid as well as with bullets.

Unfortunately, today, USAID has become a web of largely unaccountable bureaucrats with many questionable programs and staff that consider it more a charitable nongovernmental organization than an agency that’s meant to work on behalf of taxpayers. With a budget exceeding $40 billion, USAID does more to pad the wallets of contractor companies in the D.C. “swamp” than to effectively deliver assistance in support of U.S. foreign policy objectives.

Returning USAID to its roots, as a clearly defined arm of U.S. national security, is long overdue.

I care about international development. I studied and taught it at Harvard, lived with the Jesuits while helping refugees in Mozambique, and, with the U.S. State Department in Iraq and Afghanistan, I saw the best and the worst uses of U.S. development assistance in the fight against Islamic terrorists.

Now, as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I applaud the efforts of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to overhaul and refocus America’s foreign assistance efforts.

There have been some significant positive outcomes from recent U.S. foreign assistance. For example, the Bush administration–initiated funding for HIV prevention in Africa has saved millions of lives, and our direct food assistance has helped feed the hungry abroad while supporting American farmers at home. My alma mater, Washington State University, in partnership with USAID, has led research to develop early-warning systems for infectious diseases affecting livestock.

But there has also been too much mission drift under the Biden-Harris administration. Its support for fringe “woke” programs has garnered much of the agency’s attention: a $400 million digital technology project for LGBTQ people in Africa, $53 million to “empower local governments and vulnerable communities to realize their own resilient, low-carbon futures,” etc. Transforming USAID into an instrument of the “woke” agenda has also damaged its reputation with the American people, who see that their own country is $37 trillion in debt and wonder why $1.5 million in taxes is funding “DEI in Serbia’s workplaces.”

USAID also frequently fails to consider the desire — or capacity — of developing countries to successfully host its programs. When I worked on counter-narcotics in Helmand, Afghanistan, a USAID boss had decided that what the locals needed was a cobblestone road, similar to ones he had seen in Bolivia. Millions of U.S. dollars were spent on a road too bumpy for the light motorcycles favored by Afghans, who scoffed at the road and instead rode beside it through the desert. 

Beyond such oddball projects, however, I noticed another problem with USAID. It has become trapped in what has been called the “iron triangle” of government programs — bureaucrats, private contractors, and lobbyists work together to block efforts of the executive to control or even understand the agency. These elitists view the American public’s skepticism of foreign aid as an inconvenient ignorance to be ignored rather than a legitimate concern to be addressed. No wonder only 11.2 percent of USAID-eligible funding goes directly to local organizations on the ground.

It’s an old sort of problem. President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the military–industrial complex. Today, we might as well warn against the charity–industrial complex at USAID. 

The question, now, is what principles should guide a USAID overhaul?

A new foreign aid initiative must be firmly placed within our State Department, and every program must be judged by the sole criterion of how it advances U.S. national security, requiring a yearly reauthorization by Congress. It must be transparent so the public can easily review how aid dollars are spent and how much is going to overhead. U.S. foreign aid’s function as an extension of American partisan agendas and culture wars must end. Moreover, our new foreign aid programs must reach beyond the handful of gigantic NGOs and contractors who currently run the show with USAID to ensure that we do not get trapped yet again within a charity–industrial complex.

Most important, a new foreign aid program must be favored by the American people: the same people who pay for it and whose interests it is supposed to serve.