USAID Staff Cry for Their Fiefdom

"US taxpayers generally care about others, but many are struggling, as are the victims of the callousness of the last few years of global health malpractice."

By David Bell, Brownstone Institute

The largest foreign aid agency on earth has, courts willing, abruptly closed its doors in the past week and sent most of its staff home. Finding their virtue has no place to strut its worth, the response of many has been indignation and assurances of retaliation. Many of them had been working from home for years, but now must rouse themselves to show such indignation for being sent (i.e. remaining) home on full pay. Like being told to continue as normal, perhaps, but in a way that exposes uncomfortable realities to those in the community who are actually paying them.

Such cynicism is not the greatest of human traits, and when applied to an entire organization it is unfairly generalizing, but it also has its place. The new government elected by the people of the United States was, specifically, elected to dig into the accounts of large government bureaucracies and address a perception of profligate use of taxpayers’ money. Taxpayers who, mostly, get paid far less than the bureaucrats they are funding. Perhaps unusually, the elected government rapidly set about keeping some of its promises, co-opting a prominent private person (as they had also promised) as an agent to help drive the inquiries. Much of the current surprise, perhaps, arises from an elected President keeping some promises. Annoying as this can be, it is also how democracy is supposed to work.

Much is being made of evidence that USAID had been pushing ideology over need, such as stoking coups in democratic nations or supporting children’s programs that encourage ‘non-traditional beliefs on gender in conservative cultures. Concern is also correctly levelled over apparently reckless funding of bio labs in poorly controlled environments. People will argue on whether such cultural colonialism and risk enhancement are in US taxpayers’ interests (it depends on how you perceive humanity).

However, it is also important to reflect on how USAID addressed its supposed core function of supporting development and healthcare for the benefit of those in less fortunate countries. This can be considered in America’s interests because a more stable and prosperous world is good for trade, and/or because Americans are humans and there is a moral imperative to care for those less fortunate. Though some have contrary or isolationist views on this, Americans as a nation are generous givers, and this is roughly why most thought USAID was supposed to exist.

For the past 5 years, the staff of USAID has, as a team, supported policies that they knew would impoverish over a hundred million people, push up to 10 million more girls into child marriage, and drive up child deaths from malaria and malnutrition.

Rather than support education, they largely ignored the removal of formal education from hundreds of millions of children around the world, many for over a year. They knew that this would cement intergenerational poverty and increase mortality globally – undoing everything USAID is supposed to be working for. If they did not know this, then how did they get a job in a development agency?

While we now see USAID employees standing in the street protesting for being told to stay home on full pay, we did not see such protests a few years back when average American workers were told to stay home and lost pay or businesses. There were no protests in DC in support of hundreds of millions of day laborers in poor countries who lost all income and savings for a virus that posed minimal risk to them. For apparently ideological reasons that required considerable callousness or cowardice, many actually promoted this approach to Covid-19 whilst continuing to take their own salaries.

USAID does a lot of good. Abruptly stopping all disbursement of funds will kill people, particularly children. Because of the nature of diseases, supply lines, and the state of health systems in low-income countries, a sudden interruption to HIV testing and distribution of antiretroviral therapies through PEPFAR, significantly managed by USAID, will result in increased transmission and death from HIV/AIDS.

Mothballing the Presidents’ Malaria Initiative (PMI) will increase the shortfall in bed nets, diagnostics, and treatment that directly stop children from dying of malaria. Child malaria deaths are quite likely to increase by tens of thousands because PMI plays a crucial role in plugging gaps in the availability of these commodities.

Cutting funding for tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment will also increase deaths, increase transmission (new infections), and increase the spread of resistant parasites (which will increasingly reach the US). Voluntary donations to charities, despite what many want to believe, do not replace this.

So, the people stopping USAID from working in these areas also need to decide how many dead children will be acceptable. They may decide that it’s not their problem, but that is a philosophical approach that has implications that are not pleasant. It is also one that is probably not shared by most US taxpayers. Put those tens of thousands of dead kids in Texas and it starts to seem more real.

However, the people auditing and trying to understand its USAID disbursements, unravelling the tangle of good and harm, are doing important work. They are responsible to US taxpayers who had assumed their hard-earned funds were well used. Many can barely pay rent or address the needs of their own children, children who now face an unprecedented national debt because so much federal money, wisely or not, has been spent.

A government has a direct responsibility to avoid wasting its citizens’ money on the pet projects of people on far more comfortable salaries. These taxpayers are the ones with the greater right to show indignation, not those who abrogated their responsibility to the world’s disadvantaged.

Those who took USAID to a place where such radical reform is deemed necessary could devote time to introspection and examine why those funding them are asking where the money went, and why. Their world is recovering from the mess of Covid-19, originating from a virus almost certainly arising from government-funded research, likely including funds dispersed by USAID itself.

While working from home after the virus’s inevitable escape, they supported a response that ignored risk and good public health practice, wrecking the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions. They stood for corporate profit over the welfare of the many. Virtue signaling now is unlikely to help. The real harms accruing from USAID shutdowns are very much its own doing.

US taxpayers generally care about others, but many are struggling, as are the victims of the callousness of the last few years of global health malpractice. USAID has been an integral part of this problem. We can hope that those tasked with sorting out the mess this institution created have the wisdom and compassion to rapidly sift the wheat from the chaff and minimize further harm.

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