Thumbs Down to Foggy Bottom’s ‘USAID Lite’ – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The foreign aid complex is a racket. The harm it has done over the decades far exceeds its egregious waste of taxpayer dollars.

For years, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its network of taxpayer-funded “partners” have promoted a destructive, intolerant ideology that not only opposes American national interests but also subverts the social and moral order of the civilizations represented by the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (RELATED: Foreign Aid Reform: USAID Has a History of Funding Terrorists and Anti-American Organizations)

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump addressed this issue in an executive order: “The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases [they are] antithetical to American values. They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.” (RELATED: Are the Protests in Slovakia Due to NGO and USAID Interference?)

Despite the announcement of major cuts in foreign aid spending and steps toward the nominal dismantling of USAID — to be replaced with another bureaucracy with a different name — the racket remains a going concern. Its members remain deeply entrenched and powerful in the State Department and in the racket’s ecosystem of non-governmental organizations and contractors. (RELATED: Trump Should Shutter USAID — Development Economics Is a Hotbed for Corruption)

A memo purportedly written in the State Department by Trump administration officials and leaked to the left-wing media outlet Politico outlined a plan for a “complete revamp” of U.S. foreign aid. The dense, 13-page, single-spaced memo, whose pages are presented out of proper sequence on the Politico website, has two parts. First is a set of policy pronouncements joined to proposals for reorganizing the foreign aid bureaucracy. The second is a highly technical plan for legislative and administrative actions to accomplish the so-called revamp. This article will focus on the non-technical part of the memo.

Politico says the memo was written by some unnamed “Trump administration officials.” On close examination, the broader policy portion of the memo appears to be plagiarized from a policy paper released on Feb. 28 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bulwark of the Beltway Uniparty establishment. It’s no mere coincidence that CSIS receives funding from USAID and other federal agencies. Nor is it a coincidence that Politico, which published the leaked State Department internal document, is at the center of a scandal for having received funds from USAID. (RELATED: The Foreign Aid Racket Funds RINO Grifters, Not Just Democrats)

A very careful reading of the leaked document from Foggy Bottom — notably the page headed “What Should We Invest In and Why Should We Do It?” — shows that it does not really speak like the Trump administration. It’s speaking about the Trump administration to an audience of . . . whom?

The leaked government memo refers to “the Trump administration” not in the first person but in the third person. It has the tone and frame of reference of a conversation in an echo chamber between two like-minded parties: aid bureaucrats inside the government, and, on the other side of the Washington revolving door, their NGO allies. This is a further indication that the leaked memo may not have been prepared by actual political appointees of the Trump administration but instead is the product of plagiarism, or more likely, deliberate collusion between career bureaucrats and their soulmates at CSIS.

The clincher is this:

A news and propaganda publication of the foreign aid industry, Devex — also subsidized by USAID and many of its grantees and contractors — calls the leaked State Department memo “intriguing.” It quotes CSIS staff member Richard Crespin, who said, “The memo was very well thought out and well rationed. And it seems to me that whoever was the author has a pretty thorough understanding of both the legislative side of this as well as the practical side.”

The think-tank sage’s admiration for the State Department memo should come as no surprise. Crespin is a co-author of the CSIS paper that the memo parrots!

The CSIS paper and the memo attempt to flatter the Trump administration in general, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in particular. Both related papers cite criteria Rubio has established for future foreign aid: Will it make the United States safer, stronger, and more prosperous?

“Safer, stronger, and more prosperous” have become the cards of a slick three-card monte scam by experienced foreign aid grifters.

Both the CSIS paper and the putative State Department internal memo use the full panoply of buzzwords that the foreign aid racket has used for decades to gaslight the American people and their elected officials. Sixty years of government waste and fiascos in international relations are breezily brushed aside with smooth assurances by those who have made careers out of fleecing the taxpayers and abusing the public trust. This time, they assure us, they can be trusted to “do development” correctly, through their skills at “streamlining,” “restructuring,” establishing a “unified, coordinated delivery system,” and creating a “modern, effective international assistance framework.”

Powerful people in the State Department and in the remnants of USAID want us to believe there’s nothing wrong with foreign aid that can’t be made right through what they consider modern management. They want to keep many USAID programs alive under the roof of the State Department.

One of the big lies of the foreign aid racket is to call giveaways “investments.” Whether it’s donating food and medicine, paying the salaries of contractors and NGO executives, or giving cash to foreign governments that is never to be returned, the racketeers always call this “investment.”

In an essentially empty gesture to free-market conservatives, President George W. Bush created a new foreign aid agency called the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Bush misled conservatives into thinking this new entity would hold its purse strings tighter and eventually become the only vehicle of U.S. foreign assistance, while Bush was expected to dismantle the discredited bureaucracy of USAID. Bush broke that promise and doubled the size of USAID.

The memo leaked to Politico proposes that U.S. taxpayer dollars going to foreign countries be modeled on the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s instruments of “compacts,” “scorecards,” and such. The State Department document insists that this aid actually would be “transactional” and generate actual returns on “investment” to U.S. taxpayers. But in the same section of the memo, the State Department says it would “hold discretionary authority to waive eligibility criteria and penalties based on geo-political and strategic considerations.”

Dear readers: Would any of you invest your personal funds in a project that “guarantees” to repay your principal plus interest, but with fine print stating that the State Department has “discretionary authority” to renege on the guarantee? It is deals of this sort that the anonymous authors of the leaked State Department memo are proposing to make, with your tax dollars, in Third World countries. And they call their proposal a reform.

The truth is that neither the State Department nor the large remnant of USAID that it proposes to preserve are capable of planning and managing real investments. If the United States government intends to make investments in extractive industries or infrastructure projects in Third World countries, it should do so through the sovereign wealth fund that Trump has proposed. State Department and foreign aid bureaucrats should not have their fingers on a single penny of such sovereign wealth investments.

USAID’s “global health” programs were a cesspool of promoting abortion, gender ideology, and other activities against the moral beliefs of millions of Christians and Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa, among other places. Insisting that these USAID programs “save lives,” the State Department wants to take them over. (RELATED: Defunding USAID: Trump’s Biggest Gift to Pro-Lifers After Dobbs)

American aid for public health in poor countries, even if it is not morally problematic, is not within the capabilities of the State Department. Instead, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department should manage any such programs.

If the U.S. taxpayers continue to provide food aid overseas, that aid should be administered by the Department of Agriculture, not by the State Department or its “USAID Lite” unit.

Keeping such programs out of the State Department allows the department to focus on its core mission of diplomacy.

One of the strangest things about the memo that was said to be written by “Trump administration officials” in the State Department is its unconditional support for foreign aid activities that President Trump and his team clearly oppose, namely “democracy promotion” and “women’s empowerment.”

Everyone knows that, in context, the State Department’s “democracy promotion” is an Orwellian expression rightly denounced by Vice President JD Vance at his speech to European leaders in Munich. The term refers to “color revolutions,” nation-building interventions, “firewalls” against legal political parties as we’ve seen in Germany, and the annulment of free and fair national elections if the “international community” doesn’t like the outcome, as we’ve seen in Romania. (RELATED: Vance in Munich and Foreign Policy Realism for the Modern World)

“Women’s empowerment,” as it is understood and promoted by the ideologues of the foreign aid racket, is not anything as innocuous as a concern about equal pay for equal work. It means unrestricted abortion and other anti-life, anti-family policies that oppose the moral values of hundreds of millions of Christians and Muslims in countries the foreign aid racket pretends to “assist.”

Perhaps the worst thing that the foreign aid racket has done to Christian churches is to have corrupted them into accepting billions upon billions of dollars with strings attached. Take the example of the Catholic church. The conference of the Catholic bishops of the United States decades ago created Catholic Relief Services as a ministry of almsgiving, providing church members an opportunity to give — preferably sacrificially — to provide vital aid to survivors of wars and natural disasters abroad.

I remember well from when I was a Catholic parish grade school child during the 1960s, we were given “mite boxes” to fill with our pennies over the course of the season of Lent. We were called upon constantly to pray for — and with — the afflicted people we were helping to recover with our pennies. (RELATED: The US Bishops’ Hypocrisy on Human Trafficking)

Today, Catholic Relief Services has become a massive federal government contractor, an “implementing partner” for the USAID and foreign aid establishment that is profoundly anti-Christian, and indeed diametrically opposed to the moral beliefs of Muslims as well as Christians.

In an interview, Obianuju Ekeocha, an African Catholic lay leader expressed her dismay with her church’s dependency on U.S. federal tax dollars. “I find it very alarming and disturbing,” she says, “to see this organizational model where Catholic charitable organizations put themselves forward to receive significant portions of their revenue from governments which in some cases are openly hostile and historically have even been oppressive to devout Catholics living out their faith in a society that is normalizing immorality.”

Ekeocha continued:

It is an open secret that there have been immediate threats to African countries who have dared to defend traditional marriage or who have tried to pass laws considered “homophobic” by donors. Also, donor nations have compelled recipients to accept funding for things that have not been asked for, like the millions of dollars’ worth of condoms and contraceptives sent each year to developing countries. It has become a matter of whoever pays the piper dictates the tune. I have on many occasions described this ideological neocolonialism, and it is firmly rooted in foreign-aid relationships.

USAID and the foreign aid racket have always been anti-family. China scholar Stephen Mosher recently demonstrated to readers that “USAID has always been about population control.” The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which led to the creation of USAID and still governs its operations today, notes Mosher, specifies “control of population growth” as one of the criteria used to determine whether a country is committed to “the most effective use of such assistance to help satisfy basic human needs of poor people.”

A significant portion of the assistance provided by USAID since its creation in 1961, says Mosher, “has been conditioned upon the goal of driving down birth rates. The agency has, in effect, been operated on the morally bankrupt principle that the best way to eliminate poverty is to eliminate the children of the poor.”

Hundreds of major church-based international charity organizations, including Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse, have been pulled into the web of the fundamentally anti-Christian foreign aid racket. The liberal Republican-in-Name-Only former USAID administrator Andrew Natsios boasted about how he pressured Graham and other Evangelical Christian leaders to keep them in line with the racket. (See p. 34 of the linked interview with Natsios.)

The State Department and USAID for more than six decades have been conditioned to embrace the “ideology of Development,” which economist William Easterly wrote, is “almost as deadly as the tired ideologies of the last century — communism, fascism, and socialism — that failed so miserably.

Like all ideologies, Development promises a comprehensive final answer to all of society’s problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and despotic rulers. It shares the common ideological characteristic of suggesting there is only one correct answer, and it tolerates little dissent. It deduces this unique answer for everyone from a general theory that purports to apply to everyone, everywhere. … Development even has its own intelligentsia, made up of experts at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and United Nations.”

Words are powerful, whether used in service of the truth or misused as instruments of deceptive propaganda. For the foreign aid industry, “development” is a deliberately vague term serving what is essentially a gnostic cult. If the Trump administration is serious about implementing the president’s executive order, it should ban all use of the word “development” as it has been employed by the foreign aid ideologues.

The American people deserve to know the full story of the memo published by Politico. Is it a smokescreen? Is it authentic? Who actually wrote it? Who leaked it? Since the memo is obviously based on the CSIS paper, what exactly was the interaction between the State Department and CSIS in the preparation of the memo, and in the self-serving leak? Did U.S. government employees improperly share internal government policy information with CSIS?

The purported State Department memo is a unilateral act of surrender. It undermines the president’s unambiguous executive order. It goes against the thrust of the president’s powerful speech to the joint session of Congress, where he purposefully recited one foreign aid abuse after another. It kowtows to the impotent, defeated Democrats. It supposes that the lawfare battle over foreign aid that has just begun has been lost. It contradicts the theme of every campaign appearance by JD Vance: “Let’s rebuild America first.”

President Trump should repudiate it.

READ MORE from Joseph P. Duggan:

The Foreign Aid Racket Funds RINO Grifters, Not Just Democrats

Take My Congresswoman (Cori Bush) – PLEASE!

Joseph Duggan has many years of diplomatic and international policy experience in the White House, the State Department, and USAID. In the latter, during the George W. Bush administration, he witnessed firsthand the anti-Christian and anti-American character of the foreign aid network.