Among Donald Trump’s recent shakeups of the federal government is the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was created in the 1960s to counter Soviet influence abroad through American assistance. Whether the agency will reopen, and in what capacity, is anyone’s guess, but there is little doubt that it is much in need of reform. Ben Cohen and Mark Dubowitz write:
In principle, the agency’s efforts to advance democracy and prevent wars are laudable. Developing countries benefit from agricultural technologies, inoculation against disease, and educational development. But, as is so often the case with social-development projects, fringe political ideologies were imposed on USAID’s work by government employees and consultants.
In 2024, as the region reeled from the aftermath of the bestial atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel the previous year, the United States significantly boosted its financial support for projects in Gaza and the West Bank, spending more than $200 million of American taxpayers’ money in territories already rife with terrorist incitement and activity. . . . These grants were made to what USAID called “miscellaneous foreign awardees.” You wouldn’t know from the opaque accounting process that beneficiaries included local partners who praised the October 7 onslaught.
Indeed, the rot had set in before 2023. Among the twenty Palestinian NGOs that received USAID funding in 2022 was the Community Development and Continuing Education Institute, whose chairman crowed over the escape of “six of our prisoner heroes” from an Israeli jail in 2021, all of whom were later recaptured.
None of this was remotely worrying for USAID’s governing bureaucracy. Instead of heeding the August 2024 warning from its own Office of Inspector General that due-diligence standards had fallen woefully short, the agency stoked false Palestinian claims that Israel was engineering a famine in Gaza.
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