13 ms·

Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodnes

by yabones 8mo ago

Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. And to set a price floor for agricultural products.

pjc50 8mo ago
It's quite likely that, sprinkled in among the idealistic helpers of the third world, were some number of CIA agents. For good or ill. (the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)
- sedawkgrep 8mo ago
  Do you have any source for any of this?
  - irl_zebra 8mo ago
    If nothing else, the "Political Operations Abroad" section of USAID's wiki has some links and background.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
    NPOs are traditional places for CIA agents. Tends to make them targets of suspicion. Source: My father[0] was in the CIA, and worked at an NPO, in Africa. [0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm
    - heisgone 8mo ago
      >Increasingly, he found his cover work more engaging and important than his intelligence-gathering. Your father was a great man.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
        Agreed. He left the CIA, because they became something he couldn't reconcile with himself.
  - pjc50 8mo ago
    Source for Top Secret info? No, but I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_in_Pakistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_... (not USAID, a different organization)
  - heisgone 8mo ago
    If you don't mind listening to right-wing adjacent commentators, Mike Benz document those links extensively on his podcast. For exemple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR09YYX-3fg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR09YYX-3fg
- ImPostingOnHN 8mo ago
  It's also quite likely that the reincarnations of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Jesus are sprinkled among the same idealistic helpers. > the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of... ...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you. Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).
- estearum 8mo ago
  USAID is considered instrumental in ending Apartheid in South Africa. Given the timeline of the Musk family's arrival and departure... one might believe they viewed the end of Apartheid as a bit troublesome.
- ourmandave 8mo ago
  It's how we found Osama Bin Laden. CIA posing as Doctors Without Borders going door-to-door pretending to vaccinate locals. They actually did vaccinations until they found him and then quit, leaving a bunch of people with only the first dose. And a complete distrust for Doctors Without Borders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_in_Pakistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...
  - mrguyorama 8mo ago
    >It's how we found Osama Bin Laden. >The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden. Your cite disagrees
    - ourmandave 8mo ago
      Well, damn. Things I read before implied it worked and they'd keep committing the same f*ckery. Like vaccine denial isn't bad enough already. =[
jameskilton 8mo ago
[flagged]
- joe_mamba 8mo ago
  >but many US farmers were USAID farmers 100% of their crop and all of their income was tied to USAID. Got a source for this? I wanna read on this.
  - sedawkgrep 8mo ago
    Googling turns up a multitude. Quick Look says in 2025 $2B worth of us crops went to USAID. More info here. https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/usaid-dismantling-what-it-means-farmers-and-ag-research https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/usaid-dismantling...
  - throw0101a 8mo ago
    It's about USD 2B worth of purchases: * https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/06/trump-usaid-money-american-farms/ https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2... * https://theconversation.com/american-farmers-who-once-fed-the-world-face-a-volatile-global-market-with-diminishing-federal-backing-271369 https://theconversation.com/american-farmers-who-once-fed-th... * https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2025/02/13/musk-gutting-usaid-american-farms-businesses/78382724007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2025/02/13/mus... * https://betterworldcampaign.org/blog/what-us-farmers-get-from-americas-engagement-in-the-un https://betterworldcampaign.org/blog/what-us-farmers-get-fro... And in addition to farmers, a lot of companies/non-profits (for, e.g., logistics) were paid by USAID programs, as well as researchers for things like global health initiatives.
  - jeffbee 8mo ago
    There are crops that USAID bought that have literally no other market, like milo. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5296876/trying-to-keep-food-for-peace-despite-efforts-to-dismantle-usaid https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5296876/trying-to-keep-...
- 8mo ago
sedawkgrep 8mo ago
[flagged]
- wheelerwj 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- throw0101a 8mo ago
  > The #1 recipient of USAID assistance was Ukraine. UA started being at the top in 2022: care to guess what humanitarian disaster started at that time? After them, we have DRC, Jordan, Ethiopia, West Bank and Gaza, Sudan, ….
  - pocksuppet 8mo ago
    > Gaza Oh. That's why.
- seanhunter 8mo ago
  If you take a look at the data[1] you can see that it was nowhere near the top, then there was one big chunk in 2022-23 then it came back down again, and that aid was 67% military with the DoD providing 13B. So whatever you're trying to insinuate, the simple explanation is they received a lot of aid (mainly military) because they had been invaded. That's is fully supported by the evidence. [1] https://foreignassistance.gov/cd/ukraine/ https://foreignassistance.gov/cd/ukraine/
heisgone 8mo ago
The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman. Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.
- wwweston 8mo ago
  "politically impossible" is giving up on Americans ability to perceive the national advantage as well as the moral good. Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side. This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.
  - Schlagbohrer 8mo ago
    "You'll never go broke betting against the american people" -Matthew Cushman
- energy123 8mo ago
  The most compelling explanation for US soft power is balance of threat theory[0]. Soft power comes from you not being seen as a threat, and you being seen as a way to prevent other threats. Because above all, countries prioritize security. The status quo in US foreign policy was that as long as you're pliable to US interests, then the US was nice to you. You get democracy and get bounded autonomy, more autonomy than was afforded to subjects under any previous empire, to the extent that people would question whether the US even was an empire. Despite US being incredibly powerful militarily, the US was seen as non-threatening to friendly countries. That was an incredible magic trick, since those two things are usually correlated. This drew countries into its orbit and expanded its influence. Countries could see the contrast to being in the Soviet Union's orbit and having your grain stolen, your people getting kicked out (Crimea) or being put into a camp. This theory is a way to conceptualize the problem with Trump's bellicose and volatile attitudes towards Canada and European countries. If everyone sees you as a threat, this theory predicts that they will balance against you. In concrete terms, this theory predicts that countries who aren't threatened by China (due to being far away) will become closer to China if they feel threatened by the US. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_threat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_threat
nxm 8mo ago
Did you look at specifically some of the items the money was being wasted on?
- CursedSilicon 8mo ago
  Let me guess. Was it the "trans surgery for immigrants"
- estearum 8mo ago
  Pretty much every example of flagrant waste I've seen brought up by DOGE -- regardless of how insane the line item sounded -- actually ended up reading as more and more valuable the more I read about it. Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.
  - krapp 8mo ago
    Government spending and the deficit has increased by approximately $800 billion since Trump came into office. It certainly hasn't gone down. Weird that none of the DOGE apologists seem to care anymore. Trump adding billions of dollars to the deficit in increased military spending in 2026? Not a peep. Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless. But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink. [0]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886840365329608708 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886840365329608708
    - 8mo ago
Papazsazsa 8mo ago
1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra. 2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget 3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured. 4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.
- freejazz 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Papazsazsa 8mo ago
    Whether DOGE's motivations were reform, political theater, or budget slashing is irrelevant to whether the underlying problem – IC integration into civilian development infrastructure – is a legitimate issue worth addressing. For people with operational experience, the concern is real and predates DOGE by decades – USAID cover compromised actual development workers, created force protection problems, and poisoned the well for legitimate civilian programs.
    - freejazz 8mo ago
      But they aren't addressing it. They just outright ended USAID without any regard for any of the things you continue to type. Addressing it would be to provide the functions without the IC.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
reenorap 8mo ago
If anyone believes that USAID was primarily foreign aid, then they have fallen for the lie. If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.
- Swenrekcah 8mo ago
  This much is true, like most things coming from Trump this move mainly benefited Russia and China while actively harming US interests.
- ajross 8mo ago
  > control their own destinies without interference from the US Not on the menu. The question is do you want them controlled by the US or by China?
drstewart 8mo ago
>it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives A check of pretty much any UN vote shows that this was a completely and utterly ineffective method then. Example: https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overwhelmingly-rejects-the-blockade-at-the-un-for-33rd-consecutive-year https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overw...
shrubble 8mo ago
Was the statement that over 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false? It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.
- mistrial9 8mo ago
  add the recent public meeting with CA Gov's office in San Francisco, delivering 9 figures of new money to the homeless situation in CA.. with Democrat figures emphatically and pointedly declaring all the money legitimate and accountable.. at the very same moment that news headlines are showing court documents of the opposite at a large scale in multiple jurisdictions .. mostly Los Angeles to be clear #-- Governor Gavin Newsom met with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on January 16, 2026, to announce over $419 million in new state funding for homelessness and mental health efforts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The funding comes from the sixth round of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program and includes $39.9 million for San Francisco to support shelter operations, navigation centers, and services through June 2029.
- xnx 8mo ago
  > 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false? Yes, in as much as that is a nonsense phrase meant to sound bad. If USAID buys wheat from American farmers, the money stays in the US and the wheat is exported.
Isamu 8mo ago
>All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor. It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot. It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.

by yabones 8mo ago

pjc50 8mo ago

It's quite likely that, sprinkled in among the idealistic helpers of the third world, were some number of CIA agents. For good or ill. (the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)

sedawkgrep 8mo ago
Do you have any source for any of this?
- irl_zebra 8mo ago
  If nothing else, the "Political Operations Abroad" section of USAID's wiki has some links and background.
- ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
  NPOs are traditional places for CIA agents. Tends to make them targets of suspicion. Source: My father[0] was in the CIA, and worked at an NPO, in Africa. [0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm
  - heisgone 8mo ago
    >Increasingly, he found his cover work more engaging and important than his intelligence-gathering. Your father was a great man.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
      Agreed. He left the CIA, because they became something he couldn't reconcile with himself.
- pjc50 8mo ago
  Source for Top Secret info? No, but I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_in_Pakistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_... (not USAID, a different organization)
- heisgone 8mo ago
  If you don't mind listening to right-wing adjacent commentators, Mike Benz document those links extensively on his podcast. For exemple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR09YYX-3fg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR09YYX-3fg
ImPostingOnHN 8mo ago
It's also quite likely that the reincarnations of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Jesus are sprinkled among the same idealistic helpers. > the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of... ...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you. Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).
estearum 8mo ago
USAID is considered instrumental in ending Apartheid in South Africa. Given the timeline of the Musk family's arrival and departure... one might believe they viewed the end of Apartheid as a bit troublesome.
ourmandave 8mo ago
It's how we found Osama Bin Laden. CIA posing as Doctors Without Borders going door-to-door pretending to vaccinate locals. They actually did vaccinations until they found him and then quit, leaving a bunch of people with only the first dose. And a complete distrust for Doctors Without Borders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_in_Pakistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...
- mrguyorama 8mo ago
  >It's how we found Osama Bin Laden. >The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden. Your cite disagrees
  - ourmandave 8mo ago
    Well, damn. Things I read before implied it worked and they'd keep committing the same f*ckery. Like vaccine denial isn't bad enough already. =[

jameskilton 8mo ago

[flagged]

joe_mamba 8mo ago
>but many US farmers were USAID farmers 100% of their crop and all of their income was tied to USAID. Got a source for this? I wanna read on this.
- sedawkgrep 8mo ago
  Googling turns up a multitude. Quick Look says in 2025 $2B worth of us crops went to USAID. More info here. https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/usaid-dismantling-what-it-means-farmers-and-ag-research https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/usaid-dismantling...
- throw0101a 8mo ago
  It's about USD 2B worth of purchases: * https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/06/trump-usaid-money-american-farms/ https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2... * https://theconversation.com/american-farmers-who-once-fed-the-world-face-a-volatile-global-market-with-diminishing-federal-backing-271369 https://theconversation.com/american-farmers-who-once-fed-th... * https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2025/02/13/musk-gutting-usaid-american-farms-businesses/78382724007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2025/02/13/mus... * https://betterworldcampaign.org/blog/what-us-farmers-get-from-americas-engagement-in-the-un https://betterworldcampaign.org/blog/what-us-farmers-get-fro... And in addition to farmers, a lot of companies/non-profits (for, e.g., logistics) were paid by USAID programs, as well as researchers for things like global health initiatives.
- jeffbee 8mo ago
  There are crops that USAID bought that have literally no other market, like milo. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5296876/trying-to-keep-food-for-peace-despite-efforts-to-dismantle-usaid https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5296876/trying-to-keep-...
8mo ago

sedawkgrep 8mo ago

[flagged]

wheelerwj 8mo ago
[flagged]
throw0101a 8mo ago
> The #1 recipient of USAID assistance was Ukraine. UA started being at the top in 2022: care to guess what humanitarian disaster started at that time? After them, we have DRC, Jordan, Ethiopia, West Bank and Gaza, Sudan, ….
- pocksuppet 8mo ago
  > Gaza Oh. That's why.
seanhunter 8mo ago
If you take a look at the data[1] you can see that it was nowhere near the top, then there was one big chunk in 2022-23 then it came back down again, and that aid was 67% military with the DoD providing 13B. So whatever you're trying to insinuate, the simple explanation is they received a lot of aid (mainly military) because they had been invaded. That's is fully supported by the evidence. [1] https://foreignassistance.gov/cd/ukraine/ https://foreignassistance.gov/cd/ukraine/

heisgone 8mo ago

The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman. Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.

wwweston 8mo ago
"politically impossible" is giving up on Americans ability to perceive the national advantage as well as the moral good. Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side. This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.
- Schlagbohrer 8mo ago
  "You'll never go broke betting against the american people" -Matthew Cushman
energy123 8mo ago
The most compelling explanation for US soft power is balance of threat theory[0]. Soft power comes from you not being seen as a threat, and you being seen as a way to prevent other threats. Because above all, countries prioritize security. The status quo in US foreign policy was that as long as you're pliable to US interests, then the US was nice to you. You get democracy and get bounded autonomy, more autonomy than was afforded to subjects under any previous empire, to the extent that people would question whether the US even was an empire. Despite US being incredibly powerful militarily, the US was seen as non-threatening to friendly countries. That was an incredible magic trick, since those two things are usually correlated. This drew countries into its orbit and expanded its influence. Countries could see the contrast to being in the Soviet Union's orbit and having your grain stolen, your people getting kicked out (Crimea) or being put into a camp. This theory is a way to conceptualize the problem with Trump's bellicose and volatile attitudes towards Canada and European countries. If everyone sees you as a threat, this theory predicts that they will balance against you. In concrete terms, this theory predicts that countries who aren't threatened by China (due to being far away) will become closer to China if they feel threatened by the US. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_threat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_threat

nxm 8mo ago

Did you look at specifically some of the items the money was being wasted on?

CursedSilicon 8mo ago
Let me guess. Was it the "trans surgery for immigrants"
estearum 8mo ago
Pretty much every example of flagrant waste I've seen brought up by DOGE -- regardless of how insane the line item sounded -- actually ended up reading as more and more valuable the more I read about it. Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.
- krapp 8mo ago
  Government spending and the deficit has increased by approximately $800 billion since Trump came into office. It certainly hasn't gone down. Weird that none of the DOGE apologists seem to care anymore. Trump adding billions of dollars to the deficit in increased military spending in 2026? Not a peep. Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless. But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink. [0]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886840365329608708 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886840365329608708
  - 8mo ago

Papazsazsa 8mo ago

1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra. 2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget 3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured. 4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.

freejazz 8mo ago
[flagged]
- Papazsazsa 8mo ago
  Whether DOGE's motivations were reform, political theater, or budget slashing is irrelevant to whether the underlying problem – IC integration into civilian development infrastructure – is a legitimate issue worth addressing. For people with operational experience, the concern is real and predates DOGE by decades – USAID cover compromised actual development workers, created force protection problems, and poisoned the well for legitimate civilian programs.
  - freejazz 8mo ago
    But they aren't addressing it. They just outright ended USAID without any regard for any of the things you continue to type. Addressing it would be to provide the functions without the IC.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]

reenorap 8mo ago

If anyone believes that USAID was primarily foreign aid, then they have fallen for the lie. If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.

Swenrekcah 8mo ago
This much is true, like most things coming from Trump this move mainly benefited Russia and China while actively harming US interests.
ajross 8mo ago
> control their own destinies without interference from the US Not on the menu. The question is do you want them controlled by the US or by China?

drstewart 8mo ago

>it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives A check of pretty much any UN vote shows that this was a completely and utterly ineffective method then. Example: https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overwhelmingly-rejects-the-blockade-at-the-un-for-33rd-consecutive-year https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overw...

shrubble 8mo ago

Was the statement that over 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false? It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.

mistrial9 8mo ago
add the recent public meeting with CA Gov's office in San Francisco, delivering 9 figures of new money to the homeless situation in CA.. with Democrat figures emphatically and pointedly declaring all the money legitimate and accountable.. at the very same moment that news headlines are showing court documents of the opposite at a large scale in multiple jurisdictions .. mostly Los Angeles to be clear #-- Governor Gavin Newsom met with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on January 16, 2026, to announce over $419 million in new state funding for homelessness and mental health efforts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The funding comes from the sixth round of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program and includes $39.9 million for San Francisco to support shelter operations, navigation centers, and services through June 2029.
xnx 8mo ago
> 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false? Yes, in as much as that is a nonsense phrase meant to sound bad. If USAID buys wheat from American farmers, the money stays in the US and the wheat is exported.

Isamu 8mo ago

>All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor. It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot. It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.