USAID: A brief history of the Democrats’ now-defunct ‘miracle weapon’

Donald Trump has destroyed the Democrats' miracle weapon for exporting democracy, say Gergely Szilvay and Mátyás Kohán for the Mandiner news portal

By Liz Heflin
12 Min Read

USAID, which started as a Cold War weapon and has now become an LGBTQ evangelist, can no longer spend money on Democrats’ priorities worldwide, write Gergely Szilvay and Mátyás Kohán in a piece for Mandiner that explores the history and downfall of the USAID.

Donald Trump’s administration has made available a list of those supported by the official U.S. government aid organization, USAID, and other government agencies (State Department, National Endowment for Democracy, etc.).

The case is preceded by an executive order by Trump suspending the disbursement of foreign aid for three months. As a result, many Hungarian left-wing media outlets and organizations lost millions of forints in funding. Twenty-two applicants were able to say goodbye to a total of 173 million forints (€425,000). However, the implementation of the decree was suspended by two judges.

Then, people from Elon Musk’s government office, DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), showed up at the USAID building to get the data they wanted. Some USAID employees, including John Voorhees, the agency’s head of security, tried to prevent the DOGE people from entering the USAID building. Then two managers were sent on leave, and DOGE people obtained the data they were looking for.

Elon Musk wrote on X that USAID is a “criminal organization” that cannot be fixed and should be shut down. There have also been reports that the “autonomous” organization, which is otherwise organizationally under the State Department but partially under the control of Congress, will be completely merged into the State Department.

The liberal Guardian notes that USAID is the world’s largest aid agency, distributing $72 billion in 2023 and providing 42 percent of all aid counted by the UN in 2024.

Open clash with liberals

Zoltán Koskovics, an analyst at the Center for Fundamental Rights, explained to Mandiner: “With one of Donald Trump’s first presidential decrees, he suspended the disbursement of development aid in order for the State Department to review it. According to the document, this was necessary because a significant part of the programs did not meet the interests of the United States, were not compatible with the foreign policy direction set by the new administration, and, moreover, ‘serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are contrary to the internal political peace of these nations and harmonious and stable international relations.’”

He added that liberals, following their usual tactics, challenged the presidential order in court, but what followed must have surprised them. Instead of the new administration waiting for the legal wrangling to end, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sprang into action. “Within a few days, they paralyzed the operations of USAID, the agency responsible for development loans, with the undisclosed goal of bringing to light the conditions prevailing there and destroying the entire corrupt structure to the ground,” said Koskovics.

“Over the past decades, a diverse and untraceable corruption mechanism has been built around the U.S. ‘soft power’ agency, which had two basic goals: the spread of postmodern, woke ideology, and the opaque outsourcing of American taxpayer money to USAID’s foreign agents. It is no coincidence that Elon Musk called the organization a ‘criminal enterprise’ and vowed to completely eliminate it,” the expert said in a statement to Mandiner.

The roots of American aid policy

The history of American international development policy dates back to the Marshall Plan after World War II. Since communist parties posed a significant threat in Europe, the Americans ensured that aid was channeled to appropriate organizations, provided advice to several Christian Democratic-right parties (such as the Italian one), and eventually took on the support of party foundations (such as the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, affiliated with the CDU-CSU in Germany, and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, affiliated with the Social Democrats).

They even entered higher education: Since the leftists had become dominant at the German Humboldt University, they founded the Freie Universität Berlin. This was also intended to spread “Americanism.” But they failed to notice that “Americanism” meant something very different in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: From the 1960s onwards, the former Americanness meant liberalism and radical left-wing critical theories imported back to Europe.

While the European allies received Marshall Aid, the developing countries of the world received something completely different: USAID’s aid programs.

USAID is known to incorporate Washington’s government priorities into its aid programs, i.e., it also exerts indirect power in the form of ideological pressure. The American political ideas behind the organization were first mentioned by President Harry S. Truman in his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 1949. The president explained: “We must embark on a bold new program to make the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial development available for the development and growth of underdeveloped areas.” 

Truman described the world situation as follows: more than half of the world “lives in conditions approaching poverty,”  they are malnourished, sick, “their economic life is primitive and stagnant” (but) “for the first time in history, humanity has the knowledge and the ability to alleviate the suffering of these people,” and the United States has a leading role to play in this.

USAID and the Cold War

The Truman idea — that the USA, as the most developed country in the world, has the task of uplifting backward peoples — was institutionalized in the 1960s under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, in no small part as a Cold War weapon.

During the Kennedy and Johnson eras, the political director of the U.S. State Department, and later President Johnson’s national security advisor, was Walt W. Rostow. As the father of modernization theory, he firmly believed that communism was a “developmental disease” of immature developing countries that led to distorted modernity.

And the job of the United States was to lead underdeveloped countries along the path to the only correct modernity, Western modernity, and thus protect them from communism. Rostow believed that development took place in the same five steps in all countries and that his principles were applicable to all societies.

Incidentally, it was the same Rostow who first proposed military support for South Vietnam in 1965, and then the bombing of North Vietnam in 1966 – tying America into an ultimately completely unsuccessful war until 1973.

USAID and its Latin American subsidiary, the Alliance for Progress, were founded under Rostow and channeled American development aid worldwide to defeat communism. This work was well documented in 20th-century historiography. For example, a prestigious history of international development policy, published in 2018, details the secret diplomacy carried out under the auspices of USAID: In 1966, at the Aid Effectiveness Conference in London, attended by all major international development policy organizations, USAID reported that “we are increasingly recognizing that economic aid can help development not only by supplementing the limited capital and technological resources of the recipient country, but also by influencing the policies and programs of the recipient country.”

“As we become increasingly aware of the potential leverage of aid, we are experimenting with more effective leverage techniques,” USAID presented at the conference, adding that “current government policies, priorities and administrative capacity should not be considered unchangeable, they are political variables.”

USAID – together with the World Bank and the IMF – also played a major role in maintaining the Brazilian military dictatorship, also along the lines of the Cold War. Latin America, which the U.S. considers its sphere of influence according to the Monroe Doctrine, was also a key area of ​​operation for USAID. Historian Corinna Unger, professor at the European University Institute, writes in her book, for example: “He puts the amount that the U.S. pumped into Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s to keep communism in check at $20 billion, and the distribution of American funds here was also coordinated by USAID.”

New times, new priorities

After the Cold War ended, the fight against communism was no longer necessary, but the basic operating mechanism of USAID did not change: With its aid, it promoted the implementation of American policy priorities in the world, which, thanks to the democratic occupation of the institution, became the export of democracy and LGBTQ and gender politics.

The most blatant example of this was the Peruvian forced sterilization scandal that erupted in the 1990s: Under the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori, between 1993 and 1998, USAID actively contributed to the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of Peruvian indigenous women, until it was banned. (Fujimori, who was supported by USAID and accused of corruption and serious human rights abuses, was overthrown in 2000 and fled to Japan.)

USAID is active worldwide in LGBTQ issues.

In Bangladesh, their projects aimed at protecting the rights of “third genders,” those who do not want to identify as either male or female, and sensitized more than a million listeners on LGBTQ rights on 15 local radio stations.

In South Africa, they helped transgender people access sex reassignment surgery, hormone therapy, and other medical treatments.

In Kosovo, they supported organizations lobbying for the right to gender reassignment, and in 2019, they were successful, with the country’s appeals court ruling in favor of the right to gender reassignment.

In Guatemala, they provided sensitization training to hundreds of government officials in order to reduce the “stigmatization” of the LGBTQ community.

In several countries in the Middle East and North Africa, they provided educational materials to LGBTQ activist organizations.

Mandiner has also revealed what kind of support liberal organizations received in Hungary. The last head of USAID, Samantha Power, visited Hungary in February 2023 at the invitation of the since-departed US ambassador, David Pressman, to meet with NGOs working in the field of democracy export.

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