https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-...
Why? Have US-backed NGOs never saved a single life with their spending?
You can argue it's not worth the spending, perhaps, but you really can't argue that it's not happening somewhere.
> This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt.
This is a tiny, tiny, nearly invisible fraction of that reason.
- USAID's final budget was $34 billion. That's already very real money, but it came from the discretionary budget - that giant bill of spending where the government decides what to spend money on: schools, roads, housing, and so on. The entire discretionary budget for 2025 was $1.9 trillion, so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending!
- Nothing USAID was doing was irreplaceable. The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests. So saying they are saving a life when they are just another replaceable entity, even if a rather large one, is misleading. It's kind of like saying Google is why we have web browsers.
- USAID and the CIA worked hand-in-hand. For instance one project was USAID/CIA starting a fake social media site [1] in Cuba specifically with the goal of trying to create an insurrection, which would undoubtedly be very bloody had they succeeded. So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well.
- Many of their programs seemed geared towards the creation of dependencies rather than working to ensure the self sustainability of various places. I think this likely ties into the above issue. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you. Sociopathic intelligence agencies blending with philanthropy is a rather horrific combination.
So, tiny; a fraction of what we spend on much less useful things like the Iran war or huge gifts to ICE.
30 years of that level of USAID funding would only get us to a single one of those trillions in debt.
> The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests.
Yeah, we don't really want China vacuuming up all of Africa. It was already looking like a growing problem before the USAID cuts (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11304).
> So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well.
I mean, your one example cited didn't work and resulted in zero deaths. If we get to count that sort of thing, we'd have to start accounting for the soft power benefits of USAID (and those the CIA gets from the trade), too. Goodwill, intel, not having a bunch of polio infections come into the country via air, etc.
> Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you.
How does "deplete their fishing grounds (and other resources) for hundreds of years" figure into the analogy?
(This is a reference to Bill Clinton's extremely successful "Reinventing Government" initiative which actually balanced the federal budget until the next republican came along...)
Trump's OBBBA will be another reason, expected to add several trillion in the next few years. So yeah, real cuts are probably needed, but the DOGE people aren't achieving that in net.