by John Daniel Davidson at the Federalist
The most common argument you’ll hear from those defending the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is that the grant dollars in question are just a fraction of the federal budget — less than one percent! Even if the Trump administration eliminated USAID altogether it wouldn’t put much of a dent in the deficit or help control the national debt, is the argument. Everyone from the talking heads at CNN and MSNBC to Jim Geraghty at National Review are repeating this line.
But trimming the federal budget and reducing the deficit aren’t really the point of this exercise. The point is to expose USAID for the left-wing propaganda and regime change operation that it has become, and to shut it down. In the six decades since it was established, USAID has gone from fighting poverty, spreading American ideals, and undercutting Soviet propaganda, to becoming a woke propaganda operation of its own that actively undermines the pillars of western civilization. It’s gone from exporting democracy to exporting deviancy, and now we can all see it.
President Trump this week tasked Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio with a review of the agency’s grants and expenditures, which has already shone a much-needed light on where tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are going. My colleague Tristan Justice detailed a handful of some of the most insane projects USAID funds, including “$70,000 for a ‘DEI musical’ in Ireland, $47,000 for a ‘transgender opera’ in Colombia, $32,000 for a ‘transgender comic book’ in Peru, and $1.5 million for an LGBT jobs program in Serbia.” Other projects were to fund electric vehicles in Vietnam, infrastructure in Egypt, meals for Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria, and internet censorship in the United Kingdom.
One anonymous X user,…
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