By Jim Bovard
The Donald Trump administration suspended top officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development earlier this week. The move, labeled a “Monday afternoon massacre,” was spurred by allegations that top USAID officials were circumventing President Trump’s ninety day freeze on foreign aid disbursements. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) howled on Twitter that “Trump decimating USAID’s leadership without cause is all harm & no benefit for our national security.” But the sordid record of failed aid programs doesn’t support his caterwauling.
Foreign aid has long been the incarnation of American benevolence—at least according to the Washington elite. But presidents have sporadically conceded otherwise for more than sixty years. President John F. Kennedy promised “a dramatic turning point in the troubled history of foreign aid” in 1961. Didn’t happen. Twenty years later, President Ronald Reagan declared, “Unless a nation puts its own financial and economic house in order, no amount of aid will produce progress.” I bashed Reagan’s failed policies in a 1986 New York Times piece that labeled foreign aid “the opiate of the Third World.” In 1989, an USAID report conceded that foreign aid had been a dismal failure and urged a “radical reshaping” of U.S. assistance. No such luck.
In a 2010 United Nations speech, President Barack Obama promised to “change the way we do business” with foreign aid, pledging to judge aid programs and budgets “based not on dollars spent, but on outcomes achieved.” The Los Angeles Times noted that Obama’s “aides said the United States in the past has often seemed to just throw money at problems.” The following year, USAID ballyhooed a new evaluation policy for a “transformation based on absolute demand for results.”
But any “absolute demand for results” was obliterated by Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to double foreign aid. As the The Christian Science Monitor noted, USAID “created an atmosphere of frantic urgency about the ‘burn rate’—a measure of how quickly money is spent. Emphasis gets put on spending fast to make room for the next batch from Congress.” Martine van Bijlert of the nonprofit Afghanistan Analysts Network commented, “As long as you spend money and you can provide a paper trail, that’s a job well done. It’s a perverse system, and there seems to be no intention to change it.” Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) was chagrined in 2011 when he visited Afghanistan and spoke to USAID officials: “When we asked what were your results, the answer was the result was we spent X amount of money. That is all they knew, how much money had actually been spent.”
One American contractor received $35 million to promote the rule of law in Afghanistan in part by distributing kites and comic books to kids. The New York Times reported that the contractor “arranged an event to hand out kites and comic books to children. The kites were festooned with slogans about gender equality and rule of law that most of the attendees could not read. Police officers guarding the event stole many of the kites, beating some of the children, while fathers snatched kites from their girls to give to the boys.”… Login or Join Now To Read More