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The Death of USAID and a Dream [1]

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Date: 2025-02-06

The end of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), closed because Elon Musk is, at a lack of a better word, insane, has forced many people I know, myself included, into mourning. Worse, for those in the field around the world, their lives are being turned upside down, from having to leave a country where they’ve been doing projects to help the local population, to having their belief system about what they are doing attacked, if not destroyed. Local populations involved with USAID have been left in a lurch. Worst of all, it is a human tragedy, as some who depend on USAID’s assistance will die without it. That blood is on American hands.

It is also the death of what had been a firmly held American ideal in the post-World War II era: that we were the good guys and wanted to help. The first half of my professional career was spent chasing that ideal, that dream. That dream, despite admittedly being draped in my naïveté for much of that period, is not gone, but we are now without the same ability to see that dream become reality. What we replace it with is yet to be determined, although in the short term, the message is clear.

When I was young, when asked what I wanted to do with my life, I said things like, “Well, the United States has things pretty well in order, so I want to travel the world and help other countries.” I believed that the United States could do good. I knew it had done good, particularly with the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Europe after World War II. That work presaged USAID, which opened for business in 1961. I was taught that we were benevolent. I was taught that we served those less fortunate.

My first post-school job was with the Department of State. From there I chased the dream. More countries that I care to count, all the continents save Antarctica, in and out of government including working closely with AID around the world, and some actual good work later, I had had enough. The final straw was that I had gotten cholera in Liberia, at the same time and the same town where ebola had entered the country from Ghana in 2014. Such a lifestyle was not conducive to the life and priorities I then and now hold more important than trying to save the world, i.e. being a good father and husband.

As important, the dream had been tarnished. The United States was becoming coarser and our reception around the world less enthusiastic. Our entry into the Iraq War was particularly hard as, being the American in the room, I had to toe the company line despite my objections to the war. Moreover, I realized that at least some of the work I had been doing was veiled colonialism and capitalism. I had witnessed, first hand, representatives of American businesses bribing foreign government officials for access and opportunity. I had seen projects fall well short of their aims. I had seen foreign nations cynically pretend to be on the same page as we, only to take foreign assistance dollars and use them to their own ends.

To be clear, however, this is not to say that United States foreign assistance programs weren’t without success or merit. To the contrary, and perhaps one of the reasons I lasted as long as I did, such programs, all of them, successful or not, were invaluable in providing opportunity in places where such opportunities were few and far between. The exchange of cultures and ideas with peoples around the world made us all stronger.

Regardless, the dream, to spread the values of democracy and the rule of law to corners of the world that seemed to want it, was harder to achieve than anyone anticipated. Intellectual, philosophical arguments were continuous, theories of development evolved, methodologies were created, adapted, scrapped, and remade. But during all of it, those of us involved always remembered what was important: representing the United States and what it stood for to the world.

Others, wiser than I, have talked at length about what closing USAID means in terms of our soft power and our influence in the world. To me, it is the final admission that the American values upon which I was raised and that we portrayed to the world are mostly gone, at least in terms of foreign aid and I hope not much further. Kindness. Benevolence. Compassion. Hopefulness. Democracy. That was our image as a people, and it felt right and good to help further that around the world. That image, those values, have now been replaced by the cold calculus of lies, rationalizations, and cost-benefit analyses.

In time, the fever that is currently consuming the United States will break. It is my hope that someday the United States will again be a sought after partner around the world. For now, however, the message is clear: we don’t care about you. An era is dead. It is a time of mourning.

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