WASHINGTON ― Eight years after sabotaging America’s efforts to combat China’s influence by pulling out of a long-negotiated trade deal, President Donald Trump is again taking steps likely to accrue to China’s benefit, this time by gutting the United States’ premier foreign aid agency.
The U.S. Agency for International Development is taking the initial brunt of the assault against the federal government by Trump donor and quasi-White House aide Elon Musk, even while Trump and his White House bemoan China’s reach in the developing world.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday boasted of the success of Trump’s pressure on Panama to cut ties with China following Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip there. “Panama’s president said he will … no longer allow the participation in the Belt and Road Initiative,” she added, referring to China’s massive, decade-old international aid program.
During that same press briefing, though, Leavitt continued her and the administration’s criticism of USAID.
Leavitt did not respond to HuffPost queries for this story.
Stuart Stevens, a Republican political consultant and Trump critic, said he learned firsthand about USAID’s value while working in 2006 on the first election campaign following the Democratic Republic of Congo’s long civil war, which had produced a generation of orphans who were being recruited by Al Qaeda and other violent groups on the one hand and mentored and given financial assistance by USAID workers on the other.
“It was like a job fair for terrorist organization,” Stevens said, remembering American workers toiling in dangerous conditions for little pay. “It worked. Tens of thousands of these kids were steered in another direction.”
Trump began his first term in a similar fashion, pulling the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the agreement crafted by former President Barack Obama to create a trading bloc of a dozen Pacific Rim countries, including those in Southeast Asia and South America. The arrangement was to encourage relations between countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia and the United States and its allies in the Americas, making it harder for China to make inroads.
This use of so-called “soft power” is often considered more effective than shows of force using the military and is typically far less expensive.
Ironically, one of the strategy’s strongest proponents in recent years has been Rubio himself, who through his entire Senate career defended humanitarian and development aid to poorer countries as a good investment for America.
“Foreign aid is not charity. We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security,” he wrote in a 2017 social media post.
“I promise you it is going to be a lot harder to recruit someone to anti-Americanism and anti-American terrorism if the United States of America is the reason one is even alive today,” he said in a floor speech that same year.
Now that he is Trump’s secretary of state, though, Rubio has modified his view of USAID. “In many cases, USAID is involved in programs that run counter to what we’re trying to do in our national strategy with that country or with that region,” he told reporters in El Salvador this week.
Rubio also confirmed that he is now the acting director of the agency that Musk and Trump want to eliminate entirely or move into the State Department. Either option appears to require a new law, and it is unclear whether even a Republican-controlled Congress is interested in going along.
Trump and his allies, meanwhile, are attacking another tool of soft power, the intelligence community. Trump’s CIA director, John Ratcliffe, has put out an early retirement offer to the workforce that could, if successful, replace experienced analysts with recruits chosen primarily because of their personally loyal to Trump. The net effect would be to damage the agency’s ability to provide accurate and nuanced information.
“Elon and Trump are trying to buy out the CIA and [national security] agents that keep Americans safe,” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the ranking member of the Senate intelligence committee, wrote Thursday on social media.
Separately, Musk appears to be plowing ahead in his continued attacks on USAID, which have included calling it a “criminal organization” and boasting that he spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” On Wednesday, after an ally pointed out that former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney once worked in USAID, Musk wrote: “Interesting.”
Cheney, who won Trump’s ire with her service on the House select committee that investigated his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt, replied: “Damn right, @Elon. I’m proud of what America did to win the Cold War, defeat Soviet communism, and defend democracy. Our nation stood for freedom. You may be unfamiliar with that part of our history since you weren’t yet an American citizen.”
To Stevens, the Trump administration’s attacks on USAID and other entities are yet more proof that they do not understand the government he was elected to run.
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“None of these people has any idea of how the world works…. The world’s greatest power wants to have as little influence as Liechtenstein,” he said. “Now, because of some criminal who’s out on bail from Queens and a South African who was probably here illegally, we’re going to give away American power?”