06 Feb USAID and American Decline
The other day, while looking through my files for something else, I stumbled across the following, which I wrote in June of 2022. President Biden had issued an executive order requiring the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to expand access to “gender-affirming care” for children, which struck me as incredibly unwise, ethically and politically. I wrote:
The political elites in this country have decided that the sexualization of children is the hill on which they will die. And it’s entirely possible they will – metaphorically.
This fall, two years from now, four years from now, and so on, the American people are apt to be unhappy about a great many things – inflation, gasoline, recession, 401(k) portfolios in the garbage, and so on. It is entirely possible, however, that they will be most upset by the ongoing, delusional, politically motivated escalation of the sexualization of children. And if they are, they may well choose to vote for a candidate (or candidates) who makes the reversal of this sexualization a priority….Americans will gladly open their arms and hearts to anyone who can provide them relief from what they see as the sexual abuse of their children….
As I have noted repeatedly in these pages, I’m pretty “noninterventionist” when it comes to grown adults living their lives as they choose. And I suspect that most Americans are fairly like-minded. But the key words there are “grown adults.” By taking this fight to children and by sexualizing children for largely political purposes, the cultural Left has crossed a boundary that most Americans are not especially likely to tolerate.
Those paragraphs probably would have worked pretty well as post-election commentary: “See? I tried to warn you?” They will work just as well, however – if not better – as commentary on the closure and exposure of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
As you likely know, President Trump has closed USAID, or at least ended its existence as an independent agency, moving its functions where they rightly belong, to the State Department. Official Washington – Left, Right, and in between – is righteously indignant about the President’s actions, insisting that he is damaging the nation’s standing abroad, all to make a show of cutting waste and fraud, on a program that accounts for less than 1% of federal spending.
On the one hand, I agree that the budgetary impact of USAID is minimal. If we, as a nation, are going to address our spending problem, we will have to address our entitlement-program problem. There is just no way around that. Sure, there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit around that can be cut, but that alone won’t fix our fiscal woes. It won’t even make a real start. And pretending that it can is a mistake. Cutting “waste and fraud” has been the plan of every administration since Reagan at least, and while that would be nice, solving our spending issues will require far more than that.
On the other hand, that’s really not the point. The relative budgetary impact of USAID is irrelevant here. What matters is the outrageousness of it all. The point is that USAID has become a slush fund, used to funnel taxpayer monies to every stupid, pointless, corrupt, and manipulative idea anyone on the Left has ever had. Consider, for example, the following, compiled by the good folks at Tablet magazine and other sources:
$47,000 for a transgender opera in Columbia
$32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru
$500,000 for efforts to “expand atheism” in Nepal
$1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion” for LGBTQ+ people in Serbia.
$38 million for the lab from which COVID-19 is believed to have originated from, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
$70,000 for a ‘DEI musical’ in Ireland.
$45 million for ‘diversity scholarships’ in Burma.
$2 million to strengthen trans-led organizations to deliver gender-affirming health care, advocate for improved quality/access to services, and provide economic empowerment opportunities in Guatemala.
$520 million for “consultant-driven ESG investments in Africa
$1 million to Stephen Leonelli of Washington, DC for supporting “development, democracy and innovation inclusive development hub programs protecting the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals.
Sadly, the list goes on and on (and on and on…). The overwhelming majority of USAID projects and programs are, undoubtedly, legitimate foreign aid expenditures. Much of the aid over the last few years has gone to Ukraine to help fight its war against Russia. Whatever one thinks about that war and this nation’s role in it, that’s a legitimate political endeavor. At the same time, however, a good portion of USAID’s disbursements have gone to what can only be described as bullsh*t. And much of that bullsh*t has been directed specifically at undermining traditional cultures and trying to replace them with the liberal/Left’s blinkered ideas about sex, God, and other matters of no small importance.
All of this leads to two conclusions.
First, all of the politicians and bureaucrats out in the streets screeching and howling about the damage Trump and Musk are doing to legitimate foreign aid efforts should stop and look in the mirror. If you wanted to protect legitimate foreign aid efforts, then, perhaps, you should have done something to address the illegitimate efforts when you had the chance. These sexuality and gender-obsessed programs undermined the legitimacy of the entire operation. Trump and Musk didn’t do this. You did. You allowed this to happen and for this fraudulent waste of taxpayer dollars to destroy USAID’s credibility.
Second, you also allowed this fraudulent use of taxpayer dollars to destroy the nation’s credibility. Think about this for a minute. If you’re a normal, nominally religious, nominally traditional resident of Guatemala and your daughter comes home from school jabbering about becoming a boy, you’re going to be confused and angry. If you find out, in addition, that she’s jabbering thusly because of a program taught in her school and funded by American aid, you’re going to be even angrier. And you’re going to be angry at the United States. Now, multiply that by every country that receives American foreign aid and by all the programs outside of USAID (military aid, for example), and you can see how a problem might develop.
The pictures below, which I pilfered from Tracy Shuchart, show the shift in global trade over the last two decades. This shift has many explanations, but the impact of American cultural evangelization cannot be ignored. As Stand Together’s Russ Greene put it the other day, “Imagine you’re a conservative Muslim or Christian nation in Africa that lacks electricity, whose women are dying from indoor cooking and disease, and the US government shows up talking about reducing your carbon footprint, and trans rights.” China may have dastardly plans for your kids, but those are far into the future, and they don’t involve turning your sons into your daughters.
As I have noted before in these pages, the course of contemporary radical Sunni Islamism was famously influenced by the alleged degeneracy of American culture. In that case, it was ridiculous, pathetic even. But can we say the same about current or future anti-American movements?
Is it so hard to imagine that this nation’s sexuality and gender evangelization would produce the same reaction in foreign populations as it did in the American population?
