U.S.A.I.D. – The Good and the Bad
by Rachel MacNair
The Trump administration is trying to shut down the United States Agency for International Development. The courts are weighing in and developments are likely to change between the time I write this and the time you read it.
The US Congress is supposed to have a say since it created the agency and legally has to have a say in shutting it down, but it seems to be amenable to the idea. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the humanitarian aid will be transferred to the State Department and that he’ll then work with Congress to shut down the agency itself.
So what’s a consistent lifer to think? We at the Consistent Life Network aren’t going to have an opinion on how the bureaucracy defines which group is doing what so long as it’s done well. We wouldn’t get into an argument over whether humanitarian aid like food and medical care is administered by U.S.A.I.D. or instead by the US State Department, or some other entity, as long as it’s distributed with life-saving impact that preserves the dignity of recipients. But the extent to which that’s been what’s been happening all these decades isn’t as total as it should be (as discussed under negatives below).
Opponents of war as we are, the division of sides into the white hats and black hats is something we know better than to do. That’s not how the real world works. It’s a mixture, as practically all of life is, and so I’m going to offer thoughts on two positives and two negatives about U.S.A.I.D.
Positive – Humanitarian Assistance
This New York Times opinion piece says it well: As Fellow Pro-Lifers, We Are Begging Marco Rubio to Save Foreign Aid (February 10, 2025).
One of George W. Bush’s major achievements was the PEPFAR program, giving medical help to HIV-AIDS patients. It has provided help to over 20 million people world-wide, so the lives saved are probably far greater than the number that were taken in his wars. The wars still shouldn’t have happened, of course, but it gives you a sense of the magnitude.
As the “Fellow Pro-lifers” say:
We think PEPFAR should be a special priority of the pro-life movement. Its treatments empower mothers to protect their unborn children and provide hope that the births of these children will be moments of joy, not despair. It’s the same kind of hope we’ve tried to give mothers when we’ve stood outside abortion clinics to offer alternatives, or counseled women through high-risk pregnancies.
This is one of many U.S.A.I.D. initiatives fighting disease. Food aid to places of famine is also crucial.
Elon Musk is claiming “no one has died” due to his cuts, but this is clearly untrue. The lack of care with which sudden cuts were made has led to deaths; The New York Times details some in the linked article.
Even if the administration gets its act together to undo the damage to the organizations that sudden cut-off caused, there will have been deaths in the meantime. Heartless bureaucrats that can’t be bothered to be careful or well-informed about what their policies are actually doing on the ground should be mortified to realize it. They need to repent.
Positive – Autocrats Hate It
From Jon Lee Anderson in The New Yorker: Growing Up U.S.A.I.D. (February 25, 2025):
Perhaps the best advertisement for U.S.A.I.D. is that autocrats tend to hate it. In 2012, Vladimir Putin expelled the agency from Russia, purportedly for inciting pro-democratic unrest; Evo Morales, the left-wing president of Bolivia, ejected it the next year. When Trump announced recently that the program would be killed, there were celebratory announcements from petty despots around the world—in Belarus, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán chortled on Facebook that Trump was upending the world order by ending support of U.S.A.I.D., “gender ideology,” “funding for the globalist Soros,” “illegal migration,” and “the Russia-Ukraine war.” Orbán added that he intended to hunt down recipients of U.S.A.I.D. funding in Hungary. “Now is the moment when these international networks have to be taken down,” he said. “It is necessary to make their existence legally impossible.”
Negative – A Pro-Abortion Organization
Last year, about $607.5 million of the U.S.A.I.D. budget was for family planning.
Under Republican administrations since Reagan, this has by executive order not included abortion. Reagan established this as “the Mexico City policy” because of a conference in Mexico City in 1984, and the name has stuck.
All Democratic administrations since then have rescinded the policy by executive order.
So under Democratic administrations, U.S.A.I.D. has become one of the major promoters of abortion internationally. Millions of dollars have not only gone to abortion provision, but lobbying governments to legalize abortion.
It has been common to call the Mexico City policy a “global gag rule.” This pejorative view of what’s actually a life-saving policy, when held by the people supposed to carry out aid under Republican administrations, will do great damage. Aid workers have gotten used to being able to re-establish abortion advocacy when Democratic administrations come to power.
Promoting abortion in countries that view it as baby-killing that they don’t want is a form of cultural imperialism.
From Is Legal = Safe?, May 15, 2014, Culture of Life Africa
As International Planned Parenthood Federation (and other like-minded groups) continues to mount coordinated pressure on African nations for legal and “safe” abortion for women, we see them pouring astronomical amounts of money to grease corrupt palms, confuse undecided minds and harden unsuspecting hearts towards the unborn in various African countries.
This is most unfortunate because throughout our Continent, there is a unanimous celebration of human life from the womb . . .
But all of this is under severe attack by the well-paid proponents of Abortion who have flown into Africa on the wings of wealthy, western pro-abortion organizations . . . They speak with the unmistakable force and arrogance of 21st century imperialists
Negative – Imperialism
Again from Growing Up U.S.A.I.D:
As my family moved around the world, it was clear that perceptions of the United States were far more complicated than that, and not just because of the bloody debacle in Vietnam and the racist outrages back home. In my twenties, when I told people that my father had worked for U.S.A.I.D., the inevitable knowing response was “You mean the C.I.A.”
The proximity between the two agencies was hard to deny. In the sixties, America often disbursed aid as “credits” to foreign governments, which in turn supplied the equivalent amount of local currency to the U.S. Embassy. The funds were apportioned by the “country intelligence team”—which invariably included the C.I.A. station chief. The C.I.A. also partnered with the Office of Public Safety, an American program that trained police forces in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. In 1973, after reports emerged that its graduates had engaged in terror and torture, Congress disbanded it. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report lamented that the program’s notoriety had helped “stigmatize the total U.S. foreign aid effort.”
And a final thought from that article:
Recently, the left-wing author Ignacio Ramonet, who is close to the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, took a moment during his weekly podcast to ponder the significance of Trump’s dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. “It’s just incredible,” he exclaimed. “Is he destroying the U.S. empire from within?”
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For more of our posts on recent politics, see:
Not Panicked / Always Panicked
Trump Sabotaging the Pro-Life Movement
The Deserving and Undeserving Poor vs. the Worthy and Unworthy of Life: How Both Major Political Parties Pick and Choose Who They Help and Whom They Kill
Aftermath of State Ballot Initiatives
Presidential Election 2024: Consistent Life Perspectives
Pro-life Voting Strategy: A Problem without an Answer
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