USAID’s promotion of DEI, gender ideology, and population control around the world, along with its efforts to undermine democracies in Europe and Latin America, have greatly damaged America’s standing in the world.
The closure of a corrupt government agency is always cause for celebration.
Not that it happens very often. As President Ronald Reagan once remarked, “The closest thing to eternal life on earth is a government program.”
In the case of the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development, its shuttering will save U.S. taxpayers some $54 billion a year.
But Trump’s closure of the rogue agency is about far more than reducing the size of government or balancing the budget. We are not even talking about simply ending waste, fraud, and abuse, although there were bucket loads of that going on.
Under its former director, Samantha Powers, the agency had been transformed into a slush fund for woke fever dreams. No project was too wacko to throw money at.
You want funding to convince Peruvian girls they were born into the wrong body, or to promote LGBT activism in Serbia? USAID had a check for you.
You need money to fund sex changes in Guatemala or to open a transgender surgery clinic in India? You had but to ask.
But as corrosive to the sensibilities of normal people – and to America’s image overseas – that this reckless promotion of DEI and gender ideology was, our overseas aid agency was engaged in far more nefarious schemes.
It turns about that many millions of dollars of aid to the Middle East made their way into the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah. From funding the college education of al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki to sending $2 billion to Gaza over the past two years, our tax dollars have been used to underwrite terrorism.
An estimated 90 percent of our aid to Gaza ended up in the hands of Hamas post-October 7, 2023. Without the constant infusion of U.S. funds, it is doubtful that the terrorist organization would have survived.
Equally egregious is USAID’s undermining of democracy. As Marjorie Taylor Green just noted at a congressional hearing, “What we have learned is that USAID has been used by Democrats to brainwash the world with globalist propaganda to force regime changes around the world.”
Roughly half a billion dollars went into one organization alone. It was called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and billed as a global network of investigative journalists. But it had as much to do with promoting globalist narratives and undermining populist politicians as it did with exposing corruption, perhaps more.
If you want to know why populist Jair Bolsonaro is no longer president of Brazil, why the conservatives lost in Poland, or why the democratically elected president of Romania – another populist – has now been arrested, look no further than USAID’s massively funded propaganda campaigns against these and other anti-globalist politicians.
As in Xi Jinping’s China, where the Chinese dictator has been purging his political enemies under the guise of an “anti-corruption campaign,” USAID’s anti-corruption campaign was ultimately not about corruption at all.
Like Xi, who was, as the Chinese say, “hanging up a goat’s head, but selling dog meat,” the agency was motivated by a hidden and deeply corrupt purpose – undermining democracy in order to promote globalism.
Victor Orbán of Hungary, whose government has survived years of similar onslaughts, is now vowing to crack down on all of the foreign-funded NGOs operating in his country. He will find that his opposition was chiefly funded by our tax dollars, judging from the many trips to that country that Samantha Powers took over the past few years.
As ruinous as all this is for America’s standing in the world, there is even worse news. Many of the tens of billions of dollars that the agency was flushing down the toilet didn’t go overseas at all, but was spent in and around the Washington, D.C., swamp.
And almost all of this – well over 95 percent – went to Democrat-controlled groups.
How much of the incessant lawfare against Trump that began as soon as he announced his candidacy for president in 2015 was funded indirectly by our tax dollars?
How much of Kamala’s $2 billion campaign coffer came from our own pockets, laundered by USAID through well-connected NGOs and leftist politicians?
Despite the mounting evidence of corruption, there are still those who claim that USAID does much good and should be reformed, not shuttered. “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” one recent headline read.
The problem is that USAID was never primarily about feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty or, for that matter, saving babies. In fact, from the very beginning it was designed to be an instrument of population control.
Its stated goal was “population stabilization.” To this end, it busied itself reducing the number of babies born, all in the name of fighting “overpopulation,” “eliminating poverty,” and, more recently, “saving the planet.”
This is spelled out clearly in Richard Nixon’s National Security Study Memorandum 200, which made it clear that foreign aid was to be used to bribe or bludgeon countries into reducing their birth rates.
Even today, USAID was – until a few weeks ago – promoting abortion in Malawi, doing abortion referrals in Uganda, and pressuring Sierra Leone to legalize abortion as a condition of receiving foreign aid.
Supporters of USAID argue that its programs create goodwill, but it’s hard to see how telling African women and men they would be better off sterilizing themselves and aborting their children accomplishes this end.
And how would Americans feel if China, say, were funding a program to vasectomize American men? Think about that for a second.
USAID’s promotion of DEI, gender ideology, and population control around the world, along with its efforts to undermine democracies in Europe and Latin America, have greatly damaged America’s standing in the world.
But the crime that calls for the complete destruction of the agency is that it was striking at the very roots of the republic itself.
Using the taxes paid by a free people to undermine their freedom is, by anyone’s definition, treason.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of The Devil and Communist China.
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Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told reporters Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s goal was to have major trading partners agree to negotiate after Trump announced a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs for many countries after dozens reached out to the administration.
Trump announced the pause via a Wednesday post on Truth Social that also announced substantial increases in tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States, saying 75 countries had asked to talk. Bessent said during a press event held alongside White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that Trump had obtained “maximum leverage” to get trading partners to negotiate with the April 2 announcement of reciprocal tariffs.
“This was his strategy all along,” Bessent told reporters during an impromptu press conference at the White House. “And that, you know, you might even say that he goaded China into a bad position. They, they responded. They have shown themselves to the world to be the bad actors. And, and we are willing to cooperate with our allies and with our trading partners who did not retaliate. It wasn’t a hard message: Don’t retaliate, things will turn out well.”
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China imposed retaliatory tariffs on American exports to the communist country Wednesday, imposing an 84% tariff on U.S. goods after Trump responded to a 34% tariff by taking American tariffs to 104%.
“Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately,” Trump said. “At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable.”
“They kept escalating and escalating, and now they have 125% tariffs that will be effective immediately,” Bessent said during the press conference.
Bessent said that China’s actions would not harm the United States as much as it would their own economy.
“We will see what China does,” Bessent said. “But what I am certain of, what I’m certain of, is that what China is doing will affect their economy much more than it will ours, because they have an export-driven, flood the world with cheap export model, and the rest of the world now understands.”
The Dow Jones Industrial average closed up 2,962.86 points Wednesday, with the NASDAQ climbing by 1,755.84 points and the S&P 500 rising 446.05 points, according to FoxBusiness.
President Donald Trump continued ahead Wednesday with his on-again, off-again tariffs, with his latest tariff suspension sending U.S. markets soaring.
Trump announced Wednesday afternoon on his Truth Social app that he would pause the majority of the reciprocal tariffs he announced last week on “Liberation Day,” the April 2 start of the implementation of the tariffs only to reverse course and put everything on pause.
Stocks jumped on the news with the Dow Jones gaining nearly 6% Wednesday after sharp losses during the previous week.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it was all part of the plan.
“We saw the successful negotiating strategy that President Trump implemented a week ago today. It has brought more than 75 countries forward to negotiate,” Bessent said Wednesday. “It took great courage for him to stay the course until this moment.”
Trump’s pause includes all the tariffs that went into effect at midnight, except the additional levies on China. Trump has targeted the world’s second-largest economy in a tariff war that China has said it will “fight to the end.”
While many other nations called Trump’s trade team seeking deals to avoid reciprocal tariffs, China showed no signs of backing down.
“The U.S. threat to escalate tariffs is doubly erroneous, once again exposing its extortionist nature. China firmly rejects such actions,” China’s commerce ministry said Tuesday. “Should the U.S. persist in this reckless course, China will respond resolutely until the end.”
Trump’s decision to suspend tariffs came after tough questions from Republicans, including U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.
“I just don’t know what his goal is right now,” Kennedy said earlier in the day after comparing Trump to a dog chasing a car and catching it.
“President Trump has been a Rottweiler here, but now he’s the Rottweiler who has caught the car,” Kennedy said. “That’s the moment we are in now. My question is: What is he going to do with the car?”
Trump has made big, bold promises about his tariffs. He has said tariffs will make the U.S. “rich as hell,” bring back manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past and shift the tax burden away from U.S. families. He’s also promised to help working Americans with his tariffs.
On Tuesday, Trump wrote “I’m proud to be the President for the workers, not the outsourcers; the President who stands up for Main Street, not Wall Street; who protects the middle class, not the political class; and who defends America, not trade cheaters all over the globe.”
Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights advocacy group, said Trump’s latest suspension of tariffs showed he doesn’t support the workers who elected him.
“Who’s left out of his megalomaniacal game? The workers he claimed to support,” said Melinda St. Louis, global trade watch director at Public Citizen. “All he has shown is that he’ll cave to Wall Street’s handwringing and prioritize his own power over real people’s plight.”
