WASHINGTON—The Trump administration announced this week that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is being reorganized and merged into the State Department. A statement declared the agency has “long strayed from its original mission of responsibly advancing American interests abroad” and that U.S. tax dollars need to “further U.S. national interests.”
There is a lot to unpack here because Trump and Musk are conducting an unprecedented attack on the Constitution and workers’ rights by having Musk take over numerous government agencies. The first open agency takeover by Musk was at the headquarters of USAID and workers from there and from other government agencies massed in front of the headquarters to oppose the unlawful and unconstitutional takeover by Musk.
The Trump administration tried to deflect from the outrageous attack on worker rights by claiming that USAID was “full of radical left-wing lunatics.” Nothing can be further from the truth. USAID has always advanced the interests of U.S. foreign policy regardless of how “humanitarian” its efforts may have appeared at any given time.
What Trump is opposing is not “left wing lunatics” in USAID but the section of the capitalist class that favors globalization as the means to maximizing its profits. Trump, on the other hand, represents capitalist forces that favor “America First,” which is a cover phrase for capitalists who do better at exploitation when America focuses internally. They see capitalists who benefit from globalism as taking away some of their profits. Neither side in that fight, however, have the interests of the workers at heart. What they disagree on is how best to exploit people.
Musk throws another ball into the works by saying that USAID conducted criminal activity around the world including support of violent overthrowing of governments in order to advance U.S. interests. No one can argue about the truth of that claim which is why he made it. Anything that can weaken opposition to his takeover of government institutions and getting rid of workers is something he will employ, however.
Liz Cheney showed her undying allegiance to capitalist domination of the world today by condemning Musk for saying what he said and then sanctimoniously talking about how proud she is to have supported the efforts to overthrow communist regimes in Europe. So we have the richest man in the world taking one side and Liz Cheney, a lifetime supporter of capitalist expansion taking another in the internal fight among thieves (another word for capitalists).
Designed to confuse
It’s all designed to confuse people and both sides, as noted, support exploitation of workers all around the world. When it comes to USAID it too has always ended up on the side of exploitation.
This is not to condemn any U.S. workers or their unions who demonstrated in favor of workers’ rights outside the USAID headquarters earlier this week who are being treated unjustly. Ultimately workers around the world and in the U.S., however, have not benefitted from USAID policies. Humanitarian aid has never been the main goal of the agency.
President Donald Trump has now appointed Secretary Marco Rubio as Acting Administrator of USAID as an interim step to “gain better oversight of the agency’s activities” and to ensure that it is aligning with an “America First” agenda.
Speaking to the press at the time in El Salvador, Rubio said the “functions of USAID” must align with U.S. foreign policy and that it is “a completely unresponsive agency.”
For the past week, unionized federal workers, including the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees union, have been mobilizing to defend their members and the larger federal workforce against Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government. The situation escalated when Trump declared that union contracts for federal workers are to be trashed and that they’re “un-American.”
Official USAID policy and efforts are contrary to efforts it makes to present itself primarily as a vehicle for humanitarian aid. Its past conduct shows it has long played a role in advancing U.S. geopolitical and economic agendas that go well beyond the distribution of humanitarian aid. Its “reorganization” by Trump and Musk also prompts questions about how they plan to use it in service of U.S. imperial interests going forward.
With operations in 100 countries across Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, the agency has an annual budget of nearly $30 billion for global development programs. (By comparison with that figure Musk has increased his personal wealth by more than $100 billion since the election.) Established in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy and the U.S. Congress during the Cold War, USAID was designed to promote U.S. influence worldwide as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union’s appeal, especially in developing countries.
The roots of U.S. foreign aid can be traced back to the Marshall Plan after World War II. Enacted in 1948, the Marshall Plan was a massive initiative designed to rebuild Western Europe in the aftermath of World War II and to combat the growth of Communist Parties on the continent, the rise in organized labor’s power, and the growing influence of the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan laid the groundwork for extensive U.S. capitalist investment and also dismantled trade barriers in order to expand access for big business.
Kennedy, who spearheaded the creation of USAID, framed its establishment as continuing this “fundamental obligation of the United States.”
He outlined three core responsibilities that justified the agency’s formation: positioning the U.S. as “the wise leader” of nations tasked with guiding others toward progress”; as “the wealthiest people in a world of largely poor people”; and, as “the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom,” particularly the socialist countries and the Soviet Union. In practice, USAID has historically functioned as a tool of U.S. imperial “soft power.”
In its early decades, the agency focused on designing programs and building infrastructure, largely in the Global South, to attract investment for big business in developing countries. This often involved advocating for “free trade” agreements, offering loan guarantees, and implementing agricultural development programs that, in effect, opened up markets in poorer countries to U.S. big agribusiness and development firms.
From its inception, USAID has forged direct partnerships with corporate America, awarding multi-million-dollar contracts to giants like DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola to execute “development” and aid projects in the Global South. These initiatives are branded under USAID’s official banner, leveraging the credibility—and implied endorsement—of the American people.
Programs quite different
The programs were quite different from Soviet efforts around the world where they designed and helped build projects like the Aswan Dam in Egypt that resulted in a larger working class in that country, an impetus for longer range progressive political development. They did that in Yemen too where nomads eventually became workers in Soviet supported industries. In Afghanistan too they encouraged real economic development whereby industries they jump started and schools and universities they supported attracted people into the professions and into the working class. Women became doctors and there were so many improvements that the U.S. competed not with its own humanitarian aid but support for the Taliban in order to overthrow the development of socialism in Afghanistan. That backfired when the anti-communists backed by the U.S. not only overthrew progress in Afghanistan but then came to blow up the World Trade Center.
USAID is very much a part of this reliance on U.S. foreign policy and corporate partnerships, with its troubling history of meeting its profit-driven needs to consistently undermine the communities USAID claimed to help. While these projects are marketed as “mutually beneficial,” the gains for U.S. corporations and U.S. foreign policy often come at the expense of the local economies, exacerbating inequality and dependency rather than sparking genuine economic development.
In the 2000s, as the U.S. military devastated Iraq and Afghanistan, USAID was tasked with “rebuilding” both countries. The agency claimed its focus was on maximizing efficiency—getting “the most bang out of its funding allocations.” However, its actions revealed a different priority: USAID began soliciting bids from a handpicked group of “pre-qualified” corporations to rebuild Iraq over a month before the U.S. invasion even started.
Around the world, USAID has also employed private contractors to run “democracy promotion” programs, which serve as a front for advancing U.S. foreign policy interests. These initiatives have aimed to reshape civil society in developing countries, often through training programs or by backing local “movements” or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that destabilize governments resisting U.S. influence. Far from fostering genuine democracy, these efforts prioritized installing regimes aligned with U.S. imperialism and further entrenched economic dependency and inequality.
In Bolivia, USAID attempted to carry out a “Democratic Development and Citizen Participation” program in order to undermine the influence of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party. The MAS, whose base consisted largely of Indigenous farmers and peasants, opposed the exploitation of Bolivia’s natural resources by international corporations. The agency’s “democracy promotion” program attempted to split the base of MAS and weaken the Bolivian peoples’ struggle against foreign capital.
From October 2009 to September 2012, USAID partnered with Creative Associates to implement a covert civil society project in Cuba to spark a counter-revolution. The initiative involved recruiting Venezuelan, Costa Rican, and Peruvian youth, paying them as little as $5.41 an hour, to travel to Cuba under the guise of tourism.
Their mission was to identify and recruit Cubans who could be trained as political dissidents and counter-revolutionaries. In one particularly controversial effort, the “democracy program” even established an HIV-prevention clinic—which memos stated was a “perfect excuse”—as a front for its regime-change activities. When the initiative ultimately failed, USAID and Creative Associates terminated the travelers’ program and shifted their strategy. Instead of sending youth to recruit within Cuba, they focused on securing exit visas for reactionaries and providing them with training in the U.S.
Through its Feed the Future program, USAID partnered with corporations like DuPont and Monsanto to push patented seeds and chemicals onto developing nations, creating dependency on U.S. products. For instance, DuPont has since expanded its footprint in Ethiopia’s agricultural sector, solidifying its control over the global seed market under the guise of “sustainable agriculture” and “food security.” In reality, these initiatives prioritize corporate profits over local autonomy, locking farmers into cycles of economic dependency.
Despite its rhetoric of advancing “democracy” and “sustainable economic development,” USAID has long operated as an anti-democratic institution, prioritizing the profit-driven interests of U.S. corporations over the needs of the global majority.
The agency’s programs—from agriculture, to infrastructure, to governance—reveal a consistent agenda: entrenching dependency, undermining sovereignty, and advancing U.S. foreign policy goals, all while masking exploitation under the banner of “humanitarian aid.”
It operates in a tradition started by the Marshall Plan after World War II which was ostensibly a massive program to build war-torn Europe. Just one example of this “humanitarianism” was what the Plan did in Germany by extending “help” to what became Western Germany and denying it to Eastern Germany which was pursuing a socialist course. The Soviet Union wanted a united, demilitarized Germany but the U.S. pumped massive aid into the Western German occupation zones it controlled thereby economically dividing the country instead. A divided Germany better ensured capitalist profits al over Europe by creating a bulwark against the growing socialist movements all over the continent. This was a clear indication of how, after the war, the U.S. intended to wield “soft power,” along with, of course, military action in order to protect capitalism.
Even after whatever reorganization of USAID takes place under the Trump administration’s State Department, the agency’s legacy of serving U.S. imperialism is certain to continue in one form or another. The anti-imperialist and peace movements must remain vigilant and resist whatever new forms Trump and Musk develop to undermine development and democracy around the world.
C.J. Atkins contributed to this story.
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