Trump’s Campaign To Cut USAID May Have A Silver Lining – OpEd
By IDN
By Kalinga Seneviratne
Since President Donald Trump made the shock announcement last week of freezing United States’ (US) foreign aid budget for three months while threatening to close down its main delivery agency, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the multi-million dollar aid industry has been in shock, while the western media, particularly the American media, has been saturated with reports of how the poor of the world will suffer, if the US aid budget is frozen.
In reporting the aid freeze, New York Times (NYT) in an article under the heading “Health programs shutter around the world” said that health workers across Africa, South America and Southeast Asia were in tears talking to NYT about how years of building health care assistance to the vulnerable over the years are now facing closedowns.
The report cited national malaria control programs in Uganda; provision of dehydration salts to treat life-threatening diarrhoea in toddlers and drugs to stop brain haemorrhages in pregnant women in Zambia; clinical trials of the use of medical devices by patients in Africa and South America: and frontline care for treatment of chronicle disease such as HIV-AIDS, as among the programs that will be threatened by this aid freeze.
“They presented a compassionate, generous image of the United States in countries where China has increasingly competed for influence,” noted NYT.
Washington Post noted that the US “is by far” the world’s largest source of foreign assistance providing “4 out of every 10 dollars donated for humanitarian aid”. While pointing out that the Secretary of State Marco Rubio has provided a waiver on some forms of humanitarian aid, it said, the “move would rescue more of the programs that keep alive refugees, the gravely ill and others around the World”.
London’s Guardian focusing on USAID programs in Southeast Asia said, “such funding provides humanitarian assistance to communities that are among the most vulnerable in the world to natural disasters, as well as support for pro-democracy activists who risk their lives to campaign against repressive regimes”. It pointed out as examples, funding for health care centers on the Thai border for tens of thousands of Myanmar refuges; even within Myanmar there are junta-controlled health ministry’s HIV programs that US funds.
Development newswire Devex focused on how Trump’s aid freeze is impacting on the USAID funded Bureau for Humanitarian Affairs that predicts famines in Africa and help to move food aid to the needy. It also focused in another article on how the freeze would threaten the continuation of USAID funded climate change mitigation projects in the Global South.
These type of reports have been reproduced widely in the Asian media. But, what these reports conveniently ignore is another side of USAID activities that make up a substantial portion of USAID funding – that is assistance some times in tow with other American and western aid agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the Soros Foundation agencies, that fund “regime change” campaigns around the world, known as “colour revolutions”.
At the 2022 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in Uzbekistan, Chinese President Xi Jingping warned member countries of such activities funded by “external forces” and offered to set up a training center in China to train counter terrorism personnel to counter it.
In a scathing commentary in Sri Lanka Guardian (SLG)[1] on 3rd February, it argued that Trump is unmasking “a monster in disguise” in USAID. “This agency which claims to be a beacon of democracy and human rights, operates under a far more insidious agenda of geopolitical interference, manipulation, and exploitation of foreign political systems,” SLG argued. It further said that the agency’s so-called “funding for democracy” is a ruse, that is a carefully constructed narrative designed to conceal its real aims to destabilize governments and control the political landscape in nations to served US geopolitical interests.
SLG gives a long list of examples to back this claim that includes the agency’s involvement in the ZunZuneo project in Cuba using stolen phone numbers to track and profile Cuban citizens to manipulate their political thinking. It says this is not an isolated incident; a similar project has been funded in Venezuela targeting the Nicolas Madura government. Ukraine is another country where USAID has been pouring millions of dollars over the years to build an anti-Russia movement. In Egypt they have been involved in the ‘Arab Spring’ movement that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.
Sri Lanka is no stranger to USAID’s interference in local politics, where, with the close involvements of the US Ambassador in Colombo, local NGOs have been funded under the disguise of good governance and democracy projects to interfere in elections such as in 2015 and 2024.
In June 2023, the US Ambassador in Bangkok was forced to call a press conference to deny allegations in Thailand the USAID and other funding agencies were involved in manipulating the young people to vote for a new party that had obvious US-leanings, and was also accused of trying to undermine the Thai monarchy[2].
After the long-time Bangladesh leader Sheikh Hasina was overthrown by a student-led protest movement, in August 2024, Indian media reports claimed that USAID has been instrumental in funding the protect movement. The protests started at the BRACS University.
BRACS (Building Resource Across Communities) is Bangladesh’s largest international development agency (with operations overseas) that has been heavily funded by USAID and Gates Foundation for years. Following Hasina’s overthrow, founder of Grameen Bank Mohamad Yunus, who is extremely close to the Democratic Party in the US, was installed as Interim leader.
SLG notes that USAID’s operation remains largely immune to public scrutiny in the US, “leaving it free to continue its agenda of political manipulation, covert intervention and exploitation (of local youth)”. SLG calls on the US government to “re-evaluate USAID’s mission and its operation must to held to highest ethical standards”.
Perhaps there is a silver lining. It is interesting to note that Washington Post[3] reported on 3rd February, that Trump’s trouble shooter Elon Musk has described USAID as a “criminal organization” and it “deserves to die” after his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) team members were denied access to USAID offices by staff.
One hopes that Musk and his DOGE team would be able to clean up the unethical practices of the US government’s official aid program, and the Trump administration’s isolationist policy would stop further creation of chaos in the Global South through manipulation of restless youth.
- Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sri Lankan born Australian journalist and international communications specialist based in Bangkok. He is the author of the recently published book ‘Geopolitics and the Media in Asia and the Pacific: Pulling in Different Directions’ (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK).
[1] https://slguardian.org/trump-unmasks-usaid-the-monster-in-disguise/
[2] https://apnews.com/article/thailand-elections-washington-interference-efd2624624d1a5d3fe91cd8551764a82
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/02/usaid-trump-musk/?
