USAID: Making a Square Fit into a Hole

By VGV @Adobe Stock

Trump Faces the Rule of Law

On Wednesday, protesters — led by Democratic lawmakers and nonprofit workers — demonstrated in Washington, D.C., in response to the Trump administration’s decision to furlough nearly all employees at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID is an independent agency that manages a budget of more than “$50 billion,” which is more than the CIA and State Department combined, according to Roger Kimbal in Spectator.com.

What do they spend the money on? It is supposed to help the United States project “soft power” by injecting US aid to needy entities around the world. But it is not really about aid.

What in fact does, as the commentator Mike Benz noted, is to coordinate “clandestine operations through foreign left-wing NGOs. What it’s developing is all the activist organizations in foreign countries that the State Department is building to gain influence.”

Corruption at USAID

How about research in Wuhan? Did it fund Covid-19? “Why, yes,” answers Mr. Kimball. A boatload of money, “some of which went to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in China.” It also has a domestic apparatus. In 2019, USAID paid cash to susceptible journalists to dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and, Benz writes, “use[d] that dirt as the basis to impeach” Donald Trump.

For anyone looking to know more about USAID, Roger Kimball recommends reading Mark Moyar’s book Masters Of Corruption: How The Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged The Trump Presidency, which Roger published last year at Encounter Books.

Moyar, a celebrated historian of the Vietnam conflict, now teaches at Hillsdale College. He was employed at the USAID during Trump’s first term. He witnessed the corruption and self-dealing first-hand and was penalized for calling it out.

Elon Musk also is learning the ways of Washington, DC, maybe the hard way. According to a Brookings Scholar, the “2024 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act explicitly prohibited a reorganization, redesign or elimination of USAID without congressional participation.”

A move the Trump administration to abolish USAID, whose programs supposedly have helped people deal with humanitarian crises in more than 100 countries, “is troubling,” argues William Galson in the WSJ: According to USAID, the agency does critically important work. The big unanswered question: does Trump’s threat to shut USAID exceed his authority and usurp congressional powers?

What’s Happening? 

What is the rule of law? It’s the foundation of our constitutional system. Congress is—directly or indirectly—the source of law., explains William A. Galston in the WSJ.

The U.S. president must exercise executive authority within statutory limits. In moving to abolish USAID, Mr. Trump seems intent on defying Congress, which has expressed its will clearly on the subject.

USAID was established under JFK’s executive order, relying on authority granted to him by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.

Had USAID remained in this status, Mr. Trump would be within his rights to eliminate it by reversing Kennedy’s order. But in 1998 Congress enacted a law establishing USAID as a distinct entity within the executive branch and distinguishing between its functions and those of the State Department. The law granted President Bill Clinton a few months to modify the plan, after which his authority to do so would lapse. His report to Congress stated that USAID would “continue as an independent establishment in the Executive Branch.”

In summary, USAID exists pursuant to law, its functions are defined by law, and it would take an act of Congress to alter it significantly or abolish it.

As in Life, Complications Arise 

The 1998 law that established USAID stated that “The Administrator of the Agency for International Development . . . shall report to and be under the direct authority and foreign policy guidance of the Secretary of State.” This means that USAID isn’t a fully independent agency and would violate the terms of its authorizing legislation if it refused to accept the secretary’s guidance.

And then entered Marco Rubio via the Trump administration. As Secretary of State, Rubio climes that USAID is “a completely unresponsive agency.” Citing his experience in Congress, Rubio reported that USAID refused to respond to policy directives mandated by the State Department.

If alleged unresponsiveness continues, Mr. Rubio would have the authority, to fire noncompliant officials and seek to replace them with people who would respect his statutory authority. But he has no legal right to abolish USAID, any more than the president does, continues the Mr. Galston:

Neither (Elon) Musk nor (Donald) Trump has offered evidence to support these charges. Even if they could, they wouldn’t have the legal authority to shutter the organization.

Yes, indeed, USAID probably does need reform. Alas, Congress and the executive branch have been wrestling with the architecture of foreign assistance for more than six decades, and further changes may well be in order.

In the past decade, thinkers across the political spectrum have offered reform proposals ranging from fully integrating USAID into the State Department to consolidating all development programs into a new Global Development Agency with cabinet status.

Walking into a Trap

If the Beltway opposition truly believed its rhetoric, wouldn’t it be even more appalled than Team Trump that needed funds are being siphoned off to fund political race and gender projects and even allies of terrorists. How many starving children, wonders the WSJ’s James Freeman, could be fed with the money now used to pay the agency’s 10,000 employees?

USAID also brings up an overwhelming question: how did the party of working people become the party of elite institutions? Democrat strategist David Axelrod weighs in on the problem facing Democrats: “Part of the problem for the Democratic Party is that it has become a stalwart defender of institutions at a time when people are enraged at institutions.”

Fundamental questions arise about the extent to which international economic assistance serves U.S. national interests. Mr. Trump has every right to do so, and the debate he has sparked could lead to more clarity on the goals that overseas economic aid should promote.

But he can’t translate his policy preferences into action without congressional involvement and new legislation.

The Rule of Law

Courts certainly will challenge Mr. Trump’s attempt to abolish USAID. William Galston maintains that he has a good handle on the reading of the law. If Galston’s reading of the law is correct, which he is assures WSJ readers it is, the judicial branch won’t allow the president to proceed.