It’s impossible to say “all” foreign aid, especially that which passes through the Kennedy-era United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is “wasted.” But it is equally impossible to assess that a majority of foreign aid “works.” Therein lies the rub for the U.S. taxpayer, and the moral imperative for the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (officially the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization) to go about fisking USAID as one of its first orders of business.

Without repeat and loud, evidenced, and exemplified assurances that their lives and the lives of others are being made better, safer, and freer as a result of their coercive investment, there exists no ethical justification for gifting away $50bn or so a year.

Nor was it ever envisioned as such an entity, with its earliest advocates such as President John F. Kennedy–oft falsely invoked by the legacy media–acknowledging that America’s 1960s aid efforts were meant to usher in “a decade of development.”

It has now been 6.4 decades, and reading JFK’s letter to Congress on the subject from March 1961, it is easy to see how he would likely agree with President Trump on streamlining America’s soft power efforts.

Kennedy made the following points from the get-go:

1. Existing foreign aid programs and concepts are largely unsatisfactory and unsuited for our needs and for the needs of the underdeveloped world as it enters the Sixties.

2. The economic collapse of those free but less-developed nations which now stand poised between sustained growth and economic chaos would be disastrous to our national security, harmful to our comparative prosperity and offensive to our conscience.

3. There exists, in the 1960’s, an historic opportunity for a major economic assistance effort by the free industrialized nations to move more than half the people of the less-developed nations into self-sustained economic growth, while the rest move substantially closer to the day when they, too, will no longer have to depend on outside assistance.

He elaborated: “For no objective supporter of foreign aid can be satisfied with the existing program-actually a multiplicity of programs. Bureaucratically fragmented, awkward, and slow, its administration is diffused over a haphazard and irrational structure covering at least four departments and several other agencies.”

Nothing truer could be said for USAID’s efforts today, barring the addendum that much of this so-called “aid” ends up in the hands of dictators, oligarchs, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and is, too often, highly ideologically charged.

Part two of Kennedy’s message was even more explicit: the moral and strategic imperatives (especially vis-a-vis communism) must dovetail. Given the far-left nature of much of America’s foreign aid projects, this can hardly be used as rationale today. Furthermore, if the aim is beating back the new Soviets in the form of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), we are scarcely playing by the same rules.

For every dollar America spends on drag queen story hours in Mozambique (or something equally asinine), China spends two dollars building or acquiring ports, developing infrastructure, and entrenching itself and its interests in any given nation’s technological and economic base.

America, meanwhile, has been fighting culture and currency wars, relying more on McDonald’s and the Federal Reserve than on the notion of fostering economic interoperability and interdependence.

Fast food and feds are the least of America’s aid problems; however, rage-inducing examples of globalist profligacy have been pouring out of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in recent days. Millions for diversity programs in Serbia; electric vehicle commitments in Vietnam, sex changes and LGBT rights activism in Guatemala; tourism in Egypt (did they need new Pyramids?), as well as the bizarre and irredeemably corrupt practice of dishing out millions in subsidies to legacy media outlets like POLITICO.

The National Pulse, on the other hand, was amongst the first publications to expose how USAID even had a hand in funding the so-called “gain of function” work at the now-infamous Wuhan Lab via a non-governmental group (NGO), the EcoHealth Alliance.

THE NGO-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.

As discussed in 2018, government aid programs and taxpayer-funded charity work have long been leveraged as sovereign wealth funds for so-called NGOs–most of which, at best, represent a drastic perversion of the charitable sector.

Many of these groups are not “non-governmental” in a strict sense. They couldn’t function without taxpayer cash, and they both give advice to and receive marching orders from government bureaucrats. At most, they are an unconstitutional extension of the state, operating with public money but no oversight. In an ideal world, most government-funded NGO activity would actually be unlawful. If the charity sector cannot sustain a perceived necessity, it is far better to have the activities directly answerable to Congress, if they should exist at all.

The U.S. State Department’s website confesses there are “[a]pproximately 1.5 million NGOs operate in the United States,” adding: “Indeed, NGOs exist to represent virtually every cause imaginable. Their sources of finance include donations from private individuals (American or foreign), private sector for-profit companies, philanthropic foundations, or grants from federal, state, or local government. Sources of finance may also include foreign governments. There is no prohibition in U.S. law on foreign funding of NGOs; whether that foreign funding comes from governments or non-government sources.”

There are, in fact, countless examples of foreign-funded NGOs actively working inside the United States in order to undermine its national borders, sovereignty, and the rights of its own natural-born citizens. But with friends like the American-funded NGOs on their own, who even needs these enemies?

It should be a policy priority to restrict the foreign funding of organizations such as these. The only reason it is currently not is reciprocal bans would follow within nations wherein the U.S. routinely interferes. Good. Such a move would only serve to expedite the destruction of what has become known as The Fifth Estate.

Modern NGOs are not the “little platoons” encouraged by Edmund Burke, nor do they represent the “American associations” reflected upon by Alexis de Tocqueville.

The fervent establishment opposition to President Trump’s USAID changes is because they know they are in an existential fight. Not just the employees but also the donor class. The usual foundations and grantees who steer political NGO priorities (read: mass migration and open borders, climate change, foreign interventionism, abortion access, and more) have lurched from the largesse of the Biden regime to the threat of institutional collapse within a few short months.

Truly, this is a ‘dark MAGA‘ moment, echoing Lord Byron’s poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

“Here is the moral of all human tales, Tis but the same rehearsal of the past. First freedom and then glory; when that fails Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last. And history, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.”

The wealthy, viceful, and corrupt actors at the heart of decades of the NGO-industrial complex now stand before us, pants around their ankles, in some cases fuming, in others pleading for their grift. MAGA should offer no quarter.

FOREVER-AID.

The well-received 2005 book by Bush-era economists R. Glenn Hubbard and William Dugan stated, “Overall, we might estimate that only 10 percent of USAID supports local business”—another starkly divergent approach from that espoused by Kennedy and USAID’s early enthusiasts.

The idea of the “decade of development” was to lift allied nations and those susceptible to the lures of communism out of poverty, not trap them in a cycle that sees some Kalorama-dwelling non-profit CEO take home $2,000,000 a year in basic salary to assess their needs and delivery them white papers on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Kennedy pledged in ’61 that “approximately $2 billion out of the requested $2.4 billion in economic aid will be spent directly for goods and services benefiting the American economy,” which is in no way close to the situation with foreign economic aid. Additionally, those 1961 numbers represent half as much in aid spending–at the height of the Cold War, no less!–than America gives away today.

The 35th President was explicit, in fact, on the topic of forever-aid: “We must say to the less-developed nations, if they are willing to undertake necessary internal reform and self-help… that we then intend during this coming decade of development to achieve a decisive turn-around in the fate of the less-developed world, looking toward the ultimate day when all nations can be self-reliant and when foreign aid will no longer be needed.”

For further reading on the exploitative nature of USAID bureaucrats, one can consult a Heritage briefing issued in 2022, which enumerates the Biden-era priorities which ultimately led to the most recent, heightened scrutiny of the NGO-sector’s work in the United States. Or one can simply pay attention to the dozens of horror stories emerging from the ‘DOGE’ teams encounters with spending data–a phenomenon that must surely kickstart a trend of equal amounts of scrutiny for every government department, not least the Department of Defense.

For the few USAID programs that actually promote American interests, a handful of State Department and embassy staff in the relevant and respective nations concerned can and should be able to take care of it. For the rest, it is the beginning of a great reset, in order to avert that last line of Byron’s narrative: “barbarism at last.”