Penny Wise, Pound Stupid: Shredding USAID, Trump Also Shreds America

Jeff Robbins on Feb 11, 2025

"The key to success," George Burns observed, "is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made." Donald Trump has established himself as far and away the most successful faker in American history, conning half the country plus a bit more in battleground states into believing that he is all about Making America Great. Motivated instead by projecting raw dominance, he's administering a wrecking ball to the country.

Three weeks into his administration, Trump has reduced the federal government to utter chaos. He is gutting the Central Intelligence Agency, increasing our vulnerability to enemies, of which we have plenty. He is gutting the Federal Bureau of Investigations, consigning us to upsurges in terrorism financing and planning, drug and sex trafficking, and organized crime, of which we likewise have plenty.

He's also well down the path to gutting America's reputation abroad, for generations to come and probably irreparably. The president and co-president Elon Musk have declared an end to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has helped to save lives, enhance American national security and improve our standing abroad for over 60 years. The good that USAID has done to relieve global suffering is incalculable. The same is true of the good it's done projecting American influence abroad and checking the attempted influence of our adversaries. And the same for the good it's done burnishing our international standing -- standing that most Americans rightly care about.

Musk World has gleefully disseminated stories about de minimis expenditures on items that may (or may not) have been dubious, at least from the characterizations we've been handed by USAID's critics: what are alleged to have been for "DEI operas" and "transgender comic books" and such. We may never know whether those characterizations are fair or distorted.

But assuming that these expenditures were what we've been told they were, they constitute a tiny fraction of what USAID funds go for. As much as 30% of USAID's budget provides disaster and emergency relief for those in dire straits due to long-running crises and wars -- in Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen, Gaza, Syria and across Africa, for instance -- or acute disasters such as Ebola, earthquakes and hurricanes. Far more representative of USAID than operas or comic books are the humanitarian aid workers who, while Musk enjoys the privileges that a half trillion dollars can buy, risk their lives delivering nutrition to the malnourished, care to the sick, and water and toilets to the miserable. "Everyone who does this work does it for the mission," one USAID employee says, anonymously, of course, out of fear of retaliation by a power-drunk Trump administration ecstatic about its ability to do what it wants to whomever it wants whenever it wants. "Nobody does it because of the money."

As for the line being pushed that the agency is the paragon of waste that Musk and Co. say it is, the employee says this is somewhere between overblown and nonsense. "All these lies about no oversight, they're all fake," this employee says, "and they directly contradict the extensive legal obligations to which all USAID staff involved in procurement are beholden."

Donald Trump may be the Garbage Spewer-in-Chief, but Musk is giving him a run for his money. They have flooded the zone with the very fake news that Trump ("I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man," Musk posted last weekend) has persuaded millions he stands against. Trump and Musk have much in common, but nothing more fundamental than a propensity for peddling fraudulent claims. Musk, for example, has claimed that USAID is a "form of money laundering taxpayers' money into far-left organizations," has paid celebrities to visit Ukraine and has paid the news outlet Politico, as Trump puts it, to write "good stories about the Democrats." It is the usual BS for which Trump and Musk will ultimately go down in history.

But hey! It's working.

Trump, Musk and their band of bros are on a tear, literally. They're tearing to pieces the America that, for its many flaws, has inspired people all over the world since its founding. More than half of Americans are down with it. And that's the saddest thing of all.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.