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18 minute read

The future of USAID.

Plus, can you separate a political position from a moral one?

Pallets of food, water, and supplies from USAID staged to be delivered. | Credit: USAID
Pallets of food, water, and supplies from USAID staged to be delivered. | Credit: USAID

This is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 13 minutes.

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We break down the recent changes at the aid organization. Plus, a reader asks if it's possible to separate political positions from moral beliefs.

Upcoming content.

It’s been a busy start to the year, and we’ve been doing our best to cover it all. We’ve got a slate of interviews with compelling political thinkers releasing soon. Then, on Friday, we’ll be publishing a deep-dive on last week’s mid-air accident in Washington, D.C., featuring interviews with a former Federal Aviation Administration safety inspector, veteran airline pilots, and a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot. 


Quick hits.

  1. The United States will pause its planned tariffs on Canada for 30 days after President Donald Trump spoke with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who agreed to take several actions on border security — including implementing a $1.3 billion border plan and appointing a “fentanyl czar” — in return for the pause. (The agreement) Separately, President Trump’s 10% tariff on Chinese imports took effect on Tuesday. The Chinese government responded with tariffs on liquefied natural gas, coal, farm machinery, and other products from the United States. (The response)
  2. A federal judge extended a temporary ban on the Trump administration’s attempted pause on trillions of dollars in federal spending while she considers a lawsuit challenging the action’s legality. The judge said the administration had not offered a sufficient explanation for the scale of the pause. (The decision)
  3. The Senate voted 59–38 to confirm Chris Wright, a former oil and gas executive, as energy secretary. (The confirmation)
  4. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent halted most activity at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after taking over as acting director of the agency. (The pause)
  5. President Trump signed an executive order that outlines plans to establish a sovereign wealth fund as an economic development tool. Trump suggested the fund could be used to purchase TikTok’s U.S. business. (The order)

Today's topic.

The future of USAID. On Monday, following a week of upheaval at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he had taken over as acting administrator of the agency and told lawmakers that he intends to work with Congress to reorganize it. Rubio’s statement ran counter to comments made earlier in the day by Elon Musk, who said that he and President Donald Trump had decided to shut down USAID. These conflicting remarks and efforts by representatives of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to curtail the agency’s operations have created uncertainty about the agency’s future. 

Back up: USAID is an independent agency of the United States government that provides humanitarian assistance and financial aid to countries across the world. Its work focuses on a variety of international issues, from human trafficking to famine to medical services and more. Shortly after taking office, President Trump issued an executive order for a 90-day pause in foreign development assistance to review all aid allocations to ensure alignment with his foreign policy. The order prompted the State Department to issue a "stop-work" order for existing foreign assistance and pause new aid payments. Days later, Secretary of State Rubio approved a waiver for continuing “life-saving humanitarian assistance,” though confusion persisted among aid organizations about which services were exempt. 

Over the past week, USAID has experienced significant disruption, with dozens of senior officials placed on leave, thousands of contractors laid off, and employees locked out of their work accounts. USAID’s new acting administrator, Jason Gray, said the employees had been placed on leave with full pay and benefits while the agency assessed “actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people.”

On Monday, the Trump administration closed USAID’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., instructing employees to work remotely. Additionally, hundreds of contractors reportedly lost access to their official emails and systems over the weekend, raising concerns that the agency would be shut down imminently. While Rubio’s statement to Congress affirmed that USAID would not close, the Trump administration is reportedly considering absorbing it into the State Department, a notion that Rubio also advanced

“The Department of State and other pertinent entities will be consulting with Congress and the appropriate committees to reorganize and absorb certain bureaus, offices, and missions of USAID,” Rubio wrote to Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

Meanwhile, Democratic leaders have said that any move to shut down USAID without Congressional approval would be illegal, as the agency was created — and is funded — by Congress. “Donald Trump does not have the authority to erase an independent agency created by Congress. Nor can the Department of State absorb USAID,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said.

Today, we’ll share arguments from the left and right about the outlook for USAID and foreign aid commitments during the Trump administration. Then, Managing Editor Ari Weitzman gives his take while Executive Editor Isaac Saul is on paternity leave.


What the left is saying.

  • The left criticizes the aid suspension, arguing the U.S. spends relatively little on aid but that it provides critical services. 
  • Some say any attempt to shut down USAID could spark a constitutional crisis.
  • Others suggest that U.S. foreign aid does not do what it promises. 

The Washington Post’s editorial board said “Trump’s freeze on foreign aid will hurt America.”

“For many people around the world, aid is also the most visible symbol of U.S. power — soft power — and a tangible demonstration of America’s decency. Amounting to $68 billion in fiscal 2023, foreign aid is only about 1 percent of the federal budget. Yet it has long been in the crosshairs of some fiscal conservatives and other critics who deem it a waste of taxpayer dollars that could be better spent at home,” the board wrote. “A sweeping order freezing most foreign aid programs risks causing immediate harm. Though the new waiver for lifesaving medicine, medical services and shelter is a welcome reprieve, for many other vital programs, even a three-month suspension could do damage.”

“The United States is also the world’s largest donor to the global fight against malaria, mostly through the President’s Malaria Initiative, known as PMI… With even a short suspension of this aid, prevention gains could be reversed, especially in malaria-prone cities such as Lagos, Nigeria, African health officials warn,” the board said. “The aid suspension also will hamper refugee resettlement. The United States assists civic groups that help people, such as Afghan special immigrant visa holders, by providing food, housing and child care to help them settle into American communities and find a path toward self-sufficiency.”

In Slate, Fred Kaplan argued “it’s a huge deal that Trump is trying to shut down USAID.” 

“After Trump ordered a freeze on foreign aid, Musk sent his squad of tech bros into USAID’s headquarters. When a security aide blocked its access to offices containing highly classified documents, the squad made a phone call and had the aide put on leave. It’s not clear whether the group obtained access; under normal circumstances, if an unauthorized person did that, it would be a serious felony,” Kaplan wrote. “Then again, shutting down a congressionally funded federal agency—like much of what Trump and Musk pulled off this past weekend—is illegal too.”

“USAID employees have been told to work from home, and hundreds were locked out from agency computer systems. A contractor at one USAID-funded nongovernmental organization told me he was told to pack up, that the project was over. He said he’s heard similar reports from other NGO workers. More drastically, programs delivering food, medicine, and other forms of aid are at best aimless, and at worst shut down entirely,” Kaplan said. “Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who came into the job of his dreams two weeks ago with probably no idea that he would witness the dismantlement of its foreign-aid outlet without having a say in the matter himself.”

In Jacobin, Carlos Cruz Mosquera wrote “US foreign aid was always about furthering US interests.”

“This decision will not only affect military aid, which makes up a large percentage of the total, but also threatens funding for development aid, human rights campaigns, and initiatives that support democratic institutions,” Mosquera said. “The general response to this announcement, however, reinforces a long-standing false dichotomy: the notion that US and Western humanitarian and developmental interventionism operates independently of these nations’ broader, overtly aggressive geopolitical and imperialist interests.”

“Alongside overt forms of domination — military interventions, territorial acquisition, direct political interference — Western powers have long developed parallel forms of intervention and control, sometimes called informal imperialism… This form of imperialism has empowered so-called civil society — nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society organizations (CSOs) — in the peripheralized regions,” Mosquera wrote. “These Western developmental aid and humanitarian programs are not only fundamentally incapable of addressing the region’s severe social and ecological crises; they have also served as tools to reinforce the very structures that perpetuate these problems.”


What the right is saying.

  • The right mostly supports the changes to USAID, arguing the agency has strayed too far from its mission.
  • Some note that Musk’s influence in the government is starting to have wide-reaching consequences. 
  • Others say Musk is right to scrutinize where USAID’s funding has gone. 

In Hot Air, David Strom wrote “just like that: USAID is (mostly) dead.”

“As a practical matter, as long as the president can get DOGE to go through the books it will be hard to revive the agency in its current form because, simply put, it is corrupt to the core. Not that it doesn't do some good things—with tens of billions of dollars something good might come of it. But current estimates are that only about 10% of the aid ever reaches the ‘intended’ recipients—assuming that the downtrodden really ARE the intended recipients,” Strom said. “All the big consulting firms get billions of dollars from this slush fund, NGOs live and die with USAID grants, and the IC uses the agency to launder money and agents into other countries.”

“You may think of foreign aid in terms of keeping the poorest of the poor from dying horrible deaths, but the meat and potatoes of USAID is extending the tendrils of power for the transnational elite and funding political operations. The censorship-industrial complex depended almost entirely on this slush fund,” Strom wrote. “Trump is going for the jugular here—and the target is almost 100% domestic. If the estimates of how much goes to legitimate aid to poor people is really 10% of the foreign aid budget—as seems likely—then this one move could rob the left of several dozen billions of dollars dedicated to expanding their power over us.”

In The Dispatch, Michael Warren said “Elon Musk’s Twitter becomes real life.”

“What, exactly, is Elon Musk up to? The South African-born billionaire had a busy weekend, with his team of exceedingly young disruptors at the Department of Government Efficiency working overtime to implement the old Facebook company motto: Move fast and break things,” Warren wrote. “The Musk approach appears to be getting results, particularly with the dismantling of USAID, the chief administrator of the country’s foreign developmental aid. That process began when Musk’s DOGE team won a standoff with senior USAID leaders on Saturday to gain access to the agency’s classified information.”

“While it’s hardly fair to call it a co-presidency, Musk’s assertion of power continues apace, while Trump seems to approve. On Sunday evening, Trump told reporters the agency was rife with ‘radical lunatics’ and praised Musk for doing a ‘good job’ in his role at DOGE,” Warren said. “For those in Washington waiting to see this Musk-led effort to reshape the government either lose favor with Trump or collapse on its own, it may be that neither happens. A DOGE-ified government will almost certainly exist on the other side. But will anyone be pleased with the results?”

The American Greatness staff praised DOGE for “pull[ing] back the curtain on USAID.”

“The newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) commission has gained access to the Treasury Department’s federal payment system and is revealing some disturbing truths about the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID),” the staff wrote. “DOGE has discovered that USAID is funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to various CIA fronts and favored organizations under the guise of a humanitarian agency dispensing foreign aid to needy and disadvantaged people around the world.”

“Questions are also arising over the immense amount of funding directed to Ukraine through USAID, even as Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky is claiming that he has only received $70 billion of $180 billion in U.S. aid that has been sent to his country. Nearly $40 billion of the U.S. taxpayer aid sent to Ukraine has been sent through USAID, raising serious questions about how much money has been fraudulently distributed,” the staff said. “The amount of wasted taxpayer money that is being uncovered is bad enough, but the secret work being done by U.S. intelligence agencies with that money is where things start to look highly questionable, if not criminal.”


My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where we give ourselves space to share a personal opinion from our editorial team. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

Today's "My Take" was written by Tangle Managing Editor Ari Weitzman.
  • The changes at USAID reflect Trump’s belief that foreign aid should be reciprocal.
  • The administration is right to scrutinize whether USAID’s funding mechanisms are efficient or proper.
  • However, the execution of this effort has been sloppy and raises valid legal concerns.

We’ve already had four years of Trump as president, then four years with Trump as a candidate. Now, after the first two weeks of his second term, Trump’s point of view on foreign policy is clear: The United States is not in the business of extending generosity that doesn’t provide immediate benefits. 

We also have a pretty good sense of his negotiation style: I’m willing to rethink this entire arrangement if you don’t give me what I want. We saw this on the campaign trail when he threatened to drop out of NATO if European nations didn’t put up their fair share of military spending. We saw it just this past weekend when he announced 25% tariffs on our neighbors to the north and south if they didn’t take steps to secure their borders. We saw it yesterday when he said continued aid to Ukraine would be contingent on access to rare earth minerals in the country. Now we’re seeing him run a similar playbook on USAID, with Elon Musk saying that Trump is willing to shut the whole agency down for being out of step with his political agenda.

Unfortunately for the public, that means we’re in a continual state of reacting to the most dire potential consequences of the president’s moves, even if those consequences aren’t the most likely outcome. Yes, it’s possible USAID gets shut down — but if the tariffs saga is any indicator (and I think it is), then it’s more likely that it gets reorganized and its mission redirected. So, let’s go over what’s happening with USAID: What it does, what Trump wants it to do, and what the stakes are.

What it does: The organization was founded to counter Soviet influence in international development, but it has long outlived that original mission. Now, USAID is mostly a humanitarian organization. It provides billions to help fight AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. It helps other countries prevent and respond to famine and drought through its Famine Early Warning System. It has also provided vital aid to civilians caught in the machinations of war, not just through billion-dollar grants to Ukraine and hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza, but also through tens of millions sent to war-torn countries like Yemen and Sudan.

USAID is the world leader in international humanitarian aid. It spent $68 billion on foreign aid in 2023, by far the most of any country in the world and almost double what the European Union spent. That is an enormous commitment of raw dollars. However, contextualizing that amount can also be helpful. Most Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries committed to spending 0.7% of their GDPs on aid in 1970. Today, only four countries do — Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Germany — while the United States spends 0.24%, or 1% of the federal budget.

What Trump wants it to do: Donald Trump wants the organization to advance our national interests as he sees them. It’s reasonable to ask why the United States would want to spend billions on foreign assistance when our country’s own issues with poverty and food security are far from under control — a sentiment that many Americans share. When you put it into that perspective, it’s only fitting for the government’s chief executive to scrutinize its foreign aid agency’s spending.

And USAID’s model is certainly worthy of scrutiny. It gets funding through Congress, but that funding is usually not earmarked and the agency can still issue emergency disbursements to react to international crises. It is an independent organization, but it also answers to the State Department. It manages its own workforce, but it also distributes 25% of its resources to “locally-led development” and has planned to increase that amount to 50% over the next ten years.

In other words, USAID takes taxpayer dollars and gives them to an independent organization that decides what it wants to focus on, then distributes those dollars to other third-party organizations. Again, the president is right to scrutinize that model — or, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio (and current acting head of USAID) more pugnaciously put it, the agency is “insubordinate” to State Department priorities and should be redirected to serve the national interest.

What the stakes are: $68 billion is an enormous sum, but visualizing how much that is on a global scale is difficult. On one hand, that’s “only” $200 for every American; on the other hand, it’s more than the GDPs of over half the countries in the world. Even just redirecting that amount of money internationally will have earth-shaking impacts.

Also, remember USAID’s original mission: countering the development practices of foreign adversaries. If you reorient this budget towards that goal, the United States is no longer leading the world but playing catch-up to China. The Belt and Road Initiative, China’s global strategy to invest in infrastructure projects to further Chinese trade and grow its relationships on the global stage, made over $90 billion in deals in 2023. Meanwhile, Russia is pursuing a strategy of growing its influence in Africa through arms sales, a strategy that seems to be working to curry favor with some national governments. Obviously, humanitarian aid is a very different diplomatic tool than infrastructure investment and selling weapons, but if USAID makes decisions that result in the State Department working against itself, then the U.S. is hurting its ability to compete with our adversaries.

In sum: I agree with a lot of the communications that have been coming out of the federal government, especially from Rubio. If the United States government is going to be in the philanthropy business, it should be directing its funds strategically. That isn’t to say that fighting AIDS in Africa isn’t important or moral or even flat-out beneficial to the entire globe — of course it is — but why is that the job of the U.S. government? To be incredibly blunt, why should the U.S. subsidize the health of countries that align with Russia? If we as citizens want to spend billions of dollars on philanthropy, we can do so on our own rather than outsourcing our charity to the government. 

However, I disagree with a lot of the government’s communications, too — especially from Musk. “Let’s realign this organization to follow the national interest” is completely different from “let’s shut this whole thing down,” and dangling USAID off the sharp edge of a precipice has real consequences, to say nothing of the fact that Musk’s involvement with USAID has been ham-fisted, childish (in a very literal sense), and potentially illegal. That AIDS program in Africa? Frozen for 90 days. The famine warning system? Offline. Official communications about aid programs to countries like Yemen and Sudan? Totally dark.

As Editor Will Kaback wrote when we covered the U.S. pulling out of the Paris Agreement and the WHO, Trump’s approach on the international stage is akin to taking a sledgehammer to a spiderweb. Why threaten to blow up an agency when you can just say you’re going to redirect its efforts? You’re not negotiating with a foreign power here, you’re managing the executive branch that you oversee. 

With USAID, just as with federal employment in general through the Office of Management and Budget, Trump seems to be following the Project 2025 playbook of consolidating the executive branch’s powers under the president. As the head of the branch that’s his prerogative, but the method he’s employing to do so has been frankly terrible: Give unfettered access to poorly vetted DOGE contractors, haphazardly shut everything down, and pursue a policy change of unspecified benefit at a massive cost. Doing so destabilizes the agencies that Trump is tasked with managing, it puts the civil servants who work with or for those organizations (and their families) in tremendous stress, and it creates real concern abroad about wanting to work with the U.S. 

There are plenty of good reasons to want to shake up USAID, but citizens and non-citizens alike shouldn’t be left trying to give our best guess on what those reasons are — and “government by rug pull” isn’t a great strategy for the most powerful person on the planet.

Take the survey: What do you think Trump should do with USAID? Let us know!

Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.


Your questions, answered.

Q: Do your personal and/or moral positions ever vary from your political positions? If so, will you share an example? I often separate how I personally/morally feel about an issue versus how I politically feel about it and those positions frequently vary, sometimes in a significant way.

— Ryan from Rochester, NY

Hunter Casperson, Editorial Fellow: Absolutely! An example that comes to mind is President Trump’s recent immigration actions. 

A bit about me — for the first seven years of my schooling, I attended a two-way immersion program where my classes were made up of about 50% English-speaking students and 50% Spanish-speaking students. This experience brought me closer to my peers — some of them lacking U.S. citizenship, others with birthright citizenship but whose parents immigrated illegally. You can guess where I am headed with this: these relationships laid the foundation for my belief that Trump’s narrative and strategy on immigration is immoral.

However, as Tangle Editor Will Kaback wrote last Wednesday when we covered Trump’s executive orders on immigration, “Trump is doing exactly what he said he would, and those views seem to have a lot of support, which makes his actions fundamentally democratic.”

Although I find Trump’s actions on immigration unjust, politically I support democratic leadership and therefore, indirectly, Trump’s immigration acts. 

Still, I wonder how much of public support for Trump’s immigration agenda has been cultivated by the president’s rhetoric on the criminal nature and inhumanity of immigrants, rather than representing the American people’s authentic beliefs. As a matter of policy, I have not researched data directly addressing American’s perception of immigration in relation to the visibility of Trump’s rhetoric on immigrants, so I am shelving that thought as an idea “to be researched before being claimed valid.” 

Overall, it is always easier to find reasons to align your political beliefs with your moral ones. But it's important to reflect critically on whether you can defend your beliefs on grounds other than morality or simply emotion.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.


Under the radar.

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced its approval of a pill to treat acute pain, the agency’s first approval for a non-opioid pain medicine in more than 20 years. The drug, Journavx, differs from opioid pain medication in that it latches onto receptor proteins on nerves outside the nervous system, whereas opioids attach to nerves in the brain and spinal cord, increasing the risk of addiction. "A new non-opioid analgesic therapeutic class for acute pain offers an opportunity to mitigate certain risks associated with using an opioid for pain and provides patients with another treatment option,” Jacqueline Corrigan-Curay, acting director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said. Ars Technica has the story


Numbers.

  • 1961. The year USAID was established by President John F. Kennedy as an independent agency, following Congress’s passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. 
  • 99. The number of countries where USAID has an official presence as of 2024. 
  • 130. The approximate number of countries that received assistance from USAID in fiscal year 2023. 
  • $44.2 billion. USAID’s budget in fiscal year 2024. 
  • 0.4%. USAID’s budget as a percentage of the federal budget in 2024.
  • $66.1 billion. The total foreign assistance appropriations provided by Congress for fiscal year 2023. 
  • $42.45 billion. The amount of aid disbursed by USAID in 2023. 
  • 69%. The percentage of U.S. adults who said the country is spending too much on assistance to other countries in a March 2023 AP-NORC poll.

The extras.

  • One year ago today we had just published a subscribers-only piece with solutions to the border crisis.
  • The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the ad in our free version for Brad’s Deals.
  • Nothing to do with politics: In a full-circle moment, Taylor Swift presented Beyoncé with the Grammy Award for best country album.
  • Yesterday’s survey: 2,792 readers responded to our survey on Trump’s tariffs with 43% supporting the Chinese levies. “I don't mind the tariffs on China. I think the tariffs on China should be higher and the tariffs on Canada should be much lower,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

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