To the Phoenix:
To the students and faculty colleagues who have reached out to me in solidarity about USAID (United States Agency for International Development), where I was chief economist in 2014 and 2015: thank you. It is hard to overstate the current disarray. Round one has hardly begun, and USAID is already on the canvas and dimly hearing the knockout count.
I’m writing to share some context that readers will surely pick apart from their own perspectives (discussions of foreign aid tend to do that). My main point is that we’re in a constitutional crisis that goes beyond USAID, and that this is a good time for voters to write to their members of Congress.
USAID uses tax dollars to deliver humanitarian aid and development assistance overseas. Both are distinct from military assistance. In recent years, USAID has delivered about $35-$40 billion a year, roughly a penny for every five dollars of American pre-tax income.
The idea of bilateral development assistance dates from Truman’s 1949 inaugural address, delivered a year into the four-year Marshall Plan in Europe, less than a year before Mao established communist China, and a year before the Korean War began. Truman laid out a 4-point plan to contain the global expansion of communism by expanding the ranks of democratic and prosperous countries. The idea of using U.S. technology and resources to help poor countries achieve prosperity and sustain it on their own was point four. When USAID was founded early in the Kennedy administration, development aid was already well underway in South Korea, among other places.
Unlike private charity, foreign aid is an instrument of foreign policy. Truman and subsequent presidents have viewed aid as a source of soft power: a projection of American institutions and values, viewed in the tradition of Hamilton and Madison as beacons for the oppressed. But not as something for nothing: aid would promote U.S. and global security by strengthening alliances with countries seeking to reconcile political freedoms with social stability and economic prosperity.
This vision is fraught in many ways.
Conservatives worry that aid creates dependency, which is the opposite of prosperity and self-determination. USAID officials fight this concern through evidence-based project design, oversight, and evaluation.
Progressives worry that aid is driven by commercial interests, including exporters of food aid and consulting firms whose cut from the $40 billion flow reduces what lands among the poor. Powerful lobbies motivate Congressional earmarks that limit how USAID can spend money and undermine the agency’s flexibility to respond to country-specific needs or opportunities. USAID staff work within these constraints to follow the evidence and make the best difference they can on the ground.
Geo-political realities divert some portion of aid to brutal bedfellows (Mobutu for decades), and the strategic use of aid can undermine its continuity elsewhere. To limit the downsides, some portion of aid is allocated by the State Department, carved out explicitly for strategic priorities like Afghanistan and now Ukraine. But except for briefly under Bush Jr., Congress has resisted the temptation to sweep foreign aid into the State Department, for fear that military and political exigencies will then completely drive the allocation of humanitarian and development assistance.
These limitations make aid a fraught and deeply debatable business. But Congress has not considered them to be disqualifying. Instead, there has been a strong bipartisan consensus in favor of foreign aid throughout USAID’s roughly 65 years of existence.
We’re now in a crisis. You don’t have to be a major proponent of soft power to see how damaging the Musk/Rubio tactics are: when you brutalize your friends it is easy for your strategic rivals to be nicer to them. We are in a crisis of U.S. soft power and a real-time crisis of suffering for those affected. But the fundamental crisis is constitutional. The dismantling of USAID and the freezing of already-appropriated funds is a fork in the road (to mimic Musk). It is a big first step. Congress and the courts need to contest it on behalf of the system of government bequeathed to us by Hamilton and Madison. Trump and his coalition are systematically trampling constitutional restraints on executive power because they consider their own disparate objectives to be more important than the Constitution. The time to stop this usurpation is now, using the powers granted to Congress and the courts under the Constitution. To the voters among us, and in solidarity with our international students who face new uncertainties of the same provenance: writing to your members of Congress about the urgency of contesting legal violations and the importance of retaining Congressional prerogatives may seem a feeble response, but it is what we can do. It is time to get the Democrats off the back foot and to appeal to the courage of Republicans who honor the Constitution.
Sincerely,
Stephen O’Connell
Gill and Frank Mustin Professor of Economics
Great article.
Well said!