A longtime supporter sent the following e-mail about the dismantling of USAID. We are sharing it, as well as Glenn's response below, in case anyone else finds it interesting.
From Supporter:
PS on not opposing Trump -- or anyone -- reflexively: What most came to mind there for me was Bush and PEPFAR. I'm not a fan of Bush to put it mildly - - I'll never forgive him for lying us into war for starters. But still I have no problem giving him props for PEPFAR which saved millions of lives from AIDS. Of course he just deserves part of the credit -- I'd also want to be sure to remember the late Paul Farmer, who unlike Bush was a genuinely good and decent man throughout (I had the good fortune to meet him a few times) -- but it wouldn't have happened without Bush's buy-in. "Compassionate conservatism" was mostly bullshit, but this was a very prominent exception that massively changed the world for the better.
But I guess you're on the other side of this? I see you celebrating the shut down of USAID. I'm all for praising Trump if and when he does something good, but in my opinion this ain't it. For one, is this even legal the way they are going about it? I am not a lawyer, and won't pretend to have a well-informed take, but it seems pretty questionable. Even if you want to argue it's legal, I really struggle to understand celebrating the world's richest man suddenly shutting down aid for some of the world's poorest. I get the argument that USAID has sometimes been used as cover for the CIA or whatever. The first thing that comes to mind was using a more or less fake vaccination program to catch Bin Laden (though googling, that one doesn't seem to have involved USAID. But do you think shutting down USAID is really going to materially undermine the CIA? They'll find the cover somewhere else. And to the extent aid continues, this will make it less independent of political concerns, bringing it under direct control of the State Department. Not sure if you followed the similar move in the UK where DID -- a formerly independent agency in the UK, widely seen as the best major national aid agency - was brought under the Foreign Office and more political control. At least there, they did it in an orderly way (and in fairness, from what I've heard, while clearly negative for the quality of decision making wasn't nearly the sea change critics feared, at least so far).
From: Glenn
It's a bit reductive to dichotomize the debate to Keep USAID or Abolish USAID, at least in terms of how I see it. I have zero doubt that there are USAID programs that save lives and do a great deal of good for the neediest.
But this is not the primary objective of SAID and it never was. The primary objective is to bolster US imperialism and the power to interfere in other countries. They fund countless propaganda rags around the world; programs that destabilize regions; and campaigns to manipulate foreign elections. Most of the most vicious "independent" Ukrainian press - the kind that routinely smears Americans as being Kremlin agents for questioning NATO narratives (I've been on many of those) -- are USAID funded. They do that in Russia, Cuba, everywhere.
The whole issue with Trump comes down to this clip where Jeremy Scahill describes how Seymour Hersh sees Trump. We have this gigantic part of our government that operates in secret, completely on its own, with zero accountability, designed to foster failed bipartisan US foreign policy. Nothing and nobody has had the ability to shake or subvert it other than Trump, for whatever reasons and with whatever motives. Absent him, it just not only continues but expands and becomes more sinister.
Of course they'll find other ways to do much of this. But the reason USAID was created in the first place is because it's so much easier to access and manipulate other countries when there's a pretense of humanitarianism to it rather than an explicit CIA or State Dept program. I wish there were someone viable proposing surgical and precise cuts to the stuff that should be excised, but there's not. So absent that, I prefer a more blunt assault than just allowing the status quo to continue and fester unmolested.
