While USAID was just shuttered, its story is important because it reveals the transmission belts that the deep state uses to enlist and redirect other U.S. agencies to support the political agendas that are central to the cultural Marxist transformation at home and abroad.
Until Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered the records of USAID diverting tax-payer funds to countless ideological transformation initiatives in countries all over the world, most Americans assumed the agency established by JFK more than 60 years ago was a noble force serving humanitarian needs.
What has been going on at USAID is part of an elitist cultural Marxist agenda that has infiltrated almost all government agencies—a process known as “the long march through the institutions”—a descriptive term coined by Antonio Gramsci, a founding member and leader of the Communist Party in Italy in the 1920s.
The “long march” is described in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks written while he was jailed between 1929 and 1933. Gramsci advocated the abandonment of the traditional proletarian revolution uprising, and the embrace of communist infiltration and progressive subversion through the culture. For Gramsci, the Marxist transformation could be best accomplished subliminally through government bureaucracies, NGOs, universities, the media, churches, and cultural institutions.
A partial list of USAID funding of recent overseas projects reveals just how far the agency has gone off the rails of its original mission, self-evident by the unmistakable patterns of an ideological and political agenda totally out of step with the majority of Americans and the needs of the people of the countries receiving USAID funding:
$20 million to launch the Arabic-language LGBT-inclusive Sesame Street program in Iraq.
$7.9 million to train Sri Lankan journalists on how to avoid ‘gender binary language’
$20 million to launch the Arabic-language Sesame Street program in Iraq.
$4.5 million to Kazakhstan to ‘combat disinformation’.
$1.5 million for ‘Arts for People with Disabilities’.
$2 million for gender reassignment surgery and ‘LGBT activism’ in Guatemala
$6 million to ‘transform digital spaces to reflect feminist democratic principles.’
$2.1 million to help the BBC ‘value the diversity of Libyan society’.
$10 million worth of meals funded by the USAID were given to Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist organizations.
$25 million to Deloitte to promote ‘green transport’ in Georgia.
$268 million spent on influencing media and journalism in foreign countries.
USAID has been integral to CIA-sponsored color revolutions to bring about regime change in target countries, spending billions over many years on mobilizing an extended “censorship industrial complex.”
$16.8 million to an independent ‘inclusive’ organization in China.
Approximately $5 million to the Eco Health Alliance, which has funded COVID research through 2022.
$20 million to organizations linked to key figures in the Russiagate impeachment scam.
$1.1 million to the Armenian ‘LGBT community’
$1.2 million to help build ‘a state-of-the-art 440-seat auditorium’ for the African Methodist Episcopal Service and Development Agency in Washington, DC.
$1.5 million to promote ‘LGBT advocacy’ in Jamaica.
$1.5 million to ‘rebuild’ the media ecosystem in Cuba.
$2 million to promote ‘LGBT Equality through Entrepreneurship’ in Latin America
$3.9 million for ‘LGBT causes’ in the Western Balkans
$5.5 million for LGBT activities in Uganda
$6 million to advance LGBT issues in ‘global priority countries.’
$6.3 million for the loss of men who have sex with men in South Africa.
$8.3 million for multiple Equity and Inclusion programs
What the USAID saga shows is long-standing fiscal irresponsibility within the U.S. federal government, which is particularly unacceptable given the present legacy of $2 trillion annual federal government deficits.
DOGE examinations and audits need to be driven by various matrices of prioritization:
The U.S. Department of Justice Department and the FBI are a high priority because their dysfunction undermines the people’s unalienable Constitutional rights, and undermines the functioning of America as a Constitutional Republic.
The Department of Defense, CIA, DHS, the State Department are high priorities for DOGE because of their roles in national security, warfighting, and diplomacy.
The Department of Education (DEA) is charged with maintaining high academic standards for schools and equipping young people for citizenship. Because it has utterly failed in these missions DEA should be shuttered just like USAID. Responsibility for education and citizenship training should be returned to the states and localities as it was prior to DEA’s founding in 1977.
The Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency all need to undergo DOGE audits and be staffed with personnel supportive of Trump’s policies to expand and increase the extraction of hydrocarbons.
DOGE needs to examine the General Services Administration (GSA), which appears to operate with a fundamental conflict of making a profit off other federal agencies that use GSA programs and contracts. The GSA then shovels these profits into what appears to be a billion-dollar slush fund—a pattern of irregularities not unlike that of USAID.
There is also a little-known slush fund within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, called the Commodity Credit Corporation, which has become a go-to funding source for as much as $30 billion annually in the last few administrations, Democrat and Republican alike. Most recently, the Biden administration improperly used these funds to help carry out its climate agenda.
American people know that the federal government has gone way beyond Thomas Hobbes’ vision of a Leviathan—and has become a self-serving and unaccountable beast that threatens the American people’s constitutional rights and freedom.
The America First MAGA movement has risen in response because people know that American’s achievements of unsurpassed freedom and prosperity were made possible by a constitution that limited abuse of government power. That movement has picked up momentum and is now unstoppable because people cannot unsee the widespread corruption within the federal government and a super majority has emerged that embraces common sense, courage and zeal to restore all things that make America great.
Scott S. Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His timeless book, Rediscovering America, has been #1 Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org