Republicans have never met a government program outside the Defense Department that they wanted to save. Democrats, outside the Defense Department, have never met a government program they wanted to close. With Donald Trump's election, the discrete niceties of Washington, D.C., have been pushed aside in favor of a Republican effort to shutter portions of the executive branch.
"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," reads the very first sentence of Article II of the Constitution. "A" is singular. There is a President of the United States. He has the executive power. The federal bureaucracy operates under the President. Congress has, in some cases, established executive departments that the President cannot get rid of due to their statutory origin. Congress has granted some executive powers that the President cannot get rid of due to their statutory origins. But everyone in the executive branch serves at the pleasure of the President and, with few limits, he gets to direct the executive branch.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy created the United States Agency for International Development. Congress did not create the USAID but has recognized its existence and directed a lot of federal foreign aid through the organization. But an agency created by executive order can be changed by executive order. Trump's pace of business -- light speed compared to his predecessor -- and his willingness to shatter norms, which are just operating procedures put in place to preserve Democrats' power when not in office, have Democrats screaming "coup." Trump is, they claim, engaged in a coup against the American administrative state.
One can hardly launch a coup against oneself. The executive power is vested in a single President, not an administrative state. Trump is retrieving powers long ago distributed to unelected bureaucrats who have used that power to advance progressive goals even when progressives do not hold power.
USAID does some good. In addition to being a useful front for CIA operatives working abroad, it has advanced many good humanitarian programs that use soft American power, through charitable spending, that reduce the need for American hard power with boots on the ground. But USAID has, for too long, also served as a piggy bank for left-leaning non-governmental organizations that advance progressive social goals with taxpayer largesse.
Contrary to some Trump supporters' claims, USAID did not spend $50 million on condoms for Gaza. It was $45 million and included other "sexual and other reproductive health care" along with $10 million in the Gaza province of Mozambique in Africa. But USAID did spend $2 million on health care for transgender youth in Guatemala; $45 million for DEI scholarships in Burma; $520 million for left-wing ESG investments in Africa; and $45 million to promote social justice and democracy based on the theories of an Italian Marxist professor. The money flows through and subsidizes various left-wing NGOs. Virtually 100 percent of USAID's top outside contractors, recipients of billions of dollars, donate to the Democratic Party. Tim Meisburger, a former USAID employee, discovered that "Of the top 17 grantees and partners of USAID's Office of Democracy, Human Rights and Governance, 14 saw 100 percent of their political donations during the 2019-2020 election cycle directed to Democratic Party ca! uses with only one (the International Republican Institute) under 90 percent."
Therein lies the reason both Republicans now wish to wind down USAID and Democrats wish to preserve it. The organization is not just a clearing house for aid from the United States to the developing world, but it is both a boundary-breaking vanguard of progressive funding abroad and a pass-through source of Democratic Party donations domestically.
PEPFAR and other programs can be run by the State Department. USAID is not a necessary entity. It struggles to audit its funds and fails to keep itself accountable to the American public through redirections in purpose as presidential administrations change to reflect the will of the people.
There are plenty of criticisms one might make about Donald Trump's robust first few weeks in office. But an entity created by a President can be altered by a President, and it is no coup for the American President to rein in the bureaucracy that serves under him. It is covered in the first sentence of the second article of the American Constitution.
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