Around 15 years ago, I was in the Tagab Valley of Afghanistan, about two hours’ drive north of Kabul. I was there as an adviser for the U.S. Army, helping them build better relationships with local communities in the hopes of reducing insurgent violence directed at troops and the national government. It was a tense period in a tense region, as the valley had recently been the staging ground for a series of violent assaults by terrorist group Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, known by the acronym HIG. I was attached to a Provincial Reconstruction Team, an innovative hybrid of military, civil affairs, police advisers, State Department diplomats and representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.
At our first meeting with community elders from the area, they expressed a familiar set of needs: less disruptive behavior by the troops, more security, more money, less corruption, more opportunity. The first need was relatively straightforward to address: Our adviser team learned that male troops were invading female spaces, so we asked the unit to use female troops to search those spaces instead. It eased tensions and reduced the rate of car bombs targeted at international troops. It was the other complaints, about corruption, food, infrastructure and money, where we had less success. One of the elders, an old man with a big fluffy white beard, was upset that his family could not leave their village in the winter due to impassable mud roads. “We can build a working road,” he insisted, according to my notes of the meeting, “if we are given the money and equipment.”
When I brought this concern to the USAID representative, he shrugged and said they already had a road construction partner, a local businessman with ties to an Indian subcontractor who was paid to build a highway nearby. I relayed this news to the elder. “But we hate this man,” he told me. “This man steals from us. He is a HIG.”
Catholic Relief Services is losing at least half of its funding this year due to the USAID cuts, which means millions of people are at risk of an agonizing, preventable death.
I never found any evidence that the subcontractor was actually tied to the terrorist group, but I believed the villagers that he did steal from them. USAID contractors doing reconstruction work in Afghanistan hired networks of subcontractors to do work, each layer of the industry extracting fees along the way. The corruption that resulted was a depressingly common story in that part of Afghanistan. USAID had a reputation for building computer labs without electricity, power plants that cost more to run than to refuel, and roads meant to improve commerce that instead became superhighways for terrorists.
On top of the corruption and poorly conceived construction projects, USAID was also painfully slow to act. When the nearby Forward Operating Base, Morales-Frazier, developed a flooded entrance gate, the agency told us it would take six months of paperwork and thousands of dollars for a subcontractor to clear. It just wasn’t a priority for them, despite the malaria risk and impediment to responding to security threats. In frustration, a colleague and I spent $40 of our own money to buy a shovel and a small pipe. We dug a hole under the fence line and drained the gate area in less than an hour.
Despite all the frustrating examples of inefficiency, however, USAID also helped untold numbers of people in Afghanistan. Many of the villagers I met were only able to eat because of USAID-provided food aid. The roads, though repurposed for terrorism by the Taliban and other militias, really did help reconnect cities, improve commerce and lessen suffering across the country. The expensive power plants really did provide electricity and many of the schools where young people studied only existed because of USAID funding.
A target of tyrants
I am recounting this story to make a point: USAID is hardly a perfect agency, but it is also life-saving for millions of people in ways that protect American lives and national security interests. Before we dismantle it entirely, we should remember that without USAID programs and money, far more soldiers and contractors would have died in Afghanistan, as poverty and isolation led many bereft young people to join the Taliban. Without USAID resources, an entire generation of children would likely have grown up with only sporadic, mediated access to the West, leaving them more vulnerable for recruitment by extremists. These programs may have waste, but they also matter. They help us.
Take for example Catholic Relief Services — founded 82 years ago to help World War II survivors in Europe — which assists more than 200 million people in 134 countries access education, microfinance, food and medicine and other relief. The organization is losing at least half of its funding this year due to the USAID cuts, which means millions of people, relying on a U.S. government-funded Christian relief organization, are at greater risk of an agonizing, preventable death.
I saw USAID’s utility and importance after I left Afghanistan, too. I wound up in Washington, D.C., where I worked for the Eurasia Foundation, which operated in the 1990s and early 2000s as a grants manager for USAID and the State Department. These grants materially contributed to establishing the fledgling democracies we have seen emerge from the wreckage of the former Soviet Union: Countries like the Republic of Georgia hold elections today, however troubled, because of the work USAID did to support civil society, democracy and the rule of law 25 years ago. Small programs of barely $1 million paid back decades of direct benefit for American interests.
In his farewell address, President George Washington begged the fledgling United States to “observe good faith and justice towards all nations” so that we may “cultivate peace and harmony with all.”
As the Eurasia Foundation shifted in the 2010s to direct services, it secured USAID money to work with women in the Middle East to build small businesses; civil society groups in the Caucasus to support democracy; and governments in Central Asia to reduce corruption and improve services for citizens. The foundation even operated a small program doing civic exchanges with scientists and activists in Russia as an effort to build bridges and lower tensions. The program remained open even after Russia evicted other civil society groups following its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Globally, USAID has become the target of tyrants who loathe civic participation, and the agency’s support for democratic governance made it a looming enemy in Russian state propaganda. The Russian government hates voices it cannot control, and USAID supported independent media there that documented corruption and abuse (that support has ended, and their staff are at risk of imprisonment, torture and murder).
USAID was also instrumental in supporting the democratic development of Ukraine, which helped it break free of Russian domination. Russian leaders have never forgiven the agency for it. Misinformation researchers can trace how Russian state media produces messages spuriously attacking the agency, which then end up in American media, creating a false impression of wasteful or illegal conduct. These falsehoods have fueled the current crusade to disband the agency and distract the public from understanding how central USAID is for saving lives.
The DOGE response to disasters
Earlier this year, when the Department of Government Efficiency came to USAID, disconnecting phones and computers, forcing people out of work and misappropriating funds in the name of saving money, it felt like a stab in the heart — not just because of the disruption and contested legality (a lawsuit claiming President Donald Trump overstepped his constitutional authority in shuttering the agency is wending its way through the federal courts), but because it is an effort to end USAID’s lifesaving work abroad.
In less than a month, horror stories emerged as death, misery, financial ruin and starvation accompanied the sudden cut of funding. Government employees were abandoned, defenseless and without resources in dangerous conflict zones. The Telegraph, a British newspaper, reported in early February that within a week of USAID’s funding being cut off, a woman died because she could no longer access oxygen from a USAID-funded hospital. In late March, staff at the agency’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance received letters of termination the day an earthquake struck in Myanmar, killing 2,700 people. Instead of hundreds of U.S. disaster rescue and relief workers being among the first on the scene of the disaster, the State Department dispatched a team of advisers and donated $2 million to affected communities.
It is hard to recount these stories of preventable death without feeling rage. There are reports of food crops being abandoned, which will place hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people at risk of starvation. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program to treat HIV that President George W. Bush started, widely credited with saving tens of millions of lives, was shut off without warning — placing hundreds of thousands of people at immediate risk. Children are dying of preventable disease because they suddenly, overnight, cannot access USAID-funded medicines. In the same way that USAID has saved untold lives through its work, the sudden stop to such activities is putting untold numbers of people at risk, too. The cruelty is nearly unimaginable.
Even religious agencies aren’t immune from this disruption. World Vision, the Christian aid agency, receives hundreds of millions of dollars from USAID to distribute food grown by American farmers to starving children. It is now cut off, and while these groups scramble to secure bridge funding and exemptions from government officials, people are dying daily from starvation and preventable disease. The Associated Press reported that World Relief, another Christian USAID contractor, was unable to distribute seeds in Haiti, leaving them to languish in a warehouse during the growing season instead of yielding much-needed food. World Relief also operates in war-torn South Sudan to feed malnourished children under 5. It is unknown how long those children can survive without USAID support. In March, eight people, including five children, died while walking through the desert to a clinic in South Sudan. They were seeking treatment for cholera after USAID cuts forced their local hospital to close. A State Department spokesperson said without evidence that while many U.S. government programs remain in South Sudan, those providing medical services had enriched the country’s leaders instead of helping those in need.
Globally, USAID has become the target of tyrants who loathe civic participation, and the agency’s support for democratic governance made it a looming enemy in Russian state propaganda.
That same month, Pete Marocco, Trump’s deputy director-designate for USAID at that time, held a closed-door meeting with the representatives of World Relief, Samaritan’s Purse, Christian Aid, Food for the Hungry, Compassion International and the National Association of Evangelicals — all Christian relief organizations that rely on USAID money to save lives. As The Washington Post recounted, these leaders explained, in excruciating detail, how the cuts will cost lives every day that they aren’t reversed. Marocco insisted that the cuts were a “success,” which was met with disbelief by leaders of the faith-based charities. At meetings with congressional leaders, he reportedly repeated the false claim that USAID was a “money laundering scheme.” As of this writing, the funding remains inaccessible.
It is important to note that even temporary “pauses” on funding are not costless. In the near term, suddenly stopping medicine and food aid has already killed people and the death will continue until it is restored. But the longer these cuts remain in place, the harder such aid efforts will be to restart. Both Catholic Relief and World Vision have said that they will need to terminate employees and permanently lose capacity as a result of the money disruptions, even if they do eventually negotiate exemptions to continue their lifesaving work. The damage being done, not just to human lives but to our capacity to ever safeguard them again, is willful and permanent.
Foreign aid and the nation’s founding
So, why has the new administration pursued a path that will result in the deaths of thousands of people who cannot survive without aid? The stated motivations — addressing waste and fraud, being responsible with money — do not fit any fact on the ground. USAID may have its share of waste, but it is minuscule compared to other government agencies that have been untouched: In 2016, for example, The Washington Post found that the Pentagon had “buried” around $125 billion in bureaucratic waste, which is money that could be saved without sudden program cuts, mass layoffs or other forms of disruption. The Defense budget last year was nearly $900 billion. In contrast, last year USAID’s total budget was $44 billion, or around one-third of just the identifiable waste in the DOD’s budget.
The comparisons raise an obvious question: Why target aid, and why now? While conservative media places the blame for foreign aid waste on USAID, vastly larger amounts of waste and inefficiency in the military go largely untouched, facing none of the disruptions, layoffs or mass death that is accompanying USAID’s sudden cutoff. It is hard to find an innocent explanation for it.
The interesting thing about USAID is that its lifesaving work overseas directly helps Americans, too. The food aid that I watched save lives in Afghanistan comes from American farms, which stand to lose billions of dollars of business as the agency is dismantled. The medicines it distributes are made by American companies whose workers’ livelihoods could be threatened because of the sudden stoppage. Foreign aid gets a bad rap in the media, but it is also domestic aid, as well: We benefit from these programs as much as the overseas beneficiaries. They support American industry, businesses and lives. That’s largely all gone now.
During a meeting of the Continental Congress, after the British had occupied Philadelphia and chased the founding fathers to York, Pennsylvania, Samuel Adams said, “We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection.” It is a value that liberals and conservatives have agreed on for over a century: American virtue is one of our great strengths and abandoning that virtue one of our great weaknesses. The rapid shuttering of USAID threatens that virtue: It has harmed American businesses and interests, already killed people and placed millions more at risk, and has directly burdened religious relief organizations with mass layoffs, broken promises and preventable death. Yet, we have the opportunity to speak up for the helpless, to demand we fulfill our promises to save and to stop assaulting Christian charity in the false name of efficiency.
In his farewell address, President George Washington begged the fledgling United States to “observe good faith and justice towards all nations” so that we may “cultivate peace and harmony with all.” The public credit of America, as he described it, was our “important source of strength and security.” Whatever fiscal decisions the government decides to make, it must live up to that credit: We cannot simply abandon the poorest and most vulnerable we have promised to help.
Globally, USAID has become the target of tyrants who loathe civic participation, and the agency’s support for democratic governance made it a looming enemy in Russian state propaganda.
Joshua Foust is an assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University and a former adviser for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.
This story appears in the May 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.