THERE is an understandable outcry here about the potential termination of much-needed medical and humanitarian support to Third World countries as the Trump administration moves to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAid). 

For all intents and purposes, USAid appears to be — and to some extent is — a dispenser of essential aid to countries in need. Its termination is an ominous move in a likely trend. 

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump’s unelected henchman, Elon Musk, threatened to throw USAid “into a wood chipper.” At a hastily called rally at the US Capitol on Wednesday, Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts asked: “What else is going into that wood chipper? Healthcare, democracy, fighting for the rights of those who are most desperate around the world.” 

The takeover of USAid was just the start, Markey warned. Other agencies would be next. “This is a dictatorship in the making.” Or, as Congressman Jamie Raskin, who led the Congressional investigations into the January 6 2020 insurrection, said days earlier, “it’s a coup.”

The widespread public opposition to the abolition of USAid stems from a broad understanding that the agency saves lives. Those words were plastered on placards at Wednesday’s rally. Denying help to countries confronting epidemics of HIV or Ebola, or suffering famine and droughts, insulted a public sense of justice. 

What many in the crowd were likely unaware of, however, was that, as is invariably the case with any such largesse emanating from an imperialist power, it comes at a price. 

In justifying the attempt to eliminate USAid, Musk labelled the agency “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” But as political commentator and historian Vijay Prashad aptly replied: “Actually @elonmusk, radical left Marxists such as myself detest USAid. It was a viper’s nest of liberal imperialists.”

The portrayal of USAid as some sort of benevolent charitable overlord, bringing aid to the desperate, omits another important part of the story.

It does do these things. But its origins also betray its current agenda. USAid was created by president John F Kennedy during the cold war and was designed to counter Soviet influence overseas. In other words, USAid is fundamentally an extension of the CIA.

The USAid website is gone now, removed by the Trump-Musk junta, but there remains a description of it that reads: “The US Agency for International Development (USAid) is the principal US agency to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms.” No mention of its underlying purpose. 

This latter was on remarkably inept display back in 2010 when the US government launched what was ostensibly a Cuban version of Twitter, in reality a ploy to try to undermine the Cuban government. The project blew up spectacularly in the virtual sense, since the Cuban government could see the data of Cubans who used it. 

As Catherine A Traywick described the fiasco in a 2014 Foreign Policy article, Cuban Twitter was “a digital Bay of Pigs” and “an eye-opening display of incompetence.” It was also, as she pointed out, “funded by USAid.”

It came as rather a surprise, therefore, to see the USAid covert cat so completely out of the bag in a candid opinion piece by Delaware Democrat Senator Chris Coons in the Washington Post this week. 

“USAid’s programmes, like all our foreign assistance, play a central role in combating extremism, promoting stability and protecting our homeland,” Coons wrote. “This money isn’t charity. It bolsters our security and advances our values.”

Just in case the lenses of our rose-tinted spectacles weren’t completely cracked yet, Coons went on: “Our foreign assistance funds are used to train friendly militaries to raid terrorist training camps, to secure prisons where Islamic States members are held, and to provide the equipment needed to screen and keep bombs off planes.”

Training militaries and securing prison camps were probably not what most of those protesting at the attack on USAid thought they were protecting with their taxpayer dollars.

But at Wednesday’s rally, the third in so many days decrying the attacks by Trump and Musk on federal agencies, Democratic senators and representatives made no pretence that USAid was anything other than an arm of US foreign security. 

“They are cheering in Beijing and Moscow and every corner of the globe,” said Congressman Greg Stanton of Arizona, warning that US national security was now in jeopardy.

“If Elon Musk wins and our foreign assistance completely ends, who will cheer and who will win? The cartels will win. Terrorists will win. Russia will win. China will win,” said Coons at the Wednesday rally.  

The demise of USAid, it seemed, presented one more opportunity to rattle sabres at our “enemies” while claiming that calls for the agency’s restoration would make Americans safer.

“USAid has a long history of engaging in intelligence work and meddling in the domestic politics of aid recipients,” wrote Traywick in Foreign Policy. 

The US is the richest country in the world. It ought to supply humanitarian aid wherever it’s needed. But that aid should come without political strings attached and without nests of spies along for the ride.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.