Trump Declares Independence for USAID Recipients | The American Spectator

A Reagan administration joke depicted a Bureau of Indian Affairs administrator sobbing at his desk. “What’s wrong?” The bureaucrat responded, “My Indian died.” 

Like the best political humor, it uses a ridiculous scene to illustrate a truth. Bureaucracies eventually exist for the bureaucrats. 

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) demonstrated this truth for more than six decades without, unfortunately, providing a laugh. On Tuesday, it ceased to exist. (RELATED: The Trump Administration Sets Its Sights on the Parallel Government)

Do you also turn its funeral into a party this weekend? The complete cessation of any department, bureau, agency, or even program of the federal government, after all, occurs more rarely than does the Fourth of July. This is a victory for everyone who believes in restrained government. The fact that next-on-the-chopping-block NPR laments its passing proves this. (RELATED: Uncle Sam Just Conducted Its Final April 15th Pledge Drive for PBS and NPR)

Started during the peak of the Cold War, the initial purpose, whether stated or not, of USAID involved providing money to poorer countries as a means to prevent their slippage into the orbit of the Soviet Union, whose class-warfare rhetoric had already seduced denizens of many such countries. But for most of USAID’s existence, the Soviet Union did not exist. 

Perhaps a USAID bureaucrat somewhere cried when his Communist died. But bureaucracies prove more resilient than people or even ideologies. They are hard to kill. Just ask Elon Musk. 

They also tend to wander from mission. This seems to be a key component that explains why the Trump Administration so easily abolished the agency. 

USAID gave nearly $80 million to EngenderHealth, an abortion outfit that, as Dr. Thomas Williams points out, was started as the Sterilization League of New Jersey. It spent tens of millions on gay initiatives abroad, including transgender healthcare in India and Vietnam, Scottish gender identity seminars, and a European gay rights group called Stonewall that compiles a Workplace Equality Index to pressure companies to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion-type policies. (RELATED: Defunding USAID: Trump’s Biggest Gift to Pro-Lifers After Dobbs)

Perhaps worst of all, it gave $20 million in U.S. tax dollars to the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability Through Investigative Reporting program (journalist, investigate thyself!) that attempted to dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to find the truth about Ukrainian corruption. 

Former President Barack Obama claimed that ending all that “hurts the most vulnerable.” 

“Is it in our interest that 25 million people who would have died now live?” asked former President George W. Bush. “I think it is.”

“It’s not left-wing rhetoric to feed the hungry, heal the sick,” U2 frontman Bono reacted to the closure. “If this isn’t murder, I don’t know what is.”

But was USAID feeding the hungry or healing the sick when it bankrolled Scottish gender-identity seminars or efforts to investigate the former mayor of New York? Did George W. Bush offset the supposed 25 million lives saved with the tens of millions of dollars that went to the abortionists? 

The vulnerable people hurt by aid programs always and everywhere live in the donor country. The beneficiary, almost always and everywhere, primarily amounts to governments and the well-connected. Who administers the money sent by our bureaucrats? Their bureaucrats. As with our bureaucrats, pass-through expenses occur with their bureaucrats. 

It is bad enough that the federal government burdens taxpayers with providing for the welfare of other Americans, many of whom suffer from an allergy to honest work. The fact that the feds impose taxes so that Americans pay for not merely poor people in other countries but rich gays in London seems like a dare to defund. 

The Trump administration took that dare. 

When celebrating American independence this weekend, do not forget to eat a hamburger in honor of the independence that the Trump administration has granted to Stonewall, the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability Through Investigative Reporting program, and other foreign groups heretofore reliant on our tax dollars. 

Now they are free. Not everyone wants to be.

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