The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, recently sparked a turbulent debate in India. Political parties tried to use the statements emanating from Washington DC against one another, especially the contradictory or quixotic ones of President Donald Trump.
The pitch was particularly high because a part of the aid had allegedly been given to ensure voter turnout, implying that the US had tried to interfere in our elections. However, since the answers to the question about who benefitted from the aid, whether it was really meant to influence polls or given for such a purpose at all, were terribly hazy, the genie was put back into the bottle. Perhaps it will be pulled out by one political party or the other at a later point when it allows for a flat narrative with a clear target.
Whatever the chatter in India, at the core of the debate is the Trump regime’s attempted dismantling of USAID, which it finds rather unproductive. Amidst intense review, nearly all foreign aid has been put on a three-month freeze. Independently gathered data shows India is not the biggest beneficiary of USAID philanthropy. Also, the money channelled through USAID to countries across the globe is not so humongous as to bankrupt the US.
Therefore, Trump’s disruption is more ideological and not out of economic compulsions. It is another thing that the attack on USAID by the Trump regime may have ‘dehumanised’ the US in the eyes of the world and a large section of its citizenry because USAID was always meant to create a humanitarian halo for the US. There is also this fear, not unfounded, that the US may lose its soft power and strategic advantage (to countries like China) if USAID is indeed dismantled or dwarfed.
According to US treasury sources, USAID makes up only 0.7 percent of its federal budget. Predictably, the highest recipient in recent times has been Ukraine. If one looks at countries around India for ten years between 2014 and 2023, Afghanistan has received $11.68 billion, Pakistan $3.9 billion, Bangladesh $3.2 billion, Myanmar $1.9 billion, Nepal $1.6 billion, and India the least—$1.3 billion.
In the last decade, health has been the top sector in which USAID has spent maximum dollars globally at $80.7 billion, followed by spending on ‘humanitarian assistance and economic development’. Under the head of ‘democracy, human rights and governance’, it has disbursed $14.4 billion in aid, more than education and social services. Environment has got the least at $2.5 billion.
The central question that President Trump has been asking—why should the US pay for the world’s well-being and how much has the money already spent truly impacted change globally—has been asked in the US at different times and in different ways. It, in fact, became a point of huge debate around 1971, a decade after President John F Kennedy created USAID.
In 1961, Kennedy also created the Peace Corps, an overseas volunteer programme for American youth. To start with, both agencies were Cold War instruments, essentially meant to check the growing influence of the Soviet Union and communism as well as simultaneously enlarge America’s humanity—a euphemism for soft power, network and influence.
The US Congress re-evaluated the entire foreign aid policy beginning May 1973, and a significant reorientation was agreed upon by that December. President Gerald Ford signed a bill within two weeks of assuming office. It was an indirect admission that until then, the US foreign aid programmes did not reach the poor in developing nations, but realpolitik governed the aid programme and was deployed for Cold War efforts in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
When American money was given to friendly regimes, dictatorial or quasi-democratic, the hope was that it would trickle down to the people. That obviously did not happen. In 1971, for the first time in the legislative history of the US Senate, the foreign aid programme was defeated. It had survived only because of a last-minute Senate-House compromise. Even 50 years ago, foreign aid was a controversial topic in the US. They were worried about the bang that their buck could manage. The chatter began when America’s involvement in Vietnam did not go down well.
“Why should Congress vote to continue a programme that has created so much disillusionment both at home and abroad? If foreign aid is to be continued, a meaningful aid policy must be developed and articulated—a policy that the American people can believe in once more, a policy which the people in the developing countries can respect,” Bradford Morse, the Under Secretary General of the United Nations, and Donald Fraser of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee wrote. This was in a foreword to a significant book published in 1972: Development Reconsidered: Bridging the Gap between Government and People by Edgar Owens and Robert Shaw.
Edgar Owens, who had worked as a USAID official in many countries, wrote in his book: “The United States has confused its priorities and thus raised doubts as to its real foreign aid objective. Is it to help the poor countries develop, or to help achieve US foreign policy goals? The pursuit of anti-communism in the Third World is a foreign-policy goal, not a developmental policy that could increase yields per acre, create jobs, raise living standards, or induce people to be loyal to their government. Moreover, democracy versus communism is not the issue in villages and overcrowded shanty towns, among the illiterate and hungry.”
In the final section of the book, reflecting the mood of the American people, it said they began to question whether they should help faraway places at a time when there were “so many dilemmas at home—race, the cities, unemployment, inflation, the search for values”. There was also a feeling among them that they may not possess the wisdom to solve the development problems of countries vastly different from their “our own” in culture, religion, and custom. In addition, many in the US had come to believe that aid served only to make the “rich richer and to prop up corrupt and inefficient governments” based on a rather nebulous concept of national security.
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(sugata@sugataraju.in)
Sugata Srinivasaraju | Senior journalist and author of Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi