I didn’t expect that the first great struggle of the Trump administration would focus on the United States Agency for International Development. But in hindsight it makes perfect sense, because U.S.A.I.D. sits at the place where the traditional conservative critique of government spending meets the populist critique of professional-class ideology: It’s two battles for the price of one.
In the traditional right-wing argument, the key problem with government is that its spending is prone to waste, fraud and abuse. Foreign aid is seen as especially wasteful because the money doesn’t flow back to the American taxpayer, and is especially vulnerable to abuse when it flows into countries run by corrupt governments eager to redirect U.S. dollars to self-enriching ends.
In the populist argument, the key problem with government is that it’s been captured by ideological progressives, for whom even neutral-sounding official goals provide cover for advancing social liberalism and woke causes. Because much of U.S.A.I.D.’s work has an explicitly cultural component, defending American values and funding ideas-driven enterprises, it is an especially ripe target for this kind of critique.
The populist critique is not unique to the Trump era: From the Cold War to the war on terror, many conservatives have been suspicious of liberal humanitarians and State Department do-gooders. But the critique’s potency and influence have increased sharply since the Obama era, as a cultural revolution has undeniably swept through the foundations and philanthropies and universities that are intertwined with the work of governmental institutions.
This is something that liberals lamenting the right’s war on foreign aid need to recognize: The specific examples of ideological mission creep that Elon Musk and various Republicans keep highlighting, the various D.E.I. and L.G.B.T.Q.-related grants, are illustrative of a general transformation that nearly everyone experienced over the last decade, where institutions that used to have a putative neutrality and a modest liberal tilt became more self-consciously ideological, more intentionally left-wing. (This certainly extends to areas like scientific grant-making, another looming area of conflict.)
And this is a special problem for an institution like U.S.A.I.D. that’s supposed to represent the United States around the world. If you begin to assume that American values are just progressive values, you shouldn’t be surprised when conservatives lose faith in the mission. If you try to implement the revolution, don’t be surprised when you get Thermidor.
The problem for the triumphant Thermidorians is twofold. Most immediately there is the temptation for populists to imagine that government agencies weren’t just influenced by progressive ideas but actually invented wokeness, and that by following U.S.A.I.D. money through various flowcharts you can somehow defund the entire liberal professional class. (This is one of the theories that Musk himself keeps elevating.)
That’s a mistake, and it’s linked to a deeper slippage that you see in right-wing conversations — from a critique of how progressivism has warped American influence operations to the idea that it’s bad for the U.S. government to be trying to influence the world at all.
In fact, the limited-government critique of foreign aid, while correct about the failings of some programs, was overdrawn in general. The amount of money we spend on humanitarian efforts is far too small to be considered a major area of budgetary waste, and its benefits almost certainly justify those dollar figures.
Some of those benefits are just the rewards of virtue. Vice President JD Vance recently stirred an online argument by talking about the “ordo amoris,” the hierarchy of obligations that requires us to care first for our own communities and not prioritize distant needs over immediate duties. This is a strong critique of some recent forms of liberal policymaking — for instance, letting dubious asylum claimants overwhelm social service networks designed for American citizens. But spending tens of billions on foreign aid in the context of a nearly $7 trillion budget is, in fact, how a rich superpower’s ordo amoris ought to work.
Then there are the strategic benefits. So long as America remains a global power with an imperial footprint, we should wish to appear more benevolent than our Chinese and Russian rivals. This benevolence is squandered when charitable works get tangled up in progressive ideological demands. But the charity itself, the malaria nets and H.I.V. prevention, is still a wise investment.
Officially this is the position of the Trump administration, which is promising to reorganize its foreign aid work to focus on humanitarianism. But there is a division within the right over whether the goal of Trumpian foreign policy is to right-size American empire, using restraint and rebalancing to sustain a dominant position in a multipolar world, or whether we should be falling back to a North American perimeter, not precisely isolationist but very much in retreat.
I think Secretary of State Marco Rubio, now the acting head of U.S.A.I.D., belongs to the first camp, the right-sizers rather than the retreaters. But what he does now with America’s humanitarian efforts is a good test of whether right-sizing will be the Trumpian strategy, or whether MAGA might prefer to let our imperium expire.
The post Can MAGA Run the American Empire? appeared first on New York Times.
