In its earliest days, the second Trump administration cut off lifesaving food and medical aid to countries worldwide. It halted efforts to stop teens from joining drug cartels in Mexico. And it shut down programs aimed at resettling Afghans who assisted U.S. troops during the fight against the Taliban.
But at least initially, the budget for expensive artwork to hang in U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide remained robust.
The State Department planned, for instance, to purchase a $650,000 “triple-height suspended sculpture” for its embassy in Brasília. It had designs on a $55,000 “wall installation” in Malawi. A “textile work” that costs $105,000 and a $94,000 “suspended sculpture that would span two levels” were on the books for Mauritius. And $550,000 was set aside for “three ceiling suspended sculptures” that would hang in the “main atrium space” of the American embassy in Riyadh.
The intended purchases, which total nearly $2 million, were described to me by a U.S. government official with information about the State Department’s spending plans. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of retribution. I verified the planned acquisitions by reviewing a government document—dated earlier this month, weeks after Donald Trump took office—with itemized descriptions of the artwork.
When I asked about the planned purchases this week, a State Department spokesperson said that they had been developed and approved by the Biden administration. The spokesperson claimed in an email that “in line with the Trump administration’s priorities, all art-related purchases are suspended until further notice.” The spokesperson added that “zero taxpayer dollars” had been spent on the art.
But when pressed for information about when the purchases had been suspended or how the order had been carried out, the State Department spokesperson did not specifically answer. The suspension of art purchases, the spokesperson said, was not a result of executive action by Trump. Instead, the spokesperson said, “halting the purchase is rooted in an organizational ethos of reevaluating expenditures with the objectives of the new Administration in mind.”
Asked a second time when the State Department had decided to no longer buy the art, the spokesperson did not provide any timeline or evidence that the purchases had been suspended before I raised the question.
The lack of transparency over the suspension of art purchases contrasts with the gleefully public way in which Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire DOGE co-founder, have approached cuts to foreign aid. Trump’s administration has slashed the foreign-aid budget in the name of rooting out “waste” and “fraud.” Musk, the world’s richest man, has described USAID, without evidence, as a “criminal” enterprise and has boasted of skipping “great parties” so he could spend the weekend feeding the agency “into the wood chipper.”
Had the art purchases gone through, they would not have been out of the ordinary. Such acquisitions are a staple of government spending and count toward the half percent of the federal budget that is allocated to the State Department. The department’s Art in Embassies Program explains on its website that it “bridges cultures and strengthens ties with our allies through the power of visual art and creative exchanges.”
The program, described as a collaboration with artists, museums, collectors, and galleries worldwide, “curates around 60 exhibitions each year and has established more than 100 permanent art collections in diplomatic spaces spanning 189 countries.”
But at a time when the foreign-aid budget is being decimated, the planned purchases stood out.
In Mexico City, prior to the cuts, USAID had been in the process of launching programs focused on stopping gender-based violence and dissuading young people from joining cartels. Combined, the programs would have cost less than $1 million for one year, a Mexico-based Foreign Service officer told me. But those efforts are now suspended indefinitely. Meanwhile, plans to install a $110,000 painting outside the embassy’s executive suite were proceeding as of earlier this month.
“Nothing that they’re doing makes sense in terms of efficiency,” said the Foreign Service officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “And so it’s really not cool that whoever is making these decisions would think that $1 million worth of art is what the State Department should be spending their money on now.”
The Trump administration is firing some 2,000 USAID workers in the United States and is set to recall nearly all of the agency’s officers stationed abroad. Last week, a federal judge cleared the way for the plan to move ahead, with most internationally based USAID employees given 30 days to return to the country.
“I’ll probably have to live in a family member’s basement,” the Mexico-based Foreign Service officer told me. “Are they going to pay us; are they going to fire us when we land?”
Within hours of taking office, Trump issued a blanket freeze on foreign aid, including drugs to treat HIV and food for starving children. Within days, a halt-work order swept across USAID; workers overseas were left in limbo, with no ability to do work, as food and other supplies sat unused. Over recent weeks, as Musk and the White House accused USAID workers of criminality and fraud without providing evidence, Pete Marocco, a Trump loyalist put in charge at USAID, has moved to systematically dismantle the agency.
When confronted by a reporter with some of the disinformation he’s spread about USAID, Musk responded: “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected.” Since then, he has continued to post falsehoods to his more than 200 million followers on X, his social-media platform.
In a court filing on Wednesday, Marocco said that 92 percent of USAID contracts, totaling roughly $57 billion, “were terminated” after a review by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Told of the planned art purchases before the apparent suspension, current and fired USAID employees reacted with derisive laughs and expletives.
“No, no,” a recently fired USAID worker told me. “And then I get cut because I’m providing, like, fucking grain from American farmers in Kansas to farmers in Southern Africa. Fuck that.”
With approximately the same amount of money that had earlier been set aside for embassy art, the fired USAID worker said, the U.S. could continue supporting farmers in Southern Africa as the region recovers from one of its worst droughts in recent history.
It was crucial to “get these seeds, to get them planted before the rainy season. And we were just getting them in there. And now the plug was pulled,” the fired worker said. “Now we’re letting those fields just, to what, to rot?”
A Foreign Service officer who recently had to evacuate from the Democratic Republic of the Congo told me that she is living in a basement with her husband and children. She’d been instructed to return to Washington and report to USAID headquarters, only for the office to be closed to all staff.
“I haven’t been sleeping; I haven’t been eating,” the officer said. “My husband has not been doing either of those things either. We’ve both been frantically applying for jobs and checking our finances.”
“I essentially am grieving the loss of a life, a profession, security, trust in our government, possibly all of our belongings and our democracy,” she told me.
Over in Doha, Qatar, the State Department had plans to acquire a $60,000 series of “works on paper” drawings. Qatar is one of the main processing points for Afghan refugees, including those who helped the U.S. government during its war against Taliban fighters and who are vulnerable to retaliation now that the radical-Islamist movement is in power. More than 2,000 Afghans are stuck in Doha after Trump indefinitely suspended funding for a program that relocated Afghans to the United States.
“I’ve been to the ambassador’s houses in Mexico City and Doha, I’ve been to those places, and there’s a shit ton of art already,” says Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and the head of #AfghanEvac, a coalition of veterans and advocates helping Afghans who are seeking resettlement.
“We can’t fund taking care of our wartime allies to the tune of $18,000 per person,” VanDiver told me, citing government figures. “But we can buy sculptures and art so that President Trump’s ambassadors can look at more pretty things in addition to the pretty things already there.”
The post Let Them Eat Art? appeared first on The Atlantic.
