[yabones]

Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. And to set a price floor for agricultural products.

[Papazsazsa]

1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.

2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget

3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.

4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.

[ajross]

> 1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.

That's... pretty much a good definition of soft power, and frankly not even a cynical one. Your argument presupposes a world where "clandestine infra" and whatnot simply wouldn't happen if we didn't do it. But obviously it would, it would just serve someone else's interests.

And fine, you think the cold war US was bad, clearly. And maybe it was, but it was better (for the US, but also for the world as a whole) than the alternatives at the time, and it remains so today. China's international aspirations are significantly more impactful (c.f. Taiwan policy, shipping zone violations throughout the pacific rim, denial of access to internal markets, straight up literal genocide in at least one instance) and constrained now only by US "soft power".

The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.

[heisgone]

The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman.

Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> With a 6% of the GDP deficit

This isn't a problem if the money is well spent.

The problem is that a very small fraction of the money is being spent on anything that can reasonably be considered "an investment".

[energy123]

The most compelling explanation for US soft power is balance of threat theory[0]. Soft power comes from you not being seen as a threat, and you being seen as a way to prevent other threats. Because above all, countries prioritize security.

The status quo in US foreign policy was that as long as you're pliable to US interests, then the US was nice to you. You get democracy and get bounded autonomy, more autonomy than was afforded to subjects under any previous empire, to the extent that people would question whether the US even was an empire. Despite US being incredibly powerful militarily, the US was seen as non-threatening to friendly countries. That was an incredible magic trick, since those two things are usually correlated. This drew countries into its orbit and expanded its influence.

Countries could see the contrast to being in the Soviet Union's orbit and having your grain stolen, your people getting kicked out (Crimea) or being put into a camp.

This theory is a way to conceptualize the problem with Trump's bellicose and volatile attitudes towards Canada and European countries. If everyone sees you as a threat, this theory predicts that they will balance against you. In concrete terms, this theory predicts that countries who aren't threatened by China (due to being far away) will become closer to China if they feel threatened by the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_threat

[wwweston]

"politically impossible" is giving up on Americans ability to perceive the national advantage as well as the moral good.

Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side.

This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.

[openasocket]

> An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible.

I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.

Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.

> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.

Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.

> Another problem is the US is broke.

USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.

[pjc50]

It's quite likely that, sprinkled in among the idealistic helpers of the third world, were some number of CIA agents. For good or ill.

(the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)

[estearum]

USAID is considered instrumental in ending Apartheid in South Africa.

Given the timeline of the Musk family's arrival and departure... one might believe they viewed the end of Apartheid as a bit troublesome.

[ImPostingOnHN]

It's also quite likely that the reincarnations of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Jesus are sprinkled among the same idealistic helpers.

> the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of...

...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you.

Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).

[ourmandave]

It's how we found Osama Bin Laden. CIA posing as Doctors Without Borders going door-to-door pretending to vaccinate locals.

They actually did vaccinations until they found him and then quit, leaving a bunch of people with only the first dose.

And a complete distrust for Doctors Without Borders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...

[sedawkgrep]

Do you have any source for any of this?

[Isamu]

>All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives.

You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor.

It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot.

It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.

[drstewart]

>it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives

A check of pretty much any UN vote shows that this was a completely and utterly ineffective method then.

Example: https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overw...

[joe_mamba]

>but many US farmers were USAID farmers 100% of their crop and all of their income was tied to USAID.

Got a source for this? I wanna read on this.

[naasking]

> Not only has USAID's destruction permanently destroyed US reputation in many place and will be responsible for the deaths of millions, including children, but many US farmers were USAID farmers. 100% of their crop and all of their income was tied to USAID.

I predict that these predictions will mostly not happen.

[seanhunter]

If you take a look at the data[1] you can see that it was nowhere near the top, then there was one big chunk in 2022-23 then it came back down again, and that aid was 67% military with the DoD providing 13B. So whatever you're trying to insinuate, the simple explanation is they received a lot of aid (mainly military) because they had been invaded. That's is fully supported by the evidence.

[1] https://foreignassistance.gov/cd/ukraine/

[throw0101a]

> The #1 recipient of USAID assistance was Ukraine.

UA started being at the top in 2022: care to guess what humanitarian disaster started at that time?

After them, we have DRC, Jordan, Ethiopia, West Bank and Gaza, Sudan, ….

[nxm]

Did you look at specifically some of the items the money was being wasted on?

[CursedSilicon]

Let me guess. Was it the "trans surgery for immigrants"

[kube-system]

Taking those line items at face value is just a bunch of Dunning-Kruger. The government isn't like a tech company with a single product that can be understood well by one person. It produces many thousands of different specialized products and services.

When the National Partnership for Reinventing Government successfully cut spending in the 90s, they took 5 years to carefully evaluate what the government was doing and why, followed legal processes to propose improvements, and saved a lot of money simply by finding ways to streamline processes and procedures.

DOGE has taken a completely different approach, slashing and burning without understanding the consequences of their actions (or potentially, not caring), and intentionally doing it without involving other stakeholders. Many of the things they've cut that they thought were stupid were immediately found to be important and reversed. Some of the other things they’ve cut we’ll be finding were important for decades to come.

DOGE is just Chesterton’s Fence as a service.

[estearum]

Pretty much every example of flagrant waste I've seen brought up by DOGE -- regardless of how insane the line item sounded -- actually ended up reading as more and more valuable the more I read about it.

Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.

[shrubble]

Was the statement that over 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?

It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.

[xnx]

> 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?

Yes, in as much as that is a nonsense phrase meant to sound bad. If USAID buys wheat from American farmers, the money stays in the US and the wheat is exported.

[mistrial9]

add the recent public meeting with CA Gov's office in San Francisco, delivering 9 figures of new money to the homeless situation in CA.. with Democrat figures emphatically and pointedly declaring all the money legitimate and accountable.. at the very same moment that news headlines are showing court documents of the opposite at a large scale in multiple jurisdictions .. mostly Los Angeles to be clear

#-- Governor Gavin Newsom met with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on January 16, 2026, to announce over $419 million in new state funding for homelessness and mental health efforts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The funding comes from the sixth round of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program and includes $39.9 million for San Francisco to support shelter operations, navigation centers, and services through June 2029.

[reenorap]

If anyone believes that USAID was primarily foreign aid, then they have fallen for the lie.

If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.

[ajross]

> control their own destinies without interference from the US

Not on the menu. The question is do you want them controlled by the US or by China?

[Swenrekcah]

This much is true, like most things coming from Trump this move mainly benefited Russia and China while actively harming US interests.