The headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which is responsible for distributing U.S. foreign development and humanitarian aid, was closed over the weekend. It has now been folded into the State Department, and its future appears very uncertain. This followed U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order from earlier in the week pausing the disbursement of foreign aid. While exemptions were made for critical life-saving assistance, much foreign aid remains frozen, thousands of aid workers have been laid off, and USAID’s website has been reduced to a single webpage.
In justifying the actions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted that the measures were to ensure that U.S. foreign aid was being well spent, remarking that “The U.S. government is not a charity” and that aid, like all projects, needed to be aimed at making “America safer, stronger or more prosperous.”
The actions against USAID specifically and the targeting of foreign aid generally could be seen as part of the Trump administration’s overall goal of reducing the reach, impact, and size of the federal bureaucracy. Trump seems to want a 19th Century-sized government, meaning small, to go along with his other 19th Century foreign policy preferences, meaning limited.
