It is difficult to conceive of any action which the Trump administration has taken so far that will be as devastating as the abrupt dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). While the draconian crackdown on undocumented migrants will likely affect millions of people eventually, the shuttering of most USAID operations will have life-or-death consequences for the very poor in more than 100 countries. Migrants can try to rebuild their lives after deportation; for many others dependent on American aid, there could be no tomorrow.

President John F. Kennedy created USAID by executive order on Nov. 3, 1961, to bring together various U.S foreign assistance programs and placed it under the State Department; Congress made it independent in 1998. Aid shipments were carried banners proclaiming, “From the American People.”

John Norris, who worked at USAID and the State Department during the 1990s, reflected on its history in a Foreign Service Journal story marking its 60th anniversary in November 2021: “USAID and its many partners in development have helped achieve what by any reasonable accounting must be considered unprecedented advances in the human condition since the agency’s founding.”

Norris noted the agency’s key role in smallpox eradication worldwide and added, “USAID spearheaded child survival campaigns with its partners, saving millions of lives with a simple intervention of oral rehydration therapy that costs only pennies per packet to produce. The Green Revolution, championed by the Johnson administration and advanced through research funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, staved off what many feared would be an era of global famine, while boosting incomes for poor farmers.

“Countries such as Taiwan and South Korea, once dismissed as economic backwaters, were transformed into economic powerhouses (and, ultimately, donors themselves), in no small part because of large U.S. investments through USAID, particularly in building the technocratic expertise within their planning and finance ministries.”

Marco Rubio, while a senator, proclaimed that “in every region of the world, we should always search for ways to use USAID and humanitarian assistance to strengthen our influence.” The agency, he said, was necessary as a means to counter China’s growing influence.

Norris acknowledged there had been shortcomings but that the reason for USAID’s creation and its work remained “surprisingly constant.” However, within hours of his second inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order which led to 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200 programs being eliminated and almost all 10,000 employees being fired or sent on leave. USAID became another victim of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose then leader Elon Musk called it “a criminal organization” and “a crazy waste of money.” The planet’s richest person led a war against the world’s poorest people.

Trump himself claimed USAID was being “run by a bunch of radical lunatics.” Then Rubio, newly appointed Secretary of State, accused it of spending tens of millions of dollars “in ways that did not serve (and in some cases even harmed) the core national interests of the United States.” What was left of USAID was placed under him.

Most of the accusations against USAID were ridiculous. For example, in late January, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the agency sent $50 million “to fund condoms in Gaza.” Her comment followed a New York Post story that “scores of condoms were being used to create IED-carrying balloons that winds would carry into southern Israel, raising alarm on schoolyards, farmlands and highways.” The Jerusalem Post first made that claim five years ago.

The New York Times subsequently reported that USAID staff explained that the funds had been earmarked not for condoms but for family planning generally, such as birth-control pills. And, in a rebuff to the blatant attempt to fabricate an anti-semetism link, officials also said that the birth-control items had been earmarked not for Gaza in the Middle East but Gaza province in Mozambique about 4,000 miles away.

And, despite Musk’s labelling USAID “a crazy waste of money,” its annual budget had been around $40 billion. That was less than one percent of the federal budget, but it made the U.S. “the largest humanitarian operator globally,” providing “42 percent of all humanitarian assistance from all countries,” public health expert Devi Sridhar noted in The Guardian.

James Macinko, a health policy researcher who co-authored a study published in The Lancet medical journal, told NPR in July that “the average [U.S.] taxpayer contributed about 18 cents per day to USAID. … For that small amount we’ve been able to translate that into saving up to 90 million deaths around the world.” The researchers projected that, if the foreign aid freeze remains through 2030, up to 10 million people, including 4.5 million children, who could be saved would die.

If there had indeed been need to close USAID, the administration owed it to everyone concerned to provide adequate notice. And if money were really tight, the government could have sought private funding. The U.S. has 813 billionaires with a combined wealth of $6.72 trillion, according to Forbes. One trillion dollars is equal to 1,000 billion dollars, so $6.72 trillion is equal to $6,720 billion – and USAID, it is worth repeating, cost just $40 billion a year. But it is doubtful that the administration was really interested in continuing to pursue its global objectives through soft power, since it still maintains 750 military bases in about 80 countries costing $56 billion annually, according to the Institute for Responsible Statecraft. It spent at least $100 billion on new construction since 2000.

Any USAID postmortem must include why up to 130 countries were dependent on foreign assistance. Perhaps it was because donor nations did not transfer technology along with aid, another unfulfilled goal of the NonAligned Movement. So undeveloped countries have mostly remained merely sources of raw materials for developed nations, no different from colonialism.

It would have, however, been naïve to expect the industrialized nations to make available to the “Global South” the technological know-how to develop competing manufacturing sectors that would have, for example, enabled Guyana to progress from being a supplier of bauxite ore since 1916 to producing aluminum and enhancing its income from that industry by factors of 10. So, too, with the production of cane sugar, which started in 1868.

Caribbean analyst Kenneth Mohammed, while denouncing the scrapping of USAID, recalled in The Guardian this observation by Uhuru Kenyatta, former President of Kenya: “I saw some people the other day crying that Trump has removed [funding] … Why are you crying? It is not your government; it is not your country. He has no reason to give you anything. You don’t pay taxes in America.”

The end of U.S. aid, Mohammed argued, “presents an opportunity for the Caribbean to rethink its economic model. … Foreign aid is never free; it comes with conditions that keep us dependent and unable to chart our own course. … Caribbean nations must take decisive steps to reduce economic reliance on the U.S. Strengthening intra-regional trade, boosting local production and developing digital economies and sustainable industries will be the key.”

That, in fact, was one reason why the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) was established in 1973, as it was for its predecessor the Caribbean Free Trade Agreement (CARIFTA) created in 1965. So, too, for Africa, where civil war and weapons purchases compete with some nations’ efforts to deal with economic problems.

Coincidentally, even before USAID’s shuttering, some developing nations had begun looking for alternatives. One current option is BRICS, formed in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It now has 11 members, and 32 other countries want to join. BRICS began causing a headache for the U.S. even before Trump ended USAID. There is, for example, talk of establishing an alternative international currency to the dollar. Also, some BRICS states have now moved to counter Trump’s harsh tariffs. China, for example, announced it will allow 183 products to enter its markets tarifffree.

Trump has shown, with the bombing of Iran, that he would be willing to maintain American hegemony by force. But if a confrontation does come, it will probably be because the scraping of USAID and crippling tariffs helped to speed up the creation of a rival global economic order.