Steve Bannon explains this very well. It's called "flooding the zone." Because people can only focus on 1 thing at a time, fascists do 5 things at a time. The media focuses on one thing while they make progress on the other 4. The culture war nonsense has proven to be delicious bait for the media and now so has DEI.

Using culture wars to attack foreign aid is a decades-old strategy of the GOP.

Entirely eliminating foreign aid would not meaningfully reduce the scope & power of the federal government in the U.S. (although obviously it harms our soft power abroad and there are millions of people who will be directly and indirectly impacted).