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.
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.
Besides security guarantees/defense aegis, the heaviest lifters in U.S. soft power projection are structural and cultural forces that operate largely independent of government:
- Dollar hegemony & financial infra
- Cultural exports
- Universities & research
- Private sector (including tech)
but in this instance I can't help but wonder from a game theory standpoint, is there anything GAINED by affecting USAID in a way in which we clearly lose some (relatively small per your comment) amount of soft power?
That is to say, a perfectly played game would involve not making any sacrifices unless it was to gain some value or reduce some loss. What is gained (or not lost) here?
Domestic 'gain' is fiscal + political + transparency. USAID was pass-through where taxpayer dollars flowed to NGOs and contractors whose missions aligned with whatever administration or congressional bloc was in power – but with enough layers of separation to obscure the nature of the spending.
Foreign 'gain' is a move away from liberal internationalism to transactional bilateralism/resetting expectations wrt American largesse. We were being outbid everywhere anyway, and the org was ineffectively doing something DoS should be doing.
> USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S.
And the goalposts move again. Your original point was that soft power was bad. After pushback, now it's "soft power is good but USAID was inefficient".
I submit that neither of these arguments was presented in good faith and that your real goal is just defense of DOGE.
In a thread about USAID it makes sense to talk about the damage to USAID. If these other pillars of soft power matter more to you, then try writing productive comments lamenting their destruction rather than downplaying in this discussion.
If you believe this, why did you just go "well, what about China?"
Basically: analysis of international relations and influence techniques can only be correct when it treats with the influence of all parties, and not just the US. You agree with that framing, right?
My point really isn't that cynical, it's more optimistic: if you're going to do all that stuff (and let's be honest and admit upfront: we were 100% going to do all that stuff) you might as well feed a bunch of people and garner some good will along the way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?
> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID
That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.
The Belt and Road Initiative is reputed to be 7 times bigger than the Marshall plan in today's dollar. It's getting hard for the US to compete with that.
So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?
What do you think is the moral thing to do here?
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".
(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)
Tends to make them targets of suspicion.
Source: My father[0] was in the CIA, and worked at an NPO, in Africa.
Your father was a great man.
> 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.).
Given the timeline of the Musk family's arrival and departure... one might believe they viewed the end of Apartheid as a bit troublesome.
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_...
>The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden.
Your cite disagrees
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.
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...
Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.
Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless.
But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink.
DOGE was an exercise in vice signaling.
Which is a real shame because there was a real opportunity to inject a fresh set of eyes on what is surely a problem-rich environment.
It will unfortunately serve as discredit to all future efforts that look anything similar.
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.
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.
#-- 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.
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.
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.
Not on the menu. The question is do you want them controlled by the US or by China?