Shannon Tiezzi
After U.S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, one of his very first actions was issuing a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid. In subsequent weeks, Trump and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – which, despite its name, is not an official government department – moved to more permanently dismantle the underpinnings of decades of U.S. foreign aid policy. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was effectively scuttled, with somewhere between 80 to 90 percent of its programs cut.
The Trump administration framed the cuts as necessary steps to combat waste and fraud. Analysts say otherwise, with experts pointing to the immense importance of foreign aid – both for increasing U.S. “soft power” and, more directly, helping keep the United States secure by defending against transborder threats like pandemics and terrorism fueled by poverty and state failure.
The Diplomat’s Shannon Tiezzi spoke to Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, about the benefits of U.S. aid and why it’s become so controversial.
No comments:
Post a Comment