How USAID Damages U.S. Relations With Foreign Countries

The federal government hasn’t just been wasteful. It’s been funding and organizing toxic projects around the world that have damaged the reputation of the United States.

That’s what a professor at a university in the country of Georgia said in a letter provided to The Daily Signal on Wednesday that highlights issues at the heart of recent debates about foreign aid.

The United States Administration for International Development, of USAID, has come under particular scrutiny since President Donald Trump returned to office. The foreign aid agency is currently being investigated by the Department of Government Efficiency, run by entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will now oversee USAID, said that the agency has been rife with insubordination and has been operating with total disregard for American interests.

Trump put a 90-day freeze on foreign aid and has put thousands of USAID employees on leave.

Democrats responded angrily to these moves arguing that USAID provides a global humanitarian service that acts as an indispensable element of U.S. soft power.

Critics of the crackdown on USAID have argued that halting its programs will damage American relations abroad. Some say that China or other foreign adversaries will now step in to fill the void when USAID programs go away.

But the reality is that USAID is not only using its money on a variety of useless and morally dubious projects, it’s often actively harming U.S. relations with partners abroad because of the values it promotes.

Giorgi Labadze, an American studies professor at the Tbilisi State University in Georgia, wrote an open letter explaining how that’s the case in his country.

“In recent years, anti-American sentiments in Georgia have reached an unfortunate peak,” Labadze wrote. He noted that despite direct state aid and other investments, relations between the two countries remain strained.

Among the challenges he noted was the erosion of trust in U.S. backed organizations.

“For instance, while most Georgians support freedom of speech and minority rights in principle, programs aggressively promoting inclusivity for non-traditional groups (such as LGBT) have become flashpoints for controversy,” he wrote. “Despite awareness of the sensitivities of the vast majority of Georgia’s churchgoing conservative population, relevant officials and NGO [nongovernmental organization] representatives have failed to adapt their approach or present these initiatives in a more culturally appropriate manner.”

In addition, education initiatives provided by USAID portray America in a largely negative light.

Labadze pointed to the Civic Education Program and Basic Education Program. While these programs provide important assistance to Georgian schools, he wrote, they have also been “weaponized” to pressure teachers to promote “anti-U.S. sentiments in classrooms.”

“Thusly, these programs have failed to foster pro-American attitudes within Georgian public schools as intended; and worse, have even yielded the opposite desired effect,” Labadze wrote.

It’s now easy for anti-Western forces in the country to paint a negative image of American influence because of these programs, he wrote.

On the other hand, the letter explained, the promotion of particular American values that would appeal to a much larger swathe of Georgians is missing.

“Many Americans, like Georgians, prioritize family, Christian values, and community activities such as hunting, social gatherings, and shared meals,” Labadze wrote. “However, American civil society programs in Georgia have disproportionately focused on minority rights and social issues, while neglecting to highlight these cultural commonalities.”

Instead of promoting ideals that would be embraced by most Georgians, Labadze wrote that USAID has provided support to nongovernmental organizations “often misaligned with local cultural sensitivities—which has had a devastating effect to the reputation of the United States among the majority conservative population.”

The Georgian professor wrote that these USAID-funded nongovernmental organizations “have aggressively promoted progressive social causes, particularly politicized LGBTQ+ rights.”

Labadze pointed to the “East West Management Institute’s grants to Tbilisi Pride since 2020” which have “inadvertently reinforced perceptions of America as primarily focused on far-left social causes incompatible with the values of the Georgian society.”

Some of the USAID-supported organizations even promote a “Marxist-Communist ideology” that criticize the United States for being an “imperialist power,” he wrote.

There was a time during the Cold War in which the United States explicitly promoted the idea that it was a God-fearing country committed to peace, prosperity, and justice. That image was contrasted with the ruthless, atheistic Soviet Union that sowed conflict, violence, and misery the world over. To that end President Dwight Eisenhower added “one nation, under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.

That change was meant to reinforce the “dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty.”

Just as importantly, he wrote that Americans must remember that “over the globe, mankind has been cruelly torn by violence and brutality and, by the millions, deadened in mind and soul by a materialistic philosophy of life.”

America would stand as a light in the dark. That’s largely what USAID was designed to highlight when it was created by executive order in 1961.

Is USAID promoting an image of America that Eisenhower would have recognized or is it now promoting exactly the kind of ideology that deadens the mind and soul?

That’s the important debate when it comes to USAID or any of the federal agencies now coming under fire from the Trump administration. This isn’t just about inefficiency or waste, though there is certainly a lot of that. It’s about what ideas and values the U.S. projects at the highest level.

For too long the elite institutions of this country have been commandeered by people with an anti-American worldview, who have turned to ship of state into a conduit for Leftist values around the globe.

It should be no surprise that USAID has partnered with left-wing nonprofits associated with billionaire George Soros. This public institution has become a massive, taxpayer-backed slush fund for every toxic, left-wing social cause that’s been rejected by Americans and the majority of people abroad.

Poisoning the well in allied countries with noxious ideology isn’t helping the U.S. counter China, it isn’t benefiting the American people, and it’s hardly in line with USAID’s original intended mission.

A total shakeup of the agency is long past due.

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