Gutting the USAID-Industrial Complex

Created to fight Marxist subversion, it became a slush fund for Marxist cadre-building. An in-depth look at USAID’s history, and how it became one of the most corrupt parts of the U.S. government.

by J. Michael Waller
February 28, 2025

“The strategy is to delay, postpone, obfuscate, derail.”

That was the U.S. Agency for International Development’s approach to protect its autonomy from the president. It had nothing to do with resisting Donald Trump and DOGE — this line was written three decades ago to resist reforms by Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton’s mild-mannered secretary of state.

The career bureaucrats and their aid-industrial complex won out. That marked the last shovelful of dirt on the grave of attempts to rein in USAID.

Until Trump and his DOGE team.

Recent revelations go beyond the imaginations of what many knew but could seldom prove. USAID has become an out-of-control agency spending billions a year in bloated crony contracts, rotten from top to bottom with systemic fraud, corruption, and politicization. USAID has a budget roughly triple the official budget of the CIA, and has become an unaccountable slush fund for a left-wing political machine. For decades, that slush f…