The 64-year-old United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has seen more ups than downs in its six decades of globetrotting promoting the good deeds of American aid — but never like now.
With a budget of over US $40 Billion in 2024, it started 2025 bullet-holed into near-obliteration by hostile presidential decree, accused by the White House of being corrupt and inefficient and subjected to a naked total transfer to the responsibility of the US State Department.
But its crippling is also being protested by and in nations that benefit positively from USAID’s crucial financial support.
USAID is by-far the world’s biggest aid donor and its stated global programmes include: ‘Fighting Epidemics, Educating Children, Providing Clean Water and Supporting Other Areas of Development and Partnering with Local Governments and NGOs to Develop Curricula, Train Teachers and Build Schools.’
By 2000, the giant aid donor had resident operations in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe; and by 2023 was present in 130 countries, with resident missions in 100.
In 2023, the top global recipients of USAID included: Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan and Syria.
Its main global programmes included: ‘Protecting the Amazon rainforest and fighting cocaine in South America; Disease Response, Girls’ Education and Free School Lunches in Africa; Countering Russian influence; Hospitals in War-ravaged Syria; Support for Marginalized Communities (from the Balkans to Uganda); Support for Media in Myanmar and Mine Clearance in Cambodia; and Wartime Help in Ukraine.’
Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and Latin American observers quietly note the absence of LAC nations, where programmes dwindle in ranking import vis-à-vis other world regions.
However, USAID has different faces and different strokes for different folks in different places, its aid for mainly health and other humanitarian causes being used properly — and improperly — in different parts of the world.
Its objective, since its establishment in 1961 by President Robert F. Kennedy, has been to promote America abroad by assisting causes that affect people positively.
Until 2025, USAID flew the American flag proudly, red-white-and-blue star-spangled banners adorning its boxes, bags and packages of food, health and other emergency and ongoing humanitarian support supplies.
The US agency is, therefore — and in many cases — a thankful and necessary help.
But USAID is also now being accused of interfering in the internal political affairs of some nations.
Take the following examples:
In SaintLucia and other West Indian colonies in 1961, USAID was best known to most for the free powdered milk distributed in infant and primary schools, intended to be a daily nutritional upgrade for students and beneficial to low-income families, unemployed and/or single parents.
In some Caribbean states, small USAID programmes today also promote conflict resolution and rehabilitation of ex-prison inmates and otherwise help address crime reduction issues.
But some African nations depend on USAID funding for life-saving support — like in South Africa, where millions living with AIDS face dying from disappearance of vital daily health services and support.
With USAID missions also abruptly shut-down by presidential diktat in places like Bangladesh and Thailand, tens of thousands of ethnic refugees from Myanmar have been without a single doctor.
And then there’s Venezuela, where the US Embassy recently revealed that USAID had donated (at least) US $116 million to the political opposition for health and humanitarian purposes, that instead ended-up in purses and pockets of exiled opponents to the Nicholas Maduro administration and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).
It was further officially revealed that over US $1 Billion was provided to the anti-Maduro opposition’s so-called provisional ‘government in exile’ led by former national assemblyman Juan Guaido, recognized by Washington as an alternative president in 2019, even while Maduro was still serving his official six-year term.
USAID’s funding of the political opposition in Venezuela during the Biden Presidency makes good cannon fodder for the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s continuing efforts to kill USAID, which Musk tweeted on his ‘X’ platform as being ‘criminal’ and therefore ‘has to die’.
The disclosures by the US embassy in Caracas under the Trump presidency in 2025, therefore, can be seen as more than simply transparent and well in line with the current White House’s mission to discredit the preceding administration and support current claims of ‘corrupt’ handling of USAID financing under President Joe Biden.
Guaido and others who benefitted from the largesse of USAID’s political capital are being officially investigated today, while Caracas and Washington are facilitating the return of Venezuelan migrants under an official home-return programme.
This programme had been in operation four months and already accommodated school places for over-400,000 children of returning migrants before Trump took office on January 20.
President Trump’s stop-work order has upended many crucial projects worldwide, including nurses being laid-off and clinics closed in more than 25 countries where two-thirds of all child deaths occur globally.
But, as twisted fate would also have it, dismantling USAID by presidential decree, through a wrecking crew led by the world’s richest man, is resulting in creation of more of the same crises the world’s biggest aid agency had been able to help reduce or solve in places where it’s originally-intended mandate was being fulfilled.
Ditto the other Executive Order halting overseas US aid for 90 days, which also cut daily assistance programmes in several nations, as well as the previous Trump White House proclamations on illegal immigrants that have seen millions of LAC citizens among the many nationalities rounded-up and detained at home and at work, for deportation.
The backlash on nations unprepared to receive the millions of forcibly-returned citizens will surely create more need for the original USAID.
But its death sentence has been read and it’s already in America’s execution chamber, only awaiting its final shock from Musk and his royally-loyal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).