By Joshua Arnold

“Three weeks into the Trump administration, and the fur is flying,” declared Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. The subject of the latest no-holds-barred scrum was the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency the Trump administration has targeted for a major overhaul, when the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs held a Thursday hearing, unsubtly titled, “The USAID Betrayal.”

Yet the hearing itself outperformed even this dramatic title, from shocking revelations about USAID’s conduct to the shocking poverty of arguments mustered in the agency’s defense. “If there was any doubt over the accusations of waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars at the agency — well, House Republicans brought the receipts with them,” Perkins said on “Washington Watch.” The star of the opposition were protesters, who lashed out with more volume than information.

On the first day of his administration, President Donald Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid spending until the new administration could get a handle on what, exactly, the government was funding. On February 3, the White House published a select list of “only a few examples of the WASTE and ABUSE” found within USAID:

• “$1.5 million to ‘advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities’”
• “$70,000 for production of a ‘DEI musical’ in Ireland
• ”$2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam
• “$47,000 for a ‘transgender opera’ in Colombia
• ”$32,000 for a ‘transgender comic book’ in Peru
• “$2 million for sex changes and ‘LGBT activism’ in Guatemala
• ”$6 million to fund tourism in Egypt
• “Hundreds of thousands of dollars for a non-profit linked to designated terrorist organizations — even AFTER an inspector general launched an investigation
• ”Millions to EcoHealth Alliance — which was involved in research at the Wuhan lab
• “‘Hundreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria’
• ”Funding to print ‘personalized’ contraceptives birth control devices in developing countries
• “Hundreds of millions of dollars to fund ‘irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,’ benefiting the Taliban.”

Some are large ticket items, while others are small. But all these projects are ridiculous recipients of public money, and even the smallest items matter. Perkins raised and responded to this objection, “Now you’d say, ‘Well, you know, $32,000 is not a lot.’ I don’t know. It’s the salary that some people make in this country. But this adds up. And that’s what we’re talking about, is when you begin to cumulatively look at how this money is being spent and what it’s promoting, it’s out of control.”

Worst of all, “what’s been uncovered in the spending of USAID … was not mission creep. It was not drift. This was intentional,” Perkins added. “This came from the White House to all agencies to basically put the pedal to the metal and advance this radical, ideological agenda.”

“It came from the top,” agreed Max Primorac, former USAID deputy administrator in the first Trump administration and now a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “As soon as President Biden came into office, immediately he disassembled everything that we had done under the Trump administration — international religious freedom, free market economics — and then used — or misused — foreign aid as a global platform to expose the woke ideology [of] gender fluidity, abortion, the climate agenda.”

“It almost seemed as if the purpose of foreign aid was not to promote our interests, but simply to serve as a money pot to promote this progressive ideology not only overseas, but at home as well, because they created an army of ‘politicals’ that support their agenda,” Primorac continued. “When you consider that 50% of this money stays here in Washington, D.C., not only was it a way of trying to remake the world in their progressive, left-wing image, but it also provided a ton of money for all of their friends here. … Every time we have elections, they exercise a completely out-of-proportion influence on the electorate. And it’s on the American taxpayer’s dime.”

Among the USAID recipients who are active in U.S. domestic affairs are the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and George Soros’s organization, said Primorac.

USAID would naturally lean to the left even before the Biden administration’s progressive putsch, posited Primorac. “When you look at Federal Election Commission records on political contributions to candidates, you’ll see that State Department, USAID — but also the entire foreign aid industry — 95% of their political donations go to the Left,” he said. “When I came into USAID, the big issue was the situation of the persecuted Christians in northern Iraq, where they were victims of genocide by ISIS. And we had such difficulty trying to get the bureaucrats to accept that we should be helping them. They came up with false arguments of, ‘Oh, it’s against the Establishment Clause; it’s illegal; it’s anti-constitutional.’”

To keep the foreign aid bureaucracy in check, then-Vice President Mike Pence appointed Primorac as an envoy to Iraq for 18 months, to “have eyes and ears on the ground, to make sure that the president’s agenda of helping religious minorities got executed.”

Yet USAID was not always biased and broken. When President John F. Kennedy initially founded the agency, USAID “was an anti-Soviet program,” explained Primorac. “It was very effective. After the fall of the Soviet Union, foreign aid was used to help integrate the former countries of the Warsaw Pact.”

Unfortunately, over the past few decades, Democratic administrations have used USAID to push left-wing policies. “We saw already with the Clinton administration — specifically Hillary Clinton — start[ing] to push this agenda — first and foremost, the abortion agenda,” said Primorac. “And then, under President Obama, we saw an acceleration of that, plus the LGBT agenda, plus the climate agenda, and then a little bit of the DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion]. But I tell you, when President Biden came in, they went all out.”

In this sense, America’s foreign aid programs as a whole followed the same track as PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, initially adopted under President George W. Bush. “It was a Christian-based response to the crisis in Africa, but it got taken over by the Left. They started funding International Planned Parenthood, U.N. organizations that promote abortion,” Primorac lamented.

These parallel left-wing hijackings provoked the same disgust from the very people American diplomacy is supposed to influence. “I was in Kenya and in Mozambique last year and meeting with a lot of Catholic, Anglican, and evangelical leaders. And they were horrified by the fact that this really good, godly program [PEPFAR] had suddenly become utterly corrupted, using it to push the trans ideology, pushing abortion,” Primorac recalled. “I’ve had so many of them come to me and tell me, ‘The communist Chinese don’t require me to sacrifice my religious convictions in order to do business with them.’ Unfortunately, under the Biden administration — I mean, they took it in a direction that was completely extreme.”

This is relevant to the debate over USAID reform because “some of the media reports about the efforts to cut USAID are comparing it to China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” Perkins observed. “But you’re right. … They’re not imposing some kind of immoral agenda on them, like our government is doing.”

Interestingly, PEPFAR came up in the House Committee hearing, when protestors interrupted Primorac’s testimony with chants for Congress to fund PEPFAR. “I guess these guys don’t watch the news,” responded House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-Fla.). “They didn’t realize that PREPFAR was one of the many programs that did prove to be life-saving, so the funding was restored” by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as acting administrator of USAID.

“There was so much disinformation that I heard during the remarks by some of the members of Congress,” responded Primorac. “Number one, accusing the administration of responsibility for people dying because they’re not getting their medicines. In fact, Secretary Rubio not only gave a waiver, but the monies are flowing.”

In general, committee Democrats embraced not only misinformation but sheer contrarianism, complained Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) on “Washington Watch.” “My colleagues, friends on the other side of the aisle — there’s just no limit to the waste and abuse of spending that they won’t support,” he said. “If Trump is for cleaning it up, they’re for keeping it going. That’s just kind of where we are, unfortunately, at this point.”

“What President Trump is doing is what the American people want,” insisted Primorac. “They want to make sure that every dollar we spend is in America’s interest and aligns with American values.”

“So, as the administration goes through what are something like 20,000 individual project activities funded by our foreign aid, they’re going through to make sure that all of this nonsense is taken out,” he continued. “This is the only way that we can reestablish the trust of the American people, that their charitable impulse — they’re the most charitable people in the face of the planet — is not being misused by people to fund things that are completely outside of the norms.”

“The secretary of State has made very clear that he recognizes there’s a lot of good things that can be done with foreign aid,” but “because it’s so broken … he’s forced to take these steps,” Primorac concluded. “Foreign aid should be a very powerful weapon to promote our values and our interests. It just hasn’t been.” Perhaps, by putting greater focus on the issue, the Trump administration can reverse decades of mismanagement of U.S. foreign aid programs.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.