USAID should help those in need, not serve as a slush fund for leftist priorities

The Hill

16-02-2025

I remember growing up as a young child and seeing a logo on my dad's car. The logo had a shield and a handshake — the symbol for the U.S. Agency for International Development or USAID.
At the time, we were living in Niger, in sub-Saharan West Africa. My dad, a Cornell-educated agronomist, helped the people there cultivate the land and grow millet, one of the few crops that could survive in the harsh desert region. My father took a great deal of joy teaching Nigeriens how to feed themselves from the scarce resources that were available to them.
However, there was constant frustration surrounding the money promised to the USAID workers, which never seemed to completely make it down to the people most in need.
The top officials within Nigerien leadership at the time would each take their share from the top. By the time funding trickled down to the villagers, it was often only a fraction of what was promised. As a result, USAID workers like my father had to make do with what they received.
Years later, while I was in Pakistan helping with the relief efforts following the 2005 earthquake there, I recall seeing a USAID tent. I never quite knew what they did because they didn't coordinate with our primary efforts to bring supplies and shelter to the mountainous regions of Kashmir before the harsh winter set in. From what I could gather, the USAID workers at the tent appeared to be operating on their own, so we left them alone while we recovered victims' remains from underneath the rubble.
While I was serving in Iraq, there was a major investigation into a large shipment of computers specifically set aside for school children that suddenly went missing. The USAID workers wanted to know where thousands of laptops had disappeared to. Well, they weren't in the marshlands down in Basrah, that's for sure. Those people didn't even have electricity, much less internet.
In Afghanistan, there was a push for female police officers and empowering gender equality. A lot of these female officers were the first targets of the Taliban after it easily seized control of Afghanistan after the disastrous U.S. withdrawal. While serving in Afghanistan, it dawned on me that the USAID I remembered growing up — my father's agency, bringing people in remote villages in Niger, Zaire, Guinea and Cameroon what they needed — had morphed into an agency that brings people what the aid workers want.
In Pakistan, they wanted blankets and tarps to last through the winter, not gay and transgender-affirming entertainment. In Iraq, they wanted stability, not the Cloud. In Afghanistan, they wanted to be free from the oppressive Taliban that doesn't allow women's voices to be heard in public.
It seems as if those who have taken over USAID in recent years have become more concerned with shaping the world to look like what they think America should look like, rather than giving people in need basic human necessities like food, water and shelter.
The arrogance in the agency is astounding. I witnessed a senior USAID official tell his young cohorts in 2018, 'Don't worry about what Donald Trump wants. Just do what you know is right. Wait him out.'
We discovered this past week, thanks to Elon Musk, that the agency has indeed become the left's slush fund. Besides spending $2.5 million for a DEI program in Serbia, $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia and $32,000 for transgender comic books in Peru, we are now finding out that USAID has given millions to Soros-backed enterprises.
As we learn more each and every day of the new Trump administration, the handshake that I remember on the USAID logo as a child seems more like a slap in the face now. While the left cries about unelected officials like Elon Musk and his team who are uncovering waste, fraud and abuse, perhaps they should first take a look at the unelected officials that have run USAID and spent taxpayer dollars to further their own pet projects.
Hung Cao is a retired Navy captain who served in Special Operations for 25 years. He is a refugee from Vietnam and immigrant to the United States after his family escaped in 1975 shortly before the fall of Saigon. Cao was the 2024 Republican U.S. Senate candidate for Virginia.