How Project 2025 Took Down USAID

The organization vilified the human rights agency before Trump even took office.

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Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Rep. Gerry Connolly (R-VA) are joined by fellow lawmakers and employees and supporters of USAID today in response to the shutdown. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The government’s sudden shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development is a punch in the face to people facing humanitarian disasters around the world. It not only stops direct funding to developing countries, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, it kills money that powers nongovernmental organizations working to help people around the world. In fiscal year 2023, USAID distributed more than $40 billion of assistance for things like education, good governance and health.

As of today, the USAID website is down, and the 10,000 civil servants who work there have no idea what is going to happen to them and the work they care about. With two-thirds of its staff working overseas, the agency currently has people stranded abroad, often in war zones and other dangerous places.

Why would anyone do this? I turned to Project 2025, the ultraconservative policy playbook for the new Trump administration. And believe me, I found answers, the first of which demonstrates the right’s disdain for the world outside the United States.

“The next conservative Administration will have a unique opportunity to realign U.S. foreign assistance with American national interests,” the project authors write. But that depends on what each administration deems “American national interests,” and this one, under Trump, believes in a viciously bigoted and cold-hearted “America first” policy.

Aside, I’m not here to argue about USAID’s bloat and need for reform. Like every government endeavor, it’s complicated. Instead, I’ll show you a little of the thinking behind the ridiculously named DOGE group (the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency), which is the body that shuttered the agency today. (Side note: The leader of Venice’s oligarchy was called the “doge.” While someone on Twitter pointed out that the name may be a quirky reference to the old doge meme, I can’t help but think that Musk and his cronies liked it for the more regal reference.)

The project writes that the Biden administration utterly misused funds at USAID, calling their work a “gross misuse of foreign aid by the current Administration to promote a radical ideology that is politically divisive at home and harms our global standing.”

Beyond the right-wing’s desire to tie aid to pro-life ideas (expressed as “promoting abortion” in the position paper) and religious indoctrination in foreign countries, Project 2025 clearly expresses that the administration wants any funding sent abroad to be used to promote ideological extremes and beef up U.S. national security. It even recalls the Cold War years with endless ramblings on what the Project 2025 authors call “Communist China” repeatedly.

See: “The Biden Administration discontinued these programs and allowed USAID’s counter-China architecture to waste away, subordinating our national security interests to progressive climate politics in which Communist China is viewed as a global partner.”

The project refutes science, calling climate change “climate extremism”: “The aid industry claims that climate change causes poverty, which is false,” they write. “Enduring conflict, government corruption, and bad economic policies are the main drivers of global poverty. USAID’s response to man-made food insecurity is to provide more billions of dollars in aid — a recipe that will keep scores of poor countries underdeveloped and dependent on foreign aid for years to come.”

A) Climate change does induce poverty. For example, when people can’t produce their yearly crops due to unforeseen weather events like drought or are forced inland because warmer seas prevent them from reliance on fishing for their livelihood.

B) This analysis fails to take into account the damage done by colonialism and American imperialism, which left countries struggling to rebuild after decades or centuries of violence and plunder.

C) Yes, food insecurity is often “man-made.” That does not excuse the U.S. moral responsibility as one of the wealthiest countries in the world to help people starving.

See this from Project 2025: “USAID’s emergency responses once were focused primarily on natural cataclysms such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. Today, the agency spends more than 80 percent of its humanitarian budget on chronic man-made crises.”

So basically, unless a natural cataclysm hits, the U.S. is supposed to ignore people caught up in war and desperate displacement. The project authors say instead: “In effect, humanitarian aid is sustaining war economies, creating financial incentives for warring parties to continue fighting, discouraging governments from reforming, and propping up malign regimes.”

I’m not sure how food assistance to, say, conflict-ridden DRC sustains a “war economy.” All it does is feed people who’ve fled their destroyed villages and ended up in refugee camps. The main perpetrator of the conflict raging in DRC right now is M23, a Rwanda-backed militia. Allowing civilians to eat isn’t going to change the militia’s political/ideological reasons for war. On top of that, the country is relatively new to democratic elections, and in 2023, USAID was the largest foreign donor to “improve transparency, strengthen electoral administration, and empower civil society through civic education on peaceful participation,” according to the U.S. embassy in DRC.

Instead, in Project 2025’s twisted logic:

“The massive growth in ‘emergency’ aid distorts humanitarian responses, worsens corruption in the countries we support, and exacerbates the misery of those we intend to help. The permanence of this assistance, particularly in countries where we have little to no in-country presence and must rely on U.N. agencies to self-monitor, has morphed into a co-governance scheme in which the U.S. government effectively finances the social services obligations of corrupt regimes that threaten the United States. These governments can then redirect scarce budget resources away from costly health and education toward financing their wars, supporting terrorism, repressing their citizens, and enriching themselves. Examples of this abuse are spread throughout the world.”

The writers cite billions in aid given to places like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. For example: “In northern Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis — targeted for genocidal extermination by ISIS — remain in miserable camps unable to return home because of the Iraqi government’s refusal to clear out Iran-backed militias occupying their homeland.”

Because the U.S. didn’t help smash Iraq to pieces in the eight-year war the country waged there. And because, according to the extreme right, the Yazidi survivors don’t deserve outside help.

There is a level of compassion required to assist others who are caught up in violence and pain in the world. This news about USAID and its staffers who work hard to help people in danger is shameful.

We already know that President Donald Trump has little to no empathy. But this decision is disgraceful, and it is not what we, as Americans, believe in. Many of us, instead, believe in “America first” in the sense that we, as a country, will be first in line to raise our hands and jump into action when needed.

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