Taking left lunacy out of USAID

Elon Musk may have a point when he claims USAID, the vast international humanitarian and development arm of the US government founded by John F. Kennedy in 1961, is “a viper’s nest of radical left Marxists who hate America”.

Donald Trump obviously agrees.

With his usual restraint, he says: “I love the concept (of USAID) but they turned out to be radical left lunatics.”

Hence their determination, as South African-born Mr Musk put it about Washington’s key vehicle for the vital exercise of “soft power” diplomacy in 130 countries, to “basically get rid of the whole thing … it’s beyond repair … we’re shutting it down”.

In seeking to do so, however, Mr Musk and Mr Trump need to be careful.

USAID’s annual budget of $US46.66bn ($74.45bn), and the agency’s staff of more than 10,000 people across the world, may appear an easy potential target for Mr Musk’s razor gang.

USAID does vital work, from landmine clearance in war zones to emergency response work and natural disasters.

But stories about millions misspent on funding transgender clinics in India and millions more given to “organisations in Gaza controlled by Hamas” calling for “their lands to be ‘cleansed’ from the “impurity of Jews ”, provide clear evidence that the global US organisation is in need of oversight and rationalisation.

In doing so, it is imperative nothing is done that diminishes the effectiveness of US soft power facilitated by USAID and thereby opens the door further to China’s pernicious use of its notorious Belt and Road Initiative to step in and gain strategic advantage from budgetary cutbacks by Washington.

USAID was established by Kennedy specifically as a vehicle for “soft power” (the term was popularised by US political scientist Joseph Nye to describe the ability to influence others to deliver desired outcomes) to counter the influence of the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, and to run foreign assistance programs based on the idea that American security was tied to stability and economic advancement in other nations.

The importance of that goal to the US and its allies remains no less vital now.