There’s a story going around in the mainstream media today about how eight cholera patients, including five children, in South Sudan died walking to get treatment last month. The United Kingdom-based charity Save the Children blames the cutting of USAID funding, though a spokesperson mentions that European countries have also cut funding. (The MSM headlines don’t mention that, of course).
It’s absolutely heartbreaking that people are dying from a treatable disease and I wish that wasn’t so, but the MSM’s attempts at blaming the Donald Trump administration are ridiculous, and quite frankly, I’m sick of it. It’s the same BS they do with illegal immigration — making it seem like Trump is only deporting grandmothers and nurses rather than some of the most violent and deranged people on the planet.
The truth is that the blame doesn’t lie with Trump. It lies with everyone who led our country before him. It lies with corrupt government officials, diplomats with agendas, and the many disingenuous nonprofits around the world. It lies with, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio often puts it, the “federal aid industrial complex.” And it’s time to stop using United States tax dollars as an ATM to line everyone else’s pockets.
Reuters reports that a State Department “spokesperson said many U.S. government programs remained active but medical sources had also been used to enrich the country’s leaders.” Reuters also reported that “South Sudan’s government has acknowledged a significant amount of public corruption.” (And I’m not giving Reuters any credit here because it buried all of this under the headline “South Sudan cholera patients died walking to clinic after US cut aid, charity says.” )
Rubio appeared on Donald Trump, Jr.’s podcast “Triggered with Don Jr.” on Tuesday evening, and the two men dove into this important topic of foreign aid and the changes we’ll see going forward. Rubio pointed out that the U.S. is no longer the world’s cash cow. We’re still willing to help, but we’re taking care of ourselves first. Every dollar we spend on foreign aid from here forward must “make America stronger, it has to make America more prosperous, or it has to make America safer.”
He basically pointed out that there may be many great causes out there that don’t necessarily do those things, but U.S. taxpayers aren’t a charity. However, there are many charities around the world that can help. {He specifically called out the Gates Foundation, but I think it’s too busy making meat out of bugs and buying up farmland.)
And that’s something I truly don’t understand. Why must everything come from our federal government? Why are we forcing hardworking people to pay for these things that have no impact on their own lives? There’s a whole big private sector out there with lots of money to be donated to this cause and that one. I’m all for helping others, but I do not believe it should be forced upon someone. Many on the left would do good to step off their anti-Trump social media platforms and stop doing stupid performative protest dances every weekend and get out there and volunteer and actually make a difference. But I digress.
Related: Rubio: ‘Every Time I Find One of These Lunatics, I Take Away Their Visa’
Anyway, Rubio also pointed out that part of the problem with our foreign aid as it was when he became Secretary is that “we turned it into a tool to export our domestic policies of the far left.” He added, “So the far left decided these are things that we think are good and it also became cultural imperialism. We began to use foreign aid not as a way to make America stronger, safer, more prosperous, but as a way to impose – impose – the domestic political agenda of the left onto foreign countries. And it became a vehicle for that.”
Next, he explained that the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that run many of our foreign aid programs and other middle men are essentially lining their pockets so that the result is that the people who truly need the money aren’t getting most of it. And that’s why the State Department has stepped in and is reviewing these programs.
I think the third thing that developed over time is what I call the foreign aid industrial complex. And I’m talking about dozens and dozens of these nongovernmental organizations, these NGOs, that were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars to run these programs on behalf of the U.S. Government. And it came out – and this is not me; Samantha Power would have said this – you have to spend – in order to get $12 million to people directly, you have to spend $100 million. You have to spend 100 million to get 12 million out to – directly, because you have to pay the NGO and then the subcontractor then the sub-sub and the sub-sub-sub. And before you know it, you’re paying Hamas to hand out food or whatever. And that has to stop and that has to end.
So we conducted a review of 6,000 programs, almost 6,000 programs, at USAID. We identified close to 900 that we are going to continue to do, either in their current form or amended. We canceled 5,000-some of those contracts, and now the goal is to bring all of those programs under the State Department so that we can directly review – because remember, USAID was separate from the State Department. They did whatever they wanted.
Make sure you read: Rubio: ‘We’re Not Doing Idiotic Things Anymore’
At the end, Rubio explained that the State Department is realigning how the U.S. will handle foreign aid going forward. We’re going to help countries with what they truly need rather than paying other people to go in and push their agendas while getting rich doing so. He used his recent travels to the Caribbean to explain:
…I just came back from a trip to the Caribbean where I went to Jamaica, I went to Guyana, and I went to Suriname – the Caribbean Basin. And their number one complaint is that USAID-funded NGOs didn’t partner with government…
By the way, this is not really well understood. There’s always been tension between State Department and USAID, because there’s some ambassador that’s like, okay, I’m trying to get – we’re trying to get good relations. The foreign policy of the U.S. is to have good relations with the leader of this country. And then USAID, operating out of their embassy, is, like, funding the political opposition of that leader…
But in the case of the Caribbean, it’s like, okay, they want to spend all this money on these literacy programs out in the countryside – which we’re not against as a government – we’re fine with that. The problem is that we can’t even get to those schools, kids can’t even go to school, until we first, like, get rid of the gangs that are threatening kids from going to school. So our number one priority, if you want to help us, help us with what we need. Don’t help us with what you want, which is to get into these rural schools, where now you start indoctrinating people on the social priorities of the far left in the United States. It’s part of that exporting of it.
So we’re going to realign foreign aid, so we’re actually going to be helping countries with what they generally need. And a lot of these countries, it’s security assistance.
In the end, Rubio pointed out the most important thing: The goal of foreign aid should be that it ends once it serves its purpose. It shouldn’t be ongoing.
The best foreign aid is foreign aid that ultimately ends because it’s successful, because you go in, you help somebody, they build up their capacity, and now they can handle it themselves, and they don’t need foreign aid anymore. That’s what foreign aid should be geared towards, not perpetual – these programs exist for 25 years. If a foreign aid program has been going on for 25 years, it has not achieved its purpose because it hasn’t solved the problem.
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