Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s eyes bore into the camera as he excoriated, the agency he now heads. “They’re completely un-responsive,” chided Rubio on Fox News, referencing the U.S. Agency for International Development, which he currently leads as acting administrator. “They don’t consider that they work for the U.S., they just think they’re a global entity and that their master is the globe and not the United States.”
The interview on Monday from the agency’s new leader signals a troubling new direction for USAID. The agency, which provides billions of dollars of humanitarian and development assistance around the world has been under constant bombardment from the new administration. Over the last two weeks, President Donald Trump has issued a broad 90-day freeze on foreign assistance, purged senior leadership, handed control of the agency to Rubio, closed the D.C. office, and announced that as of Friday, thousands of employees worldwide would be placed on leave and recalled stateside.
These moves have left the countless humanitarian and development organizations that rely on USAID funding in limbo. (Rubio, for his part, has refused to say whether he agrees with “Department of Government Efficiency” head Elon Musk that the agency needs to “die.“)
Promoting U.S. interests abroad, including global health and security, has always been an implicit part of delivering foreign assistance. The United States provides a small fraction of its immense wealth to provide lifesaving aid abroad, such as malaria and HIV prevention, as well as development programs. The thinking goes that the U.S. benefits in two ways: from a theoretically safer and more prosperous world, as well as the promotion of U.S. interests globally through this display of soft power.
Now, amid a broader downsizing of foreign assistance and with Trump and Musk reportedly contemplating killing USAID entirely or moving what remains of it under the State Department, experts worry that any ongoing U.S. overseas aid efforts will become a more overt tool of U.S. influence. Such a shift would leave lifesaving programs at risk if they don’t have an immediate perceived benefit for Trump and his administration’s desires.
“All government assistance, development and humanitarian, it’s there to further a government’s interests,” said Paul Spiegel, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health. “Under this particular administration … they’re going to give a much more narrow interpretation of how aid should be used, and this kind of soft power or getting goodwill from countries to help you in the future will be diminished, and they’re going to concentrate much more on something that is perhaps more proximal or immediate in terms of the benefits to the United States.”
