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Decimation
In the course of just a few weeks, Donald Trump’s administration has decimated the domain of U.S. democracy aid. Forty years of work building a sophisticated network of U.S. organizations supporting freedom around the world and an immense range of relationships with activists fighting to bolster shaky democracies and challenge overweening autocrats have been shattered. Even at a time when disruptiveness, and in some cases destructiveness, have been keywords in the Trump administration’s overall approach to governing, the abruptness and harshness of the devastation to democracy aid has been stunning.
The three main funders of U.S. democracy aid have traditionally been the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Last year, USAID and the State Department were responsible for about 90 percent of the approximately $3 billion annual budget for such work, and the NED for the remainder. Democracy aid from USAID and the State Department has been halted since late January as part of the administration’s freeze of all U.S. foreign assistance, which has been followed by the cancellation of thousands of aid contracts and grants and the institutional dismantling of USAID through mass firings of staff and other measures. Although funding to the NED is not actually part of the foreign assistance budget, the organization’s funding has also been stopped, through an unexplained refusal by the Department of the Treasury to release allocated and approved funding for the NED.
The cessation of essentially all funding for democracy aid has crippled the nonprofit U.S. organizations that have carried out such work for decades, such as the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. They have had to let go of most of their staff and are teetering on the edge of having to close altogether. The aid freeze has also dealt a body blow to the development consulting firms that have long been engaged in implementing democracy programs globally as part of their broader aid portfolios, like Chemonics International, DAI, and Management Systems International. More broadly, it has weakened or devastated thousands of organizations around the world that have been supported by U.S. democracy aid, including human rights organizations, anti-corruption groups, media organizations, judicial training institutes, electoral management bodies, civic education organizations, and many others.
U.S. pro-democracy organizations and their international partners have often confronted harsh adversaries and have learned to be creative and courageous in their responses, especially during the past decade, when resistance from autocrats has sharpened. Yet never did they imagine that the source of their greatest existential crisis would be a U.S. president and his foreign policy team, a team that includes senior people who until just a few months ago praised such work fulsomely. And never did they imagine that the U.S. government would simply walk away from providing aid for democracy globally without any serious explanation for why it was doing so or any sign of significant thought about the broader implications of their actions.
Understanding why this existential crisis has arrived for U.S. democracy aid is crucial to assessing whether there is a path out of it. That issue connects in turn not just to larger questions about whether U.S. foreign aid will have any future going forward but also how radical a departure Trump foreign policy will be from that of his recent predecessors in its overall conception of the U.S. role in the world.
The Animus Toward Democracy Aid
In part, the decimation of U.S. democracy aid is the result of the administration’s broader assault on all U.S. foreign assistance. That attack is rooted in Trump’s lack of belief in the value of foreign aid. Convinced that the United States has long been taken advantage of by other countries, the president appears to find the idea of aiding other countries both pointless and in some sense antithetical to his overall America First stance. His decision to give Elon Musk a decisive role in his endeavor to shrink the federal government sealed the fate of aid—Musk has made clear in multiple X (formerly Twitter) posts that he believes aid to other countries is a waste of money and absurdly declared that USAID is a “criminal organization.”
Many Republicans in Congress had long supported foreign aid and spoken forthrightly of its value to the United States. In 2013, then senator Marco Rubio stated, “We don’t have to give foreign aid. We do so because it furthers our national interest.” Yet they have now largely gone silent. Their support was in many cases relatively soft to start with—given a propensity among many U.S. conservatives to see foreign aid as an international extension of domestic welfare programs—and is seemingly not a cause on which they feel willing to go against the president.
Yet it would be a serious mistake to see democracy aid as merely an incidental casualty of the larger attack on aid. The administration has singled out democracy aid as one of a short list of types of assistance that it finds most objectionable. And the fact that it has made a point of halting funding to the NED, even though that funding is not part of foreign aid, further underlines the Trump team’s specific animus toward democracy aid.
The source of that animus should be understood as occurring at two levels, one general and one specific. At a general level, the Trump team’s aversion to democracy aid is part of its overall turn away from the long-standing bipartisan consensus that bolstering democracy’s global fortunes is a vital goal of U.S. foreign policy. Such a goal has no apparent place in a foreign policy defined by an America First transactional outlook that concentrates on striking economic and security deals with other countries, no matter their political regime type. In fact, the president has a clear admiration for autocratic leaders, starting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whom he perceives as strong and prioritizes as a deal-making partner, and disdain for democratic leaders, whom he perceives as weak and needy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed this disinterest in any democracy focus ahead of his recent trip to Central America when he wrote that the United States would now base its foreign policy on “shared interests” and not “utopian ideologies.”
In simple terms, the Trump team appears to have decided that supporting democracy globally is no longer a foreign policy goal, so why should the U.S. invest in democracy aid?
But a second, much more specific level of animus toward democracy aid also exists. Particular aspects of democracy aid appear to irritate at least four highly reactive nerve endings in the MAGA mind:
- First, in the MAGA worldview, democracy aid is associated with “regime change” and “nation-building”—as manifested in the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost so much blood and treasure for such limited results.
- Second, some elements of democracy aid entail work on progressive goals that the Trump team is trying to eradicate from U.S. domestic and foreign policy. These are objectives like promoting gender equity, LGBTQ rights, racial and ethnic inclusion, and other parts of what Trump conservatives consider to be the universe of “woke” policy issues. Moreover, democracy frequently involves support for nongovernmental organizations, a category of institutions that some MAGA adherents equate with noxious liberal views. The explicit calling out of “civil society” within the administration’s attacks on aid underlines this viewpoint.
- Third, small amounts of U.S. democracy aid have gone to a few countries led by MAGA friends, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, fueling a view among some in the Trump camp that democracy aid is about stopping right-wing populists from gaining or holding power and thus constitutes an additional form of “regime change” aimed at those leaders.
- Fourth, programs seeking to help other countries combat disinformation in politics, especially Russian disinformation, have been included in the democracy aid portfolio in recent years. Combating disinformation touches a nerve among many U.S. conservatives, who conflate the issue with efforts to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 victory or what they regard as censorship of conservative voices more generally.
Although these may appear to be relatively minor issues in the large domain of democracy programs, in the current environment of swirling conspiracy theories on the right about what many parts of the government have done under prior administrations, they have muddied the waters significantly for democracy aid.
The Coming Struggle over a Reconstitution of Foreign Aid
While the administration has been at work dismantling USAID, senior officials have continued to say that it does not intend to end all foreign aid and will in the future carry out some from the State Department. Although discussions have started within the administration on the absorption of USAID into the State Department, there is no indication yet of when this will happen, how the department will go about managing foreign aid, or what size and scope a reconstituted aid program under State Department auspices might have. Officials have made it clear that the administration will only continue aid that is “fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States” (incorrectly implying that U.S. foreign assistance, which has long been closely scrutinized and budgetarily earmarked by Congress and overseen by the Office of Foreign Assistance at the State Department and has been specifically developed by successive prior administrations to align with U.S. interests, has somehow ignored the national interest). If and when the State Department does start moving to reconstitute aid, one can foresee a great deal of effort among the U.S. foreign aid community to reestablish for the new team in charge that their work does in fact serve U.S. interests.
Given the administration’s aversion toward democracy aid described above, the democracy aid community will have its back to the wall to preserve any place for itself in whatever reconstituted aid program emerges. It will have to do so both by defining a place for democracy support within the larger picture of Trump foreign policy and by getting past the specific areas of ideological neuralgia that democracy aid triggers in the MAGA mindset.
A Place for Democracy in the Overall Policy
With respect to the place for democracy support in Trump foreign policy overall, the argument could start with the observation that the choice between transactionalism and democracy support is false. Even though all recent previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, articulated democracy as an overarching goal of U.S. international engagement, they were heavily realist in practice. As president, Ronald Reagan made promoting freedom in the world a hallmark of his foreign policy and established the institutions of democracy aid that are being battered now. Yet he also pursued warm relations with many autocracies around the world for the sake of U.S. security and economic interests in specific places, whether in Egypt, Indonesia, or Zaire. The foreign policies of all of his successors were also marked by the same dualism.
The constant inconsistency between America’s tendency to define itself as a pro-democratic global power and its willingness to work hand in hand with many autocracies has aggravated countless observers around the world and within the United States who accuse Washington of rank hypocrisy. Yet the inconsistency is a feature, not a bug, of the foreign policy of a superpower with an extremely complex array of global interests. For the Trump team, there are at least two reasons for keeping democracy in the mix of U.S. policy even under Trump’s turbocharged transactionalism. First, supporting democracy helps limit the reach of America’s strategic adversaries. When countries slide away from democracy, they often slide into the welcoming arms of America’s rivals, especially China. The less democratic Nicaragua has become over the last ten years, the closer it has drawn to Beijing. When the Philippines went through a democratic dip under Rodrigo Duterte, it embraced China and unsettled arrangements relating to U.S. military bases in the country. The greater the democratic backsliding in the world, the more fertile is the international domain for the ambitions of China, Iran, Russia, and other adversarial autocracies.
Second, even when pursued inconsistently, supporting democracy contributes to the projection of American strength. Military and economic threats and coercion can achieve certain results for the United States in the world. But standing as a positive force aligned with the aspirations of people around the world who want to live in freedom gives America powerful additional diplomatic standing and leverage. Despite all the struggles democracy is facing globally, it remains the most popular political system in a large majority of countries. It is noteworthy that although Trump may think of himself as the ultimate realist, when he criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 19, he accused him of being a dictator—reflecting that somewhere in Trump’s mind remains the instinct such a leader is not a good partner for the United States.
Despite all the changes in the world, the Trump team should not ignore the enduring fact that America is safer and stronger in a world that is more democratic rather than less. Crafting their new policy of renewed American strength should mean combining their zealous transactionalism with the embrace and pursuit of democratic values at other levels. Upholding the quiet work of democracy support through aid programs that back organizations and people seeking to advance freedom is one of the easiest, cheapest, and most effective of those other policy levels—a smart complement, not an unneeded relic from a past time.
Addressing the Nerve Endings
In making the case for a place for democracy aid going forward, the democracy aid community will also face the challenge of soothing the four specific nerve points relating to democracy aid. One of them, concerning regime change and nation-building, is worth contesting on the facts. Regime change is what the U.S. military did in Afghanistan and Iraq—militarily ousting governments deemed to be security threats. The democracy aid community did not plan or push for these changes, but rather it was pulled into the efforts to reconstruct those countries post-invasion. These engagements were completely atypical examples of democracy aid, and not ones democracy aid organizations have any interest in repeating. The vast bulk of democracy aid is entirely different from such endeavors. Helping a group of investigative journalists in an African country expose the corruption of their leaders is not regime change. Nor is helping a shaky Latin American democracy strengthen the integrity of its national election commission. Nor is helping exiled Chinese dissidents bring to light Chinese human rights abuses.
Refutation will not work with the other three nerve points because they are in part true. Some democracy aid has sought to advance goals that are part of what conservatives see as the woke agenda. Very small amounts of U.S. aid have flowed to civic and media organizations in Hungary and a few other countries led by MAGA favorites. And some programs have sought to help citizens and governments combat Russian political disinformation in various countries, like Kazakhstan and Ukraine. One could try to point out that work on gender in fact follows the guidance of Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy, which stated, “We will support efforts to advance women’s equality.” Or that a small number of modest-sized grants to help citizens air alternative views in some countries where the government is suffocating media freedom hardly constitutes an effort to oust those leaders. But rather than try to fight over those facts or convince skeptics that such types of aid do in fact advance U.S. interests, it would be better to concede those points and instead emphasize that every new administration has specific priorities within the democracy portfolio—if the Trump team finds these areas objectionable, it can excise them while still supporting a wide range of other productive democracy programs.
The Democracy Aid Canary
The existential crisis facing the democracy aid community will be resolved—whether negatively or positively—as part of the debates and decisions about what sort of post-USAID reconstitution of foreign assistance the Trump administration carries out. Mounting carefully crafted, empirically and historically based arguments to try to preserve a critical area of U.S. assistance may seem a quixotic quest given the new world of significant influence on U.S. policy from “alternative” sources, many rooted in fact-free, conspiratorial views. But there may still be people within the administration, although probably not among the first movers in the assault on aid, who will have some influence on whatever future aid has and will be open to such appeals.
More broadly, the precarious future of democracy aid is tied to the much deeper question of how radical a departure Trump foreign policy will be from the long line of predecessor policies that made support for global democracy an integral part of U.S. foreign policy, albeit inconsistently, out of the recognition that it contributes to America’s strength and security. Democracy aid is thus a canary in the coal mine of a much broader struggle over the definition of what sort of global power the United States will be going forward—a canary with only limited ability to determine its own fate, but no choice except to try hard to do so.
