Elon Musk, our era’s restless oracle, got it right: mistakes are inevitable when you burn away the rot of government waste. You need to fix the errors … quickly.
Clearing ground for a foreign aid policy that serves America First means shoveling out the rocks — but in the rush to dismantle USAID and shift its role to the Department of State, the new administration seems to have swung too hard.
Thousands of programs were axed, often without adequate scrutiny. In that hasty process, some diamonds were buried in the debris. We can still dig them out.
At its best, foreign aid isn’t a globalist slush fund — it’s a lever of American might. Ronald Reagan wielded it to crush the Soviet Union without a bullet, pairing strength with strategy. Today, as China stalks our hemisphere, we can’t ditch or minimize the use of that tool. USAID needed a reckoning — years of mission creep and outright corruption of purpose demanded it. However, torching the whole foreign assistance enterprise isn’t the fix; refocusing it on America First is.
Take the recently terminated USAID Honduras program aiming to improve reintegration services for deported or voluntarily returned irregular migrants — a programmatic gem lost in the purge. It bolstered reintegration services for migrants sent back to Honduras, many or most scarred from the trek north. Thirty percent of women report cartel abuse; kids, often orphaned, fare no better. This program offered to improve psychosocial counseling to patch their wounds, expand job referrals — 60 percent call work their top need — to keep returnees from resorting to crime, and provide legal aid to root them in their home country. Why care? Because 34 percent plan to retry our border without a reason to stay. This wasn’t handouts — it was border security by proxy, cutting the chaos that washes up on our border.
It’s not just Honduras. We gutted a program tracking bird flu and Ebola across 50 countries — right as a deadly outbreak spikes egg prices, kills 35 million birds, and claims an American life. That’s economic pain at home. Food aid cuts stall $2 billion in U.S. farm sales, hitting growers while 36 million abroad starve — easy prey for China’s sway. Slashed humanitarian aid in the Middle East and Africa once checked ISIS by winning desperate loyalty. These weren’t frills — they shielded our health, propped up our farmers, and kept foes at bay.
The administration’s instinct was sound: USAID had ballooned into a caricature, serving everyone but us. Folding it into the State Department made sense; corruption begged for a purge. The execution? A sledgehammer, not a scalpel.
Programs like the Honduran Safe Return Activity, disease monitoring and food aid aren’t relics; they’re tools that, when smartly honed, advance our interests. In Honduras, Safe Return fostered job referral services through private-sector partnerships that offered to support U.S. firms ‘nearshoring’ deals — jobs for us, not Beijing. That’s America First, not America Alone.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio nailed it. Aid must make us safer, stronger and richer. Ending thousands of programs without thorough review didn’t trim fat — it hacked bone.
Mistakes happen in reform; wisdom corrects them. History warns that great powers falter by overreach … or retreat. China’s grinning as we fumble — let’s not hand them the field. Sift the wreckage, resurrect the diamonds, and refocus foreign aid on our America First ends. Do it fast, before the costs pile up.