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Back in 2025, DOGE axed USAID and, according to partisans on the left and right, the results have been monumental.
To the left, USAID was somehow singlehandedly keeping millions of Africans alive. The loss of USAID resulted in their deaths. Wikipedia, the fallen one, reports this:
Obviously this is farcical on its face. And nearly 18 months later, there is no evidence of the massive death wave that was predicted.
Not to be outdone, the right has its own version of a USAID conspiracy theory: that closing USAID somehow killed leftism in South America.
Since USAID was shut down, seven countries in Latin America have held Presidential elections (Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Colombia). All seven have elected a President who is right of center. Brazil now remains as the strongest center of leftism in Latin America. But it looks like they might flip as well. In the first round of voting, Flávio Bolsonaro beat Lula by nearly 2 points. They now advance to the runoff.
Conservatives on X are crowing about how this shows that USAID was propping up leftist governments in Latin America. But... I just don't see the mechanism. The money spent was too small. The programs too ineffectual.
The likelier truth about USAID is, like most government programs, it was essentially useless. The biggest political effect is that it allowed leftists a sinecure with good pay and benefits. And cutting it was worth it for that reason alone. But did cutting USAID kill people in Africa or bring down communists in Latin America? Press D to doubt.
I AM bought in on the idea that the crushing of funding for various NGOs and similar government agencies that controlled the flow of 100's of millions of dollars with minimal accountability has resulted in the collapse of the overall lefty network of professional activists and organizers, and thus reduced their capability of shifting outcomes in various countries.
The amounts of rampant fraud that has come out in the last couple years is convincing me that there are well-oiled grift machines out there that convert tax dollars into either Mansions, Range Rovers, and Crab legs for some particular class of people, OR converts them into protests, election influence, and propaganda for particular candidates or causes. And STILL DOES, but has to be more judicious with its spending. Nudging a lefty candidate over the line in Bolivia, thus, would be less of a priority than, say, making one of your guys the Mayor of New York or Los Angeles.
And these flows were HIGHLY dependent on the U.S. government acting as a rich but absent-minded benefactor who hears a nice sounding cause or title and keeps writing checks because nobody told them what the money actually went to. Then you've got your George Soros' and Meckenzie Bezos supplementing these efforts, and funds being directed towards keeping those funds flowing, and it becomes a perfect parasitic organism.
So it is completely believable to me that organizations doing the work on the ground and sloshing money around to various causes in-country got dismantled due to lack of funding and these close elections are now slipping back towards the less-well-funded side.
I would want to see the actual money flows traced, however.
I just want to note how nonsensical this sentence is on its own. It is incredible how the very acronym for non-governmental organization is now tied to government funding and nobody bats an eye. And it is not just USA, it is the same in EU and everywhere, NGOs are now openly used as vehicle to support government policies at best and vehicles for corruption and nepotism at worst.
The word NGO itself is used for deliberate equivocation and propaganda, as if government is crushing private charities - by not giving funds. By the way, the same language was used by Harvard president Randall Kennedy in his latest debate against Crowder, where good professor likened Trumps funding cuts to "extortion". It is like the classic beggar vs rich man joke:
RIGHT?
I feel like when I was younger, if you were part of an "NGO" the implication was that you were privately funded but also worked in tandem with governments to achieve generally important goals. Like the Red Cross, or Amnesty International, the Government recognizes they provide important services that supplement the government's own capabilities and thus endorses but does not fund their operatons. Red Cross, at least still claims to meet this definition closely. This was helpful to make sure there is always excess capacity for emergencies, and possibly to avoid international disputes if 'official' government actors were to get involved in a space.
NOW, its basically tacitly accepted that a private organization can become an arm of the state but because of the label we don't expect it to be held to account by the voters, and also if the owners/operators become fabulously wealthy it doesn't quite register as "abuse of taxpayer funds" because in theory these NGOs can also take private money too.
And because the Constitution doesn't really create any strict rules on how such orgs can interface with the state the rules are made up and the funding can be tucked away in various large omnibus bills where nobody technically has to answer for or justify the spending.
On the flip side, as we've seen, that makes it fairly trivial to de fund them if the current President (with a friendly congress) turns a serious eye on them.
And yeah, I agree its a deliberate equivocation that lets them straddle the "private vs. public" divide without anybody thinking too much about how much that distinction matters.
There's plenty of other examples of grinding down the private/public distinction to a sheer fiction (revolving doors between large corpos and regulatory agencies, defense contracting, whatever Hunter Biden was doing) but the term "NGO" is the one that makes it a blatant mockery on its face.
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