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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.
The PEPFAR numbers get complicated, even under their own assumptions, if you look at them remotely critically. USAID as a whole have numbers some more plausible backing, but that's damning with faint praise, and they're still not that plausible.
Part of this is the difficulty of getting any serious numbers at scale: you can't get a good measure of how many people are dying of what cause in Somalia for the same reasons people are (presumably) dying in Somalia.
More of it's because they had easy metrics that showed they were Doing Something, and a lot of reasons to conflate Doing Something with actual productive impact, and very few people with the ability to investigate those numbers had or have the ability to promote their findings. So you get a lot of statistics where the underlying measure is partly or mostly money spent, sometimes added through many other statistics that are partly money spent.
The political impact is messy, and virtually unprovable and undisprovable. The steelman arguments are less a clear fund labeled 'make sure Lula gets reelected', and pretty much any spending could also have a side effect of an army dedicated to promoting a specific political viewpoint or blamming the political opposition, but it's not clear what proof would look like, and even less clear what would be needed to show it didn't happen.
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