“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy,” declared President Donald Trump in an executive order signed on the date of his second inauguration, “are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.  They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”

Trump ordered: “It is the policy of the United States that no further United States foreign assistance shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.”

If that sounds familiar, we’ve heard variations of this song before from Republican presidents beginning with Ronald Reagan. What is different today is that Trump is giving force to this long-held conservative idea. He has unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on the foreign aid bureaucracy, cutting off funds and suspending operations of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the spongers who call themselves “development professionals.”

Beltway bandits are reeling. The high-minded idle rich in Aspen and Davos are haltingly navigating the no-man’s land between denial and anger. Blue-state politicians are seeing red.

They are feeling the powerful effects of an idea whose time came more than half a century ago, finally being implemented.

USAID had been created not by legislation but by an executive order of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. USAID soon earned notoriety for its failed social engineering projects in South Vietnam. One was the “strategic hamlets” program (1961-1963). This was such an embarrassment that by January 1964, the new Johnson administration and a former champion of foreign aid, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William Fulbright, were already considering abolishing USAID and drastically cutting non-military foreign aid spending.

USAID nevertheless survived. It was a key player in the Vietnam War’s Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program (1967-1975). Like strategic hamlets, this was a “civil-military” joint endeavor of USAID, the U.S. military, and the corrupt, incompetent South Vietnamese government. These ménages à trois became textbook cases of the futility of assuming that liberal Western mindsets and values, brimming with the faddish optimism of Camelot and dogmatic belief in social “science,” would be comprehended and embraced by uneducated peasants half a world away.

During the 1970s, economists whose work gave rise to many of Margaret Thatcher and Reagan’s policies had rendered their verdict against foreign aid. It is the system, British development economist Peter Bauer wrote at the time, by which “poor people in rich countries are taxed to support the lifestyles of rich people in poor countries.”

Bauer and like-minded economists were favorites of Reagan, but during his eight years in office and despite thousands of Adam Smith neckties being knotted around the collars of Reagan acolytes, little to nothing was accomplished to cut back on wasteful, utopian foreign aid spending and programs.

The liberal Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party remained influential when Reagan became president. It impeded the Gipper from implementing policies to rein in the foreign aid bureaucracy. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Rockefeller Republican Sen. Charles Percy of Illinois had the power to block Reagan conservatives from foreign affairs posts.

Reagan conceded USAID to the liberals. He appointed a liberal Republican, Peter McPherson, to head USAID. McPherson appointed other liberal Republicans and promoted left-wing bureaucrats to run the agency in much the same way a Nelson Rockefeller administration would have done.

At the insistence of conservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R- N.C.), Reagan forced McPherson to accept as head of his Africa bureau a lawyer named Frank Ruddy, who described himself as “the token conservative at USAID.” Details of the Reagan administration’s failure to reform, much less defund or dismantle USAID, are in Ruddy’s fascinating and often hilarious interviews given to the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.

McPherson embraced the Rockefeller doctrine of population control, including abortion, as a means of “poverty reduction.” Ruddy clashed with McPherson over this and other liberal policies and prevailed when Reagan announced the “Mexico City policy” against U.S. foreign aid funding for performing or promoting abortions. Reagan would not allow McPherson to fire Ruddy, but McPherson got his revenge by reassigning Ruddy to an office where he had no duties or powers. The White House and congressional allies told Ruddy not to resign. Eventually Ruddy was sent as ambassador to a backwater called Equatorial Guinea.

Summarizing his observations on USAID, Ruddy said: “[It] it wouldn’t have made any difference if Abbie Hoffman or William F. Buckley were running AID. … The bureaucracy runs USAID.”

George H. W. Bush proved Ruddy’s point when he appointed a cipher named Ronald Roskens, an obscure educational bureaucrat from Nebraska, to head USAID. The agency’s leftist bureaucracy ran on autopilot for four years.

George Bush the Younger campaigned for president in 2000 with refreshing remarks against “nation building” and associated foreign aid follies. Once taking office, however, he reversed course. He named a liberal Republican hack from Massachusetts, a longtime crony of White House chief of staff Andy Card named Andrew Natsios, to run USAID. Like previous USAID leaders and staff, Natsios, having spent his entire career working for either the government or USAID contractors, had no experience in the private, for-profit sector. With megalomaniacal zeal, he embraced what New York University economist William Easterly has called “the ideology of Development.”

During the Dubya administration, Easterly warned that

Developmentalism” is “almost as deadly as the tired ideologies of the last century—communism, fascism, and socialism—that failed so miserably. Like all ideologies, Development promises a comprehensive final answer to all of society’s problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and despotic rulers. It shares the common ideological characteristic of suggesting there is only one correct answer, and it tolerates little dissent. It deduces this unique answer for everyone from a general theory that purports to apply to everyone, everywhere. … Development even has its own intelligentsia, made up of experts at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and United Nations.

Natsios and his liberal team at USAID sneered at Easterly’s superbly researched, scholarly work.

Historians will remember Natsios mostly for his wildly underestimated cost projections for reconstructing Iraq. On April 23, 2003, just before the American invasion, Natsios was interviewed by Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline. He asserted that the total cost to the United States of reconstructing Iraq would be $1.7 billion.

“The rest of the rebuilding of Iraq will be done by other countries who have already made pledges,” Natsios said. “But the American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this.”

Koppel was incredulous.

Bush fired Lawrence Lindsay, his chief economic advisor, for projecting the total costs of the Iraq war at $200 billion. Lindsay had contradicted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s cost estimate of $50 billion. The total costs as of 2025 are tallied at more than $2 trillion, or as much as $6 trillion when one adds projected future costs of veterans benefits and interest on the national debt. Accounting data for the costs allocated to reconstruction are hard to find, but an extremely conservative estimate is $88 billion.

The president reportedly was infuriated by Natsios’ much-ridiculed remark, but Andy Card protected his buddy. Natsios stayed on for several more years as USAID head and was emboldened to pursue ever more grandiose projects. One of the more absurd was the “ministry in a box” program. Natsios boasted that USAID could “stand up” a national government ministry with a simple kit containing furniture and how-to manuals for 100 civil servants. We know how that worked out.

On the receiving end of Natsios’s boxes of ministries was the Coalition Provisional Authority—that is, the American occupation regime in Iraq. The Baghdad interim government’s chief of economic policy was a man 20 years older but still no wiser: Peter McPherson.

“The power of Developmentalism is disheartening,” William Easterly wrote, “because the failure of all the previous ideologies might have laid the groundwork for the opposite of ideology—the freedom of individuals and societies to choose their destinies. Yet, since the fall of communism, the West has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and with disastrous results.”

Donald Trump’s first term failed to address the foreign aid elephant in the room. Instead, it installed an enabler as head of USAID, a former congressman and confidant of Mike Pence named Mark Green. With neoconservatives Mike Pompeo and Elliott Abrams calling the shots, the foreign aid racket rolled merrily along.

When Green left office in 2020, he was lauded by the left-wing foreign aid industry. Devex, an online publication funded in part by USAID and several United Nations agencies, praised Green as one who had “held the line at USAID.” The leftist newsletter stated: “Faced with repeated attacks on his budget, political demands from the White House, and an administration that doubted the basic premise of foreign assistance, Mark Green managed to protect—and maybe even sharpen—USAID’s development mission.”

It is too early to declare that the foreign aid industry and ideology of Development have been vanquished by Trump’s aggressive new moves. USAID and its ideology have had 60 years of success in staving off well deserved extinction. Can Elon Musk succeed where others have failed? The struggle continues.