Last spring and summer, The Fulcrum published a 30-part series on Project 2025. Now that Donald Trump’s second term has commenced, The Fulcrum has started Part 2 of the series.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is on life support, which is ironic given how much support for life the agency has historically provided. Absent a dramatic save by the federal courts, its days are probably numbered.
What is going on? How did we get to the point where the premier governmental aid organization in the world is now vilified by the leader of the very country that practically invented humanitarian assistance? Not that long ago, both Democrats and Republicans sang USAID’s praises. It represented the rare meeting of the partisan minds. Not any longer, it seems.
President Trump signed an Executive Order titled "Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid"on his first day in office, January 20, 2025. This order initiated a 90-day pause on all U.S. foreign development assistance to assess the efficiency and alignment of these programs with U.S. foreign policy. The order also called for reviews of each foreign assistance program to determine whether to continue, modify, or cease them.
The executive order was followed by some notable statements by Trump and his unofficial Secretary of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk. Musk stated on social media that "USAID is a criminal organization"and Trump echoed Musk’s sentiments by saying, "The agency is run by a bunch of radical lunatics."
Given Trump's statements while campaigning for President, none of this should be surprising. What is astonishing is that even the playbook that most Americans believed was President Trump’s roadmap—Project 2025—underestimated the stampede. We can now say, with some confidence, that Project 2025 represents a more moderate and gradual dismantling of “inside the beltway” customs compared to the President’s actual intentions.
In just the past three weeks, the White House has issued a dizzying array of executive orders, many of which target longstanding organizations with honorable and critical missions. Halting USAID’s work has been breathtakingly bold. Foreign assistance projects have been shuttered overnight. Civil servants by the thousands have been told to stay home, their jobs in jeopardy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, abruptly, and possibly illegally, assumed control of the independent agency. Local partners in global south countries have been left to fend for themselves.
The reaction has been equally swift. Democrats launched warnings—“watch out FEMA; you’re next”—while Republicans heralded the isolationist, “America First” attitude. The result? The political fissure between the left and the right has only widened.
The swiftness of action and the laser focus on foreign aid fit the Trump agenda. USAID is an easy scapegoat for Trump’s “ America First ” platform. To be sure, the accounts of “ waste and abuse ” in foreign assistance—DEI projects in Serbia and Ireland, transgender artistry in Colombia and Peru, for example—rankle those on the right. Never mind that most of the “abuses” cited by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are not USAID-funded, these expenditures still represent the type of taxpayer-backed initiatives that galvanize the Republican base. Mentioning them with disdain and exasperation is good for the GOP brand. Campaigns will now be won and lost on whether a candidate believes “USAID is [or was] a criminal organization.”
This is not to say that none of the practices at USAID warrant examination. Some should be reformed and others eliminated. Indeed, there are reasonable examples of misused or mismanaged funding. There are examples of foreign aid being used as a tool for political leverage that results in the support of regimes that do not align with U.S. values. Corruption in assistance programs does happen. But, what is needed is a non-political, unbiased analysis of the problems and how best to correct them. Not the hatchet and elimination approach that Trump’s and Musk’s rhetoric implies will occur.
The political circus that this debate about USAID has become raises a bigger concern, one that transcends partisan bickering. I’ll call it the “whiplash effect” of dramatic and swift executive action. In short, citizens on both sides of the aisle should be aware of the long-term damage done to America’s reputation when the president acts unilaterally and with an abruptness not seen before.
The damage can be described in three parts:
1. The credibility of the American political brand across the globe suffers. A new administration has earned the right to change the direction of the political ship. But a frenzied, sudden, and dramatic change in policy sends a message to foreign adversaries and allies alike that they should be skeptical of any promises made in the past. In contrast, the gradual evolution of those partnerships, even if they differ from administration to administration, strengthens American credibility.
2. Partisanship remains the only coin of the realm. When partisanship completely trumps everything else in politics—institutions, elections, justice, reason, equality, decency—the American citizen is the big loser. USAID programs were funded by Congress. For Congressmembers to collectively shrug at the instantaneous halting of, say, vaccine distribution abroad is deeply troubling. A majority of Americans, even those on the right, believe in most vaccines…and most humanitarian efforts.
3. America is losing its moral standing. In an otherwise bleak report on America’s moral compass, one finding remains hopeful: one in five Americans (by far the highest percentage) believe that “consideration of others” is the most important moral indicator. I will assume that such generosity also applies to the entire human race and not just those residing between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Pulling up our foreign assistance tents will erode any moral currency we still possess.
Much has been written about the noble mission of USAID, of its life-saving programs, and its capacity to build alliances and friends around the world. Even so, it seems hard to imagine that Democrats and Republicans will now agree on what exactly to do with USAID. What I hope we all can agree on is that the whiplash effect evidenced by the sudden dismantling of America’s foreign assistance arm will have long-term consequences. The soul of America should not be so easily sacrificed.
Now is a critical moment. Congress and other political actors must assert their voices during this 90-day pause to ensure that we have a non-partisan assessment of USAID programs, one that results in much-needed improvements and not wholesale elimination.
Samples of Phase 1 articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
- Voters oppose the far-right playbook
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
- The Department of Justice
- A blueprint for Christian nationalist regime change
- How anti-trans proposals could impact all families
- The Federal Reserve
- A threat to equitable education
Beau Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.