“Radical leftists, grifters, and lunatics” are the labels that Elon Musk uses to describe people who worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) or anyone who dares to speak up in favor of an agency that for over sixty years has embodied the democratic values this country aspires to live by. Most Americans, indeed, have no clue what foreign aid is, which makes it easy for this Administration to weaponize it and demonize USAID’s work.
For the record, I worked at USAID for three years as a senior communications advisor in the Bureau for Global Health. I was hired as a contractor under the Obama Administration and stayed for about 18 months into the first Trump Administration. Before joining USAID, I worked with organizations that implemented USAID’s programs and delivered humanitarian assistance in far-flung places. For seven years, I lived in Nairobi, Kenya, where I saw first-hand the impact of U.S. foreign assistance programs.
USAID rally in Washington DC, one with Senator Cory Booker. Kelley Lynch
So yes, I suppose Musk could label me—and thousands of aid workers like me—as leftists, grifters, or lunatics. But here’s the difference between us and Musk: we choose to work in foreign aid because we believe that every person, regardless of wealth or geography, has the right to live in peace, with dignity, and the opportunities to reach their full human potential. That means access to education, healthcare, and protection from intimidation and harm.
Is this really a “radical” idea?
The executive order to reevaluate and realign foreign assistance was among the first ones signed by President Trump on his inauguration day. On January 24, a Stop-Work Order targeting USAID was issued by Secretary of State Rubio. What started as a 90-day freeze on U.S. foreign aid programs, pending a review process has turned into a permanent shutdown of an Agency and an entire sector where the U.S. was a leader for six decades. This move leaves a ready-made power vacuum for China to step in.
The latest figures, as reported by Devex, suggest that USAID’s workforce was cut from 10,000 to 294 in just a week. USAID staff stationed in U.S. embassies were told to return home immediately, having to quickly pack up homes and pull kids abruptly out of school. USAID’s website, which contained a ton of useful data, went offline almost immediately, and its X account was removed. This was a deliberate purge meant to eradicate what Musk and President Trump perceive to be a “Marxist ideology.”
The disinformation Musk has spread since vowing to annihilate USAID is astonishing. On X, he called the agency “ criminal ” and said it was “time for it to die,” boasting that he spent the weekend “ feeding USAID into the woodchipper.” What I find most alarming is that he and other tech plutocrats now control our digital information landscape, using “freedom of expression” as a pretext to eliminate fact-checkers, amplify falsehoods, and discredit many dedicated government workers.
Shutting down USAID does not just impact the federal workforce, but it is definitely taking a major hit. It is also affecting thousands of people working for USAID’s implementing partners. They are the backbone of USAID, the “boots-on-the-ground,” those who work with local governments and civil society to strengthen health systems, boost agricultural productivity, harness innovation for research, or train media professionals to discern facts from fiction – just to name some USAID-funded activities.
Most importantly, the looming USAID shutdown is wreaking havoc in communities worldwide. People who depend on life-saving medicines for HIV, TB, and malaria are being turned away from health clinics. Clinical trials are abruptly stopping in South Africa, leaving people with no access to monitoring or care. Afghan girls will lose access to secret schools, their only hope to get an education under Taliban rule. An aid worker friend warned me that without USAID support, Burmese journalists in Thailand would be forced back to Burma, risking their lives.
To make matters worse, efforts to contain disease outbreaks—like Ebola, Mpox, or Bird flu—are suddenly defunded, putting American lives at risk. Let me break this down for you. During the Zika outbreak, I traveled to Honduras and Jamaica to document U.S. taxpayer-funded programs. These initiatives supported mothers of babies born with congenital Zika syndrome, trained community leaders on basic sanitation measures, strengthened lab capacity for disease surveillance, and partnered with U.S. companies to harness innovation. Infectious diseases don’t respect borders. The only way to contain them is by collaborating with other countries and investing in preparedness.
Watch Samantha Power’s video interview with Stephen Colbert on why we need USAID:
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Let’s be clear: poverty and despair fuel radicalization, posing a threat to U.S. national security. USAID’s work, and that of its implementing partners, are the “soft power” of American diplomacy. By helping others, we help ourselves. When I lived in East Africa and visited refugee camps in Kenya and Sudan, I often saw large bags of food aid bearing the USAID logo with the tagline “from the American people.” In rural pharmacies, I encountered stacked boxes of medicines with USAID branding. I used to cringe when I saw that logo. Other donors are not as eager to publicize their gifts. But American generosity has brought us goodwill on the ground despite our sometimes-harmful foreign policy.
Experts question the legality of shutting down USAID, an agency created by Congress in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy. Lawsuits are being filed, but President Trump, eager to appease his base, is pushing ahead. After all, this is an easy target that feeds the MAGA narrative on “massive” spending of American taxpayer’s money abroad. The fact is that Congress sets USAID budget priorities, and the U.S. only spends about 0.7% of its federal budget on foreign assistance, far less than other G7 countries.
At the end of the day, foreign aid and humanitarian assistance are about understanding that uplifting others is not a zero-sum game. This is the “radical” concept that seems to be so threatening to one of the wealthiest men in the world and to this administration.
Beatrice Spadacini is a freelance journalist for the Fulcrum. Spadacini writes about social justice and public health.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.