The USAID Fight Is About Power, Not Spending

Photo by U.S. Government, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A lot of ink has been spilled over DOGE and the Battle of US AID. A lot more will be spilled before it’s over, but much of what is being written misses the point.

Republicans are telling a lot of stories about waste and abuse at US AID. Some of these stories are true. Many are not. Many others lack context, such as the $6 million for Egyptian tourism that actually originated in the first Trump White House per fact-checkers.

I could explain that foreign aid from all sources, about $72 billion in 2023, is only about one percent of the federal budget. US AID’s budget, at $40 billion is slightly more than half of that.

I could explain that most foreign aid money is spent in the United States. US AID typically purchases large amounts of American agricultural products to send to needy countries. Those purchases have stopped, which will negatively impact American farmers.

Likewise, US AID partners with Christian charities and ministries around the world, the agency’s closure will leave a gaping hole in charitable budgets and directly lead to starvation and illness in many poor countries.

As Christianity Today notes, “Most of USAID’s budget goes to grants for specific development projects, including at Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, World Relief, Catholic Relief Services, and many other faith-based groups. It supports local Christian health clinics in Malawi and groups providing orphan care.”

I could point out that Trump’s new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio (who, by way of full disclosure, I volunteered for in 2016), was a staunch supporter of US AID until a week or so ago. So were Melania and Ivanka Trump.

Even Elon Musk worked with US AID to deploy Starlink in places like Ukraine. US AID’s inspector general was investigating the agency’s relationship with Starlink prior to DOGE’s onslaught.

US AID is a tool of American soft power. It helps to build friendships and allies around the world while promoting American and Western values. If MAGA isolationists want to withdraw into our borders and ignore the rest of the world (except Gaza apparently), they can do it but it won’t make America great and China is ready to fill the void. In fact, China is already stepping up.

But none of this is the real issue. The real issue is that the Trump Administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE are trying to establish dominance over Congress, at least bypassing the legislature and possibly rendering it irrelevant.

The problem is that no president, not even Donald Trump has the authority to undo an act of Congress with an Executive Order. That includes both the laws establishing the agency (where the specific text of the law does matter) and its congressional appropriations.

Despite what you may have heard, US AID’s existence is rooted in congressional statutes. JFK originally created the agency with an Executive Order, which was authorized by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, but Congress cemented the agency’s existence as a separate entity from the State Department with a statute in 1998.

Additionally, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 prohibits the president from refusing to spend appropriated funds or shifting them to other items (with certain limited exceptions). The White House can’t just veto laws passed by Congress by not spending the money or shifting funds to more favored projects. The Constitution contains a veto process, and this ain’t it.

While I do have problems with some of the items that have been funded by US AID, the lawful process for dealing with these expenditures is to go back to Congress which is controlled by Republicans, and fix the problems in the new budget.

Donald Trump should know all this because unlawfully impounding funds is what led to his first impeachment. I have to wonder if Trump picked this budgetary fight out of spite because of his earlier experience with Congress.

With Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and the party singularly uninterested in holding Trump and/or Musk accountable, it will fall to the courts to preserve the American constitutional system. The judicial branch was created to be similar to the conservative in William F. Buckley’s famous phrase, standing “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop,’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

That’s also the role of the courts in times like this. With (almost) half the country cheering Trump’s abuses of power on, the courts have the duty to blow the whistle and stop the Administration’s actions where they exceed his lawful authority. The courts should be a roadblock to unlawful abuses of power.

To some extent, this is already happening. One of the first legal snags hit by the new old Administration was an injunction against Trump’s birthright citizenship EO. As I’ve explained in the past, Trump’s interpretation of birthright citizenship is blatantly unconstitutional and at least two courts have ruled against him so far. A federal judge has also blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury Department payment systems and another paused the buyout plan for government workers.

Look for more injunctions in the coming days and weeks, but the longer that Trump remains in power and the more judges that he appoints, the greater the chance that he will find loyalist judges who support his decrees over the law.

But not everything Trump does is unlawful and not everything is bad. Firing the heads of the Kennedy Center and putting himself in charge is awful but probably lawful, I’m not sorry to see government DEI programs go, but at the same time, it’s going too far to remove references to the Tuskegee Airmen from Air Force Basic Training (since reinstated) and references to Women in Leadership from NASA websites.

Even more disturbing are cuts, buyouts, and firings at defense intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and among the military leadership. At a time when the world is a tinder box and China is making aggressive moves toward Taiwan, Trump’s staffing cuts could dangerously weaken US preparedness. Trump’s new attorney general, Pam Bondi, also shut down a DOJ task force that targeted Russian oligarchs as one of her first acts. The massive personnel cuts are bloodless but are reminiscent of Stalin’s purges of experienced officers that left Russia woefully unprepared for WWII.

Elections do have consequences, but that does not mean that Trump gets to ignore Congress and existing law. Legal policies can still be bad, and there will also be plenty of constitutional but unwise ideas to deal with. It will take untold years to repair the lawful damage that Trump does over the next few years.

But Trump will continue to push the bounds of his power until and unless he is stopped. That has been his MO for a decade now. Even when he is stopped, he will push elsewhere, like squeezing a balloon causes it to bulge outward at another spot… until it pops.

And to make matters worse, Trump is using an unelected, unaccountable, pseudo-federal agency to push the bounds of his power. There is a lot that we don’t know about DOGE including whether its workers have passed security checks and exactly what they are doing. The potential security threat from DOGE could far exceed that of Hillary Clinton’s “homebrew” email server, but those concerns are quashed because DOGE is on the right team.

I’m aware that a lot of my readers don’t consider Trump’s actions to be predominantly bad, but they should consider that Executive Orders can be easily undone by the next Democratic president. And there will be another Democratic president unless Republicans end elections or at least stop them from being free and fair.

If you like how Trump is stretching presidential authority until it’s no longer recognizable to “own the libs,” you probably wouldn’t have liked it if Obama, Biden, or Harris did the same things. And you won’t like it when 2028 voters are sick of Republicans and elect a Democrat who pushes the bounds further but acts in a progressive direction.

Back in 2009, I thought that Democrats were ready for leadership by a strongman. I wasn’t necessarily wrong about that, but I was wrong in that Republicans got there first. The party that claimed to be constitutionalist would be more than happy to install The Donald as president for life. I’ve seen at least one “president for life sign” and Trump seems open to the idea. Some Republicans are already talking about amending the Constitution and Trump raised the prospect of a third term last week.

I’ve seen no evidence that more than one or two congressional Republicans would act to oppose Trump if he declared himself emperor. Just ask RFK.

The next four years are not going to be pretty, but just how bad things are going to get may be determined within the next few months. If the courts keep the president in check until the midterms and then the voters send a clear message by giving Democrats a majority (a likelihood in the House but a longer shot in the Senate), then we will hopefully emerge from Trump II with America in a recognizable state. But if the Supreme Court is no more willing to stand up to the would-be strongman than congressional Republicans, we are in deep trouble.

I usually avoid the trope of “the most important election of our lifetime,” but the 2026 midterms will be consequential. If Republicans keep hold on Congress and are allowed to rubber stamp the appointment MAGA loyalists to the courts, the days of our constitutional republic might well be numbered. Our check and balances and guardrails are being systematically dismantled.

There’s also the question of what will happen if Trump and his Republican backers simply refuse to accept unfavorable court decisions. Let’s all hope that it doesn’t come to that.

We will have an idea of which way events will break over the next few months to a year. Court decisions involving the trumped-up (the pun is a happy coincidence) allegations against US AID will likely be a bellwether for whether Trump will be allowed to run roughshod over the Republic. If he can bypass Congress here, it won’t be the last time.

If you’re a constitutionalist, you should be very nervous. If you’re a Trump supporter, maybe the alligator will eat you last.