>All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives.

You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor.

It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot.

It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.

1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.

2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget

3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.

4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.

The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman.

Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.

It's quite likely that, sprinkled in among the idealistic helpers of the third world, were some number of CIA agents. For good or ill.

(the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)

Was the statement that over 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?

It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.

>it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives

A check of pretty much any UN vote shows that this was a completely and utterly ineffective method then.

Example: https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overw...

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Did you look at specifically some of the items the money was being wasted on?

If anyone believes that USAID was primarily foreign aid, then they have fallen for the lie.

If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.