Local opinion: The heroic projects of USAID

Elon Musk’s gleeful claim of “feeding USAID into the wood chipper” and right-wing editorials supporting his actions are based on false images of this important agency. Until January 2025, USAID was the single greatest source of humanitarian aid in the world, providing life-saving medical treatment, emergency food aid and shelter in war zones, and physical infrastructure like roads as well as digital capacity throughout the poorest regions of the world. Claims of a leftist agenda are simply nonsense. USAID does not only save lives abroad. By promoting peace and economic security in regions that could otherwise become sources of conflict, terrorism and refugees, USAID protects the interests of the United States.

I first learned about USAID as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala. My job was encouraging farmers to plant trees for fruit and firewood to prevent deforestation. A lot of the work was what you might call climate resiliency — building terraces and barriers to prevent erosion, digging water-infiltration ditches to store the precious water that fell rarely but in deluges, reforesting unstable bare slopes. I also spent time with the children in the villages, growing tree nurseries and teaching them how to graft fruit trees.

My favorite place was a little village called Pila Escondida (hidden sink), a hillside cluster of palm-thatched houses around a central spring. The only solid structure was the school, the center of the village and a handy shelter during the torrential rains. I remember sitting on the school porch with a cheerful little girl named Maria de los Angeles (Marilu for short). She was fingering a metal plaque on the wall. The first in her family to learn to read, she slowly spelled out “Oo-sigh-eed. What is that?” I looked and realized she was reading USAID with a Spanish accent. I explained that USAID was a part of the U.S. government and had helped build the school. Her eyes were wide. “They built a school? For me?” She took USAID support personally, as a sign that people far away believed in her.

USAID funded other projects in Pila Escondida through private charity organizations like Heifer International and Foster Parents Plan. These organizations get some of their funds through private donations, but USAID is a major funder and until now was more reliable than many individual donors. I helped with a USAID Women in Development project (a gender business equity goal) in which the women of the village received training and then parcels of 12 chicks specifically bred for egg production in that region. The women built little coops and vaccinated the chickens against the common diseases. (I helped with the vaccinating, which was traumatic for both me and the chickens.)

The women were delighted with the high level of egg production, and everyone had more protein in their diets. The extra eggs were taken to the town market 2 miles away every week. I remember the leader of the women’s group, Dona Natividad, walking with several dozen raw eggs balanced in a basket on her head. The cash from the egg business was used to buy shoes for the children, a luxury previously out of reach for many families.

I wasn’t involved in some of the truly heroic USAID projects, like George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to combat global HIV/AIDS that has saved over 25 million lives in Africa, or the Maternal and Child Health programs that have saved tens of thousands of babies and repaired or prevented horrendous birth complications known as fistulas in those babies’ mothers. All I know is that USAID is worth every penny. Are we really so impoverished as a nation that we are willing to let millions of people die so we can maybe reduce federal spending by one-half a percentage point?