During his speech to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday, President Trump listed a number of foreign assistance projects he thought demonstrated “appalling waste.” Below is his list of examples and a little more context on what the projects were designed to achieve.
“$45 million for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma.”
The USAID Lincoln Scholarship program is (or was) “investing in the professional education of approximately 135 young Myanmar leaders from diverse backgrounds. Selected applicants will receive a Lincoln Scholarship to obtain a master’s degree from a U.S. university in fields of study that are critical to Myanmar’s development. The program will empower scholars with the technical knowledge, leadership skills, and respect for diversity to address Myanmar’s development challenges.”
“$40 million to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants.”
A project in Colombia that was helping to improve lives for Venezuelan refugees and host communities in Colombia by supporting businesses and job creation.
“$8 million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho.”
I cannot find a matching contract record (nor does the Lesotho government or its largest LGBTQ advocacy group know about it).
“$60 million for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America.”
The IPACE or Indigenous Peoples and Afro-Colombian Empowerment Activity “partners directly with ethnic-led national and local organizations to strengthen their existing initiatives and elevate their priorities on the national agenda to close gaps in racial disparity … IPACE works with institutions and organizations in implementing and monitoring progress on the 2016 Peace Accord’s ethnic chapter to ensure an inclusive peacebuilding process in Colombia.”
“$32 million for a left-wing propaganda operation in Moldova.”
I cannot find a record of this. This DOGE tweet notes $22 million for "inclusive and participatory political process" in Moldova. This is likely related to work ensuring free and fair elections in the country.
“$10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique.”
This is potentially referring to a grant to an organization in the country. It is worth noting how powerful a tool male circumcision is in the fight against AIDS. Reaching targeted male circumcision rates in Mozambique would have prevented 220,000 HIV infections 2011–2025.
“$20 million for the Arab “Sesame Street” in the Middle East.”
This appears to be a grant to support Ahlan Simsim Iraq, which does produce a TV show—but the grant was for a separate five-year early childhood development project that reached hundreds of thousands of children. (As it happens the TV show has been evaluated across the world and found to produce “significant positive effects of exposure to the program, aggregated across learning outcomes, and within each of the three outcome categories: cognitive outcomes, including literacy and numeracy; learning about the world, including health and safety knowledge; social reasoning and attitudes toward out-groups.”)
“$1.5 million for voter confidence in Liberia.”
The Liberia Domestic Election Observation activity backed evidence-based responsive election observation and reporting to the public.
“$14 million for social cohesion in Mali.”
The USAID Community Stabilization Activity in Mali (and this contract to deliver it) is designed to reduce conflict in the country using peacebuilding tools like mediation alongside cash transfers.
“$250,000 to increase vegan local climate action innovation in Zambia”
This project supported USAID’s “direct relationship with new, grassroots, community-based, and/or private sector organizations to support climate smart innovations. Emphasis will be placed on locally led, locally developed, innovative, risk-embracing concepts that engage the private sector and communities in climate-friendly economic growth.” I’m not sure where the vegan bit came from.
“$42 million for social and behavior change in Uganda.”
This project was designed to encourage more women to get prenatal checks, more parents to feed their kids varied diets and have them sleep under bed nets, more high-risk people to get HIV testing, and a range of other socially beneficial behaviors.
“$14 million for improving public procurement in Serbia.”
This project was designed “to bring public procurement processes increasingly in line with international standards, working on sustainable tools and approaches for analyzing procurement data, identifying points of increased risk of corruption and wrongdoings, and providing capacity building for risk mitigation.”
“$47 million for improving learning outcomes in Asia.”
This project was an umbrella grant to support USAID offices working on education across the region in “conducting impact evaluations and student learning assessments; developing studies, guides and policy briefs; designing and conducting targeted analyses on a range of sub-sectoral or thematic issues,” amongst other things.
Opinions will differ on the efficacy of some of these approaches and the use of US taxpayer dollars to fund them. But calling these activities “an appalling waste” surely seems a stretch. Nor does a list of disliked projects worth about 0.5 percent of the US foreign assistance budget seem to justify the current gutting of US foreign aid as a whole.
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