Elon the Terrible and the folly of bullying USAID
Anyone who has been a member of an internet forum will know the kind of person who always ends up taking over: he’s not just ignorant but aggressively ill-informed; he’s arrogant; he mistakes being a bully for being funny. The whole place eventually adopts his personality, decent posters slip away so you do too. You’ll miss the chat and the companionship but the thing that made the forum worthwhile is gone. It’s sad, but it’s not real life.
Except now it is.
The president of the United States has given that person free rein to commandeer the forum but it’s not possible just to log off. Elon Musk’s tiresome jokes, gross politics, and crass ignorance are no longer confined to X, or even the Oval Office, but have been unleashed onto the world’s most vulnerable people. “Corruption is development in reverse, devastating the outcomes we seek across all sectors, eroding the rule of law, and undermining citizen trust in governing institutions and processes,” said a (now grimly ironic) mission statement from USAID, issued just two years ago. A statement that now can’t be read on its web site because Musk has shut it down.
He has used X and his status as “Special Government Employee” to dismiss the world’s most important aid agency – in words that presumably landed well with his acolytes on X but signified nothing to me – as “a radical-left political psy op.” Just from my own knowledge, I can say this vandalism will benefit no one but America’s enemies and undermine its friends.
A FORCE FOR GOOD
Take, for instance, the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv. It has done more than anyone to cement honesty in Ukraine – which, a decade ago, was arguably the most corrupt nation in Europe – and was 20% funded by USAID. Or the Journalism Development Network, which has exposed corruption and misgovernance throughout Eastern Europe and beyond, its reporting helping considerably to prevent the Kremlin from buying influence. It too was funded by USAID. These projects aren’t just important for informing curious people, banks’ compliance departments rely on news reports like these to assess whether a potential client is a crook or an entrepreneur. Without the journalism that USAID funded, the world’s anti-money-laundering guardians will be blind.
And that’s not all. The Kurdish guards of a camp for former Islamic State fighters and their families are able to keep it safe, and its inmates fed, thanks to money from USAID. Here’s a USAID-funded programme to combat corruption in sea ports; here’s a story about a radio station in Afghanistan that also received USAID funding. USAID helped spread the practice of democracy into places it had never been. The agency’s $43 billion annual budget may sound like a lot, but it’s less than Musk paid for Twitter before he trashed it, and it’s barely a fifth of the increase in his own personal wealth in just the last twelve months.
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, NOT POLITICS
Of course, not everything USAID has done has been ideal. But there is an incredible degree of idiocy in failing to appreciate that the cheapest and easiest way to win arguments is not to have them in the first place. USAID is the world’s single largest donor for humanitarian causes. Spending money to win friends is a good investment.
“Elon Musk is the world’s wealthiest man and right now he seems to be calling the shots with decisions that are literally going to be life or death for the world’s poorest people,” said Giff Johnson, the laconic and wise editor of the Marshall Islands Journal, the leading newspaper in a country that is both very aid dependent and very strategically located. Where the United States steps back, China will step forward. “It’s an opening for anybody else who wants to fill the gap, I suppose, until Washington decides what it is doing.”
On top of all this, the Department of Justice has disbanded Task Force KleptoCapture, which was part of an international effort to make Vladimir Putin’s corrupt allies and officials pay the cost of the Ukraine war. Oh, and it’s decided not to investigate foreign intervention in US politics.
It is beginning to feel a little like the United States is changing sides here. Or maybe it already has?
THE COST OF HAVING PRINCIPLES
Also changing sides, have been the billionaires coalescing around Trump, particularly Jeff Bezos once described as a “woke philanthropist” for his funding of climate organisations and tuition-free preschools.
In 1947, Time magazine reported on a 37-year-old Japanese judge called Yoshitada Yamaguchi who, too poorly-paid to live on his salary and too honourable to break the law, starved to death. “It is horrible these days to be married to an honest man,” his widow said.
I remembered that story when reading about how Bezos’ charitable foundation had cut funding for the world’s leading climate standard setter, apparently in order to avoid annoying Donald Trump. “Obviously Jeff Bezos and the tech companies have changed compared to eight years ago,” one source told the FT. It is clearly not reasonable to expect people to starve to death rather than betray the needs of the society they live in, but honestly you’d have thought a billionaire might be willing to go without his elevenses to stand up for some principles? What is the point of having all those commas on your bank statement if you roll over like a whipped dog when someone threatens to say something mean to you?
How different Bezos, and his flexible principles, are from the likes of Guatemalan lawyer Virginia Laparra Rivas, who dedicated her career to fighting corruption and organised crime. She won a prize in London last week for her work and her courage. After five years of harassment, Laparra was imprisoned for two years in 2022 after being convicted of abusing her authority as head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity in Quetzaltenango, in a process that was widely condemned.
“I wonder how many of us who speak about and act in support of the rule of law in the UK so confidently would have the bravery and the principles to do so in a country such as Guatemala,” asked senior judge David Neuberger in a speech at the awards ceremony.
Or indeed in Washington DC right now?
NO FISH TOO SMALL TO FRY
And speaking of the courage required to take on the powerful. By the time you read this, Transparency International will have published its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, and there will be all the usual hoopla about how Denmark has gone up, South Sudan has gone down, and – oh dear – under Donald Trump, the United States has slipped to – I don’t know – maybe thirtieth? Whatever the actual scores, there will be a map showing Europe and North America in a friendly yellow, while Africa and Asia will be an angry red, just like last year and the year before that.
Please ignore it. The index is meaningless nonsense, in which “corrupt” is just a synonym for poor. And it does real harm, since the CPI’s metric filters into so many of the ways that aid agencies make funding decisions, and companies decide whether to make investments or not. I’m convinced the only reason TI keeps producing it is because everyone talks about it so if we stop, maybe they will too.
A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.