No Soup For You: Project 2025’s Foreign Aid Program
The Republican National Convention’s keynote speaker for Wednesday was Project 2025’s lead author, Tom Homan. He was introduced as the former director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The man who ran the government’s deportation force under President Trump vowed to restore order to the border and to begin ousting some of the millions of immigrants in the United States, warning:
“You’d better start packing now because you’re going home.”
If you had doubts about what a Trump administration would look like, now is the time to realize that it’s already scripted out.
Once those 12 million or so immigrants arrive “home,” perhaps they’ll learn about the new frontiers of US aid.
Project 2025: Agency for International Development by Max Primorac*
USAID is charged with sending non-military assistance to developing countries and areas impacted by natural disasters.
Its contemporary projects in health care and climate change mitigation have been at the forefront of the day to day business of projecting soft power for the US in developing nations around the world.
Emergency assistance in war-torn areas has come under some scrutiny as nationalist politicians have raised objections, citing US aid as tacit support for one side or the other. Aid for Palestinians has been disrupted thanks to allegations of Hamas involvement with aid workers; some on the far right say aid to Ukraine will only prolong the conflict triggered by a Russian invasion.
It is the contention of the author in Project 2025’s commentary on USAID, that the Biden administration has used foreign aid “to promote a radical ideology that is politically divisive at home and harms our global standing.”
What the treatise is proposing amounts to a radical reordering of the agency, one that prioritizes pro-life values, conservative foreign policy objectives, and funds aligned faith based groups.
This action plan includes, as they all do in Project 2025, by enumerating the various ways political appointees can be placed in key positions to carry out the president’s agenda.
The big no-nos of assistance in Project 2025 are climate change, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Agenda, assorted multilateral aid groups (U.N. WHO, etc), and health programs inclusive of reproductive care.
In order to eliminate what the author calls discrimination against men, all USAID communications would scrub the terms “gender”, “gender equality”, “gender equity”, “gender diverse individuals”, “gender aware”, “gender sensitive”, “abortion”, “reproductive health” and “sexual and reproductive rights”.
Steps to be taken, according to P2025, are:
Blocking or eliminating aid programs to organizations deemed not sufficiently anti-abortion.
Dismantle USAID’s DEI apparatus; remove DEI requirements from contract and grant tenders and awards; issue a directive to cease promotion of the DEI agenda, including the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda
Advancing international religious freedom by ensuring that cooperating religious groups are in line with the tenets of Christian Nationalist ideology.
Integrate religious training into all the agency’s programs, including the five-year Country Development and Coordination Strategies
Aligning foreign aid to foreign policy; means no soup for you if the designated authorities decide support of U.S. policy is insufficient.
Aid now helping poorer countries respond to climate impacts would instead be used to boost coal, oil and gas.
Move away from large awards to large, “corrupt” UN agencies, global NGOs, and contractors to local, especially faith-based, entities already operating on the ground
Leverage USAID resources to promote private-sector solutions to end the need for future foreign aid.
Build on a strong baseline of Trump Administration reforms to counter Communist China’s strategy of world domination
Maximizing the branding of assistance to ensure the U.S. is recognized as a donor. (American flags on everything.)
This section of P2025 also provides commentary on countries who have or are receiving foreign aid.
Nations where foreign assistance projects that are “doing more harm than good” include Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Burma, Yazidis in Northern Iraq. Funding for those regions would be eliminated. Future funding for humanitarian crises would need to include a “Journey to Self-Reliance” exit strategy.
Most Americans believe that foreign aid is a large part of the nation’s expenditures.
From a Brookings Institute Report:
Opinion polls consistently report that Americans believe foreign aid is in the range of 25 percent of the federal budget. When asked how much it should be, they say about 10 percent. In fact, at $39.2 billion for fiscal year 2019, foreign assistance is less than 1 percent of the federal budget.
As is true with nearly everything about a Trump-envisioned administration, the underlying precept is “what’s in it for me.” The impact of Project 2025’s approach to foreign aid would be imposing Christian Nationalist values on developing countries.
Having said that, we should also keep in mind that past administrations’ foreign policy actions have centered on US values and policy goals, sometimes with disastrous results, like in Haiti, where an influx of dollars is related to the number of refugees fleeing the country.
For a different point of view, try reading the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs history of US aid programs.
*Agency for International Development author Max Primorac
Former Chief Operating Officer and Assistant to the Administrator, Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, USAID; also Director, Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy, The Heritage Foundation.
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Monday: The General Welfare - Agriculture & Education Departments
Previously:
(Intro) Digging Deep into Project 2025 - (a multi-part Series)
Going Deep into Project 2025 - Partisan Priorities for Civil Servants
Project 2025: Christian Soldiers Marching Off to Land Wars
Homeland Security’s Authoritarian Role in Project 2025
What Can You Do For Trump Today? Project 2025’s Diplomats, Spies and Spokespersons
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Thursday’s Noteworthy News Links
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The Bible According to the RNC by Brian Kaylor at A Public Witness
With media attention focused on last weekend’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump and on the Republican National Convention this week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a Trump campaign spokesperson went on Fox News Tuesday (July 16) from the convention hall to talk about the state of the campaign. After claiming “the Left is godless,” Caroline Sunshine joined preachers and Republican politicians in saying God miraculously saved Trump during the shooting. But then with the numerological zeal of a Swiftie, she added a biblical lens through which to consider the moment.
“President Trump survived as they said [with] divine intervention,” she said. “The bullet pierced President Trump at 6:11 p.m. Ephesians 6:11 tells us, ‘Put on the full armor of God, so you can stand against the devil and his schemes.’”
Putting aside her perhaps unrealized implication that God did not merely save Trump but actively orchestrated the attack to occur at that precise time to line up with the “armor of God” verse, this palm-reading approach to the Bible is theological malpractice. Not only were the chapter and verse numbers added centuries after the texts, but there are dozens of books with an 11th verse in the 6th chapter. Thus, such an approach is so malleable as to allow someone to flip through until they find one to fit their preconceived beliefs. That’s not God speaking in mysterious ways like Miss Cleo; that’s abusing the Bible for politics. We could just as easily — and stupidly — turn to Amos 6:11 to interpret this as a sign predicting the fall of the house of Trump: “For the LORD commands: The large house will be smashed to pieces, and the small house to rubble.”
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AI’s ‘Oppenheimer moment’: autonomous weapons enter the battlefield via The Guardian
Growing conflicts around the world have acted as both accelerant and testing ground for AI warfare, experts say, while making it even more evident how unregulated the nascent field is. The expansion of AI in conflict has shown that national militaries have an immense appetite for the technology, despite how unpredictable and ethically fraught it can be. The result is a multibillion-dollar AI arms race that is drawing in Silicon Valley giants and states around the world.
The refrain among diplomats and weapons manufacturers is that AI-enabled warfare and autonomous weapons systems have reached their “Oppenheimer moment”, a reference to J Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb during the second world war. Depending on who is invoking the physicist, the phrase is either a triumphant prediction of a new, peaceful era of American hegemony or a grim warning of a horrifically destructive power.
Altogether, the US military has more than 800 active AI-related projects and requested $1.8bn worth of funding for AI in the 2024 budget alone. The flurry of investment and development has also intensified longstanding debates about the future of conflict. As the pace of innovation speeds ahead, autonomous weapons experts warn that these systems are entrenching themselves into militaries and governments around the world in ways that may fundamentally change society’s relationship with technology and war.
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It Doesn’t Take a Conspiracy Theory to Explain Law Enforcement Incompetence via Mother Jones
I can’t really begrudge a certain level of disbelief from people who are understandably shaken. (Do you know how paranoid the response was to the Lincoln assassination?) But much like the condition of the DC jail, there’s also a reality waiting to be acknowledged: Yes, law enforcement really can be that bad. The Secret Service has a huge budget, incredible amounts of training and ability, and a huge list of recent fuck-ups. In 2017, a guy jumped the White House fence and wasn’t spotted for 15 minutes. In 2014, a guy got into the White House with a knife. A few years before that, two complete randos crashed a state dinner. There has been a prostitution scandal, and a drinking scandal. The Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig wrote a whole book about the crisis at the agency.
And if the Secret Service can whiff like this and act like that, you better believe that local law enforcement agencies can. Just consider how many agencies and officers—with how many hours of special training and millions in funding—failed to respond to the mass shooting at a high school in Uvalde, Texas in 2022. Or how often they kick down the wrong door and shoot the wrong person’s dog—or the wrong person.
If a close encounter with the prison system could turn some right-wingers into reformers, perhaps a kajillion-dollar security failure might cause a few more people to question the competence and infallibility of armed agents of the state. Or maybe they’ll just settle on a familiar scapegoat
