The federal agency’s work to improve lives around the world helps keep the U.S. safer, too.

By Allyn Writesel
March 7, 2025

The United States Agency for International Development has been villainized by Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, two men who have no idea what it was created to do, whom it serves, where most of its money goes and what benefits the U.S. reaps from operating it.

If they wanted to listen, I could enlighten them a little.

John F. Kennedy created USAID in 1961, the same year he created the Peace Corps. Many former Peace Corps volunteers contracted with USAID after they completed their two years of service. USAID recruiters sought volunteers’ skills in speaking the local language, respecting local customs, advising farmers in agriculture and educating in maternal and child health.

This is the path I took. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger from 1975 to 1977, I learned to speak Hausa fluently and worked to provide health education. In 1986, I was hired as a contractor to help improve nutrition among rural residents of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I joined a team of Congolese educators and contract managers and four Americans experts; my job was to predict food shortages and prevent famine.

We conducted feasibility studies of prospective projects and evaluations of those already funded. My team delivered farm tools; purchased a hand-turned mill, baby chicks, and fish to stock a pond; and paid the salary of a guard to watch over the well-stocked pond. Villagers’ access to nutritious foods increased significantly. For example, the hand-turned mill ground corn that was too tough to hand-pound; it contained much more protein than the easily hand-pounded cassava or manioc flour. The increase in protein prevented malnutrition in children. In the project’s education office, Congolese teachers trained elementary school teachers to teach the nutrition curriculum they had written.

In the town where I lived and worked, Kikwit, Ebola broke out six years later.

What Musk and Trump do not understand is that the agency’s aid to fight disease helped stop Ebola from spreading to the U.S. from the west coast of Africa. Former President George W. Bush funded USAID-run HIV clinics in Africa. USAID famine and disaster relief saves lives and stabilizes communities.

Musk and Trump do not know how much people around the world depend on the programs USAID sponsors. Foreign aid is not money spent for no good reason. It is not fat to be trimmed.

Allyn Writesel lives in Albany.