Secretary of State Marco Rubio is one of my favorite people in politics. On Tuesday of this week, he was the guest of Donald Trump, Jr. on Trump’s podcast. They had a great conversation that covered a number of foreign policy topics. Rubio’s comments on Venezuela and Mexico, among others, are noteworthy. The State Department’s web site posted a transcript of the podcast, which I encourage you to check out.
For now, I think Rubio’s comments on the future of foreign aid are worth reproducing in their entirety:
I think that foreign aid is something that we need to do and we’re going to continue to do, but every dollar we spend in foreign aid has to achieve at least one of three objectives. It has to make America stronger, it has to make America more prosperous, or it has to make America safer. If the program doesn’t do one of those three things, it may be a great cause and I encourage the Gates Foundation or charities all over the world to take it up, but it has to be one of those three things.
I think the other big mistake that happened with foreign aid is we turned it into a tool to export our domestic policies of the far left. So the far left decided these are things that we think are good and it also became cultural imperialism. We began to use foreign aid not as a way to make America stronger, safer, more prosperous, but as a way to impose – impose – the domestic political agenda of the left onto foreign countries. And it became a vehicle for that.
I think the third thing that developed over time is what I call the foreign aid industrial complex. And I’m talking about dozens and dozens of these nongovernmental organizations, these NGOs, that were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars to run these programs on behalf of the U.S. Government. And it came out – and this is not me; Samantha Power would have said this – you have to spend – in order to get $12 million to people directly, you have to spend $100 million. You have to spend 100 million to get 12 million out to – directly, because you have to pay the NGO and then the subcontractor then the sub-sub and the sub-sub-sub. And before you know it, you’re paying Hamas to hand out food or whatever. And that has to stop and that has to end.
So we conducted a review of 6,000 programs, almost 6,000 programs, at USAID. We identified close to 900 that we are going to continue to do, either in their current form or amended. We canceled 5,000-some of those contracts, and now the goal is to bring all of those programs under the State Department so that we can directly review – because remember, USAID was separate from the State Department. They did whatever they wanted.
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Well, some of that’s been referred to the Justice Department to look at, but what I can tell you most definitely is that there are people that have made a lot of money by being part of the foreign aid industrial complex, by being part of this network of NGOs who do things. And then some of it, frankly, just didn’t make any sense, right? Like you – I just came back from a trip to the Caribbean where I went to Jamaica, I went to Guyana, and I went to Suriname – the Caribbean Basin. And their number one complaint is that USAID-funded NGOs didn’t partner with government, right? And then – and you can even go to embassies.
By the way, this is not really well understood. There’s always been tension between State Department and USAID, because there’s some ambassador that’s like, okay, I’m trying to get – we’re trying to get good relations. The foreign policy of the U.S. is to have good relations with the leader of this country. And then USAID, operating out of their embassy, is, like, funding the political opposition of that leader.
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Another example, right, these sorts of things that you see. But in the case of the Caribbean, it’s like, okay, they want to spend all this money on these literacy programs out in the countryside – which we’re not against as a government – we’re fine with that. The problem is that we can’t even get to those schools, kids can’t even go to school, until we first get rid of the gangs that are threatening kids from going to school. So our number one priority, if you want to help us, help us with what we need. Don’t help us with what you want, which is to get into these rural schools, where now you start indoctrinating people on the social priorities of the far left in the United States. It’s part of that exporting of it.
So we’re going to realign foreign aid, so we’re actually going to be helping countries with what they generally need. And a lot of these countries, it’s security assistance. What they want to do is they want to be able to build up police departments and security forces so they can become self-sufficient at taking on these gangs and not require foreign aid in the future. The best foreign aid is foreign aid that ultimately ends because it’s successful, because you go in, you help somebody, they build up their capacity, and now they can handle it themselves, and they don’t need foreign aid anymore. That’s what foreign aid should be geared towards, not perpetual – these programs exist for 25 years. If a foreign aid program has been going on for 25 years, it has not achieved its purpose because it hasn’t solved the problem.
