The Trump Administration's Humpty Dumpty Foreign Policy

On begging for forgiveness versus asking for permission.

Photo by Jasmin Egger on Unsplash

In 2019 I published a short paper in the Journal of Politics entitled “Present at the Destruction,” evaluating Donald Trump’s first-term efforts to remake the foreign policy bureaucracy. My thesis paragraph:

This article argues that the Trump administration has largely failed in embedding its foreign policy ideas into new or existing foreign policy institutions. Trump’s brand of populism has succeeded more in the enervation of existing institutions dedicated to liberal internationalism than in the creation of populist alternatives. Through a mixture of intention and incompetence, the Trump administration has succeeded in weakening foreign policy bureaucracies. While the institutional foundations for populism are likely to remain weak in the future, this administration appears poised to succeed in eroding the capabilities of existing institutions, making any post-Trump restoration of liberal internationalism more difficult. This suggests that the literature on bureaucratic control cannot treat all ideas equally. Some ideas are more likely to thrive in a deinstitutionalized environment than others.

It seems fitting to examine this hypothesis further today, given what the Trump administration is doing to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Trump’s attack on USAID embodies the populist urge to destroy institutions perceived as antithetical to their Jacksonian worldview. But it also exemplifies Elon Musk’s Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break shit” — that it is easier to take action and then beg for forgiveness rather than ask permission in the first place.

Maybe that ethos works in the private sector. When it comes to political institutions, however, it creates a Humpty Dumpty problem: all the foreign policy horses and all the national security professionals can’t put this back together again.

Let’s start with what is being broken. The sole page that currently appears on the U.S. Agency for International Development’s website leads with the following: “On Friday, February 7, 2025, at 11:59 pm (EST) all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs. Essential personnel expected to continue working will be informed by Agency leadership by Thursday, February 6, at 3:00pm (EST).” This confirmed earlier reporting by ABC News, the New York Times and Reuters of the Trump administration’s intention to essentially fold USAID earlier this week.

Let’s be clear at the outset: this is both a legal abomination and a policy disaster. When the likes of Belarus, Nicaragua, and Russia are cheering on a U.S. foreign policy move, that’s a good indicator that it’s a fiasco.

So why, exactly, is the Trump administration doing this? Well, the State Department issued this piss-poor attempt at an explainer:

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has long strayed from its original mission of responsibly advancing American interests abroad, and it is now abundantly clear that significant portions of USAID funding are not aligned with the core national interests of the United States.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has a question: how is this claim about USAID “abundantly clear”? Is it because Elon Musk said USAID is “evil” and a “criminal organization”? I hope not, since Musk’s assertions about USAID lack empirical foundation. Is it because the Trump White House claims it to be true? Their claims have also been exposed as bogus.

The “savvy” Democratic strategists talking to Politico suggest that Trump has declared war on USAID because it’s politically popular:

Relaunching the resistance to defend one of the least popular corners of the federal budget could be a monster miscalculation — and some prominent Democrats told me they have serious strategic reservations about how their party is fighting back.

When I asked veteran strategist David Axelrod whether Democrats were “walking into a trap” on defending foreign aid, he literally finished my sentence.

“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’” he said. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”

Rahm Emanuel — the former House leader, Chicago mayor and diplomat — told me much the same: “You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch. And my view is — while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador — that’s not the hill I’m going to die on,” he said.

No doubt, foreign aid rarely if ever polls well. But that is because poll after poll also shows Americans believe that anywhere from a quarter to a third of the entire federal budget is devoted to foreign aid — when, as Paul Krugman noted earlier this week, USAID’s entire budget is less than one percent of all federal spending:

Source: the Congressional Budget Office Congressional Research Service via Krugman

Most survey research reveals that, once respondents are informed about these numbers, a solid majority of Americans want to increase the foreign aid budget.

Now it could be argued that in the MAGA times we are living in, this sort of high-falutin’ kind of argument doesn’t play. One of the effects of cutting of almost all USAID spending, however, is that it flips the script on public sympathies. When USAID is funded, the media coverage often gravitates towards examples of wasteful spending. When USAID is shuttered, the coverage flips to reporting out on all the great things that USAID does, and the ways in which the abrupt aid freeze generates a ton of collateral damage.

Which is a polite way of saying that this Trump administration move will needlessly kill people.

Think I am exaggerating? The New York Times’ Stephanie Nolen produced some of the receipts last week:

Lifesaving health initiatives and medical research projects have shut down around the world in response to the Trump administration’s 90-day pause on foreign aid and stop-work orders.

In Uganda, the National Malaria Control Program has suspended spraying insecticide into village homes and ceased shipments of bed nets for distribution to pregnant women and young children, said Dr. Jimmy Opigo, the program’s director.

Medical supplies, including drugs to stop hemorrhages in pregnant women and rehydration salts that treat life-threatening diarrhea in toddlers, cannot reach villages in Zambia because the trucking companies transporting them were paid through a suspended supply project of the United States Agency for International Development, U.S.A.I.D.

Dozens of clinical trials in South Asia, Africa and Latin America have been suspended. Thousands of people enrolled in the studies have drugs, vaccines and medical devices in their bodies but no longer have access to continuing treatment or to the researchers who were supervising their care….

The programs that have frozen or folded over the past six days supported frontline care for infectious disease, providing treatments and preventive measures that help avert millions of deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases. They also presented a compassionate, generous image of the United States in countries where China has increasingly competed for influence.

Nolen’s follow-up reporting demonstrates the sheer idiocy of how this freeze has been implemented. Her best example:

In England, about 100 people have been inoculated with an experimental malaria vaccine in two clinical trials. Now, they no longer have access to the clinical trial staff if that vaccine were to cause an adverse reaction in their bodies. The trial is an effort to find a next-generation vaccine better than the one now used in Africa; that shot protects children against about a third of malaria cases, but researchers hoped to find a vaccine that offered much more protection. Malaria remains a top global killer of children; 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023, the latest figure available.

Had the trial not been frozen, the participants would be coming to a clinic routinely to be monitored for adverse physical effects, and to have blood and cell samples taken to see whether the vaccine was working. The participants are meant to be followed for two years to assess the vaccine’s safety.

A scientist who worked on the trial said she hoped that partners at the University of Oxford, where it was being conducted, were shuffling staff to respond if any participant fell ill. But she was fired last week and no longer has access to any information about the trial….

“It’s unethical to test anything in humans without taking it to the full completion of studies,” she said. “You put them at risk for no good reason.”

The damage has been done, however. For the Elon Musks of the world, this is fine. He has said at various times since November that if he and his DOGE team overreaches in budget cuts and hiring freezes, they will simply course correct and fix their mistake.

To repeat a theme that will apply to much of Trump’s second term, however, what might work outside of government usually works horribly inside of government. Some actions are path dependent and irreversible. As the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie explained earlier this week, “[as] opponents strategize their response, it is vital that they see the important truth that there is no going back to the old status quo. President Trump and Elon Musk really have altered the structure of things. They’ve taken steps that cannot be so easily reversed.”

Even if USAID funding is restored, the mechanisms to implement it have been eviscerated. Six months from now, the folks who have been fired will have moved on. State capacity has been destroyed; rebuilding it will be next to impossible. This is the asymmetry of Musk and Trump; both of them are great at disruption and God-awful at institutionalization.

Clay Risen explained in Politico that the last time the federal government attempted to purge its bureaucracy for bullshit political reasons, the result was a crippling of U.S. policy competence:

The widespread political purges of the early 1950s echo clearly today. Seventy years ago, the reasonable pretext of hunting Soviet agents opened the way to a yearslong, paranoid campaign, motivated by outlandish conspiracy theories, that destroyed countless careers but did nothing to improve America’s security.

Today, a stated desire to check the excesses of diversity, equity and inclusion programs has already been used to justify whirlwind firings and closures of entire federal offices. So it may be wise to consider the consequences of that previous era of purges, part of what came to be known as the “Red Scare.”

At a time of intense geopolitical competition, the United States kneecapped itself, removing thousands of valuable employees and forcing those who remained into unhappy conformity. It is hard not to see the same mistake being repeated today….

While it is impossible to quantify a counterfactual, the cost of the anti-communist purges of the 1950s was clearly enormous and played out not just over the subsequent years but over decades. For instance, had expertise not been purged and dissent not been punished so severely across the government during the early 1950s, wiser heads might well have raised the right objections to America’s short-sighted anti-communism in East Asia, above all its rush to intervene in Vietnam. Does the Trump administration run the same risk of short-sightedness today?

I’m a political scientist — my day job is all about making conditional statements about the state of the world. As in “this move is unlikely to work” or “this policy initiative is likely to increase costs” or “this strategy has a decent chance of failure.” Most social scientists hedge because the world is complex and stochastic in nature.

The destruction of USAID? I don’t need to hedge. This is an own-goal that helps America’s rivals and harms the national interest. And the damage will be permanent.