Trump’s foreign aid cuts are a boon for dictators in China, Venezuela and Cuba

Andres Oppenheimer

The dictators of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and several other countries must be celebrating President Trump’s plan to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which has been helping pro-democracy and human rights groups in Latin America and around the world for decades.

Trump’s decision will force many civil-society organizations in Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador and other Latin American authoritarian countries to shut down or drastically reduce their operations, leaders of some of these groups told me.

“The suspension of U.S. foreign aid has been a gift to Latin America’s authoritarian rulers,” says Tamara Taraciuk, a civil-rights expert with the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington, D.C. “In several countries, these groups are often the last, if not the only thing standing in the way of the government.”

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his allies in the region have long attacked USAID as an alleged U.S. tool to destabilize their regimes. But the fact is that USAID funding for Latin America’s pro-democracy groups has been minuscule compared to what Venezuela, Cuba, Russia and Iran spend on foreign aid and political propaganda in the region.

While most of USAID’s foreign aid has gone toward fighting malaria, tuberculosis or providing food for starving children in 160 countries around the world, a portion of it has gone to help defend democracy and human rights.

Last year, USAID earmarked $211 million for Venezuela, including $33 million for “democracy, human rights and governance” watchdog groups, according to a Feb. 5 report i n the U.S.-government funded Voice of America website.

Several Venezuelan civil society group used these funds to monitor the 2024 elections, organize an independent vote count and collect copies of the voting tallies. That allowed the international community to verify that opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia had won by a landslide. Maduro stole the election and proclaimed himself re-elected, without ever showing any voting tallies.

The leader of a major Venezuelan pro-democracy organization, who asked not to be identified for security reasons, told me that his group depended on USAID funds for 75% of its income. The funds did not come directly from USAID, but from third party contractors such as the International Republican Institute, he said.

“Trump is doing what Maduro has not been able to do — choking civil society,” the leader of the group told me. “He is paving the way for Latin America to be filled with [China’s] Confucius Institutes and other Chinese and Russian foreign aid organizations.”

USAID was created by then-President John F. Kennedy in 1961 in an effort to counter influence form the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. Since then, it has been a major tool to project America’s “soft power” around the world, especially amid a growing Chinese presence in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Trump administration says USAID wasted a lot of money, although the agency accounted for less than 1% of the U.S. federal budget. The agency’s near 14,000 worldwide staff will be reduced to about 300, and hundreds of programs will be cut, U.S. officials say.

Trump has said that USAID is run by “lunatic” leftist radicals, and mega-billionaire and Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk called it a “criminal organization.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that what remains of USAID will be taken over by the State Department.

Ironically, Rubio used to be a major supporter of USAID. As recently as in 2022, Rubio urged the Biden administration in a letter to prioritize USAID’s funding as a key tool to “counter the Chinese Communist Party’s expanding global influence,” CNN reported this week.

What happens next? Civil rights groups in Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and El Salvador say they are still hopeful that Rubio will issue waivers to allow them to continue receiving at least some USAID funds. Rubio will probably want to do that, but it’s an open question whether Trump and Musk will give him the funding for it.

But civil rights leaders say the damage has already been done, because all foreign aid has been suspended for 90 days pending a revision of the agency’s expenditures. It may take many more months — or years — for a skeleton staff of employees to navigate the bureaucratic procedures to reinstate existing foreign aid programs.

In addition, pro-democracy groups fear that Musk’s army of 20-somethings examining USAID’s contracts may disclose the names of the organizations receiving U.S. funding, putting their staffs in danger of immediate arrest in countries where accepting USAID money would be treason.

The suspension of funding and potential disclosure of groups receiving U.S. funds “will have a devastating effect on civil society organizations and the democratic opposition in countries such as Venezuela,” the Inter-American Dialogue’s Taraciuk told me.

I agree. Just like when Trump recently helped legitimize Maduro by sending White House special envoy Richard Grenell to meet with the Venezuelan dictator and pose in smiling pictures with him, Trump’s de facto abandonment of pro-democracy groups in the hemisphere is a major blunder. China, Maduro and their friends couldn’t be happier.