They say that the most effective disinfectant is light. In that case, the American government appears to be going through a deep cleansing, and the revelations about USAID and government spending have actually been enlightening!
Until recently I believe only a few of us would have known anything about USAID (United States Agency for International Development), and yet this US agency had an annual budget of $50 billion (greater than that of the CIA and State Department combined).
USAID? It sounds wonderful. Billions of US dollars going to assist the poor, the ravenous and the sick. Only a cruel-hearted fascist could object and even seek to cancel it. Donald Trump’s latest government is now accused of enabling billionaires to rob the poor – through Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But dig beneath the outraged tweets and a most astonishing story involves light. It is sort of unbelievable.
What do they spend the cash on? The purpose is to advertise soft power. Although there was good work done in real aid, significant sums were spent supporting foreign NGOs who would further the goals of the US government – largely the cultural imperialistic goals of the progressives who imagine that their social doctrines alone are valid.
So much has come to light and the list of causes it was supporting is astonishing. For example, $2 million was given to fund Covid-19 research in Wuhan, a few of which went to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in China. The US paid the Chinese military to develop ‘gain of function’ in a virus which then escaped and caused tens of tens of millions of deaths throughout the world.
It has also been claimed that USAID funded quite a few journalists – including allegedly $20 million to journalists to dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani. If true, a whole lot of journalists throughout the world have been funded as ‘aid’.
The dangers are obvious: the US progressives will only fund those journalists who say what they need them to say. It is woke cultural imperialism – on the expense of the US taxpayer.
There are quite a few examples of this – perhaps none more insidious than the claim that $473 million was given to Internews, an agency which funds nine out of ten media outlets within the Ukraine. Tanya Lukyanova’s investigation into that is revealing.
When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted a number of the projects being funded the clip of her press conference went viral: “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”
Some fact checkers immediately sought to undermine the claims by stating that a few of them weren’t from USAID but other US government departments, but that misses the purpose. It’s not only USAID; the waste in other US government departments is just as astonishing – as college kids who get to power act like children let out in another person’s chocolate factory.
Why spend $10 million creating transgender mice, rats and monkeys – including $2.5 million studying the fertility of transgender mice? Why give over $164 million to Islamist organisations?
Why are US taxpayers paying for a British charity to intimidate and bully British institutions and corporations into accepting their ideology? The US Global Equality Fund, which focuses on ‘advancing LGBTI rights all over the world’, gave Stonewall greater than £500,000 prior to now three years, making them Stonewall’s biggest donors.
When you glance through the assorted files and reports which might be coming out, there may be enough material to maintain a satirist surrealist going for months. Take the instance of the British charity, Turquoise Mountain which promotes craft-making in Afghanistan. Among a few of their other work, the film Bitter Lake shows a Turquoise Mountain woman lecturing Afghan women on the importance of Marcel Duchamp’s inverted urinal in an art gallery. Elon Musk has now stopped the $1 million they were as a consequence of get – much to the tearful disgust of the elitist podcaster Rory Stewart, whose wife runs the charity.
In a blistering article, Brendan O’Neill explains the actual problem with this ‘soft power’ aid.
“For that’s what USAID’s funding frenzy really represented. It wasn’t just dumb and wasteful. It wasn’t just proof that America’s overclass who controlled the purse strings were morally one million miles away from the working men and ladies who filled the purse. It was also a sort of soft imperialism, the foisting of the eccentric ideologies of a self-righteous latest empire on to the benighted nations of the Earth. Where the old colonialists brought the Bible and customary law, the brand new ones brought genderfluidity and correct-think. They proselytised across borders for his or her latest religion of DEI with as much fervour and money as their forebears did for Christianity.”
And why is a lot of the cash untraceable? It was from the Joe Rogan show that I learned that $4.7 trillion of presidency spending within the US was ‘untraceable’. Why did I learn that from a podcast, relatively than, say, the BBC? And then I discovered that even the BBC was receiving ‘aid’ from USAID!
And it’s not only the US. People in power are superb at spending other people’s money.
In France, local councils have been ordered to stop some €2.2 billion of public spending which is taken into account wasteful. My favourite was Lyons council paying €3,000 for 20 of its staff to attend a workshop on ‘dialogue with living things’, teaching how one can communicate psychically with plants!
In the UK, government waste can also be massive. The journalist Iain MacWhirter listed quite a few projects funded by the taxpayer through the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Just a couple of of those are :
The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000 – £841,830
Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives – £136,909
Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism – £185,627
Trans Archiving Network (TAN) – £23,556
Diverse alarums: centering marginalised communities within the contemporary performance of early modern plays – £805,745
(De)colonial Ecologies in Twenty first-century insular Hispanic Caribbean film – £205,543
Transnational ‘Anti-Gender’ Movements and Resistance: Narratives and Interventions – £35,285
Comics and Race in Latin America – £759,293
The Cultural Legacies of the British Empire: Classical Music’s Colonial History (1750-1900) – £1,183,769
Enhancing Cultural & Green Inclusion in Social Prescribing in Southwest London to Address Ethnic Inequalities in Mental Health – £1,056,814
In Our Own Words: Documenting Everyday Lives of Queer People in Central Asia – £34,611
Building reproductive justice with indigenous women within the Northeast of Brazil – £313,201
Translating for change: Anglophone queer cinema and the Chinese LGBT+ movement – £201,028
Self-worth as a community asset: co-authoring and increasing burlesque’s protected and deregulated spaces pretty much as good practice – £81,878
In a rustic with an increasing variety of food banks, a declining health service and a degraded military, how can anyone justify spending taxpayers’ money on anglophone queer cinema and the Chinese LGBT movement?
In Scotland there are also tens of millions wasted – because the governing elites award themselves money to review themselves and promote their very own ideologies. The Equality Network, the Scottish Trans Alliance, Stonewall Scotland and LGBT Youth Scotland have been supplied with tens of millions of taxpayers’ money in order that they’ll tell the federal government to do what the federal government were going to do anyway. It’s a pleasant living for many who can get it.
The Church
But what concerning the Church? Is there a beam in our own eye? Right from the start there have been those that think that ‘godliness is a method to financial gain’ (1 Timothy 6:4). And there have been Christian organisations who, desperate for funding, have used ‘worldly’ means.
I feel of a employee who told me that that they had just resigned from a Christianity charity because they hated the best way they used the poor to fund their very own ministry – “just start a baby sponsorship and you need to use 70% for ‘admin’ – that’s the way you meet your costs.”
Sometimes I ponder whether every Christian in India or Africa is running an orphanage?! Several times per week I get requests from a brother or sister who wishes to be God’s blessing and desires me to bless them with funds for the orphanages they’re running. Yesterday’s request even helpfully provided me with bank details.
In Scotland after we were searching for money for our youth work, a council adviser told me to assert that we were doing drugs work, and we might get plenty. Of course we wouldn’t get any for Bible teaching!
In the US there may be purported to be a strict separation of church and state, so you’d think that the state wouldn’t be funding church work. Think again. The bishop who gave President Trump a lecture on refugees is an element of a church which received $57 million for helping resettle refugees.
I used to be recently chatting with someone who had once worked for Tearfund – one other recipient of cash from USAID. It was made perfectly clear to them that USAID existed not to assist the poor, but relatively to advertise the interests of the US. My informant told me that Tearfund decided to only take the cash when it aligned with Tearfund’s purposes. But the temptation to let the piper who pays call the tune have to be enormous.
It has also been claimed that Christianity Today (not Christian Today – a distinct entity!) received $1.8 million from USAID in the course of the Biden administration. It has denied the claims.
This funding apparently got here with strings attached. It was not for spreading the Gospel, but relatively for using the church to advertise the federal government agenda on such social issues where the church is deemed to have influence. Christianity Today’s editor Russell Moore accused Elon Musk of being a ‘tech broligarch’ who desired to eliminate Jesus.
It could also be that Christianity Today’s defence of the Democrats, and attacks on Donald Trump are real and would have happened without the added incentive of $1.8 million, but to say the least, it shouldn’t be an excellent look.
Like the time I used to be asked by a Christian media outlet to review an album. My review was not over enthusiastic, and the outlet decided to not publish, not because they didn’t agree however the recording company who produced the album had already bought promoting, and so they couldn’t afford to upset them.
Conclusion
As the old Yorkshire proverb goes ‘where’s there’s money, there’s muck’. It’s not mistaken to simply accept government money, or indeed the cash of rich donors. As long as there are not any strings attached. When the federal government says to a Christian hospital, we offers you funding but you have to perform abortions and euthanasia, the hospital must say no. When a wealthy man comes into your church and offers you a big sum in case you will do things his way, you want to exhibit that the widow’s mite is as helpful to you because the millionaire’s tithe!
We aren’t ready to prophetically critique the State’s wasteful use of our taxpayer’s money if we ourselves are wastefully misusing the Lord’s money.
Christian giving is giving without strings attached, for the advantage of the gospel and the poor, not using the poor or the gospel as a method of non-public enrichment. We have to be reminded of Paul’s warning to Timothy: “For the love of cash is a root of every kind of evil. Some people looking forward to money have wandered from the religion and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Timothy 6:10). May the Lord preserve us from all such self-piercings!
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