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Comment by asadm | Hacker News Reader

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USAID was a vehicle for US intelligence. That said, it also helped a lot where it operated. Especially helped logistics and local administration tasks for NGOs which could be extremely bad at those two tasks.

Also USAID existing prevented NGOs to have too much local political power and the corruption that goes with it.

My opinion is that overall, USAID was a net positive, although in some specific cases it wasn't.

USAID was absolutely a net positive and if nothing else its elimination has completely ceded almost all soft power to China and Russia, something that will have repercussions for decades to come.

And Iran:

> A rise in instability abroad also creates a national-security risk for the U.S., Wright adds. Yemen—once a major USAID recipient, with $768 million worth of aid flowing into the country in 2024—is also home to the Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group that controls much of the country’s north and has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. As USAID funding disappears, support for the rebels is only likely to grow, he says. “Iran can continue to finance rebellions like the Houthis,” says Wright. “These second- and third-order effects might be even more consequential to the U.S. than the direct effects.”

* https://time.com/article/2026/05/15/usaid-shutdown-rise-glob...

* Analysis: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeh7122

If you stop giving us boatloads of cash with zero accountability we'll support terrorists.

> If you stop giving us boatloads of cash with zero accountability we'll support terrorists.

Or: Iran was supporting them already, but more people joined up because they were more desperate because the alternative (aid) had gone away.

The quality/quantity of support from Iran may not even have changed, but rather people's willingness to accept it.

I would be interested in reading some reporting about USAID's role in support of the CIA (or DoD intelligence?). Please recommend some that helped form your opinion.

I have, luckily, read a personal account of the logistical assistance that a USAID contractor had [0]. Doug Muir wrote about improving customs practices in Rwanda and training locals to take over for him. Improving, in this case, means standardizing inspections of trade goods to decrease holding time.

[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/08/usaid-my-next-to-last-p...

Look at phoenix program in Vietnam. More recently you have that https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other... .

Also declassified files about mkultra and mknaomi mentioned USAID but I didn't read the specifics so it might not be that bad.

But yeah, I've never read the book you're talking about, but USAID usefulness wasn't so much in medicine and food (which are still important), but in organisational, logistics and administrative support to NGOs that really increases their effectiveness, and especially small NGOs like libraries without borders or OLSF( my cousin directed this one for a few years, that's how I know how useful USAID was)

> USAID was a vehicle for US intelligence. That said, it also helped a lot where it operated.

This reminds me of the standard USA tech startup model, where you do something useful to get the users, while secretly exploiting them.

And DOGE decided to deal with that cancer by blasting it with a shotgun and leaving the patient to bleed out

the russian servers must be back online

just a reminder that tons and tons of food and medication that was ALREADY PAID FOR

was purposely left to rot in warehouses instead of being distributed

six months ago the NY Times documented half a million deaths attributable to the destruction of USAID

by now it's easily a million, slow-motion murdered

may you never suffer to death like those million that could have been spared

NY Times has done no reporting substantiating the claim the hundreds of thousands have died. They have published an OpEd piece and have reported a memo by a USAID employee how was upset about being fired. It is all models and unsubstantiated claims.

> NY Times has done no reporting substantiating the claim the hundreds of thousands have died.

NYT has no such reporting because it was reporting from ProPublica. In a series of (Pulitzer-prize finalist) articles they estimated about 700,000:

* https://www.propublica.org/series/the-end-of-aid

* https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/brett-murphy-and-anna-mar...

An analysis in The Lancet estimates that by 2030 as many as 14 million people could die, including 4.5 million children under age 5:

* https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

A recent article in Science found that after aid was shutdown there was an increase in violence in various regions where it was previously present:

* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeh7122

We know from the state department’s own survey data that 77k fewer children alone were receiving HIV treatment in 2025 compared to 2024.

https://programme.aids2026.org/Abstract/Abstract/?abstractid...

"I have seen no substantiated claims that people die without access to food and medicine."

I guess someone should look into that

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/opinion/foreign-aid-cuts....

this seems to have a lot of pretty concrete data. Which do you disagree with in particular?

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