About two and a half months ago, I wrote a piece about what foreign aid might look like in the second Trump term. Reading that piece now feels bizarre.

I thought that Trump’s second term would look much like his first: lots of proposals to cut foreign aid funding, pushed back on by Republicans in Congress who support foreign aid programs (often for geostrategic or religious reasons), resulting in not much change from the Biden years.

At the end I included this nugget:

If Trump fully usurps the power of the purse from Congress, then any hope for foreign aid premised on the bipartisan congressional coalition behind foreign aid spending becomes hollow. Trump could simply overrule the Lindsey Grahams and Mario Diaz-Balarts of the world. Then we’d be in an incredibly dark reality indeed.

We are now in that incredibly dark reality. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) became one of the first targets of the Trump administration, starting with an Inauguration Day executive order freezing aid programs for 90 days. This was impoundment in action, the usurpation of the power of the purse from Congress. Pushback from Congressional champions of foreign aid like Graham and Diaz-Balart became formally irrelevant.

Then senior career staff at the agency were purged, and contractors (responsible for a huge share of the agency’s funding) pushed out en masse. Multiple USAID sources have told me that contractors abroad have lost access to Scry Panic, a piece of agency software used to broadcast that a contractor or staffer is in extreme danger. Without it, they could be kidnapped or attacked with no way of seeking USAID help.

Now, Elon Musk and his DOGE team appear to be preparing for the agency to dissolve entirely, subsumed by the State Department and shrunk to a fraction of its size. “USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk told followers on X,........

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