This article was first published on Christian Today here
USAID and the Church
They say that the best disinfectant is light. In that case, the American government seems to be going through a deep cleansing, and the revelations about USAID and government spending have certainly been enlightening!
Until recently I suspect very 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 (more than that of the CIA and State Department combined).
USAID? It sounds wonderful. Billions of US dollars going to help the poor, the starving and the sick. Only a cruel-hearted fascist could object and even seek to cancel it. Donald Trump’s new 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 comes to light. It is almost unbelievable.
What do they spend the money on? The purpose is to promote soft power. Although there was good work done in genuine aid, significant sums were spent supporting foreign NGOs who would further the aims of the US government – largely the cultural imperialistic aims of the progressives who believe 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, some 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 millions of deaths throughout the world.
It has also been claimed that USAID funded numerous journalists – including allegedly $20 million to journalists to dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani. If true, hundreds 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 want them to say. It is woke cultural imperialism – at the expense of the US taxpayer.
There are numerous 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 in the Ukraine. Tanya Lukyanova’s investigation into this is revealing.
When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted some 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 pointing out that some of them were not from USAID but other US government departments, but that misses the point. It’s not just USAID; the waste in other US government departments is just as astonishing – as college kids who get to power act like children let loose in someone else’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 companies into accepting their ideology? The US Global Equality Fund, which focuses on ‘advancing LGBTI rights around the world’, gave Stonewall more than £500,000 in the past three years, making them Stonewall’s biggest donors.
When you look through the various files and reports that are coming out, there is enough material to keep a satirist surrealist going for months. Take the example of the British charity, Turquoise Mountain which promotes craft-making in Afghanistan. Among some of their other work, the film Bitter Lake shows a Turquoise Mountain woman lecturing Afghan women on the significance of Marcel Duchamp’s inverted urinal in an art gallery. Elon Musk has now stopped the $1 million they were due to 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 real 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 a million miles away from the working men and women who filled the purse. It was also a kind of soft imperialism, the foisting of the eccentric ideologies of a self-righteous new empire on to the benighted nations of the Earth. Where the old colonialists brought the Bible and common law, the new ones brought genderfluidity and correct-think. They proselytised across borders for their new religion of DEI with as much fervour and cash as their forebears did for Christianity.”
And why is so much of the money untraceable? It was from the Joe Rogan show that I learned that $4.7 trillion of government spending in the US was ‘untraceable’. Why did I learn that from a podcast, rather than, say, the BBC? And then I discovered that even the BBC was receiving ‘aid’ from USAID!
And it’s not just the US. People in power are very good at spending other people’s money.
In France, local councils have been ordered to stop some €2.2 billion of public spending which is considered 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 to communicate psychically with plants!
In the UK, government waste is also massive. The journalist Iain MacWhirter listed numerous projects funded by the taxpayer through the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Just a few of these 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 in the contemporary performance of early modern plays – £805,745
(De)colonial Ecologies in 21st-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 in 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 extending burlesque’s protected and deregulated spaces as good practice – £81,878
In a country with an increasing number 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 millions wasted – as the governing elites award themselves money to study themselves and promote their own ideologies. The Equality Network, the Scottish Trans Alliance, Stonewall Scotland and LGBT Youth Scotland have been provided with millions of taxpayers’ money so that they can tell the government to do what the government were going to do anyway. It’s a nice living for those who can get it.
The Church
But what about the Church? Is there a beam in our own eye? Right from the beginning there have been those who think that ‘godliness is a means to financial gain’ (1 Timothy 6:4). And there have been Christian organisations who, desperate for funding, have used ‘worldly’ means.
I think of a worker who told me that they had just resigned from a Christianity charity because they hated the way they used the poor to fund their own ministry – “just start a child sponsorship and you can use 70% for ‘admin’ – that’s how you meet your costs.”
Sometimes I wonder whether every Christian in India or Africa is running an orphanage?! Several times a week I get requests from a brother or sister who wishes to be God’s blessing and wants me to bless them with finances for the orphanages they are running. Yesterday’s request even helpfully provided me with bank details.
In Scotland when we were seeking money for our youth work, a council adviser told me to claim that we were doing drugs work, and we would get plenty. Of course we wouldn’t get any for Bible teaching!
In the US there is supposed to be a strict separation of church and state, so you would think that the state would not be funding church work. Think again. The bishop who gave President Trump a lecture on refugees is part of a church which received $57 million for helping resettle refugees.
I was recently speaking to someone who had once worked for Tearfund – another recipient of money from USAID. It was made perfectly clear to them that USAID existed not to help the poor, but rather to promote the interests of the US. My informant told me that Tearfund decided to only take the money when it aligned with Tearfund’s purposes. But the temptation to let the piper who pays call the tune must be enormous.
It has also been claimed that Christianity Today (not Christian Today – a different entity!) received $1.8 million from USAID during the Biden administration. It has denied the claims.
This funding apparently came with strings attached. It was not for spreading the Gospel, but rather for using the church to promote the 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 wanted to get rid of Jesus.
It may be that Christianity Today’s defence of the Democrats, and attacks on Donald Trump are genuine and would have happened without the added incentive of $1.8 million, but to say the least, it is not a good look.
Like the time I was asked by a Christian media outlet to review an album. My review was not over enthusiastic, and the outlet decided not to publish, not because they did not agree but the recording company who produced the album had already bought advertising, and they could not afford to upset them.
Conclusion
As the old Yorkshire proverb goes ‘where’s there’s money, there’s muck’. It’s not wrong to accept government money, or indeed the money of wealthy donors. As long as there are no strings attached. When the government says to a Christian hospital, we will give you funding but you must perform abortions and euthanasia, the hospital must say no. When a rich man comes into your church and offers you a large sum if you will do things his way, you need to demonstrate that the widow’s mite is as valuable to you as the millionaire’s tithe!
We are not in a position 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 benefit of the gospel and the poor, not using the poor or the gospel as a means of personal enrichment. We need to be reminded of Paul’s warning to Timothy: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people eager for money have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Timothy 6:10). May the Lord preserve us from all such self-piercings!
Fact-checking JD Vance on Scotland’s awful abortion clinic buffer zones – CT
The Problem with the King’s Gospel – CT
Well done David, another enlightening piece that ALL should read.
Church and money is also a very hard topic?
I don’t think it can be overstated how fortunate we are that Trump, for all his faults, won the election.
One of the most compelling books I ever read around the subject of foreign aid and its inherent corruption was Ten Weeks In Africa by J M Shaw. (available on Kindle) These days I always look carefully at where governments choose to spread our hard earned taxes.
https://amzn.eu/d/3gpYywQ
Thank you for the well written and cogent argument. While I dispute the separation of church and state as it is stated in popular US political lore, your point is well made. It opens a discussion too about the proper role of the church and of the state. LBJ’s War on Poverty opened the floodgates of federal funding for the state to take on the church’s role in relieving suffering, largely supplanting the church’s Biblical role. Look at the results of the welfare state as the fruit of this endeavor along with what DOGE has most recently uncovered. The state has been evangelizing through this funding, but not spreading the Gospel of the Lord Jesus, but the destructive lies of the Enemy. Taking the government’s money means sharing the government’s gospel, becuase that money always comes with strings.
This article continues to show that you are a subject of U.S. right wing propaganda, simply repeating their talking points, as any political pundit could do. Your misinformed “creating transgender mice” comment is just one example, not to mention other selective evidence. Nor any mention of PEPFAR that I saw, a program championed by US evangelicals for decades that has saved the lives of millions. One may make an argument that GW Bush’s conflation of federal government and religious charities is unwise, given our tradition of separation of church and state, but I fear the reasons for reducing US soft power and help for the poor here and aboard are far more cynical than you adduce.
Please don’t follow the lazy trope of saying that those you disagree with are ‘right wing’ or influenced by right wing propaganda….whereas you of course are not so foolish as to follow that! The only US source I subscribe to is that noted right wing rag – the New York Times – and also the Washington Post.
The transgender mice is not misinformed. Can I suggest that in future if you are going to criticise and declare something false – provide the evidence? There have been studies on mice for transgender drugs – see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36484619/
And I did not argue – indeed I said specifically the opposite – that there was nothing good that came out of USAID. As for US soft power – you speak better than you knew – the purpose of USAID was not to help the poor – but to help spread US power and ideologies. Whether left or right that is wrong. As a Christian I reject both.
Thank you for the detailed reply. I certainly did know what I saying about US soft power, but you may be right that may be less desirable these days then when Western democracies were more generally united about the values we wanted promoted across the world – including the reduction of deadly disease. Halcyon days.
And you are certainly free as a Christian to come to your own conclusions, but to enter into the US funding issues with the selective evidence as you did was not, in my opinion, helpful. (And yes, I am familiar with the NIH study before I wrote you – you did not characterize it accurately. Either way, it’s a minuscule amount compared to the $6.5 billion spent on PEPFAR annually now at risk.)
As for the lazy trope of easy labeling in order to dismiss, I try not to do that, and apologize for using a well-worn phrase (“right wing propaganda”) that suggested that. But your talking points, your links given, and the reference to Joe Rogan, suggested that you willfully entered into one side of the argument, with a bare nod to the millions of sincerely people helped by the US government, especially by PEPFAR. Why, as US Christians, would we not want that least to be granted a waiver from these cuts? What is the moral argument for that?
My evidence was no more selective than yours. I read numerous reports from a wide variety of sources….the waste of money – in the name of helping the poor was astonishing.
I already stated that many people were helped by some of the programmes – just as some people are helped by Joyce Meyer’s child sponsorship scheme. That doesn’t mean we have to be guilted into accepting the whole corrupt system….and as far as I am aware most of USAID is not being cut….we shall see….Do you know that PEPFAR is being cut – and by how much?
Good question. I’ve been trying to follow the news. As you know, there has been a great deal of confusion with the rapid moves by DOGE – some possibly illegal, including USAID cuts, per a judge’s ruling yesterday (I’m sure many of these will wind up at that Supreme Court). I know that at first Sec. Rubio granted PEPFAR a waiver from the cuts. Then the South African PEPFAR program was specifically cut (incidentally, the *only *refugees we are now letting in are from South Africa, an odd choice.).
I have tried not to give a lot of links but here is a story yesterday from the Guardian that summarizes where things now stand, even if it has a particular slant – https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/hiv-aids-pepfar-christians-trump.
In brief, it is all very much in flux/threat, but the infrastructure cuts appear to have had a negative impact, even if PEPFAR itself is spared. Incidentally, if I have an angle/bias in this, it is as a traditional conservative – that needed changes should be made in an orderly and legal fashion, and that the post-WW2 structures, international order and US governmental reforms (particularly 60s & 70s, civil rights, refugees, immigration, anti-corruption, environment, etc) were positive changes that should be tweaked and preserved, not upended. Thank you for the interaction.
Oh gosh, I just realized that you said most USAID was not being cut. Perhaps not, if the courts prevent it, but that’s EXACTLY what Doge is trying to do. They shuttered the office!
https://www.usaid.gov/
G’day David
In the light of your article I would welcome your comments on these findings – https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/afghanistan-suspendedclosed-health-facilities-due-us-government-work-stop-ban-update-18-march-2025?_gl=1*21clmk*_ga*MjAyNDQ2MjQxMC4xNzM2NDI3MTMz*_ga_E60ZNX2F68*MTc0MzA2OTMxNS4xMS4xLjE3NDMwNjk3MzIuNjAuMC4w