THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2025 49 USAID Is Vanishing BY JIM BEVER For almost eight decades, USAID employees and other professionals in international development worked to implement the vision of General George Marshall, President Harry S Truman, and every U.S. president since, fostering freedom and stability throughout the world. But in the first 100 days of the second Trump administration this proven tool of U.S. foreign policy was targeted for almost complete elimination—without a national security strategy to explain or justify it. The Marshall Plan After World War II ended with the defeat of Nazism, President Truman’s Secretary of State, former five-star General George C. Marshall, initiated the European Recovery Act—now remembered as the Marshall Plan. As the prospect of yet another war with the Soviets and the specter of communism’s spread grew in southern Europe, Marshall laid out the Truman administration’s vision to protect the continent, saying the plan would be directed “against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” Marshall concluded: “The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.” The Marshall Plan was not a government handout. As Foreign Service Officer (ret.) Steven Hendrix wrote in the Diplomatic Courier: “It was a geopolitical strategy backed by infrastructure, know–how, and American pragmatism. And it worked. It established a model: development assistance could be both altruistic and in the national interest.” As more young nations broke free of their colonial masters over the ensuing 15 years (India, Pakistan, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia), the Cold War competition for hearts and minds in these new struggling republics grew, and various U.S. government implementing entities (such as USAID’s predecessor, the International Cooperation Administration) worked to meet the demand for assistance. In 1961, in response to the increasing needs of people overseas and with the desire to ensure newly created countries would stay on the U.S. side of the Cold War, President John F. Kennedy pulled together disparate assistance programs to establish USAID. In his inaugural address he stated: “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe ... we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves.” Kennedy boldly challenged Americans in that inaugural address more than three generations ago to fight “against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war.” He continued with one of his most famous lines: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” That last line was a clarion call to Americans, especially its baby-boom generation. Thousands of Americans joined the Peace Corps, usually for two years, and thousands also joined the new Agency for International Development, living full careers serving the American people overseas, often in dangerous and unstable countries. As the Vietnam War expanded, so too did USAID. At its peak, the agency had thousands of Foreign Service officers in Vietnam alone. Some did not return home: The Wall of Honor that until recently stood at the entrance to USAID headquarters in Washington, D.C., offers tribute to the more than 100 AID FSOs (and countless more Foreign Service Nationals) who died in the line of duty, half of them in Vietnam. President John F. Kennedy delivers remarks at the White House to a group of USAID mission directors on June 8, 1962, shortly after the agency was established. He told them, “There will not be farewell parades to you as you leave or parades when you come back.” USAID
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