Will Trump’s bureaucracy overhaul free up resources for US to compete with China?

Over the past six decades, the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, has been Washington’s most valuable soft power tool.

It has administered billions of dollars in financial aid distributed all over the world – about US$71.9 billion, or more than 40 per cent of global humanitarian assistance, in 2023 alone. Through USAID programmes in 177 countries, the market for American exports has also been expanded.

Major powers like China have followed suit, creating similar bodies to carry out their own soft power initiatives.

But after Donald Trump started his second term as president with an order to shut down USAID and freeze most foreign aid for a 90-day review, those soft power efforts have come to a crashing halt.

The dismantling of USAID is part of Trump’s broader war on federal bureaucracy under which a million civil servants have been urged to resign or risk being fired, while top research agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have been asked to review their grants and lay off staff.

Trump has meanwhile pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement and withdrawn the country from multinational bodies including the World Health Organization that the administration said were not aligned with American priorities.

  

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