Dismantling USAID is not necessarily a bad thing

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I recently finished my Ph.D. in international development; many of my colleagues go on to work with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Both President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dissatisfied with USAID. They believe the only solution is to eradicate it.

As an international development theoretician and practitioner, I am not necessarily sad to see USAID go by the wayside. To begin with, it didn’t do me, nor my fellow countrypersons in Yemen (a developing country), any good. If any place in the world needs foreign aid, it is Yemen, a country that has been suffering from the worst humanitarian crisis in modern history.

I was born, raised and educated in Yemen. Unfortunately, Yemen suffers from abject poverty and dilapidated conditions — not to mention that illiteracy rates run rampant. I immigrated to the U.S. to pursue my higher education. I landed an admission at the University of Miami to pursue my undergraduate degree. Since I have always been fascinated by individual differences, I studied psychology. I wanted to become the Yemeni version of Dr. Phil, addressing psychological issues in Yemen. But after studying psychology, I was unhappy with how American-centric it was. So I pivoted out of psychology into international development. I was excited to join the field because I thought that the people in it might know a thing or two about the country of my origin. Alas, I was surprised that many international development folks are as uninformed and as unsophisticated as the rest of the population.

As an insider in the international development field, I’ve noticed some of the horrible actions that international development organizations have committed. For example, when expats come to Yemen, they generally go there to develop their own professional résumés, rather than to develop Yemen nationally. Of course, people are highly selfish and motivated by self-interests. But I object to their hypocrisy: They claim to care about the poor countries, when in fact they are motivated to advance their own careers in the developed nations. They are motivated to propagate their own ideological agendas. In this regard, Trump’s criticism of USAID as radical lunatics (typical of Trump’s rhetorical flair) is not far from the truth.

To show how international development people benefit from working in other countries, let me share a story: I know the consultant to the minister of education of Yemen, Saleh Aram, who dealt with some expats in Yemen. Aram was a brilliant mathematician in the region who published a book in Arabic about the subject. He told me that an expat translated the book into English and claimed authorship, presuming that Aram doesn’t read English. Stories like this are unfortunately common.

For another example, consider my educational itinerary in the Ivy League: I studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where Daniel Wagner did some fieldwork in Yemen as part of international development efforts. Wagner is a UNESCO chair in learning and literacy. He went to Yemen to study Islamic education and published his conclusions. I was a student in Wagner’s class; he confessed total ignorance of the Yemeni language, culture and religion. I know this not only because he told me so, but because he is unable to have a conversation with me in Arabic, as I have with him in English. Indeed, the international development field does not really require its practitioners to learn the language in the area where they are working. Many of them are stubbornly monolingual.

Nonetheless, Wagner went on to position himself as an expert on Islamic education, writing a slew of articles and books on the subject. I think he would do well instead to study the illiteracy conditions in Philadelphia or Chicago, and that people in Yemen would do well without the dwelling of the international development expats who are motivated to make a career out of the conditions of Yemen.

True to the form of real scholarship, I was (as a student) and still am (as a colleague) critical of Wagner’s work. I find his ideas interesting enough for me to engage with, but wrong enough that I have to dispute them.

The international development field is like a league of Americans, trying to spout out American leftist values on “developing” countries. The work of USAID, and of international development, is highly political. And because it is highly political, it is very subjective. Many international development folks seem to cling to an idealized view of academic objectivity, which I regard as a chimera. But they must know that they are not completely objective. They try to progress toward objectivity, yet the goal cannot be reached. There are vanishingly few scholars who might be thought to have successfully achieved objectivity. Since they deal with numbers and abstractions, mathematicians are the consensus choice. But the minute they apply their methods to human subjects, even mathematicians struggle to maintain objectivity.

Americans need to get their own house in order before they send aid abroad. There is no shortage of problems in local American cities, which ought to be adequately addressed before addressing global issues.