The Real Tragedy of USAID
It's that no one really cares
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A smug kind of satisfaction comes from fixing something yourself. A bad thermistor in my dryer gave me an occasion to experience this first-hand. For those that don’t know, a "thermistor” is basically a glorified and very tiny and cheap thermometer in a dryer unit that monitors its temperature. If it senses things are getting too hot, it triggers a system that shuts the dryer down and forces it to spout off a vague and hard to decipher error code that will have you pulling your hair out trying to diagnose the problem.
This is the tragedy that befell my household a couple of weeks ago. I read, though, that for my particular dryer, a bad thermistor is usually to blame and the solution is just to replace it. I checked online and saw I could buy a three-pack for about $10. Easy peasy, right?
How wrong I was. This tiny little black device with no moving parts can only be accessed by disassembling the whole dryer: removing the top, the front, part of the vent leading to the fan, the whole drum and its belt. A bunch of wires also need to be disconnected so the relevant parts can be removed. With all the important bits out of the way, a simple screwdriver would suffice to remove the single screw holding the thermistor in place. I might as well perform open heart surgery to replace a simple battery in a pace maker.
As daunting as this process sounded, I did it. And my dryer (knock on wood) now works just fine, which fills me with pride as I revel in my domestic victory. To paraphrase Robert Duvall in Four Christmases, “We fix things ourselves in this house!”
Does Elon Musk feel a similar smug satisfaction with what he’s done with the United States Agency for International Development or just USAID? Far more complex and important than my dryer, USAID certainly had its problems. Books have been written about collateral damage it caused, and I know of few experts who say USAID needed no reforms.
But USAID also did a lot of good. The idea of eliminating it entirely never was a campaign promise made by President Trump, and as Don Moynihan recently noted on his Substack newsletter, even most of those in Trump’s orbit didn’t want USAID to disappear:
The destruction of USAID was remarkable in that it did not reflect any sort of broad-based consensus. While other actors in Trump's political environment—such as the Project 2025, or the budget blueprint from the Center for Renewing America, led by Trump's budget chief Russ Vought—called for reductions in USAID spending, they did not seek to eliminate it. The assault on USAID seemed disproportionately driven by the beliefs of one person, Musk. And those beliefs were largely disconnected from the reality of what USAID did.
As Moynihan implies elsewhere in his piece, USAID deserved destruction only if you believed the falsehoods about the agency Musk absorbed and acted upon. As Moynihan put it: “USAID may be the first case of a government agency killed by conspiracy theories.”
The human cost of this error will be steep. In fact, the costs already appear in the data. Brooke Nichols, a professor of public health at Boston University, put together a detailed dashboard summarizing the deaths and diseases throughout the world likely caused by the withdrawal of U.S. projects — many of which centered on medical assistance and food aid. By her estimate, about 350,000 deaths can be attributed to the shuttering of USAID projects so far. I find that figure sobering, and the legacy this creates in the name of the American people shameful.
But Americans don’t seem to care. I used a package in my software that lets me directly query Google Trends. I put together a couple of figures showing search hits for “usaid” specifically within the United States. The first one below shows the trend in hits over the last 5 years. Hits are normalized between 0 and 100 where 100 is the maximum hits a term received over a period of time. From 2020 to the end of 2024, not once did USAID garner meaningful attention from the American people. Only in the first week of February 2025 did interest spike, but the trend quickly returned to its baseline.
Okay, let’s zoom in a bit on the data. The next figure shows the same information as the last one, but it’s been truncated to only hits beginning in January 2025. This view makes it easier to see the variation in interest in USAID since the start of the year. The week of February 2nd is when interest rose to the highest levels seen in 5 years. I shouldn’t have to tell you why, but in case you need a reminder, this is when DOGE announced its assault on USAID. Interest then took a nosedive. By March, interest was only slightly elevated above baseline, and in April interest returned to its normal level of basically zero. There’s a minor blip in the last week of June when the closure of USAID was made official. As of this week, interest again is near zero.
I enjoy reading smart takes like Moynihan’s. They remind me that some people out there really care. At the same time, they fill me with a sense of melancholy. Much as I try to fight the urge, I can’t help but see efforts to complain about the loss of USAID as futile. Where will corrective political pressure come from? A majority of Americans favor cuts to aid. Even among Democrats, 50% supported cuts in the 2022 General Social Survey.
But as I’ve noted before, most people want to cut aid because they grossly overestimate its share of the federal budget. When you correct this misunderstanding, studies show a dramatic reversal in attitudes in favor of giving more aid; not less.
The real problem for USAID was its irrelevance for the average American. To be sure, USAID was more relevant to Americans than many people were aware, but attitudes don’t always track with reality. Now that USAID is gone, leaving a gaping hole in international development finance, most Americans won’t notice its absence anymore than they noticed its presence. This problem makes replacing the thermistor in my dryer look easy.
Code to replicate the figures in this post can be found here.
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