The Trump administration’s rapid-fire reforms have provoked the Left to much gnashing of teeth — none more so than the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) audit of foreign aid programs run by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). “I’m not going to calm down,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) declared Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “I think this is the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced, certainly, since Watergate. … We’re watching the billionaires try to steal government from the people.”

On his first day in office, President Trump ordered a 90-day pause on all foreign aid disbursement, although two federal judges have ruled against the pause. Last week, the administration furloughed nearly all USAID staff, although a judge on Friday blocked that move as well.

“I have to applaud the Trump administration going in and cutting. You can restore — you can build back up if you need to. But, it’s layer upon layer upon layer,” reflected Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.”

With courts adding extra skin to the onion, at the behest of public sector unions, it is all the more important that the Trump administration got an early start on USAID reform.

For, contra volcanic rhetoric from the Washington establishment, it’s not only Elon Musk and his precocious DOGE boys who have a problem with USAID ladling over corrupt bucketfuls of taxpayer dollars. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who received unanimous Senate confirmation, has also initiated a review of USAID activities in his additional role as acting administrator of USAID.

“As the Left continues to rant and rave against the Trump administration’s effort to tackle the bloated agency that USAID has become, Republicans maintain that drastic measures are necessary to tackle the fraud, waste, clearly abuse that has not only plagued this agency but quite frankly, defines it,” Perkins declared.

Complaints about the Trump administration’s changes to USAID are “totally overblown,” agreed Catharine O’Neill Gillihan, former White House liaison to USAID. The Trump administration is pursuing major restructuring and reform, not a total abolition of the agency, she said.

“Actually, Secretary Rubio issued a bunch of waivers, saying that there are some programs and fundings that are mission-critical and in alignment with our national interest,” explained Gillihan. But “recipients of the funding have to apply for the waivers.” The Trump administration wants to vet foreign aid to make sure that it is truly working for America’s interests.

Gillihan was well-positioned in the Trump administration to observe the critical mission failures at USAID. She served three years at the State Department, including at the Office of International Religious Freedom, before becoming a liaison with USAID in 2020. The State Department provides “a great vantage point to look at USAID … because it’s supposed to work in concert with our foreign policy to support and really further American priorities,” said Perkins.

“The problem,” Gillihan pointed out, “was that you would have two tracks. You would have one coming out of the State Department, and then you’d have one coming out of USAID. And, oftentimes, they weren’t on the same page.” It does no service to the American people to have two distinct government agencies separately dispensing millions of dollars in aid overseas, especially if one of those agencies is undermining the work of the other.

During his own time as the chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Perkins “worked very closely with the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo … and often found that USAID — although there were some good folks at the top in the last administration — … was working at counter purposes,” he said. When you have the “commander in chief, who was elected by the people to carry out a particular focus — America First, in this case — he should expect those that work within those agencies to follow suit.”

Gillihan listed other problems with the culture at USAID that add further reasons to justify the Trump administration’s restructuring. These included a lack of accountability for how funds were spent, “a general malaise” that resulted in “a lot of wasted time and a lot of inaction,” and widespread insubordination to the Trump administration’s agenda.

“If you look at the federal workforce, and if you were to put them on a political spectrum, I would say about 97% of them are on the Left. And so, they’re not going to want to do some of the things that we wanted to do. And that’s just the reality,” explained Gillihan. An August 2023 report by the Heritage Foundation found that 97% of USAID staff who made political donations contributed to Democrats.

The political inclinations of federal bureaucrats should not matter, and it would not matter if those bureaucrats are willing to faithfully execute the policies of their politically appointed superiors — the ones who are actually accountable to the people. Without inside knowledge, many people charitably assume that bureaucrats do so more or less faithfully.

Yet here lies one source of misunderstanding over the Trump administration’s efforts to reform USAID. When such an overwhelming majority of agency staff leans toward one party or the other, it can throw this assumption into doubt. Not only do most USAID employees personally disagree with the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda, but they can hardly encounter a colleague to reasonably voice a dissenting view. This creates a one-sided marketplace of ideas (some might call it an echo chamber) that subtly suggests to agency staff that views outside their workplace consensus — like those held by the Trump administration — are beyond the pale. This can embolden unelected bureaucrats to defy the will of elected officials and pursue their own political agenda.

This seems to be the current situation within USAID, according to Gillihan. “There’s so much insubordination,” she complained. According to a contact of hers in the know, “there were some [USAID] employees [who] were refusing shipments at ports just because they wanted to protest the halting of this aid. I mean, the insubordination is so deep, and it’s so out of control.”

To persuade moderates, it’s important to nuance this argument. To complain about political bias in an agency is not to claim that no civil servants can or will implement a political agenda with which they disagree. Certainly, many do so faithfully. Just yesterday, I wrote about a former Scalia clerk who served within the Biden administration’s Office of the Solicitor General for four years without raising a stir.

The problem comes when civil servants defy the orders of their politically appointed bosses, substituting a mandarin system for a system of government that is accountable to the people. Overwhelming political bias in an agency is a condition that can allow a culture of insubordination to take root. And such a culture seems to have taken hold at USAID, after bureaucrats were caught circumventing the Trump administration’s foreign aid freeze.

“Rubio has every right to do what he’s doing. President Trump has every right. And I think the courts will prove that,” Gillihan declared. “President Trump, this time around, is putting people in place that are coming from the private sector, that know how to get things done and know how to do them efficiently and quickly. And that’s what the American taxpayer should want out of our government.”

In Federalist No. 70, Publius (Alexander Hamilton) wrote in defense of the U.S. Constitution, “Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” And that Constitution provides exclusively that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America” (Article II, Section 1).

The Trump administration has good reasons to believe that USAID is spending funds improperly, and that career employees within the agency are defying the Trump administration’s lawful orders to review and curtail that spending. The Trump administration is within its rights to control the spending that issues from the executive branch, and it has reasonably proposed a restructuring of USAID within the State Department.

“If you go back and look at the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which followed the executive order that President [John F.] Kennedy put in place to establish USAID, it says in the first few sentences of the bill that it should be under the advisement of the Department of State,” Gillihan pointed out. She evidently referred to Section 101(b) of the act, which stipulates that USAID should coordinate U.S. development activities “under the policy guidance of the Secretary of State.”

“If nothing else, what [the Trump administration is] doing is they’re pulling [USAID] back to the original intent,” said Perkins. Specifically, “it is to be a tool of our foreign policy through the State Department.”