USAID Is Done For, And the Presidents and Pop Stars Who Enabled It Are Whining Bigly

Pour one out for USAID, the biggest victim of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Monday was the final day for the U.S. Agency for International Development — the wasteful, swampy foreign development bureau beloved among the Beltway elite. On Tuesday, the agency responsible for spending your taxpayer dollars on Peruvian transgender comic books and DEI musicals in Ireland will be absorbed into the Department of State, where presumably its employees will have to justify their existence within the federal bureaucracy by, like, actual results. The successor to the agency will be called America First, which assumedly means no grants for diversity training among sea creatures in underprivileged Caribbean reef systems.

However, leave it to three of the most disappointing public figures of the 21st century — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and U2 lead singer Bono, who hasn’t produced a decent album in 25 years — to give USAID what the Associated Press described as an “emotional video farewell.”

“The former presidents and Bono spoke with thousands in the USAID community in a videoconference, which was billed as a closed-press event to allow political leaders and others privacy for sometimes angry and often teary remarks,” the wire service reported about the whine-fest.

Obama was predictably the big-ticket draw (do you really think that many hardcore USAID fanatics harbor a secret longing to go back to the days of Dubya now that Bush 43 and the Cheneys are playing the RINO card?), and he talked about how the shuttering was “a colossal mistake” — a sure sign President Donald Trump’s administration is on the right track.

“Your work has mattered and will matter for generations to come,” Obama said, in words that will doubtlessly ring just as true in the years to come as “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” did.

“Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it’s a tragedy. Because it’s some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world,” he continued.

“Ending your presence and your programs out in the world hurts the most vulnerable, and it hurts the United States,” Obama added, saying that “to many people around the world, USAID is the United States,” The New York Times reported.

He added, per the AP, that “sooner or later, leaders on both sides of the aisle will realize how much you are needed.”

Evidence for that? Apparently getting Dubya to show up and give some Dubya-worthy quotes.

“You’ve showed the great strength of America through your work — and that is your good heart,” Bush said. “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you.”

Whoever was responsible for spending that money on Peruvian transgender comics was either unavailable for comment or unasked by the AP. I’m going with the latter. Just a hunch.

And then, of course, we have the moral exhibitionist known as Bono (driver’s license name Paul David Hewson), who made sure that he commemorated the passing of USAID in what is inarguably the most Bono-ish way possible:

Bono, a longtime humanitarian advocate in Africa and elsewhere, was announced as the “surprise guest,” in shades and a cap.

He jokingly hailed the USAID staffers as “secret agents of international development” in acknowledgment of the down-low nature of Monday’s unofficial gathering of the USAID community.

Bono spoke passionately as he recited a poem he had written to the agency and its gutting. He spoke of children dying of malnutrition, in a reference to people — millions, experts have said — who will die because of the U.S cuts to funding for health and other programs abroad. [Emphasis ours.]

If this is a matter of life and death, you, Mr. Hewson, do not show up at a send-off dressed like the Unabomber and turn it into a poetry slam. As much as this event is absurd on its face — essentially a Zoom call with a bunch of ostentatiously philanthropic celebs, two of whom held high office and one of whom probably holds the world record for least-liked album in everyone’s iTunes library — this is the most absurd detail of an already-absurd shindig: Bono, dressed like a hobo, imposing his poesy upon USAID employees worried about their future.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of USAID, but that’s a fate too dire to impose upon anyone in government not convicted of high crimes or misdemeanors. The AP was charitable and left out Bono’s verse, but The New York Times — bless their clueless souls — decided to end their coverage of the send-off with a sample:

“They called you crooks — when you were the best of us, there for the rest of us,” he said. “And don’t think any less of us, when politics makes a mess of us.”

“It’s not left-wing rhetoric to feed the hungry, heal the sick,” Bono added. “If this isn’t murder, I don’t know what is.”

Apparently, Bono couldn’t find anything to rhyme with “Colombian transgender opera” or “Serbian workplace DEI” — just two of the other multitudinous examples of waste I haven’t mentioned that led to USAID being rolled into the State Department and rebooted under the guise of an agency that actually does the job it’s supposed to instead of imposing wokeness upon target countries.

But, no — according to private-jet-owner Bono, not wanting your taxpayer dollars wasted by profligate do-gooder apparatchiks is tantamount to “murder.” To say this is thoroughly unserious is a relative kindness.

At the very least, you can’t say that USAID didn’t demonstrate, in its final act, precisely why it needed to go — and, indeed, why DOGE managed to make such quick work of it.

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