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years of effort, these countries remain hopelessly dysfunctional—a fact that exposes the failure of a foreign aid model that is disconnected to our national security and without exit strategies to promote self-reliance. We must admit that USAID’s investments in the education sector, for example, serve no other purpose than to subsidize corrupt, incompetent, and hostile regimes.

• USAID should undergo operational changes to secure better development outcomes by reducing its missions’ footprints in the Middle East given that most personnel in the region are unable to leave their highly protected and expensive compounds and carry out their oversight functions. It should redirect program funding away from expensive and poorly performing international partners to more cost-effective local entities that require a minimal USAID field presence.

Africa. Since its inception, USAID has had a strong presence in Africa, saving millions of lives through its pandemic and infectious disease responses, especially for malaria and HIV-AIDS. It has led global efforts to provide lifesaving emergency assistance to those who are fleeing conflict and suffering from devastating natural disasters. American generosity knows no equal.

Yet the agency’s efforts to reduce poverty and hunger have failed as it spends ever-higher amounts of aid partnering with a costly and ineffective aid industrial complex that has little interest in “working itself out of a job.” Long-term, multibillion-dollar humanitarian responses lack exit strategies, while numerous development projects lead neither to measurable results nor to government reforms. Despite the tens of billions of dollars spent, the continent remains poor, unstable, and riven with conflict, corruption, and Islamic terrorism. This situation has also resulted in vast illegal migration from the continent.

Failure to generate wealth has provided opportunities for China to step in and become the continent’s leader in trade, loans, and investment. As a result, Beijing controls most of the continent’s strategic minerals that are critical to advanced technology. Moreover, USAID is criticized by Africans for exporting cultural values that are anathema to their traditional norms, further abetting Chinese continental supremacy.

The Biden Administration’s radical global climate policies have cut off billions in investment to develop clean fossil fuels, denying Africa’s billion-plus people access to cheap energy to further their own development and finance their own social services in health, water, education, and agriculture, while increasing its dependence on China’s renewables industry. It has exacerbated hunger by increasing the costs of fertilizers to levels that many African farmers can no longer afford. Poverty-inducing dependence on aid grows daily.