Shoeonhead's Insane Falsehoods About USAID

A video with over a million views is filled with easily checkable falsehoods

1 Shoeonhead

Recently, popular YouTuber Shoeonhead (not her real name, nor a true description of the relation between a shoe and her head) made a video critical of USAID. This video has now been viewed over a million times, and many on the internet seem to think it makes a devastating case against USAID. However, when one investigates the claims made in detail, many of them are extremely misleading. She failed to perform even basic fact checking and her video contains an almost astonishing degree of factual error.

(By the way, USAID, if you’re reading this and want to pay me large sums of money for defending your honor, hit me up! I’ll even start endorsing woke Nicaraguan transition surgeries). (Also, unrelated, is it Shoeonhead’s or Shoe’sonhead? Is this a culs-de-sac/attorneys general situation? I’ll just call her Shoe for simplicity.)

For context, USAID serves two major functions. First, it provides humanitarian and development aid. This is what it does most substantially. Second, it serves to advance U.S. foreign policy interests. The first category of activity is generally quite good. The second is a mixed bag.

I thought it would be worth debunking this video in detail given just how important USAID is. The shutting down of USAID is likely to cause roughly 25 million new deaths in the next 15 years, according to one paper on the subject. One of the USAID programs that’s been axed is PEPFAR, a program that’s saved roughly 19 million lives since its implementation. PEPFAR is the reason annual AIDS death in Africa began dropping quickly around 2003.

Another thing to note about aid: the best programs are much more effective than the median programs. The best 1% of foreign aid probably does more good than the bottom 99%. So even if a lot is wasteful, feeding it into the woodchipper is a recipe for killing large numbers of people.

I also thought Shoe’s video was a good example of how ideology makes us all crazy. If you have leftist sympathies—like Shoe—you spend lots of time worrying about exploitation by large corporations and insidious CIA actions. You probably spend less time worrying about problems like famine that don’t fall as neatly on partisan lines. We all spend more time talking about problems that we can blame on our political opponents than ones we can’t.

For this reason, leftists have a tendency to overestimate the horrors of imperialism and underestimate more banal horrors—like deaths from disease. They overly focus on foes with faces and neglect more mundane evils. As a result, when the bad things done by USAID reek of imperialism, and the good things just prevent more generic bads, leftists have a tendency to be wildly irrationally critical of USAID.

2 Allegedly woke and wasteful spending

One of the first claims she presents in the video is that most USAID funding goes to contractors not to real aid. This is technically true but misleading. Suppose the U.S. pays a contractor to distribute food to poor countries. The money from USAID would flow directly to contractors, but still, this would still be a kind of foreign aid.

This is the primary way USAID delivers food to poor countries. U.S. contractors are intimately involved in the process, doing things like directly delivering the food overseas. USAID food distribution policies, working with contractors, fed about 5.2 million people in 2023. So while it’s true that a lot of USAID money goes to contractors, this doesn’t mean that it’s wasted. When I purchase food from the store, the money goes to the store, but that doesn’t mean the money is wasted nefariously propping up grocery stores.

Shoe then runs through a list of claims of the gratuitous ways that USAID is supposedly wasting money. The problem: they’re all misleading! She claims large amounts of money were spent on each of the following:

1. Teaching Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid gendered language. Edit 4/23: While she doesn’t explicitly say millions were spent on this program, she implies it heavily by listing it alongside programs that cost millions of dollars and saying “billions of dollars are spent on things like…” before listing this program and the later programs. In reality, however, 7.9 million was spent for a broader program in Sri Lanka to promote Democracy. Rick Evans notes “most of the funding went toward investigative jour­nalism training, web development grants for publications, digital liter­acy training, and grants to upgrade newsrooms.” One minor portion of what the program did was to avoid gendered language. Now, that’s a dumb way to spend money, but it’s simply not true that millions were spent on Sri Lankan gendered language.

2. Combatting disinformation in Kazakhstan. This one is true. They spent a few million dollars training and funding investigative journalism in Kazakhstan. Now, while one can argue about this, it doesn’t seem obviously wasteful. Having a free press is quite a valuable thing. Promoting it is not an obvious waste of money.

3. Promoting inclusion in Vietnam. While doing this sounds woke, in reality, this actually involved providing social services to people with severe disabilities, including those with injuries from agent orange. This…doesn’t sound so bad. If the way that one promotes inclusion is by demanding cartoon characters use nonbinary pronouns, that is bad. If the way they promote inclusion is by paying for assistance for the seriously disabled by providing “rehabilitation, care, psychological support, assistive devices, and/or livelihood assistance,” to 60,000 people, that seems pretty good. At the very least, it shouldn’t be treated as if it’s obvious bullshit spending.

4. Promoting an LGBT group in Armenia. The group in question is Pink Armenia. Their aim is to help LGBT Armenians form communities and “advocate for legal and policy changes for ensuring the inclusiveness of addressing LGBT+ human rights.” Now, I don’t know how well they spend money, but in a country that bans same-sex marriage, prohibits LGBT adoption, and subjects LGBT people to significant discrimination, this doesn’t seem like an obviously terrible idea! Just because a program has a woke sounding term in a random country—like “inclusion in Bolivia”—doesn’t mean it’s bad. And if one is finding the least defensible USAID programs, it’s notable that the ones they name aren’t clearly bad.

I could, of course, keep going through the list. But the point should be clear: when one looks into the supposedly shocking instances of spectacular waste from USAID, the story is always more ambiguous than they claim.

3 Bullshit ‘bout Bolton

Next Shoe asks: if USAID is so progressive, why was John Bolton the head of USAID? John Bolton is a neocon, so if he’s the head of USAID, it must be a neocon organization, right?

The problem is she failed to do even the most basic level of fact checking. Bolton was never the head of USAID. Here’s a list of administrators for USAID going back to 1961. None of them was John Bolton. Don’t believe me? Ask AI. To make sure I wasn’t confused, I asked each of the existing AI models on the market to confirm. Turned out, I was right. Shoe had simply failed to check her facts. Under Reagan Bolton was an Assistant Administrator of USAID for Program and Policy Coordination, but never the head of USAID.

Why was Bolton involved with USAID? Because he’s a foreign policy guy and some of what USAID does attempts to advance foreign policy interests. Much of it is humanitarian, some of it is not.

4 Would America ever do anything good?

Next, Shoe mocks the idea that America would ever spend money philanthropically. It’s true that the U.S. often meddles in the affairs of other nations. But certainly some of what we do is benign. PEPFAR, for instance, did not have any ulterior motive. Nor does Medicare. It takes a great degree of political naivete and dogmatism to reject out of hand the idea that the government might do something good internationally.

What did the U.S. get out of treating Tuberculosis cases in Bangladesh? Rohingya refugees are now in crisis after the USAID cuts. What did we get out of malaria initiatives that prevented over a billion malaria cases and saved over 5 million lives? What did we get from funding cyber security programs that help maintain Democracies under attack? What did we get from efforts to fight measles—programs that have now been slashed?

Assuming at the outset that the government never does anything good requires a childish level of delusion about how the government works. It’s not all devils in the government. Some good people, genuinely interested in helping people, work for government.

5 Communism?

Next, Shoe asserts that the purpose of USAID was originally to stamp out communism. This is an oversimplification. It had a dual function, both to promote humanitarianism abroad and fight communism. Much of the way it fought communism, however, was by promoting development and providing aid to countries under risk of falling under the Soviet bloc.

For instance, USAID was a major player in the fight against smallpox. In total, smallpox eradication efforts saved about 200 million lives. Under JFK, who created USAID, the food for peace program was feeding 35 million people by 1962, and now has fed a total of 4 billion. John Norris, summarizing the early actions of USAID, writes:

USAID spearheaded child survival campaigns with its partners, saving millions of lives with a simple intervention of oral rehydration therapy that costs only pennies per packet to produce. The Green Revolution, championed by the Johnson administration and advanced through research funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, staved off what many feared would be an era of global famine while boosting incomes for poor farmers. Countries such as Taiwan and South Korea, once dismissed as economic backwaters, were transformed into economic powerhouses (and, ultimately, donors themselves), in no small part because of large U.S. investments through USAID, particularly in building the technocratic expertise within their planning and finance ministries.

Now, one thing Shoe gets right is that during the Cold War, USAID was engaged in some shady behavior. They funded police traifly bad, but it’s not the catastrophic threat she makes it out to be. Misinformation is a bad thing. When half the country believes in easily debunked lies, something has gone badly wrong. In a world where various conservative commentators were spewing propaganda on Russia’s dime, actions to crack down on misinformation as part of a broader foreign policy agenda aren’t obviously crazy.

The next part of the video is spent ranting about how we shouldn’t spend money overseas when there are problems domestically. I’ve addressed this argument at length—in short, it makes sense to help people overseas because we can help them hundreds of times more effectively than people domestically. There would obviously be a moral obligation to stop the holocaust. Yet the number of lives estimated to be lost by foreign aid cuts is more than the number of people exterminated in the holocaust.

7 A mixed bag

The video lists a few other shady things done by USAID. And it’s true, USAID has done some bad things. But again, these are tiny in magnitude compared to the immense good that we’ve done. The deleterious USAID actions mostly involve failed attempts at regime change. The good programs saved tens or hundreds of millions of lives.

Later, Shoe gets quite outraged about USAID funding journalists. But why is this so outrageous? They’ve funded journalists in poor countries without a substantial free press. This seems like a good thing!

Shoe closes out the video by listing a variety of horrible things that USAID allegedly did. One of them was funding drug production in Afghanistan. In reality, they provided farm equipment that got misused for drug production. This is like saying the U.S. welfare system “funds drug production” on grounds it’s sometimes spent on drugs.

Another was “covering up a child sex abuse ring in Kenya.” In reality, however, the U.S. funded an orphanage where it was later discovered children were being sexually assaulted. This is obviously bad, but not that surprising. If the U.S. government spends billions of dollars hiring large numbers of people, likely some will abuse children. There’s also abuse in public schools, but no one says “the department of education was covering up a child sex abuse ring in public schools.” In fact, USAID cuts have gutted organizations providing much more substantial efforts to stop child abuse. This has led to an increase in the abuse of children.

She correctly notes USAID has facilitated kidnapping and torture in Uruguay, however, that was through the aforementioned training program that was terminated in 1974 and mostly active during the Cold War. She also correctly notes USAID facilitated forced sterilization in Peru, which was very bad! Now admittedly, this was carried out by the Peruvian government, and USAID just provided support for them, but this was still quite bad.

8 Conclusion

Shoe concludes by endorsing Trump’s termination of USAID. But she has obviously not made anything approaching a case for that. Imagine one argued that the federal government should be abolished, and justified this by rapidly listing off government programs that are bad. They would obviously have not made a persuasive case, because they systematically ignored all the benefits of the government.

Similarly, Shoe entirely ignores the benefits of USAID. Most of what she cites occurred during the Cold War—the height of USAID shadiness—or occurred only on a very small scale and had little effect. She wholly neglects the hundreds of millions of lives saved, the millions of people who are now in jeopardy after having their source of lifesaving medicine cut off. One would think that before advocating razing an organization, one should minimally look into both the good things and bad things it does—rather than simply misleadingly rattling off bad things it does, while constantly spewing falsehood. When one tallies up both the benefits and costs, it’s not even close; USAID was, though imperfect, a force for immense good in the world, and its destruction will kill millions of people.

Edit 4/23: Astonishingly, Shoe has broken an over years long break from Twitter to reply to my article. In it, she doubles down, claiming her only error was saying that John Bolton wasn’t an administrator but an assistant administrator.

First of all, saying someone is the head of USAID when they’re not is a non-trivial error. It would be like saying Marco Rubio is the president.

Second of all, as you’d know if you read the article, this isn’t right. There were lots of other factual errors, like asserting that USAID spent millions teaching Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid gendered language.