Here’s more:
For generations, the United States has devoted a modest amount of taxpayer dollars to foreign aid. (Polls show that many Americans think foreign aid accounts for as much as half of all federal spending. In reality, only about 1% of the federal budget — just one penny out of every dollar — goes to foreign aid.)
There are many reasons why our government does this, including:
- No nation lives in a vacuum. The security of the United States and the health of the American people are affected by challenges like famine, disease, and disasters in other countries.
- Relatively small amounts of aid can make an enormous difference, saving and improving literally millions of lives all around the world.
- Many consider it the moral duty of the richest nation on Earth to provide at least a modicum of help to poorer countries. (Especially given the historical reality that some countries, including ours, are as rich as they are in part because they exploited the people and natural resources of other countries for decades or even centuries.)
Despite these and other reasons, both noble and self-serving, to maintain at least a minimal foreign aid program, the Trump regime has — notoriously, arbitrarily, and recklessly — taken a sledgehammer to foreign aid.
This assault on foreign aid is literally killing people. But that, apparently, is not sinister enough for the Trump regime. In recent months, the Trump administration has used foreign aid to essentially bully other countries into giving the regime access to their data and natural resources.
For example, as reported in The New York Times, the Trump regime is considering withholding lifesaving aid for over 1,000,000 HIV patients in Zambia unless the country grants the United States even more access to its mineral resources than it already has.
In other nations, the Trump administration is seeking direct access to health data and viral samples without any guarantees that resulting medical breakthroughs would then be shared with those countries.
Like the villain in a trite action movie, the Trump regime is blackmailing poorer countries and threatening the lives of millions of people so that American corporate tycoons and their MAGA cronies can get even richer.
Worse still, the Trump administration is keeping the terms of these coercive agreements secret. Under the Freedom of Information Act, we requested copies of the agreements, but the regime has failed to respond.
On April 3, Public Citizen filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to order the Trump administration to produce the relevant records with no further delay, so that the American people can know how the Trump regime is exploiting other countries — and threatening the lives of their citizens — in our names.
This our 36th lawsuit (so far) against the administration since Donald Trump returned to power. And while the justice system can move slowly, in many cases we have already kept the regime from doing maximum damage, and we have no intention of giving up the fight as our cases make their way through the courts and as we file new lawsuits.
Are these lawsuits alone enough to fully defeat Trump and MAGA? Of course not. But are they a meaningful part of the pushback that is the only chance we have to collectively save our country? No doubt about it.
What you and Public Citizen are doing together matters. What hundreds of other organizations, big and small, are doing matters. What millions upon millions of our fellow Americans are doing matters. We believe that to our core. We take solace in that. And we draw inspiration from that. We hope you do, too.