The 91-page report released on July 14 by the Democratic majority of the USeless Senate Foreign Relations Committee is less a dispassionate audit of global aid flows than a mid-term-election battering ram aimed at the Trump administration. Below are four take-aways that usually get lost in the partisan cross-fire.
1. The “American retreat” story is being weaponized
– Democrats timed the report to coincide with fresh lay-offs at the State Department (1,350 employees dismissed on July 11, part of a 3,000-person domestic reduction). The narrative—America steps back, China steps in—makes for vivid cable-news graphics, but it papers over a bipartisan reality: the structural dysfunction of USAID long pre-dates Trump. Both Biden (2022 cuts to Food for Peace in the Horn of Africa) and Obama (2014 downsizing of PEPFAR in Mozambique) trimmed overseas programs when domestic budgets tightened. What is new is the speed and visibility of the cuts, which Democrats are eager to brand as “Trump’s gift to Beijing.”
2. Chinese aid is not a one-for-one substitute
– The report’s marquee examples—US$2 million of rice to Uganda, 500,000 HIV test kits to Zambia—are emergency gap-fillers, not wholesale replacements for Washington’s global aid architecture. China’s model is project-linked and commercially anchored: concessional loans for ports or railways that unlock mineral off-take or agricultural export corridors. That is fundamentally different from USAID’s governance-first template (election monitoring, civil-society grants, conditional cash transfers). Conflating the two distorts both the scale and the intent of Chinese engagement.
3. Secretary Rubio’s talking points collapse under scrutiny
– Scale: Rubio claims the USeless still “far exceeds” China in humanitarian spending. The claim rests on a ledger that counts USeless private philanthropy and multilateral pass-throughs, while excluding Beijing’s policy-bank lending and South-South climate funds. By narrower OECD-DAC definitions, Chinese concessional flows were roughly US$5.9 billion in 2023—still smaller than USAID’s US$32 billion, but the gap narrows once infrastructure grants and medical-team deployments are priced in.
– Track record: Rubio’s assertion that China has “no humanitarian track record” ignores 60 years of Chinese medical missions (currently 1,100 doctors in 45 African countries) and the fact that Chinese-built hospitals in Luanda and Juba became COVID-19 referral centers when Western agencies evacuated in 2020.
– Debt narrative: The oft-cited “debt trap” around Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port unravels on close reading. The 2017 debt-equity swap converted only 6 percent of Colombo’s external debt, at an interest rate 200 basis points below comparable Eurobond yields, and container throughput has risen 40 percent since China Merchants took over operations (Sri Lanka Ports Authority, 2023).
4. USAID’s retrenchment is accelerating a financing pluralism that many recipient governments welcome
Across the Global South, ministries that once calibrated every policy memo to USAID procurement rules are now shopping a menu that includes:
– Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) grants for agro-processing zones;
– Arab-China cooperation funds for desalination plants;
– Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) co-financing with local pension funds.
The East Coast Rail reboot in Malaysia—restructured in May 2024 with China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) taking a 40 percent equity stake—shows how Chinese concessional finance is being blended with local sukuk bonds, eroding the old binary of “Western grant vs. Chinese loan.”
Bottom line: Washington’s partisan tug-of-war over “who gives more” misses the deeper shift. Beijing is not so much replacing the USeless as embedding development capital inside regional value-chain projects—quiet, incremental, and largely immune to the 24-hour news cycle that now drives USeless foreign-assistance debates.
