Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have once again joined forces to criticize President Donald Trump, this time over cuts to international programs they say are vital to U.S. interests.
In a new video, Bush appears alongside Obama and U2 frontman Bono, an outspoken Trump critic, praising the departing staff of USAID, the international diplomacy agency that Trump significantly reduced earlier this year. Bush has long championed funding for programs combatting AIDS and HIV in parts of Africa.
Bush, who has mostly avoided criticizing Trump since he took office in 2016, used his video remarks to mourn the loss of staffers he credited with promoting global stability by combating the spread of AIDS and HIV—a program credited with saving 25 million lives over the past 20 years.
“You’ve showed the great strength of America through your work — and that is your good heart,’’ Bush told USAID staffers, according to the Associated Press. “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you.”
“Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it’s a tragedy,” Obama added in a video shown to departing USAID employees on Monday. “Because it’s some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world.” Calling the decision by Trump “a colossal mistake,” he added that “sooner or later, leaders on both sides of the aisle will realize how much you are needed.”
In partnership with Elon Musk and the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, Trump effectively dismantled the sprawling global agency, leaving only a minimal skeleton crew as operations were phased out after gross waste, fraud, and abuses were uncovered.
Musk once described USAID as “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” It became an early target of the Trump administration’s push to downsize what the president called a federal government plagued by waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars. The State Dept. officially absorbed USAID earlier this week, the New York Post noted.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio contrasted the trio’s message of doom and gloom with a message of optimism, highlighting the promise of a streamlined government free from far-left political influence.
“Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War,” Rubio wrote in his statement. “Development objectives have rarely been met, instability has often worsened, and anti-American sentiment has only grown.”
“This era of government-sanctioned inefficiency has officially come to an end,” he continued. “Under the Trump Administration, we will finally have a foreign funding mission in America that prioritizes our national interests. As of July 1st, USAID will officially cease to implement foreign assistance.” Rubio added: “Foreign assistance programs that align with administration policies—and which advance American interests—will be administered by the State Department, where they will be delivered with more accountability, strategy, and efficiency.”
