Remember earlier this year when the Donald Trump administration exposed USAID for the corrupt and fraudulent organization that it was, and the MSM was intent on pointing out every single death in every third-world nation on the planet and blaming it on the president and his cabinet?
There were so many stories about people having to walk miles in Africa to get food and medicine because Trump and Marco Rubio are big, bad bullies. Ironically, that same MSM is largely ignoring the food and medicine shortage crises that countries like Cuba and Venezuela currently face at the hands of their communist "leaders" and even praising said "leaders," which tells you everything you need to know. But I digress.
The truth is that our foreign aid had become a joke — a way to line pockets and spread wacko leftist ideology more than anything. Rubio told ABC's George Stephanopoulos — who tried to do that whole "Trump is killing people by cutting aid" thing — back in September that "We're gonna do more than anyone in the world, again, this year, but we're gonna do it the right way. We're gonna do it holistically. We're gonna do it as part of an integrated foreign policy."
During that interview, Rubio pointed out that the reason why people die is much more nuanced than what the media wants to print. In some regions, wars prevent aid from reaching its target, or gangs steal it before it can reach its intended recipients. In some places, the middlemen, the distributors, simply don't handle it well, etc. The world is not a one-size-fits-all situation, George.
Related: WATCH: Rubio Destroys Stephanopoulos Over ‘U.S. Causing Deaths’ Narrative
"But the United States has saved more lives and continues to save more lives than any other country in the world," the frustrated Secretary of State continued. "And we're gonna continue to do it, but we're gonna do it the right way and in a responsible way. We're not gonna continue to pour billions of dollars out the door of American taxpayer funds for programs that don't work and in some cases were flat-out corrupt."
We're starting to see what this new and improved foreign aid model looks like, but, of course, the media is largely quiet on it.
On Thursday, Rubio met with Kenyan President William Ruto to sign a landmark bilateral agreement on global health cooperation. The Secretary said he hopes it's the first of many.
After calling Kenya one of our "strongest partners" in the fight against terrorism and praising the African nation's role in attempts at stabilizing Haiti, Rubio announced that it was the "first country in the world" to participate in our America First Global Health Strategy, and he hopes to eventually sign deals with 30 to 50 more.
The Secretary then explained — without interruption from obnoxious Sunday show hosts — exactly why this is a better option compared to what our country did in the past when it came to foreign aid. It's rather lengthy, but I feel it's important.
The United States has spent billions of dollars over the years in helping with health strategies all across the world. What we learned over time and especially after coming here, is that oftentimes – and I’m oversimplifying it, but this is an accurate description – what would happen is we would go to a country and say we’re going to help you with your health care needs. Then we would drive over to western – northern Virginia somewhere, find an NGO, one of these organizations, give them all the money, tell them, "go to this country and do their health care program for them." That NGO would then take about – some percentage of that money for their overhead and administrative costs, and by the time it got down to it, the host country had very little influence, it was sort of imposed on them, and only a percentage of the overall money ever actually reached the patients and the people on the ground that we were trying to help because of these costs.
This makes no sense. So why are we hiring American and international NGOs to go into other countries and run health care systems that are parallel and sometimes in conflict with the health care systems of the host country? If we’re trying to help countries, help the country, don’t help the NGO to go in and find a new line of business. And so, that’s the model that we’re breaking. We’re not doing this anymore. We are not going to spend billions of dollars funding the NGO industrial complex, while close and important partners like Kenya either have no role to play or have very little influence over how health care money is being spent. Bottom line is, if you want to help a country, work with that country, not work with a third party that imposes things on that country.
Rubio continued by explaining that "money is not just going to be spent to provide medicine and care; it’s going to be spent to improve the domestic infrastructure, health care infrastructure, so that in five or six or seven or eight years, countries will say we no longer need this much assistance, if any, because we have our own system, you’ve helped us to build it, it’s now delivering results; and, in fact, we… want to go and teach other countries how to do it. And this is a very real possibility, and it’s something we believe in."
He added that Kenya is the perfect opportunity for the first implementation because we have such a good relationship between our countries, and "they have stable and strong institutions, both in government and in the health care sector."
In a press release issued by the State Department, Rubio added that, "The agreement invests in data, commodities procurement, and modernization to build sustainable capacity. And, most importantly, it includes meaningful co-investment commitments from Kenya aligned with ambitious yet realistic performance benchmarks, paving the way for long-term health self-reliance."
In other words, we're no longer just tossing money out the door; there's an end goal. We're partnering with these countries to help them stabilize and eventually take care of themselves with less and less of our help. As a part of the plan, the countries' governments themselves must also increase their domestic health spending. A State Department fact sheet promises that "U.S. government financial support will be linked to countries’ ability to meet or exceed key health metrics with financial incentives for countries who exceed those metrics."
It's a model that Rubio has been pushing from day one since he took over the State Department, and it's the most logical one for foreign involvement.
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