As if further evidence were needed, news on Feb. 6 that two federal employee unions have filed suit hoping to halt the Trump administration’s planned shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) demonstrates yet again that Big Labor is at least as interested in advancing a radically woke political agenda to the world at large as it is advocating for its membership at home.

The complaint was filed by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), which represents 80 percent of those working for the U.S. Foreign Service — including nearly 2,000 USAID Foreign Service Officers — as well as the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which boasts a membership of 800,000 federal civilian employees. 

As of Feb. 7, nearly all of the agency’s 10,000 employees in the U.S. and overseas were placed on paid leave while President Donald Trump and his team work to downsize and fold it into the State Department.

AFSA President Tom Yazdgerdi said the action has “thrown dedicated public servants — and their families — into chaos and uncertainty.”

The court document itself, however, asserts without a scrap of evidence that pulling the plug on the billions in handouts to foreign governments distributed annually by USAID has already triggered a global humanitarian crisis.

Established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, USAID has served as America’s primary foreign assistance organization for more than six decades. With a stated emphasis on economic development, public health, education, and humanitarian relief, USAID spends taxpayer dollars in upwards of 100 countries. 

On Feb. 3, newly appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio was named acting administrator of USAID, and days later, tech billionaire Elon Musk and members of the just-established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began sifting through the agency’s information systems.

Musk posted that he spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

Meanwhile, attorneys for the two unions behind the lawsuit shamelessly insist that “300 babies that would not have had HIV, now do,” and “halting USAID work has shut down efforts to prevent children from dying of malaria, stopped pharmaceutical clinical trials and threatened a global resurgence in HIV.”

If such projects were all — or even representative — of how USAID actually spends the billions at its disposal, that argument might carry more weight. In announcing the move last week, however, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt only scratched the surface when she listed among USAID’s priorities such expenditures as: $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia workplaces; $70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland; $47,000 for a trans opera in Colombia; and, $32,000 for a trans comic book in Peru.

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Other recent grants include:

• $50 million to fund condoms in Gaza;
• $37 million to the World Health Organization;
• $16 million in funding for institutional contractors in gender development offices;
• $4 million for the Center for Climate-Positive Development;
• $12 million in support services to the Bureau for Resilience, Environment and Food Security;
• $6 million in non-emergency funding for redundant administrative supports for the Center of Excellence;
• $3 million in non-emergency funding to provide evaluation services for planning and learning programs; and,
• $600,000 to fund technical assistance for family planning in Latin America.

More pointedly, USAID is inextricably linked with America-hating billionaire George Soros, having funneled more than $270 million to the East-West Management Institute — an organization partnered with Soros’ Open Society Foundations — in the past 15 years, according to data from USASpending.gov.

Another $90 million was obligated to the institution over several contracts, according to the data.

Whatever legitimate motives USAID’s founders may have had 64 years ago, the agency today functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of the American political left, laundering billions of taxpayer dollars every year that it then uses to underwrite hundreds of moonbat causes around the world while keeping its accomplices gainfully employed out of the public eye.

No wonder organized labor is taking the point in the battle to undermine this and so many other long-overdue efforts to drain the D.C. swamp.

Whether it’s corrupting a politician with someone else’s money, writing and funding legislation specifically intended to legalize their own dubious activities, cluttering the court system with specious lawsuits hoping to delay — if not deny — justice to its opponents or strongarm its own members into line, Big Labor at every level these days proudly provides one-stop shopping for the wokest elements of the extreme political left.

Jeff Rhodes is Vice President for News and Information at the Freedom Foundation.