By choosing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as its first target for demolition, Elon Musk’s DOGE made a savvy political decision. While the federal government’s gravy train of spending largesse usually has a beneficiary somewhere in America, USAID doesn’t — the foreign aid bureaus clients are mainly a group of “Beltway bandits,” or contracting companies expert mainly in winning grants. Who (other than maybe their own employees) would stand up for them?

Moreover, it’s not hard to make a case against USAID simply by highlighting its goofier or more outlandish projects, like street theater in Afghanistan and Djibouti to promote public sanitation processes. Or, more sinisterly, the Wuhan Institute of Virology…

I’m old enough to remember when former U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), who later went on to be Barack Obama’s secretary of state and Joe Biden’s climate czar, was running for president against George W. Bush in 2004 and asked “why are we opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them down in the United States of America?” It was then a cheap shot against Bush, but an effective one.

While Sen. Kerry was windsurfing off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 2004, I was one of over 100,000 Americans hunkered down in Iraq. Occasionally stuff got blown up there. If the United States could be seen as helping people put the fires out, that was generally a good thing and made people like us a little bit more.

Still, foreign aid is almost never popular back at home, especially when budgets are stretched thin. The fact that it amounts to less than one percent of federal spending doesn’t make it any more popular, because faraway boondoggles make for an easy whipping boy. Street theater in Afghanistan is probably the last thing anyone wants to hear about these days.

Importantly, there come times when we want people in other countries to choose America over our rivals. The best example of this may be Africa, which is fast growing and one of the world’s greatest sources of mineral wealth — including all the metals and elements that go into cell-phones, computers and batteries. Over the past decade, China has been eating our lunch when it comes to influence in Africa (to be fair, Chinese citizens don’t get a vote when it comes to giving away foreign aid). Unlike China, America spent billions fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa, and we should get some credit for that.

As Ben Shapiro noted on Facebook yesterday, “the problem is, if you destroy USAID as a functioning agency, rather than going in with a scalpel, what you are actually doing is creating a dangerous vacuum.” Our geo-strategic rivals and enemies will be all to happy to fill that vacuum.

President Donald Trump suggested on Tuesday night that America re-build the Gaza Strip. While it was an idea he was floating rather than a concrete plan, if we actually were to lay any concrete in that war-torn patch of earth, how would we go about doing it? Probably via a government agency like USAID.

One of the biggest recipient of U.S. assistance right now is Ukraine, and that country’s effort to drive back a Russian invasion is spluttering. With good reason, Americans are tired of forever wars, but folding the tents and handing Russia a win isn’t a wise alternative either — regardless of the moral case, we’d like get sucked into another conflict the next time they invade a European country. So there needs to be some mechanism for managing our commitments.

Folding USAID back into the State Department has been an idea on the table for decades, and it’s not a bad one. It will require intelligent follow-through. We should be evaluating all spending as the Trump Administration has suggested through the prism of whether it helps America or not. Yet in doing so, we should also be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.