This Republican Was on to USAID Corruption Before DOGE Even Existed
Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., is a fighter. The week after 9/11, he dropped out of the University of Arizona to join the Navy and accomplished his goal of becoming a Navy SEAL. In 2023, he brought that fighting spirit to Congress, where he’s been proven prescient on major issues such as America’s actual role in the Ukraine war and the need to rein in out-of-control government spending from agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development .
Crane joined this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown” on the heels of a bombshell report from The New York Times about the extent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine and in the midst of major negotiations between Republicans in the House and Senate on cuts to government spending.
The Arizona congressman was onto the U.S. Agency for International Development before the Department of Government Efficiency drew attention to it this year.
“I tried to defund USAID last Congress by 50%,” Crane told “The Signal Sitdown.”
After Crane co-sponsored a piece of legislation from former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz in August 2023 to abolish USAID, he brought an amendment to the House floor to slash USAID funding in half.
“Democrats stopped it and Republicans stopped it,” Crane recalled. The amendment failed, with 102 in favor to 326 opposed. A majority of House Republicans—114 of them to be exact—voted against Crane’s amendment.
“I only knew the tip of the iceberg of what was going on at USAID,” Crane said. “Now that Elon [Musk] has come in and been able to look behind the scenes and bring his computers and his team in there to actually evaluate what’s going on there, … we’ve learned more and more and more.”
“It’s kind of like Ukraine ,” Crane said of the GOP shift against USAID. “Republicans are starting, I think, to wake up a little bit to the situation.”
With Donald Trump out of office, Republicans in Washington reverted to the status quo. Despite protestation from conservatives, Congress kept sending American taxpayer dollars overseas to foreign countries like Ukraine.
“When I look at this whole situation as a former warfighter myself, I’ve just been concerned about it the entire time,” Crane said of America’s involvement in foreign conflicts. “It seems like we just go from never-ending war to never-ending war, and after five, 10, 20 years … we have to ask ourselves a couple hard questions. Was this worth the blood and treasure that we spent?”
“When you’re up here [in Washington, D.C.,] you realize how many people who have never been to war, never buried a buddy, never had to go console a Gold Star Mother,” nonetheless make military decisions, Crane said. It’s no surprise, then, that these members of Congress keep voting for war. “It’s almost as if they’ve never seen a war that they didn’t want us to be involved in.”
Trump’s return has caused Republicans to come back to their senses, especially on matters of U.S. foreign policy, he argued.
“I’m grateful for the president in trying to bring peace in the Middle East, trying to broker peace talks between Russia and Ukraine,” Crane added. The House Republican sees ending the wars as part of Trump’s larger effort “to realign us geopolitically.”
“I think a lot of what he’s doing is kinda like Monroe Doctrine 2.0 and trying to lock down the Western Hemisphere, and at the same time trying to prevent us from this idea that we should be some world police force,” he said.
Pulling off this pivot will require the Trump administration to purge the military of woke ideologies that not only undercut its lethality but push the U.S. into foreign wars.
During his military career, Crane said he ”watched the military become what it’s become and just completely inundated with DEI .” At one point in the discussion, Crane recalled a meeting in a Capitol intelligence facility where Navy admirals repeated leftist slogans when Republicans asked simple questions about military funding for DEI.
“I’m very concerned for many of the people that I know within the military just because we’ve gone from having a military that was focused on lethality to, in many ways, a military that’s often distracted by many of these woke cultural agendas like diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Crane added.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is the change agent the military badly needed, Crane suggested. “He’s really, in my opinion, changing the culture, not only with eliminating a lot of the DEI and woke programs,” but by “showing our troops that he’s willing to get down and dirty and work out with them and hang out.”
“That’s not something you see a lot,” Crane confided. “That’s not something you see a lot from generals or admirals, let alone the secretary of defense.”
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